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Monday, September 1st, 2025

    Time Event
    2:40a
    ICE's surveillance on wire transfers

    The US is tracking financial payments to find people to deport. The deportation thugs could do this with bank card payments, too. (The bully's henchmen can disregard and flatten privacy laws.) The targets do not have to be limited to people who entered the US without authorization. They could apply it also to people like Mahmoud Khalil, who are in the US lawfully but committed the "crime" of criticizing Israel's war crimes, or El Supremo himself.

    It was first predicted in the 1970s that a widely used trackable digital payment system would be a tool for repression and tyranny. Nowadays we can see this in practice in China. The bully's order for all federal government departments to give all their personal data to the DOPE, and to Palantir, is preparing to use data mining to find anything the bully disapproves of, even if lawful or constitutionally protected, to generate an excuse to persecute.

    The basic grass-roots way to resist this is to pay cash.

    2:40a
    Whitehouse fund withholding over gender ideology

    The bully demands states delete mention of trans people from their sex education curricula, or he will deny them the funds for sex education. Republican-ruled states will rush to obey, and I see no way of stopping them. But what about state governments that disagree?

    It is foolish to yield to such bullying, because the extortionist will still have the threat in hand and will demand more, more and more.

    A better response is a counter-threat. For instance, how about adding the case of E Jean Carroll and Trump to the sex education syllabus?

    That example could be used to clarify various aspects of the issue of varieties of forced sexual acts and how they might be prosecuted.

    8:39a
    Urgent: HUD translation services

    US citizens: call on HUD to continue offering translation services to people in their official requests and transactions.

    Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)

    First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.

    I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"

    They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.

    To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.

    Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:

    First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.

    This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.

    8:39a
    Urgent: Military takeover of D.C.

    US citizens: call on Congress to stop the persecutor's military takeover of Washington D.C.

    If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

    8:39a
    Urgent: Stop global heating denial

    US citizens: Stop the wrecker's plan to burn up NASA's climate watchdogs.

    8:39a
    Urgent: Stop price gouging

    US citizens: Become a grassroots co-sponsor of the Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act.

    8:39a
    Urgent: Overly hasty mining projects

    US citizens: call for stopping fast-tracked mining projects that threaten wildlife.

    8:39a
    Urgent: Make Billionaires pay

    Protest on Labor Day (Monday, Sept. 1). Protest again on Sept. 20 (Saturday). These are nation-wide protests to demand we make billionaires pay for the damage and harm they are doing with help from the repressive government.

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