I enjoy this artist’s comics every week. This one is particularly topical; the ones I see more often are in regard to mental health. I guess this one is, in its fashion, also. Enjoy! If you go to the comic page, you can go back through the other work, too.
| October 14, 1943 As the result of an uprising at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, about 300 of its Jewish prisoners escaped, though only about 50 survived until the end of the war.Following the escape, the remaining inmates were killed and the camp was promptly closed by the Germans. Though Sobibor’s six gas chambers could exterminate 1200 people at a time, it was the smallest of the death camps.  Some of the people who took part in the uprising at Sobibor (picture taken in 1944). The story of Sobibor |
October 14, 1979 The first national gay and lesbian march for civil rights in Washington, D.C., drew over 100,000 demanding an end to all social, economic, judicial, and legal oppression of lesbian and gay people. More info about the March |
| October 14, 1981 Dock workers in Darwin, Australia, began a seven-day strike, refusing to load uranium on board “Pacific Sky” for eventual use by the U.S. military. After a week, the ship was forced to leave without its cargo. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october14
And, the Ramstein meeting gets postponed because of Hurricane Milton.
This week was a dark one for Ukrainian journalism.
On Oct. 9, Ukraine’s leading news outlet Ukrainska Pravda (UP) said the President’s Office was threatening their work by exerting “long-term and systemic pressure” against the newsroom.
UP said Zelensky’s office was blocking government officials from talking to the outlet or taking part in its events, as well as pressuring businesses to stop advertising collaborations with the outlet.
“These and other non-public signals indicate attempts to influence our editorial policy. It is especially outrageous to realize this at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when our joint struggle for both survival and democratic values is extremely necessary,” UP said in a statement.
The statement also referenced the outright disrespectful exchange between Zelensky and UP’s star political reporter Roman Kravets during a press conference in late August. The President was visibly annoyed with Kravets, interrupted him, and eventually accused the outlet of having a secret agenda to undermine him with negative coverage.
It’s worth noting that all governments, even democratic ones, try to control media narratives and restrict access to journalists. All those anonymous American officials giving comments to journalists without authorization risk getting fired when doing it, for example.
However, what is happening to UP is worse than just normal politics. Pressuring businesses to stop collaborating with the outlet directly undermines UP’s ability to stay afloat, at a time when advertising already plunged because of the war.
To be frank, apart from being objectively worrying, this situation is also quite embarrassing. Every public-facing Ukrainian spends countless hours persuading the world that Ukraine is a democratic country that’s defending European values and is worth the world’s help. Why the Ukrainian government would shoot itself in the foot when the world’s patience and money for Ukraine are running out is a mystery to me.
Yet this wasn’t even the worst piece of news. On the next day, we learned that Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna died in Russian captivity.
She was only 27, and was supposed to be included in the upcoming prisoner exchange, the government said. She was reportedly held in a brutal detention facility in the Russian city of Taganrok, known for its torture of prisoners.
I never met Viktoria, but her former colleagues say she was the embodiment of her profession – brave and determined, always the first one at every scene, working and bothering editors about her work 24/7.
She was taken captive while reporting from Russian-occupied territories in August 2023. But that wasn’t her first time in Russian captivity.
Viktoria was first detained by the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB) for 10 days in March of 2022. To the dismay of her colleagues, she was trying to get into occupied Mariupol, which was being obliterated by Russian fighter jets back then.
“Nothing could stop Vika if an idea was born in her head. Nothing was more important to her than journalism,” her former colleague Yevheniia Motorevska wrote on Facebook. “She was a force of nature that we failed to tame.”
On the geopolitical front, Ukrainians were disappointed with the postponement of the Ramstein group meeting because of Joe Biden’s preoccupation with Hurricane Milton.
The Ramstein group—which is called the Ukraine Defense Contact Group but steals the name from Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, where its meetings happen—is a coalition of more than 50 states who militarily support Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The group was scheduled to meet this Saturday, Oct. 12, at the level of state leaders, for the first time ever. Zelensky hyped up the meeting beforehand, saying it would be “special”, while the media reported that President Biden may even be ready to advance Ukraine’s NATO bid before he leaves office, perhaps making significant decisions during the Ramstein. Biden was supposed to chair the meeting. But it didn’t happen: The US President had canceled to stay in the US and deal with the hurricane.
With Ramstein postponed indefinitely, Zelensky went on a European tour with his “victory plan”, presenting it to leaders of France, the UK, and NATO.
Presidential Office advisor Mykhailo Podoliak said on Saturday that the President might reveal the plan to the Ukrainian public within days. I’ll keep you updated as soon as that happens.
That will be it for today. I’ll be back next week,
Cheers, and Glory to Ukraine
— Yours Ukrainian
October 12, 1492 Natives of islands off the Atlantic shore of North America came upon Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who was searching for a water route to India for Spanish Queen Isabella.  |
| October 12, 1945 Pfc. Desmond Doss became the first conscientious objector ever to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist, enlisted in 1942 but refused to carry a rifle or train on Saturdays. On the island of Okinawa, under heavy Japanese fire, he saved the lives of 75 sick and wounded soldiers by lowering them, one by one, down a 400-foot cliff.  The guest house at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is Doss Memorial Hall in his honor. Read more (includes movie trailer) |
| October 12, 1958 A Reform Jewish Temple in Atlanta (the city’s oldest) was firebombed with fifty sticks of dynamite in retaliation for Jewish support of local black civil rights activists. The Temple’s Rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, was outspoken in his support of civil rights and integration, and was a friend of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. before he became well known nationally.  From Georgia PBS |
| October 12, 1967 British zoologist Desmond Morris stunned the world with his book, “The Naked Ape,” a frank study of human behavior from a zoologist’s perspective. Morris had earlier studied the artistic abilities of apes and was appointed Curator of Mammals at the London Zoo. Read more |
| October 12, 1967 “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” appeared in The Nation and the New York Review of Books. 20,000 signed it, including academics, clergymen, writers. It urged “that every free man has a legal right and a moral duty to exert every effort to end this war [Vietnam], to avoid collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same.” This document became the main basis for the federal government’s criminal prosecution (for encouraging draft evasion) of five of the signers: Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. Read the Call |
| October 12, 1970 Lt. William Calley was court-martialled for the massacre of 102 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai; far more actually died during the incident.  The full sad story  Lt. Calley |
| October 12, 1977 “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke” was argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The question: Did the University of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by practicing an affirmative action policy that resulted in the repeated rejection of Bakke’s application for admission to its medical school? Read more |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october12
Read on Substack Jess Piper Oct 10, 2024
(Note from Ali: Jess wrote the anti-misogyny rant I was thinking of.)
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
~Maya Angelou
I go solo camping often. I head up to the North Shore in Minnesota or down to Northwest Arkansas and hang out a few days by myself or with my daughter. My husband is a big ole, corn-fed country boy who will not sleep on the ground, so we leave him at home.
I love to sleep outside, but the very thing I hate about camping is sleeping outside — exposed. As a woman, this is something I think about a lot. When I wake up for some unknown reason and wonder if I heard something in my sleep. Or, I wake up to actually hearing something or someone. I get scared. I get nervous. I wonder why in the hell I do the things I do and take the chances I take.
And then I go back to sleep and wake up on Lake Superior or Devil’s Den and hike to waterfalls and forget it all until it is time to go back to sleep outside. Love and hate.
Lake Superior, Split Rock Lighthouse State Park.
I once asked my husband if he’s ever afraid when he is alone. He laughed out loud.
“Of what? Why would I be scared?”
I tend to be an overthinker, but I can’t tell you how many times I have wondered about his statement of fact. He is not scared. Of men or animals or most of the danger I intuitively see around me. He has nothing to be scared of — he is physically imposing and there is not one law on the books that will harm him.
He has never worried about walking at dark. Or encountering someone on a trail. Or sleeping outside. Or most of the things that take up a lot of my mental space.
He has lived his life completely unencumbered by his environment, even as a resident of a red state. A homegrown Missouri man.
Sure, the Missouri GOP trifecta, a supermajority, has defunded the schools and let our roads crumble and closed hospitals and generally made a nuisance of themselves, but that is exactly what they were to him. An inconvenience. Annoying. Turds in the punchbowl, but nothing to get too riled up about.
He was just living his life.
He didn’t see it. Not because he is not empathetic. Not even because he doesn’t pay attention to politics. It’s because he has lived his life with a privilege he didn’t know existed until I pointed it out. Because, until he saw the world through his daughters’ eyes, through my eyes, these things just never occurred to him. He didn’t deny privilege, he just didn’t see it. He isn’t uncaring or a dolt — he just had absolutely no experience being marginalized. I had to tell him.
Once he saw it, though, he couldn’t look away. He was disgusted. He understood.
This is where I should mention something that I have spoken of in front of safe men. When I tell them that I have been sexually assaulted as well as almost every woman I know, they are astounded. When I tell them of sexual harassment, they are amazed. And then, one day it clicked for me. These are good and safe men and the predators know it. They don’t hurt women while they are around. They don’t talk about it or joke about it, because these men wouldn’t put up with it. The good guys have often really not been a witness to the behavior we have endured because they are just that…good guys.
I am not making excuses for the menfolk.
The men in my life will attest to the fact that I constantly push them to see what we see. I am hard on them. I ask that they look beyond themselves and be an ally to others. To be a witness and bear witness.
We don’t need protectors, but we do need witnesses.
As a woman, as a mom of girls and granddaughters, I have no degree of safety in Missouri and I know all of my girls fall into the same category. They are not safe from sexual assault or rape. They are not safe after a sexual assault or rape. They will likely be dismissed, or worse, blamed. They would be forced to bear the child of their rapist. They would likely be forced to co-parent with their rapist.
Missouri has a total abortion ban with no exemptions for rape or incest. Not that it would matter…I am sure there is some process to that exemption as well and I really hate the notion that a woman or girl can’t have bodily autonomy unless she has first been violated.
Writing that sentence made me sick at my stomach.
Missouri women have been denied care because of the abortion ban. A Kansas OBGYN, Dr. Ahmed, shared a story last week about her Missouri patient who suffered a miscarriage:
“She came in for a follow-up still bleeding,” said Dr. Ahmed. “Turns out there was some tissue that was still there. Retained tissue in that setting can become infected, can cause a lot of bleeding, so I discussed with her the options.”
The patient decided on medication and Dr. Ahmed says she prescribed it. But the following morning, she received a fax from Walgreens on Stateline after prescribing Misoprostol or Cytotec for the miscarriage stating, “Under Missouri law medication abortion is now illegal. Please advise patient to fill across Kansas border”.
Missouri has also had a 25% decrease in OBGYN residency applicants willing to come to our state because of the ban. That decreases care for all women, not just pregnant women.
We aren’t safe in Missouri.
The good news is that Missourians will get to vote on Amendment 3 in a few weeks. This amendment will restore abortion rights in Missouri. We will be the first state to overturn a complete ban.
The bad news is that our bodily autonomy is even put to a vote. That geography dictates our rights. That random folks will get to decide if we are first or second-class citizens. That we have been treated as less than. That our rights have been up for debate.
This is red state shit. We are used to it. It is constant and it is something we live in fear of every day. It is the thing I point to when I am speaking to the men around me. I never let them daydream their way back into complacence. I don’t let them fade into the peace of not knowing…of not being engaged. I don’t let them forget the fear of the women around them. I keep them awake.
Woke. (Emphasis mine- Ali)
I don’t want to be scared of living in Missouri anymore. I don’t want anyone to be scared in their home state. This is why we have to speak on it. Say it.
The reality is that we cannot gain our rights back without involving men. I have such good men in my life. Would they have voted yes on Amendment 3 without me telling them? I’d say yes. Would they be as rabid in telling other men around them to vote yes if I had not worked on them for so long? Maybe not.
It’s not that we are dealing with self-centered jerks. It’s that they didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Now they do.
~Jess
by Tanya Modersitzki Thu, October 10th 2024 at 12:51 PM
Updated Thu, October 10th 2024 at 4:13 PM
OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA — As Superintendent Ryan Walters sees the inside of a courtroom more with recent court dates piling up, he’s also racked up more than $100,000 in attorney fees in a five-month time span.
On Oklahoma State Court Network’s website, since last year, he’s named in eight lawsuits, not including the one involved with the State Grand Jury on alleged misspent pandemic money, and others related to the Oklahoma State Department of Education.
State Representative Mark McBride said he’s concerned how much Walters’ legal fees are costing taxpayers.
“I’m pretty confident there’s another investigation going on by the feds in the Department of Education. I think he’s 12 or 14 lawsuits,” McBride said.
Walters most recent lawsuit came from the Bixby Public Schools Superintendent for alleged defamatory remarks.
From March of this year until July, records we received from Oklahoma Management and Enterprise Services show Walters averaging roughly $20,000 a month in lawyer fees.
In March, OSDE paid an attorney invoice for more than $28,000.
In May, multiple invoices came out to cost more than $19,000.
In June, OSDE paid nearly another $28,000 for attorneys.
In that timespan, Walters’ attorneys cost the state more than $104,000.
McBride said this is all at the cost of constituents.
“These things I think he’s going to lose at the end of the day and taxpayers foot the bill,” he said.
These totals don’t reflect charges for August, September, and October. NewsChannel 8 is working to get those numbers.
Walters’ office did not respond for a comment.
| October 10, 1699 The Spanish issued a royal decree which stated that every African-American who came to St. Augustine, Florida, and adopted Catholicism would be free and protected from the English. |
| October 10, 1963 The Limited Test Ban Treaty—banning nuclear tests in the oceans, in the atmosphere, and in outer space—went into effect. The nuclear powers of the time—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had signed the treaty earlier in the year. In 1957, Nobel Prize-winner (Chemistry) Linus Pauling drafted the Scientists’ Bomb-Test Appeal with two colleagues, Barry Commoner and Ted Condon, eventually gaining the support of 11,000 scientists from 49 countries for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. These included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Albert Schweitzer.  Linus Pauling Pauling then took the resolution to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, and sent copies to both President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev. The final treaty had many similarities to Pauling’s draft. It went into effect the same day as the announcement of Pauling’s second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace. |
| October 10, 1967 The Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) demilitarizing outer space went into force.It sought to avoid “a new form of colonial competition” as in the Antarctic Treaty, and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause. Discussions on banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit had begun among the major powers ten years earlier.  1949 painting by Frank Tinsley of the infamous “Military Space Platform” proposed by then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the December 1948 military budget. Read more |
| October 10, 1986 Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (in closed executive session) that he did not know that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a White House employee in the Reagan administration, was directing illegal arms sales to Iran and diverting the proceeds to assist the Nicaraguan contras. Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to withholding information on the Iran-contra affair during that congressional testimony, but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.  Elliott Abrams  Presidents George W. Bush & George H.W. Bush  Oliver North Read more about the pardons |
| October 10, 1987 Thirty thousand Germans demonstrated against construction of a large-scale nuclear reprocessing installation at Wackersdorf in mostly rural northern Bavaria. |
| October 10, 2002 The House voted 296-133 to pass the “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” giving President George W. Bush broad authority to use military force against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, with or without U.N. support.  |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october10
Trump has a long history of endorsing police violence, having said that police reaction to the racial unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “was a beautiful thing to watch.”
The former president, who risks jail time and more criminal trials if he loses, has expanded his range of baseless attacks on U.S. voting procedures in recent weeks and months. Trump falsely claimed Monday that Democrats are exploiting an overseas ballot program for expats and military members in order to circumvent “any citizenship check or verification of identity.”
Look at the projection in the next story. Look the only end might be the clawing back some of the taxes owned to the public treasury from the wealthy people who constantly want more and more public funds only for themselves. The only loss will be a white majority nation, and Elon Musk is a full out South African racist bigot. Full out racist bigot. He is not worried about voting, he is a white man. He is worried brown / black people will get to vote. He and tRump talk bad about Haitians and immigrants while hiring them on the cheap. Hugs. Scottie
David Pakman recently released a video of Donald Trump’s greatest cognitive hits and when seen in total is something to behold:
These maga gang thugs think they can get away with anything and that they don’t have to obey any laws or rules. Hate rules their lives. It may have been this guy who said he wrote the bill because he couldn’t stand that kids were coming out at school and being accepted by other students instead of targeted for abuse. He wants LGBTQ+ kids to be scared to be themselves and to stay in the closet hiding from them straight cis bullies. Hugs. Scottie
Fine was in court due to a lawsuit involving a Brevard County election official. As I’ve said here before, he is probably the most obnoxious of all Florida lawmakers, which is really saying something.
He last appeared here when DeSantis vetoed funding for a “woke zoo” because it wouldn’t host a fundraiser for Fine.
Fine also appeared on JMG in May 2022 when he tweeted what many interpreted as a threat to assassinate President Biden. That tweet remains online.
Before that, Fine appeared on JMG when he called for felony charges after Florida Democrats staged a sit-in over the racist US House map submitted by DeSantis.
And before that, he appeared here when he threatened to defund a Florida Special Olympics event and called a local school board member a “whore” because she’d been invited its fundraiser gala and he was not.
Fine was a sponsor of the bill that stripped Disney’s self-governing status. His family owns annual passes to the “woke” theme park giant.
In 2022, he arranged for a Florida town to honor a war criminal who was convicted of executing four Iraqi prisoners. In April 2023 he declared, “Damn right, we ought to erase” LGBTQs.
Fine is also a sponsor of Florida’s bill criminalizing drag shows in view of minors. Of note, his wife runs a self-described “sultry” burlesque show that would violate her husband’s law.
As you’ll see in the video report, Feldman demanded that the school display the black and white version of the “straight pride” flag seen below.
Hit the link for other already known examples of Trump withholding federal relief from blue states. Earlier this week Trump posted that Biden was withholding relief from “Republican areas” in North Carolina.
Popp is posting screenshots of the threats on the bakery’s Facebook page.
Tengrain’s Mock Paper Scissors has the pleading, which has been unsealed. Though there are redactions, they’re easily ID’d by people like us who pay attention, and there’s a nice index of them on MPS’s page. The link to the pleading, which is delicious (the pleading, I mean,) is also here.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to get ahead of what could be this election’s October surprise: the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report detailing evidence in the election fraud case against the former president.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Trump’s legal team accused the Department of Justice of putting together a “politically motivated manifesto” specifically timed to influence voters “in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States.”
They asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to highly redact the report or stop it from appearing in the court’s public docket altogether.
The report, which runs approximately 180 pages and was filed last Thursday under seal pending the judge’s approval for public release, would reveal grand jury testimony and what Trump lawyers called “sensitive witness statements” gathered by federal investigators over recent years.
Trump’s team says prosecutors must explain “why their proposed public disclosure … will not pose risks to potential witnesses and unfairly prejudice the adjudication of this case.” Ironically, their argument comes after Trump, for months, has been complaining that a judge-imposed gag order has prevented him from attacking former allies for assisting FBI agents and testifying against him.
Trump’s defense attorneys, John F. Lauro and Todd Blanche, turned that narrative upside down, claiming that the DOJ special counsel is hypocritically publicizing investigative materials after vehemently trying to keep them secret in Trump’s classified records case. (Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed those charges this past summer, and the case is on appeal.)
“Now that public disclosure serves their politically motivated mission, the special counsel’s office takes a different view. The office believes President Trump’s constitutional rights to
impartial jurors and fair proceedings — to say nothing of witness privacy and even safety — all take a back seat to the office’s political goals,” they wrote.
Unstated in today’s filing is that the potentially disastrous timing of this report — and its existence — is only due to the Trump team’s delay tactics in the case. Trump managed to push back the trial by fighting the indictment all the way up to the Supreme Court, which granted him an expansive new definition of presidential immunity. That opinion ultimately sent the trial judge on a fact-finding mission to figure out what alleged misconduct counts as personal versus official actions — hence Smith’s latest report.
Trump’s lawyers initially tried to file their counterargument under seal, but Chutkan ordered the D.C. federal court’s clerk to post it publicly by midday Tuesday.
The judge gave Trump’s team until noon today to file their proposed redactions to the report and until Oct. 10 to go over what they want to keep secret in what’s expected to be a large and detailed appendix to the report. Chutkan could order the report’s release at any time after that.
—
Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
https://www.notus.org/trump-team-jack-smith-election-fraud-report-redaction
“Nothing I have experienced prepared me for the very public and relentless implosion of my father’s life,” writes Caroline Giuliani, announcing her support for Kamala Harris.
By Caroline Rose Giuliani September 30, 2024
Snippet:
I am constantly asking myself how America is back here, even considering the possibility of electing Donald Trump again, after all of the damage he has caused, both in office and since. While Kamala Harris has gained extraordinary momentum by infusing this election with vitality and hope, I worry that too many Americans remain disconnected from the visceral, psychologically draining memory of Trump’s deeply destabilizing presidency. If enough people truly remembered what that chaos felt like, another Trump term wouldn’t even be on the table. But for those open to seeing the bare and unvarnished truth, there are unmistakable reminders of Trump’s destructive trail all around us, and it has broken my heart to watch my dad become one of them.
As Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, I’m unfortunately well-suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side. Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America. Not to disregard individual accountability in the slightest, but it would be naive for us to ignore the fact that many of those closest to Trump have descended into catastrophic downward spirals. If we let Trump back into the driver’s seat this fall, our country will be no exception.
My dad and I have a cartoonishly complicated relationship. But he is still my father, and despite his faults, I love him. I’ve seen him experience surreal heights, and, now, unfathomable lows. The last thing I want to do is hurt him, especially when he’s already down. Plus we never know how much time we have left with our parents. The totality of that makes this the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Yet this moment and this election are so much bigger than any of us.
From reproductive rights and the economy, to foreign and environmental policy, we need experienced, sane, and fundamentally decent leaders who will fight for us instead of against us—who will safeguard our democracy rather than dismantle it. And as a recently engaged-to-be-married, 35-year-old who hopes to feel more joyous than fearful about the potential of becoming a parent myself, I need to advocate for a future worth bringing children into, which is why I am voicing my adamant support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. (snip-MORE) This is a worthy read, and it’s free.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/caroline-giuliani-trump-kamala-harris
Scottie's Playtime 