This was really difficult to get through. As angry as I get just speaking these words, they don’t express a fraction of my true feelings. I don’t know if there are words for that. I don’t know if this will help, but I feel helpless, so I’m using my platform, which is something most people don’t have. At first, I wondered if it conflicted with my previous video, but after some contemplation, I realized that it doesn’t. My previous video never advocated disregarding injustice and atrocity. It never advocated abdicating righteous indignation. It was an anti-hate video. On the contrary, my commitment against hatred is what compelled me to make this video.
I think I’m done trying to make moral arguments. They all feel like bad faith now, like a waste of time. I guess if I ever do bring them up again, I’ll really have to consider who exactly I’m trying to convince, because some people have proven to be so completely delusional or dishonest, that it would be useless to argue – like talking to a tree.
It is World Food Day. (Among other things; this is a busy date!)
October 16, 1649 The British colony of Maine granted religious freedom to all citizens the same year that King Charles I was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church.
October 16, 1859 Abolitionist John Brown led a group of 21 other men, five black and sixteen white, in a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. They had hoped to set off a slave revolt — throughout the south — with the weapons they had planned to seize. John Brown Virtually all his compatriots were killed or captured by General Robert E. Lee’s troops; Brown was wounded and arrested, and hanged for treason within two months. Read more The Tragic Prelude (John Brown)mural by John Steuart Curry (1937-1942) Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said of Brown that he was a white man “in sympathy a black man, as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
October 16, 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most prominent African American of his time, to a meeting in the White House. The meeting went long and the president asked Washington to stay for dinner, the first black person ever to do so.Newspapers in the both the South and North were critical, but the South with more venom. The Memphis “Scimiter” said that it was “the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Roosevelt claimed he had invited a friend to dinner with his family and it was no one else’s business. Booker T. Washington
October 16, 1934 Dick Sheppard, who volunteered and joined the Army as a chaplain in World War I, started the Peace Pledge Union in England. In a letter published in The Guardian newspaper and elsewhere, Sheppard, a well-known priest in the Church of England, invited those who would be willing to join a public demonstration against war to send him a postcard. Within a few weeks he had received 30,000 replies. Members of the Peace Pledge Union vowed to “renounce war and never again to support another.” Reverend Sheppard had been the first ever to broadcast religious services on the radio and, when Vicar of St. Martin-in-the Fields, Trafalgar Square, he had opened the building to the homeless of London.“Up to now the peace movement has received its main support from women, but it seems high time now that men should throw their weight into the scales against war.” -Dick Sheppard Read more about the Peace Pledge Union
October 16, 1964 China detonated its first atomic bomb, becoming the fifth nuclear-armed nation. The 20-kiloton fission device (equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT) was detonated in the vicinity of Lop Nor, a lake in a remote region of the Central Asian province of Sinkiang. ” To defend oneself is the inalienable right of every sovereign State. And to safeguard world peace is the common task of all peace-loving countries. China cannot remain idle and do nothing in the face of the ever-increasing nuclear threat posed by the United States.China is forced to conduct nuclear tests and develop nuclear weapons . . . In developing nuclear weapons, China’s aim is to break the nuclear monopoly of the nuclear Powers and to eliminate nuclear weapons.” Chou En-lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, sent messages to all heads of government for a world summit conference on nuclear disarmament. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a news conference that the United States did not regard Communist China’s proposal “as having any practical value.”Deng Jiaxian. The father of the chinese bomb. TRINITY AND BEYOND™ (The Atomic Bomb Movie), a documentary by Peter Kuran
October 16, 1967 Joan Baez the day after the arrest Folksinger Joan Baez was arrested in a peace demonstration as rallies took place across America during “Stop the Draft Week.” 1158 young men returned their draft cards in eighteen U.S. cities. Baez was among 122 anti-draft protesters arrested for sitting down at the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California; she was sentenced to 10 days in prison. Read more
October 16, 1968 During medal presentations at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, winning sprinters Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) raised their black-gloved fists while the U.S. national anthem was played. They were suspended from the team at the insistence of the International Olympic Committee, and expelled from the Games two days later. Smith later told the media that he raised his right fist in the air to represent black power in America while Carlos’s left fist represented unity in black America. They were wearing just socks to represent world poverty. Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights) badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. He was castigated upon return to Australia and throughout his life for his support of these two brave athletes. Read more
October 16, 1973 Henry Kissinger U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, though accused of war crimes by some for the massive bombing of Laos and Cambodia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (who refused the honor) for the cease-fire agreement they had negotiated. This occurred just a month after the bloody military coup, fully supported by the Nixon administration and aided by the CIA, that overturned the democratically elected government of Chile, and installed General Augusto Pinochet as military dictator for the next 17 years.
October 16, 1984 Desmond Tutu, the archbishop of South Africa, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in fighting apartheid. He has gone on to be a relentless advocate for justice around the world. Desmond Tutu – Nobel peace prize recipient
October 16, 1998 In a human rights and international law breakthrough, British authorities, after receiving an extradition request from Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, placed former Chilean dictator, and senator-for-life, General Augusto Pinochet under arrest for “crimes of genocide and terrorism that include murder.” Augusto Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher Chronology of Pinochet’s rule
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
Brain drain could undermine the country’s hi-tech economy as liberal families conclude social contract has been broken
This summer, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered in the ruins of the Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal.
Nir Oz was the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza.
If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned – with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of doctors and other professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite already feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future.
Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests against his government before the war. But concern about this trend is not limited to political opponents of the Israeli leader. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, joined forces with the administrative expert Ron Tzur to warn that Israel faces an existential threat.
In a paper calling for a new political settlement, they warned that under a business-as-usual scenario “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades”. (snip)
The problem precedes the 7 Octoberattacks and the war that followed, as demographic and political shifts have prompted some secular, liberal Israelis to question their future in a state increasingly dominated by religious traditionalists.
Noam is a father of three with businesses that include a PR consultancy and a cannabis pharmacy. He expected that his 40s would be a time of “less doing, more enjoying”, after decades of hard work.
Instead, he and his wife spend evenings poring over school options in European countries as they weigh up where to start a new life. The war increased the urgency of the search, but it has been a decision born out of longstanding concerns.
“The main reason we are leaving is that we are seeking a better future for our children. Even if peace can be brokered tomorrow, we still can’t see a future we want to be a part of,” Noam said. “The demographics speak for themselves.”
John Brown
President Theodore Roosevelt
Booker T. Washington
Deng Jiaxian. The father of the chinese bomb.
Henry Kissinger
Scottie's Playtime 