Lula won the elections, here’s my take on why we shouldn’t celebrate this:

PressTV telegram video

Thousands of people protest outside Japan’s Parliament in Tokyo, demanding Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s resignation over her support for the United States and Israel.

I don’t think we are voting our way of this babee.

Actual propublica article

Calgary Opera Have Doubled Down On Their Cancellation Of A Performer For Displaying The Palestinian Flag

Future ‘Tosca’ performances in Canada’s Calgary Opera will not feature bass singer Gabriel Sanchez-Ortega.

The Calgary Opera apologised to pro-Israel viewers who it spoke to like they were victims, simply for having to view the flag of the people they are seeking to oppress and erase from existence.

I finished reading Nick Turse’s ‘Kill Everything that Moves’ about how American strategy in Vietnam involved systematic execution of war crimes dictated from the top down, aimed at killing as many Vietnamese as possible to demonstrate a growing body count as evidence that the war was winnable.

It’s a difficult read, with many pages of description of war crimes. A few things that jumped out at me:

• in the movie Apocalypse Now, the protagonist is sent up river by the US military to kill Colonel Kurtz because Kurtz had gone insane. Kurtz is treated like an aberrant mad dog that the military wanted put down. In reality, the most Kurtzian figure depicted in Kill Everything that Moves, General Westmoreland, was supported by the military and the civilian adminstration, he weathered My Lai just fine and died of old age in 2005.

• I didn’t know that South Korean troops were so heavily involved in Vietnam. The use of foreign proxy/vassal forces including South Vietnamese and South Korean to do dirty work creates plausible deniability between American decision makers and those that wield the knife (or the water board or the electrical torture). Parallels can clearly be seen in other US led operations, like the use of Egyptian/Israeli/Iraqi black sites in the global war on terror or the use of El Salvador’s prisons in preventing migration.

1. I’m gonna return to my coverage of the world’s rebellions as promised, but I gotta do real organizing and family and work shit so it’s delayed

2. Also, I’m George R.R. Martin, and here’s a different piece of political analysis that’s top of mind:

In Ohio, Senate candidate Greg Levy is starting to show up meaningfully in the polls:

Greg, as a guy, is simply the best. He’s a full-time mover working 40 hours a week for two men and a truck. He’s a dedicated comrade who’s been in the streets loud and proud for years and runs a secular revolutionary gospel choir. We love Greg.

Ohio is a politically significant state for three main reasons: relatively large population that’s demographically similar on most accounts to the US as a whole; considered a major political bellweather that can meaningfully indicate the national mood; and a major economic region (roughly equivalent GDP to Turkiye) with manufacturing, AI datacenter scramble, world-leading medical institutions, and all-in-all a big boy for the bourgeoisie who run the show here about as freely as anywhere on planet earth.

PSL is running Senate campaigns for the first time. Contrary to the dead-end political advice of liberals who say you need to elect a bunch of pointless school board members to go anywhere, our argument is that you aim for high profile, high-impact races to raise the profile and organization of the party as a revolutionary vehicle. To that end, we picked Ohio and Massachusetts for our first forays into this scale of electoral work (MA is also going great, polling as high as 19% [!] although results in the 5-10% range seem more likely). We’ve been campaiging pretty hard all summer to extremely positive reception, targeting Black working class communities in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Akron and generally everybody loves us. I’ve been told so often at people’s doors ‘you folks probably aren’t ready for what I think, cause this country needs a revolution’ and I get to enthusiastically affirm that view and invite them into political action. There are whole neighborhoods stacked up with Greg signs delivered on the explicit promise of a socialist third party that fully rejects the Democrats and Republicans. We built on our extensive community networks and organization trust, especially in Cleveland and Columbus, to get Greg to around 2-3% in most polling.

Then, starting in late September, we kicked up our canvassing efforts substantially, and that lead to the poll above, which has fascinating implications.

Obviously, the response we get from online libs on Reddit and Instagram is pretty uniform: we cannot afford to take votes away from Sherrod Brown, Hero of the Imperialist Trade Unions and AIPAC, during such a critical election, so Greg should just lay in a hole and die if the voters don’t rightfully kill him first. Our argument is two fold: one, we don’t care, fuck the dems; two, we aren’t drawing from the same voter pool at this stage but instead we’re activating people who weren’t going to vote for either candidate in the first place. And that poll bears out our entire argument. Sherrod Brown is up by a whopping 6%, an absolute drubbing in an Ohio that seemed irreversibly Republican (if you listen to idealist libs, at least) while Greg is ALSO polling at 5%. Our on-thr-ground work has done a ton to boost the campaign’s visibility and we did it all while raising less than $100k throughout the whole campaign, running entirely on party cadre and non-party volunteers. For us, our big spend was a whopping 5 billboards statewide, but we’ve still been booming.

And then something very interesting happened after this polling period. A Republican-run PAC started sending out AI-generated pro-Greg mailers en masse, dropping almost half a million dollars. Now they’ve apparently increased their spend and are running AI pro-Greg TV ads during major sporting events that target Brown for being pro-Israel and pro-private prison. Greg’s campaign disavowed and condemned this trick, and Greg rejects being utilized as an AI blackface pawn for inter-bourgeois political competition. This has kicked off a new round of lib screeching that we’re just a ‘GOP op’, and our response to that is simply an opportunity for us to reinforce our total opposition to both billionaire parties: they may think we’re a joke or a sideshow for now, but it looks to me like we’re only 7 weeks away from a Marxist-Leninist party to get more than 5% in two major statewide elections for the first time since the Great Depression at least. The actual GOP trickery will not be enough to win over Brown because Jon Husted is just a lizard that performs sex doll performance for Trump and has had no campaign besides a detranser from Texas and Brown is genuinely pretty popular here. What it will do is push our numbers even higher and solidify the best third party performance in Ohio since the Worker’s World Party got 6.7% in 1992, and frankly I’m thinking we can beat that.

Ohio’s going to have a dramatic, high-profile Senate election this year that will receive significant national coverage when Brown predictably upsets Husted, and all that TV coverage is going to have to feature the Black communist veteran dad who grew up in public housing as the reason why neither candidate crossed 50%. Obviously we’re not going to be positively covered, but it’s going to blow up a lot of the Dem myths about elections that have already taken a beating from DSA primary wins, and it should raise to the many millions of politically hopeless people that if a genuine political alternative can take off in Ohio, it can take off anywhere in this country. All that ‘bad press’ is only going to raise the profile of a party who says cut the check for reparations now, cut the military budget by 90%, supports a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea, and (if you look at Greg’s campaign material) is consistent and disciplined about the need for a Literal Fucking Revolution in this country to much applause.

Burkina Faso moves to decolonize education through curriculum reform

Burkina Faso’s new school programs seek to challenge colonial portrayals of African history, elevate liberation struggles and indigenous knowledge, and strengthen national and cultural sovereignty.

Liberation struggles are at the centre of the new curricula, Armel said. “African states and countries of the Global South have always fought for their emancipation. The history of these struggles must be known by present and future generations,” he said. “It is in this spirit that the Haitian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and Thomas Sankara’s revolution are being taught.”

“The objective is to sow the seeds of revolution among young students,” he said. He noted that the Ministry has developed teaching modules and curricula and distributed them to teachers.

Just in case you’re not yet convinced that khat is essentially real-life spice melange from Dune that gives you powers of precognition, here’s Ansarallah fighters hitting a fucking moving target about 6km away with an ATGM:

Kenyan Communist leader Booker Omole acquitted on all counts

our comrade walks free

WSJ got their hands on Anthropic’s draft S1 form. It looks like Anthropic made $16 billion in revenue in the first 6 months of the year, this got them a nice cool $80 billion loss. Any normal company would instantly declare bankruptcy after these results. $2 billion of their revenue was interest income on the cash they weren’t able to spend yet.

We have some heavy Ed Zitron stuff here.

Amazon has warehouses of GPUs that can’t be installed, and is buying them so far in advance that a supply chain team said they “didn’t have a clear forecasted path” to installing them.

The most amazing thing about this is that Amazon will keep buying more anyway. It looks like Nvidia and all their partners have decided they want to make PC components as expensive as possible. Their hobby is creating inflation.

https://x.com/edzitron/status/2112336168784134484

https://web.archive.org/web/20261020012724/https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-220-billion-ai-bet-data-centers-spending-challenges-2026-10

Cereal production rises to a historic high: Burkina Faso’s pursuit of food sovereignty

god economic planning is the fucking best, this article is full of targets hit and quotas exceeded and it’s just

Burkina Faso Bans Privatization Of State-Owned Enterprises:
https://nitter.perennialte.ch/Spearhead_Af/status/2113272915739460083

On October 19, 2026, Burkina Faso’s People’s Legislative Assembly unanimously adopted a law banning the total or partial privatization of state-owned enterprises. Burkinabé state companies like CIM-SAHEL (cement), TEXFORCES-BF (textiles) and RAFFINOR-BF (gold) can no longer be legally privatized.

At pro-Palestine protest in Germany, a protestor challenges a riot cop to take him down. The protestor turns the tables on the cop, taking him down and punching him as he lies on the ground

The French PM announced “localised” curfews in big cities, some places in Paris and Lyon, and in Marseille groupings are forbidden. Le Monde (French) live newsfeed with no paywall, Regular Le Monde article with no paywall

Additionally, Mélenchon said that the PM suggested using Article 16 of the Constitution, which allows for the suspending of all constitutional freedoms and parliamentary activity, and granting emergency powers to the president and government. This has only been used once since the current Constitution was promulgated, during the Algerian war of independence when fascist generals tried to assassinate de Gaulle because he finally recognised he couldn’t stop independence. I don’t think a PM has ever openly mentioned Article 16 in recent memory, but I may be wrong on that (also, the PM can’t proclaim emergency powers, only the president can, but since Macron fucked off to the Middle East the PM is basically speaking for him now, even more than he usually is). Regardless, this is still serious stuff that the guy speaking for Macron is putting emergency powers on the table.

Edit: I put a Nitter link now Edit edit: changed “mentioned” to “suggested” for clarity