A Couple of Tidbits
Been very busy and also feeling a bit sick lately (heat? dunno - but today's supposed to be cool and rainy, so we'll see). Therefore, I've not got a lot for today's Open Thread. But I do have a few tidbits!

Tidbit 1:
A young woman in Canada, a student at a high school in Montreal, got suspended for supporting Palestine! So much for free speech, eh? It was, of course, that she was against the wars and the genocide Israel is doing. And she posted a link to a reel by Lee Camp about October 7th. And those two things got her suspended.

Lee says:

That’s right. Apparently the first ever suspension in Montreal public schools (or perhaps even Canada’s public schools in general) due to reposting criticism of a country was because of …me. Wow. I’m more powerful than I realized.

But here’s the good news. After many people wrote to defend the student and protesters even showed up in freezing temperatures in March to demand the school system apologize, the student was vindicated.

What the heck?! Canada, how disappointing!

Protesters in support of the student, what the student wrote on her own private instragram account is on the little white protest sign (from the story at therover.ca here)

What Works?

Like I mentioned last week while writing about Frank Church, I've been reading a book called Battlefield America: The War on the American People, by John W. Whitehead, published in 2015. It's well worth a read, although it's very, very depressing. I can't say it takes a right or a left wing slant; it gets angry at both sides. Towards the end of the book, Whitehead lists 10 basic principles that 'We, the People' can, understand, agree with, insist upon and support in our attempt to stop our country's almost finished progression to a police state, an empire. I found the principles interesting, so I thought I'd list them here.

1. 'We must come to grips with the reality that the present system does not foster freedom.'
2. 'Voting is practically worthless.'
3. 'Question everything.'
4. 'Materialism is a death knell to freedom.'
5. 'There is little hope for true resistance if you are mindlessly connected to the electronic concentration camp.'
6. 'An armed revolt will not work.'
7. 'Be wise and realize there is power in numbers.'
8. 'Act locally but think nationally'.
9. 'Local towns, cities and states can nullify or say 'No' to federal laws that violate the rights and freedoms of the citizenry'.
10. 'Understand what freedom is all about.'

I think we agree that we already know all these things; maybe most Americans do, whether they acknowledge it or not. So, where do we go from here?

1932: Bonus Army shacks on fire after the attack on their 'Hooverville' in the Anacostia flats (the Capitol is in the background) by the regular army under MacArthur, from Wikipedia. Bye, Bye, Hoover!

Doing This Yet Again? I Guess We Have To

After the start of the current Gaza war Dennis Kucinich wrote a really good essay about why we should not do war, should not support war (even if it's Israel in their latest pogrom) and so on. The essay is called, 'Thou shalt NOT Kill' and is pretty darn good. It got me to thinking, 'Maybe, maybe it's not entirely useless to protest this damned war and the Ukrainian war and all the others...' Anyway, the essay is worth reading. It does make me wonder, is the obvious disagreement between Kucinich's and RFK, Jr's ideas about the Israel Gaza war what made Kucinich leave the campaign?

Pro-Peace/Palestine March in Washington, DC from NPR