DS #126: Hold the Line

As Maria Ressa says, we must hold the line. We should not surrender in advance to authoritarianism in Brazil, South Korea, The Philippines, or the USA.

Today — exactly one year after my last episode — I turned on the mic and spoke from the heart about Trump, Musk, DOGE, Grover Norquist, the Department of Education, Israeli war crimes in Gaza, AI, and more. Plus a tiny glimpse of one of the best female MCs in the world today.

Enjoy!

Want to do something about the horrors of the world? Why not write a letter for Amnesty International?

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Current Events

• Trump and the angry white guys who voted for him [Pew Research: Voting patterns in the 2024 election]
• Donald Trump and Steve Bannon need angry young men. They’re using Gamergate culture to get them

Economics

• Drowning public schools in the bathtub to promote GOP ideology

Education

• ACLU: Trump's Department of Education Attack Explained
• In Engaged Buddhism, Peace Begins with You

Killer Robots

• MIT: Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact

Hip-Hop

• Sa-Roc feat. Black Thought: “The Black Renaissance”

Quote of the Show

Salah Ta’mari is (or was; I can’t find info on him now; this is from a 1992 book) a writer and former member of the Palestine resistance movement. He wrote in his Journey into Hades: Diary of a Palestinian in an Israeli Prison:

• [At the end, after hallucinating a conversation with his mother] "One million giants stood up in me and began fighting their way to the surface again, with determination, fury, and force. No way to make me give up. I was stronger, I would fight back, I would rise to the challenge."

End US arms sales to Israel!