"If Trump makes a bid to steal the election, calling it a coup highlights that it’s an undemocratic power grab. At the same time, the term “coup” can be misleading, because it conjures images of soldiers occupying government offices and TV stations, setting up roadblocks, and arresting political opponents. Trump stealing the election would—by design—be a lot muddier than that. As Barton Gellman argues, Trump’s strategy makes use of traditional voter suppression methods—such as purging voter rolls and (probably) intimidating people at the polls—but the crux of it is not controlling the election but discrediting the electoral process itself.

For example, Trump’s efforts to disrupt mail-in voting (such as gutting the postal service) may help shift the results in his favor, but their main effect—coupled with his team’s relentless lies about the supposed danger of widespread voter fraud—is to call the validity of the results into question. Through this and other tactics, in Gellman’s words, Trump “could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold onto power.” At that point, the outcome could depend on Trump’s control over key federal agencies and support from rightist street forces (Patriot groups, Proud Boys, etc.), but only because the election itself has been discredited."

https://itsgoingdown.org/resisting-trumps-coup/

"Of all the wild speculations Elon Musk made during the Neuralink launch, the most accurate prediction was his quip that the device is “sort of like if your phone went in your brain.” “Sort of like,” indeed: Neuralink is like a phone in that it is yet another machine built for generating data. While the device does not represent a major advance in brain-machine interfaces, and the pipeline for applications beyond movement disorders is at best decades long, what Neuralink does offer is an opportunity to harvest data about the brain and couple it to the kinds of data about our choices and behaviors that are already being collected all the time. The device is best understood not as a rupture with the past, but as an intensification of the forms of surveillance and data accumulation that have come to define our everyday lives."

https://thebaffler.com/latest/shit-for-brains-carr

"We design apartments that are too small, condos that have no privacy, communities with no access to green space, schools without safe walking paths and natural playgrounds, hospitals that are completely mechanistic and inhuman, universities without daylit classrooms and adequate natural retreat spaces, and office buildings with no connection to nature at all. Our builders, developers, engineers, and architects have convinced us that we cannot afford any other option."

"Contact with nature nurtures us into a state of relaxation that supports our health and the development of our intelligence, sociability, and creativity.

When we remove contact with nature from our world, we live a circumscribed existence that increases levels of anxiety and fear and compromises creativity. Social tensions arise when we are too crowded without the relief provided by parks and waterways.

As developers, designers, and builders, we need to ensure that buildings are connected to natural light, views, and sounds. We need to build communities that are garden-based with real links to waterways and to wild nature. We need to redefine the postindustrial city; we need to rewild it."

https://independentmediainstitute.org/how-the-built-environment-is-damaging-childrens-connection-to-nature/

#video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie6IY-GuXDI

#books

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/cia-brainwashing-program-mk-ultra-sidney-gottlieb/

"We had seen the very least of the night’s brutality, itself but a sliver of the repression that the Mexican state routinely exercises against journalists, activists, and anyone who dares to challenge it. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists—by some counts, the most dangerous non-war zone. Five journalists have been killed this year alone; at least 130 have been murdered since 2000. For all its infamy, though, the logic of violence against Mexican journalists is often opaque to outsiders, and I struggle to explain it myself. It often works like a spiral. The state—by which I mean the police, the military, and paramilitary groups—or perhaps not the state, but another group of shadowy interests, understood under the heuristic of organized crime—tortures and/or disappears and/or murders someone. Activists, friends, and family members turn out to protest the violence against that someone, until the same thing happens to them. A journalist covers the new violations, and they, too, become a victim—then the activists who protest for them, the journalists who write about them, and so on."

thebaffler.com/latest/conspiracy-of-silence-wattenbarger