INDEPENDENT GLOBAL JOURNALISM: “Who are the Real Terrorists in the Mideast?” / truthdig / Danny Sjursen ☮

Back when I still wore the uniform of a U.S. Army officer, and well before many of my former brothers in arms labeled me a traitor, I taught freshman (“plebe”) history at West Point. I loved asking my cadets provocative questions, the sort of queries they never heard in high school Advanced Placement U.S. history courses. Consider just one. At the end of the class on World War II, I always asked: “What is the moral difference between flying three planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon—killing 3,000 civilians—and using hundreds of U.S. planes to firebomb Tokyo on March 9, 1945—killing some 90,000 civilians?” Suffice it to say that most cadets didn’t like this question at all.

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PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” / The Intercept ☮

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves? We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late. This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

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HAPPY HITCH DAY! “The Hitch” / Documentary / Christopher Hitchens ☮

CAPITALISTS AND CLERGY: “Freethought of the Day” / Rosa Luxemburg ☮

On this date in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was born in Russian Poland to a middle-class Jewish family. A revolutionary agitator by her teens, she moved to Zurich, in part to avoid possible imprisonment. She studied at the University of Zurich, receiving her doctorate in 1898. From Warsaw, Luxemburg tried to help the Russian revolution. She wrote more than 700 pamphlets, articles, speeches and books, advocating mass strikes by proletariats. She was in and out of prison, once for advocating during World War I that German soldiers turn their guns upon the government and overthrow it. In 1919, she and two leaders of the German Communist Party, which Luxemburg helped found, were arrested. She was knocked out, shot and thrown in a river. Although socialism, not freethought, was her life’s passion, she wrote the article “Socialism and the Churches,” in 1905, first published by the Polish Social Democratic Party. Luxemburg, who strongly believed in freedom of conscience, sought to show that the church, originally considered a refuge for workers, was now clearly oppressing them. D. 1919.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: “Spotlight on Freethought” / Freedom From Religion Foundation / Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor ☮

What is Freethought? FFRF Co-President Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor discuss freethought in history. Learn more about the Freedom From Religion Foundation at ffrf.org.

CLIMATE CHANGE: “The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change” / TEDx Stockholm / Greta Thunberg ☮

In this passionate call to action, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg explains why, in August 2018, she walked out of school and organized a strike to raise awareness of global warming, protesting outside the Swedish parliament and grabbing the world’s attention. “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions,” Thunberg says. “All we have to do is to wake up and change.”