#Chicago assembly speech

[indiadiries]

The Soul-Stirring Words of Swami Vivekananda: Igniting the Flame of Motivation

In the magnificent city of Chicago, on the historic day of September 11, 1893, Swami Vivekananda delivered a speech that would forever reverberate in the hearts and minds of millions. His address at the Parliament of World Religions was not just a mere representation of Indian spirituality, but a powerful call to embrace universal brotherhood, religious tolerance, and the empowerment of the human…

[terrestrialnoob]

Strange Friends

Fandom: Danny Phantom, Young Justice (cartoon)

Ships: N/A

Rating: Gen.

Word count: 8,228

Summary:

Being heroes has a negative affect on Danny and Valerie's grades, but luckily, they can sacrifice a weekend with Tetslaff to get their History grades up. A two hour bus ride to Chicago, and they find themselves in an anthropology museum when a nearby robot attack drives everyone outside. Luckily, the local heroes, The Martian Manhunter and his never-before-seen sidekick, are there to save everyone! Or maybe the Martians are the ones who need saving?

Danny and Valerie stepped off the bus in front of the Chicago Museum of Anthropology. The two stuck together mainly because there were only a dozen students there and everyone else were nerds and jocks these two didn’t have the time or patience to deal with. Coach Tetslaff checked the bus for stragglers then shouted at the assembled teens before her.

“Alright, everyone here is in danger of failing history, whether in my class or another teacher’s. So this is your punish- I mean, extra credit opportunity; you’re going to spend your entire weekend here with me. Today, you and your partner are going to choose any exhibit currently on display in the museum and write a report on it. Then tomorrow, you’ll both present your report not only to the class, but also the museum curator Professor Summer Davies.”

She stared out at the unfocused faces that had heard this speech ten times already, then she sighed and continued, “Meet here in front of the museum at 12:50 for the group lunch, if you didn’t sign up for the group meals, you’ll have to go find and pay for your own food. Now, let’s get to it people!”

“Ugh, I can’t believe I have to spend my hard earned weekend doing school work.” Valerie rolled her eyes and glanced at Danny. They’d chosen to sign up as partners on this fieldtrip because Danny knew Valerie would take him seriously and listen to his ideas, and Valerie knew Danny was dependable, despite being a goof, and neither of them would push all the work onto the other.

“Tell me about it,” Danny said as the two made their way into the museum. It was as interesting as most museums are when you’re forced to go instead of choosing to go; Danny would have loved to visit and learn about this stuff any other day, but today it was homework. There was a display on the history of kitchen technology, an intro to forensic anthropology, a collection of Native American musical instruments, and something about the evolution of Victorian house design.

“This should be fascinating,” Danny said, taking notes in a spiral notebook he’d been carrying with him.

“I’m very fascinated by the development of the knife,” Valerie said as she took a photo of some restored kitchen knives that were over a hundred years old when the security guard was turned away.

“I don’t know, they can’t cut ghosts,” Danny teased.

Valerie raised a playful eyebrow at him, “They do when I use them.”

“We both know that’s not how that works,” Danny chuckled and made another note, though, the Forensic Anthropology might be the best option, it was the widest category, and it could be useful with superhero work, two birds - one stone. They had been trying to improve that part of their lives. Valerie and Sam were trying to drag Danny to a workout every day, while Danny was working with Tucker to refine their ghost database and improve their equipment. There had to be something useful they could learn from researching forensic science, even if it was specifically focused on figuring out human history.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion from outside.

Danny rolled up the notebook and stuck it in his jeans pocket as he and the rest of the students left the building in a group under the shouted orders of Coach Tetslaff. Outside, there was a crowd of scared citizens running past the museum. Danny and Valerie shared a look and, while Tetslaff was distracted by the other students, turned and headed towards the source of the commotion instead of away from it. Barely a block away from the museum, there was a large figure fighting two smaller figures in the air.

Once they got close enough, Danny recognized one of the smaller figures as Martian Manhunter, and another was smaller but very similar in appearance. She looked like a teen girl with Martian green skin, long red hair, a navy blue skirt matching the color of both their capes, and while she wore a white shirt instead of Manhunter’s black body suit, they both had the same red X’s on their chests and gold pins holding their capes (that probably only Danny could see at this distance with his weird ghost eyes). They were clearly working together despite Danny never having heard of Martian Manhunter having a sidekick.

Their enemy looked to be an nine-and-a-half-foot tall robot, with six long spindly arms sticking out from it's extended torso. There were sharp claws on two with arcs of electricity flitting between its fingers, blasters on two others that shot globs of white hot plasma, and the last too were fucking flaming swords. It flew around in the sky about fifteen feet in the air using rockets built into its feet, but it wasn’t a stable floating, the way its rockets were designed, it couldn’t stay still in the air.

“Wow, a real superhero fight!” Danny marveled as he watched, uh, Martian Girl? – sure – as she dodged one of the robot’s plasma blasts.

“And what are we? Fake superheroes?” Valerie shook her head, but watched with deep intrigue as Martian Girl kept the robots attention on her while Martian Manhunter flew up behind it, raising his hands towards it.

Danny could almost see the psychic energy radiating off Martian Manhunter as the robot’s two blaster arms were torn from its body followed quickly by the two claw arms. Then Danny felt more, stronger psychic energy coming from Martian Girl as she turned to face it. The rest of the robot was immediately crushed into a ball of jagged metal and electrical sparks. Danny couldn’t tell if it was because it was stuck between the two Martian’s telekinetic powers or if it was all Martian Girl. But Danny could practically see it, the psychic power rolling off her in waves and hitting the robot along with Martian Manhunter’s power at its back. Looking closely, Martian Manhunter had a lot of control, he could thread a needle with his psychic abilities, but Martian Girl had so much raw psychic energy flowing out of her, it sent shivers down Danny’s spine. It almost lit up his ghost sense, like it was enough emotional energy for him to sense it but not the right type of energy to fully ping for him; it kind of left him wanting his sense to go off to just acknowledge the power the two of them had up there. He glanced at Valerie to see if she felt it too, but no, it was just him.

The Martians lowered to the ground now the robot wasn’t a threat, and Danny heard the girl say, “- didn’t have a mind for us to read, so it’s not like we could have found out what its plan was.”

“There are more ways to get information from an enemy than simply reading their mind,” Manhunter explained, “And if this machine had remained intact, we could have downloaded information from its memory.”

“Oh, hello Megan, of course we could have!” Martian Girl said and facepalmed. “I’m sorry, Uncle J’onn, I shouldn’t have destroyed it like that.”

“Miss Martian,” Martian Manhunter pointedly said, and she meeped and mumbled an apology.

He sighed and said, “You are still new to this. I had years as a m’hontrr before coming to Earth, and more as a private investigator before becoming a superhero. You will learn these things with time and experience.”

Danny glanced over at Valerie, a familiar red glow in her eyes. “See anything useful?”

Valerie sighed, blinking the nanites away from her eyes, “No, there’s too much pollution to get a clear rocket trail, and its power signature isn’t unique enough to stand out.”

“And how would you know that?” Martian Manhunter asked, turning and flying over to them.

“And why are you here? We told everyone to evacuate the area!” Martian Girl said, coming up next to, apparently, her uncle.

“Sorry, it’s my fault,” Danny said rubbing the back of his neck and trying to look embarrassed on purpose, “I wanted to see real superheroes; I just couldn’t help it! You guys are so cool!”

Martian Girl blushed a little herself and tried, and failed, to firmly state, “It was still really dangerous and - you know, shouldn’t do it again.”

“Yes ma’am,” Danny said and gave an over-serious salute. She smiled and nodded at him.

“We should get back to the rest of the class,” Valerie quickly said pushing on Danny’s shoulder, “We don’t want our teacher to get worried about us.”

Danny weaved out from her hand and quickly pulled his notebook out of his pocket, “Actually, real quick. Can we get your autographs?”

Martian Manhunter nodded, and Martian Girl, or Miss Martian as she wrote it, signed her name before handing it over to her uncle to sign as well, and finally back to Danny.

“Good luck on your robot hunt!” Danny called as he dashed to where Valerie was already walking down the street.

Once they got back at the museum, Coach Tetslaff gave them an earful about running off alone during a supervillain attack, they should really know better. The two then learned it was going to be about three hours before the students of Casper High were allowed back into the museum; security needed to do a routine check to make sure nothing was stolen in the confusion. Coach Tetslaff decided the kids could go to the library to get a head start on their projects or go for lunch early, but made it abundantly clear that Dangerous Robot Attacks will not excuse them from doing their reports.

>><< 

The boy had felt weird to M’gann. She almost didn’t notice it, after her own guilt of messing up by destroying the robot and the chaos and fear she still felt from both herself and everyone around them at the beginning of the fight. It was odd enough that she hadn’t sensed any fear from either of the two teenagers, but she wasn’t sure what counted as a scary experience for the normal human teenager. It was similar to how the rest of the team was, so maybe this was just something teens on Earth were used to? But her uncle had heard the girl say something strange, and when he and M’gann went to see who had been watching their fight, she’d gotten a strange aura from the boy.

He had dark hair, light skin, and blue eyes, and he wore a white t-shirt with red stylized Saturn-like planet symbol in the center, and normal looking jeans despite the notebook he’d managed to stuff in one of its pockets. Very normal in appearance. But, the unusual thing was that he seemed to put out an aura of – it wasn’t quite emotion, but it wasn’t not emotion – and if it was emotion then it was so extremely raw and concentrated compared to most humans, like there wasn’t anything physical keeping the emotions in, or no, that’s not it. He just wasn’t quite… Solid? Human? No, no. She could see he was definitely solid and human, but there was just something off about him.

And the girl he was with. She wore a yellow tank top and an orange skirt with thick gold bracers on each arm and a red backpack, that seemed off somehow, but M'gann hadn't seen a lot of backpacks yet to be sure. She had dark skin and hair, but her eyes seemed to change color the closer she got and M’gann couldn’t tell if they were a shade of red or brown or green - or somehow switched in between. But she didn’t feel unusual to other humans, no matter how inhumanly her eyes behaved, and who was M'gann to say that human eyes couldn’t change like that?

But then again, Uncle J’onn seemed to have sensed something off too. He psychicly told her that he suspected the two might be involved with the robot, perhaps sent there to observe how easily the Martian duo could dispatch with it. He asked her to follow them to see what they were doing in the city while he tried to find clues off the remains of the robot.

M’gann wasn’t sure if he actually thought the teens were important or if he was just getting her out of the way after her screw-up. While the psychic link was a lot clearer on Earth, there was also an expected level of polite, what she deemed, “not looking”, not just for normal humans, but other psychics as well. She’d learned from the team too, that entering anyone’s mind without express permission and forewarning was not a good thing to do and could even hurt a human, or Kryptonian, who wasn’t expecting it. And Uncle J’onn wanted her to practice vocalizing her words more and only use a psychic link to communicate with other heroes. There were still so many rules she needed to get used to on Earth.

She followed the two humans to The Chicago Museum of Anthropology. She’d gone there with Uncle J’onn for one of her first days on Earth; it gave her a basic understanding of the history of humanity, how the species and society developed on Earth. She’d enjoyed the visit.

She stayed at a distance and morphed into her human form before venturing closer. She watched as they stayed with a group of about twelve high school students under the supervision of a large, muscular woman who liked to give orders. The group of students soon dispersed, apparently they’d come to the museum for a school project but the museum would be temporarily closed.

She quickly hurried to close behind her two targets, she wasn’t going to lose them. This was her first solo mission on Earth, she had already messed up with the robot, she wasn’t going to disappoint her uncle again by letting her targets get lost in a crowd. She got close enough, she herd the boy say, “Did you pay for the provided meals?”

“No. Full offense to Tetslaff, I do not trust her taste in food,” The girl responded.

“Yeah, I bet she’s taking the poor idiots who signed up for it to a sports bar or something,” the boy said and took out his phone, “The restaurant finder app I downloaded so we could find places that were vegan friendly for Sam doesn’t have to be used just for vegans. We can put in whatever kind of food we want and it’ll find something for us.”

“Anything but burgers,” the girl said.

“There’s an amazing pizza place a couple blocks down this street,” M’gann said behind them, and suddenly realized - she was just supposed to be listening this conversation. Hello, Megan! How could you mess this up already!

All three stopped and the two of them turned around to give her funny looks. “Sorry, I was just… uhm… also hungry and trying to think of a place to eat! And I’m – I…”

No, no, you’re making it worse! She panicked and suddenly shouted, “Do you want to be friends with me?”

The two stared at her in shock, then the boy made sure his friend was looking at him before he gripped his hands in the air in front of him. The girl shook her head, raised an eyebrow, and held a hand towards M'gann. The boy nodded and smiled and repeated his hand movements from before and then tapping his thumb and pointer finger together twice and rubbed one hand over the side of the other? Then, for some reason, the girl sighed and nodded.

The boy turned to M'gann and smiled as he said, “I like pizza.”

“Yeah, pizza’s good,” The girl added, dryly, each word, taking effort to but still, becoming less hostile, more friendly. “You live around here?”

M’gann smiled, she wasn’t going to fail. All she had to do was keep an eye on them, right? And it wasn’t like she didn’t want more human friends. “No, but my uncle does. I’ve visited him a couple times now, so I know where some of the good places are. I’m Megan, by the way. Megan Morse.”

The girl looked unimpressed, but held out her hand for M’gann to take. “I’m Valerie and he’s Danny. We’re not from around here either.”

“Oh? Then what brings you to Chicago?” M’gann asked as she shook Valerie’s hand. She used the physical contact as a bridge - a cover to scan the surface level of thoughts in her head without her knowing. There wasn’t anything too bad. Valerie was suspicious of M’gann’s eavesdropping and on guard against her. She didn’t want to trust some random girl who seemed way too friendly, but not wanting to come off as on guard to tip her off to just how suspicious she was. There was something else, she felt Danny was being too trusting? But that did nothing for her instincts. She reminded M’gann of Robin; his mind also raced with worst case scenarios and possible threats and solutions to those threats, even if they weren’t real.

“School trip,” Danny answered not taking M’gann’s offered hand and making her awkwardly have to put it down again. “We have to make a report-presentation-thing on one of the exhibits at the anthropology museum.”

“Oh, yeah, humans are very interesting,” M’gann said before she could stop herself.

“I love those humans and all their humanity,” Danny said with a snort and Valerie elbowed him.

“So, where’s this amazing pizza place?” Valerie asked and M’gann pointed behind them.

“Down a little further, I don’t know if it’s “amazing” amazing, but I like it.”

“Lead the way, M’lady,” Danny said, and motioned for her to walked next to him. He was starting to remind her of Wally, tying a little to hard to make her laugh, but still succeeding.

The three made their way down the street where M’gann had pointed; Danny talked a lot while Valerie watched M’gann with wary eyes. They were from a smaller city called Amity Park, northwest of Chicago and surrounded by a lot of wilderness, near Lake Eerie, with two E’s.

Danny chuckled at his own joke, then asked, “So, did you see that superhero fight? I didn’t know Martian Manhunter had a sidekick, but she seems pretty cool.”

M’gann tried to hide her blush and lie, “I didn’t get a good look at it. It can be pretty dangerous to get too close.”

“What do you know about them? Martian Manhunter and Miss Martian?” Valerie said her first thing since they started walking together.

M’gann thought for a moment about what she could and should say. “I’ve seen them around and heard the news talk about them. I don’t know if she likes being called a sidekick though, I know that other heroes don’t like it. Like Robin and Kid Flash.”

Valerie rolled her eyes, “She’s fighting crime with Martian Manhunter, wearing a matching outfit, and has a matching name all for the purpose of learning how to be a superhero from him, right?”

“Well, I guess so,” M’gann admitted. Is that what a sidekick is? M’gann thought there was a translation issue or something, that it was an insult. Why do Wally and Red Arrow hate it so much?

“Then she’s a sidekick, and there’s nothing wrong with being a sidekick,” Valerie confidently said and M’gann decided that she was right.

“And! It’s a good idea to learn from people who’ve been doing it longer than you and have more experience.” He gave Valerie some kind of look as he continued, “Even if you’re the same age, the extra time spend doing a thing can make one person a lot better at it.”

M'gann understood that, the rest of the Team were way better than she was and all of them are younger than she is.

Valerie raised her eyebrow at Danny, “Even if the newer person does more training than the older one because she actually takes being a hero seriously?”

M’gann looked between the two of them and asked, “I’m sorry, are you still talking about the Martians?”

Danny shook his head, “Sorry, there are heroes in our town too. Phantom, who’s been a hero for over a year and a half now, and Valiant, who’s only just started being a hero.”

“But she’s a better hero even though she’s newer,” Valerie added quickly to Danny’s explanation.

“You think she’s a better hero,” Danny corrected, “But I think she’s still really wild, overly violent, and messes up a lot. Valiant doesn’t have to try to intimidate everyone she thinks is a bad guy, it’s better being friendly sometimes. And Phantom does take it seriously, he’s just having fun while being a hero.”

“Valiant is just driven to get the job done!” Valerie defended, “And Phantom goofs off too much. Not everything needs to be pun, you can just catch the bad guy and be done with it, no jokes necessary.”

“Excuse you, puns are an artform,” Danny said with an overdramatic handwave.

“Oh please,” Valerie said exasperatedly.

M’gann laughed, they really reminded her of Wally and Robin; they must have been best friends for a long time now. They finally reached the pizzeria her uncle had taken her to when they’d had their trip to the anthropology museum. It was a quaint little family run place that was pretty emptied out. It should have been the second half of the lunch rush, but the robot attack must have scared everyone off.

“So, do you know how old she is?” Valerie asked as the three ordered their food.

“Sorry?” M’gann asked, she’d been distracted wondering what was a normal food order for a human. Last time she’s coping Megan’s order from episode 24 , and that was apparently too much food for a normal human teenage girl.

“We were just talking about how it doesn’t matter how old you are,” Danny said, and M’gann couldn’t tell if he was trying to avoid their previous argument or still trying to win.

“She’s the Martian equivalent of a teenager,” M’gann said, but realized halfway through that, a human wouldn’t know that. “Probably.”

Danny looked at her with wide eyes, “Really? So Martians really do age at a different rate than humans? That’s so cool!”

“You might too,” Valerie said under her breath, but Danny ignored it and M’gann didn’t understand what it meant.

“Do you know how long she’s been on earth?” Danny asked with growing excitement as they sat at a booth in the corner; the two of them on one side with her on the other.

M’gann couldn’t resist feeling that same excitement, very few people showed interest in her normal life. “Yeah, about three months!”

 “How do y- I mean, does she like it here?” Danny asked, his excitement becoming so strong, M’gann didn’t think anything of his tripping over his words.

“I re- really think she likes it.”

Valerie raised an eyebrow at her, “Why do you think that?”

M’gann floundered for a moment, “Uh, prob- probably because she’s still here. Like, if she could get to Earth, then she could get back to Mars, but she’s chosen to stay.”

Valerie gave her an oddly intense look, “Is that really how you know?”

“I bet she has a lot of friends here,” Danny said, seemingly saving M’gann from answering, before he added, “I mean, you are really friendly and I like you well enough.”

M’gann blushed, “No, no! I’m not…”

“You don’t hide it very well,” Valerie said and M’gann dropped her head in her hands.

“Oh, come on, don't be hard on her!” Danny said and playfully shoved Valerie's arm, “I only knew because you have the same, like, aura as Miss Martian. If you hadn’t come up to us so soon after we met you in costume, I wouldn’t have made the connection. And don’t let Val get to you, she only realized after I pointed it out.”

Valerie glared at him as she pulled her wallet out again and passed some money over to Danny. “I had all the clues though, and would have put it together eventually. Unlike you, I don’t cheat.”

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” M’gann had to ask while peaking between her hands. She can’t believe she messed up this much in one day. Who knew some humans could read Martian auras?

“Of course not! We’re not snitches,” Danny said, and shared a glance at Valerie, who shook her head violently and mouthed the word “no”. Danny shrugged and turned to M’gann to whisper, “We’re actually in a similar situation.”

M’gann blinked at them, and was just about to ask what he meant when there was an explosion. The front wall of the pizzeria was blasted open and a robot that looked exactly like the one they’d seen earlier stepped through the hole. Its featureless face locked onto M’gann; it lifted one of its blasters and shot a ball of hot plasma at them.

All three teens ducked under the table and Valerie asked, “Didn’t you just junk that guy?”

“It must be a new one!” M’gann said as another blast tore through the wall behind them, shattering the plastic table and dropping a pile wall and roof on top of them. A second robot stepped through the new hole in the wall and locked onto M’gann.

M’gann had somehow ended up on top of the rubble, but Danny wasn’t visible and she saw Valerie’s arm sticking out from under a chunk of table for a moment before it gave a thumbs up and was pulled completely under. She did a quick psychic scan the pizzeria, there was only the three of them and the robots in the building. Her eyes glowed red and her skin shifted to Martian green, her face became slightly less human proportioned and her red and white cloths turned into her hero costume. She telekinetically lifted herself from the rubble and motioned to lift the debris off her new friends, but they acted before she could.

Danny, or who she assumed was Danny, phased through the rubble and floated above it. If she hadn’t been looking at his face moments ago, she might not have recognized him. He was the same general size and build, but subtle changes. He had a sharper chin and ears and nose, and even sharper teeth, but he also had bigger, rounder eyes that glowed a toxic green. His hair was the same length, but so pure white, it looked more like mist than strands. His clothes changed too; his t-shirt and jeans had been replaced by a jumpsuit. It was mostly black but with a big white rectangle around the neck that became a little thicker and lest plastic-like as it curved over his shoulders. There were white gloves that reached half way up his forearms, and a pair of white patches on his elbows that looked to be made of the sturdier white material around his shoulders. Thick white lines went from his armpits down the sides of his torso to a white plastic looking utility belt. His boots were white too, coming up to half his calves and having patches of the sturdy white over his knees. There was a hero symbol over his heart, a white P where the long straight side of it looked almost like it was either on fire or fading into mist. Phantom.

At nearly the same time, the rubble shifted and some of the smaller bits flew out in different directions and something that looked like a robot stood up. A black helmet that encircled her entire head with only a red triangular faceplate breaking up the black, except for small lines that seemed to mimic the look of computer circuits that branched off the sold red into the black. The small pattern pulsated red light from a set of red triangles on the center of her chest, one solid while the other was a thin line around it. There, the pattern branched off in all directions, but with specific places where the red energy settled into solid lines that didn’t fade with the pulsing energy. Two solid red triangles on her shoulders, mimicking shoulder pads, and a thick red line around her waist like a belt that had a sharp downward point in the center that echoed the points of the triangles on her chest. There were also red lines around her wrists and calves that made it look like she was wearing gloves and boots. It was like she was covered in a black and red circuit board, but after a moment, the red pulsating glow of the circuitry faded, leaving her in a mostly black armored suit.

M'gann had been distracted by the sudden appearance of these two and was shocked when Danny appeared in front of her, hands raised in a defensive position as a bast of white plasma shattered across a shield of green energy that suddenly surrounded them. There was the sound of a machine powering up and a blast of red energy shot from a blaster that sprung into existence on Valerie’s arm, the red circuitry around it glowing momentarily before fading to black again. The blast hit the robot that shot at them from across the building. Valerie hit the joint of one of its arms, partially melting it and limiting its movement. Two shots hit the shield behind them, as the second robot moved closer to them through the wall leading behind the pizzeria. It reached its electrified claw towards Valerie.

“Look out!” Danny shouted and lowered the shield so he could fire a blast of green energy at the robot reaching for Valerie, causing it to stumble backwards. But she ignored it and fired at the first robot again, hitting the exact same place as last time and melting off its arm completely.

M’gann used her telekinesis to throw the robot that tried to grab Valerie out the hole in the wall it had come through. Danny flew out after it, firing his green energy at it. She followed outside and saw him flying around erratically. She was worried for a moment before she realized, Danny was too fast for the robot to be able to aim its blasters at him, continually firing into the open sky and missing its target. M’gann decided to take advantage of its distraction and telekinetically tore the blaster arms from the robot’s body. It turned its attention towards her and must have seen her as an easier target. It dived for her and she pushed it back with her mind so it stood frozen in air, rockets blasting with greater force trying to break through the invisible wall she’d put in front of it. Suddenly, it was hit with a rain of green energy balls, they burned holes through its outer shell and melted through its electrical insides. Its rockets failed and it crumbled to the ground in pieces.

The two quickly returned inside to find Valerie in the middle of a sword fight. There were melted stumps where the robot’s blaster arms and left claw arm had been melted off, and Valerie was wielding a black sword made of the same material as her suit that glowed with red energy. She was able to block the two flaming swords that bore down on her with the all the artfulness of a poorly rendered video game opponent. But it had one too many arms for her to keep up with and a clawed arm weaved its way through her defenses to grab onto her shoulder. It tried to send an electrical shock into her, but the black suit turned red under its touch as it absorbed the energy. M’gann could actually follow the energy through the suit’s circuitry over to her sword, that glowed brighter and started to melt through the flaming blades it was pressed against.

M'gann decided that was enough of that and threw the robot against the wall with her telekinesis, and regretted it immediately. The clawed hand had been embedded deeper into Valerie than M’gann had realized, and as it flew across the room, it tore through Valerie’s shoulder, taking some of her suit and skin with it. She cried out in pain and turned to look at M’gann who threw her hands over her mouth.

“Oh my god! Oh my god! I’m so sorry!” She quickly hovered over to Valerie, but she didn’t know what to do about the injury. She didn’t have any medic training yet. It was on her list, and there was even a training session for the team planned for it, but she hadn’t done it yet. How was she going to fix this? Valerie had just risked her life to help M’gann and she’d been repaid by getting her shoulder torn up!

“It’s fine,” Valerie said in a such a firm voice it almost convinced M'gann, but it was clear by the way Valerie moved; it wasn't fine but she didn’t want attention drawn to it. Valerie cautiously walked over to the robot, her sword was somehow pulled into her suit and replaced with a blaster that she trained on the downed robot. When it didn’t react to her coming up to it, she placed her hand on it. M’gann could see the red circuit board pattern spread from the red pad of her hand over to the robot like an infection. After a moment Valerie said, “I have a source, and we should go now.”

Danny nodded and asked, “What did you find out?”

>><< 

J’onn was worried. He sent M’gann to follow the odd teenagers who had watched their fight with the robot much closer than any sensible person would. He knew teenagers were often unaware of the level of danger around them, especially when famous heroes were present, but there was something strange about these two. The girl had something strange in her eyes, something that glowed and changed color, and the boy -  there was simply something wrong about him, something wrong with the way psychic energy moved around him made him seem – less physical somehow, but J’onn couldn’t begin to guess why, what, or how. He sensed no malicious intent from them, if anything, he sensed a strong desire to protect from the boy and a powerful desire to fulfill responsibility from the girl.

He wasn’t sure if M’gann would have been safer following them or staying with him, but this was her first public excursion as his sidekick and he knew for certain that he didn’t want her fighting a robot that seemed tailor made to hurt him. The flaming swords, the hot plasma, the projected electrified field to prevent phasing into them, and no mind to read. The only clues they had were the strange teenagers and a serial number on the hunk of metal that had once been part of the robot. He would trust M’gann not to get too close to the humans or come to him if trouble stirred. She was naive and inexperienced but not an idiot or a pushover. She would keep proper distance, he was sure; reconnaissance was what she was learning with the team after all.

J’onn’s personal computer was patched into a number of databases, and it was a simple task to search for the source of the serial number. It belonged to a robotics company that specialized in custom joint systems. The piece with his serial number had been part of a large order by the Defense Lab of Classified Exobiology, a lab that researched alien life. The D.L.C.E. was a private organization that was owned by a parent company called VladCo. that also owned an advanced technologies development firm, a paranormal research lab, a pop-technologies designing firm, and several other smaller labs and factories, including the company that made the specialized joints. It was an unfortunately common scheme of a company buying from itself to make money; not illegal but shady nonetheless.

J’onn went to the listed address of the D.L.C.E. and found a very normal looking office building. He did a mental sweep of the building but didn’t find anything other than the usual office drudgery. He disguised himself as human, one of his usuals of a white man in a white suit under a beige trench coat and matching fedora, and entered the building. There was a middle-aged woman sitting at the front desk that J’onn didn’t need psychic powers to know was bored.

He pulled out an old police badge and prepared to sweet talk his way past the bored woman. “Excuse me, miss, but I’m from the-”

She didn’t wait for him to finish before pushing a button on a dashboard on her desk, “There’s another goo here for you, Dr. Copen.”

“I told them to give me a few more days!” Dr. Copen seemed to respond from the other side, and then said, “Send them down, I’ll come up with something.”

The woman hummed disbelievingly. She stood up, “Follow me, please.”

J’onn didn’t correct her and followed her down a hall to an elevator bay. She waved her I.D. card in front of a scanner and one of the elevators opened. Once inside, she scanned the I.D. again and the button panel lit up completely before a symbol lit up indicating they were going down. The foundations of the building went deeper than they should have, but eventually, the elevator stopped and they were let out into a large underground laboratory.

A man came up to them in a disheveled lab coat, wild dirty blond hair, circles under his eyes, coffee stains and burn spots on his cloths and arms, a pair of safety goggles pushed up on his head. “Ah, welcome Agent – uh?”

“Operative J,” J’onn provided from the top of the woman’s mind.

“Right, Operative J, sorry, yes, I remember you now.” The man said, “I know I told Director Beta that I’d have results by the end of the week, and while things didn’t go as planned, I assure you, by the end of today, I’ll have something big to show you.”

J’onn scrutinized the man, then probed, “What is this big thing? And why is it worth my time?”

“Yes, Dr. Copen, what have you got?” The woman asked incredulously.

Dr. Copen ignored her as he turned and waved for them to follow, “Earlier today I almost got a subject. The data was inconclusive on why the retrieval unit failed, the hyper connection antenna was damaged somehow before it was able to send any useful information, but I’ve sent out two retrieval units with the same tracking system.”

“Tracking system?”

Dr. Copen grinned and nodded, “Didn’t Director Beta tell you? We got a sample of a an enzyme that’s created when a Martian shapeshifts, we can use it to locate any Martian that has recently changed form, no matter how human they may seem.”

They stopped in front of a large monitor array and the doctor pressed a button and it flickered on. Two robots like the ones that had attacked J’onn and M’gann earlier that day, one with the other in its camera view, they few over the city and started to lower themselves towards … a small pizzeria J’onn recognized.

“Now, so long as whatever interfered with the previous hyper-link connection doesn - uhg…” Just as he said it, and the first robot broke through the front wall of the pizzeria, the camera feed turned filled with static, not receiving a clear image of anything within the building.

“Damn, what is messing with the signal?” The doctor typed furiously at the keyboard under the monitors, there were occasional flashes of clear video.

M’gann was there - and another person in black futuristic armor? There was a clear video, but only of the black armored person shooting the robot to pieces with some kind of arm mounted plasma blaster, before they charged the robot, the blaster somehow being replaced with a sword. After a minute, everything went black. The monitors weren’t off, but they stopped receiving information.

“AGAIN? What are they doing to my retrieval units?” Dr. Copen groaned as he desperately tried to pull data from the robots. He was saving the clearest images of M’gann and the armored person, not enough to identify them, but too close for J’onn’s comfort.

J’onn’s anxiety was increasing, he needed to get to M’gann to make sure she was okay. While the doctor was distracted, J’onn would find a way to destroy the lab. There were plenty of dangerous chemicals lying around; looking back the way they’d come, he saw some large containers with a label warning “oxygen-flammable liquid”. He reached out with his psychic power, only to be suddenly struck in the back of the head and filled with an electric shock. He felt his form revert to its most familiar shape, the form of The Martian Manhunter, the hero he’d created all those years ago.

“Mildred?” Dr. Copen shouted.

“He’s one of them,” The woman said with disgust dripping from the words and a taser pointed at his head.

J’onn’s vision blurred and he felt something latch around his neck. He couldn’t concentrate past the pounding in his head and he couldn’t get to his feet until he felt a hand grab his arm and pull him up. Then he was shoved into a tight confined space, between a wall of glass and a bed of hard metal. Just as he forced control over his movements again, he was suddenly cut off. He could feel his powers being shunted behind a wall, out of reach from him, as energy radiated from the black collar around his neck.

The woman stared in at him, a grimace on her face and the doctor behind her, clearly confused. “Wait, but- My retrieval units? They were just locked onto the Martian signal?”

“There must be two of them,” The woman said, her eyes narrowing and teeth gritting, “It’s multiplied like a cockroach, at this rate, they’ll be crawling all over the place.”

Panic was setting in, not just for the situation he was in, but M’gann was fighting off two Martian Hunting robots by herself, he didn’t know or trust the armored person who could have been working with these people for all he knew. He needed to get out, but without his powers? He was helpless and trapped, and M’gann needed his help! What-

Suddenly, there was an explosion, and the lab filled with thick grey smoke. The black armored person burst from the smoke behind Mildred and slammed her to the ground. Mildred jumped up with the taser discarded for a gun and fired at her assailant, who was apparently bullet proof. J’onn barely caught sight of something glowing green impacting Dr. Copen deeper in the smoke. Suddenly, M’gann was in front of the pod he’d been put in, worry written in her face. She looked around the pod for the way to open it, but she was too panicked.

The grey smoke started turning black and a fire could be seen spreading through the other side of the room. J’onn couldn’t hear what M’gann was saying, but after a moment, there was a boy next to her. He had white hair, green eyes, and a black and white jumpsuit. He phased his hands though the glass front of the pod, grabbed onto J’onn’s clothes, and pulled him through. Once out, J’onn saw M’gann and the person in black (on a flying surfboard?) carry his two captors up through a hole in the ceiling, and the boy flew J’onn out as well.

M'gann and the girl in black left the receptionist and the doctor outside the D.L.C.E. building. The four of them went to the roof of the building across the street from the D.L.C.E. and they watched as first responders put out the fire.

“Thank you,” J’onn said as the boy set him down. It was interesting, the way the boy flew was different from the way J’onn flew. The boy seemed to have gravity simply not affect him vs a Martian's telekinetic flight.

“No problem, Valiant?” The boy said, hovering back and allowing the girl in black to approach him.  She reached up and pressed the red pads on her fingers to the black collar around his neck, and after a moment, it clicked and came off.

“Thank you as well,” J’onn said.

“Uncle J’onn, are you okay?” M’gann asked rushing forward for a hug as the girl in black stepped back and examined the collar.

He returned her hug and looked her over, “Yes, and you?”

M’gann smiled broadly, “Yeah, but –“ She looked at the girl, “Are you sure you’re okay, Valiant?”

The girl rolled her shoulder, and when she spoke her voice was slightly distorted through her helmet, “I said it’s fine.”

“Her suit takes care of stuff like that,” The boy said, “It’s a pretty cool piece of technology.”

Valiant, as the boy called her, growled, then sighed. “Now that this is taken care of, we have our other work to do, Phantom.”

“That’s right, you two have to get back to the museum,” M’gann said and smiled at them.

“Is there anything we can assist you with? It would be rude for us to not thank you for your help,” J’onn said, both from honesty and curiosity. He wanted to learn more about these two teenage heroes. They had to be the two from earlier, Phantom had the same somewhat ethereal bend of psychic energy around him as the black haired boy they’d seen earlier.

“Oh, no, we’re literally just here on a school trip. We’re supposed to do our own work,” Phantom supplied. “But, it was super cool meeting you!”

Valiant took a step towards J’onn; he couldn’t see her face through her helmet, but he could feel an intensity radiating from her. She took a deep breath and said, “If you’d like to repay us, then I’d like to make a request.”

Phantom gave her a questioning look, “We don’t need a reward or anything.”

Valiant nodded in agreement, “But we do need training.”

“He’s already got a sidekick! And a pretty cool one, I might add,” Phantom winked and M’gann blushed. "He doesn't need to waste time on us."

“I would not mind an occasional additional tagalong. Though, there are other’s out there who would better suit being your mentors," he glanced over Valiant, "such as experts in human technology, that I can introduce you to.”

J’onn felt the sudden connection of a psychic link, Do you think they could join the Team?

He looked at M’gann and replied, I will speak with Batman about the matter. But there is no guarantee that he will agree to it.

She giggled happily, then pulled a cell phone out of her pocket, “Uncle J’onn just got me this, I’d love to have your numbers, maybe we can team up or have pizza together again sometime?”

Phantom blinked at the two of them, then widely smiled, “That’d be cool!”

There was a second where J’onn saw something in Phantom’s eyes. He ventured a guess, “Did you hear any of that?”

Phantom paused in typing his number into M’gann’s phone, taking a second to process what had been asked and responded with, “Were you talking?”

Phantom went back to typing as J’onn clarified, “You looked at us, each in turn, as we had a psychic conversation.”

“Oh!” Phantom said as he handed the phone to Valiant, “I could tell you were doing something. Like, I felt you using your powers, but I didn’t know what.”

“I see.” J’onn would have to investigate further. If Phantom could sense the use of psychic powers, and it seemed those with psychic powers could sense him, then learning to work together could be an immense advantage when devising countermeasures to either ability. As it stood now, though, J’onn was a little proud. It was hard to get his niece out of her shell; he’d learned from his recent call with his sister that M’gann’s life on Mars had been a hard one, but here she was, making friends remarkably quickly and easily. Even if Batman didn’t agree to them joining the team, even if there wasn’t the possible advantage of training with someone who could sense their psychic abilities, J’onn would keep an eye on his niece’s new friends.

"I'll call you next time I visit Chicago!" M'gann said as they prepared to fly off.

Valiant paused on her hoverboard just over the edge of the building, "I guess you're not too bad. We'll have to bring you down to Amity some time too."

"You'll have to come around a lot actually," Phantom said, "I need you to tell me all about space and Mars and how you got here, and-"

"Okay, space boy, let's get going," Valiant said, grabbing Phantom by the scruff of his jumpsuit.

Then Phantom shout to the heavens as he was being dragged off, "I love having an alien friend! Please text me all the time!"

Yes, J'onn was definitely keeping an eye on these kids.

[garudabluffs]

"Despite his fearsome reputation as a player, until 1967 Buddy Guy was having to work as a tow truck driver in the daytime while playing clubs at night. But by the end of the decade, his fortunes were changing. In March 1969, he was invited to play at the so-called Supershow, in Staines, Middlesex, alongside Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Jack Bruce, Stephen Stills, Buddy Miles, Glen Campbell and others.

In 1972, he established the Checkerboard Lounge with LC Thurman, a blues club in Chicago’s South Side. He left the partnership in 1985 and in 1989 opened Buddy Guy’s Legends club, a venue that is still thriving today."

+ "

Buddy Guy is now the last, living American blues legend. When Clapton and BB King inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in 2005, their induction speeches were both reverential and heartfelt. When Buddy Guy himself stepped onto the podium to accept the honour, he was clearly moved.

“Look at this,” grinned Guy as he looked over to his left where BB King and Eric Clapton were standing. “To be standing here and [having to] pick up a guitar and get between these two guys and play… man, you’ve got to be me to know how I feel tonight. This is no small task.”

As he ended his acceptance speech, he left the assembled artist and music industry dignitaries in the audience with one last parting thought. “If you don’t think you got the blues,” he grinned, “just keep livin’.”

[dailyanarchistposts]

G.3.1 Is “anarcho”-capitalism American anarchism?

Unlike Rothbard, some “anarcho”-capitalists are more than happy to proclaim themselves “individualist anarchists” and so suggest that their notions are identical, or nearly so, with the likes of Tucker, Ingalls and Labadie. As part of this, they tend to stress that individualist anarchism is uniquely American, an indigenous form of anarchism unlike social anarchism. To do so, however, means ignoring not only the many European influences on individualist anarchism itself (most notably, Proudhon) but also downplaying the realities of American capitalism which quickly made social anarchism the dominant form of Anarchism in America. Ironically, such a position is deeply contradictory as “anarcho”-capitalism itself is most heavily influenced by a European ideology, namely “Austrian” economics, which has lead its proponents to reject key aspects of the indigenous American anarchist tradition.

For example, “anarcho”-capitalist Wendy McElroy does this in a short essay provoked by the Seattle protests in 1999. While Canadian, her rampant American nationalism is at odds with the internationalism of the individualist anarchists, stating that after property destruction in Seattle which placed American anarchists back in the media social anarchism “is not American anarchism. Individualist anarchism, the indigenous form of the political philosophy, stands in rigorous opposition to attacking the person or property of individuals.” Like an ideological protectionist, she argued that “Left [sic!] anarchism (socialist and communist) are foreign imports that flooded the country like cheap goods during the 19th century.” [Anarchism: Two Kinds] Apparently Albert and Lucy Parsons were un-Americans, as was Voltairine de Cleyre who turned from individualist to communist anarchism. And best not mention the social conditions in America which quickly made communist-anarchism predominant in the movement or that individualist anarchists like Tucker proudly proclaimed their ideas socialist!

She argued that ”[m]any of these anarchists (especially those escaping Russia) introduced lamentable traits into American radicalism” such as “propaganda by deed” as well as a class analysis which “divided society into economic classes that were at war with each other.” Taking the issue of “propaganda by the deed” first, it should be noted that use of violence against person or property was hardly alien to American traditions. The Boston Tea Party was just as “lamentable” an attack on “property of individuals” as the window breaking at Seattle while the revolution and revolutionary war were hardly fought using pacifist methods or respecting the “person or property of individuals” who supported imperialist Britain. Similarly, the struggle against slavery was not conducted purely by means Quakers would have supported (John Brown springs to mind), nor was (to use just one example) Shay’s rebellion. So “attacking the person or property of individuals” was hardly alien to American radicalism and so was definitely not imported by “foreign” anarchists.

Of course, anarchism in American became associated with terrorism (or “propaganda by the deed”) due to the Haymarket events of 1886 and Berkman’s assassination attempt against Frick during the Homestead strike. Significantly, McElroy makes no mention of the substantial state and employer violence which provoked many anarchists to advocate violence in self-defence. For example, the great strike of 1877 saw the police opened fire on strikers on July 25th, killing five and injuring many more. “For several days, meetings of workmen were broken up by the police, who again and again interfered with the rights of free speech and assembly.” The Chicago Times called for the use of hand grenades against strikers and state troops were called in, killing a dozen strikers. “In two days of fighting, between 25 and 50 civilians had been killed, some 200 seriously injured, and between 300 and 400 arrested. Not a single policeman or soldier had lost his life.” This context explains why many workers, including those in reformist trade unions as well as anarchist groups like the IWPA, turned to armed self-defence (“violence”). The Haymarket meeting itself was organised in response to the police firing on strikers and killing at least two. The Haymarket bomb was thrown after the police tried to break-up a peaceful meeting by force: “It is clear then that … it was the police and not the anarchists who were the perpetrators of the violence at the Haymarket.” All but one of the deaths and most of the injuries were caused by the police firing indiscriminately in the panic after the explosion. [Paul Avrich, The Maymarket Tragedy, pp. 32–4, p. 189, p. 210, and pp. 208–9] As for Berkman’s assassination attempt, this was provoked by the employer’s Pinkerton police opening fire on strikers, killing and wounding many. [Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 86]

In other words, it was not foreign anarchists or alien ideas which associated anarchism with violence but, rather, the reality of American capitalism. As historian Eugenia C. Delamotte puts it, “the view that anarchism stood for violence … spread rapidly in the mainstream press from the 1870s” because of “the use of violence against strikers and demonstrators in the labour agitation that marked these decades — struggles for the eight-hour day, better wages, and the right to unionise, for example. Police, militia, and private security guards harassed, intimidated, bludgeoned, and shot workers routinely in conflicts that were just as routinely portrayed in the media as worker violence rather than state violence; labour activists were also subject to brutal attacks, threats of lynching, and many other forms of physical assault and intimidation … the question of how to respond to such violence became a critical issue in the 1870s, with the upswelling of labour agitation and attempts to suppress it violently.” [Voltairine de Cleyre and the Revolution of the Mind, pp. 51–2]

Joseph Labadie, it should be noted, thought the “Beastly police” got what they deserved at Haymarket as they had attempted to break up a peaceful public meeting and such people should “go at the peril of their lives. If it is necessary to use dynamite to protect the rights of free meeting, free press and free speech, then the sooner we learn its manufacture and use … the better it will be for the toilers of the world.” The radical paper he was involved in, the Labor Leaf, had previously argued that “should trouble come, the capitalists will use the regular army and militia to shoot down those who are not satisfied. It won’t be so if the people are equally ready.” Even reformist unions were arming themselves to protect themselves, with many workers applauding their attempts to organise union militias. As worker put it, ”[w]ith union men well armed and accustomed to military tactics, we could keep Pinkerton’s men at a distance … Employers would think twice, too, before they attempted to use troops against us … Every union ought to have its company of sharpshooters.” [quoted by Richard Jules Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, p. 200 and p. 135]

While the violent rhetoric of the Chicago anarchists was used at their trial and is remembered (in part because enemies of anarchism take great glee in repeating it), the state and employer violence which provoked it has been forgotten or ignored. Unless this is mentioned, a seriously distorted picture of both communist-anarchism and capitalism are created. It is significant, of course, that while the words of the Martyrs are taken as evidence of anarchism’s violent nature, the actual violence (up to and including murder) against strikers by state and private police apparently tells us nothing about the nature of the state or capitalist system (Ward Churchill presents an excellent summary such activities in his article “From the Pinkertons to the PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policing in the United States, 1870 to the Present” [CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1–72]).

So, as can be seen, McElroy distorts the context of anarchist violence by utterly ignoring the far worse capitalist violence which provoked it. Like more obvious statists, she demonises the resistance to the oppressed while ignoring that of the oppressor. Equally, it should also be noted Tucker rejected violent methods to end class oppression not out of principle, but rather strategy as there “was no doubt in his mind as to the righteousness of resistance to oppression by recourse to violence, but his concern now was with its expedience … he was absolutely convinced that the desired social revolution would be possible only through the utility of peaceful propaganda and passive resistance.” [James J. Martin, Men Against the State, p. 225] For Tucker “as long as freedom of speech and of the press is not struck down, there should be no resort to physical force in the struggle against oppression.” [quoted by Morgan Edwards, “Neither Bombs Nor Ballots: Liberty & the Strategy of Anarchism”, pp. 65–91, Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty, Coughlin, Hamilton and Sullivan (eds.), p. 67] Nor should we forget that Spooner’s rhetoric could be as blood-thirsty as Johann Most’s at times and that American individualist anarchist Dyer Lum was an advocate of insurrection.

As far as class analysis does, which “divided society into economic classes that were at war with each other”, it can be seen that the “left” anarchists were simply acknowledging the reality of the situation — as did, it must be stressed, the individualist anarchists. As we noted in section G.1, the individualist anarchists were well aware that there was a class war going on, one in which the capitalist class used the state to ensure its position (the individualist anarchist “knows very well that the present State is an historical development, that it is simply the tool of the property-owning class; he knows that primitive accumulation began through robbery bold and daring, and that the freebooters then organised the State in its present form for their own self-preservation.” [A.H. Simpson, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 92]). Thus workers had a right to a genuinely free market for ”[i]f the man with labour to sell has not this free market, then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken from him. Now, such a market has constantly been denied … to labourers of the entire civilised world. And the men who have denied it are … Capitalists … [who] have placed and kept on the statue-books all sorts of prohibitions and taxes designed to limit and effective in limiting the number of bidders for the labour of those who have labour to sell.” [Instead of a Book, p. 454] For Joshua King Ingalls, ”[i]n any question as between the worker and the holder of privilege, [the state] is certain to throw itself into the scale with the latter, for it is itself the source of privilege, the creator of class rule.” [quoted by Bowman N. Hall, “Joshua K. Ingalls, American Individualist: Land Reformer, Opponent of Henry George and Advocate of Land Leasing, Now an Established Mode,” pp. 383–96, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 4, p. 292] Ultimately, the state was “a police force to regulate the people in the interests of the plutocracy.” [Ingalls, quoted by Martin, Op. Cit., p. 152]

Discussing Henry Frick, manager of the Homestead steelworkers who was shot by Berkman for using violence against striking workers, Tucker noted that Frick did not “aspire, as I do, to live in a society of mutually helpful equals” but rather it was “his determination to live in luxury produced by the toil and suffering of men whose necks are under his heel. He has deliberately chosen to live on terms of hostility with the greater part of the human race.” While opposing Berkman’s act, Tucker believed that he was “a man with whom I have much in common, — much more at any rate than with such a man as Frick.” Berkman “would like to live on terms of equality with his fellows, doing his share of work for not more than his share of pay.” [The Individualist Anarchists, pp. 307–8] Clearly, Tucker was well aware of the class struggle and why, while not supporting such actions, violence occurred when fighting it.

As Victor Yarros summarised, for the individualist anarchists the “State is the servant of the robbers, and it exists chiefly to prevent the expropriation of the robbers and the restoration of a free and fair field for legitimate competition and wholesome, effective voluntary cooperation.” [“Philosophical Anarchism: Its Rise, Decline, and Eclipse”, pp. 470–483, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 41, no. 4, p. 475] For “anarcho”-capitalists, the state exploits all classes subject to it (perhaps the rich most, by means of taxation to fund welfare programmes and legal support for union rights and strikes).

So when McElroy states that, “Individualist anarchism rejects the State because it is the institutionalisation of force against peaceful individuals”, she is only partly correct. While it may be true for “anarcho”-capitalism, it fails to note that for the individualist anarchists the modern state was the institutionalisation of force by the capitalist class to deny the working class a free market. The individualist anarchists, in other words, like social anarchists also rejected the state because it imposed certain class monopolies and class legislation which ensured the exploitation of labour by capital — a significant omission on McElroy’s part. “Can it be soberly pretended for a moment that the State … is purely a defensive institution?” asked Tucker. “Surely not … you will find that a good nine-tenths of existing legislation serves … either to prescribe the individual’s personal habits, or, worse still, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial, and proprietary monopolies which deprive labour of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a perfectly free market.” [Tucker, Instead of a Book, pp. 25–6] In fact:

“As long as a portion of the products of labour are appropriated for the payment of fat salaries to useless officials and big dividends to idle stockholders, labour is entitled to consider itself defrauded, and all just men will sympathise with its protest.” [Tucker, Liberty, no. 19, p. 1]

It goes without saying that almost all “anarcho”-capitalists follow Rothbard in being totally opposed to labour unions, strikes and other forms of working class protest. As such, the individualist anarchists, just as much as the “left” anarchists McElroy is so keen to disassociate them from, argued that ”[t]hose who made a profit from buying or selling were class criminals and their customers or employees were class victims. It did not matter if the exchanges were voluntary ones. Thus, left anarchists hated the free market as deeply as they hated the State.” [McElroy, Op. Cit.] Yet, as any individualist anarchist of the time would have told her, the “free market” did not exist because the capitalist class used the state to oppress the working class and reduce the options available to choose from so allowing the exploitation of labour to occur. Class analysis, in other words, was not limited to “foreign” anarchism, nor was the notion that making a profit was a form of exploitation (usury). As Tucker continually stressed: “Liberty will abolish interest; it will abolish profit; it will abolish monopolistic rent; it will abolish taxation; it will abolish the exploitation of labour.” [The Individualist Anarchists, p. 157]

It should also be noted that the “left” anarchist opposition to the individualist anarchist “free market” is due to an analysis which argues that it will not, in fact, result in the anarchist aim of ending exploitation nor will it maximise individual freedom (see section G.4). We do not “hate” the free market, rather we love individual liberty and seek the best kind of society to ensure free people. By concentrating on markets being free, “anarcho”-capitalism ensures that it is wilfully blind to the freedom-destroying similarities between capitalist property and the state (as we discussed in section F.1). An analysis which many individualist anarchists recognised, with the likes of Dyer Lum seeing that replacing the authority of the state with that of the boss was no great improvement in terms of freedom and so advocating co-operative workplaces to abolish wage slavery. Equally, in terms of land ownership the individualist anarchists opposed any voluntary exchanges which violated “occupancy and use” and so they, so, “hated the free market as deeply as they hated the State.” Or, more correctly, they recognised that voluntary exchanges can result in concentrations of wealth and so power which made a mockery of individual freedom. In other words, that while the market may be free the individuals within it would not be.

McElroy partly admits this, saying that “the two schools of anarchism had enough in common to shake hands when they first met. To some degree, they spoke a mutual language. For example, they both reviled the State and denounced capitalism. But, by the latter, individualist anarchists meant ‘state-capitalism’ the alliance of government and business.” Yet this “alliance of government and business” has been the only kind of capitalism that has ever existed. They were well aware that such an alliance made the capitalist system what it was, i.e., a system based on the exploitation of labour. William Bailie, in an article entitled “The Rule of the Monopolists” simply repeated the standard socialist analysis of the state when he talked about the “gigantic monopolies, which control not only our industry, but all the machinery of the State, — legislative, judicial, executive, — together with school, college, press, and pulpit.” Thus the “preponderance in the number of injunctions against striking, boycotting, and agitating, compared with the number against locking-out, blacklisting, and the employment of armed mercenaries.” The courts could not ensure justice because of the “subserviency of the judiciary to the capitalist class … and the nature of the reward in store for the accommodating judge.” Government “is the instrument by means of which the monopolist maintains his supremacy” as the law-makers “enact what he desires; the judiciary interprets his will; the executive is his submissive agent; the military arm exists in reality to defend his country, protect his property, and suppress his enemies, the workers on strike.” Ultimately, “when the producer no longer obeys the State, his economic master will have lost his power.” [Liberty, no. 368, p. 4 and p. 5] Little wonder, then, that the individualist anarchists thought that the end of the state and the class monopolies it enforces would produce a radically different society rather than one essentially similar to the current one but without taxes. Their support for the “free market” implied the end of capitalism and its replacement with a new social system, one which would end the exploitation of labour.

She herself admits, in a roundabout way, that “anarcho”-capitalism is significantly different that individualist anarchism. “The schism between the two forms of anarchism has deepened with time,” she asserts. This was ”[l]argely due to the path breaking work of Murray Rothbard” and so, unlike genuine individualist anarchism, the new “individualist anarchism” (i.e., “anarcho”-capitalism) “is no longer inherently suspicious of profit-making practices, such as charging interest. Indeed, it embraces the free market as the voluntary vehicle of economic exchange” (does this mean that the old version of it did not, in fact, embrace “the free market” after all?) This is because it “draws increasingly upon the work of Austrian economists such as Mises and Hayek” and so “it draws increasingly farther away from left anarchism” and, she fails to note, the likes of Warren and Tucker. As such, it would be churlish to note that “Austrian” economics was even more of a “foreign import” much at odds with American anarchist traditions as communist anarchism, but we will! After all, Rothbard’s support of usury (interest, rent and profit) would be unlikely to find much support from someone who looked forward to the development of “an attitude of hostility to usury, in any form, which will ultimately cause any person who charges more than cost for any product to be regarded very much as we now regard a pickpocket.” [Tucker, The Individualist Anarchists, p. 155] Nor, as noted above, would Rothbard’s support for an “Archist” (capitalist) land ownership system have won him anything but dismissal nor would his judge, jurist and lawyer driven political system have been seen as anything other than rule by the few rather than rule by none.

Ultimately, it is a case of influences and the kind of socio-political analysis and aims it inspires. Unsurprisingly, the main influences in individualist anarchism came from social movements and protests. Thus poverty-stricken farmers and labour unions seeking monetary and land reform to ease their position and subservience to capital all plainly played their part in shaping the theory, as did the Single-Tax ideas of Henry George and the radical critiques of capitalism provided by Proudhon and Marx. In contrast, “anarcho”-capitalism’s major (indeed, predominant) influence is “Austrian” economists, an ideology developed (in part) to provide intellectual support against such movements and their proposals for reform. As we will discuss in the next section, this explains the quite fundamental differences between the two systems for all the attempts of “anarcho”-capitalists to appropriate the legacy of the likes of Tucker.

[bountyhaunter]

TIMING: Current LOCATION: ClubWeigh PARTIES: Wyatt @loftylockjaw and Daiyu @bountyhaunter SUMMARY: At clubweigh, Wyatt's eating a sandwich when Daiyu slides down in the seat across from him. She knows him from somewhere, but where... CONTENT WARNINGS: N/A

Daiyu had walked into ClubWeigh thinking it was Subway — she’d seen the distinct green and yellow and thought it was the chain she knew and loved. She wasn’t even aware that this wasn’t the same store she’d frequented plenty of times before, more focused on the way the employee was assembling her sandwich and how her stomach was lurching with not just hunger but something else.

There was a lamia in the shop.

She had this feeling – the hunter tingle, as she called it – a lot in Wicked’s Rest. It seemed the place was relatively overrun with shifters. It wasn’t often that she felt it this distinctly, though, that she was hit with the certainty of the nature of the shifters. Lamia were rare, after all. But there was one here in this shop. 

It wasn’t going to keep her from her meal, of course. She had her priorities straight. And so when her sandwich was done, she maneuvred around the shop, setting her sights on the only other person eating away and plopping down across from him. It was pretty shit manners, to sit down at someone’s table when there were other ones free, but Daiyu had a speech prepared, “Sorry to barge in on your eating moment, but you know, in this society? We have allll these public seating spaces and no one ever sits together. Really sad. So! I’m doing a thing where I sit down with strangers.” 

She lifted her sub (which was really a club) to take a bite and eyed the other, who looked very familiar. This was troubling. Encountering a lamia during lunch was one thing, but a lamia she recognized … “Which sub d’you have?” She didn’t know where she recognized him from, though. Maybe he’d tell her. Possibly by reaching across the table and attacking her because he knew she was a hunter — but she hoped he’d have better manners than that. “I got the Italian … something. Fucking slaps.”

—

Despite gaining no real nutrition from it, Wyatt was still a habitual eater of human-food. Cooking was his passion, after all, it wouldn’t be right if he never ate any of the things he made. Plus it still tasted good, usually. And empty calories, well, that was a win-win! The lamia could gorge himself on ice cream if he wanted without suffering a single side effect. That meant that trying shifty local sandwich shops was never a waste of a meal, and for whatever reason, the locals were a little nuts about this one. The whole rabbit’s foot promotion thing aside, they swore up and down it was a million times better than the chain it often got confused with. So.. fuck it. He wanted to stress eat, anyway.

Sitting down alone with his food, he paid no mind when another customer entered the restaurant ten or so minutes later. He was staring out the window at the street beyond it, sunglasses hiding his eyes that had decided they didn’t want to be their usual, human blue, and instead insisted on remaining yellow with slits for pupils. It wasn’t just that, either—there were scales on his midsection that he couldn’t get rid of! No matter how hard he focused, his body was determined to fuck around today. It probably would have been wiser to stay home, but he was going fucking stir crazy in that place. Wyatt was lost in his thoughts when that other customer was suddenly sitting across from him, drawing his gaze away from the window that was now getting streaked by raindrops. 

“... it was somethin’ like a Chicago dog, but a sandwich. At least, I think that’s what they were goin’ for…” he spoke after a moment of stunned silence. As he answered the stranger’s question, his surprise waned and he gathered himself up, pushing his other worries from his mind for the time being. “That’s mighty brave of you, anyway. Can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.” He smirked gently, but there was a general air of sadness about him that he couldn’t seem to shake. “So… you find a rabbit’s foot in yours, or…?” 

— 

Her aunt had been killed by a lamia. Nay, eaten. Hair and skin and all. Daiyu hadn’t really known her, as she’d been off in a different state, but it’d made quite an impact on her when she’d been young. She’d conjured up images of it in her mind’s eye, picturing a gigantic snake wrapping its jaws around her aunt and swallowing her whole. Sometimes the imagined snake would burp up some of her aunt’s signature blonde hair. Sometimes it’d lick its paws. (In this fantasy, the snake had paws.) She was a big eater, but swallowing a whole person or animal in full made her feel rather uneasy. It seemed like a pretty shitty death. 

So why was this lamia eating a Chicago dog-sandwich? Daiyu wondered if he’d loosen his jaw to swallow it whole. It wasn’t the first thought on her mind, but it was definitively there. She mostly was just trying to remember where she knew his face from as she worked on a bite of her sandwich. Was it from somewhere back in Seattle? Couldn’t be — most lamia she and her family had encountered there had been killed. Her sister had a nice lamia-skin pair of boots to prove as much. Maybe he was an actor. Mack Ross was a zombie, after all, so maybe this guy was also an actor whose name she couldn’t recall, and just happened to also be a sandwich eating lamia.

She was trying to remember all the lamias who had met an end at her hands, but those weren’t ringing any bells either. It was also making her head feel fuzzy with static, like an old tv. Like she might shock herself. “Soooo…. not very authentic, then?,” she concluded, as if she wasn’t remembering blood spurting from half-reptiles, half-humans. At least these things never managed to ruin her appetite. “Good, good. Otherwise this would become very uncomfortable real fast. We’re becoming too lonely as a species.” They were not the same species. Daiyu did not eat aunts and other people whole. “Nope. I checked right when I got it. Disappointing, you know? I could use some luck. You?”

—

“Not especially, no,” Wyatt agreed. “Granted, never had one from Chicago itself, so really, who am I to talk?” He reached for his cup, taking a sip through the straw as he regarded the woman with a critical eye. He wasn’t nervous, but her behavior was unexpected. Maybe not suspicious, it was difficult to say just yet, but still. He was trying to be more aware of his surroundings since keeping his head in the dirt had only caused him trouble lately. “God, yeah. Could use a whole truckload of it, as it happens. Been mighty unlucky these past few weeks! Super lame.” 

Making sure his hands were clean first, the lamia extended a hand halfway across the table. “Well, stranger, I’m Wyatt. What should I be callin’ you?” His gaze was drawn briefly to the window again as the rain suddenly came down harder, pelting it so hard it sounded like hail. A flash of lightning lit up the dark afternoon sky, and thunder rolled in the distance. Wyatt raised a brow, shaking his head and giving a gentle laugh. “Damn… dunno if I wanna be steppin’ out into that any time soon.”

—

“I mean, that whole authentic shit doesn’t really matter to me anyway sometimes. I just want my food to taste good, ya know?” There were some instances where she was more critical, especially as it pertained to the Chinese cuisine — but generally speaking Daiyu’s palette was far from refined. She thought herself a connoisseur all the same, though, and so did her 16 instagram followers. (Half of them were bots, but they were smart bots.) “Very fucking lame. Has to be something in the water, then. Maybe we should order a truckload of sammies and see if we get lucky.” 

She shook the hand, her gut protesting at the physical proximity. She tried not to let her lip rise in something negative. Not disgust – she’d never really been good at feeling disgust – but it was something all the same. She still didn’t know who this Wyatt was. Wyatt… Why… at… It rung no bells. “I’m Daiyu,” she quipped in reply, eyeing the weather outside at the same time as the other. “Nah, I definitely don’t. Been rained on so much these past months. Fucking Maine.” Not that Washington was any better, rain wise. “Must be because we didn’t get the rabbit’s foot that the weather’s this bad.” She turned her head, jumping onto another topic as the other’s familiarity continued to be an itch she couldn’t scratch. “Say, you look familiar. Are you a model or something?”

—

“Sure, if you’re buying,” Wyatt laughed. Daiyu. The name was scratching the back of his brain. Something about it was familiar, though he was nearly certain he’d never heard it spoken aloud before. Quietly pondering this as the woman asked him a question, he broke out into a wide grin. “Wow, straight to model, eh? I’m not, but between you n’ my other friend’s comments, I’m startin’ to think I oughtta put this face to good use…” 

…. wait, Daiyu? It struck him suddenly. “Hold on… you’re the one that said you’d sign my tits! The one with a sticky sweet center,” he cackled, delighted to be meeting the wisecrack in the flesh. His gaze dropped to the drink she had with her and he shook his head almost fondly, clicking his tongue. “And look at you go, workin’ hard on that as we speak.” 

—

“What?” She looked offended. “What do you mean? We’re gonna dine and dash. Or, lunch and leave, I guess.” Daiyu didn’t want to make an enemy out  of the sandwich shop, in all truth, but in this hypothetical there was no fucking way she was paying for tens and tens of sandwiches. If they were going to eat their weight (and then some) in clubs to get that rabbit foot, they’d do it for free.

She was about to go on about his modeling features when he made the connection. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’re him! The rotten fruit with bad taste himself! Do you have frog legs on your sandwich?” Daiyu crinkled her nose at the fact, which was ironic considering all the Snicker-Snackers she’d eaten in her life. She squinted, wondering if that online conversation was where she knew the other from, but no. Her itch remained unscratched. “Yes, I am ready to be eaten. After I am done eating myself, of course.”

—

Giving Daiyu a smirk, Wyatt made a show of opening his sandwich to show her the (peculiar) ingredients. “See? Decidedly lackin’ in frogs legs. Coulda thrown some on there, though… wouldn’t have minded.” Yes, I am ready to be eaten. Her declaration, however innocuous given the context of their online conversation, still made him chuckle. And… consider. She looked like she’d be tasty. He didn’t have a particular sweet-tooth, but still. 

“Well, then… to dyin’ and bein’ devoured,” he toasted with a small lift of his sandwich, grinning as he went in for another bite. Chicago dog sandwich… who came up with this shit? Wasn’t a hot dog like, already a sandwich? He was pretty sure there were countless online arguments about  that subject.

—

There was a lot more to be said and Daiyu was ready to prattle on forever and ever before taking a bite of her sandwich. It was really unfortunate, the way her chatterbox nature kept her from eating sometimes — but this time it wasn’t that which kept her from taking a bite. As Wyatt lifted his sandwich to take a bite and a bit of sausage covered his upper lip from her perspective, the dots connected.

“You —” She lifted a finger, this time. “You used to have a mustache!” Daiyu quickly remembered herself and took hold of her own sub (club?) and took a large bite to keep herself from revealing how she knew that. But her itch was finally scratched. She had not seen Wyatt before in a family context, nor had she seen him in magazines or simply online — his face had been plastered on the bounty wall. Dead or alive, for eating someone alive. With a nice sum. She swallowed half the bite and tried to sound normal, the excitement from recognizing the other dissipating. “Where’d it go, man?” 

—

That was… odd. He had not been the only mustachioed man in town, though perhaps he’d been the most handsome… still was, of course, stache or no. His brow furrowed curiously, an uncertain smile following shortly after. There might have been good reason to be suspicious, given everything about this town, but the shifter’s ego was of course always the first consideration, and being recognized by someone he didn’t know was only one rung below being complimented on the ladder of hubris. Of course she recognized him. Even if she’d only seen him out in public once, of course she would recognize him. He was hard to forget.

His free hand swiped across his face as if to confirm that yes, it was in fact gone now, matching the length of the rest of his facial hair instead. “That I did,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Got tired of the upkeep.” Got depressed, was more like it. Shaved it off, then decided to not fuck much with his general appearance. He didn’t need to fuss, anyway. He was pretty even when the curly hair on his head was experiencing wanderlust. “Sorry, have we met before? I can be shit with faces…”

— 

See? This was why she preferred to hunt in the woods. That was how it was supposed to be. She, nature, her weapons, her tracking equipment. Daiyu grumbled inward at her mess up, annoyed that the person across from her was a murdering alligator person who wasn’t lounging around in a bit of woods but in stead just sat here. Across from her. Eating a sandwich just for the heck of it, because it certainly didn’t fit into his serial-murder diet. (Although she was a foodie who was known for shoveling food into her mouth, she always found the way lamia ate pretty distasteful.)

“Aaaaaaah,” she said, drawing out the sound and quickly stuffing her mouth with another bite. This was awkward. It was even potentially really stupid. She tried to remember how much money the shifter across from her was worth and recalled it was a fair bit. But there was no attacking people in a place of business. Especially not ones she wanted to return to — but the other knew her now, and she didn’t like being known by her prey. Whatever. She’d talk her way out of it and figure it out. “Yeah, man, totally — I remember now. We met at a bar, I think? You def had a mustache then.” 

—

A bar. Well, it was about as likely as anything else. And if it’d been a bar, there was a good chance he’d actually met her and just wasn’t remembering it. Wyatt had a tendency of getting a little out of hand when alcohol was involved. Speaking of things getting out of hand… he could feel his control over his current state of human-ness slipping again, likely a result of his staunch refusal to let himself nap for even a moment. Things kept going to shit every time he closed his eyes, so he was on day… oh, who knew anymore? The sunglasses weren’t just hiding yellow irises, but the exhaustion his eyes could no longer mask. The teeth in his mouth had gotten sharper, noticed as he fidgeted on the spot and accidentally scraped his own tongue on them.

It was time to go. 

Crumpling up the last few bites of his questionable sandwich into its wrapper, the shifter cleared his throat. “Sounds like me!” he agreed, offering Daiyu a smile. “Hey, I just remembered that I have to be somewhere, so… I’m gonna go.” There wasn’t time for being clever. He glanced outside again, dreading the rain as much as he had when remarking that he would not be going out in it, but now he had no choice. “Good to meet you in person, and all. Don’t be a stranger!” He was clearly trying to get out of there quickly, offering no more explanation as he chucked his trash into the bin on his way to the door, hissing in a breath as the cold humidity hit him in the face. Ugh. Ugh, it was too fuckin’ cold when it rained around here.

— 

The sense that a lamia was in the store with her grew stronger, which was a strange thing and most likely meant he was becoming more … reptilian and less human. Daiyu considered the person across from her, wondering if Wyatt would start showing what kind of lamia he was. If scales would spread on his hands, if he’d grow his teeth into pointy, poisonous things in a response to her recognition of him. She could have been more smooth about it, but smooth had never been her style and her mouth did move faster than her head at all times. But the shifter did not … shift. Not fully, at the very least, and nothing came from the feeling tugging at her stomach.

“Oh,” she said at his vague statement. Daiyu watched from where she sat as the other got up, not having to play up how flabbergasted she was by this sudden turn of events. The guy across from her was a lamia wanted for eating a guy alive. That same lamia was also someone she’d shot the shit with online. And before she could properly grasp that, he was gone.

She made quick work of wrapping her own sandwich in a bit of tissue paper and got up, moving on instinct alone. Stache or no stache, there was a bounty connected to this guy and with good reason — the least she could do was track (or tail, in this case) him to wherever he was going for future reference. So Daiyu got in her car and kept her eyes sharp, following her literal gut feeling as she tailed the other from a distance as her club sandwich laid on the passenger seat, waiting to be finished. The route they were driving was familiar and it was almost like she wasn’t even tailing the guy — it was almost as if she was just driving home to her rented cabin in the Pines. He took a left where she’d usually take a right at some point, though so it at least wasn’t like he was driving to her house (a worry she’d had for one paranoid minute).

She waited in the wings, watching the lamia get out of his car from a fair bit away before driving past and stopping by the side of the road some 700 feet further down. Daiyu opened up her phone, got out her maps app and placed a pin at 12 Mudpuppy Point for later, before restarting her car and going home. 

[readingsquotes]

"Free speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum nor in a perfect liberal society composed of individual signatories to a social contract where everyone has equal rights to express themselves freely. Academia reproduces an epistemology of ignorance, as Charles Mills put it, whereby whites in general, are unable to understand the world they themselves have created (Mills, 1997, p. 18). Unfortunately, this does not only apply to white scholars but to the whiteness we all can uphold. As Ruha Benjamin mentioned at a commencement speech, Black and Brown faces in high places will not save us.

Despite those who are seduced by whiteness and coloniality, there still exists the presence of radically situated others who threaten dominant discourses that justify colonialism. After all, racialized and colonized others “know where the bodies are buried.”

....

It’s for this reason that the emerging student movement urges us to not only question or interrogate academia’s silence and complicity but also to unsettle the technologies of colonial violence in which universities are deeply invested. Student activists are teaching us what a decolonial praxis demands—that is, a radical ethical and political commitment that remains steadfast in the face of institutional and police violence. Take for instance, Christopher Lacovetti, a PhD student at the University of Chicago encampment who was interviewed by Fox News when he expressed the following:

if our government and our academic institutions are complicit in this, there comes a point where we say, “we’re not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us because there are principles and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures.” And that our commitment to Gaza runs deeper than fears for our safety, fears for our careers, fears for ours paychecks.

Students are teaching us a radical form of academic freedom and right to assemble. They’re pressuring universities to divest from weapons manufacturers profiting from Israel’s genocidal campaign.

[gaymormonmike]

STUDS TERKEL

I am reading Terkel's book Coming of Age. It is a chronicle of interviews he had with people who shaped the 20th Century. These aren't the people you would be familiar with. Stud's hung out with and was friends to the marginalized . He fought against any prejudice aligning himself with Blacks such as Mahalia Jackson, gay and lesbians, downtrodden workers, unionists, and was comfortable with anyone that was open, honest and willing to speak out. He had a Chicago radio program that interviewed people (we would call them podcasts today) from 1952 to 1997. He wrote oral histories of his famous people and of the everyday person. His oral history of people on the home front during WWII won a Pulitzer prize and made me love the way he wrote and spoke and how much he wanted to record the unspoken stories of everyone. He understood that everyone had a story to tell. I am sharing this because if you never heard of Studs Terkel, you are missing an American treasure. Check him out. Here is part of his story from Wikpedia:

A political leftist, Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work that varied from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements. In the late 1940's he voiced characters in WMAQ's Destination Freedom series, written by Richard Durham.[5] His own well-known radio program, titled The Studs Terkel Program, aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997.[6] The one-hour program was broadcast each weekday during those 45 years. On this program, he interviewed guests as diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Mort Sahl, Bob Dylan, Alexander Frey, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Jean Shepherd, Frank Zappa, and Big Bill Broonzy.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Terkel was also the central character of Studs' Place, an unscripted television drama about the owner of a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago through which many famous people and interesting characters passed. This show, Marlin Perkins's Zoo Parade, Garroway at Large, and the children's show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie are widely considered canonical examples of the Chicago School of Television.

Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it in 1967 with his first collection of oral histories, Division Street: America, with 70 people talking about the effect on the human spirit of living in an American metropolis.[7][8][9]

He also served as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Chicago History Museum. He appeared in the film Eight Men Out, based on the Black Sox Scandal, in which he played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players' plans to throw the 1919 World Series. Terkel found it particularly amusing to play this role, as he was a big fan of the Chicago White Sox (as well as a vocal critic of major league baseball during the 1994 baseball strike), and gave a moving congratulatory speech to the White Sox organization after their 2005 World Series championship during a television interview.

Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time—Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy.

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. His 1985 book "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize. For Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book, Working, in which (as reflected by its subtitle) People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, also was highly acclaimed. Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show of the same title in 1978 and was telecast on PBS in 1982. In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Journalism and Communications. In 1997, Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he received the George Polk Career Award in 1999.

[shotofstress]

I was reading the Unethical Human Experimentation in the United States (as you do to know the amount of crimes and monstrous things usa has done and keeps doing, not just to usa itself, but also Global South and my country), and then I read this part which is the less terrible and less important one btw, so with that in mind:

In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California, to use prisoners as test subjects for its Active Denial System that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain."

From Psychological and torture experiments

Against the backdrop of growing authoritarianism, the basic principles underlying representative liberal democratic political systems are important to preserve and sustain. In fact, liberal democracy is at its lowest level in 25 years whereas the number of dictatorships is rising (V-Dem Institute, 2022). A key such principle in need of safeguarding is the ability of democratic citizens to express dissent through collective assembly. Historically, this modality of political expression in liberal democracies has been crucial in widening the reach of political and economic rights, especially for those who are most marginalized. There are examples, throughout history and in the contemporary present, of societies renewing themselves through mass mobilizations, which are a form of democratic speech in their very existence. However, the last century has seen a proliferating use of various technologies against protesting assemblies, and these technologies have circulated between democratic and authoritarian systems, often deriving validation from their use by liberal democracies. In recent decades, such technologies have blurred distinctions between war with the enemy and protest policing as war against the democratic citizen. This is especially the case for ‘non-lethal’ weapons (NLWs) that are increasingly deployed against domestic civilian populations across regime types.

In contrast to lethal weapons (for example, guns), these NLWs range from tear gas to sound cannons to rubber bullets to smell bombs to pellet guns and more. All weapons (lethal and non-lethal) cause pain, which is a somatic sensation. We are not focusing on pain per se but rather on the blunting of human senses and the sensory apparatus through which NLWs can both incapacitate and repress.

From "Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democtracies" (May 31, 2024)

Studies done so far have found that the effect of such exposure is minimal and is limited to skin reddening and irritation. However, 8 people did get a more severe second-degree burn, consisting of a pea-sized blister.

The Active Denial System: What Is It And What Does It Do? (19 Oct 2023)

Testing on military volunteers identified several cases of skin burns, blisters, or prolonged pain. Capable of penetrating about 0.5 mm into the body, the electromagnetic waves could potentially access skin past the dermal layer, which contains blood vessels, nerves, and glands. The skin on eyelids, for instance, is 0.2 mm deep. Increased exposure times can produce skin burns and dermal damage. Areas of thin and delicate skin, such as on the face and eyes, could be more at risk for injury.

Health Impacts of Crowd-Control Weapons: Directed Energy Devices. Physicians for Human Rights (18 Oct 2020)

A 2008 New Scientist article quotes James Lin, a University of Chicago scientist, worrying that MEDUSA might cause “neural damage.” More distressing, however, is that turning up the power makes people hear phantom sounds, inviting all manner of unethical uses.

[...] Both the US Army and the Secret Service have developed microwave systems that make people hear sounds, Del Monte says, and the US Air Force obtained a classified patent for such a system in 1996. Put simply, people who dismiss the alarming number of ‘Havana Syndrome’ cases as entirely paranoia or delusion because they doubt the very existence of microwave weapons, are all terribly, utterly wrong. Those people could not possibly be more wrong.

'Havana Syndrome' Weapon Is A Cold War Tech That's Perfect For 'Hybrid War'

And I remember the School of the Americas, the Project Artichoke, Project QKHILLTOP, that weird declassified documents published in the new work times I think? That was this kind of weapon but in a helicopter.

Then statetians wonder why we say that usa is a terrorist state and why everyone hates it. Is a dictatorship with 1 party in reality and that is basically the biggest criminal regime.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.28 (after 1920)

1921 – Russian Civil War: The Red Army dissolved the Makhnovshchina, after driving the Revolutionary Insurgent Army out of Ukraine. 1924 – The Georgian opposition stages the August Uprising against the Soviet Union. 1936 – Nazi Germany begins its mass arrests of Jehovah's Witnesses, who are interned in concentration camps. 1937 – Toyota Motors becomes an independent company. 1943 – Denmark in World War II: German authorities demand that Danish authorities crack down on acts of resistance. The next day, martial law is imposed on Denmark. 1944 – World War II: Marseille and Toulon are liberated. 1946 – The Workers’ Party of North Korea, predecessor of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, is founded at a congress held in Pyongyang, North Korea. 1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is lynched in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, galvanizing the nascent civil rights movement. 1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the United States Senate from voting on the Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later, the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator. 1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech. 1964 – The Philadelphia race riot begins. 1968 – Police and protesters clash during 1968 Democratic National Convention protests as protesters chant "The whole world is watching". 1973 – Norrmalmstorg robbery: Stockholm police secure the surrenders of hostage-takers Jan-Erik Olsson and Clark Olofsson, defusing the Norrmalmstorg hostage crisis. The behaviours of the hostages later give rise to the term Stockholm syndrome. 1988 – Ramstein air show disaster: Three aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team collide and the wreckage falls into the crowd. Seventy-five are killed and 346 seriously injured. 1990 – Gulf War: Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province. 1990 – An F5 tornado strikes the Illinois cities of Plainfield and Joliet, killing 29 people. 1993 – NASA's Galileo probe performs a flyby of the asteroid 243 Ida. Astronomers later discover a moon, the first known asteroid moon, in pictures from the flyby and name it Dactyl. 1993 – Singaporean presidential election: Former Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong is elected President of Singapore. Although it is the first presidential election to be determined by popular vote, the allowed candidates consist only of Ong and a reluctant whom the government had asked to run to confer upon the election the semblance of an opposition. 1993 – The autonomous Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia in Bosnia and Herzegovina is transformed into the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. 1993 – A Tajikistan Airlines Yakovlev Yak-40 crashes during takeoff from Khorog Airport in Tajikistan, killing 82. 1996 – Chicago Seven defendant David Dellinger, antiwar activist Bradford Lyttle, Civil Rights Movement historian Randy Kryn, and eight others are arrested by the Federal Protective Service while protesting in a demonstration at the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago during that year's Democratic National Convention. 1998 – Pakistan's National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the "Qur'an and Sunnah" the "supreme law" but the bill is defeated in the Senate. 1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa. 1999 – The Russian space mission Soyuz TM-29 reaches completion, ending nearly 10 years of continuous occupation on the space station Mir as it approaches the end of its life. 2003 – In "one of the most complicated and bizarre crimes in the annals of the FBI", Brian Wells dies after becoming involved in a complex plot involving a bank robbery, a scavenger hunt, and a homemade explosive device. 2009 – NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-128.

[pashterlengkap]

A happy marriage at the DNC—coastal liberalism and prairie progressivism

This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission. If you did a word cloud diagram of the Democratic convention in Chicago, the two big words that appear would be “freedom” and “joy.” Less prominent, if it showed up at all, would be “progressive.” Yet the Democrats spent four long nights deploying the attractive concepts of freedom and joy to sell a progressive agenda to voters. Moreover, with the ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the Ds have bolstered this pitch by marrying coastal liberalism with prairie progressivism. This union offers a powerful punch to the party’s core message: Government ought to be proactively deployed to address the problems and challenges Americans face. When Vice President Harris two weeks ago chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her campaign partner, there was much obvious commentary that he provided from-the-heartland balance to her California lineage and that his white-guy-dad-plaid-coach persona complemented her Black-Indian-Jamaican-woman identity. What drew less attention was how Walz’s selection reinforced the ideology and values message of the ticket. He and Harris are both progressive-minded politicians, but they hail from culturally different strains of liberalism. Related Kamala Harris says Trump & GOP are “out of their minds” in closing DNC speech “Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said, “but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” Your LGBTQ+ guide to Election 2024 Stay ahead of the 2024 Election with our newsletter that covers candidates, issues, and perspectives that matter. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Harris, more or less, represents what many folks these days think of as a liberal. She’s from the Bay Area. She’s a person of color. She talks about helping marginalized communities and seeking economic justice. She crusades for abortion rights and LGBTQ rights. Her days as a prosecutor have caused some conflict with the left. But in general she fits the familiar mode—a Big City Lib, a Blue State Lib. There’s a reason why Donald Trump and JD Vance believe they can score points by falsely branding her a crazy “communist.” Not a real American, in their view. Walz is not an easy-to-attack caricature. Nebraska-born, he’s a hunter and a former National Guard noncommissioned officer. He ice fishes. He wears flannel shirts. He could be in a truck commercial. And, yes, he coached high school football—and middle-school track and basketball—in a very red district, where he won his first election to Congress in 2006. Yet as governor, Walz has assembled an impressive progressive record. He signed into law a measure that made abortion a “fundamental right” and guaranteed access to contraception, fertility treatments, sterilization, and other reproductive health care. Having been an advocate of gay rights as a high school teacher, he signed an executive order protecting access to gender-affirming care and a “Trans Refuge” bill that banned the enforcement of arrest warrants and extradition requests for those who traveled to Minnesota for such care. He okayed a package of gun safety measures. He approved a law implementing paid family and medical leave. He legalized recreational marijuana. There’s more: He backed drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. (Advocates, including business leaders, said it would lead to safer roads and a better state economy.) He restored voting rights for former felons. He expanded access to health insurance, took steps to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, imposed stricter regulations on pollutants, and promoted electric vehicles. He signed a measure to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school children. This is a list that these days might be equated with Blue State politicians. Yet Walz represents a long tradition of prairie progressivism. Long before the nation’s political map ossified into Blue and Red territory, there was a vibrant… http://dlvr.it/TCMXcc

[dm2024bd]

DNC Day 2: Barack and Michelle Obama make the case for Harris, take on Trump in fiery speeches

Barack and Michelle Obama urged Democrats to unite behind Vice President Kamala Harris on the second night of the party's convention in Chicago on Tuesday, challenging the assembled delegates and voters at home to harness the enthusiasm surrounding Harris' candidacy to defeat Donald Trump in November.

See More

[sa7abnews]

Activists press for longer, closer DNC protest route in Chicago

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/06/activists-press-for-longer-closer-dnc-protest-route-in-chicago/

Activists press for longer, closer DNC protest route in Chicago

With less than two weeks until the start of the Democratic National Convention, a coalition of activists, led by Palestinians in Chicago, are continuing to negotiate with local authorities over their protest route.

The Coalition to March on the DNC, who have sued the city of Chicago for a longer and closer protest route, were in federal court on Monday without any final ruling. They will be back in court in the coming days.

The main points of contention between the activists and the city of Chicago are length of the route for the approximately 50,000 people expected to march and the distance from the convention, which organisers say is important to get their voices heard to protest the administration’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“We’ve been saying from the beginning that we want a route that’s within sight and sound of the DNC,” Muhammad Sankari, a Chicago-based member of the United States Palestinian Community Network, told The New Arab. 

“The city is trying to give us a route that’s just over a mile, which would have us turning through side streets and going through residential areas,” he said. “We’ll have tens of thousands of people on the streets. We should be given the main streets.”

Emphasising the importance of having a longer route, he said, “By the time the front of the march gets to the end, the people at the end might not have started the circle, and they won’t have had their constitutional right to speech and assembly. We have the right to take our demands to the door of the administration.”

According to USPCN, more than 200 organisations across the US have joined the Coalition to March on the DNC. They say they are determined to march in Chicago on Monday 19 August, the first day of the convention, regardless of the final decision of the route and despite the new nomination of Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate replacing Joe Biden.

[chubbycaucasianchristiancloseted]

Are Democrats tired of being lied to yet?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-drops-out.html

Are Democrats tired of being lied to yet? “Biden is hard to keep up with”, “Biden does more in an hour then most people do in a day”? How much did Kamala know about Joe’s cognitive decline? Joe’s tune changed very quickly on dropping out of the race, was a deal made?, were pardons promised for a Biden? Does Obama still  have that much power over the party?

I never want to be lectured again about democracy from a Democrat. Their entire primary process was just thrown out the window and elite Democrats have hand chosen the Democrat presidential candidate.

Why did he have so many people come visit him in Rehoboth if he has covid?

Good to see the New York Times take a few swings a Trump in an article about Biden dropping out of the race. They are able to work in “convicted felon”, “tried to overturn the last election” and characterized his commented about his main political opponent dropping out of the race as “caustic”. They even attempt to compare Biden’s obvious mental decline and how Trump “has confused, dates”

Direct Quotes:

President Biden on Sunday abruptly abandoned his campaign for a second term under intense pressure from fellow Democrats and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris to lead their party in a dramatic last-minute bid to stop former President Donald J. Trump from returning to the White House.

Biden officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the president began changing his mind on Saturday while in Rehoboth with family members and three aides: Steve Ricchetti, his counselor and longtime aide; Annie Tomasini, his deputy chief of staff; and Anthony Bernal, the chief of staff to Jill Biden.

At some point in the day, Mr. Biden also summoned Mike Donilon, one of his longest serving advisers and closest confidants, who rushed to Rehoboth to join the conversation, one of the officials said. Still sick, the president opted against making an announcement on camera and instead crafted a letter with Mr. Donilon, author of many of his public speeches.

No sitting president has dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle in American history, and Ms. Harris and any other contenders for the nomination will have just weeks to earn the backing of the nearly 4,000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. While the convention is scheduled to take place in Chicago from Aug. 19 to 22, the party had already planned to conduct a virtual roll call vote before Aug. 7 to ensure access to ballots in all 50 states, leaving little time to assemble support.

Instead, a flood of Democrats quickly endorsed Ms. Harris, including former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Former President Barack Obama and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom were privately concerned about Mr. Biden’s ability to win this fall, notably did not back Ms. Harris in statements they issued welcoming the president’s decision, but there was no indication they were seriously looking for an alternative.

In her own statement, Ms. Harris praised Mr. Biden for his accomplishments and for “this selfless and patriotic act” in putting country ahead of his ambitions and implicitly addressed critics who said she should not simply be given a coronation.

Mr. Trump responded to Mr. Biden’s announcement not with the grace typically offered in modern American politics when an opponent drops out, but with a characteristically caustic statement. “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site.

Democratic congressional leaders petrified by dismal poll numbers mounted a concerted effort to persuade Mr. Biden to gracefully exit as angry donors threatened to withhold their money and down-ballot candidates feared he would take down the whole ticket. Polls after the debate showed that even most Democrats preferred that Mr. Biden cede the nomination to another candidate.

Questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s own cognitive decline. He often rambles incoherently in interviews and at campaign rallies and has confused names, dates and facts just as Mr. Biden has. But Republicans have not turned against him as Democrats did against Mr. Biden.

In bowing out, Mr. Biden became the first incumbent president in 56 years to give up a chance to run again.

His announcement signaled the end of an improbable life in public office that began more than half a century ago with his first election to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970. Over the course of 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice president, four campaigns for the White House and more than three years as president, Mr. Biden has become one of the most familiar faces in American life, known for his avuncular personality, habitual gaffes and resilience in adversity.

Yet the backslapping deal maker has struggled to translate decades of good will into the unifying presidency he promised.

Among other measures, he pushed through a $1.7 trillion Covid-19 relief package; a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s roads, highways, airports and other infrastructure; and major investments to combat climate change, lower prescription drug costs for seniors, treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and build up the nation’s semiconductor industry. He also signed legislation meant to protect same-sex marriage in case the Supreme Court ever reversed its decision legalizing it.

He also appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and installed more than 200 other judges on lower federal courts despite the razor-thin control of the Senate, more than any other president to this point of his tenure in the modern era. Roughly two-thirds of his choices were women and roughly two-thirds were Black, Hispanic or members of other racial minorities, meaning he has done more to diversify the federal bench than any president.

His decision to withdraw makes him an outlier in American history. Only three presidents have served four years or less without seeking a second term, all of them during the 19th century: James K. Polk, James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes.

[lboogie1906]

John Francis Wheaton (May 8, 1866 - January 15, 1922) was a lawyer and politician. He was the first African American to serve in the Minnesota House of Representatives.

He was born to Jacob and Emily Wheaton in Hagerstown, Maryland. He graduated from the high school division of Storer College. He worked as a public school teacher, attended Dixon Business College, and moved to DC, where he worked as a clerk for Congress. He married Ella Chambers (1889) and the couple had two sons.

He graduated from Howard’s Law Department and set up a practice in Hagerstown. He was only the fourth African American to pass the bar and practice law in Maryland and the first outside Baltimore.

He moved to Minneapolis, where he worked as a clerk in the state legislature and as a deputy clerk in the Minneapolis municipal courts. He became the first African American to graduate from the University of Minnesota Law School.

At nineteen he gave his first political “stump speech.” By twenty-one, he was an unsuccessful candidate for a seat in the Maryland State Legislature. He served as a delegate in 1887, 1889, and 1891 to Maryland’s State Republican Convention and was elected temporary chairman of the 1889 Convention. At the twenty-two, he attended the 1888 RNC as an alternate.

He was elected to serve as an alternate delegate to the 1896 RNC. He was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives to represent the 42nd District. He was instrumental in passing the 1899 civil rights statute that ended discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. He lobbied for permitting African American soldiers to fight in the Spanish-American War.

He represented Minnesota at the RNC. He did not win reelection to the legislature and practiced law in Minneapolis before moving to Chicago to work for an insurance company. He relocated to New York City and switched to the Democratic Party. He worked for the New York City District Attorney’s. He ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly.

He was survived by his second wife (Dora), sons, and a stepson. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[pooma-today]

The National UN Volunteers-India

Labour Day, May 1, 2024

❄️ KANIKA SHARMA, Senior Coordinator, Vidya Valley Senior Secondary School, Mohali, Kharar.

HISTORY: Labour Day, celebrated on the first day of May in many countries, honors the contributions of workers and the labor movement. This day has deep historical roots, tracing back to the late 19th century when labor movements campaigned for better working conditions, reasonable hours, and fair wages. The Haymarket affair of 1886 in Chicago, where peaceful labor demonstrations turned violent, is often cited as a pivotal event that led to the establishment of Labour Day.

Today, Labour Day is observed in various ways around the world. In some places, it's a day of protest and activism, highlighting ongoing labor issues and advocating for workers' rights. In others, it's a day of celebration, marked by parades, picnics, and other festivities.

Labour Day serves as a reminder of the progress made in workers' rights and the importance of continued efforts to ensure fair and safe working conditions for all. It also serves as a time to reflect on the challenges that workers still face, such as job insecurity, low wages, and workplace discrimination.

This Labour Day is a day to recognize and honor the contributions of workers, past and present, and to recommit to the ongoing fight for workers' rights and social justice.

ACTIVITIES TO BE CONDUCTED IN SCHOOL:

Schools often commemorate Labour Day with various activities aimed at educating students about the significance of the day and fostering a sense of appreciation for workers and their contributions. Some activities in schools are given below:

🔘ASSEMBLIES: Schools may hold special assemblies where students learn about the history and importance of Labour Day through presentations, speeches, or performances.

🔘CLASSROOM DISCUSSIONS: Teachers may facilitate discussions about the meaning of Labour Day, its history, and its relevance in today's world. They may also discuss the rights and responsibilities of workers.

🔘ART AND CRAFT PROJECTS: Students might engage in art and craft activities related to Labour Day, such as creating posters, banners, or cards to express gratitude to workers or to raise awareness about labor issues.

🔘ESSAY OR POSTER CONTESTS: Schools may organize contests where students can showcase their understanding of Labour Day through essays, posters, or other creative mediums.

🔘COMMUNITY SERVICE: Some schools encourage students to participate in community service activities on Labour Day, such as volunteering at local organizations or helping out in their communities as a way to honor the spirit of the day.

🔘GUEST SPEAKERS: Schools may invite guest speakers, such as labor activists or workers from various industries, to share their experiences and insights with students.

These activities not only help students understand the significance of Labour Day but also instill in them values of respect, empathy, and gratitude towards workers and the labor movement.

[victims-of]

This scene from The Blues Brothers was based on real Neo-Nazis in the United States that grew as backlash to the Civil Rights movement.

George Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, called the Civil Rights movement a "Jewish plot to weaken the white race."

The film does not accurately portray how goofy and bizarre the Neo-Nazis they're satirizing actually were. They were not taken very seriously by basically anyone, and the ADL successfully urged mainstream media to not give them national attention.

Frank Collin (real name Frank Cohen) was a Neo-Nazi leader based in Chicago. He would hold Nazi demonstrations under the guise of "freedom of speech."

The Chicago City Council created a fee of $250,000 in insurance to obtain a permit to hold demonstrations. This was to hinder the Neo-Nazis.

Frank Collin began to apply for permits in less expensive areas, including Skokie - a suburb of Chicago that had 7,000 Holocaust survivor residents. Skokie denied the request to hold a Nazi rally in their neighborhood.

Frank Collin decided to sue Skokie and approached David Goldberger of the ACLU. Goldberger determined it was constitutional to assemble a Nazi march in a public space, and that he should defend their freedom of speech.

This angered basically everyone. People sent letters to the Skokie community sympathizing with them. People threatened the Neo-Nazis with violence, and cheered in the streets "Nazis have no rights."

Read More Here