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Antiracism as Thoughtcrime The sloppy fascist Donald Trump may no longer reside in the White House but he’s back on the hate rally campaign trail selling his big Hitlerian Stolen Election Lie. Meanwhile, Trumpist white nationalism is booming in the “red states,” where Amerikaner[1] Republicans hold the reins. One of many signs of this right-wing […]

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Image by Julia Zyablova.

When you want to know if the US government, or the political party in charge, is pulling a fast one on the public, look at the name they give a new program or law. The USA PATRIOT Act is a classic example. An acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, that law, passed in November 2001 with no hearings, was actually a huge wishlist of a decade’s worth of repressive and invasive assaults on the Bill of Rights pulled off Congressional shelves rushed through for President GW Bush’s signature using the 9-11 attacks as justification.

When it comes to assaults on Medicare, the same thing happens. Medicare Advantage, originally called Medicare Choice, introduced in 1997 during the Clinton administration, got its even slippery monicker in 2003. It neither improves choice nor is an advantage. Presented to Medicare enrollees as a better option than the government’s traditional Medicare Parts A and B and D, it actually reduces the choice of doctor and can leave patients without any protection from huge health costs or any ability to buy supplemental insurance.

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In 1994, I was the only non-law-enforcement expert on fake ID willing to go on national TV to talk about it. I had edited a dozen books on false identity documents for counterculture bookseller, Loompanics Unlimited, such as Reborn in the U.S.A., Reborn in Canada, Reborn with Credit, How to Get Lost, How to Disappear […]

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Innovation is said to be the mainstay of capitalist ideology, one of the supreme virtues of a system built to reward individual initiative. The genius of capitalism, according to Bill Gates, rests in ‘its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest.’ Potential for big financial returns on innovation, he adds, ‘unleashes a broad set […]

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Image by Taylor Brandon.

America’s domestic activists have achieved a great deal. In particular, they have pressured Joe Biden into moving significantly to the left—though, not nearly left enough, given the scale of the challenge—on issues relating to climate and infrastructure. It is perhaps against this backdrop of mounting grassroots pressure that the President told Israel to end its latest effort to, in the words of Israeli commentators, “mow the grass” in occupied Gaza, which along with the increasingly annexed West Bank is Palestinian territory. Whatever the motivation, Israel did, as usual, what its U.S. master instructed.

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Image credit: Giniw Collective.

This week, TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) announced that they were finally terminating the Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) project after over a decade resistance from the Alberta tar sands to Wall Street to the White House to the Gulf Coast.

It stirs a lot of feelings and memories for me. I’ve devoted myself to climate direct action for over two decades. Half of it, I spent fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. Through my KXL journey, I was arrested sitting-in the White House, recruited tens of thousands to pledge to take action, trained thousands in direct action to disrupt Obama’s approval of the pipeline (hell, I even trained the trainers), supported the environmentalists and landowners that disrupted the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline in Texas (which got built anyway) and generally made elite politicos and Wall Street bankers miserable over it. In 2013, I discovered that TransCanada had compiled a file on me and my friends and traveled to law enforcement along the pipeline route with a PowerPoint telling them that we were terrorists. We also declared victory on KXL more than once.

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One of the more nauseating things I’ve long heard from white guys of a certain stupid, faux-Marxist, fascism-appeasing, red-brown, and Trumpenleft bent[1] is that racism, nativism, and sexism are just “scams” used by the ruling class to divide the noble proletariat and divert its attention away from the working-class solidarity required to fight capitalism. To […]

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A still from In the Crosswind.

As Estonia prepares to mark the 30^th anniversary of regaining its independence from Soviet rule Martti Helde’s In the Crosswind (Risttuules) is blowing onto U.S. screens to remind viewers of an especially egregious crime against humanity: The 80^th anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s purported Baltic purge. Shortly after Crosswind’s rapturous opening depicting Erna and her husband Heldur enjoying an Estonian idyll at their countryside home, 40,000 people are deported from the Baltic Republics as part of Stalin’s alleged plot for ethnically cleansing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as titles in English inform us.

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Upon passage of HB 87 Texas will require students to read Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists in which the third President states the principle of the separation of church and state and proclaims “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions”. At the same time this law prohibits teachers from telling students that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States”. Such head-spinning duplicity could be explained glibly by wondering if Texas Republicans ever read Jefferson’s missive to the Baptists. But much more is revealed by taking this and other similar bills moving through state legislatures throughout Red America as deliberate and serious expressions of modern conservatism.

Texas’ bill, and similar GOP legislation elsewhere, began as a knee-jerk reaction to the popularity among educators of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and right-wing media click-bait stories of the horrors of multicultural workshops and diversity training. Conservatives have lumped all these approaches to analyzing the dynamics of racism under the umbrella of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) which Idaho has legally condemned for “inflame[ing] divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation”. When the legislative template for these bills was crafted it came to reflect certain novel aspects of the conservative mind as it has been shaped by evangelicalism, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, Fox News, Trump, and Q-anon.

Texas’ HB 87 declares that the purpose of social studies education is to “develop each student ’s civic knowledge” of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment”. The key word here is “the”, as in “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations”, strongly implying that there was some unity, some sort of consensus about moral and political principles at the founding. To view American society in 1776 as having anything approaching agreement about what constituted morality or the proper basis of government requires ignoring the deep factional fights within patriot ranks that eventually festered into America’s first party system, the many dissenting religious groups, and the views of the one in five Americans who were legally property. Lurking in this idea of “civic knowledge” is a mandate to consider only land-owning whites as constituting “the American experiment”.

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Gaza under attack stories; war 2021

Image by Dan Meyers.

Aya’s Story

My name is Aya al-Louh. I live in Gaza City and I am a cancer patient. I have a brother, Mahmoud, 26 years old, with special needs. He is unable to leave the house due to the constant bombing and we are trying to integrate him with us so that he is not affected by the continuous missile strikes. He cannot sleep, not even during the day. Every moment he suffers from Psychiatric disorders, we uselessly try to control it, once he hears the sound of explosions.

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Image by Josh Carter.

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

-Robert Frost, “Birches” (1916)

Suzanne Simard is a professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. She conducts research in a number of related ecological areas, including forest ecology, plant-soil microbial interactions, plant-plant interactions, ectomycorrhizae, and mycorrhizal networks.

In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree, she describes them, thusly:

[between trees] “both neural networks and mycorrhizal networks transmit information molecules across synapses …The mycorrhizal networks could have the signature of intelligence. At the hub of the neural network in the forest were the Mother Trees, as central to the lives of the smaller trees as I was to [my young daughters]. ‘

She’s a leader in The Mother Tree Project, a “guiding principle of retaining Mother Trees and maintaining connections within forests to keep them regenerative, especially as the climate changes.” She grew up in British Columbia’s rain forests. She comes from a family of lumberjacks, but after a first job out of college working for a clear-cut lumber company and was appalled at the lack of personal indifference to the environment being cleared.

This interview was conducted on May 26, 2021.

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On June 18, 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden appeared on the campaign trail at a posh fundraiser on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He remarked to about a hundred prospective wealthy donors that if elected, “nothing will fundamentally change.” In the context of the quote, Biden was referencing their pocketbooks and stock portfolios under his leadership. As […]

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India, the pharmacy of the world is currently facing a devastating second wave of the COVID pandemic. With a surge in infections crossing the 400,000 mark on a daily basis, the population of over a billion people were pinning its hopes on the ongoing vaccination drive. This, as the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is staring More

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India, the pharmacy of the world is currently facing a devastating second wave of the COVID pandemic. With a surge in infections crossing the 400,000 mark on a daily basis, the population of over a billion people were pinning its hopes on the ongoing vaccination drive. This, as the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is staring More

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