The footage of the Nazi youth camps along the east coast is chilling as is the footage of the fairly large events. Fast forward to 2020 and Trump getting nearly 47% of the popular vote. How many millions are ready to support fascism in 2024?
Nazi Town, USA | Full Documentary | PBS - YouTube
In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “Pro-American Rally.” Images of George Washington hung alongside swastikas, underlining the organizers' belief that Nazism was entirely consistent with American ideals.
‘The doom sits on your shoulders’: Farmers share how weeks of wet weather have hit them hard
Rainfall was above average in most parts of Ireland last month. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service’s latest monthly report also identified that March was wetter than average across western Europe more broadly. It was also the 10th month in-a-row to see record-breaking average global temperatures as climate change escalates.
The first episode is very well done. Another chapter in the violence perpetrated in the US by the state against Black Power activists.
The Africas VS. America | CBC Listen
In 1985, police dropped a bomb in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Their target? A family of Black radicals known as ‘MOVE,’ who found themselves ensnared in a city — and nation’s — domestic war on Black Liberation. Over seven episodes, host Matthew Amha investigates the events that culminated in the MOVE bombing, and the long afterlife of a forgotten American tragedy.
How do you define self?
Back around 1991 I co-organized and participated in a Council of all beings, a gathering created to help humans connect and empathize with the world around them. In our case the council was based upon the book Thinking Like a Mountain.
Whether it was the book or the gathering, what I took to be the foundation of both, remains with me 30+ years later: I am not just an individual human with a name. In fact, this human is trillions of bacteria, millions to billions of fungi, hundreds of trillions of viruses. We all contain multitudes. We are all an ecosystem. But we then also exist within the larger planetary ecosystem. Billions of humans sharing a planet with every other non-human species. And our “individual” wellbeing is connected to the wellbeing of the larger ecosystems in which we exist.
Those of us in the global north have focused on our individual selves and the nuclear family if we have one. Certainly this is true for those of us in the US. The cultures of the global north encourage us to focus on living a particular kind of (high energy, high consumption) life which ignores the fundamental importance and reality of our larger selves. The result of this disconnection is that humans are actively destroying the larger whole of which we are a part. Simply put, without healthy, balanced Earth ecosystems humans will cease to exist. This is an obvious truth and yet we ignore it every day. We pretend that we can exist without the rest.
From the Invocation written by John Seed:
We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves into biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of years — do not forsake us now. Empower us and awaken in us pure and dazzling creativity. You that can turn scales into feathers, seawater to blood, caterpillars to butterflies, metamorphose our species, awaken in us the powers that we need to survive the present crisis and evolve into more aeons of our solar journey.
Awaken in us a sense of who we truly are: tiny ephemeral blossoms on the Tree of Life. Make the purposes and destiny of that tree our own purpose and destiny.
Fill each of us with love for our true Self, which includes all of the creatures and plants and landscapes of the world. Fill us with a powerful urge for the well-being and continual unfolding of this Self.
It may well be that the survival of our species will require such a shift of understanding and, following from that, a shift on our way of being in the world with our fellow species. And, for that matter, perhaps equally important, a shift in how humans relate to fellow humans. As it stands in 2024 we continue to waste energy a resources in war and competition with one another. We would do far better in cooperation. One human species working together with no loss of resources to conflict.
It would be a very different kind of world for all species on the planet.
An excellent episode of Solarpunk Now! podcast:
Episode 18 – Ecology is Radical: A People’s History of Environmentalism
This Earth Month, we’re looking back on the history of environmental radicalism. Brian Tokar is a teacher, activist, and writer who’s been involved in the movements he writes and teaches about since the 70s. We discuss how leftism and environmentalism came together, why ecology matters for the left, and what lessons we can learn from these traditions and put into practice today.
References:
- Brian Tokar – _The Green Alternative_
- Murray Bookchin – “Listen, Marxist!”
- Murray Bookchin – “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”
- _Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary_
A state execution just 40 minutes north of me.
Dispatch From a Missouri Execution: A Microcosm of the US Death Penalty Fight | Truthout
The state-sponsored execution of 52-year-old Brian Dorsey on Tuesday evening in Bonne Terre, Missouri, marked the fifth such execution to take place in the U.S. this year, as right-wing activists across the nation push hard to expand the use of the death penalty.
Two more executions are already scheduled to take place in Missouri this year, despite a multipronged anti-death-penalty campaign, including prisoner support; focused bipartisan legislative initiatives starting with repeal; exoneration and clemency campaigns; and pressuring officials to reopen problematic cases tried by known racially biased prosecutors.
Just another day in the climate emergency as the reservoir that supplies most of the water to Colombian capital city Bogotá hits a record low of 16%. A city that usually receives twice as much rainfall as London, is now rationing water.
Another result of the drought, some neighborhoods are choking in smoke as wildfires burn in the forests surrounding the city.
Meanwhile Mexico City is also rationing water and Guatemala declared a wildfire emergency on Wednesday.
Continuing genocide.
Aid ‘still not reaching Gaza’, as top US official warns famine has started | The Guardian
A promised surge in aid into that Benjamin Netanyahu promised Joe Biden a week ago has so far failed to materialise, aid workers say, as the US aid chief confirmed that famine is beginning to take hold in parts of the besieged coastal strip.
We speak with two doctors who’ve just returned after two weeks at the European Hospital in Gaza. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and Dr. Mark Perlmutter are co-authors of a new piece for Common Dreams titled “As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.” They describe a hospital “hanging on by a thread,” with the majority of patients being young children, and bombing targeted at Muslim Palestinians “concentrated at the time of evening prayer.” “Genocide was the overwhelming impression that I got,” says Perlmutter.
The climate emergency is the long emergency that will have no end in our lifetimes, each future year worse than the last.
Canada risks more ‘catastrophic’ wildfires with hot weather forecast | The Guardian
Last year, Canada endured its worst-ever fire season, with more than 6,600 blazes burning 15m hectares (37m acres), an area roughly seven times the annual average. Eight firefighters died and 230,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
This winter the country experienced warmer-than-normal temperatures and widespread drought, setting the stage for another punishing summer.
Gaza Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen, Says NGO Head/Ex-CNN Journalist Arwa Damon - YouTube
Award-winning journalist Arwa Damon has just returned from a humanitarian trip to Gaza in her capacity as the founder of INARA, the International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children. Damon describes the overwhelming need for aid under Israel’s siege of the territory. "
Who has the right to self-defence, the occupier or the occupied? – Arena
To say Israel has the right to defend itself is like saying a chronic abuser has the right to defend himself because his victim hit him. Israel is not an innocent party under attack and defending itself, as it is being portrayed by much of the international media. It is a settler-colonial apartheid regime, established on the ruins of Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people in 1948.
Colonialists, occupiers and apartheid regimes do not have the right to defend their occupations and apartheid systems. It’s the occupied who have the right under international law to defend themselves and to liberate their countries. Most of the Jewish settlers are armed and members of Israel’s reserve army; Israel knew the risk it was taking by perpetrating the Catastrophe (al-Nakba) of 1948, occupying someone else’s country and denying Palestinians their rights because they are not Jews, in what was established as a Jewish state.
Impact of climate change on marine life shown to be much bigger than previously known
Alter and her colleagues calculated the consequences of three projected scenarios of carbon dioxide increase, and thus of ocean warming and ocean acidification: extreme increase, moderate increase at the current speed and—due to possible measures—mitigated increase.
Alter says, “Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively.”
Record-breaking rain in recent months has drastically reduced the amount of food produced in the UK, farming groups have said.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn.
It has been an exceptionally wet 18 months. According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England in recorded history. The Met Office started collecting data in 1836.
The UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond because of the drastic reduction in yields.
In a country beset by sky-high rates of femicide, a mutual support movement has helped women seize back public spaces – and make a living
The ‘human shields’ lie has been conclusively, irrefutably debunked - Pearls and Irritations
One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF’s Lavender AI system that’s not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians because Hamas uses “human shields”.
… a major report from +972 revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called Lavender to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which have been carried out with hardly any human verification. One automated system, psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.
The Israeli publications +972 and Local Call have exposed how the Israeli military used an artificial intelligence program known as Lavender to develop a “kill list” in Gaza that includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians who were targeted for assassination with little human oversight. A second AI system known as “Where’s Daddy?” tracked Palestinians on the kill list and was purposely designed to help Israel target individuals when they were at home at night with their families
Recommended podcast episode: Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “Decolonization Is Not a Discourse, It Is a Material Process”. An interview with:
Leila Shomali is a Palestinian PhD candidate in International Law at Maynooth University Ireland and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
Lara Kilani is a Palestinian-American researcher, PhD student, and is also a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
A focal point of the interview was the recent publication of their article “Anti-Zionism As Decolonisation” . Other topics covered in the discussion: settler colonialism, the limits of human rights discourse and international law for Palestinians.
Check out the work of the Good Shepherd Collective.