No, the D.C. shooter was NOT an Afghani terrorist brought to the U.S. by Biden.
He was a CIA operative. This was blow back.
And increasing National Guards in our cities will not make us safer. It'll just put all of us at greater risk of violence.
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/27/nx-s1-5623041/national-guard-shooting-suspect-cia-unit-afghanistan
Today in Labor History November 16, 1938: LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel. The original intention of the lab was to create a new drug that stimulated the respiratory and circulatory system. It was not until April 19, 1943, that he would first sample the new drug, when he accidentally absorbed some, leading to his famous bike ride home. After an initial period of anxiety and terror, he began to settle in with the experience, which he described as such: “In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” April 19 is now celebrated as Bicycle Day.
In 1947, Sandoz began providing the drug to researchers under the trade name Delysid. Throughout the 1950s, researchers began using the drug to treat mental illness. Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics who had failed to recover through other methods. After 1 year, 50% were still sober, a success rate that was significantly higher than any other then known method of treatment. Early experimenters and proponents of the drug included the writer Aldous Huxley, the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and actor Cary Grant. The CIA gave it to many unwitting victims as part of their infamous MKULTRA program researching mind control. There were also willing MKULTRA volunteers, like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. And, for a short time, the working class had legal access to inexpensive trips.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #lsd #psychedelic #alberthofmann #drugs #mkultra #cia
Is esting meat
Seems more relevant now than ever in our lifetimes. However, the state has a monopoly on violence, incarceration, and most other forms of social control, including the determination of what, exactly, should be defined as intolerance. Consequently, forms of intolerance that support the interests of the state are permitted, and even encouraged, while forms of dissent that oppose the interests of the state can be deemed unacceptable intolerance and be punished. For example, many Western states have determined that intolerance of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian demonstrators is acceptable intolerance, while deeming criticism of Israel and Zionism to be forms of intolerance that will not be tolerated, punishable by being fired from your job, expelled from your university, prevented from flying abroad, pepper-sprayed and beaten by the police, and jailed.
Yes, it's not just repression for the masses. It's also the most massive looting of the country ever by a U.S. president.
And the favorability of capitalism is at an all-time low. Not just in the U.S., either. People in Nepal are rising up against the gross wealth inequality between the politicians and ruling class and the rest of the public. And in France, workers and students are in the streets protesting their government's attempts to impose austerity on them to pay for their debt crisis.
Today in Labor History September 10, 1898: Anarchist Luigi Lucheni assassinated Empress Elisabeth of Austria with a sanded-down file. The authorities promptly caught Lucheni. He claimed he had come to Geneva to kill any sovereign as an example for others (Propaganda by the Deed). He said he used the file because he couldn’t afford a stiletto. During his trial, he discovered that capital punishment had been banned in Geneva. Furious, he demanded that his trial be moved to a less civilized canton so he could be martyred. On October 19, 1910, he was found hanged in his cell. The authorities cut off his head and stuck it into formaldehyde and transferred to Vienna, where it was put on display in the Narrenterm pathology museum. They displayed it there until 2000.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #assassination #atentat #LuigiLucheni #austria
Today in Writing History September 10, 1960: Alison Bechdel, American author and illustrator was born. She is most famous for her “Dykes to Watch Out For,” comic strip. And for her “Bechdel Test,” originally intended as a joke in one of her comics, but which has since become a routine metric used by critics as an indicator for the active presence of women in a film.
#workingclass #lgbtq #lgbtq #alisonbechdel #women #feminism #DykesToWatchOutFor #comics #artist #writer #author #books nostr:npub1qv0vgh4kxhj0rt2mky05082kzfenr75y7654nfgs2yt2sxvz65jsfzrtf3
Today in Labor History September 10, 1963: 20 black children were integrated into Birmingham schools in spite of opposition by the city. Martin Luther King, James Bevel & Fred Shuttlesworth led the campaign of nonviolent direct action to integrate Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Over a thousand were arrested during the campaign. Bull Connors ordered the use of high-pressure hoses and attack dogs on juvenile protesters. Racists bombed the Gaston Motel, in a failed attempt to assassinate King.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #civilrights #nonviolence #civildisobedience #MartinLutherKing #alabama #bombing #racism #JimCrow #BlackMastodon
Today in Labor History September 10, 1897: A sheriff and deputies killed 19 striking miners and wounded 40 others in Lattimer mine, near Hazelton, Pennsylvania during a peaceful mining protest. Many of those killed were originally brought in as strikebreakers, but then later organized and joined the strike. The miners were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak and German. The massacre was a turning point for the UMW. Working and safety conditions were terrible. 32,000 miners had died from 1870-1897, just in the northeastern coalfields of Pennsylvania. Wages had dropped 17% since the mid-1890s.
The strike began in mid-August, when teenage mule drivers walked off the job to protest the consolidation of stables, which had forced them to walk much further just to get to work. After a scuffle between drivers and supervisors, two thousand men walked out, as well. Soon, all the mines in the region had joined the strike. Most of the men who weren’t already members of the UMW quickly joined the union. Up to 10,000 miners were now on strike. The mine owners’ private police, known as the Coal & Iron Police (miners called them Cossacks, for their brutality), was too small to quash the strike, so they called on the sheriff to intervene. He mustered a posse of 100 Irish and English immigrants, who confronted the miners as they marched toward Latimer, on Sep 10. Along the way, they joked about how many miners they were going to kill.
The massacre provoked a near uprising. The sheriff called for the deployment of the National Guard, which sent 2,500 troops to quell the unrest. 10 days later, a group of Slavic women, armed with fire pokers and rolling pins, led 150 men and boys to shut down the McAdoo coal works, but were stopped by the National Guards. The sheriff, and 73 deputized vigilantes, were put on trial. However, despite evidence clearly showing that most of the miners had been shot in the back, and none had been armed, they were all acquitted.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #coal #mining #union #strike #latimer #massacre #police #policebrutality #policemurder #immigration #nationalguards
How to know if you're living in a police state...
The US government has added the DNA of approximately 133,000 migrant children and teens to a criminal database, which critics say could mean police treat them like suspects “indefinitely.”
https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-and-doj-face-new-pressure-over-collecting-childrens-dna/
#fascism #policestate #gestapo #ice #immigration #children #dna #privacy #police
Today in Labor History June 27, 1880: Helen Keller was born (1880-1968) in Tuscumbia, Alabama. In addition to being an early advocate for disability rights, she was also a radical socialist for women’s suffrage and birth control, the rights of workers and world peace. She supported the NAACP and was a founding member of the ACLU. She also joined the IWW and wrote for them from 1916-1918. In 1933, the Nazi Youth burned her book, “How I Became Socialist.” However, like many people of her era, from both the right and the left, she supported the eugenics movement and once claimed that the lives of infants with severe cognitive impairments were not worth saving. She published 12 books. Her most famous was her autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” (1903).
#workingclass #LaborHistory #IWW #hellenKeller #disabilityrights #socialism #feminism #aclu #naacp #eugenics #ableism
Today in Labor History May 19, 1928: A coal-mine exploded in Mather, Pennsylvania, killing 195. It was the seventh worst mining disaster in U.S. history and the second worst in Pennsylvania history. The disaster was likely caused by a methane and dust explosion triggered by an arc from a battery-powered locomotive.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #mining #disaster #WorkplaceDeaths #disaster #pennsylvania
Today in Labor History May 14, 1940: Emma Goldman (1869-1940) died in Toronto, at the age of 70. She had been raising money for anti-Franco forces in Spain. Goldman emigrated to the U.S. from Lithuania in 1885. The Haymarket Affair radicalized her and attracted her to the anarchist movement. She planned the assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, along with her lover Alexander Berkman. However, Frick survived and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. After that, she renounced “propaganda by the deed.” Nevertheless, she continued to agitate for women’s and workers’ rights and for anarchism. And she went to prison numerous times for “inciting to riot” and for distributing information about birth control. She also went to prison in 1917 for “inducing persons not to register” for the draft. When she was released, the U.S. deported her, and 248 other radicals, to Russia. She initially supported the “workers’ revolution.” However, after learning about the violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion by the Bolsheviks, she denounced the Soviet Union.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #EmmaGoldman #soviet #russia #haymarket #birthcontrol #feminism #revolution #riot #antiwar #rebellion #prison #kronstadt #rebellion #fascism #antifascism
Today in Labor History May 12, 1940: Edgar Lion, a 20-year-old Austrian Jewish student at the University of Edinburgh, was arrested by British police and shipped off to the Isle of Man with thousands of other Jewish detainees. The British government locked them all up in hotels surrounded by barbed wire. He was later deported to Canada, where he was interned with 2,300 other Jewish refugees in camps alongside German Nazis and forced to perform brutal physical labor for virtually no pay. “There were real Nazis interned with us! They were Nazis who happened to be caught by the war in Great Britain. They were bragging, and they kept telling us, ‘wait till Hitler wins the war, we’ll cut all your throats!’”
As appalling as the Trump administration is, with its arrests, deportations, and use of brutal concentration camps for innocent immigrants, as well as many legal residents and citizens, it is a misrepresentation of history to suggest that this sort of behavior is similar only to that of the Nazis, and is somehow extraordinary for modern democracies like the U.S., Britain and Canada. Concentration Camps, with forced labor, brutal living conditions, and sometimes torture and violence against inmates were operated by numerous so-called democratic Western nations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and even today. Australia used them during both World Wars, and currently runs some for refugees on Nauru and Manus Islands. During both World Wars, Canada imprisoned 8,579 male "aliens of enemy nationality" in concentration camps with forced labor, including thousands of Jews. They also interned Japanese residents. Denmark, Sweden and Finland also had concentration camps. French concentration camps, along with the torture and starvation inflicted on their inmates, and the casualties from its war of conquest in Algeria, resulted in up to 1 million deaths. And then there were thousands of Jews who were imprisoned in concentration camps under the Vichy government, most ultimately deported to Germany, where they were executed. Even Germany’s legacy of concentration camps predates Hitler, with deadly camps utilized during the Herero and Namaqua genocide they committed in Africa (1904-1908). In addition to their internment of Jews during World War II, Britain also ran offshore and land-based gulags in Ireland in the 1920s, which housed over 500 men, under brutal conditions, without charge or trial. They also ran concentration camps on the Isle of Man during both world wars.
The U.S., in particular, has a long, sordid history of using concentration camps that precede the ones they used during World War II to imprison Japanese-Americans. The first document U.S. concentration camps used for a specific ethnic group occurred in 1838, when President Van Buren imprisoned Cherokee in camps at Ross's Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Fort Payne, Alabama, and Fort Cass (Charleston, Tennessee). Many died in these camps from disease and hunger. In 1962, Minnesota executed 38 Dakota warriors in the largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history. President Lincoln pardoned another 361, but placed them in a concentration camp. And in the following winter, another 1600 Dakota men, women and children were forced into other concentration camps. Up to 300 died from disease in these camps. Thousands of other indigenous people were forced into U.S. concentration camps throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. The U.S. also operated brutal concentration camps for prisoners and civilians during its war on the Philippines in 1901. During the 1950s-1960s, the U.S. maintained concentration camps for political dissidents, primarily communists, but officially never used them. More recently, there are the examples of Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cub. Under Reagan, there were plans to imprison thousands of Central American Solidarity activists in concentration camps. And today, Trump continues to talk about sending “homegrowns” to offshore gulags in El Salvador, Guantanamo Bay, and Africa.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #fascism #nazis #prison #concentrationcamps #humanrights #antisemitism #colonialism #imperialism #worldwar #trump #hitler #reagan #guantanao #elsalvador #cecot #abughraib #indigenous #japanese #philippines
Today in Labor History May 3, 1937: The May Days began in Catalonia. This was a counterrevolution by the Spanish Republican government against radical workers and anarchists. Prior to this, the communists, socialists and anarchists had been allied against Franco’s nationalists. However, anarchist workers and their militias controlled most industries, which they had collectivized, while the communists controlled the central government and finances. As a result, this brought the various groups into conflict. To make matters worse, the Communist Party of Spain was taking orders from Moscow. And they wanted to separate the two struggles: revolution against the ruling class versus war against the nationalists. In contrast, the POUM and the anarchists saw the two struggles as one and the same. The anarchist faction included the Friends of Durruti Group and the CNT (a confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions).
#workingclass #LaborHisotry #anarchism #civilwar #spain #fascism #antifascism #durruti #communism #Revolution #trotsky #franco #moscow
Today in Labor History April 19, 1943: The 50,000 Jews remaining in Warsaw began a desperate and heroic attempt to resist Nazi deportation to extermination camps. Their armed insurgency became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There had been over 3 million Jews living in Poland prior to the Nazi occupation. The Nazis rounded them up and forced them into crowded ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto had 250,000-300,000 Jews living in abominable conditions. Roughly this same number of Jews were slaughtered at the Treblinka concentration camp within the two months the Nazis started deporting them. The Jews managed to stockpile Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, military uniforms, and even a few pistols and some explosives. However, the resistance was crushed by the Nazis on May 16.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #holocaust #antisemitism #WarsawGhettoUprising #jews #poland #warsaw #WorldWarII #nazis #genocide #resistance #uprising #insurrection #fascism #antifa #antifascism
