Ray Torres is the director of the short film

Beyond Credit Unions

The film is available for groups to show. Contact Ray at 215 753 9022

Flyer

Also: Press Release

I kinda like this as an anthem for the left these days.

Brief history of PRAWN

• Network groups, organizations, and individuals to stop the repression caused by "never ending wars" at home and abroad, by the US corporate military state
• Support organizations having common ground
• Educate and activate the general public

• East Timor & Indonesia Networks (ETAN)
  
• Delco Waging Peace
  
• Granny Peace Brigade - Philadelphia
• Otherjones - A blog by Deena Stryker
  
• Media Tank  
• Philly Against War
• Northeast Philly for Peace & Justice
  
• Philadelphia Veterans For Peace
• Wounds of War
• Northwest Greens
• Progressive Democracy of South Jersey (PDSJ)
• UFPJ-Delaware Valley Network
• UPenn - FASWI
• Delaware Valley Veterans for America

National Organizations

• United For Peace & Justice (UFPJ)
• World Can't Wait
• ACLU's Blog of Rights

 Events

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Midsection archive

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Anniversary Bombing of Nagasaki

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Moms for Liberty counter-demo

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Rally to call for end of F-35

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Rally to observe 1st Annivesary of invasion of Ukraine

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Rally to observe 2nd Anniversary of Nuclear Ban Treaty

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2nd Anniversary of attack on Capitol

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Pre-Election round-up

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AFL-CIO parade & Housing rally

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Anti-Nuclear War 16Jul

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Pro-Choice march 24Jun2022

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Poor People's Campaign Washington DC

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March For Our Lives gun safety demo

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Pro-Choice Rally by Democrats

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Poor People's March

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Supporting Ukraine

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Pro-Ukrainian Rally

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No War with Russia Rally

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Poor People's Campaign

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Pro-Palestinian Demonstration

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March for Palestinians

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Protesting Israel's attack on Palestine

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Info, articles, etc.

Reporter confirms Ukrainian positions on East side of Dnipro River, which indicates a successful landing by Ukrainians.  (9 Aug 2023)

“Another missile attack by russian terrorists on the civil infrastructure of Zaporizhzhia. A church, shops, and a high-rise apartment building were destroyed.”

Germans come through with more Patriot missile launching stations.
Zagorsky optics mechanics factory near Moscow blows up.
A casualty of the war, Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina would read stories to children. “when the city was half empty and often shelled. Kids are so attentive to her.. listen to her voice”
New demining vehicle by Daewoo Motors of South Korea.

A deep dive into Ukraine’s Marine brigades. As they don’t have landing capability, they’re focusing on working as light infantry.

In apartheid South Africa “Black students received no financial aid and could not get loans for education from banks.” In Israel today “Extremist Bezalel Smotrich, minister of finance, has frozen $680 million in funding earmarked for the development of largely Palestinian East Jerusalem.” A portion of that money was intended to go to Palestinian education.

Aww! A Ukrainian soldier whose call sign was “Lightning” is no more. She will be mourned.
Ukrainians thought the Druzhba Hotel was safe from Russia attack. A Russian missile killed at least seven people.
So the German Chancellor said he wouldn’t send any Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine until Biden also sent M1 Abrams tanks. Now he appears to be trying the same thing, Germany won’t send Taurus missiles until Biden sends ATACMS missiles.
US considers Ukraine breaking through Russian layers of defense to be unlikely. Ukrainians say they’re preparing the battlefield by cutting off supply lines and by hitting artillery pieces. The conditions Ukrainians are fighting under are ones that the US would never accept.
English voting systems under cyber-attack.

75% of Americans say it's important to the United States that Ukraine wins the war against Russian aggression

Woo-hoo! The plan to keep Ohio citizens from winning on an abortion bill in November has failed spectacularly! This is good for other measures activists want to pass.

One criticism that cannot be made of Republicans is that they are disunited and squabbling (That's a frequently accurate description of Democrats). They may, like Representative Nancy Mace, tell people in private conversation that they're pro-choice, but when the rubber hits the road, will vote along with the party.

School officials in Hillsborough County, Florida looked at the DeSantis guidelines and looked at Shakespeare readings and decided they had to provide edited excerpts of the Bard. ‘Cause hey, can’t be too careful now!

An advocate for human rights is honored with her struggle being depicted in a children’s book. She had pressed for Saudi women to be able to drive cars and her movements are restricted to this day.

Interesting claim. Lawyer John Eastman is asking that his disbarment be delayed as he might get busted for his January 6^th activities.

Russia briefly turned its attention to a military target, now it’s attacked residential buildings and yet another popular pizza shop!
August 7^th is the 15^th anniversary of Russia’s aggression towards Georgia. Zelenskyy mourns that the world didn’t forcefully respond back in 2008.
Ka-52 helicopter taken down! Cost is ₽840 million rubles or $10 million USD.
German Chancellor is under pressure to provide cruise missiles to Ukraine. US is still putzing about with ATACMS.
Story of Daniel, a 19-year old soldier killed eight years ago.

The combination of advanced age and Trump's opposition to him are taking a real toll on Senate Minority Leader McConnell's popularity.

Ukraine is slowly throttling supplies coming from Russia to the front. I agree with the blogger. It's far better to enter the 2024 election with Ukraine being a solved problem than to have Trump repeating 1930s isolationist talking points.

Interesting interpretation of what the movie “Barbie” is all about.

This morning, the Ukrainian coat of arms was installed on the Motherland monument’s shield in Kyiv.

Happy Ukrainian Air Force Day!

In this week alone, Russian terrorists have already used 65 different missiles and 178 attack drones against us, including 87 ‘Shaheds’. We managed to shoot down a significant number of them.

A Ukrainian soldier recalls her captivity after being captured at Mariupol.

I’ve been under the impression that US slavery was “chattel” slavery, meaning slaves were obtained for the specific purpose of having them work in the fields and that, therefore, it was much worse than anything that happened before. This piece takes issue with that presumption.

A Trump lawyer tries to make it sound as though Trump and Pence were merely having a calm, friendly, abstract discussion about whether Pence could overturn the election results. But instead, Trump tweeted that: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done…” This occurred in the thick of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol!

Trump sends out a tweet that Jack Smith’s team interprets as a threat. The court is notified.

Trump’s lawyers felt Monday was too soon to respond to the judge’s order and asked to respond on the 10^th. The judge said “No” and repeated that their response was due on the 7^th.

Fox News presents their five most desperate legal theories on Trump’s indictment.
Yeah, Zelenskyy is talking with a completely irrelevant political figure, Chris Christie.
Fox News is freaking out about Bidens Dark Brandon commercial.
Voyager 2 had a communications pause.

Update (6 Aug): Problem with Voyager 2 was quickly fixed. After 45 years of travel, Voyager 2 is roughly 18½ hours away at light speed.

42 countries are represented at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to try and figure out a good peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.
No safe waters for Russian ships. Officially, all Russian ships will be at risk from August 23^rd on.
Ukraine will obey International Humanitarian Law. Beyond that, anything goes. Oil tankers are definitely targets as they’re useful to the war.
Russian oil tanker hit within sight of Kerch Strait. The tanker has regularly gone to Syria.
A cartoon that’s, er, not exactly helpful.

In a really gross apples-to-oranges comparison, a Fox News show compares the cases of Alexei Navalny, an opponent of Putin, who's just been sentenced by an obviously kangaroo court, to Trump, who is free to speak and defend himself against legal charges.

By hitting a Russian oil tanker within sight of shore in the Kerch Strait, Ukraine fights back against Russia's cancellation of the grain deal by showing that no Russian commercial ship is safe. Also, comments on the diplomacy summit with all of the BRICS nations except Russia.

Yeah, absolutely. "Free Speech" should definitely be placed in scare quotes if "Lies" are going to be scare-quoted. NY Times is utterly useless for politics, but when I was reading a piece on astronomy, I found my usual critical reading skepticism for them very much relaxed.

US media seems blind to differences between US and Ukrainian armed forces.
US really should have started training and equipping Ukrainians to use F-16 jets and M-1 Abrams tanks as soon as it was clear that Ukraine would survive the Russian assault and be able to hit back.

“Ukrainians attacked the Russian naval base in Novorossiysk.” Large landing ship (little over 1000 meters long) also attacked by sea drone. Oil tanker also hit.
“Russia has doubled its 2023 defence spending target to more than $100 billion – a third of all public expenditure”
Ukraine trying tactics that work to reduce casualties, but they take a long time. Russian artillery being systematically eroded.
Are Ukrainian drones costing civilians their lives? Yes, unfortunately. There’s no way to guarantee that civilians won’t be hit. They are covered under Just War theory.

I support Nina Jankowicz in her fight against Fox News. It is very important for citizens to have reliable news and she was working on making our news more honest. Many people were quite annoyed during the Wagner Group's coming to within less than 200 km of Moscow because it really would have helped for people who were unfamiliar with the issue and the journalistic sources to have been able to know who could be a trustworthy source of news. But because Elon Musk completely messed up the blue check-mark system, no one knew what sources were trustworthy. Kudos to Jankowicz!

Back during the Vietnam War, China referred to the US as a "paper tiger," an awesome foe in theory, but one that couldn't exert its will on the battlefield. Seems that Trump has pretty much the same problem. He keeps calling for mass protests that never seem to happen.

From the piece: 

Since the 1860s, the scientific community has understood that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would warm the climate. And as long ago as 1938, the burning of fossil fuels was linked to the observed rise in both carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.

The transcript of the Devon Archer testimony has been released. It’s not at all what Republicans were hoping for.

Representative Comer has just been overseeing dud after dud after dud. His latest is what was supposed to be "bombshell testimony," but that was, again, a dud.

Yeah (Sigh!) Sure would be nice if this were to take place!

The 18th-century St. Catherine's Cathedral was damaged and was then “double-tapped,” hit with another missile while rescuers were trying to put out fires. Several other civilian targets hit.
Ukrainian air defense hits 15 out of 15 Shahed drones!

Russian local authorities have begun distributing machine guns to civilian forces in the south-west of the country…

Interesting proposal. Of course, Russia has to start building such an anti-Western coalition from scratch because generally, nobody likes them and no one is on their side.

Republicans appear to be convinced that only “banana republics” prosecute former government officials for misconduct. Actually, that happens all the time in advanced democracies!

Fox News, host Harris Faulkner gave Governor DeSantis an opportunity to explain the statement made in the proposed Florida instructional guidelines, that slaves somehow benefited from their experience.

DeSantis said of the guidelines "This was done by Black history scholars…” but the two identified authors, William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, were identified as 

Allen, a political scientist, and Presley Rice, an author who co-founded a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about the roles African Americans have played in the nation's history.

So it’s far from clear how much actual scholarship went into the guidelines.

Very interesting statement from piece: 

Military leaders subsequently testified that they hesitated to respond to the violence on January 6 largely because they were afraid of how Trump and those around him might use the military, pursuant to the Insurrection Act.

Another grain elevator in Odesa hit.
More and more nations are recognizing that the Holodomor (starvation of Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin) was genocide.
Russia offers to take its nuclear weapons out of Belarus if the US reciprocates by taking its nuclear weapons out of Turkey and Western Europe.
F-16 training program not going well.
Three foreign civilian ships make it through to Ukraine.

Many items that Palestinians have been calling attention to for years, such as the use of "skunkwater" on protesters (a really foul-smelling concoction that's hard to wash off) are all of the sudden issues for supporters of Israel because they're being used on Israelis, not just on Palestinians.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League takes issue with the post-mortem lionizing of Sinead O’Connor, who took issue with widespread pedophilia in Roman Catholicism a full decade before it became generally known that the church had a real problem there. Donohue claims that homosexuality was a contributing factor. That seems pretty doubtful. Pedophilia is a form of rape in that an adult takes advantage of someone who can’t really respond effectively. Homosexuality takes place as a result of consensual agreement between adults.

Huh. So for Senator Tuberville to have been blockading military promotions for the last several months may have had something to do with Alabama not getting the plum base that he was looking forward to. Biden is, of course, too classy to say “Neener, neener!” to Tuberville, but that would be fun for Biden to point out the obvious lesson to him.

Senator Tuberville: "As soon as Joe Biden took office, he paused movement on that decision and inserted politics..." Tuberville's blockade on military promotions has been done for absolutely nothing but politics!

US has difficulty delivering more 155 mm shells.
Drones hit both Ukrainian and Russia cities.
Ukrainians very aware of US political calendar. They know September brings political scrutiny.
Well-known futsal (soccer) player perishes.
Belorussian helicopters violate Polish air space.
Ukrainian still trying to break free of Soviet war doctrines.

Woo hoo! Trump’s 3^rd indictment drops! 

Details of the charges. This is the big, really important one. "Trump Indicted On Efforts To Overturn 2020 Election"

The trial date for the "effort to overturn the election" indictment is March 4th,  Hush money payment to Stormy Daniels is March 25th. Mar-a-Lago classified documents is May 20th, which means the "overthrowing the government" charge is considered the really serious one.

Fox News guy feels that if the case contains neither sex nor cash bribes, the public will tune it out.

So how do the Russians feel about Trump's 3rd indictment? Here's an interesting sentence: 

“He didn’t throw [Hillary] Clinton in prison, he did not deal with the rest of them and now this clan is eating him alive!”

Very short, but highly interesting history on public pools.
Cool testimony on UFOs, but no physical evidence available to corroborate anything.

Prigozhin’s Wagner Group launched a small war against Moscow near the end of laast month. Details of how Putin reacted.
Interesting tweet on NATO, Russia and their respective alliances.

Russians are really escalating their propaganda, throwing QAnon-style accusations against the West and telling their own troops that they are making a holy sacrifice of themselves to serve God.

Apartment and school buildings hit by shells and missiles.
Pictures of “Chongar railway bridge, Russian Occupied Crimea.” This critically affects Russian logistics.
Russian psyops message promises a march onto Berlin if Russians and Ukrainians can work together.
WaPo suggests that if only tanks had arrived from the West on time, Russian defenses could not have been built up so much.

July

"Biden opts to keep Space Command in Colorado, reversing Trump’s decision to move it to Alabama"
Good! A clear $%#@ you to Senator Tuberville, but also a good decision for the US military.

The doll Barbie has been criticized over the decades as being an impossible ideal for mere humans to try and live up to. The movie does a good job in showing Barbie greeting a young girl who used to be very attached to her and being devastated that the girl doesn't have any use for her anymore. And yeah, for Barbie to meet a really old person is something she never does as a doll.

"‘Trump Bucks’ promise wealth for MAGA loyalty. Some lose thousands."
Saw a piece a while ago where Trump supporters were annoyed that "coastal elites" wouldn't take them seriously and were not at all interested in what they thought. Well, this TRB scam is one of the reasons why. These people don't have any way to determine truth from falsehood and so are easy "marks" who will spend lots of money on scams.

The blogger now refers to it as “global heating” because “warming” just isn’t accurate any more. An early argument for nuclear power was that it would be “too cheap to meter.” Well, 

Because of extensive use by Australians of roof-top solar along with utility-scale solar, the price of electricity fell below zero 20% of the time in 2022, compared to 1% of the time in the Netherlands and Germany.

Museum opened up to commemorate the Azovstal battle.
Drone attack hits Moscow, “sensitive documents of Russian Ministry of Digital Transformation, were blown onto the street…”
Zelenskyy visits wounded soldiers.
Russia hits Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles.
Olga Kharlan leading her fencing team to victory!
Blogger considers the central problem of Israel. How can it help but to alienate its minorities?

Representative “Greene interrupted Garcia to make a point of order and asked that members ‘be reminded of the rules of decorum.’” This earned her mockery and disrespect as Representative Garcia promptly brought up the Hunter Biden “d--- pic” that she showed just last week (In the picture, Hunter was clearly naked and clearly engaged in a sexual act, though no actual organs were visible).

Houston, Texas, is descending further and further into Medieval tyranny and ignorance.

Euronews reports corruption is indeed a problem in Ukraine, but that Ukraine is fully aware that having corruption and joining the EU are contradictory, so Ukraine is working hard to eliminate corruption.

It’s Special Operations Forces Day!
Russian ammo dumps and infrastructure in Crimea hit.
Can’t depend on Elon Musk to keep Starlink up and running.
Aerial reconnaissance
Sea drones are said to be limiting Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

As many Ukrainians now say, adapting a well-known phrase: next year in Crimea.

Two Ukrainian servicepeople get married, fully aware that their time is short and they need to get back to the front soon.
Saudi Arabia to host Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Putin suggests it’s Ukraine’s fault that peace talks are not underway.

Navajo Nation in Norther Arizona declares an emergency as heat rises from just under 100 degrees up to 110 degrees.

Our blogger looks into why Russians engage in active defense, jumping up and running towards the enemy when just sitting in their trenches and opening fire would serve their purposes much better. Someone traces the problem to “the early Red Army’s greatest theorist and WW1 tactician, Alexei Brusilov” and the misunderstandings of his ideas over a century later.

Oh, that's good. Biden now acknowledges the grand-daughter that he was previously unwilling to concede existed.

Yep! This woman's on some seriously powerful hallucinogens if she thinks Smith and Trump are playing anything like a chess game. Trump can't "throw" anything "back into Smith's face," the law just doesn't work that way.