I am adding a new section to my GNRs, with links to the best sources of information on protests all around the US, indeed all around the world. Today I am featuring them up top, with something going on for each. Let us know which ones you plan to attend, and then how they went. Pix, please.
I have a lot of nominally bad news today, about what the nastiest, cruelest people among us think they are doing, and how they think they can get away with it. We can’t push back if we don’t know what the plan is for oppressing us, starving us, making us die of dread diseases, whatever.
Molester Mole: Forewarned is forearmed.
Deacon Mushrat [laughing]: I suppose an octopus is twice as well off.
Mole takes extreme umbrage at this frivolity, and the Deacon promises not to laugh even if Mole tells a joke.
Pogo, The Jack Acid Society Black Book, parodying the John Birch Society White Books
Grokking Republicans: The Jack Acid Society
Upcoming events
Hundreds of events, local, state, virtual, and sometimes national.
Mobilize.us: Events, Petitions, and Volunteer Opportunities
Indivisible: Sorting Soup: Turning Ideas Into Action - Join Weekly - every Thursday Zoom @5PM central
FiftyFifty.one:
50 protests.
50 states.
1 movement.
Disappeared In America
Across the country, immigrant families are being detained, disappeared, and torn from their loved ones — part of a growing authoritarian campaign to erode rights and silence dissent.
Join the Disappeared in America Weekend of Action (11/1-11/2) — a national mobilization to protect immigrants, expose corporate complicity, and honor the lives lost in detention.
3 WAYS TO TAKE ACTION NOVEMBER 1-2, 2025
We don’t have ICE, CBP, or HSI in Champaign/Urbana, but we have plenty of protestors against them. I went to No Kings 2 here (Rachel Maddow showed a clip of the event!) and to a recent Pride event.
NoKings.org: What’s Next?
The fight doesn’t end here. No Kings was a beginning — a reminder that power belongs to the people, not to those who would rule over us. The work now is to stay ready, stay connected, and keep fighting back.
Collect your No Kings moments
Tell your story
Call people in
Keep it going
We have lots of pictures from No Kings in Urbana, including signs and costumes. There was also a One Piece flag that I don’t have a picture of. I followed everyone who posted pix from the event on Bluesky.
FindAProtest.org: find a protest
Find protests and solidarity events near you — updated daily with actions in your community.
Nothing in my town, Urbana IL, but various events around Illinois.
American Muslims for Palestine, 2025 Palestine Convention
🍉 As we relentlessly work to end the genocide in Gaza, we commit ourselves to thinking beyond the survival of our people and our cause. That is why our convention theme this year is “Beyond Survival: Resisting Genocide.”✊🏽 Join the thousands coming to Chicago for AMP’s 18th Palestine Convention this Thanksgiving weekend, November 27-29, 2025. Tickets and more information at:
PalestineConvention.org
Let me know if my GNRs get to be too much for you.
World
- Gaza
Hamas is an umbrella organization. The Al-Qassam Brigades are their fighters and terrorists, who are separate from their political and social operations. Bibi Netanyahu funded Hamas to scuttle the two-state solution, and is also a terrorist.
There are getting to be more democratic elections, but there are still many authoritarian elections that something must be done about.
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Some great & important news out of the Netherlands:
“Dutch Voters Deliver Major Setback to Far-Right Party of Geert Wilders [who controlled the last coalition government before it collapsed]. A center-left party was poised to become the country’s largest political party, according to exit polls.”
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— Brent Toderian (@brenttoderian.bsky.social) October 30, 2025 at 12:50 AM
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⌛ For the first time in over a decade it seems as though there may be a serious contender able to defeat Orbán - Péter Magyar.
🇭🇺 But with Hungary slipping further towards authoritarianism under Orbán, will the elections be free or fair?
https://bit.ly/4oaZPku
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— Best for Britain (@bestforbritain.org) October 23, 2025 at 5:40 AM
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🇲🇿 In Mozambique, HRF documented an alarming escalation of surveillance, censorship, and violence following contested 2024 elections, including arbitrary detentions, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings.
— Human Rights Foundation (HRF) (@hrf.org) October 23, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Trump props up authoritarian economic disaster Milei and his ultra-expensive “free market reforms”.
Polls open in Tanzania as ruling party seeks to extend decades in power
"Polling stations across Tanzania opened Wednesday for an election marked by concerns from human rights organizations and the detention of opposition members."
This is on its face a disaster. But it is also a story of the world’s response to the disaster. Check out the dread diseases being conquered around the world in the Science section below.
Russian stuff blowing up: Friendly fire claims another Russian helicopter
Russian stuff blowing up: 'You drive over corpses—there's no other way'
Ukraine Invasion Day 1,346: UKR strikes have depleted over 20 percent of RU oil refining potential
ADAPTIVE INDOMITABLE UKRAINE:Russians Don't Want their “crippled souls” Soldiers. Neither Does Putin
Russians have been found to have widespread fear of the “heroes of the war” returning from the front.
State propaganda efforts to glorify the soldiers deployed to the Ukrainian front, whom Vladimir Putin called the country’s “new elite,” have proven futile.
Approximately 40%of Russian citizens consider the “heroes of the SVO” to be spiritually crippled, and their return from the front is expected to lead to an increase in crime and conflict, according to a Levada Center poll
.According to the study, 41% of respondents believe the war “crippled the souls” of those who experienced it; 19% believe that “SVO participants ”have become “cruel and prone to violence,” and 11% believe that the war has made people “indifferent and cynical.”
“SVO” is an abbreviation for the Russian name of the Ukraine war, which may not be called a war inside Russia.
- China
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President Trump arrived in South Korea, where world leaders are gathering for an Asia-Pacific economic forum. He is expected to meet with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday, while North Korea has not responded to his repeated offers to meet with its leader, Kim Jong-un.
Follow live.
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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) October 29, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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Jamaica
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Let’s get ready to help support the people of Jamaica and the Caribbean as they make it through Hurricane Melissa. 🇯🇲💛
“More powerful than Katrina“ (re- 2005 historic devastation of New Orleans) is not good…
However, I always regard hurricane season as a chance for the rich Christians to prove it!
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— dcii.bsky.social (@dcii.bsky.social) October 29, 2025 at 12:01 AM
- Antarctica
Rabidly Repellent Republicans Rushing to Ruin/Bad News for Them
- Shutdown day 29: Johnson is a consummate hypocrite and a really, really incompetent liar.
- Epstein
Just a reminder that Republicans released all 445 pages of the Starr report on a blowjob.
Release the Epstein files.
We see these arrests, trials, convictions, sentences every day on X for priests, parsons, pols, and police, but not on Bluesky, where we have better things to do.
- Grijalva
- Gerrymanders
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Virginia Democrats will hold a special session beginning Monday to redraw the state’s congressional map. The move makes Virginia the second state to start a redistricting process that counters the wave of aggressive Republican gerrymanders nationwide.
https://bit.ly/4hu55wL
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— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) October 26, 2025 at 6:28 PM
- Tearing down the White House East Wing
- Murder on the high seas
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Killing Venezuelan civilians off the coast of Venezuela with no due process sounds like a matter for the International Criminal Court. Who ordered the murders? The USA may not be a signatory to the ICC, but Venezuela is, and that brings it within ICC jurisdiction, I think. Should be investigated!
— Alex Wright (@alxndrw.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 1:30 AM
- CIA vs. Venezuela
This is an official rumor, posted all over Bluesky, but not by any Venezuelan authorities.
How Abortion Patients Are Being Tracked Across State Lines
Jessica Craven is traveling, so she got someone else to send out her Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter for a few days.
In Reproductive Police State, an in-depth look at the extent to which law enforcement can surveil abortion seekers via the company Flock.
Reproductive Police State
Remember how Texas police tried to track down an abortion patient using the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, Flock? They accessed more than 83,000 cameras across the country—and later tried to claim it was to ensure the woman’s safety, not to criminalize her. That turned out to be a lie: they actually opened up a criminal ‘death’ investigation into her abortion after being tipped off by her abuser.
Well now, the ACLU of Massachusetts has discovered that federal and local law enforcement agencies across the country can access Flock’s data—including live video—without warrants or even probable cause. The organization says police across the state have collected detailed information about the location of Massachusetts drivers and have shared that data with “over 7,000 agencies and organizations all over the country—including in states that have passed laws banning abortion.”
Similarly, the ACLU of Oregon filed a lawsuit last week against the city of Eugene for refusing to disclose where its 57 Flock-operated license plate readers are located.
Anti-Abortion Strategy
For months now, GOP state attorneys general have been escalating their legal crusade against abortion pills: an ongoing lawsuit against the FDA to demand that the agency reinstate medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone; letters to Congress and the Trump administration demanding a ban on telemedicine abortion access; lawsuits and criminal charges against blue state doctors who allegedly mail abortion pills into their states, challenging liberal states’ shield laws.
The goal is to launch one of these cases to the Supreme Court, and end shield laws and telehealth abortion access.
This week, Truthout has a deep dive into the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a registered 527 group—which can thus receive unlimited political contributions. The organization’s largest funder is the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, whose Concord Fund PAC has siphoned $23 million into RAGA since 2014.
Through the Federalist Society, Leo is responsible for helping to dramatically remake the nation’s judicial landscape—filling judgeships with far-right, anti-abortion extremists with the ultimate goal of establishing a Christian nationalist society. This, naturally, requires the banning of abortion pills—an outcome Leo clearly hopes that GOP attorneys general will eventually achieve one way or another.
- Declining polls and increasing resistance as a result of all of the above and more. I don’t have room for all of it. Feel free to point and laugh some more. Come round to Renewable Friday tomorrow to see the resistance to political and corporate Denial and Obstruction.
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In the new Economist/YouGov weekly track Trump's approval drops two points and crawls in at 39% approve, 58% disapprove - his worst showing in this poll this year. Here are some of the demo/issue breakouts: 2/
www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/senate-to-...
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— Simon Rosenberg (@simonwdc.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 10:06 AM
Palate Cleanser and Brain Bleach
Ana Vidovic plays Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Francisco Tárrega on a Jim Redgate classical guitar
Regular Good News
United by unimaginable loss, Palestinians and Israelis are turning pain into purpose. Their grassroots movement of bereaved families is working to build peace where politics has failed
There are two people on the Zoom screen in front of me. One, a Palestinian man in the ancient city of Jericho, in the West Bank. The other, an Israeli woman in Tel Aviv.
They’re separated, literally and metaphorically, by a wall. And they’re united in loss: specifically, the loss of a child. Something else unites them: a determination to build bridges of shared understanding at a time when the gulf between their peoples seems deeper than ever.
They’re both part of the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), membership of which has the grimmest of qualifications: that your child has been killed in the conflict. Their backgrounds could not be more different, and yet, partly because of their loss, they’ve arrived in the same place. The fighting has to end, and bereaved parents are better placed than most to achieve that.
A coalition of 25 states and the District of Columbia — including California, New York, and Pennsylvania — has filed a federal lawsuit demanding the USDA release emergency funds to keep SNAP benefits flowing for more than 42 million Americans.
And in more good news: judges are continuing to block Trump’s attacks on workers, Governor Newsom is defending fair elections, and volunteers nationwide are bringing books and joy to children in their communities.
Science! Lifeforms! Weirdness!
Chise doesn’t allow posts to be embedded. I don’t see the point, when I can copy and past them whole.
A novel cancer vaccine that stimulates the immune system to target one of the most common cancer-driving mutations has shown encouraging early results in patients with pancreatic and colorectal cancer, two of the most difficult-to-treat malignancies, according to a study led in part by researchers
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Hannah Robertson, the little celebrated wife of David Robertson an eminent 19th C Scottish marine biologist, was accomplished in the science of modern seaweeds, conchology & foraminifera. Acknowledgements of her expertise were few #Pioneering #Women www.geological-digressions.com/hanna-robert...
⚒️🧪🌊
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— Brian Ricketts (@kiwigeolog.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 9:08 PM
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Day178 of photoshopping @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver with fossils in the hopes that he saves the Paleontological Research Institution
Discussing politicians all day can lead to fantasizing about something with an actual spine, like this mysticete whale's #whalewednesday #SavePRI #fossils 🐳⚒️
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— Dr. Brendan Anderson (@fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 11:05 PM
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Spooky season royalty 👑🎃✨️
Atolla gigantea is the largest Atolla species found off the West Coast. This deep-sea crown jelly can reach a diameter of up to 15 centimeters (six inches) and is one of the most widely distributed jellyfish. The genus occurs worldwide, from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
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— MBARI (@mbarinews.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 11:55 AM
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Back in 2010, my PhD student Chase Kimball led a study of the population of binary black holes that found evidence for repeated mergers
arxiv.org/abs/2011.05332
There were still lots of uncertainties then. Now, these new discoveries are great candidates for hierarchical mergers!
🔭🧪⚛️☄️ #O4IsHere
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— Christopher Berry (@cplberry.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 1:46 PM
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My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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— Eddy Rhodes (@eddycurrents.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 12:35 PM
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I hope they explained to the Toronto fans that cancer charities are what the United States has in lieu of a functional healthcare system
— Seeing your posts in the Discover feed 😱😱😱 (@hockeybear.space) October 25, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Funny or Fuggedaboudit
Funny Music
Tom Lehrer: In Old Mexico
Dudley Moore Beethoven Colonel Bogey
If you hit a paywall on articles linked in diaries or comments, try using Archive.Today to see if you can get free reads.
