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The greatest impediment to doing anything, for homo sapiens, is often that it hasn’t already been done. “Well, sure, that sounds easy enough, but I just don’t know. I’ve never seen it done and my cousin’s friend heard it was impossible.”

The greatest means of smashing through that impediment is for the thing that needs doing to have already happened. “Impossible or not, we just did it 3 feet from where you are standing, while you were standing there. Here’s the video.”

The best chance homo sapiens has of surviving includes converting the resource-draining, environment-destroying, climate-collapsing, hatred-fueling, oligarch-enabling, secrecy-justifying, nuclear-holocaust-facilitating, murderous war industry to peaceful enterprises aimed at protecting and benefitting humanity and the earth. But who doesn’t have a cousin whose friend has heard that that’s impossible?

See/Hear our Emergency Election Protection Zoom #18:  Everything about how the 2020 balloting is under attack:   https://youtu.be/ZzHjSEdfhI8

Donald Trump has made it clear he will not peacefully relinquish power after the coming election, no matter what the outcome. He will brand any legitimate vote count that shows him losing as “fraudulent” and proclaim himself Emperor for life.  

With the devastating departure of our beloved Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump’s ability to turn yet another election at the Supreme Court is now dangerously enhanced.  

Those of us opposing a permanent Trump dictatorship must first focus our efforts on making sure he is defeated in the popular vote – and that this result is accurately reflected in the official electoral outcome. 

Excerpted from Leaving World War II Behind.

If you were to listen to people justifying WWII today, and using WWII to justify the subsequent 75 years of wars and war preparations, the first thing you would expect to find in reading about what WWII actually was would be a war motivated by the need to save Jews from mass murder. There would be old photographs of posters with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, saying “I want you to save the Jews!”

1. The effort to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange for journalism is a threat to future journalism that challenges power and violence, but a defense of the media practice of propagandizing for war. While the New York Times benefitted from Assange’s work, its only reporting on his current hearing is an article about technical glitches in the court proceedings — utterly avoiding the content of those proceedings, even falsely suggesting that the content was inaudible and otherwise unobtainable. The corporate U.S. media silence is deafening. Not only does President Donald Trump’s effort to imprison Assange (or, as he has publicly advocated in the past, kill him) conflict with media fictions about Russia, and contradict fundamental pretenses about U.S. respect for freedom of the press, but it also serves an important function that is clearly in the interest of media outlets that promote wars. It punishes someone who dared to expose the malevolence, cynicism, and criminality of U.S. wars.

The polarized nature of American politics often makes it difficult to address fundamental differences between the country’s two main political rivals, Republicans and Democrats. As each side is intent on discrediting the other at every opportunity, unbiased information regarding the two parties’ actual stances on internal and external issues can be difficult to decipher.

Regarding Palestine and Israel, however, both parties’ establishments are quite clear on offering Israel unlimited and unconditional support. The discrepancies in their positions are, at times, quite negligible, even if Democrats, occasionally, attempt to present themselves as fairer and even-handed. 

Judging by statements made by Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, his running mate, Kamala Harris, and people affiliated with their campaign, a future President Biden does not intend to reverse any of the pro-Israel political measures adopted by the Donald Trump Administration. 

A new book by Kieran Finnane has the title “Peace Crimes.” It refers to acts of civil disobedience against war, or civil resistance to war. My hope is that the phrase continues to sound as absurd as it does now, and that someday the phrase “war crimes” joins it in sounding outrageously ridiculous. “Peace crimes” should sound ludicrous because acting peacefully for peace is the most anti-criminal action possible. “War crimes” should sound ludicrous because war is the most criminal action possible, not a legitimate enterprise to which small crimes can be attached — a situation that makes “war crimes” as redundant and nonsensical as “slavery crimes” or “rape crimes” or “robbery crimes” would be if such phrases existed.

Spiking temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, catastrophic hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires are clear signs of a climate emergency caused by humans. Denying the awful reality makes the situation worse. The same can be said of denial about the current momentum toward fascism under Donald Trump.

Trump’s right-wing base and leading Republicans are in lockstep with both types of denial. They embrace the most absurd claims about climate, such as Trump’s recent comment during a visit to fire-ravaged California that “I don’t think science knows, actually.” And they refuse to recognize or deplore his autocratic moves.

“I’m going to perform a magic trick by reading your mind,” I tell a class of students or an auditorium or video call full of people. I write something down. “Name a war that was justified,” I say. Someone says “World War Two.” I show them what I wrote: “WWII.” Magic![i]

If I insist on additional answers, they’re almost always wars even further in the past than WWII.[ii] If I ask why WWII is the answer, the response is virtually always “Hitler” or “Holocaust” or words to that effect.

This predictable exchange, in which I get to pretend to have magical powers, is part of a lecture or workshop that I typically begin by asking for a show of hands in response to a pair of questions:

“Who thinks war is never justified?”

and

On September 2, the Israeli government approved a proposal that allows the military to indefinitely withhold the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed by the Israeli army. The proposal was made by the country’s Defense Minister, Benny Gantz.  

Shut up and let corporate America — and also, for that matter, corporate Taiwan — get on with its business. We have ethane to crack and plastic to produce. We dare not let America run out of shopping bags!

Environmental racism? Don’t be ridiculous.

This is the message the activists of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — a heavily industrialized, 85-mile strip of land along the Mississippi River, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — have gotten from the local powers that be regarding their determination to prevent the construction a gigantic, highly toxic, 14-plant plastics-production complex in their midst.