Marrton Dormish

Minister, advocate, writer, aspiring pacifist, 4th-gen Coloradan, #AbolishICE #CeasefireNow #BuiltForZero #BLM #RememberSandCreek 🏕 🏀 he/him/his/él

[Marrton Dormish @EverydayEpics1]

Still relevant today in many ways: ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick D... https://t.co/L1PvGiPs2Z via @YouTube

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

At least 4 million people have already been thrown off SNAP since Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year.

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

The real welfare queen in America is the Walton family, who inherited Walmart, got $93.5 billion richer since Trump’s election, got a $2.9 billion tariff refund that should have gone to their customers & is the #1 employer of workers on food stamps & Medicaid that you subsidize.

[ProPublica @propublica]

The Pentagon has never received a passing grade on a comprehensive financial audit.

One thing is clear: Vast sums are funneled into costly weapon systems that chronically come in over budget.
https://t.co/Nd4cW01wml

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

There is something deeply funny about billionaires convincing a man making $52,000 a year that the greatest threat to his freedom is another worker making $14 an hour who speaks Spanish.
Brother.
The immigrant didn't outsource your job.
The immigrant didn't buy your hospital.
The immigrant didn't raise your rent.
The immigrant didn't eliminate your pension.
You are being pickpocketed while somebody points dramatically at the guy standing next to you.

[Leo @Leonajardinho]

My cousin bought a $320,000 house in 2019. Mortgage was $1,400 a month. Life was simple.

Fast forward to this week. He hasn't missed a single payment, hasn't refinanced, and hasn't added a single square foot to the property.

His monthly payment just jumped to $2,100.

Why?

Because local property tax assessments skyrocketed 40%, and his homeowner's insurance premium doubled after two regional storms hit the state….even though his own house suffered zero damage.

The bank sent a letter saying his escrow account had a $4,800 shortage, and they increased his monthly bill by $700 overnight to cover it.

They tell you a fixed-rate mortgage locks in your housing costs for 30 years.

What they don't tell you:

The principal and interest are fixed, but the property taxes and insurance aren't.

You never truly own your home…..you're just renting it from the city and insurance companies at a rate they can hike whenever they want.

[Brian Maass @Briancbs4]

While @CityofDenver is in a $200 million budget deficit,cutting services and jobs, it paid lawyers $800 an hour to represent the city in 2 lawsuits. Legal bills have now balloned, climbing past $800k:
https://t.co/FSmZUlkieI

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

"What radicalized you?"

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?

At this point "What radicalized you?" is a much less interesting question to ask people than "Why aren't you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?"

Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything's basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You're just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Angie Nixon Just Gave Democrats a Lesson in Fighting Back

“If wanting your neighbor to afford their insulin is radical, then call me a radical.

“If believing a mother shouldn’t have to work three jobs to keep a roof over her family’s head is extreme, then call me extreme.”

Nixon was outspent roughly 16 to 1 and still won Florida’s Democratic Senate primary by 12 points.

Then she looked directly toward November:

“Ashley Moody can call us whatever she wants. But in November, she will call me Senator.”

This is what fighting for working people sounds like.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

A biology teacher in Pine Bluff, Arkansas noticed one of her students kept falling asleep in class. Instead of sending her to the principal, she asked why. The girl was living with a grandmother who had no bed for her, in a house with termites eating the walls and the electricity shut off. The teacher, Crystal Barnes, bought a bed frame and mattress with her own money, on a fifty thousand dollar salary. When she delivered it, the girl asked if she could also have some food. She was hungry. Barnes now keeps a cart of snacks in her classroom, paid for out of pocket, because she can't undo what federal cuts have done but she can do that much.

Barnes found her own way out of a similar hole as a pregnant fifteen year old, through a nonprofit that fed her son and helped her finish school. She's spending her career paying that forward one bed, one snack cart at a time. It's not policy. It's not enough. It's just what's left when policy fails and someone still shows up anyway.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Race was always a management tool.

Before the Atlantic slave trade needed a justification, the concept of race as a fixed, heritable, biologically determinant category did not exist in its current form.

It was invented.

Assembled from pieces of theology, pseudoscience, and administrative necessity by people who needed to explain why some human beings could be owned and others could own them, and who needed that explanation to feel permanent and natural and God-given rather than convenient and constructed and profitable.

They built the wall.

And then they told the people on the comfortable side of the wall that the wall had always been there.

And then they told the people on the other side that the wall was their natural condition.

And then they stood back and let the wall do the work of preventing the two groups from looking at the hands that built it.

That wall runs through every country the empire touched.

Not always along color lines. Sometimes along religious lines. Sometimes along ethnic lines. Sometimes along the lines of a border drawn in 1884 at a conference in Berlin where not a single African person was present while European powers divided the continent like a meal.

Different wall. Same architect. Same function.

Divide the people from each other.

Unite the people against themselves.

Keep the hands that built the wall out of the picture.

We are putting them back in the picture.

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

I’ve argued for years that democratic socialists were more capable than corporate Democrats of appealing to Trump voters but this stat blows my mind

[Marrton Dormish @EverydayEpics1]

#CheckInForHousing https://t.co/7rMBloPYdJ

[middleclassparty @middle_class_us]

“People don't want to work anymore” is wrong.

Offer someone $15 an hour and watch their enthusiasm disappear.

Now offer that exact same person $45 an hour.

They will show up early, stay late, and do whatever you need them to do.

Americans have a great work ethic.

They just lost enthusiasm for working full time and still being broke.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

A city in Kansas is suing residents who tried to ban data centers.

Edgerton, Kansas, is suing multiple women and an organization in an effort to void a citizen petition that would have banned AI data centers.

Enough signatures were collected, the county legal department reviewed the petition and determined that it generally conformed to state requirements, and the city received a copy of the petition.

But instead of sending the measure to voters, the city council voted to authorize the filing of a lawsuit to challenge the petition’s validity.

https://t.co/jrMQUEf74J

[Jason Koebler @jason_koebler]

Exclusive: A rare bookseller suspected his books were being bought by AI companies. He stuck an AirTag in a book and we tracked it to a secretive Amazon facility in Las Vegas where they scan and destroy books called VGT3:

https://t.co/WXSo0zB6JF

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Private prisons making $1.4 billion charging corrupt ICE bureaucracy $307,000 “per bed” as top 15 cops in San Francisco make average of $700,000 is why shifting resources from systems of incarceration to systems of care is one of the most popular policies in 40 years of polling.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Love and cherish our world. That’s the secret to remaining both (A) deeply happy and (B) well-informed about the dystopian abuses of the empire.

You don’t have to choose. You can have both.

I sometimes get called a Debbie Downer for my nonstop writing about all the evils that are being inflicted upon our world by powerful people every day, but readers who meet me or listen to my podcasts have often expressed surprise at how upbeat and cheerful I am in real life. They see me focusing on extremely dark subject matter day after day and expressing rage and revulsion at the horrors we are witnessing, so they expect me to show up as some kind of dour, jaded misanthrope.

But the truth is I am a very happy person. I don’t generally mention it because this writing project isn’t about me, but my overall experience of life from moment to moment is one of awe, wonder and delight. I experience the full range of emotions and I get my heart ripped out of my chest by Gaza just like anybody else, but after feeling my feelings all the way through I return to marveling at this astonishingly beautiful planet we get to walk around on.

And I only mention this now because I sense an urgent need for the message that you don’t actually have to choose between living a joyful, satisfying life and ferociously opposing the abuses of the machine. I can assure you from personal experience with one hundred percent confidence that you can do both.

I keep hearing people say they avoid news and politics because they find it too depressing. I often see replies to my posts talking about how it’s so hard to go on while knowing about all the war, starvation, tyranny and ecocide the empire is inflicting upon our world. People engaged in activism, real journalism and meaningful politics often look like they’re carrying the weight of the world in their faces, and exhaustion drips from every syllable they speak.

And I’m here to assure you that it really does not need to be this way. The idea that there’s some conflict between personal happiness and engagement with the harsh realities of our world is just empty mind fluff born of flawed perception. It does not deserve to be taken seriously. You can recognize this in your own direct experience with a simple adjustment in your thinking.

It’s actually easy to be both happy and well-informed, and the reason is very simple: because the source of both is the same. The same impulse which drives someone to learn about the abuses of the powerful so they can fight for a better future is also the gateway to joy and wonder. That impulse is called love.

Yes, love. That might land a little corny in an online space generally dedicated to discussing militarism and state tyranny, but it’s the truth. If you didn’t have some love for the world, you wouldn’t care that oligarchs and empire managers are destroying it, and you wouldn’t be in this online space reading this paragraph. You are reading this sentence right now because love for the world is already shining within you.

And if you have love for the world, you have the gateway to happiness right in front of you.

Love and cherish the world with all your heart, and happiness will inevitably follow. Make a practice of pulling your attention away from the grumbling narratives in your mental monologue, and place it instead on the wonders of this beautiful planet in each moment.

The sight of the sky. The scent of the air. The sound of birdsong and playing children. The human hubbub of a bustling city. The rich field of felt sensation in your body (which most adults are only dimly aware of). There is always something beautiful happening in your immediate sensory experience. Always. If you look hard enough, you will find it.

That’s what love is. Deeply appreciating what’s showing up here and now.

Relish your terrestrial human experience from moment to moment to moment, and with practice you will open up a joyful way of living that becomes exponentially better than anything you ever could have imagined. You will begin enjoying your time on this planet because you are actually present for it.

Do you see what I am pointing to here? Can you see how there is no difference between loving your experience of being in this world and loving the world so much that you want to help improve it? Between cherishing each moment on this earth and fighting to stop it from being destroyed?

It’s the same impulse. The same movement. There’s no separation and no contradiction between these two invitations. They are one.

Let your love grow and expand. Let it draw you into an intimate delight in your moment to moment experience of life on this planet, and let it compel you to action in the fight against the imperial machine. Fall in love with the world, and let it compel you to action. It’s all happening in the same motion.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is a version of anti-imperialism that is, functionally, a fan club for a different empire.

It replaces "America should dominate the world" with "China should dominate the world" or "Russia should dominate the world" and believes it has said something radical.

It has not.

It has said the same sentence with different nouns.

The actual radical position is harder to hold and less emotionally satisfying:

That no power should be able to dictate the terms of existence to smaller nations.

That sovereignty is not a privilege distributed by great powers to compliant clients.

That the architecture of the global economy should not be designed, regardless of who designs it, to extract from the periphery and accumulate at the center.

That position requires you to criticize your preferred pole when it behaves like an empire.

Most people cannot do this.

Most people need a protagonist.

The multipolar world is not a story with a protagonist.

That is precisely what makes it better.

And precisely what makes it so difficult for people raised on imperial narratives to actually want it.

[Be A King @BerniceKing]

Ankle monitors. Electric shock gloves. What’s next?

We should be deeply concerned about where this is going.

Dehumanization does not begin with the worst act imaginable. It grows when we become comfortable with treating people as threats to be tracked, controlled, restrained, and subjected to pain.

Immigration status does not erase human dignity. Government power does not erase the responsibility to respect it.

We cannot build the Beloved Community while normalizing the dehumanization of our neighbors. And we should not wait to see what comes next before we say enough.

#Nonviolence365 #BelovedCommunity #HumanDignity #ImmigrationJustice

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

I hope these words reach you if you're struggling.