Reading List: January 9, 2017

Two weeks until inauguration.

Here’s a guide to fighting back called Indivisible. It’s the product of former Congressional staffers and purports to have the ways to resist regressive political change.

The following chapters offer a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents. The guide is intended to be equally useful for stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve.

We believe that the next four years depend on Americans across the country standing indivisible against the Trump agenda. We believe that buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions will only further empower Trump to victimize us and our neighbors. We hope that this guide will provide those who share that belief useful tools to make Congress listen.

Yet for all the cheering on for the Democrats, it’s useful to remember that that party is also dangerous, murderous, and uninterested in the worries or lives of the little people. To wit, The Council on Foreign Relations published the list of bombs dropped by outgoing President Barack Obama in 2016, a staggering 26,171. The rot goes deep.

In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries. This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions. In 2016, the United States dropped 3,027 more bombs — and in one more country, Libya — than in 2015.

Finally, a remix of Adam Curtis’ appearance on Chapo Trap House from December. Change will require sacrifice, Curtis said at the time, and those of us who are most comfortable have the most to lose. But it may be necessary to save the world.