there are people who find it in order to share it with people who need it. There is a fine video in this post, and a link to another blog that is oh-so-nice; I saw great news about bottle-nose porpoises, and even a headline for a story in the US. Please care for your health, and let yourself see there are good things happening. Some of them, readers can support. 💖
Author: ali redford
I love dogs and people. I want living creatures to thrive. I love to cook, and share the food, but ya gotta get in line in front of the dog.
Kent St. Shooting, The Berlin Wall, & More, in Peace & Justice History for 8/13
| August 13, 1961 The city of Berlin was divided as East Germany sealed off the border between the city’s eastern (Soviet Union-controlled) and western (American-, British- and French-controlled) sectors in order to halt the flight of economic and political refugees to the West. Two days later, work began on the Berlin Wall.   The Wall, 155 km (96 miles) of barbed wire and concrete, completely surrounded West Berlin and had to be rebuilt three times.  The wall stood until November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall Online |
August 13, 1971 slain Kent State student U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell announced there would be no federal grand jury investigation into the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University. Ohio National Guard troops had fired on unarmed anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.  Atty General John Mitchell Defenders of the National Guard said they were responding to a shot from the crowd though that was never verified. But in 2007 a tape was released through a freedom-of-information request to the FBI revealing a Guard officer issuing the command, “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!” Kent State’s protest was part of massive spontaneous national outrage over Pres. Richard Nixon’s expansion of the war through his invading non-combatant Cambodia. Vice President Spiro Agnew had referred to the campus protesters as Nazi “brownshirts.”  Ohio National Guard troops firing on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University The day before, Ohio Govenor James Rhodes had referred to the student demonstrators as “the strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America. They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” |
| August 13, 1992 President George H.W. Bush announced strong United States support for the draft Chemical Weapons Convention completed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The president stated that the U.S. was committed to the treaty, and called on all other nations to support the treaty and to pledge adherence to it. Chemical weapons treaty update (2001) |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august13
Well, We Knew They Are Already In Some Schools…
PragerU Not Taking Over For PBS … Yet! by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Reality is bleak enough, and Dennis Prager’s disinformation factory does have a partnership with the Education Department. Eesh, no need to give them ideas! Read on Substack
The Trump administration is hard at work trying to remake American government in its fascist image, and that includes imposing rightwing culture wars on the Smithsonian and our national parks. The effects are already heartbreaking, including the recent success by congressional Republicans in pulling the plug on funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which won’t quite kill public TV and radio but will certainly mean the end for many small, rural stations that don’t have robust independent funding.
That said, we’re also a bit cheesed off at Vox for its framing of a story it ran Friday (archive link) which hints that maybe the administration is considering replacing PBS with content from the execrable rightwing disinformation factory PragerU (Not Actually a University™). Here’s the headline and subhed, with a disconcerting photo of Dennis Prager himself (they’re all disconcerting).
Just one small problem: The article — which is paywalled content for subscribers —is entirely speculation, without even a wisp of evidence that the administration is planning to replace PBS with PragerU garbage. Damn it, Vox, do better. No need to make things up when reality is awful enough!
It’s true that the CPB announced last week that it’s preparing to wind down its operations when its funding ends at the end of September, when most staff will be let go. After October 1, a “small transition team will remain through January 2026 to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations.” Then the last Muppet out the door will turn off the lights. Probably Kermit; he has to do everything.
It’s a depressing memo, and reads like the final communiqué from an embassy that’s shutting down because invading troops have reached the outskirts of the capital. Or maybe we’re just flashing back to the outstanding PBS “American Experience” documentary “Last Days in Vietnam” again. So much of American life feels like the last days lately.
But as we noted last month when the vote took place, despite the loss of the CPB, PBS and NPR will remain, for at least some time to come, because both built up solid audience support and corporate/foundation donor networks. Local stations rely more heavily on CPB funding, which they use to buy programming from NPR/PBS, so eventually the loss of those funds will shrink what the networks can do.
It really is horrible. And we won’t be surprised if at some point the administration does indeed try to set up its own propaganda network. But Vox is doing some serious speculation when it jumps from noting that CPB is going away to suggesting that PragerU is just itching to “fill the educational void” left by CPB.
Wonkette may pull your leg now and then, but we’ll never piss on your screen and tell you it’s raining. Pay us for honest jokes if you can!
The actual thing goin’ on between PragerU and what remains of the Department of Education is certainly disturbing all on its own. Last month, as part of the administration’s runup to next year’s semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the White House had a little party to launch a gross partnership with PragerU, which created a bunch of icky AI videos in which frightening animated “paintings” of Founders give you a short patriotic lecture. GROSS.
Secretary of Wrasslin’ and Education Linda McMahon and PragerU CEO Marissa Streit burbled about how great and patriotic it all was, and presumably the sounds of children screaming at the scary paintings were edited out.
In sort of a bizarre departure for a rightwing movement that hates DEI, the “museum” also includes a section on “six ladies of the Revolution,” so it’s shoehorning in some diversity without admitting to it.
Vox notes that in one of the videos, John Adams quotes fellow Founder Ben Shapiro saying, “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
The White House even hosts a guide for folks who want to re-create the full PragerU Founders Museum experience in their own schools or basement rumpus rooms. To do it exactly right, you’ll need 83 gold frames for the portraits. (There’s an Amazon Link for the frames ($60 for 5) but if you have enough printer ink you can print out the portraits directly from Prager.) PragerU also sells its own “Honest Book of America’s Founders” (not a wonket link, we stopped) for a mere $35, also at Amazon.
Inspired by the Passover Seder, this interactive ceremony guides families in honoring the bravery, sacrifice, and values that shaped our nation. It’s everything you need to turn Independence Day into a celebration of freedom, purpose, and patriotic pride.
Oh the joy. You get “A ready-to-use ceremony script,” “Founding Father profiles,” a timeline of important Bicentennial Semiquincentennial Moments and “Fun, educational activities for all ages,” shoot us now. There are no customer reviews yet, which suggests a rare exception to the old HL Mencken line that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Because we are servicey, we even watched PragerU’s Patrioglurge video about Martha Washington, which amazingly doesn’t lie as far as we can tell. It’s pretty anodyne “why America is Great” stuff, as far as it goes, and the AI is very Uncanny Valley:
To be sure, we can suggest some edits to the script, like when Martha says, “I kept the home fires burning, not knowing if I’d ever see George again,” that should be followed with “smiling at me with his dentures made from teeth pried from the mouths of slaves, which was the fashion at the time.”
Similarly, when Martha tells kids, “Freedom is not the burden of soldiers alone. It belongs to all of us,” a more honest account would add, “But not for the 577 human beings George and I kept enslaved over the course of his life at our plantation. You can read more about our history as enslavers at the Mount Vernon website, since it’s not mentioned here for some reason.”
History, as they say, is a work in progress.
But back to the Vox piece, which includes a partial transcript of Vox’s podcast interview with Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler about what PragerU is and why it’s kind of nuts. Kudos to Ms. Meckler for shooting down the speculation that PragerU is poised to swoop in and replace PBS, too. Meckler explains that while a number of states have arrangements with Prager’s Patriotic Propaganda Palace, none of them mandate it be used in classrooms. It’s bad enough that the videos are made available as “approved” supplementary material, though it’s unclear how many teachers are actually using it, if any.
But when the Voxcast host asks if it’s a very convenient coincidence that PragerU is gaining a foothold in states “at the same time as the federal government just defunded PBS,” Meckler says hold your horses, I’m not seeing anything specific happening there, although it’s certainly all part of the stupid war on “woke ideology.”
“That said, let’s not give it more power than it has. If you go to most education in this country, most classrooms have teachers who are doing their best to present a fair-minded read of history. The best teachers are challenging their students to look at it from multiple points of view and to understand that there is more than one way to read history.”
There, we have said a nice thing about a WaPo reporter, the end.
Open Windows, Clay Jones
Caribou Fascists by Clay Jones
When’s the last time we heard from Sarah Palin? Read on Substack
The last time Trump and Putin held a summit, the two “presidents” met privately with only their translators present. Trump had a Russian translator, and Putin had one who could translate English and Word Salad. After the private confab, Trump took the translators’ notes, and some say he ate them, which is why he always travels with ketchup. Then they held a joint press conference where Putin didn’t have to deny that he meddled in the 2016 election, because Trump did it for him. During the summit, Putin gave Trump a soccer ball to give to his son and future serial killer, Barron, and Trump gave Putin his balls.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 for war crimes, but just like Benjamin Netanyahu, he’ll visit the United States without any worries of Trump arresting him. Trump is too busy arresting black teenagers in the District anyway.
The major issue in this summit is ending the war, or at least obtaining a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, but they’re doing this without the involvement of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has done this before, making a deal with the Taliban for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, without involving the government of that nation at the time. Don’t expect a peace deal to come out of this.
Maybe on the side, they’ll negotiate a new Trump Tower for Moscow. I mean, Trump negotiated business deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE last time he was in the Middle East. Now I think that’s really going to happen. Maybe Putin will give him a used plane nobody else wants.
What will come out of it will be Donald Trump appeasing Putin and further embarrassing the United States in front of the world. Trump has already embarrassed us by choosing Alaska for the summit.
The US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, which Russia has regretted ever since. Holding the summit in who-knows-where in Alaska gives Putin a nod that borders can change and land can be bought, sold, and conquered. Will Putin ask Trump to give Alaska back? Maybe he’ll convince TACO that it would be a historic deal. Or maybe Trump will trade Alaska for an Eskimo pie.
And no, we don’t know where in Alaska this summit is going to be planned. Will it be in Fairbanks, Juneau, or Anchorage? If it’s held in Sitka, it’ll be a huge gift to Putin, as that city was where the ceremony was held for Russia’s transfer of Alaska to America. Now, I think it’s going to be held in Sitka. (snip-MORE)
=================================
Trump and his NFP hold a news conference by Ann Telnaes
The autocrat in chief announces his takeover of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department Read on Substack
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/11/trump-washington-dc-crime
Nukes & Mumia In Peace & Justice History for 8/12
| August 12, 1953 The first Soviet hydrogen (thermonuclear or fusion) bomb, far more potentially damaging than those dropped on Japan, was exploded in the Kazakh desert, then part of the Soviet Union. Igor Vasziljevics Kurcsatov, head of the Soviet Uranium Committee, said to Josef Stalin at the time: “The atomic sword is in our hand. It is time to think about the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”  The Soviet Nuclear Weapons Program |
August 12, 1982 Open missile tubes on Trident sub Twelve were arrested in an attempted blockade of the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, entering the Hood Canal in the state of Washington. In motorboats, sailboats and small handmade wooden vessels, the demonstrators were objecting to the presence of nuclear weapons in Seattle. The Coast Guard overturned some of the vessels with water cannon. |
August 12, 1995 Thousands demonstrated in Philadelphia and other cities in support of journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal (on death row for murder since 1982) in the largest anti-death-penalty demonstrations in the U.S. to date. All Out For Mumia Abu-Jamal |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august12
O.T., Also Fun
Cover Snark!
(Seriously, go read this. You’ll get great laughs, and the oxygen will be so good for the brain! -A)
Snippet:
Amanda: Does she have to pee?
Claudia: Yes! Also, his left pant leg is missing?
Sarah: Why is the perspective weird? Their legs look so short and their heads are so large?
Okay taking another look, I think the angle of her hip looks too low.
So it looks like her legs are short and her midsection is bizarro long, and her head is sized correctly, just looks out of whack with the leg. (snip-I cannot overstate the gold: go read it! And no drinks over your keyboard… )
Supernova Remnants
Cosmos: Cosmos is a quarterly science magazine. We aim to inspire curiosity in ‘The Science of Everything’ and make the world of science accessible to everyone.
Supernova remnant G278.94+1.35, dubbed ‘Diprotodon’, captured by CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope. Credit: Sanja Lazarević
Supernova remnants are some of the most visually impressive objects in space. Astronomer Kovi Rose offers us a unique window into these violent and powerful celestial events.
Something explosive always seems to be happening in space. We often see headlines in the news about dramatic events like a flaring star, a gravitational wave from colliding neutron stars, or the latest supernova erupting in a galaxy far, far away.
The stories normally tend to focus on the peak periods of these energetic events, which generate in a week roughly a trillion-trillion times as much energy as we generated on Earth last year. But what remains after a star’s collapse – a supernova remnant, as astronomers call it – is both spectacular and scientifically interesting.
The end of a star
Stars are endlessly collapsing under gravity. This immense pressure drives a fusion reaction, where hydrogen particles join together into heavier elements. The energy produced by this fusion reaction pushes outwards, stopping the star from collapsing in on itself. However, when a star starts to run out of fuel for its fusion engine, the balance breaks down and things get interesting.
For stars roughly the size of our Sun, there is no big explosion as they reach their final years. Instead, when they run out of fuel, they gently shrink into a glowing lump of carbon and oxygen called a white dwarf. White dwarfs don’t collapse entirely under the force of gravity, because the electrons in the remaining atoms are strong enough to push back. This is thanks to a quirky quantum effect called electron pressure.
A white dwarf can produce a supernova, but only under very specific circumstances, when the white dwarf is orbiting another star. When a white dwarf gets too close to the other star – which could even be another white dwarf – its gravitational influence will start to pull in material from the other star. This breaks the balance between gravity and those simmering electrons, ultimately causing the white dwarf to explode!
Bigger stars do end their lives in a supernova, and usually without any outside help. These stars – with more than 8 times the mass of our Sun – live fast and die young. They burn through their nuclear fuel faster than their smaller cousins, with lifetimes of millions (not billions) of years. These stars start by fusing hydrogen into helium in the core. As that runs out, they start fusing helium atoms together instead. And so it continues up the periodic table. The heavier the element, the faster the star runs out of fuel – with carbon and oxygen burning for mere years and months, respectively. But this can’t go on forever.
Once the core is made of iron, the fusion process grinds to a halt. With no new energy keeping the star inflated, its layers suddenly collapse. The rush of material inwards hits the remaining iron core and produces a shockwave that moves outwards at speeds nearing a quarter of the speed of light. These aptly named core-collapse supernovae usually leave their densely packed remains behind in the form of a neutron star – or, depending on how massive they were, a black hole.
Tuning the radio
For both classes of supernova, the stellar matter from the explosion is launched out across space at thousands, or even tens of thousands, of kilometres per second. Moving at these speeds, the leading front of the supernova can take tens of thousands of years to slow down, usually after spreading out across several light-years of space (one light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometres) and sweeping up any additional material they encounter along the way. This is a supernova remnant: an interstellar bubble created by the wake of one of nature’s most energetic explosions.
This powerful blast wave contains fast-moving electrons that interact with nearby material in a fascinating way. The space around a supernova is filled with magnetised matter, and because of the special relationship between electricity and magnetism, the electrons curve rather than flying straight. As their paths change, the electrons are forced to slow down. Some of their energy is converted into light – but not always as light our eyes can see.
Visible light is just one window into the full spectrum of electromagnetic waves. It has a short wavelength of a few hundred nanometres; for context, the average width of a single human hair is nearly 100,000 nanometres. Most of the light in supernova ‘bubbles’ has much less energy, with a wavelength of tens of centimetres or even metres. This particular type of light is called radio.
Radio astronomers have built just the right instruments to detect this kind of light emitted by supernovae. From the initial blast to the giant bubble-like structures they create as the explosion moves out through space, radio telescopes can detect these explosive supernova ‘bubbles’ expanding and eventually slowing down as they become a remnant.
We also see the brightness and energy of the light changing depending on how much material the shockwave sweeps up as it expands, or how strongly magnetised the surrounding material is. By studying the radio light generated by supernova remnants, we can learn when and how they formed, as well as what kind of dense objects the explosion left behind.
Australia’s view
Radio astronomy has a long, continuous history in Australia. We were one of the first countries in the world to use radio instruments to study celestial objects. The American radio engineer Karl Jansky, widely considered the founder of radio astronomy, first detected radio emission in 1933 from a dense region somewhere in the Milky Way. However, in 1954, CSIRO astronomers in Sydney figured out that the source of Jansky’s detection was located right at the centre of our galaxy.
As the field of radio astronomy developed, astronomers and engineers began exploring different types of telescopes that could be used to study a range of objects in the sky. Depending on the design of the instrument, we can use them to detect point-like radio sources – like the centres of distant galaxies – or diffuse clouds and filaments, like the boundaries of a supernova remnant. And using advanced image-processing techniques and modern telescopes like CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, we can create images that show the beauty of the radio sky at both small and large scales.
Exploring our galaxy
Supernova remnants are stunning markers of the explosive history of our galaxy. And luckily for astronomers, we’ve already discovered hundreds of them. Observations of that white road of stars that runs across the sky, the Milky Way, have revealed a foamy sea of interstellar bubbles created by ancient supernovae.
The shapes of supernova remnants reflect the circumstances of their formation and their encounters with neighbouring objects, including cosmic clouds of gas and dust. Some appear symmetrical, while others take on distorted forms, moulded by interactions with nearby material or overlapping with other expanding bubbles. In fact, our whole solar system sits near the centre of a ‘superbubble’ – a vast cavity containing most of the stars visible to the naked eye. Scientists reckon the superbubble was carved out by the cumulative explosions of multiple supernovae over millions of years.
Radio astronomers estimate that as many as 1,500 supernova remnants may be still hiding in our galaxy undiscovered. New observations with highly sensitive radio instruments like ASKAP and the upcoming SKA telescopes will help us uncover these elusive interstellar bubbles, and reveal more details about the energetic processes that shaped the Milky Way.
Kovi Rose is an astrophysics PhD candidate at the University of Sydney who studies the radio light from nearby dwarf stars and distant supernovae.
Originally published by Cosmos as The ghosts of dead stars
Why People Partied So Much in The 1980s, & More, in Peace & Justice History for 8/11
| August 11, 1894 Federal troops forced some 1,200 jobless workers across the Potomac River and out of Washington, D.C.  Jack London Led by an unemployed activist, “General” Charles “Hobo” Kelly, the jobless group’s “soldiers” included young journalist Jack London, known for writing about social issues, and miner/cowboy William ”Big Bill” Haywood who later organized western miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  “Big Bill” Haywood Read about “Big Bill” |
| August 11, 1958 A drugstore chain in Wichita, Kansas, agreed to serve all its customers after weeks of sit-ins at Dockum’s lunch counter by local African-Americans who wanted an end to segregation. On this day, as several black Wichitans were sitting at the counter even though the store refused to serve them, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager and said, simply, “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.” He was the owner, Robert Dockum. That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the company and was told by the a vice president ”he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color,” statewide. This was the first success of the sit-in movement which soon spread to Oklahoma City and other towns in Kansas, but is often thought to have started in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. |
August 11, 1984 Prior to his weekly radio address, unaware that the microphone was open and he was broadcasting, President Ronald Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Many Americans and others throughout the world were concerned about the President’s apparently flippant attitude towards nuclear war at a time of increasing tension between the two major nuclear powers. Among other things, the U.S. had begun a major strategic arms buildup, adding many thousands of additional nuclear warheads along with a broad range of new delivery systems: long-range bombers including 100 B-1B stealth bombers and MX (10-warhead) ICBMs, considered first-strike weapons; intermediate-range missiles to be deployed in Europe; 3000 cruise missiles; and Trident nuclear submarines with sea-launched cruise missiles. Additionally, Reagan had proposed building the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative of anti-ballistic missiles, a destabilizing influence on the nuclear balance. The Nuclear Arms Control Legacy of Ronald Reagan |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august11
Not The Sunday AM Shows!
Rather, lots of useful info instead. 🌞
Sunday Morning Wrap Up by Joyce Vance
Read on Substack
This week, as I noted last night when I wrote to you, a lot was going on. Really, too much, which seems to be a definite feature and not a bug of this second Trump administration. They don’t want us to be able to take in everything that’s going on. So I’m starting a Sunday morning wrap-up feature to help you keep up with anything you may have missed during the week.
- I’m going to cheat by a day and start with the column from Saturday, August 2nd, It’s 1984, which is the perfect lead in for starting the conversation about our Book Club book, George Orwell’s 1984, now that we’ve had some time to start reading. If you haven’t started, we’ll have a Substack Live discussion about it later this week, so now is a great time to get started. In the column, following Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Ericka McEntarfer because he didn’t like the jobs numbers, I wrote, “In the novel 1984, facts are not a barrier. Rewriting history is a central tenet of the totalitarian regime, carried out by the Ministry of Truth.” We need to take note as this becomes a feature of the Trump administration. We live in a post-truth society now.
- In The Week Ahead last Sunday, we kicked off a conversation about the Voting Rights Act, which had its 60th anniversary last week. The irony of the Supreme Court’s announcement late on the Friday night ahead of that anniversary, that it would hear a case with an issue designed to gut much of what remains of it, was far too measured to be coincidence. Here’s your essential refresher on the Act, and the way the Supreme Court has eroded it. Most importantly, this is not hopeless! Electing majorities in the Senate and the House at the midterms would almost certainly make restoring the Act, which the Supreme Court invited Congress to do, a top priority. We took that issue up in conversations later in the week, which you’ll want to see if you missed them during the week.
- On Monday, Marc Elias and I discussed the Voting Rights Act. There is no sugar coating here, but realism about where we are, and also what the path forward could look like if we don’t give up.
- There’s no nice way to put it. I’m heartsick about what’s happening at DOJ and the FBI. Discussed in this post, Desecrating DOJ. Pam Bondi is proving to be exactly the Attorney General we expected—someone with loyalty to Donald Trump instead of to the Constitution. But even here, there are guardrails—even if DOJ tries to indict its revenge cases, grand juries may refuse to go along. If they indict, trial judges and juries must be persuaded of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Make sure you read this piece to the end, because part of Trump’s shtick is persuading people to give up because he’s already won, already taken the system apart, and he has not. There is still some play in the joints, and every reason for us to persist.
- We had no chicken pictures this week, but the Turkeys that were roaming around in the woods while I finished proofreading my book were pretty engaging. I appreciated all the people who wrote to tell me this was a pack of males roaming around in the pre-mating season. The things you can learn here at Civil Discourse!
- If you missed my conversation with Alabama Congressman Shomari Figures, do yourself a favor and go listen now. Shomari was elected out of Alabama 2, the new district created last term after the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s legislature engaged in racial discrimination when it drew new maps after the decennial census and ordered them redrawn. I’m a little biased here, Shomari was my Obama-era colleague working on criminal justice reform and other issues, and his parents are civil rights icons in Alabama, but he makes you feel proud to be a Democrat. This is a conversation filled with hope but tempered with realism. Shomari is part of the new generation of leaders we need.
- This week’s Five Questions column featured Maine’s Secretary of State (and gubernatorial candidate) Shenna Bellows, who recently told the administration to “Go Jump in the Gulf of Maine,” when it asked her to give them information on Maine’s voters. This is someone who knows what it takes to run an election, but in addition to being smart, she also reminds us that elections are about us and about grassroots American patriotism. We’ll follow up with a Substack Live with her soon.
- Finally, last night’s, A Tough Week for the Rule of Law, catches us up on more of the difficult legal news from last week. “In order to resist what Trump is doing in our country, you need to be informed; you need to know what’s at stake.” It can be awfully tempting to look away right now, but don’t. This is our generation’s fight for democracy, and this week confirmed my sense that I landed on the right title for my book, when I called it “Giving Up is Unforgivable.” Get mad. Get angry. Feel the sadness of the moment. But don’t give up.
I hope you’ll use the week’s posts to stay up to speed and that you’ll share them widely—it’s going to take every last one of us to reset guardrails in Congress in the 2026 election. There will be nothing more important, and the time to start educating people around you is now. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, as we take on the challenges ahead!
We’re in this together,
Joyce
Clay Jones, Open Windows
Still grifting after all these years by Ann Telnaes
Trump and his spawn continue making money off the presidency Read on Substack
The Guardian is reporting that World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Don Jr. and Eric Trump, has made the president and his family 500 million dollars so far.
=================================
Dildos and Big Balls by Clay Jones
This entire regime is a dildo Read on Substack
The FBI is now officially politicized. There are reports that Director Kash Patel, who’s not just a joke as director of the FBI (an organization he once said should be destroyed), but also as a human being, has assigned 1,000 agents to comb through the Epstein Files to flag mentions of Donald Trump. Now, he’s sending FBI agents after Texas state Democratic senators who’ve fled to other states so Republicans can’t build a quorum to vote on gerrymandering.
Trump told Texas that he deserves five more congressional seats, just like the time he told Georgia officials that he deserved 11,781 more votes in the 2020 presidential election.
What’s the FBI going to do when it finds a Texas Democrat? They don’t have any more authority than Cartman (respect my authoritah!) to apprehend, arrest, or detain a state senator avoiding a vote. The Democrats haven’t broken any laws. So, for anyone who says the redistricting in Texas isn’t illegal, then neither is avoiding a vote on it. This special session was called to deal with the flood, not to cheat and disenfranchise the voters. It should be illegal to abuse the FBI this way. It should also be illegal to gerrymander to prevent minorities from voting. Oh, wait. IT IS!
And poor Big Balls got beat up by a teenage girl. Edward Coristine, a former DOGE official, was attacked in Washington, DC. Trump and others claim a gang was trying to carjack him. Others claimed a woman was being carjacked, but Big Balls rushed in to save her and got himself attacked for his heroism. My cockles are warming up already. Such a hero…but wait!
Now it turns out, he may have been with the woman already, and his attackers were less of a gang and more like a couple of kids on bicycles. A report from Fox 5 said they attacked Big Balls until cops stepped in. Why are kids attacking a man in front of cops? There’s a lot of this story that does not add up. First up, how do we know Big Balls literally has big balls?
The report says they’re looking for a third guy, and he’s the right skin color for MAGA outrage. (snip-MORE)
Scottie's Playtime 