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For decades, progressives have attempted to use climate change to justify liberal policy changes. But their latest attempt a new proposal called the Great Reset is the most ambitious and radical plan the world has seen in more than a generation.

At a virtual meeting earlier in June hosted by the World Economic Forum, some of the planets most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists announced a proposal to reset the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed, wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article published on WEFs website. In short, we need a Great Reset of capitalism.

Schwab also said that all aspects of our societies and economies must be revamped, from education to social contracts and working conditions.

Joining Schwab at the WEF event was Prince Charles, one of the primary proponents of the Great Reset; Gina Gopinath, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; Antnio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; and CEOs and presidents of major international corporations, such as Microsoft and BP.

Activists from groups such as Greenpeace International and a variety of academics also attended the event or have expressed their support for the Great Reset.

Although many details about the Great Reset wont be rolled out until the World Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersOvernight Defense: Appeals court rules using Pentagon funding for border wall illegal | Esper visits NATO after Trump announces Germany drawdown | Russian intel unit reportedly offered bounties for killing coalition troops in Afghanistan Former Sanders aide slams new rollback of banking rules Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' MORE (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNetanyahu still has time to change his mind on annexation Nina Turner says progressive Democrats who won primaries need to 'keep up the pressure' Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy MORE (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans.

We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment, said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow.But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies.

One of the main themes of the June meeting was that the coronavirus pandemic has created an important opportunity for many of the World Economic Forums members to enact their radical transformation of capitalism, which they acknowledged would likely not have been made possible without the pandemic.

We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change, said Prince Charles at the meeting, adding later, It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.

You might be wondering how these leaders plan to convince the world to completely alter its economy over the long run, since the COVID-19 pandemic most assuredly wont remain a crisis forever. The answer is that theyve already identified another crisis that will require expansive government intervention: Climate change.

The threat of climate change has been more gradual [than COVID-19]but its devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its ever greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of Covid-19, Prince Charles said.

Of course, these government officials, activists and influencers cant impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will throughout 2021 demand changes in line with the Great Reset.

According to the World Economic Forum, its 2021 Davos summit will include thousands of members of the Global Shapers Community, youth activists located in 400 cities across the planet.

The Global Shapers program was involved in the widespread climate strikes of 2019, and more than 1,300 have already been trained by the Climate Reality Project, the highly influential, well-funded climate activist organization run by former Vice President Al GoreAlbert (Al) Arnold GoreIntroducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy The 'blue wall' is reforming in the Rust Belt CNN coronavirus townhall to featurescience author David Quammen,'Empire' actress Taraji Henson MORE, who serves on the World Economic Forums Board of Trustees.

For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. Our current crony capitalist system has many flaws, to be sure, but granting more power to the government agents who created that crony system and eroding property rights is not the best way forward. America is the worlds most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Great Reset supporters loathe, not in spite of them.

Making matters worse, the left has already proven throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that it can radically transform political realities in the midst of a crisis, so its not hard to see how the Great Reset could eventually come to fruition.

Can you imagine George W. Bush or Bill ClintonWilliam (Bill) Jefferson ClintonWhy Joe Biden should pledge to serve just one term Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy A new age of lies? MORE printing trillions of dollars and mailing it to millions of people who didnt lose their jobs? This would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. Today,this policygarners bipartisan support.

Prince Charles was right: The present pandemic is a golden opportunity for radical change. And if Al Gore, Prince Charles and the rest of the World Economic Forum can convince enough people that attempting to stop climate change is also worth dramatically pushing humanity toward greater government control, then radical and catastrophic change is exactly what were going to get.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org)is the editorial director of the Heartland Institute. Follow him on Twitter@JustinTHaskins.

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Introducing the 'Great Reset,' world leaders' radical plan to transform the economy | TheHill - The Hill

25 June 2020

One month after the killing of George Floyd, the mass multi-racial demonstrations against police violence are in danger of being hijacked and misdirected by reactionary political forces who are attempting to promote racial divisions, sabotage the unity of working people and youth, and undermine the development of the class struggle against capitalism. This campaign is now concentrated on desecrating and destroying the statues of figures who led the American Revolution and the Civil War.

It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the monstrous attacks on memorials that honor the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the United States greatest president, who led the country during the Second American Revolution that destroyed the Slave Power and emancipated millions of enslaved African Americans.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, less than a week after the surrender of the main Confederate army, which brought the four-year Civil War to an end, Lincoln was shot in the head by the pro-slavery actor John Wilkes Booth. Nine hours later, at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, Lincoln died of the wound inflicted by the assassin. Standing beside Lincolns death bed, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously declared: Now he belongs to the ages.

Lincolns martyrdom produced an outpouring of grief throughout the United States and the world. The working class recognized that it had lost a great champion of democracy and human equality. Karl Marx, writing on behalf of the International Working Mens Association, wrote in the days after Lincolns assassination that he was one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.

Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated, escape history. Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. In the course of the brutal struggle, Lincoln gave expression to the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a new birth of freedom.

Every period of political upsurge in the United States has drawn inspiration from Lincolns life. Since its opening in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC has been the site of some of the most important moments in the struggle against racial oppression and for equality. In 1939, when Hitlers Nazis were on the march in Europe and fascism had many sympathizers among the American ruling elite, the famous African American contralto Marian Anderson was denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall. So instead she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of 75,000.

In 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the same location as he delivered his I Have a Dream speech, calling for equality and racial integration before a crowd of 250,000. Later in that decade, tens of thousands of youth protesting the Vietnam War assembled at the monument.

It is not coincidental that the working-class upsurge of the 1930s was associated with many great artistic depictions of Lincoln, including the films Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). Aaron Coplands beloved orchestral-narrative masterpiece, Lincoln Portrait (1942), concludes with the declaration that the sixteenth president of the United States is ever-lasting in the memory of his countrymen.

But now, 155 years after the tragedy at Fords Theater, Lincoln is the subject of a second assassination. This one must not succeed.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DCs nonvoting delegate to Congress, said she will introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from the Lincoln Park in Washington, DC. The race-fixated protesters have declared their intention to tear down the monument, which was paid for by former slaves and movingly dedicated by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1876.

The designers of the Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park in DC didnt take into account the views of African Americans, Norton stated in a Tweet. Democrats assert that the statue demeans the black community because it depicts Lincoln freeing a slave crouched in a runners pose, which the sculptor intended to symbolize the liberation of the Civil War.

Nortons reactionary effort is being supported by Democratic Party officials in Boston, who will hold hearings in the coming weeks to entertain demands for the removal of a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in that city.

Lincoln is not the only leader of the anti-Confederate forces to be targeted. In San Francisco last week, a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the great general of the victorious Union army and later president of the United States, was torn down.

An even filthier example of the racialist campaign is the desecration of the Boston monument honoring the legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The 54th Massachusetts, led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War. Protesters object to the fact that the 54th, famously depicted in the film Glory (1989), was commanded by a white officer, Shaw. Holland Cotter, the New York Times co-chief art critic, slandered the monument as a white supremacist visual for its depiction of Shaw leading his African American battalion.

Another Union monument, a statue of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg (18291863), was pulled down Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin. The statue was beheaded before being thrown into a nearby lake.

A Norwegian immigrant, Heg led the 15th Wisconsin regiment, known as the Scandinavian Regiment, against the Confederacy. Prior to the war, Heg, a member of the Free Soil Party, fiercely opposed slavery and headed an anti-slave catcher militia in Wisconsin. He was killed at the age of 33 at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.

The Socialist Equality Party rejects all the lame liberal excuses and justifications that are offered to legitimize the desecration of these memorials. Actions, whatever the motivations ascribed to them, have objective significance and very real political consequences.

The assault on Lincoln monuments and other memorials honoring the leaders of the American Revolution and Civil War are political provocations aimed at whipping up racial animosities. Such provocations are well-known forms of communalist politics, which resemble the burning down of Muslim mosques by Hindu fanatics or Hindu temples by Muslim fanatics. Here in the United States, the statues are being attacked as examples of white rule.

The attacks on the statues are the outcome of a campaign by the two capitalist parties and various reactionary elements in the upper-middle class to racialize and communalize American politics. The growing intensity of this campaign is a response to the upsurge of working-class militancy, which is seen as a threat to capitalism. Far from welcoming the interracial unity displayed in the demonstrations against police brutality, the ruling elites and most affluent sections of the middle class are terrified by its political implications.

In the promotion of racial politics, there is a division of labor between the Democratic and Republican parties. Trump and the Republicans pitch their appeal to the most politically disoriented elements in American society, manipulating their economic insecurities in a manner intended to incite racial antagonism and deflect social anger away from the capitalist system.

The Democratic Party employs another variant of communalist politics, evaluating and explaining all social problems and conflicts in racial terms. Whatever the particular issue may bepoverty, police brutality, unemployment, low wages, deaths caused by the pandemicit is almost exclusively defined in racial terms. In this racialized fantasy world, whites are endowed with an innate privilege that exempts them from all hardship.

This grotesque distortion of present-day reality requires a no less grotesque distortion of the past. For contemporary America to be portrayed as a land of relentless racial warfare, it is necessary to create a historical narrative in the same terms. In place of the class struggle, the entire history of the United States is presented as the story of perpetual racial conflict.

Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, efforts to create racial foundations for contemporary communalist politics were well underway. The New York Times, the principal voice of corporate and financial patrons of the Democratic Party, concocted the insidious 1619 Project, the central purpose of which was to promote a racial narrative. The main argument of this project, which was unveiled in August 2019, was that the American Revolution was undertaken to protect North American slavery and that the Civil War, led by the racist Abraham Lincoln, had nothing to do with the ending of slavery. The slaves, so the new story went, liberated themselves.

The purpose of lies about history, as Trotsky explained, is to conceal real social contradictions. In this case, the contradictions are those embedded in the staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. These contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the methods of class struggle, in which the working class fights consciously to put an end to capitalism and replaces it with socialism. Efforts to divert and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism.

Through the promotion of a racial version of communalism, all factions of the ruling class seek to divide the working class so as to better exploit it and ward off the threat of revolution. It is no coincidence that when American society is straining under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 120,000 people and sparked an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, the Democrats are ever-more ferociously seeking to make race the fundamental issue.

The alternative to the politics of racial communalism is the socialist politics of working-class unity. This is the program of the Socialist Equality Party, and those who agree with this perspective should join our party.

Niles Niemuth and David North

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Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln - World Socialist Web Site

Weve become so familiar with the idea that during the 2016 election thousands of Russian trollswith very poor grammarpretended to be Republican voters in Tennessee, Black activists in Michigan, and Trump supporters in Palm Beach that we think of disinformation as a foreign problem. I have news for you: the majority of disinformation is domestic, most of it is made right here in the USA. Focusing on Vladimir Putins troll army is something of a distraction from the seeming endless supply of homegrown conspiracy theories, fake local news sites, alt-right message boards, clickbait, and Donald Trumps daily Twitter megaphone of rumor, misinformation and outright lies.

Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals. A 2018 study by Oxford University researchers divided Twitter users into 10 different groups, including Democrats, progressives, traditional Republicans, and Trump supporters. The Trump supporters, they found, shared more junk news than all the other groups combined. As Steve Bannon so eloquently put it, Flood the zone with shit, and Trump supporters, alt-right groups, 4chan, Gab, and sites like Infowars and Breitbart do just that, putting out a tidal wave of junk news to overwhelm the traditional stuff. Then, in the disinformation ecosystem, it is picked up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitterand by your Uncle Milton who informs you that George Soros secretly hatched COVID-19. A Knight Foundation study revealed that 65% of junk news and conspiracy theories on Twitter traced back to the 10 largest disinformation websites, which included Infowars. The even darker side of Trumps attack on traditional media is that he empowers the 80% of Republicans who do not trust mass media outlets to become vectors of unchecked and unsourced information. Foreign disinformation is a distraction, New York University scholar Paul Barrett writes in his recent study, Tackling Domestic Disinformation. He urges the platform companies to take down provably false information, wherever it comes from

Ive been thinking and writing about disinformation for a while now, but the other day on Twitter, someone stumped me with the following question: Do you think the ratio of disinformation to true information is different now than at other times in human history? Our instinctive reaction is, Hell, yeah, of course it is, were overwhelmed with disinformation. But the answer is not so simple. First, disinformation has been around for as long as weve had information. Second, its awfully hard to measure the supply, scale, and scope of disinformation. Its also not always easy to spot. Plus, nobody that I know of really quantifies it.

Lets first answer the easier denominator question: has the supply of information increased? It has. In 2010, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said we create as much information every two daysabout five exabytesas all the information created from the dawn of civilization until 2003. Various scholars have disputed this, but even if its every month rather than every two days, the scale is mind boggling. Just one individual example: more than 500 hours of video are loaded to YouTube every minute. So, even if the ratio of disinformation to true information has remained constant (thats the numerator), theres a heckuva lot more disinformation in absolute terms than ever before.

The scale of disinformation is mind-boggling. Facebook announced that it had removed more than three billion fake accounts in 2019yes, thats billion with a b. One study suggested that 15% of Twitters 330 million monthly users are bots. Bots have a massive multiplier effect on disinformation because they are far more prolific than humans, tweeting hundreds of times a day. Some studies estimate that more than 60% of Trumps 80+ million followers are bots.

But the reason it seems like theres a tsunami of disinformation is not because of how much there is, but how available it is. Whats new is the ease of access, which can make it seem more abundant. Once upon a time you had to work hard to discover conspiracy theoriesfind and check out obscure books from the library, look up old newspaper clips on microfiche. Today, conspiracy theories and disinformation are an instant Google search awayor, disinformation finds you, through microtargeting or recommendation engines or your third cousin on Facebook. And, of course, if you search for disinformation or conspiracy theories on Google or read them on Facebook, you can be sure you will get a lot more of them from those same platforms.

Disinformation is also opportunistic. Topics in the news are lightning rods for disinformation. Illness and disease are laboratories for conspiracy theories. The World Health Organization has declared there is a infodemic about COVID-19, thats an epidemic of disinformation. And when the president of the United States is a peddler of disinformation, it increases exponentially. And now new state actors are getting in on the act. China has now entered the disinformation game in a big way, aggressively seeking to fix blame for the epidemic on the U.S. and it has been regularly highlighting American missteps in coping with the virus. This has been complemented by domestic actors promoting quack cures, fake medicines, and COVID-related investments.

Another traditional vector of disinformation is division and protest. The George Floyd demonstrations have occasioned another epidemic of disinformation. White extremist groups are creating disinformation around the protests, and what they are calling professional protesters and antifa terrorists. This disinformation is once again aided and abetted by the president of the United States, who is the biggest promoter of the idea of antifa terrorists. Another nefarious actor, QAnon has tweeted that the protests are the work of George Soros. In many ways, this wave of disinformation around the protests is a continuation of what the Russians did in 2016 when, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Internet Research Agency created a number of false sites that pretended to be related to Black Lives MatterBlack Matters, Blactivist and Black Guns Matter. Their goal was to increase division and decrease African-American voter turnout.

Over the last few years, according to McKay Coppins in the Atlantic, right-wing activists have been trying to hijack the credibility of local news outlets. They have created dozens of websites with credible-sounding names like The Kalamazoo Times and the Arizona Monitor to make people think they are genuine local news organizations. But they have no editors or reporters or even an address, and are organs of Republican lobbying efforts and conservative extremists. This was a technique used by the Russians in 2016 which has now become a Made-in-the-USA phenomenon.

The Super Bowl of disinformation will undoubtedly be the 2020 election. All of the malign actors, the Russians, white extremists, China and Iran will get in on the game. Whats new this time are the potential use of deep fakes; the use or renting of actual American identities; coordinated bot attacks; phony local-news sites; anonymous mass texting; the professionalization of disinformation, with firms selling such services. The Trump campaign is likely to use many of these techniques, including the weaponization of micro-targeting, as pioneered by Cambridge Analytica in 2016. They gave some of it a trial run during impeachment, where the Trump campaign ran more than 10,000 different ads about impeachment on Facebook and on the web. The tactics can be used all across the ideological spectrum: Twitter suspended 70 bot-like accounts created by Michael Bloombergs short-lived campaign.

Disinformation created by American fringe groupswhite nationalists, hate groups, antigovernment movements, left-wing extremistsis growing. These groups have a big advantage over foreign groupsthey have built-in domestic audiences of their fellow travelers, plus a better understanding of colloquial English and American pop culture. Disinformationists supporting presidential candidates are hard at work. We tend to under-estimate the supply of domestic disinformation because it has always been part of our information ecosystem. Its hidden in plain sight.

So, yes, the supply of disinformation is growing, but thats in part because the demand is also growing. The tendency to see conspiracy theories is in our genes. The ontological problem of disinformation is that it gets in the way of us seeing reality for what it is. Of course, no human being sees reality exactly the way it iswe all have prejudices and biases. But disinformation exaggerates those prejudices and biases and accentuates our divides. The truth is, disinformation doesnt create divides between people, it widens them. One reason its easy to amplify division is that we have so much of it. Thats the ultimate goal of the disinformationistsnot so much that we believe them, but that we question those things that are demonstrably true.

Adapted from a new preface to the paperback edition of Richard Stengels Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It

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Contact us at editors@time.com.

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Domestic Disinformation is a Greater Menace than Foreign Disinformation - TIME

Two hours later, Cafferty got a call from his supervisor, who told him that somebody had seen Cafferty making a white-supremacist hand gesture, and had posted photographic evidence on Twitter. (Likely unbeknownst to most Americans, the alt-right has appropriated a version of the okay symbol for their own purposes because it looks like the initials for white power; this is the symbol the man accused Cafferty of making when his hand was dangling out of his truck.) Dozens of people were now calling the company to demand Caffertys dismissal.

By the end of the call, Cafferty had been suspended without pay. By the end of the day, his colleagues had come by his house to pick up the company truck. By the following Monday, he was out of a job.

Cafferty is a big, calm, muscular man in his 40s who was born and raised in a diverse working-class community on the south side of San Diego. On his fathers side, he has both Irish and Mexican ancestors. His mother is Latina. If I was a white supremacist, he told me, I would literally have to hate 75 percent of myself.

After finishing high school, Cafferty bounced from one physically demanding and poorly paid job to another. For most of his life, he had trouble making ends meet. But his new job was set to change all that. I was very proud of my position, Cafferty told me. It was the first time in my life where I wasnt living check to check.

Read: Brands have nothing real to say about racism

When Cafferty was wrongly accused of being a white supremacist, he fought hard to keep his job. He said he explained to the people carrying out the investigationall of them were whitethat he had no earthly idea some racists had tried to appropriate the okay sign for their sinister purposes. He told them he simply wasnt interested in politics; as far as he remembered, he had not voted in a single election. Eventually, he told me, I got so desperate, I was showing them the color of my skin. I was saying, Look at me. Look at the color of my skin.

It was all to no avail. SDG&E, Cafferty told me, never presented him with any evidence that he held racist beliefs or knew about the meaning of his gesture. Yet he was terminated.

The loss of his job has left Cafferty shaken. A few days ago, he spoke with a mental-health counselor for the first time in his life. A man can learn from making a mistake, he told me. But what am I supposed to learn from this? Its like I was struck by lightning.

After Cafferty told his side of the story, the initial social-media vilification he had experienced gave way to a kind of embarrassed silence. The man who had posted a picture of the encounter on Twitter deleted his account and admitted to Priya Sridhar, a local news reporter, that he may have gotten spun up about the interaction and misinterpreted it. Repeatedly asked whether they had any evidence that Cafferty was a white supremacist, had known the meaning of the inverted okay symbol, or had previously been reprimanded for his performance, SDG&E refused to answer. Nor did the company respond to my request for confirmation that the team that had investigated Cafferty was all white.

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Stop Firing the Innocent - The Atlantic

Wikimedia DC Training

The internet has produced some of the worst garbage of the 21st century. (See: 4chan, the alt-right, the Slender Man stabbing, and, of course, LinkedIn, the undisputed worst website.) But its had some wins, too! Though its easy to take Wikipedia for granted at this point, the online encyclopedia is a genuinely incredible resource. Take a minute to really appreciate it: a crowdsourced catalogue of knowledge on nearly everything ever, presented to all for free. As a repository of human learning, it might rival the historical libraries of Baghdad and Alexandria, but its significantly less vulnerable to getting torched. A hive-mind of volunteers across the globe collaborates with more than 300 staff and contractors to make Wikipedia possible. If youve ever wanted to be a part of the Wiki project, but didnt know where to start, nows your chance to learn the basics courtesy of Wikimedia, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia. Wikimedias D.C. chapter is hosting a free lesson on the fundamentals of editing Wikipedia via Zoom. After the training, you'll be ready to apply your expertise and become a small part of one of the best parts of the internet. The event begins June 30 at 10 a.m. Registration is available at eventbrite.com. Free. Will Lennon

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City Lights: Learn to Edit Wikipedia - Washington City Paper