"We need to recognize experts more, respect them, and listen to them," argues science writer Chris Mooney. Limited knowledge accommodates false conclusions and, worse, denial. Education is essential for a scientific understanding of reality. Willful ignorance serves the sinister agenda of autocratic rule: xenophobic nationalism and endless war.
Blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump is a problem, says Katha Pollitt. "Empathy and respect are not about kowtowing to someone's cultural and social preferences. They're about supporting policies that make people's lives better, whether they share your values, or your tastes, or not. . .
"What should matter in politics is what the government does." In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.
Today the United States joined Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not signed onto the international deal forged among 195 countries to reduce emissions that cause climate change.
"Saying that we need to rely on coal and oil is like saying that the earth is not round," said Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. A withdrawal "would not only be a disaster but completely unscientific."
THURSDAY, JUNE 1
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
El Camino Real & Embarcadero Road
Palo Alto
writes Mark Morford for the San Francisco Chronicle. His call to impeach the President proposes a partisan appeal to a reluctant Congress to act in the public interest. We have little hope, or time, for a change of heart by that august body of opportunists. But Morford gets one thing right: The People are the ultimate arbiters for legitimate government and "have power in unity" to overthrow the Trump/Pence regime.
What can you do?
"You take a deep breath, and keep pushing, reposting, expressing outrage," continues Morford. "Do not get complacent. Do not normalize the orange goblin's behavior. Trump hates negative press, especially when it's accurate and damning and true - which, these days, most all of it is, when coming from the re-galvanized MSM [mainstream media]. . .
"Find those stories - they are plentiful and everywhere - and keep pumping them into the mainstream, as antidote to the cancer Trump is jamming down America's lungs. Talk about them. Call your representatives and demand an independent investigation. Keep the Resistance hot. This is the only way."
Those who remain silent make China's brutal system possible, opines artist Ai Weiwei to The Stone. His comment may be applied more universally, anyplace a state censorship system exists.
"Whenever the state controls or blocks information, it not only reasserts its absolute power; it also elicits from the people whom it rules a voluntary submission to the system and an acknowledgment of its dominion," Weiwei writes. But it is the adoption of self-censorship that debases those who accept a passive position toward authority in return for practical benefits. "They smile, bow and nod their heads, and such behavior usually leads to lifestyles that are comfortable, trouble free and even cushy."
But these "ideological slaves" can choose to revolt, offers Weiwei. "In the end, they always do." Our job is to make this sooner than later.
"If you care at all about children starving to death and selling billions of dollars worth of deadly weapons to one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on earth," notes journalist Danielle Ryan, "the only message Trump's visit to Riyadh will send is that barbaric contempt for basic human rights is tolerable so long as you serve Washington's financial and military interests. . . Trump hates radical Islam, except when you can make money from it."
Norwegian Refugee Council head Jan Egeland is on a five-day visit to the target of US-backed military intervention. "I am shocked to my bones by what I have seen and heard here in war- and hunger-stricken Yemen. The world is letting some 7 million men, women and children slowly but surely be engulfed by unprecedented famine.
"Men with guns and power inside Yemen as well as in regional and international capitals are undermining every effort to avert an entirely preventable famine," Egeland adds, "as well as the collapse of health and education services for millions of children."
The threatened assault on the key port of Hodeidah inflames the humanitarian crisis even further, says U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein:
"The fighting in Hodeida has left thousands of civilians trapped - as was the case in Al Mokha in February - and has already compromised badly-needed deliveries of humanitarian assistance. Two years of wanton violence and bloodshed, thousands of deaths and millions of people desperate for their basic rights to food, water, health and security - enough is enough. I urge all parties to the conflict, and those with influence, to work urgently towards a full ceasefire to bring this disastrous conflict to an end, and to facilitate rather than block the delivery of humanitarian assistance."
"Time is on no-one's side as regards the crisis in Yemen," posts Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence. "As nightmare visions of living skeletons with bloated bellies and pleading eyes once more appear on the planet's TV screens, we in the U.S. will have missed a vital chance to avert a world in which untold millions are to be shocked to their bones."
"Over 200 artists, musicians, writers and curators have come together to form a coalition named Hands Off Our Revolution, which will put on contemporary art exhibitions to confront right-wing populism," reports Alice Morby for Dezeen.
"The group - which includes leading figures such as Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson, Ed Ruscha, Cornelia Parker, Wolfgang Tillmans and Anish Kapoor - announced its existence yesterday with the launch of its website.
"On the site, the collective outlines its belief that art can 'help counter the rising rhetoric' of right-wing populism, as well as 'increasingly stark expressions' of xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia."
Full list of contributing artists here.
There will be no appeasing Donald Trump or his supporters. The history of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's Munich Pact of 1938, allowing Hitler to annex a large chunk of Czechoslovakian territory in return for a pledge of peace, proves the disastrous consequence of accommodation for war crimes.
"It is useful for Americans to recognize that we are facing something entirely new and different in American history," comments author Peter Dreier. "Certainly none of us in our lifetimes have confronted an American government led by someone like Trump in terms of his sociopathic, demagogic, impulsive, and vindictive personality (not even Nixon came close)." Dreier identifies the one word that best describes President Trump: fascist. "Fascists seek to unite the country behind a smokescreen of patriotism while scapegoating the weak and powerless."
Dreier anticipates a future in which to translate progressive agenda into actual policies. "But, at the moment, our stance must be one of resistance and opposition."
A lot of energy gets spent on defining "fascism," and the authoritarian disposition can take multiple forms, but would rejection of the attribution make what is transpiring, under Trump, in front of our noses, OK? Clarity on Who and What Trump represents will help to concentrate determination to Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime! To that end, World Can't Wait encourages members to participate in the following venues.
Refuse Fascism is calling for everyone to step up and step into the battle for Berkeley. They are sponsoring a major event to take this on (flyer below), and working intensely to change the terms of things and take the initiative away from the fascists. Their assault has nothing to do with the supposed denial of "free speech" to low-lifes like Ann Coulter, it has to do with the attempt to consolidate the fascist Trump/Pence regime. We need everyone to join in and step up:
A Talk and a Challenge to Debate by Sunsara Taylor
Thursday May 4, 6:00 PM
U.C. Berkeley, Hearst Field Annex
Building D, Room D37
This is not about "free speech." Far from being persecuted or suppressed by the state for their ideas, the ideas of these fascists are being imposed on the world by the most powerful state in the history of humanity. Every day, the fascist Trump/Pence Regime is slamming ahead to implement precisely the kind of genocidal racism, woman-hating cruelty, war-mongering ambitions, planet-destroying lies, and anti-immigrant ethnic-cleansing these "intellectual" hitmen promote. Every day, the Trump/Pence Regime is working feverishly to consolidate a fascist America.
Sunday May 7, 1:00 - 4:00pm
University of San Francisco
Fromm Hall, Berman room
What is fascism? What brings it on? Are the economics and politics of Europe in the 1930s relevant? Would the U.S. history of genocide and slavery make U.S. fascism something new? How can we get millions to fight fascism? Who are our friends and allies in fighting fascism?
Also this coming weekend, we will Honor our Heroes & Martyrs, comrades who never looked the other way:
In San Francisco: Saturday May 6, 7:00pm
Eric Quesada Political and Cultural Center
518 Valencia Street (near 16th Street BART)
In Oakland: Sunday May 7, 7:00pm
Humanist Hall
390 27th Street (between Broadway & Telegraph)
"For a society so worried about things that can kill us, we've focused very little of our attention on the thing that surely will," observes Tom Engelhardt, author of The United States of Fear. "Warming of the planet -- thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere -- is already doing real damage to our world.
"When we speak of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see."
But fear should never be the primary motivation of our actions, says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. "The real danger is that the way we live our lives as Americans, no matter our optimism about the future, is no longer sustainable. We can't continue to live with the current level of income inequality. Hard working people are working longer hours for less pay. And politicians and their benefactors continue to argue for trade policies that have decimated the working class in this country. We can't continue to lock up black and brown people or watch them killed in cold blood by people sworn to protect us or fail to publicly educate all of our children. We can't continue to bomb people around the world into oblivion."
War and militarism fuel climate change. "The Pentagon is the single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels," notes Environmentalists Against War Gar Smith. . . Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival. The amount of oil burned -- and the burden of smoke released -- increases whenever the Pentagon goes to war."
We should not cower in fear, counsels Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor. "Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . . we need to renew our commitments to the political movements on the ground and at work in contesting both the right and the 'lesser evil' of today's corporate and imperial state." But "any fresh vanguard for revolutionary change, must come from the most vulnerable themselves, from the communities long targeted by racist and misogynous power in the history of U.S. capitalism's structural violence. It is these communities' movements that put material pressure on the more privileged and protected to resist the corporate state.
"Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily -- surely not only -- victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity."
"Science is not a set of facts or even techniques and procedures," says the founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society. "Science is a process for understanding the nature of the world. Scientists begin from the assumption that there is an objective reality, independent of our hopes and desires. We try to understand the nature of that reality through observations and experiments. . .
"There was, during the course of the 2016 campaign, a small but vocal group of antiwar libertarians and conservatives who had convinced themselves that Donald Trump was preferable to Hillary Clinton because he, Trump, had made his (fictitious) opposition to the Iraq War a cornerstone of his candidacy," wrote James W Carden for Consortiumnews.com. "Trump, it turns out, seems every bit as captive to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus as was his predecessor."The President has been lavished with praise from leading Congressional Democrats for targeting Syria, notes The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald. (Hillary Clinton offered her categorical support hours before the missiles fell.) Those who fall in line behind Trump's bombings are ensuring that he will keep it up.
"Although Obama was the first president to spend his entire tenure in office at war, he almost certainly won't be the last," concludes John Knefel, Truthout.
One had to search the NY Times for today's lead story (World News section, subcategory Asia Pacific), U.S. Drops 'Mother of All Bombs' on Afghanistan; White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced the action in his daily briefing:"The U.S. has dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan."
President Donald Trump says he is very proud of the U.S. military after what he called a "very, very successful mission." Whether the political establishment elects to bestow gushing praise on the first-time use of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, as they did for the airstrikes on a town in Syria last week, is as yet unknown. But it is imperative that today's strike on Afghanistan be contested, not "normalized" as just another (albeit bigger) bombing-as-usual in America's war on the world.
The LA Times hopes to rein in the worst aspects of fascism in America. "[Trump's] contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable," said the paper.
We say Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime! One thing's for sure: The Trump Regime Won't Collapse Of Its Own Accord. It's up to us, people living in the United States, to stop the horrific crimes of our government and drive perpetrators from power. Sooner than later.
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It's up to us, people living in the United States, to stop the horrific crimes of a fascistic state and drive perpetrators from power.
"This administration is less than a month old and is steeped in scandal, incompetence, conflict of interest and internal disarray," tweeted Saturday Night Live Trump double Alec Baldwin. Continuing questions about Russian influence in Washington added to turmoil in the White House this week with the forced resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The U.S. ruling class is deeply divided about whether an alliance with Russia would serve American interests, but parties to that debate share a common goal: the global advancement of a rotten system of exploitation. "This is not just a matter of palace intrigue," notes Revolution newspaper, "what is happening poses potentially grave dangers for humanity."
Despite a growing list of impeachable offenses, from fraud and racketeering to treason and bribery, Trump loyalists stand by their man, sucking up 'alternative facts' like hard candy. "Trump's inflammatory campaign rhetoric continues to define him," concludes Los Angeles Times reporter Cathleen Decker. But what sold well to Trump voters, the ugliness, ignorance and fear of white nationalism, will serve to popularize his undoing.
"Only everything," answered artist and activist Harry Belafonte. "With his simple, mean, boy's heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration [of 'American Greatness'] that is not possible and could not be endured if it were."
"Perhaps more than any other person, [newly confirmed Attorney General Jeff] Sessions stands at the nexus of many of the potential plot lines that we should fear most about the Donald Trump presidency," writes Greg Sargent at The Washington Post. Voter suppression, weakened civil rights, immigrant deportation: "Trump's well-documented authoritarian impulses could conceivably tip him into genuine authoritarian rule."
Before Alabama Senator Sessions could even sit down at his desk to bask in illegitimate glory, Usurper-in-Chief Donald Trump outlined his mandate to protect law enforcement officers from the public, in an ass-backwards assignment of blame for violent crimes. Investigation of outstanding murders by police is likely to be curtailed, and commitment to police reform forgotten, if we don't act decisively.
Despite a pattern of excessive force against Chicago residents, police officers are held in higher repute than their victims. The false narrative of "crime on the rise" (violent crime in the United States has actually decreased significantly over several decades) gives rise to the "new era of justice" platitudes of a president in denial.
Donald Trump's wall against reality defends what Dr. Brian Moench calls "a Mad Hatter's tea party of scientific absurdity," contradicted by real news and real science. "We're living in a new era, where an unverified report about possible, unsubstantiated rumors of alleged, unconfirmed evidence hacked from an undisclosed source competes on an equal footing with real information," he adds. "But 'Making America Great Again' goes even further, and is apparently code for 'Making America Ignorant'."
"Donald Trump represents the dark side of human nature: ugliness, ignorance and fear," says Jesse Berney, writer for Rolling Stone. "He wants to build a giant wall, an act contrary to the idea of art. He won on the promise of banning a religion, a rejection not just of an entire culture but of the idea of culture itself."
What do we have to lose? Our humanity, if Trump has his way. We must drive out this fascistic regime. Sooner than later.
A federal appeals court in San Francisco will hear arguments February 7 at 3 PM on whether to restore President Donald Trump's controversial immigration order, reports Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post:
"Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril," Trump wrote. "If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!"Opposition [to Trump's travel order] has been successful so far, and it is growing. On Monday, ten former high-ranking diplomatic and national security officials; nearly 100 Silicon Valley tech companies; more than 280 law professors; a coalition of 16 state or district attorneys general, including those from Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia; and a host of civil liberties and other organizations formally lent their support to the legal bid to block Trump's order...Trump and his supporters have continued to press the case that the short-term stoppage on refugees and immigrants from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen is necessary for national security reasons. Trump went so far as to suggest on Twitter that if an attack were to happen, the judiciary would be to blame.
The President called opposition to his executive order "fake news." Polls reflect a different reality: thousands of people in the streets, on a regular basis, across the U.S.
Some of us remember that refrain from supporters of the Vietnam War. The rationale for endless wars of U.S. imperialism devolves from administration to administration, from allegations of communist conspiracy to supposed threats against Christianity, but the core motivation of Empire endures: exploitation of world resources, including human labor, to maximize assets of a ruling class.
Lawmakers held up candles in front of the Supreme Court tonight, in opposition to President Trump's illegitimate sanctions against Muslim air travelers over the weekend. House Democrats were scheduled to vote on a series of natural resources bills Monday, Senators on confirmation of Trump's nominee for Secretary of State, former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. It's not clear yet how, or if, they voted. What is clear is that the crowd wanted their representatives to do more.
"Do your job! Do your job! Do your job!" shouted hundreds of demonstrators. But it's up to us, with millions of people in the streets to create a political crises that forces Trump from office. Take part.
This afternoon White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the ban imposed by Trump has been "blown way out of proportion" and dismissed those challenging it, including any State Department officials who might back a draft dissent cable initiated by State Departments employees. "I think they should either get with the program or they can go," Spicer responded when asked if the administration was aware of the cable and its message.
In other news, President Trump is expected to announce his Supreme Court pick Tuesday night.
And no, he's not referring to a move to Canada. "I'm gonna make [the American dream] bigger and better and stronger than ever before," says the President. Foreigners need not apply.
Eleven days into the Trump imperium, the Pentagon is determining exemptions to the Muslim ban. Navy spokesman Captain Jeff Davis says the list will include Iraqis who have tangibly demonstrated their commitment to supporting U.S. forces.
c/o AJ+:
- U.S. judge issues an emergency order barring deportations under Trump's immigration ban
- Trump authorizes his first military action, a ground raid in Yemen that kills between 14 and 30
- After legal actions and protests nationwide, the Trump administration walks back part of the immigration ban, saying green card holders from the 7 countries will be allowed to return to the U.S.
"We call on each and every one who opposes what this regime stands for... to take part in and actively build, resistance and refusal," reads the New York Times ad. It's up to us, who refuse to accept the outrageous treatment of targeted travelers at airports across the country today, to tune into and join calls to action, or initiate your own (Refuse Fascism offers Tips On Organizing A Protest here). Release all detainees to legal counsel NOW!
In San Francisco, Sunday January 29, SFO Bay Resistance is on-going; sign up for a rapid response text alert system at http://bayresistance.org/. The Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) is a good source of on-the-ground reports for SFO action, with video. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) provides updates on the "Muslim Ban," here.
Detainees get reprieve from immediate expulsion, but their futures are uncertain.
Judge Ann M. Donnelly of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled that sending plaintiffs home could cause them "irreparable harm."
While none of the detainees will be sent back immediately, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case expressed concern that all those at the airports would now be put in detention, pending a resolution of the case. Inviting the lawyers to return to court if the travelers were detained, Judge Donnelly said, "If someone is not being released, I guess I'll just hear from you." -- NYTimes
The ruling affects 100 to 200 people trapped at airports Saturday. Hostages are beginning to speak out. Share your story with World Can't Wait, including and especially arriving passengers who joined the protest on the ground,
