RICHMOND — Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that prohibits schools from teaching that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was a peaceful demonstration or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the first Democratic state to try to shape how such events are taught.

“The White House webpage says January 6 was a peaceful protest, and people who instigated it were the police and National Guard,” said Del. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax), the sponsor of the bill, which passed the state Senate this week and the House of Delegates last month. “This is a preventative measure against a massive disinformation campaign on the part of the White House.”

On Tuesday March 3, approximately 100 students at San Diego State University demonstrated to express their opposition to the criminal war against Iran launched over the weekend by the United States and Israel in violation of international law.

The demonstration drew participation from students in the vicinity, several student organizations, and interest from dozens of students who could be seen standing at the windows of buildings near where speeches were taking place. Protesters rallied and then marched across campus. Students wore keffiyehs, carried Palestinian flags and handmade anti-war signs reading “I am not dying for the Epstein class,” “No war on Iran” and “End American Imperialism.”

The Trump regime has launched this war amid overwhelming popular opposition. Its outbreak is imparting renewed urgency to the reemergence of the student movement that began in 2023 against the genocide in Gaza and to the development of a mass anti-war movement rooted in the working class.

Chancellor Merz has seen the façade falling and dutifully taken a wrecking ball to finish the job.

A wide range of anonymous X (Twitter) users have reported that their real names are suddenly being Googled in Israel shortly after they began criticizing the country for its actions in Palestine. Some connected the phenomenon to Au10tix, the software X requires users (even anonymous ones) to use in order to verify their real identities.
Au10tix is an Israeli company founded and staffed by former Israeli spies from the elite Israeli military intelligence group Unit 8200. MintPress News investigates this disturbing phenomenon.

Crosspost from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10927965

Tensions are rising between US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the US’s approach to the war on Iran, three former US officials and a senior regional official familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.

Rubio and Hegseth were described as “at each other's throats” over the question of whether the US should deploy troops to Iran at Israel’s request, the sources told MEE.

Hegseth is supportive of the position, while Rubio is deeply wary of entangling the US in a long war, the sources told MEE.

The US has mainly confined its operations to air strikes and standoff strikes using cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, but CNN reported this week that the CIA has begun training and arming Kurdish fighters to operate in Iran.

One Gulf official told MEE that US officials have discussed sending special operations teams into Iran to target senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials and people familiar with Iran's nuclear programme.

Four House Democrats and the GOP voted down a war powers resolution, enabling Trump's assault on Iran.

Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Greg Landsman (Ohio), and Juan Vargas (Calif.) stood with the GOP for the 212-219 vote against H.Con.Res.38, which was led by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). The only other Republican to support the resolution was Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio)—though GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales (Texas), who is facing an unrelated scandal, did not participate.

“The Constitution is clear: Congress, not the president, has the authority to decide when this nation goes to war,” he added. “The American people must continue pressing their elected representatives to reclaim that authority and stop another disastrous war in the Middle East before it spirals further out of control.”

And psychologists as well as practitioners, therapists and people doing all manner of different kinds of healing work with trauma survivors have learned that there are all these different ways that people can heal. But many of those ways are not only through the mind, right? They’re accessed through changing our habits and behaviors, through shifting our relationships with people and through different types of therapies that also some of them have an element of mystery to them, right? Hypnosis, meditation, therapeutic treatments that involve light and sound, and all these kind of engage the full bodiness of our neurological systems that we actually … The nervous system is not just in the brain, it extends throughout our entire bodies.

But it’s not a one-way street, the nervous system sends messages out through our entire bodies. But the body can also send messages back to the nervous system and cause automatic reactions. That’s often what is happening when we talk about somebody being triggered or somebody being activated.

A PTSD trigger is not the same thing as a defensive reaction in a political context. But it has a really close physiological relationship. And so I ended up sort of transferring some of that research onto the question of like, how do we approach defensiveness or mental, emotional, spiritual blocks when we’re trying to unlearn or when we’re trying to have transformative conversations? Or get to a place of political transformation collectively. That there’s just a lot that we can learn from trauma practitioners, trauma therapy and trauma science about that. Because trauma is sort of the most extreme version of the casual day-to-day defensiveness, polarization, expressions of I’m not open to this. It’s like a pretty similar physiological reaction in the body just at a smaller scale.

Asked if Americans should worry about Iran retaliating against Americans on U.S. soil, President Donald Trump responded, “I guess.”

"Like I said, some people will die," the president added. "When you go to war, some people will die."

IRGC carried out the 20th wave of Operation True Promise 4 against the Zionist entity and the US bases across the region on Thursday evening.

Crosspost from https://news.abolish.capital/post/33168

This is not merely an implausible account of how great powers decide to wage war. It is a way for the U.S. government to evade responsibility by outsourcing it to Israel, and, in so doing, potentially endanger Jews worldwide. Rubio is validating an insidious storyline that isolationist populists have been constructing: that Israel, and those people in the U.S. connected to it — read, Jews — distort American priorities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the U.S. was forced into the war with Iran by Israel while speaking with reporters on Monday. He explained that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had effectively boxed in the Trump administration, taking the decision out of American hands.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio explained. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/42987861

Emmanuel Damas, 56, died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after struggling to receive timely medical care for a worsening toothache, Chandler City Councilwoman Christine Ellis told the Arizona Daily Star Tuesday afternoon.

Officials in the United States are claiming success in their campaign against Iran, stressing that Washington is in the process of crushing the government in Tehran “without mercy”.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said the US military is loosening the rules of engagement and operating with little restraint as casualties, including hundreds of civilian deaths, mount in Iran.

Mine is East Germany. I think the German culture and heritage fits socialism really well. They always had a militaristic and hard working culture so that Soviet militarism would fit them pretty well (militarism does not mean attacking other countries or having a strong military but more like a dicipline structure overall). They would not mind having a police state where the military and the state controls everything. They were also the most loyal communist state to the Soviets.