“The long dormant seeds of ‘bottom-up’ culture, evolutionally baked deeply into our DNA and our neurophysiological systems, are vibrantly reawakening.”

“When I asked Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, ‘What’s the next big thing on the web?’ He

replied that it was trust.”

“This tsunami of bottom-up thinking and behavior is causing a bigger paradigm shift than the inventions of writing or Gutenberg’s printing press because we’re already genetically primed for this by our millions of years of human evolution.”

So many trends today look toward the end of life as we know it—climate change, the huge gluttony of the super-rich who work together to transcend national boundaries in their pursuit of more money, more power, ultimately a global feudal system.

UK folk-pop singer Lucy Spraggan will be playing a headlining show at Rumba Cafe on June 23rd.

She just released her fifth (!!!) studio album Today Was A Good Day on May 3rd via Cooking Vinyl. The four-time UK Top 40 artist's signature folk-pop style (Think a mix of Courtney Barnett, KT Tunstall, and Ed Sheeran) has captured hearts in her home country, allowing her to forge her own path across Europe and the UK. She has also received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube (With some of her videos reaching millions of views!!).  

With each criminal conviction, the state of Ohio matter-of-factly tells the defendants how long they will spend behind bars. Hidden from view, in the “fine-print,” is a long list of additional penalties attached to these convictions. 

Only upon leaving prison and while attempting to rebuild their lives, do offenders experience, first-hand, how these non-prison “collateral consequences” limit or deny their basic rights to housing, food stamps, education, voting, employment, child custody and much more.

A 2018 study conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative found that “formally incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27%—higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression…[and]…Exclusionary policies and practices are responsible for these market inequities.”

The study concludes: “A prison sentence should not be a perpetual punishment…States should implement automation record expungement procedures and reform their licensing practices so as to eliminate the automatic rejection of people with felony convictions.”   

Community Pride’s third event was a screening of Laverne Cox and Jac Gares’ documentary, “Free CeCe!” The film is about the revolutionary prison abolitionist politics of CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was incarcerated into a men’s prison for acting in self-defense when experiencing fascist violence. The film was shown in the Beeler Gallery on Tuesday at 7pm and was followed by a panel discussion of four black trans activists with co-director of the festival, Dkéama Alexis, as the moderator.

A prominent theme in the documentary is how transmisogynoir, oppression of black trans women, is legalized in the police and prison systems. Cox and Gares highlight how there is no respite from violence and abuse as a trans woman of color. The film portrayed McDonald’s resistance to the state’s racist policies and the international support for her. The integral argument is that solidarity with black trans women means to reject respectability politics. There can be no trans liberation without prison abolition. McDonald skyped in after the screening to express her disgust at mainstream pride events and explain why she will not be celebrating Pride.

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, June 11, 2019

According to exit polls from late May, an impressive 82% of Irish voters say Ireland should remain a neutral country in all aspects. But Ireland is not remaining a neutral country in all aspects, and there’s no indication of whether Irish voters know that, or specifically what they think of the fact that the United States military, year after year, ships large numbers of troops and weapons (and occasionally presidents) through Shannon Airport on their way to endless disastrous wars.