Flor de la palabra

Jefferson Bethke – Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus

2012-01-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion
What if I told you voting Republican really wasn't His mission?
What if I told you Republican doesn't automatically mean Christian
And just because you call some people blind doesn't automatically give you vision

I mean if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars?
Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor?
Tells single moms God doesn't love them if they've ever had a divorce
But in the Old Testament, God actually calls religious people whores

Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice
Tend to ridicule God's people, they did it to John The Baptist
They can't fix their problems, and so they just mask it
Not realizing religion's like spraying perfume on a casket
See the problem with religion, is it never gets to the core
It's just behavior modification, like a long list of chores
Like let's dress up the outside make look nice and neat
But it's funny that's what they use to do to mummies while the corpse rots underneath

Now I ain't judging, I'm just saying quit putting on a fake look
Cause there's a problem if people only know you're a Christian by your Facebook
I mean in every other aspect of life, you know that logic's unworthy
It's like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey
You see this was me too, but no one seemed to be on to me
Acting like a church kid, while addicted to pornography
See on Sunday I'd go to church, but Saturday getting faded
Acting if I was simply created just to have sex and get wasted
See I spent my whole life building this facade of neatness
But now that I know Jesus, I boast in my weakness

Because if grace is water, then the church should be an ocean
It's not a museum for good people, it's a hospital for the broken
Which means I don't have to hide my failure, I don't have to hide my sin
Because it doesn't depend on me it depends on Him
See because when I was God's enemy and certainly not a fan
He looked down and said I want... that... man
Which is why Jesus hated religion, and for it he called them fools
Don't you see so much better than just following some rules
Now let me clarify, I love the church, I love the Bible, and yes I believe in sin
But if Jesus came to your church would they actually let him in
See remember he was called a glutton, and a drunkard by religious men
But the Son of God never supports self-righteousness not now, not then

Now back to the point, one thing is vital to mention
How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums
See one's the work of God, but one's a man-made invention
See one is the cure, but the other's the infection
See because religion says do, Jesus says done
Religion says slave, Jesus says son
Religion puts you in bondage, while Jesus sets you free
Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see
And that's why religion and Jesus are two different clans

Religion is man searching for God, Christianity is God searching for man
Which is why salvation is freely mine, and forgiveness is my own
Not based on my merits but Jesus's obedience alone
Because he took the crown of thorns, and the blood dripped down his face
He took what we all deserved, I guess that's why you call it grace
And while being murdered he yelled
"Father forgive them they know not what they do."
Because when he was dangling on that cross, he was thinking of you
And he absorbed all of your sin, and buried it in the tomb
Which is why I'm kneeling at the cross, saying come on there's room
So for religion, no I hate it, in fact I literally resent it
Because when Jesus said it is finished, I believe he meant it

Old Man by Niel Young

2012-01-15T09:52:00.000-08:00

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

Twenty four

and there's so much more

Live alone in a paradise

That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,

Give me things

that don't get lost.

Like a coin that won't get tossed

Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life

I'm a lot like you

I need someone to love me

the whole day through

Ah, one look in my eyes

and you can tell that's true.

Lullabies, look in your eyes,

Run around the same old town.

Doesn't mean that much to me

To mean that much to you.

I've been first and last

Look at how the time goes past.

But I'm all alone at last.

Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life

I'm a lot like you

I need someone to love me

the whole day through

Ah, one look in my eyes

and you can tell that's true.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,

I'm a lot like you were.

Clasificaciones de los pendejos

2012-01-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

Bueno, esta palabra es sin duda una de las mas usadas en el español hablado por el mexicano y sin duda en otros países, pero es en México donde esta palabra es usada hasta el cansancio. La palabra pendejo junto con el verbo chingar es lo que le da esa floritura al mexicano y lo hace tan diferente. Si no lo cree, quitemosle a un tepiteño estos dos vocablos y de seguro que se queda mudo!!!

Pendejo Optimista	El que cree que no es pendejo
Pendejo Pesimista	Cree que solo el es pendejo
Pendejo Telescópico	Desde lejos se le nota lo pendejo
Pendejo Fosforescente	Hasta en la obscuridad se le nota lo pendejo
Pendejo Aplicado	El que se preocupa por aprender pendejadas nuevas
Pendejo Esférico	Por el lado que se le vea se nota que es pendejo
Pendejo Laborioso	Todo el ida se la pasa haciendo pendejadas
Pendejo Petulante	Se enorgullece de sus pendejadas.
Pendejo Amigable	El que tiene puros amigos pendejos
Pendejo Enciclopédico	El que sabe un montón de pendejadas
Pendejo Simpático	El que sus pendejadas causan risa
Pendejo Literario	Escribe pendejadas y media
Pendejo Campana	Es tan... tan.... tan... pero tan... pendejo.
Pendejo Creyente	Cree cualquier pendejada
Pendejo Consciente	Sabe que es pendejo
Pendejo Pedigrí	Desciende de pendejos campeones
Pendejo Campeón	Nadie le gana en hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Alegre	Se ríe de cualquier pendejada
Pendejo Introvertido	A nadie le cuenta sus pendejadas
Pendejo Enamorado	Le gusta cualquier pendeja
Pendejo Líder	Le siguen todos los pendejos
Pendejo Inútil	Ni las pendejadas hace bien
Pendejo de Referencia	El que se usa para explicar donde queda algo. "Alla donde esta parado aquel pendejo"
Pendejo Valiente	Se rompe la madre por cualquier pendejada
Pendejo Pelón	El que no tiene un pelo de pendejo.
Pendejo Clandestino	El que se esconde para hacer sus pendejadas
Pendejo Ambicioso	El que sueña con ser un buen pendejo.
Pendejo Convicto	El que esta en el bote por pendejo
Pendejo Hiperactivo	No para de hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Filosófico	Se pregunta el porque de sus pendejadas
Pendejo Poliglota	Dice pendejadas en varios idiomas
Pendejo Xerox	Se copia las pendejadas de los demás
Pendejo Esperanzado	Cree que lo pendejo se le va a quitar
Pendejo Ignorante	Todos saben que es pendejo menos el.
Pendejo Añejo	Con el tiempo se hace mas pendejo
Pendejo Radioactivo	Irradia pendejadas por doquier
Pendejo Insistente	Hace la misma pendejada varias veces
Pendejo Vigoroso	No se cansa de hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Ecológico	Es pendejo por naturaleza
Pendejo Precavido	Es pendejo por si se ofrece
Pendejo Multifacetico	El que abarca dos o mas clasificaciones
Pendejo Desocupado	Usted por haber leído hasta aquí....
Pendejo de Referencia	El que se usa para explicar donde queda algo
Pendejo Gay	El que por pendejo se hizo marica
Pendejo Apestoso	Se le huele lo pendejo a leguas
Pendejo Mil Usos	Hace pendejadas en la actividad que despempeñe
Pendejo Magisterial	Le enseña a los demas a hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Estudioso	Estudia las pendejadas de los demas
Pendejo Religioso	Le pide a dios cada dia ser mas pendejo
Pendejo Hipocondriaco	Se enferma de sus propias pendejadas
Pendejo Lento	Necesita mas tiempo para hacer sus pendejadas
Pendejo Ahorrativo	Se guarda sus pendejadas para cuando las necesite
Pendejo Despilfarrador	Hace pendejadas de mas
Pendejo Burocrata	Solo hace pendejadas de 9 a 5 de lunes a viernes
Pendejo Egolatra	No hace mas que hablar de sus propias pendejadas
Pendejo Presumido	Anda contando a todos su ultima pendejada
Pendejo Investigador	Prueba experimentalmente sus pendejadas
Pendejo Aries	Solo EL es pendejo nadie mas
Pendejo Tauro	Lento pero pendejo
Pendejo Geminis	Pendejo por partida doble
Pendejo Cáncer	Se siente de cualquier pendejada
Pendejo Leo	Se siente orgulloso de ser "el pendejo"
Pendejo Virgo	Analiza por que hace tantas pendejadas
Pendejo Libra	Soy pendejo? No... Pero y si soy? no o si?
Pendejo Escorpio	Hace pendejadas con Saña
Pendejo Sagitario	Tiene gran vision para hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Capricornio	Hace pendejadas pase lo que pase, caiga quien caiga
Pendejo Acuario	Piensa antes de hacer una pendejada
Pendejo Piscis	Llora por cualquier pendejada
Pendejo Cleptomano	Toma pendejadas de los demas y las toma como suyas
Pendejo Erudito	En cuestion de pendejadas, se las sabe todas
Pendejo Ermitaño	Se retira a hacer sus pendejadas donde nadie lo vea
Pendejo Astuto	Cree que a todo mundo agarra de pendejo
Pendejo Sabio	Se abstiene de hacer pendejadas
Pendejo Inteligente	Opina puras pendejadas
Pendejo Loco	Grita a mil voces sus pendejadas
Pendejo Invisible	Es tan pendejo que nadie lo puede ver
Pendejo Neurotico	Los nervios lo apendejan
Pendejo Esquizofrenico	Lo pendejo le viene desde adentro
Pendejo Paranoico	Cree que todos saben que es pendejo
Pendejo Deprimido	No soporta ser pendejo
Pendejo Indeciso	Es pendejo, a veces
Pendejo Mediocre	Es medio pendejo
Pendejo Moderno	Hace sus pendejadas por Internet
Pendejo Computacional	Borra el disco donde hizo sus pendejadas
Pendejo Global	Todo el mundo sabe sus pendejadas
Pendejo Local	Solo hace pendejadas en casa
Pendejo Visitante	Hace pendejadas solo en casa ajena
Pendejo Dependiente	Depende de otros pendejos
Pendejo Importado	El mas fino de los pendejos
Pendejo Argentino	El mas pendejo de todo el mundo, segun el
Pendejo Abogado	Es pendejo por derecho
Pendejo Alternativo	Ejerce su libertad como pendejo
Pendejo Matematico	Es exactamente un pendejo
Pendejo Sociologo	Viene de una sociedad pendeja
Pendejo Psicologo	La sociedad lo hizo pendejo
Pendejo Fiscal	Cuestiona las pendejadas que hacen los demas
Pendejo Estadístico	En promedio es un pendejo
Pendejo Contador	Lleva un registro de cada pendejada que hace
Pendejo Economista	Hace pendejadas marginales
Pendejo Político	Es pendejo pero segun el, tiene solucion
Pendejo Confirmado	Es aquel que en el transcurso de los años sigue pendejo
Pendejo Disfrazado	Es mas pendejo por dentro que lo que se le nota por fuera
Pendejo Periferico	Es aquel que tiene muchas salidas pendejas
Pendejo Desocupado	El que acaba de leer toda esta lista

Un deseo por Victor Hugo

2012-01-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

Te deseo primero que ames,

y que amando, también seas amado.

Y que, de no ser así, seas breve en olvidar

y que después de olvidar, no guardes rencores.

Deseo, pues, que no sea así, pero que sí es,

sepas ser sin desesperar.

Te deseo también que tengas amigos,

y que, incluso malos e inconsecuentes

sean valientes y fieles, y que por lo menos

haya uno en quien confiar sin dudar.

Y porque la vida es así,

te deseo también que tengas enemigos.

Ni muchos ni pocos, en la medida exacta,

para que, algunas veces, te cuestiones

tus propias certezas. Y que entre ellos,

haya por lo menos uno que sea justo,

para que no te sientas demasiado seguro

Te deseo además que seas útil,

más no insustituible.

Y que en los momentos malos,

cuando no quede más nada,

esa utilidad sea suficiente

para mantenerte en pie.

Igualmente, te deseo que seas tolerante,

no con los que se equivocan poco,

porque eso es fácil, sino con los que

se equivocan mucho e irremediablemente,

y que haciendo buen uso de esa tolerancia,

sirvas de ejemplo a otros.

Te deseo que siendo joven no

madures demasiado de prisa,

y que ya maduro, no insistas en rejuvenecer,

y que siendo viejo no te dediques al desespero.

Porque cada edad tiene su placer

y su dolor y es necesario dejar

que fluyan entre nosotros.

Te deseo de paso que seas triste.

No todo el año, sino apenas un día.

Pero que en ese día descubras

que la risa diaria es buena, que la risa

habitual es sosa y la risa constante es malsana.

Te deseo que descubras,

con urgencia máxima, por encima

y a pesar de todo, que existen,

y que te rodean, seres oprimidos,

tratados con injusticia y personas infelices.

Te deseo que acaricies un gato,

alimentes a un pájaro y oigas a un jilguero

erguir triunfante su canto matinal,

porque de esta manera,

te sentirás bien por nada.

Deseo también que plantes una semilla,

por más minúscula que sea, y la

acompañes en su crecimiento,

para que descubras de cuántas vidas

está hecho un árbol.

Te deseo, además, que tengas dinero,

porque es necesario ser práctico,

Y que por lo menos una vez

por año pongas algo de ese

sólo para que quede claro

quién es el dueño de quién.

Te deseo también que ninguno

de tus defectos muera, pero que si

muere alguno, puedas llorar

sin lamentarte y sufrir sin sentirte culpable.

Te deseo por fin que, siendo hombre,

tengas una buena mujer, y que siendo

mujer, tengas un buen hombre,

mañana y al día siguiente, y que cuando

estén exhaustos y sonrientes,

hablen sobre amor para recomenzar.

Si todas estas cosas llegaran a pasar,

no tengo más nada que desearte.

Maya numerology

2012-01-10T21:38:00.000-08:00

Base 20 counting system

0 - chun

1 - hun

2 - ka

3 - ox

4 - kan

5 - koo

6 - wak

7 - wuk

8 - waxak

9 - bolon

10 - lahun

11 - buluk

12 - lahka

13 - oxlahun

14 - kanlahun

15 - koolahun

16 - waklahun

17 - wuklahun

18 - waxaklahun

19 - bolonlahun

20 - wiknik

(Wiknik: "human being". Represents totality of his digits.)

The Yucatec number words reveal a clear vigesimal (base 20) structure with an embedded decimal layer evident in the numeration from 13 through 19.

There are two, possibly 3, layers in maya numerology. 20 on top of 13, on top of five for written numbers.

Hollander, Sidney. Calendario Maya.

The New Colossus

2012-01-09T16:52:00.000-08:00

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus

2011-12-26T22:33:00.000-08:00

Me levanta una brisa fresca. El cielo amanece, el sol todavía no llega. El cielo todavía tiene color de sombra. Ahí está arriba de los árboles, suspendido tan lejos. Apenas llega aquí su luz. Tan pequeña, parece inofensiva, pero significa la muerte. Hoy, esta estrella significa que hoy voy a morir. Yo le entrego mi vida, ya que, sin mi sangre, la tierra y las estrellas dejarán de nutrirse.

~~~

A fresh breeze wakes me. An innocent, warm peach color tells me the sky is also wakingup . I scan the sky and I see it low on the horizon, just abovethe trees. It hovers silently. Its fearsome glimmeringlight is distant and small. I stare into the eyes of a god this morning, a gaze I should know betterthan to hold. A terrible accident for anyone else, but I accept my fate because I am scheduled to die today under an obsidian blade. This star heralds my death and my sacrifice. Without myspilled blood, and the blood of others like me, how will the the stars and the earth remain connected?.

Tlaltecatzin icuic ~ El poema de Tlaltecatzin

2011-12-10T01:59:00.000-08:00

Náhuatl		Español
Zan ye ihuan noncuica yehyan, noteuh In tonaya, tlatoayan, yie xochincacahuatl in pozontimani, a xochioctli. Nocoya ye, noyol quimati, quihuinti ye noyol, noyol quimati: ¡Zan ca tlauhquechol! celiya, pozontimani, mocquipacxochiuh. ¡Tinaan! Huelicacihuatl, cacahuaizquixochitl, zan tonnetlatehuilo, ticahualoz, tiyaz, ximaaz. Can tiyehcoc ye nican, imixpan o teteuctin, timahuiztlachihualla, monequetza. Moxiuhcizquetzalpetlapan, tonihcaca. Cacahuaizquixochitl, zan tonnetlanehuilo, ticahualoz, tiyaaz, ximoaz. Ah zan xochicacahuatl in puzontinmani, yexochitlain tlamaco. Intla noyol quimati, quihuintia ye nonyolia, Aya yece ye nican, tlalla icpac, antetecuita, nopilhuan, a noyol quimati, quihuintia ye noyol. Ah zan ninetlamata, niquitohua: Maca niya ompa ximohuayan. Tlazotli noyol. In nehua, nehua, zan nicuicanitl, teocuitlayo noxochihuacayo, Inniquiyacahua, zan niquitta nochan, xochimamani. ¿Mach huey chlachichuitl, quetzalli patlahuac mach nopatiuh? In zan ninoquixitiz, quenmanian, ca zan niyaz, nipoliuhtiuh. Ninocahua, ¡ah notecu! Ah niquitohua: ma niyauh, ma ninoquimilolo, ni cuicanitli, ma ihui. ¿Ma aca ca cizquia noyol ac? Zan yuh niyaz, xochuihuiconticac ye noyolio. Ye quetzal nenelihui, chalchuitli in tlazotli yectla mochiuhtoca. ¡Acan machotica tlalticpac! Zan ihui ya azo, ihuan in ihuiyan.		En la soledad yo canto a aquel que es mi Dios En el lugar de la luz y el calor, en el lugar del mando, el florido cacao está espumoso, la bebida que con flores embriaga. Yo tengo anhelo, lo saborea mi corazón, se embriaga mi corazón, en verdad mi corazón lo sabe: ¡Ave roja de cuello de hule!, fresca y ardorosa, luces tu guirnalda de flores. ¡Oh madre! Dulce, sabrosa mujer, preciosa flor de maíz tostado, sólo te prestas, serás abandonada, tendrás que irte, quedarás descarnada. Aquí tú has venido, frente a los príncipes, tú, maravillosa criatura, invitas al placer. Solre la estera de plumas amarillas y azules aquí estás erguida. Preciosa flor de maíz tostado, sólo te prestas, serás abandonada, tendrás que irte, quedarás descarnada. El floreciente cacao ya tiene espuma, se repartió la flor del tabaco. Si mi corazón lo gustara, mi vida se embriagaría. Cada uno está aquí, sobre la tierra, vosotros señores, mis principes, si mi corazón lo gustara, se embriagaría. Yo sólo me aflijo, digo: que no vaya yo al lugar de los descarados. Mi vida es cosa preciosa. Yo sólo soy, yo soy un cantor, de oro son las flores que tengo. Ya tengo que abandonarla, sólo contemplo mi casa, en hilera se quedan las flores. ¿Tal vez grandes jades, extendidos plumajes son acaso mi precio? Sólo tendré que marcharme, alguna vez será yo sólo me voy, iré a perderme. A mí mismo me abandono, ¡Ah, mi Dios! Digo: váyame yo, como los muertos sea envuelto, yo cantor, sea así. ¿Podría alguien acaso adueñarse de mi corazón? Yo solo así habré de irme, con flores cubierto mi corazón. Se destruirán los plumajes de quetzal, los jades preciosos que fueron labrados con arte. ¡En ninguna parte está su modelo sobre la tierra! Que sea así, y que sea sin violencia.

~~~

Miguel León Portilla. Trece poetas del mundo azteca. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Primera edición. 1967

(Ms. Cantares Mexicanos, Biblioteca Nacional de México, fols. 30 r. y v., y Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, fols. 7 r., -8 r.)

The authoritative version of Super Mario Bros. theme

2011-12-03T16:27:00.001-08:00

Some guys in Bulgaria keep their traditions alive and kicking.

Whiskey

2011-12-01T23:39:00.001-08:00

The birdcage looked like a miniature Spanish colonial church. On its tin floor lied four dead parakeets. The fifth and last one was breathing rapidly on its perch.

Don't die, don't die, thought Linda. She had been sweeping in her pajama pants and noticed the tiny witness panicking. It had deliberately been left alive. As she hunched in front of the birdcage, her large brown eyes took in the scene. The bright green parakeet's breathing began to slow. A shiver quickly undulated its feathers, and its breathing slowed gently. Now there was one breath. Now there was another. Its pink little feet began to relax. Its eyelids began to close. Its head drooped and its stiff little body leaned forward, and fell on the tin birdcage floor with a PLUNK! Linda sighed and shook her head.

Her psychic sister had been at it again.

CLASES DE INGLES CON LOPEZ DORIGA

2011-11-29T22:25:00.001-08:00

What father. (Que padre!)

Few mother. (Poca madre!)

Go you to know (ve tu a saber)

Drink a chair (toma una silla)

I am engoated (Estoy encabronado)

I will drink it on count. (Lo tomaré en cuenta)

Syrup cover-uncle. (Jarabe Tapatío)

He stretched out the leg (Estiró la pata)

That way is very bad milk. (Ese güey es bien mala leche)

You have the mouth full of reason. (Tienes la boca llena de razón)

That is from the year of the broth! (Es del año del caldo!)

Little paper, talks (papelito habla)

I'll just re-fuck my goats and go. (Nomás recojo mis chivas y me voy)

The comb has already come out. (Ya salió el peine)

He hasn't given the face. (No ha dado la cara)

You believe yourself very sauce. (Te crees muy salsa)

She believes herself the very very (se cree la muy muy)

....Y pa los que no entendieron, busquen un fall-donkey!! (tumba burros)

Y por supuesto no puede faltar la pregunta clave para Examen Final del curso:
JUAY DE RITO? (porque El Rito?)

Black Friday in parts of the world... and in the USA

2011-11-26T11:05:00.001-08:00

In California...

And in Somalia...

In some parts of the world, people riot for food and medical supplies. In other parts of the world, people riot over stretchy jeans. Now you have to wonder what the riots will look like when the stretchy jeans people run out of food. Scary...

~~~

En algunas partes del mundo hay motines por comida y medicina. En otras partes del mundo hay motines por unos jeans muy ajustados. Ahora, hay que considerar cómo serán los motines cuando los compradores de jeans se quedan sin comer. ¡Aguas!

The New Common Sense

2011-11-25T00:10:00.001-08:00

In Unity,

THE NEW COMMON SENSE

A Declaration of INTERDEPENDENCE, born of necessity, from and for the collective conscience of the "99%" to and for the oligarchic "1%" of the United States of America.

SUMMARY

SECTION I: The Right to Equal Participation in Government has been taken from the People and is explained. -- A Plan is offered to restore the Right to Equal Participation that requires only the use of tools and procedures that have already been proven to work. -- The restoration of Equality must take priority above all and reasons are given. -- Outside damaging influences must no longer be allowed privileged access to Elected Representatives in a Constitutional Republic. -- An Offer in Compromise that would reunite this Nation with its Foundation is clearly stated. -- A clear, workable and simple method by which we may rebuild ourselves as a Prosperous Nation and return to being One Hundred Percent is explained. -- A New Litmus Test of our government is declared and explained. -- A plan and petition to rebalance the Branches of Government is outlined in detail.

SECTION II: Monitions are forwarded to our Leaders, to the Congress in specific, to the Media, to Law Enforcement and the Domestic Militia, and to the "1%" -- A direct message and plea for the "99%" from the author(s).

SECTION I - Common Sense from the "99%"

INTRODUCTION AND PREAMBLE

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the Citizens of a Nation to petition their own Government for a redress of grievances, the People have a duty to exercise their rights under the First Amendment collectively if they so choose. To this end, We the People hereby assert our right to peacefully assemble and petition our Government for redress when we feel that this is our best, and perhaps only remaining option to seek remedies.

We affirm that any lasting and workable solution must reach beyond mere politics, that political issues do not matter at a time when our collective voice has been nearly silenced. We believe that the current political climate has caused a paralysis of our Government. We find that our individual opinions mean little when we are no longer being properly represented. In fact, we believe that the Balance of Power between the Branches of our Government has been corrupted to the point where it can answer only to members of an affluent and politically active upper class. The impending result of this imbalance is that government of the People, by the People, for the People has almost perished from Our Nation. We believe that government has been influenced by an external source that has conspired to control it to the point of stalemate. We believe that this was forced upon us by "special interests", corporations, lobbyists, the banking and the financial sector including Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, who together have used unrestrained financial leverage leading to the corruption of many politicians, regardless of their political party, resulting in great damage to the People and to this Nation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal regardless of their financial status. -- That we free Citizens of the United States are without exception endowed under a Federal Constitution granting us certain unalienable Rights. -- That among these Rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure and protect these rights, our forefathers drafted this Constitution, ratified by the then several States and agreed to by the People. -- That this Constitution defines and protects us all with a system of Checks and Balances by which the powers and responsibilities of government would be divided amongst the Federal, the States and the People. -- That this original Social Contract in which those powers were granted has been repeatedly violated by the Federal government. -- That we no longer are represented by our Government. -- That we no longer have a voice in our Government. -- That the limits of power of the Federal Government have been deliberately and repeatedly breached. -- That our Government has become destructive towards the vast majority of the same People that they are supposed to protect. -- That outside influences have gained unreasonable power and influence within our Government. -- That the Fair Election system is being systematically dismantled and no longer allows for a full, on paper, verification and accounting of actual balloting. -- That We the People have the Fundamental Right and Patriotic Duty under the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights to peacefully assemble and to demand that the Government cease and desist from or correct any of these violations. -- That the Government cede back to the States and to the People all such Powers that they have unconstitutionally seized, regaining such Powers from the States via Constitutional Amendment if they are to have them at all. -- That our Government must Right these encroachments on the People by realigning itself to the Constitution. -- That vague interpretations of the Constitution should be clarified through civil discourse leading to a series of new Amendments and with full participation by the several States.

We also hold that the Constitution was originally designed to prevent the Federal government from encroaching upon the rights of the People and the States. Adjustments to Federal Powers were to be made only via Constitutional Amendment. We hold that this Amendment procedure has largely been ignored in recent history. In fact, when the Constitution was originally crafted, the political party as we know it today did not even exist. The modern era of rampant partisanship was not even envisioned by the Founders. We thus believe that the current "political party system" as it stands has served to divide this Nation to the point of paralysis. As a Great former President once said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

While we who have named ourselves the "99%" may each have our own individual personal concerns and grievances, we know that we must set them aside at this time due to a more pressing need to demand the return of the Representation that has been taken from us. Until such time, we contend that nothing can be accomplished in a spirit of true discourse.

Collectively we can all certainly agree upon these Truths that have led us to our outrage.

DEFINITIONS

We hold that the branches of Federal government have been corrupted, convoluted and debased, that they have all strayed from their intended purpose, standing idly by while their effectiveness and objectivity have been debased by a conglomerate, known to us as the "1%".

By "1%" we mean specifically those from an aristocracy who manipulate government in their own self-interests: the affluent "elite", the bankers, the corporations and the special interests who use their wealth and financial power as leverage to gain an unreasonable lobbying influence on government legislation and policies. They most often do this in ways that harm the common People.

We define the "99%" as the common citizen, the employed and the unemployed, the poor and the disabled, the aged, the disadvantaged, the students, the public and civil servants with a conscience, the lower and middle classes, even those honest politicians and members of the "1%" itself who refuse to "buy into" this oligarchy. We include all of these and more regardless of our individual affiliations, political leanings, opinions, beliefs, religions, our race, ethnic background, sex, age or even financial status. We are the People of real flesh and blood. We represent all walks of life from all corners of this Nation.

We shall offer and elaborate on examples which will help illustrate where we believe that the four branches of government have now failed us.

THE JUDICIAL BRANCH

Article III, Section 1 of the United States Constitution reads in part, "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior..." yet there is no clear definition of "good Behavior" given, nor does recent history show us any consistent method of accountability that protects the People or the States from judicial "bad Behavior". Indeed, the phrase "good Behavior" has been historically misinterpreted to mean "appointed for life." These permanent appointments result in Judges that become firmly entrenched and nearly unaccountable to the People for the decisions that they make.

We believe that due to this misinterpretation, the Supreme Court has obtained unbalanced, far-reaching powers well beyond the intention of our forefathers. The People have no reasonable recourse if these Judges prove to be partisan and refuse to rule in the Best Interest--or if they fail to uphold and defend the Constitution. Justices appointed for life terms can easily dodge accountability, as history has so proven.

Many examples of truly questionable Supreme Court decisions exist.

In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Court decided that corporations were recognized as "persons" for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. This gave corporations the same legal rights as a living, breathing individual. Yet, the corporations enjoy other legal protections not afforded to real persons, such as tax shelters and loopholes, liability shields and others. This grants them unbalanced protections that lead directly to unfair opportunities for governmental influence at a disproportionate level than that of the People.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, (2010), the Court ruled 5-4 that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. This decision in part lead to the creation of the "super PAC", by which corporations, special interests and the affluent can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously through 501(c)(4) corporations, leaving the entire political process unaccountable, untraceable and with the People unable to execute a Public audit of the funding of political campaigns. The Supreme Court also struck down those provisions of the McCain–Feingold Act, Public Law 107-155 (2001) that prohibited all corporations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, as well as unions from broadcasting "electioneering communications." Alarmingly, the decision itself also notes that, 'It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their "personhood" often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of "We the People" by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.' If this is the case, why then were they given the same rights as flesh and blood persons under the Fourteenth Amendment when they arguably are not equal? How can the common People compete against such invisible and unaccountable financial influence upon politics? The consequences of this have been disastrous. This form of court-sponsored "political "money laundering" has served to corrupt our system in favor of the "1%".

The general attitude that the Supreme Court is perfect and void of corruption internally and thus remain immune from scrutiny has caused yet more damage. Our history is rife with examples of the Judiciary overstepping their bounds. In fact, one case illustrates their large contribution towards the start of Civil War. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), the Court ruled 7-2 that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution, could not sue in court and could never be U.S. citizens. It took the Civil War, the loss of countless lives and not one but two Constitutional Amendments (Amendments Thirteen and Fourteen) to even begin to repair the damage that the Court inflicted on the People with this decision.

Yet, even with two Amendments ratified after the War, that were in part intended to prevent the supreme and all lower courts from continuing to make such socially divisive decisions of this nature, the Supreme Court later opted to breach even these key additions to the Constitution in future decisions.

Over thirty years beyond the end of the Civil War, in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), the Court voted 7-1 in favor of upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal". This segregation between races remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its unanimous repudiation in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), fifty-eight years later.

Thus, a decision that the court made in 1857 helped launch a Civil War and it took two Constitutional Amendments in 1862 and 1868 followed by approximately one hundred more years of civil unrest and divisive Court decisions until these issues finally began to resolve. To this day these issues still remain unresolved to a certain degree; such is the damage that has been done.

In addition, a more recent decision that clearly illustrates how the Court exceeds its jurisdiction and breaches Constitutional authority can be offered. Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) was a landmark case that for the first time retreated from the "political question doctrine" (the test of whether or not the court system is an appropriate forum in which to hear a specific case). The details of this case itself are far less important than the effect that it had on our System of Justice. In this case, the Court ceased to limit themselves only to cases based upon a legal question per the doctrine. Instead, they chose to exceed their jurisdiction and authority by ruling on a political dispute instead of a legal one, and over an issue internal to a single State no less.

Baker v. Carr not only violated the doctrine but it set a new precedent that has, under the banner of stare decisis (a legal principle by which judges are generally obliged to respect the precedents established by prior decisions), has led to even more violations by the Court going forward. Never was it intended for the Court to decide individual internal State issues, but now the Court takes on many of these cases regularly.

These cases prove the need for an urgent return to a staunch reliance upon the Constitutional Amendment procedure as our method of restraint against the Court and we must remember to rely on it as our first course of action in these situations. This was the intent of the Constitution as it was written. It is what made our Constitution a "living document" in the first place.

But as we have now shown, sometimes even Amendments fail to keep the Court in check. We suggest that a serious reconsideration be given regarding term limits for Justices or for some other remedy upon which we can all agree to further curtail this danger.

We maintain that the liberty of "vague interpretation" is not for the Court to enjoy for they are bound by oath to remain impartial and not stray too far from their constitutionally defined boundaries. Clearly they were not meant to hold power that gives them the right to decide cases that are beyond the scope of the Constitution and that lie out of their jurisdiction?

According to Title 28, Chapter I, Part 453 of the United States Code, each Supreme Court Justice takes the following oath:

"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."

This oath, we believe, is no longer respected as a matter of policy.

The People have lost their ability to seek redress against such injustice due to the failure of government at all levels to pursue the Constitutional Amendment with which to enforce and more clearly define Court boundaries. Since appeals or requests for reviews are not allowed by the People, apathy from Congress and the States has nurtured a Supreme Court that need answer to no one, not even to the Constitution itself.

This is no longer acceptable by The People.

THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

We hold that much of the fabric of the Constitution has been deliberately dismantled by the Congress. Over the course of time Congress has debated and passed numerous laws of questionable constitutionality, laws that the Supreme Court then upheld without comment or simply refused to review. Many of these laws served to create and endow Federal agencies with expanded Powers that were originally reserved to the States. Instead of petitioning the States to relinquish these officially via an Amendment, Congress merely took these Powers anyway, often through threat to withhold federal funding to the States, and with other forms of political blackmail.

In fact, they use a series of vague interpretations of parts of the Constitution itself, from which they achieve this.

These breaches have occurred slowly and over time through repeated violations of the Tenth Amendment, an amendment which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

This piecemeal seizure of Power from the States and the People also relies upon the following two Constitutional Clauses being used as excuses by which they have further effected this breach.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 of the Constitution ("The Necessary and Proper Clause") states, "The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer there of." This clause was meant only to grant Congress the power to make Federal Laws in order to aid them in executing Powers already granted to them in the Constitution and nothing more.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 ("The Commerce Clause") states, "[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;" and has been used in combination with "The Necessary and Proper Clause" as a loophole by which they encroach upon and legislate to the States.

In addition, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 states that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time."

Examples of wholesale breaches of this clause by all Branches include: The privately issued "Federal Reserve Note" being forced upon us as our sole currency even though Congress only has the constitutional authority to "coin" money under Article I, Section 8. -- Debasement of our currency and private control of its value. -- Secret bailouts in the amount of trillions by the Federal Reserve (some to foreign entities including foreign banks). -- Covert military actions combined with apathy by the Legislative Branch who have failed to seek estoppel of multiple undeclared wars.

Congress and the private Federal Reserve have ceased to be fully accountable to the People in the reporting of actual receipts and expenditures, proof of which lies in their combined refusal to present a completely detailed audit to the People.

Transparency in government and the Right of Participation by the People does not cease once an election is over. Those who are elected must continue to answer to their constituents for the duration of their term(s). The Congress now acts independently of the People that they swore to represent. They now answer only to the special interests of the "1%", not to the People, all while they ignore the Constitutional limits and procedures that they swore an oath by.

Their oaths, we believe, are no longer respected as a matter of policy.

This is no longer acceptable by The People.

THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

There is no Constitutional provision or statute that explicitly permits Executive Orders. Instead, there is a vague grant of "executive power" in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution as well as the phrase "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" in Article II, Section 3.

We fail to see how only the phrases "executive power" and "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed", when taken on their own or even in combination can serve as de-facto justification for any sitting President to claim under the Constitution the right to issue Executive Orders at all.

Furthermore, while most Executive Orders may attempt to justify themselves by claiming that their authority has been granted merely from these two phrases, history makes clear that the original intent of these orders was merely to help direct Officers of the US Executive to carry out their delegated duties and the normal operations of the Federal government itself.

Could it be more obvious that this has clearly not been the case?

Executive Orders through the years included orders that -- authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones -- arrested and relocated Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II -- criminalized the possession of monetary gold by any individual, partnership, association or corporation and forced U.S. citizens to deliver all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve (with violations of the order punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or up to ten years in prison, or both) -- waged war without a Declaration from Congress -- restricted access by the People to the non-classified papers and communications of certain Presidents -- made up most of the "New Deal" itself -- allowed INTERPOL to operate inside the U.S. with more authority than our own FBI -- created FEMA, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Safety Administration and many other agencies that dramatically restructured government agencies as a whole, then transferred incredible amounts of unjustified Power to them.

In fact, it can be argued that multiple Presidents have overstepped their Constitutional bounds using the Executive Order, or via Presidential Proclamations, Determinations, Memorandums, Directives and Signing Statements by which they exceed their authority. They even use them to legislate.

While the use of these Executive Orders, Presidential Proclamations, Determinations, Memorandums and Directives as well as Signing Statements may or may not be unconstitutional per se (as this has rarely been challenged), we believe at the very least that they stand on shaky Constitutional ground and that their use should be reevaluated and clarified, perhaps even limited by law or by an Amendment. After all, if the permitted scope of these orders are not clearly defined, then how can anyone, even the Presidents themselves, ever know the limits of their authority?

The oath of President, we believe, is no longer respected as a matter of policy.

This is no longer acceptable by The People.

The failures of the first three branches of government to abide by the Constitution have caused so much drift away from our Foundations that we now suffer the grave consequence of political paralysis. In fact, these failures have resulted in the creation of a new "fourth branch" of government that is also in large part responsible for this.

THE SPECIAL INTEREST BRANCH

Multiple questionable rulings by the Supreme Court that "money equals speech," in combination with the privatization of the central banking system, have given rise to a new oligarchical and unconstitutional branch of government that we now term "The Special Interest Branch". This new branch has corrupted the Balance of Power between the original branches of our government.

While the piecemeal creation of this new branch occurred slowly over the course of years, some particular actions by the government including (but not limited to) The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the more recent Supreme Court decision Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976) were instrumental in its implementation.

The now infamous "money equals speech" doctrine was enshrined into law with Buckley v. Valeo. This decision saw the Court uphold a Federal law (The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971) which set limits on campaign contributions yet rule that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. The court also ruled that candidates can give unlimited amounts of money to their own campaigns. Although this decision actually upheld restrictions on the size of outside campaign contributions, it also struck down limits on expenditures, albeit temporarily. As of 2010, those with great wealth can effectively drown out the speech of average citizens anyway because Citizens United paved the way for unlimited anonymous "back door contributions", often laundered through the 501(c)(4) corporation then funneled into the "super PAC". We must also point out that the phrase "back door contributions" was intended to be a double entendre.

These decisions have served to grant unprecedented leverage, influence and power based solely on wealth. They have created a method by which the affluent, the corporation, the unions and other well-funded "special interests" may unduly influence and shape legislation that is contrary to the Will of the People. These entities now have the ability to "buy" their way into the political arena anonymously, influencing those who have sworn to be the Representatives of the People in a manner which actually forces them to represent only these entities' own self-interests.

We submit that such unrestrained non-elected influence is mainly responsible for the utter stalemate and paralysis that exists in government today. Through the promotion of unreasonable partisanship combined with the outright purchasing of both candidates and those who hold office, combined with the unrelenting pressure from well-funded and powerful lobbies, a series of hard political lines have been drawn which greatly diminish the ability of the Legislative, the Judicial and the Executive branches to function impartially.

We refuse to recognize this new perverse and corrupt "branch" of the Federal Government and we demand that it be expunged. No one among us, "99%" or "1%" alike should be given any more of a voice than anyone else in any capacity. Our Representatives themselves can no longer respond to the Will of the People due to this outside influence. This modern doctrine of "money equals speech" is wholly outrageous and must be ostracized from the government landscape at all levels and without delay.

We believe that only full transparency in all political campaigns and the full public disclosure of the activities, affiliations and financing of all lobbies, PACs (Political Action Committees) and "super PACs" can correct these inequities. In addition, The 501(c)(4) corporations must fully disclose their donor list or be barred from contributing to a "super PAC" or political campaign fund. Their contribution amounts and political expenditures should be limited if they are to participate at all, or otherwise they need to be forever barred from participating in political financing. In fact, the "super PAC" itself should be outlawed as it serves no true democratic purpose.

Money verses more money isn't democracy; it's a cancer on our Republic.

Laws that guarantee the full transparency of this and of all other matters not related to National Security must be drafted, passed and vigorously enforced. And finally, a loophole free litmus test must be designed by which matters of National Security may be verified as such in order to protect the Public Right to Disclosure from any more abuse.

As this branch consists of the non-elect and non-appointed, its members need take no oath whatsoever and it is clear that they believe that they are exempt from and thus need not show any respect for the Constitution as a matter of policy.

This is no longer acceptable by The People.

A NEW LITMUS TEST

A litmus test shall be used by the people henceforth.

We ask of our government at all levels, to those holding corporate or financial power and to the media, that we be given a serious and prompt response to The New Common Sense. We call for you to accommodate it as a priority and to publicly acknowledge it without delay.

This serves an important purpose as it will allow us to learn your individual true colors.

If you lend this your assistance, we will then know that you are worthy of election, reelection and/or our consumer support and respect.

If you choose to speak out against this unfairly or if you make an attempt to discredit, slant, misreport, distort, slant, misstate, exaggerate, falsify or suppress it, then we will know that you are beholden to the "1%".

And be forewarned: if you do opt to ignore this entirely then we will be forced to assume that you guard the status quo and we will embrace you as if you were opposed. We will consider it to be similar to a plea of "no contest".

While in a criminal court a plea of "no contest" is given the same effect as a plea of "guilty", in this case such a plea will not protect you from the civil consequences of our negative judgment.

OUR PETITION

Firstly, we must state that we already understand the historical truth that whoever fires the first shot often loses the war. Thus, let it be known that our resistance and petitions for redress are by all intentions nonviolent and limited to lawful and rightful forms of expression under our Rights given to us by the First Amendment. We feel driven to these ends and believe that we must use these and other rightful methods because we have been otherwise precluded from equal participation by recently erected financial barriers that give unfair influence in the government to the affluent members of corporate, political and financial society. We collectively term this invading class the "1%", who have together formed an oligarchy that clearly takes its position against the People, one that has used its collective financial power as a weapon against us in an attempt to reduce or even eliminate our fundamental right to participate in our own government.

We also believe that the government has allowed for this to happen deliberately and has actually welcomed this infiltration by the "1%".

This has lead us to reach the following conclusion, of which we can surely all agree: the system as it was originally designed is now broken. Thus, we stand in protest against those who wish for it to remain broken because it is broken in their favor.

We submit that if a candidate for office is running at all, then they are most likely bought and paid for by the "1%". Those who truly care and are trying to participate for the common good, however few, we see them ostracized, character assassinated, politically destroyed and harassed by the mass media and other tools of the "1%". We can only conclude that while in this climate, any candidate that we are given the opportunity to vote for is meaningless because we have already lost the chance to gain actual Representation for ourselves. We view any two competing candidates as two sides of the same worthless coin.

This "1%" now owns and controls the mass media, funds the lobbyists and sit at the heads of many corporations including the financial institutions. With such power, they greatly intervene in the affairs of the House, the Senate, the Presidency and the Judiciary.

Who can blame us for the outrage we share and now express? If we still had an equal voice in our own government we would not be driven to this.

As we have previously stated, we believe that the problem is now beyond politics. Another election will solve nothing because the "99%" no longer have anybody to vote for who will represent us once they achieve office. Beyond this lies our serious concern for "electronic voting" systems that by design do not allow for a paper trail. This must also be remedied if our faith is to be restored. We can no longer place trust in the fairness of our own elections in large part because of this.

Thus, mere political issues do not matter at this time and our opinions do not matter when we are not being heard. Until we get our voice back, we must demand redress until such time as our Right to Equal Participation is returned to us.

We repeatedly affirm that our personal issues and affiliations (political or otherwise) while important and needful of resolve in due time, must be set aside temporarily until such a time as we regain our Equal Voice in our government. We realize that until we truly reconnect with our government that our concerns will fall upon deaf ears.

We believe that we as a Nation have lost our ability to be an example to the World of a working Representative Democracy. In order to regain the world's respect, we believe that our government must again completely realign itself with the Constitution that this Nation was founded upon. We cannot sell our way of life to the rest of the world through force while we can only display a ridiculous inability to solve our own problems. Instead, we must bring about an honest desire in their collective hearts to emulate our system by fixing it. Only when we can stand again as an example to the World as a sound Constitutional Republic can we possibly regain that respect. The reality is that respect cannot be earned merely through force and these recent pursuits against parts of the world are some of our greatest mistakes.

We also believe that this One Problem must be corrected before the solutions to any of our other problems can again be within our reach. We absolutely must realign ourselves with our Foundations as the priority. The paralysis will continue if we do not and we as a Nation are running out of time. How much longer can this go on? Compromise in government discourse will remain impossible if we do not repair the Platform that we all absolutely must stand upon and recommit to It our full respects. If we do not do this immediately then we as a Nation face certain doom!

This is strong language, we know. Therefore, we must now make clear that we are not petitioning that our System should be abolished. We are merely stating that it is in dire need of repair. This is a Declaration of Rights and a Petition, not a Declaration of Independence. We cannot stress this enough. We believe that the system as it was originally designed does work; that we can again be the envy of the modern world just as we once were. We have lost touch with ourselves and our Constitutional Foundations and are now politically paralyzed. We must reconnect with the Ideals that the United States was founded upon and we absolutely must do this before anything positive can occur. We see it as our hope by which we can save ourselves at this point.

Please allow us the liberty to preface our proposed detailed solution and plan for execution in terms that even a corporation or bank would understand. Any business that does not take regular inventory or does not do regular internal audits will eventually lose control of itself and self-destruct. To put it another way: poor self-management is the best recipe for failure.

We believe that the same is true with government. Therefore, we now propose an Exact Method by which we may exorcise every last one of the corruptions and usurpations that have occurred from within our realm.

-- A Complete Inventory and Audit of Powers of all Federal Branches, Institutions, Procedures, Laws and Entitlements of our government should be taken and evaluated piecemeal in full view of the People.
-- All that are enumerated would then be checked for Constitutionality against the Federal Constitution.
-- All found to not be compatible can be given a notice of cease and desist or be granted a Constitutional Amendment by the States through the Amendment Procedure.
-- All that fail to gain an Amendment from the States would then be returned to the States themselves under the Tenth Amendment.
-- The States can then debate these items as a possible Amendment to their own individual State Constitutions, thus making them legal in their individual States.
-- In the case where each State does not ratify the proposed Amendment and if it is judged as incompatible with their Constitution and there is no other State Law preventing it, then the People can implement it if they so choose at the State or Local Levels via Law or Ordinance.
-- If that fails, then it wasn't a power that the Government or the People should have assumed in the first place. It should then be regarded as fundamental in the interest of Liberty if there is no other Law preventing it.
-- During this process, anything enumerated specifically in the Constitution as unconstitutional or already prohibited by it (such as the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery) shall remain inaccessible to implementation at any lower level. The Federal Constitution always retains priority over the States. State Constitutions always retain priority over Local Ordinances and Laws.
-- To prevent a reoccurrence of any future encroachments at the Federal level, an Amendment fully defining and clarifying both Article I, Section 8, Clause 18 ("The Necessary and Proper Clause") and Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 ("The Commerce Clause") and any other ambiguous clauses should be debated by the States and ratified into the United States Constitution for the sake of clarity. The litmus test for that is a simple one. If any disagreement exists during the piecemeal review and evaluation, then they are enumerated and then subjected to further clarification or repeal using Amendment(s).

Through this process, Liberty is thus fully restored and then preserved and protected.

In no case will these inventoried powers and institutions remain with the Federal government without a Constitutional Amendment that gives each of them full legitimacy or without a full verification of the preexisting intrinsic constitutionality of same.

In this way, the overreaching power of the current Federal, State and Local governments can be rebalanced and placed firmly back under the scope of the Constitution. Powers improperly taken from the States can be returned or given back to the People. This also will realign the Constitution with all aspects of the corporate, financial, housing and banking systems automatically. It will also allow for all other issues from the People to be addressed in their rightful order and in due time. This re-enumeration of Powers rebalances the Federal government with itself, with the States and with the People resulting in a much needed sense of clarity. It will serve to stem the tide of corruption that has been infecting our government. With a Unified and Informed Nation, whole once again and working together again in the Spirit of True Discourse and with such a renewed Collective Spirit, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.

It has been said that the best ideas are simple. We submit that this idea of realignment with our Constitution is the Cornerstone by which we may all reunite as One People and truly solve many of our Nation's problems. We submit that for this Nation to continue to exist, we absolutely must take heed of and implement this proposal at once.

Duly signed,

_____________________________________________
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SECTION II - Monitions

TO OUR LEADERS

We must wonder who among you could possibly take issue against an honest implementation of this proposal, save for those of you who would continue to profit from the status quo or would wish for a deliberate debasement of our way of life?

We realize that there are many among you who are just as concerned as we are. We also acknowledge that many of you possibly may not have realized, while you were campaigning for office, just how pervasive and influential the "Special Interest Branch" truly is. Perhaps only after you were elected did you learn just how entrenched they really are? Perhaps this is why you have so readily abandoned your campaign promises to us so predictably?

Due to these possibilities, surely we can offer you the temporary benefit of the doubt. But let us be clear: it is now up to you to decide our future opinions of you.

You must immediately and publicly recommit to both the "99%" and "1%" alike. In addition, you must declare that you will serve the recombined "100%" equally and without partisan favor. You must reaffirm your oaths to uphold, preserve and protect the Constitution as well and above all else. You then must start to act like it. The opaque influence of the "1%" must be made transparent and then equally balanced with transparent influences of our own. You may well continue to agree to disagree with each other as usual but you must temper your discourse and debate with a new sense of mutual respect and restraint at all cost.

In other words, you need to start doing your jobs.

Have you forgotten that no matter your party affiliation, that once elected you are supposed to serve everyone equally?

The age-old phrase, from fable, lyric and motto, that "United we stand, divided we fall" rings true to this day with the exact points that we make.

You must also cease your political infighting and cross the party lines that you have drawn that constrain you and strive to reach an accord with your brethren regardless of political party. You must do this in order to regain our trust and respect.

We can agree that there are radicals among us in the "99%" just as we can surely agree that there are radicals among you. Regardless, we both know that between us there lies a Voice of Reason. We hope that this New Common Sense proves that to you.

However, even reason demands that you should take heed of the following monition.

We hereby inform you that we will also be taking our own Inventory and Audit of all current and future representatives at all levels of government. The New Common Sense is but the start and we offer it to you as the First Fair Notice of only one way by which we will go about it. Because we wish to support and will embrace only those who are willing to come forward to help repair this damage, we must identify you from where you stand. We certainly do not wish the continued mutilation and destruction of our beloved Constitutional Republic to continue. Do you?

We affirm that we wish to help repair our Nation in the true spirit of INTERDEPENDENCE. We demand that you do too.

We need to remind you that you are not the ones in charge. We are. This is a Nation of the People, by the People, for the People, remember?

If you choose to declare The New Common Sense to be extreme, then we declare that it must be true. After all, if a mere request that we recommit to obeying our own Constitution is extreme, then we've made our point, haven't we. If, however, you choose to declare it as not extreme then it must also be true because then that means that we are right. You can't win a propaganda war against us this time. We now have you in a corner and you surely must realize this.

We the People have already chosen to rise above the fray. We have delivered to you this document, eschewed all opinions temporarily to open a discussion over some Simple Truths. We've boiled it down to one clear demand that no one who is a patriot could possibly disagree with: That the Constitution of the United States should be placed back at the "center" of active government.

As we have so painstakingly pointed out, inventory of ourselves and the government from top to bottom should have been what we've been doing all along. Can anyone truly disagree with the idea of holding all that we are up to the Light of our Federal and State Constitutions? Could they object to this with a straight face? Can anyone who is a true patriot honestly say that they do not wish to rid our system of corruption, or level all playing fields once again, that they do not wish to obey and see enforced only the legal laws of this country? And most importantly: would they not wish for all involved to declare a new respect for our Constitution and would a patriot not wish to witness the process of repairing it back into the Living Document that is was designed to be?

There's but one more item of needful mention. Political attack ads need to cease. They are not constructive and will no longer help your cause. If you can find nothing good to say about yourselves then perhaps you shouldn't be running for office. If you instead show respect for the other candidates and their ideas by refusing to run attack ads, then you will be sending us the message that you may be able to field diverse opinions and ideas. You will show us your ability to be flexible and will show us true Statesmanship. Attack ads only serve to inform us that you are not willing to compromise and thus not worthy of our vote. This type of politician we no longer need in office. So please, stop it if you wish to gain or keep your job. This tactic will no longer secure you any votes from us.

TO THE CONGRESS IN SPECIFIC

That there are three basic levels of human societal structure. From least to most evolved, they are dependence, independence and interdependence.

We seem to be at odds because the "1%" appears to want to force us into the lowest state of dependence with your help.

Our Nation, however, was founded via The Declaration of Independence which was then followed by a social contract (The Constitution) that guaranteed that we would all participate in a society based solely on interdependence. The "1%" has broken that contract with us in league with you.

Dependence is not an option for We the People, for we would have to give up the freedoms and liberties that our hard won, hard kept and wholly cherished interdependence grants us. We simply are not willing to endure a forced state of dependence and our continued interdependence is the only option that we will accept.

You must understand this.

To be clear: if you want Unity with the People again it can only be accomplished at the level of interdependence. If you wish to continue to try to force unwarranted dependence upon us, with or without the aid of the "1%", then we shall continue our petitions for redress under the protections of the First Amendment.

You must also declare your independence from the influence of the "1%". You must protect yourselves from their attempts to also make you dependent on their money. You must find your own interdependence with each other, again, and with the Whole of the People.

TO THE MEDIA

Before you try to analyze The New Common Sense in an attempt to label it as politically slanted or discount it as extremist rhetoric, let us state that this message is by its design well beyond the bounds of political partisanship. Otherwise, it will not stand up to the "divisive for the sake of being divisive" political scrutiny that we all bear daily witness to.

We realize that you may also attempt to lambast or ridicule the language and carried tone that we used in this missive as a strategy of your scrutiny. You may have noticed that the document begins in a more "classic" language style and then proceeds to slowly change its language, punctuation and overall tone into a modern one as it progresses, becoming almost informal and overtly personal towards the end. This was by design. It was our intention to begin the document in the same tone as (as well as to borrow liberally some of the language of) various historical documents and then to slowly modernize this tone as we ultimately connect it firmly to the now. In addition, the nonstandard use of capitals is a way for us to retain emphasis in a document that in some forms may be distributed as plain text and without formatting. This technique has been used before by writers greater than we (including the composer(s) of the Declaration of Independence) so we cannot apologize for it. It, too, was deliberate. We hope that this explanation of some of our grammatical intentions help to clear up what you may consider to be unintended inconsistencies and that it removes an opportunity for you to criticize it on its face.

But let there be no doubt about this: the political system in this country is fundamentally broken and no amount of political rhetoric and slanted "expert" opinions broadcast to the public by which you can fix a broken political system. Therefore, the only true answer to the Problem must come from a source that is not only above and beyond politics, but it must also be a solution that can include the voluntary input of literally everyone who would bear the equal burden of responsibility in implementing it. That includes you. You must return to a state of genuine balance in your reporting.

The New Common Sense asks only for our government to -- Immediately reject what we term "The Special Interest Branch" and kick them out of backroom politics. -- Put laws in place giving equal voice to anyone who wishes to speak regardless of their financial status. -- Respect and uphold the laws that are constitutional and abolish and/or correct those that are not. -- Take an inventory of all agencies and branches of government, using the Constitution, and only the Constitution, as the de-facto guide with which to go by. -- Recommit to the Constitution as the first word on the boundaries of government. -- Reduce the ability for anyone to (mis)interpret the Constitution so broadly by discussing and then passing Amendments which will serve to clarify and modernize it. -- Restore to the People a transparent, open and fair election system nationwide that allows for a full accounting by the people of all elections.

It asks for nothing more. Do not try to read further into it. We're tired of your spin.

If you want our respect then show us that you have the courage and honesty to speak out in favor of this proposal's existence, even if you disagree with it as a matter of corporate mass media policy. Help us promote The New Common Sense for the good of the Nation. Offer time and space for its discussion and open yourselves to all ideas that may stem from it and give it a platform. This is a unique chance for you to prove to us that at least you are not promoting imbalance.

For the sake of clarity, please let us remind you of something of which you surely are already aware:

For the first time in history, technology has given us all a level playing field in terms of our ability to share information and communicate. We know that this must scare you. We know that, even apart from mere greed, this is most likely why the "1%" have instigated such an insane power grab in the first place.

Thus, we ask almost rhetorically, "What will prevent The New Common Sense from being ridiculed or simply ignored?" We protest, for example, to remind the "1%" that while they may have the largest share of the wealth, we, the People retain control of most of the other numbers. While the "1%" controls the mass media, we have the internet, social media and each other in great numbers. The "1%" can no longer silence us with mere money, for they (in this case, by "1%" we mean those who speak through you and reward you for your performance with a paycheck) no longer have a monopoly on the distribution of information to the masses with which they have attempted to manipulate us.

We know that the moment in history is upon us where we finally have the tools with which we can level the playing field with you. We can accomplish these goals with or without you. You see, we're not buying your disinformation anymore, thus it's time for you to have a real and serious dialog with us.

Thanks to the internet and our growing awareness, the "1%" can no longer operate in the shadows. We shall expose their greed and mockery of our way of life through our protests. our collective voice, our individual efforts, all guided by the Light of this Declaration and with this New Common Sense.

After all, the roaches scatter when a light is shined on them, do they not?

The filters that the "1%" have attempted to install on reality, we can now remove. The New Common Sense itself stands as proof of this.

You have asked us where we stand. You have asked us what we want. We have now given you your first detailed answer.

It's time to change the conversation, will you not agree?

We have a monition for you as well.

We will no longer believe your "anonymous sources," your "unnamed insiders," your unverified "experts" nor do we care for your unsolicited opinions. You can stop telling us what to think and save from extinction the legacy of the media just reporting the facts. Believe it or not, we are fully capable of drawing our own conclusions and do not need your help in that regard. The very existence of this New Common Sense proves that.

We demand complete media transparency. We want accountability in our media and demand that you always declare your sources.

And you may mock The New Common Sense and/or this monition at your peril.

TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AND THE DOMESTIC MILITIA

You are part of the "99%" too. Thus, we realize that you must be victims in this as well.

Please stand with us. We wish for nothing more than for you to join us in solidarity.

For your badges we have no monition. We have only a request plea for you.

We hereby recommit to obey the law as we seek our redress and we respectfully ask that you enforce only the law as it pertains to us, without preventing our right to peaceful assembly.

Thus we should have no conflict.

TO THE "1%"

We certainly do not define you as the whole of the affluent 1% based upon your portfolio and assets. We define you as the affluent who use your wealth to gain self-serving leverage over government.

We understand that you are merely following human nature. We know that you have justified as good the things that you do. We are aware that our own apathy has contributed to this situation that we all find ourselves in today. We can even admit that given the opportunity, we might have done some of the same things you've done.

After all, who doesn't want more wealth? It's the American Dream after all.

However, the rift between us has become too wide. You have become too consumed by greed. Do you see all of this as a game? Are you addicted to Wall Street in the same way a gambler is addicted to the casino? Cannot you even see that ultimately you will destroy our way of life, yours included, with your greed and lust for power? And do you not realize that by destroying the Middle Class you are actually eliminating your main source of income?

The games that you insist on playing with our society will ultimately become your own ruin. Destroy our economy and you destroy yourselves with it.

But do you not feel it? Do you not realize that time is running out? Don't you know that it might be "game over" soon?

You may feel that in this race against time, that you must "lock us down" and control us. You urge the government to violate our privacies and attempt to scare us with propaganda churned out by your various mass media machines. You try to silence our collective voice, pollute our conscience as if it were the environment itself and divert our attention in the hopes that we may waste time arguing with ourselves and never realize what you are up to. But we are on to you now. We have found a new common sense.

Lower and lower you do sink, not even realizing that we are all in the same boat. We have news for you. We're going to occupy your life raft too if this continues.

From where we stand in protest. we see your problem as this: Your money cannot buy Truth and this is the lesson that you must learn.

In fact, it is your Achilles' heel.

By now you must have realized that this isn't a "Declaration" at all, but that it is actually an edict. We the People are the rightful holders of true Power in this Nation, shared equally with all, including you, even though we know that you probably do not see it that way. The Truth is the Truth and we are in possession of It now. Your money can only buy you more lies and a false sense of security.

We absolutely do not wish for a "class war" between us. You need to understand, however, that we are quite serious. We're not asking. Stop your corruptions now.

Your monition is as follows:

Do not judge The New Common Sense unfairly and do not attack it. Work with us. Show us proof that you are willing to clean up your act and we shall work with you and for you. Police yourselves and reign in your greed. If you truly want to save this Nation then stop gaming this broken system for your own ends.

If after reading this missive you dare still hold the opinion that we are "sheep", then by all means, allow the sheep to give you a message: No longer may you force us to consume the defecation that you call grass.

TO THE "99%"

By its design The New Common Sense is nothing more than a "voice of reason" that is designed to be compatible with all other past, present and future voices. It was crafted by persons just like you in a true spirit of cooperation and in the hopes that it will serve as a tool by which we can be further unified. It is our hope that it will aid in the start of a new dialog with the "1%" who, by reading this also, will hopefully realize that it's time for them to listen and engage us with respect. It also points out, explains and offers a fully detailed and workable solution to the real core problem that affects us all. It then petitions the simple request for all of us to work together to implement it.

If you suspect that this is an "infiltration" of some sort, then please read it again. We believe that it speaks for itself .

The New Common Sense was crafted to be above and beyond our individual issues, yet it still includes them "under its umbrella" as it shows how we can have our individual issues ultimately addressed. It makes the argument that we first have a serious problem to fix in government before anything else can matter.

This makes it a "first word" on our common plight, but surely not the last. We believe that this is what makes it so special. It's not combative by nature yet it is firm in its demands and explicit in its proposal. It deliberately avoids specific issues that do not directly support the main thesis. It's merely honest and forthright in its tone. It is also designed to breed inspiration and is meant to be used as a starting point upon which you are all encouraged to follow up on with your own forms of public discourse going forward.

Please embrace The New Common Sense fully and help distribute it as fast and as far as you can! If this so much as touches your hands or crosses your eyes then it is critical that you must help distribute it immediately. If you can afford to print copies, please do so. If you can upload it and share, please do so. If you can tell others about this or share links to it, please do so. An "audio book" version is also being released for the benefit of the blind (who are of course part of the 99%, too!) and distributed as well.

Each and every one of us must stand together and treat all ideas such as this with the utmost of importance. We must act now! If we show apathy or delay then we may lose our opportunity to help instigate true change and we may never have another chance to be heard. Don't think for a minute that the "1%" isn't plotting and scheming for a way to prevent us from being able to speak out like this again. If we show any weakness at this point, if we make the same mistakes that other failed movements have made (such as by not staying decentralized or by choosing sides on issues instead of standing together against a problem-- BIG difference!), if we don't act now and unite, then we may lose what could be our last chance to ever right these wrongs.

The author(s) have decided to remain anonymous in order for this to stand as a true gift to the masses. All ego has thus been removed as there is now no personal credit to be had. However, there is another reason that is not so altruistic that we must be honest about. We are also anonymous for our own protection. The "1%" is playing hard ball. They might go to great lengths to make sure that Truths like this do not see the light of day. Therefore we do it as a protection for all of us. We also do it to keep them guessing, right out of the Sun Tzu playbook. For all they know, this could have come from anywhere, even from their own back yard. This is to our advantage (because it very well might be true).

Also, in order to protect this document, an insurance file has been made that can be opened only by the actual author(s) and it is also being distributed. In the unforeseen case that the document should ever become corrupted and it becomes necessary to prove the source of the original (or the actual text of the original itself if it becomes diluted or corrupted), then we will be able to do so. The insurance file also allows us to release true updates for this if they are ever needed and allows us to prove source because we can then release the old insurance password to prove that since only we could know it while providing a new one for the update which would replace it. In this way, you can be sure that it came from the same source.

If you see this insurance file, please download it and copy it. Please distribute it also. It is the only thing that stands between this message and its destruction. It is what will allow this to stay whole long enough to distribute without being infiltrated and diluted (or worse).

An MD5 sum (a sort of "serial number" generated from the data of a file that can be used as a way to insure that a file hasn't been modified, please Google it if you'd like to learn more about it and do not know what it is) is also included in the insurance file so that anyone can check and verify that the digital release of this document is in fact the original, since the MD5 sum will change if it was altered in any way.

Now for a necessary word about copyright. While this document is being given freely to the public domain without any duplication or distribution restrictions so long as they remain non-profit, the copyright is being reserved and all modifications are discouraged as another means of a protection from those who may wish to modify it with the intention to dilute and/or discredit it. So please make no changes to this? Just pass it on, if you would.

Did we say that there is no credit to be had for this? Well, we misspoke. The credit belongs to you! Since this document was originally gifted to our minds through the process of carefully collecting public opinion, it really does come from you, the "collective conscience" that is mentioned at the very beginning. We merely collected the ideas that we found to be most popular and attempted to put them into words.

So go ahead, take the credit, you've earned it!

May we digress for a moment and inject a few personal notes? This was originally written with the intent for it to be nothing more than a simple Declaration. It had the working title of "A New Declaration of Interdependence". Only when it was completed and fully edited did we see it as a whole and realize that we may have actually achieved something beyond just that. In fact, we received a great surprise when we compared it to the classic historical treatise by Thomas Paine, known as "Common Sense" (published in 1776 and yet completely out of our minds during the period that we crafted this). When we compared it, we noticed that it too was written with the exact same intentions as ours and that we have indeed achieved a document that we believe is at nearly the same level. Hence, it became obvious that this should be given the title of The New Common Sense. We can only hope that it has the same impact of the original. W can make no apology for its length. It needed to be complete and unabridged because there is no time to do this piecemeal. We wish we could have made it shorter, but we truly believe that everything in it had to be said. Therefore, we worked hard on it up front to make it as thorough and as complete as possible so that it can be catapulted as is into the public discussion, and fast! Oh, and "Common Sense" was much longer than this even if we include the monitions section when we compare size.

How you can easily and immediately help:

By affixing a signature, you may convert The New Common Sense into a letter and make it your own. Send it to your congressmen, the media, to friends and family, to corporations. Send it to anyone and everyone that you can.

By collecting signatures, you may transform it into a petition. You can even combine it with others who have done the same and create larger petitions.

By working together to distribute The New Common Sense to the "99%" and "1%" alike, we will turn this into a unifying movement and change the course of history!

Please, don't allow The New Common Sense to be in vain. Sign it, own it, send it, copy it. Please help spread it far and wide, as fast as possible. We have no more time to lose.

Lets "Occupy The Constitution!" And may we receive our Due Justice and see a speedy and peaceful return to the Constitutional Republic that we were supposed to inherit.

A space for signature(s) is placed at the bottom of the "Our Petition" chapter. We hope that by now you have already seen it?

Good luck! Thank you for embracing and sharing The New Common Sense in advance, and may we all further unite and take our country back as One (but without the percent, unless they shape up of course)!

Thanksgiving ~ Día de acción de gracias

2011-11-24T13:38:00.001-08:00

I'm here in Oregon hanging out with my dad and my step-mom getting food and things ready for our guests who will arrive shortly.

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday. It started out from the Puritans giving thanks to the Indians for their having provided a feast to the new poor, starving immigrants.

How did whitey pay it forward? What follows is a brief history of American immigration.

~~~

Estoy aquí en Oregon en casa de mi papá y mi madrastra y estamos preparando la comida y demás cosas para nuestros invitados que no tardan en llegar.

El Día de acción de gracias es un día festivo extraño. Tiene sus orígenes en la historia estadunidense cuando los puritanos agradecieron a los indígenas por haberles dado un festín cuando se morían de hambre, estos nuevos inmigrantes.

A continuación, la una breve historia migratoria de los EE.UU. (Ojo: los gringos no fueron tan generosos como los indígenas fueron con ellos).

~~~

1795 Naturalization Act restricts citizenship to "free white persons" who reside in the United States for five years and renounce their allegiance to their former country.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricts Chinese immigration.

1923 In the landmark case of United States v. Bhaghat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court rules that Indians from the Asian subcontinent could not become naturalized U.S. citizens.

1934 The Tydings-McDuffie Act, which provided for independence for the Philippines on July 4, 1946, strips Filipinos of their status as U.S. nationals and severely restricted Filipino immigration by establishing an annual immigration quota of 50.

1942 Filipinos are reclassified as U.S. citizens, making it possible for them to register for the military. Executive Order 9066 authorizes the military to evacuate 112,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast and placed them in ten internment camps.

1944 In the case of United States v. Korematsu, the Supreme Court upholds the internment of Japanese Americans as constitutional.

1954 Operation Wetback forces the return of undocumented workers to Mexico. [What a name!]

Source:
"Landmarks in Immigration History". Digital History. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/immigration_chron.cfm

This generation

2011-11-22T20:26:00.001-08:00

This is the future! The practically-minded, socially-aware, environmentally-conscious way of life is the future, and it is now!

We can consume anything from any age: we can dress however we like, listen to music from any age, and read whatever we please. For lunch: fourty-nine dolmas, all-you-can-eat dim sum, and eighty tacos al pastor, all out of a taco truck at 3am on Mission Street in San Francisco.

And we are empowered! We are knowledgable! We are unstoppable!

We can make anything we need to use, retrieve anything we need to know, and share everything that needs to be talked about:
like Tahrir Square in Egypt
like the quad at UC Davis
like Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley
like Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland
like Zuccotti Park in New York
like 14th Street
like Wall Street
like all streets

The future is now! The future is here!

Step right up! There's an amazing selection of technological tools at your disposal. (Brought to you by slave labor and environmental devastation in China.)

Step right up! There's a just-as-amazing parade of paradoxes to gawk at:
We’re free as consumers, but not as citizens. (Just ask Ben and Jerry if they can get married.)
We’re free to consume, but not to create. (Just ask a tagger whose name isn't Banksy.)
We’re free to be schooled, but not to be educated. (Just last spring, I took a trip to hike the north rim of the achievement gap.)
Once upon a time, the fairy tale ended without a "happily ever after" when we realized that a far larger power laid claim to the land beneath your feet, and didn’t want you to dance on it anymore.

There can be no rebellion, only an inexorable march toward those virtues which have made all that’s right in the world: education, fraternity, liberty, respect, art, beauty, nature. These are the light and the light can be seen by anyone who has eyes. That’s where I come in.

This is a manifesto, my manifesto.

I write this in peace, for peace. Yet I take up arms against the forces of darkness and I surrender my weapons only to the God. My mission is to bring light through education. I am only one man, and I cannot do battle against the entire forces of darkness, but what I will is to share my light among others, some of whom will in turn share theirs. I may not be around to see the end result, but I will die in peace with the assurance that I answered the call to arms and charged into Battle, making the world brighter with every step.

This is the future, our future!

The fool looks at the finger when it is pointed at the moon. Our technology is a finger and it points to knowledge and inter-connectedness. It points to wonder, intelligent organization, and an underlying order to seemingly random chaos. We must not, must not, must not become entranced by this magic mirror lest we become dazed and fall in love with ourselves. It is a portal to a part of our world we are just beginning to understand, the world created by our mind.

We begin to understand that this is *our* world. It belongs to all of us. We have the tools we need to advance society on our own. We have the power in our hands, and we're ready for the responsibility to determine our own destiny. We've proven that the media is us, and that we are the media. We've shown that the government is us, and that we are the government. We're showing that we no longer need to consent to be governed because *we* can govern.

This is our future.

After the revolution

2011-11-22T16:49:00.001-08:00

The seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organization on a planned basis. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. And at this point, in a certain sense, man finally cuts himself off from the animal world, leaves the condition of animal existence behind him, and enters conditions which are really human. The conditions of existence forming man’s environment, which up to now have dominated man, who now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and insofar as he has become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as external, dominated laws of nature, will then be applied by man with complete understanding, and hence will be dominated by man. Men’s own social organization, which has hitherto stood in opposition to them as if arbitrarily decreed by nature and history will then become the voluntary act of men themselves. The objective, external forces which have hitherto dominated history, will then pass under the control of men themselves. It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history; it is only from this point that the social causes set in motion by men will have, predominantly and in constantly increasing measure, the effects willed by men. It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. To carry through this world-emancipating act is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. And it is the task of scientific socialism, the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, to establish the historical conditions and with these the nature of this act, and thus to bring to the consciousness of the now-oppressed class the conditions and nature of the act which it is its destiny to accomplish.

Source:
Friederich Engels. Anti-Dühring.

Beat Poets not beat poets

2011-11-20T22:06:00.001-08:00

by Robert Hass

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent undergraduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

Source:
Robert Hass. "Poet-Bashing Police". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html?_r=2&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all

Nov 20 - UC Davis students send a powerful message to their chancellor

2011-11-20T21:13:00.001-08:00

by Lee Fang and Zack Whitaker

It was not what you heard, but what you did not hear. A deafening silence of hushed voices but seething anger. The video was painfully awkward to watch as an outside observer, whilst equally inspiring and poignant. The contempt could be sliced through the air from the disgust felt by the students there.

A few commenters and people on Twitter have asked why the chancellor is at the center of this firestorm over the police pepper spraying. Chancellor Katehi approved of the police action (though specifics of what she ordered exactly are still a mystery), and ordered the UC Davis cops to evict the protesters, resulting in the heinous pepper spraying video now plastered everywhere on the web. She has not apologized to the students or worked to remedy the situation — for instance, one student who was pepper sprayed told me she still has health problems after the incident, and no one from the administration contacted her to see if she’s okay. Katehi’s refusal to condemn the police action has only made a bad situation worse.

A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.

On Wednesday, November 19, within hours of the attack on the students, UC Davis police were forced to issue a press statement defending their actions.

“Students were given warnings to leave their tents [pitched on campus] by 3 p.m.”, it said. “The protest initially involved about 50 students”, Annette Spicuzza, UC Davis’ police chief said. “Some were wearing protective gear and some held batons”.

The final insult was when she said: “Officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them”, adding, “There was no way out of the circle”.

It makes one see there could have been at least two sides to the story. Perhaps the students were being unruly, or defiant, or armed and ready to commit violence. It was possible, and had been previously witnessed in England during the student protests.

But the statement was spin, and the spin doctor who wrote that statement was clearly unaware that citizens had recorded the event in full, and could in no way document the blasé attitude of the police officer, spraying the students at point-blank range with a thick fog of violent pepper-spray.

The video had been published to YouTube, where it has amassed nearly a million viewers in just over 24 hours, but clearly had not been seen by those who released the pro-police spin.

The next day at a news conference, describing the video images as “chilling”, Katehi said that a task-force would be set up to investigate the actions of the police during the clearly peaceful demonstration.

A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave the press conference. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).

Sources:
Zack Whitaker. "UC Davis: Official 'spin' crumbles in the face of "too many videos". ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/uc-davis-official-spin-crumbles-in-the-face-of-too-many-videos/13347

Lee Fang. "Breaking Video: UC Davis Chancellor Emerges From Press Conf., Tells Me She Didn’t Feel Threatened". The Second Alarm. http://thesecondalarm.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/ucdavis-chancellor-video/

Censored: #occupywallstreet

2011-11-19T11:52:00.001-08:00

Has Twitter acted to silence Occupy Wall Street? As a new generation of protesters relies on social media to get their message across, doubts are beginning to surface that the latest tool for popular revolution is firmly in corporate hands.

As OWS protestors gathered at intersections around Wall Street Thursday, their plans to stop traders from ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange was quickly thwarted by a heavy-handed police response.With an estimated 400 arrested and demonstrators complaining of police brutality, the coordinated nationwide clampdown by local authorities is in full effect.But amid the historic level of civic protest that has not been seen in the United States in a generation, many were wondering: “Why isn’t Occupy Wall Street trending on Twitter?”

Twitter: an instrument for change?

Twitter, the online social networking service that enables users to send and read text-based posts known as “tweets,” has long been touted as a tool helping grassroots organizers foment social and political change. During the contentious 2009 Iranian presidential elections, the US State Department reportedly worked with Twitter to help expand its access in Iran. In what would ultimately be dubbed the “Twitter Revolution,” activists relied heavily on Twitter and other social networking sites as they coordinated their activities against the ruling regime.Washington was also said to have asked Twitter to delay maintenance plans so Iranian activists could communicate with each other.

Likewise, social media advocates heralded the dawn of a new age when the use of Twitter became instrumental in organizing revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, ultimately igniting the Arab Spring in late 2010/early 2011.

Occupy Wall Street meanwhile, which started as a small spark in downtown New York on September 17, has since spread like wildfire around the world. Having been largely ignored by the mainstream media, the protestors in the square-block Zuccotti Park, located in the heart of New York’s financial district, did what protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square did; they relied on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to coordinate their actions.But what happened when the cyber utopians struck at the heart of an empire that Twitter itself is a part of? That is a calculation that many Occupy Wall Street Protestors apparently did not make.

Twiter Remains SilentCritics have argued that at the movement’s inception on September 17 and again on October 1, when some 700 OWS protestors were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, #occupywallstreet did not appear on the Twitter trending list.

According to some activists, on both September 17 and October 1, #occupywallstreet tweets were occurring in greater frequency than other top trending topics which appeared on Twitter’s homepage. So why did it not show up as a trend?Sean Garnett, Twitter’s vice president of communications, claimed in a statement posted on quora.com that this most likely occurred because the public “don't have access to our trends algorithm and may not have access to the full firehose of tweets.” Others have counted misspellings and other variations of phrasing that could have lead to the phenomenon.However, using Trendistic, a statistic-based trending analytic tool around, Jonathan Albright, a PhD. Researcher at the University of Auckland, said the data seems to contradict the primary arguments about how topics trend on Twitter – their relative newness, volume, and related spikes in interest.

First, Albright compared #occupywallstreet with two other topics that trended on October 1; #whatyoushouldknowaboutme and #october. Comparing the data, Albright discovered that #october had been on Twitter for much longer than #occupywallstreet and did not experience a dramatically greater peak in activity. Meanwhile, #whatyoushouldknowaboutme, which trended nearly all day, had a less dramatic peak in overall tweets than #occupywallstreet.

Meanwhile, Emily Chambliss from Attention, a global social media marketing agency, determined in her own statistical analysis:

"In the first week, average mentions per day were an unimpressive 18.8 mentions per day. Not many people were talking about Occupy Wall Street. After the start of occupation on 9/17 and up until 9/23, average mentions per day increased by a whopping 2,004 per cent. The following week had a 97 per cent increase over the week prior, and the week after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests saw a 216 per cent increase in average mentions per day."

So #occupywallstreet was relatively new, very hot, experienced great peaks in activity, but did not trend. Whatever the reason, it raises doubts about Twitter’s claim its automatically-generated algorithm “rewards discussions that are new to Twitter."

Twitter: a corporate tool

Many activists believe Twitter is working against Occupy Wall Street at the behest of corporate interests.In March of 2011, Bloomberg news reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co., arguably the largest corporate bank in the world, “has invested in a fund that has bought about $400 million in Twitter Inc. shares.With an estimated value of $4.5 billion dollars and one of the world’s major financial service providers heavily invested in it, Twitter might be a favorite tool of the “99 per cent”, but their interests obviously do not correspond with them.In the end, Twitter might be more than happy to help the US government overthrow undesirable regimes in other parts of the world. But when it comes to giving voice to those who have decided to challenge a system of corporate greed and income inequality at home, silence might ultimately figure better into their bottom line.

Source:
"Censored: #occupywallstreet". RT.com. http://rt.com/news/twitter-ows-protest-censorship-653/

Nov. 18 - Police pepper spray and arrest students at UC Davis

2011-11-19T09:37:00.001-08:00

[...] As we recently concluded, the use of pepper spray “may be reasonable as a general policy to bring an arrestee under control, but in a situation in which an arrestee surrenders and is rendered helpless, any reasonable officer would know that a continued use of the weapon or a refusal without cause to alleviate its harmful effects constitutes excessive force.” LaLonde v. County of Riverside, 204 F.3d 947, 961 (9th Cir.2000) (emphasis supplied). Because the officers had control over the protestors it would have been clear to any reasonable officer that it was unnecessary to use pepper spray to bring them under control[...]
Source:
HEADWATERS FOREST DEFENSE v. COUNTY OF HUMBOLDT. United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1332957.html

When Hope Comes Back

2011-11-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

by Josh Healy, on Nov. 16 on Savio Steps in Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley

When Hope Comes Back
(A Poem for the 99%)

when Hope comes back
he will be more than a campaign slogan
and a face on a poster faded red, white, and blue
he will not come from a presidential palace
bought and paid for like a Citibank stock option villa
he will put not forget to put on his walking shoes
and join the picket lines in New York
the bread lines in Baltimore
to shake the calloused hands
of everyone walking by
when Hope comes back
he might be named Barack
but he won’t be named Obama

when Hope comes back
he will be a Black Panther baby
who speaks Spanglish
and cooks Korean tacos
and does 180 sun salutations
to the soundtrack of Zion I
- yes, Hope is hella Bay

when Hope comes back
he will be a UFW farmworker
who loves his fields and his flag
more than he hates his foreman
he will be a runaway foster child
who forgives his parents
he will be an Iraq war veteran
who returns to protest in Oakland again
without tear gas canisters to his head

when Hope comes back
he will come back from the future
in a DeLorean like Michael J. Fox
and show us all the things we’d won
like people swimming across the Rio Grande
for fun rather than survival
and the only student debt being to our livers
rather than to our banks
and then Michael J would take us
for a ride back to the past
and show us this is not our first occupation
Flint, sit-down strikers in ’36
Alcatraz, American Indian Movement in ’69
Sproul Plaza, Free Speech Movement in ’64
and every semester since then that was worth a damn
and reminded Berkeley what it means
to be called Berkeley

when Hope comes back
he will be one of my students
East Asia meets East Oakland
brilliantly cross-continental
even though he hates the ocean
speaks with the wisdom of Buddha and Mac Dre
really, he is my teacher
and I think he knows it
and we’re both ok with that

when Hope comes back
he will actually be a she
because hey, that’s who actually gets shit done
she will be a librarian by day, a DJ by night,
an Occupy activist in between
she will be thick hair and thick hips
and if you try to touch either one
you’ll get a thick hand to the face

when Hope comes back
she’ll show us to burn down the banks in our
hearts and love without lust or profit or restraining orders

when Hope comes back
she will be an OPD cop,
then NYPD, then UCPD,
refusing to follow orders
putting down their riot gear
and picking up a picket sign
cuz when the cops join the 99% they actually belong to
that’s when the banks will have nowhere to hide

when Hope comes back
she will be a midwife
in tune with the moon and the womb
an ancient healer who knows every herb in the redwoods
ready to help us birth a new world
one without bombs or borders or Michelle Bachman
a planet of peoples free to honor the earth
and each other like the God
in whose image we’re still trying to evolve into

when Hope comes back
she will be here
right here, right now
on the streets and plazas and parks
of New York and DC
Milwaukee and Austin
Portland and Nashville
London and Manila and Cairo
San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, CA
with the people and the hashtags
setting up her tent in the morning
paintings banners in the afternoon
attending ridicously long meetings in the evening
shutting down the port of Oakland
and reminding us all that yes,
Hope still lives here in America
she has always lived here with us

and now she is back before our eyes
marching head high, fist higher
and whispering to the millions amongst her,
“Thank you.
Thank you.
You’re bringing me back.
Take my hand,
feel my pulse joined with yours.
Trust my taste on your tongue,
my strength in your lungs,
and let’s see how far we can go
together.”

Source:
Josh Healy. http://joshhealey.org/2011/11/16/when-hope-comes-back/

What the hell is taking so long?

2011-11-19T03:05:00.001-08:00

posted Nov. 13Going to sleep every night knowing that your friends may be assaulted at any moment can be nerve wracking. It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street, or rather Nightmare on 14th Street, and instead of Freddy Kruger we have Jean Quan and the OPD. We don’t know when the attack will occur and we cannot stop it from occurring but we also need to get some sleep eventually.

The Oakland Police Department might raid Occupy Oakland at any moment, although that has been true for at least 48 hours. Everybody thought the raid was going to happen last night, either at 8pm or 1am or 4:30am, but none of those predictions (mine was the latter) proved to be true.

Is this game of chicken being played by Quan an example of psychological warfare or political incompetence?

Those of us outside City Hall have no way of knowing for certain. We have to assume the most likely possibility, that a raid continues to be imminent though unpredictable. But there are some other factors that have come to light that we should all be aware of as well.

First, it would seem that the “best” time for a raid is the very early hours of the morning–3am to 5am–on a weeknight, when few people are at the camp and fewer are able to arrive as many will have to go to work. So it would seem they may be holding out for Monday or Tuesday morning–more on that below.

Second, according to Bay Citizen, Oakland is in jeopardy of losing at least some mutual aid from neighboring police departments.

“There are some chiefs and some city councils that I think are upset with having to keep sending officers to Oakland,” Sgt. J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department told told Bay Citizen. “And their point is: ‘Why are we sending people there when their own mayor can’t make a decision on what to do?’”

Many members of local law enforcement are in open revolt–rhetorically, anyway–with the Oakland Police union saying they are “confused” by Quan’s inability to make a decision, and now the City of Berkeley turning down mutual aid with University of California Police. It’s hard to see them getting too excited about sending cops to Oakland.

This is a serious problem for Quan, the City Council and OPD. Actually, many on the City Council relish the fact that Quan is unable to act because they are benefiting from her mismanagement of this issue. But that is beside the point.

Let’s clear up the difficulty here. OPD is perfectly capable of expelling Occupy Oakland from the Plaza during a 4am raid. If they do so again, I suspect they will succeed.

But then they will be responsible for holding down the Plaza for several weeks, not allowing anybody to enter or exit. Setting up fences outside of the perimeter had no effect on keeping us out the last time and it will have no effect this time, either. No, OPD will need to setup a military operation at the Plaza for several weeks, denying entry to everybody.

There are 647 members of the Oakland Police Department. Total. We often have more than that number of people at a General Assembly, not to mention the thousands who showed up after the previous raid and tens of thousands who participated in the General Strike. Is the City of Oakland and OPD prepared to commit 400 riot police, ie 50 along each edge of the Plaza, indefinitely? Would that even work? And would the mutual aid agreements hold up under such a plan?

To carry this out would entail a full-blown military operation. Maintaining order in this situation could require the National Guard, but this is not a national emergency. It’s a fucking camp. Shutting it down will be more chaotic than allowing it to remain, as we have already seen.

This is one of those moments that people talk about that never seem to happen until it finally does and then everybody is taken by surprise. “If everybody just stopped working,” us activists sometimes say, “then capitalism could no longer exploit us.” Still waiting on that one. Or, “if Black people in the South just sat down at those lunch counters, nobody could stop them.” That one actually worked out pretty well. This time it’s, “if people keep coming back, the cops cannot hold the Plaza.” It is not about 50 or 100 “violent” black bloc members confronting the police–they will be dispensed with ruthlessly but swiftly. On the other hand, thousands of militant activists, concerned citizens and supporters would be an unstoppable force.

Everybody who has thought this through realizes this is the case. That is one reason why this is all taking so long. The Chamber of Commerce is up in arms but if Quan were to unleash the hounds then she would likely lose whatever progressive support she still has. Don’t believe the lies–there is still massive support for Occupy Oakland, whatever the official polls reveal. We had two marches in the last two days and the cars stuck in traffic loved us, honking and pumping their fists in support.

Third, and this screws everything up all over again for Quan, UC Berkeley students have called for a strike on Tuesday. Quan does not want to crack down on Tuesday morning because mutual aid for that day may be impossible, even if it were politically feasible. Maybe this makes Monday more likely, but again the police forces are already planning for Tuesday and Monday’s crackdown wold just piss off the kids at Cal even more. And can Quan really wait until Wednesday?

What she really wants is to come to some sort of an agreement in order to avoid a violent expulsion. Word is going around the camp that members of Occupy Oakland who represent nobody but themselves–and are currently nowhere to be seen–are attempting to come to a resolution with the city. I doubt anybody here is going to go for that and at least one of the “eviction” orders states that Jefferson Park and Snow Park are off limits, which would have been the two places that would be recommended. So these guys are wasting everybody’s time and should just stop. They have their seat at the table, but it’s the kids table. Nobody gives a shit about what they have to say in their supposed negotiations, other than Quan who is just trying to keep them in the fold.

Nobody knows what will happen next or when it will happen but it will likely be a chaotic mess and we are likely to either hold the Plaza or regain it within a few days. The only question is how much violence Quan and the OPD are willing to inflict before we continue marching forward.

Source:
Occupied Oakland Tribune.

Tragedy at 14th and Broadway

2011-11-19T03:01:00.001-08:00

posted to Occupied Oakland Tribune on Nov. 11It was supposed to be a night of quiet celebration, a birthday party commemorating the one month anniversary of Occupy Oakland. The real action was going to happen up Telegraph Avenue at UC Berkeley–we in Oakland were just going to eat cake. So when when the explosive bursts rang out as I approached the south side of Oscar Grant Plaza while crossing 14th Street, many of us were incredulous that they could be gunshots. “I think somebody shot a pellet gun,” one woman told me at the amphitheater. A few other people scurried in panic but there couldn’t possibly have been a shooting here, it seemed, in spite of the media hysterics about violence in Oscar Grant Plaza. After all, this is a peaceful encampment.

The northern corridor of the Plaza was a completely different scene, however. A few dozen teenagers, the kids who hang out in the Plaza every night, stood in a chaotic circle just past the BART entrance as folks from the camp ran toward them.

Moments later, an Occupy Oakland medic jumped on top of the victim and began performing CPR while others helped break up the circle to create room for the emergency workers who began to arrive. There must have been a moment of panic among others–as there was in myself–as the first responders arrived but Occupiers were vigilant in making room for the paramedics, firefighters and, yes, even the police. The chaotic confrontation that could have erupted was avoided by cool heads and strong organization by many experienced activists.

Stories have circulated about a TV news videographer being attacked for attempting to film the scene, resulting in a concussion. I did not witness that incident but it is definitely unfortunate. One photojournalist who was at the scene told me that “some of those TV guys” can be very aggressive in that sort of crime scene and backed herself up as soon as she saw the confrontation. In that context, it was not surprising that somebody felt they needed to defend the dignity of the victim, even if they took things further than necessary.

On the other hand, I did overhear a KCBS radio reporter on the scene comment on the fact that the shooting occurred just beyond the meditation tent. “I love it,” he chuckled with a big grin on his face.

I am a critic of the corporate media but I also recognize that most journalists are a part of the 99%. Many of them are decent people trying to make a living by telling an honest story but the cynicism and condescending commentary among some of them can be disturbing. Those journalists in the media who feel they have been disrespected by the Occupiers should consider taking a look at the behavior of some of their colleagues.

For my own part, I reflexively pulled out my phone and began to take a picture only to lower it in embarrassment at my own insensitivity just as the flash went off, capturing nothing more than a snapshot of the walkway directly in front of me which I promptly deleted. It just seemed too awful, in the middle of this tragedy, to take a picture of this young man as his life slipped away.

The police quickly put up their yellow tape and then repositioned it moments later to cover most of the northern corridor of Oscar Grant Plaza, literally hanging the tape at the edge of the grass-covered encampment. For a moment it seemed that they were going to transform the entire camp into a crime scene. Once again, however, cooler heads on our side prevailed in spite of the escalation on the part of the police.

Shortly afterward, the media parade began while many around Occupy Oakland were wheeping at the tragic death of this youth that most of us did not know. Three helicopters flew overhead and Councilmember Larry Reid arrived on the scene. The previous day he and several other Councilmembers attempted to hold a press conference near Lake Merritt–presumably City Hall was too chaotic, but not too chaotic for this photo-op–before they were shouted down by Occupiers. In the same form on Thursday night, he announced that he had nothing more to say as soon as a few questions were asked about Scott Olsen and others who were seriously injured by the police. Apparently, only violence that legitimizes his political position is worth discussing, not the violence inflicted on peaceful protesters. And that’s all Jean Quan’s fault anyway, in case you were wondering.

Even Police Chief Howard Jordan was on the scene with an impromptu press conference before he too was shouted down. “Turn the lights on!” people shouted, regarding the lack of electricity at the Plaza over the last few days. Jordan promptly disappeared behind the yellow tape, having received his appropriate amount of face time.

Anybody who has watched The Wire will find these scenes all too familiar. Politicians are much quicker to jump out in front of a crisis for the benefit of their own careers than they are to offer real solutions. To be perfectly blunt, this was the one hundred and first murder in Oakland this year. Where were all the helicopters for the other one hundred? Where was Jordan–or his predecessor Batts–for those photo-ops? The tragic death of a young African-American man is suddenly made “important” by the political crisis around Occupy Oakland and the opportunity that the establishment sees in the impending take-down of Jean Quan. Like the Bush administration sharpening it’s knives after 9/11, salivating over the opportunity to reshape the Middle East, the Oakland political establishment sees their opportunity to win a few political points over a dead man’s barely cold body.

It has become increasingly clear that a raid will happen and soon, possibly as early as tonight. The temperature in this city has been ramped up so high over the last couple of days that Jean Quan’s political survival depends on it. Every day that Occupy Oakland continues to exist is another nail in the coffin of her career and her rivals in the City Council and now the Chamber of Commerce have made that clear. They all agree that it cannot continue and are now going all in, insistent that the Plaza needs to be emptied out of various supposedly unsavory elements.

Whatever faults of Occupy Oakland found by Jean Quan and the City Council pale in comparison to the deeper structural problems of the city. Anybody who thinks that crime in downtown Oakland began with the occupation should say that statement out loud and hear how ridiculous it sounds. Ten years ago I lived on 14th and Harrison, just three blocks away from the Plaza which I walked past every day on my way to BART. Yes, Larry Reid, there was crime in downtown Oakland even then. I was personally mugged on the southwest corner of 14th and Broadway and, as far as I can remember, there were no tents on the lawn at the time.

This is part of what we are protesting. Occupy Oakland has always been about more than Wall Street and inequality. In many ways it is an organic outgrowth of the struggle around the murder of Oscar Grant and the failure of the city to meet the social crisis faced by its population. Billions of dollars flow through the Port of Oakland while impoverished workers live just footsteps away. Many of them stood on their lawns as Occupy Oakland marched to shut down the Port during the General Strike. They are the people who have suffered the brunt of inequality, racism, police brutality and more. They are the people who can transform this city and they are on our side.

The young man, whose name we are told is “Alex,” died shortly after the shooting. Now, the city is going to use his death to unleash yet another assault on a peaceful encampment, likely producing only more tragedies and needless assaults as they did on people like Scott Olsen, Kayvan Sabeghi and Scott Campbell. We need to stand strong against this impending assault but also be aware that it could be even more severe than the last two attacks by the police. The city is no longer looking for a temporary solution–they have made it clear that they are now intent on eliminating Occupy Oakland altogether and they are preparing a brutal assault over the next few days.

Another Oakland is possible. So far, there is no sign that it will come from inside City Hall but it just might come from the mass democracy taking place in the amphitheater and the encampment outside if we are able to defend it.

Source:
Occupy Oakland Tribune. http://occupiedoaktrib.org/2011/11/11/tragedy-at-14th-and-broadway/

The cop group coordinating the Occupy crackdowns

2011-11-19T02:55:00.001-08:00

by Shawn Gaynor

As cities across America evict encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement, similarities of timing, talking points and tactics among major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs have led critics to wonder: Is some sort of national coordination going on?

The White House says there’s no federal oversight. Speaking November 15 aboard Air Force One, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said “The president’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues.”

But a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events.

Speaking to Democracy Now! On November 17, PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler acknowledged PERF's coordination of a series of conference-call strategy sessions with big-city police chiefs. These calls were distinct from the widely reported national conference calls of major metropolitan mayors.

The coordination of political crackdowns on the Occupy movement has been conducted behind closed doors, with city officials and PERF refusing to say how many cities participated in the conference calls and the exact nature of the discussions. Reports of at least a dozen cities and some indication of as many as 40 accepting PERF advice and/or strategic documents include San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Portland, Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington DC.

The San Francisco Police Department and Mayor Ed Lee's office did not returned the Guardian's request for comment about the PERF calls by press time. However, Oakland interim Police Chief Howard Jordan was quoted by the Associated Press confirming Oakland and San Francisco police involvement in the strategy sessions.

PERF coordinated a November 10 conference call with city police chiefs across the country – and many of these cities undertook crackdowns shortly afterward.

"We know that there were influential conference calls of private groups that include police chiefs who played key roles in repressing the anti-globalization movement, in order to stage rolling attacks on occupations across the country,” said Baruca Peller, an organizer for Occupy Oakland. “In less than a week an unprecedented number of protesters have been brutalized and arrested, and in many cities such as Oakland these evictions were pushed for by the local one-percent.”

“Occupy Oakland is calling for a national day of re-occupation on Saturday, to let them know that if they can take a national offensive against us, we can take a national offensive in response and we will re-take these public spaces and what is already ours."

According to PERF's website, general membership in the group is exclusive to “the executive head of a municipal, county or state-funded agency that provides general police services. The agency must have at least 100 full-time employees, or serve a population of 50,000 or more people.”

PERF’s current and former directors read as a who's who of police chiefs involved in crackdowns on anti-globalization and political convention protesters resulting in thousands of arrests, hundreds of injuries, and millions of dollars paid out in police brutality and wrongful arrest lawsuits.

These current and former U.S. police chiefs -- along with top ranking police union officials and representatives from Canadian and British police -- have been marketing to municipal police forces and politicians their joint experiences as specialists on policing mass demonstrations.

Chairing PERF's board of directors is Philadelphia Police Commissioner and former Washington D.C. Metro Police Chief Charles Ramsey, who was responsible for coordinating the police response to protests against international banking institutions including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those protests, and Ramsey's response to massive anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC in the lead up the the Iraq War, often resulted in preemptive mass arrest of participants that were later deemed to be unconstitutional.

Ramsey's predecessor as organization chair is former Philadelphia Police Commissioner and former Miami Police Chief John Timoney, who is responsible for the so called “Miami Model,” coined after the police crackdown on the 2003 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas protest. The police response to protesters in Miami lead to hundreds of injuries to protesters. The ACLU won multiple suits against the Miami P.D. over abuse to protesters and free speech concerns.

Prior to the 2003 protest, Timoney was quoted as saying that the FTAA was “the first big event for homeland security … the first real realistic run-through to see how it would work.”

Timoney arrived in Miami with plenty of baggage. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Timoney coordinated a crackdown that resulted in more than 420 arrests with only 13 convictions, none of which resulted in jail time. As in Miami, there was well documented abuse of some of the people arrested.

Also among PERF's directors is Minneapolis police chief Tim Dolan, who was responsible for the crackdown on protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That event also resulted in lawsuits, protester injuries and an outcry from the national press about police brutality and the preemptive nature of the police action.

PERF is more than a mere policy group. Wexler has personally represented PERF at major political events, in face-to-face dialog with police tactical commanders and leadership. That was the case at the 2008 Republican National Convention, where Wexler and Minneapolis Police Chief Dolan coordinated what is widely regarded as one of the most aggressive political crackdowns in recent American history.

Wexler spent the afternoon of October 14 observing Occupy Philadelphia with Philadelphia police commissioner Ramsey.Speaking to the Philadelphia Tribune, Ramsey said: “They wanted to see what the Occupy protesters were doing here in Philadelphia. As we walked through their encampment, almost immediately they were texting other groups around the country – it was happening while we were there and that was very, very interesting. It’s instant communication, and it’s worldwide. We have to become more adept at using the technology. Our police department has its own active Facebook page as a way of reaching out to the community.”

“Had a great one-day conference in Philly about social media – very pertinent these days with the occupy protests ...” Wexler stated from his twitter account.

As the occupation movement grew, PERF began circulating a publication titled Managing Major Events: Best Practices from the Field. The manual – a copy of which we downloaded -- amounts to a how-to guide for policing political events, and gives special attention to policing “Anarchists” and “Eco Terrrorists” at political events.

The guide encourages the use of undercover officers and snatch squads to “grab the bad guys and remove them from the crowd.” It urges local law enforcement to use social media to map the Occupy movement.

An earlier PERF guide Police Management of Mass Demonstrations advocates the use of embedded media to control police messages, the use of undercover cops to infiltrate protest groups, the use and pitfalls of preemptive mass arrest, an examination of the use of less-than-lethal crowd control weapons, and general discussion weighing the use of force in crowd control.

Source:
Shawn Gaynor. "The cop group coordinating the Occupy crackdowns". SF Bay Guardian. http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/11/18/cop-group-coordinating-occupy-crackdowns

Why I got arrested at Oscar Grant Plaza

2011-11-19T02:48:00.001-08:00

by Cami G., graduate student and a member of the media committee of #OO.On February 1, 1960, four students from the all-black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond—strolled into the Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee. Because of the counter’s “whites only” policy, they were refused. Several employees and a manager asked them to leave, but they remained until the store closed, when they peacefully dispersed.

The next day, the teenagers came back, this time joined by fifteen others. Again, they were refused service, and, again, they stayed until closing time. The next day, there were more than sixty demonstrators, and by the fourth day, over 300 people were participating in sit-ins at lunch counters across the city. By the following week, the movement had spread not only throughout the state but across the entire South. The sit-ins lasted for almost six months, and on July 25, due to boycotts, diminishing profits, and outside pressure prompted by the publicity of the sit-ins, Woolworth desegregated all of its stores, allowing blacks to sit at lunch counters and receive the same service as whites.

There were, of course, difficulties before this victory was achieved. On the very first day, one black employee accused the young men, now called the Greensboro Four, of hurting rather than helping race relations. The demonstrators were heckled and threatened by mobs, with some protests turning violent. Many years later in February of 2008, Franklin McCain discussed the danger of blacks demonstrating in the 1960s South: “I had pre-concluded if I were lucky, I would go to prison for a long, long time. If I were not so lucky, I would come back to my university campus in a pine box.” The four also lamented the difficulty of getting people to commit to sitting in the stores from open to close, to returning day after grueling day. Considering all this, one might ask why the right to be served lunch next to white people was important enough to risk their lives devoting five months to idle loitering. One might ask what sitting passively at a lunch counter was expected to accomplish when the enormity of race problems in the South was so overwhelming.

I would argue that small acts like these are the essential building blocks of successful dissent, but we can’t always see at first how they will factor in the account of history. In retrospect, we understand the impact of the Greensboro sit-ins; we know that four black students sitting at a Woolworth five-and-dime was the first domino in a chain that spread to parks, libraries, museums, beaches, and other facilities across the South. We know that it was the catalyst that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated all public spaces. But on February 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four didn’t know that. They only knew that they were tired of talking, tired of waiting for somebody else to do something, and they were going to walk into the store and stand up for themselves by sitting down.

Very early on the morning of November 14, I stood on the edge of the Occupy Oakland encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza and listened to reports that hundreds of riot police were approaching. Admittedly, I was nervous, and I had plans to disappear the moment I faced the possibility of being arrested.

Yet, a few moments later as I watched the police close in, I began to think about what their presence meant, and I began to imagine the disappearance of the camp where I had spent so much of my time and made so many friends in the past weeks. It had all but emptied out as hundreds took to the intersection of 14th and Broadway, drumming and chanting, and the quiet that fell over the vacated tents was eerie. A group of people had silently linked arms at the Interfaith tent, surrounded by candles. Here and there, people sat, meandered aimlessly, packed their belongings, and even slept, but it wasn’t the bustling tent city I had begun to think of as a second home, where I could start a conversation with almost anyone, exchange ideas, hear peoples’ life stories or tell my own, be fed, pick through free books, meditate, learn yoga, listen to people sing and play instruments, and watch children play.

We all knew that there was nothing that we could do to stop what was coming—that we couldn’t defend the camp, and that the police would destroy it no matter what, and they would arrest as many of us as they needed to in the process. We had no choice but to acknowledge that the military arm of the local government was too powerful, and, judging by their billy clubs and tear gas guns, they weren’t afraid to commit violence as they had done before. Many in the camp had already gone to jail and couldn’t risk it again, and still others had jobs, school, and families which they couldn’t abandon to spend a day or more being detained for silly misdemeanors.

All of this led me to a feeling of profound despair. Our reluctant resignation and the imminent dismantling of the camp suddenly represented something more to me. It represented the forced invisibility of millions of people, the overwhelming majority of the planet’s seven billion people, in fact. And it represented the dehumanization of those near and dear to me, too. I thought primarily of my mother, who raised two children in abject poverty, often working more than one job, often tolerating the abuses of an alcoholic husband, often welcoming neighborhood kids into her home when their own homes became too volatile or unstable. This latter detail about my mother is what emerged most prominent in my mind—the fact that despite the obstacles in her way, the stresses of raising children and working constantly, and the paucity of her home and the environment in which we lived, she never closed her arms to anyone who needed her help, no matter their past, their problems, or their ideologies. Maybe it’s melodramatic, but my mother symbolizes for me a vision of Liberty, saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!” Because of her, it is clear to me that Liberty is not a blue-blooded woman doling out charity from a safe distance but a fierce, penniless yet empowered, broken-but-not-beaten mother defending her children against the injustices of a system that functions without conscience or accountability.

I realized that what I had come to appreciate about the people at Occupy Oakland was that many of them shared this same attitude of unabashed goodwill and inclusivity. They were full of optimism and zeal. They often came to the camp with little but freely offered whatever they did have—bread, soup, energy bars, books, clothing, blankets, electronics, artwork, kind words, ideas, laughter, music, and prayers—so many commodified things (because yes, even prayer is a commodity, these days) were given purely out of the kindness of peoples’ hearts. We had begun to build a community, a real community!

Was it muddy and stinky? Sure. Were there disagreements and arguments? Of course. Was there even some drug use and unspeakable violence (which I will still argue was not prompted by the presence of the encampment)? Yes. But these are human problems, not problems exclusive to Occupy Oakland. In fact, the fetishization of these problems by the mainstream media, the government, and detractors is representative of the way in which the problems of the marginalized have always been used by those in power to further alienate and disenfranchise those deemed “undesirable”—as though these same problems don’t exist across socioeconomic boundaries and aren’t often a direct product of a long history of cultural and social denigration. I’ve heard many on the outside call us degenerates, but what I saw at the camp was the extraordinary capacity for human kindness. An incredible passion for justice. Each person made me proud. Each person in some way or another embodied the principles of Liberty that my mother, by her actions, taught me to value.

So when I imagined the cops tearing down those tents, I imagined them tearing down a home like the one my mother had made. Those in power didn’t want the camp gone because it was dangerous or a threat to public health; they wanted it gone because the people there lived their successes and their failures too publicly, right in front of City Hall where they could no longer be ignored. Those in power didn’t want to have to look at, to be forced to deal with the problems of homelessness, joblessness, poverty, and violence endemic to our society, just as they didn’t want to give us the opportunity to congregate and work together to build a new one. Those in power have their own agenda, and the possibility of our uniting against them to address the real, every day issues we face was too great. They’d rather see us disappear and suffer alone in silence and shame.

At that thought, I decided that I couldn’t abandon the camp. I may be one small person, but the very least I could do was try to be like Greensboro Four who decided that a minor act of passive resistance was better than nothing at all. Sitting for two-and-a-half-hours surrounded by riot police isn’t much. Spending ten hours in police custody napping and singing show tunes with a group of cheerful women, many of them clergy members, isn’t much. It isn’t much compared to what those who participated in the Civil Rights Movement faced fifty years ago, nor is it much compared to what protestors in Tunis, Cairo, and across the Middle East and North Africa face today. It isn’t the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi. And it doesn’t seem to do much. It doesn’t do much to actively help the silent peoples from Oakland to Brazil to rural China who daily face the horrors of poverty, exploitation, sickness, and violence, or the middle class citizens who are finding themselves suddenly jobless and homeless. But it’s what I could do in the moment to show how much that camp meant to me, and how tearing it down was another act of aggression by the powers-that-be that was only going to strengthen my resolve. It was my way of extending solidarity to Occupy camps across the globe, which I think of as extended sit-ins. I couldn’t disappear. I refused to be ignored.

We won’t disappear. We must refuse to be ignored.

As Franklin McCain said forty years after he first sat down at the lunch counter at Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina: “This is my country… I fought for the chance to make it right. No one’s going to deny me the opportunity. I am going to be a full participant in every aspect of this community.” I think this is the goal of Occupy Oakland, no matter how they try and stop us.

Source:

Cami G. "Why I got arrested at Oscar Grant Plaza". Occupied Oakland Tribune. http://occupiedoaktrib.org/2011/11/17/why-i-got-arrested-at-oscar-grant-plaza/

Class consciousness

2011-10-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

Class consciousness: Members of “lower” classes are often more aware of their economic class than are members of the “upper” class. However, this may not necessarily be the case in societies where class hierarchy is a strict and deep tradition.[citation needed]

In the United States, class consciousness is somewhat conflated with race consciousness. Because racial minority correlates with poverty in that country, members of racial minorities may focus more on racial identities than on identities arising from economic class.

Defining a person’s social class can be a determinant for his awareness of it. Marxists define classes on the basis of their relation to the means of production – especially on whether they own capital. Non-Marxist social scientists distinguish various social strata on the basis of income, occupation, or status.

Early in the nineteenth century the labels “working classes” and “middle classes” were already coming into common usage. “The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an “upper class”. Its consciousness was formed in part by public schools (in the British sense) and Universities. The upper class tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process.”

Safety for Medical Caregivers During a Protest

2011-10-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

by Paramedic & Activist

As a moment of Introduction, I am a paramedic with 17 years street experience and participated in many protest marches during the Act-Up and AIDS protests in San Francisco in the early 1990′s. Having one foot in the Public Safety world, and the other in the Protest community may, at times, seem to be a contradiction; however understanding the basics of police tactics and the appropriate role of a medical aid provider in a protest is essential to prevent the injuries and mis-handling of the injured person shown in the now famous U-Tube videos. There are glaring errors on BOTH sides of the line. Obviously, the fact the person was injured in the first place is of concern. Equally is the “rush” of protesters towards a solid police line under the “cover” of the few individuals who were rendering aid to the fallen protester is foolish, and the apparent ”justification” for the use of the stun grenade.

If you watch the video closely, the police take no action when a few individuals approach. They are obviously helping the fallen person. However when the crowd of protesters, many with covered faces and brandishing signs, flags, yelling directly at the officers, the situation changed in the eyes of the police; THAT is when they used force. Notice, the “protesters” run away from the grenade, the folks helping the wounded man do not run. They had intent of purpose, the others were opportunists.

Taking this in mind, and being on the side of NO-ONE GETTING HURT, I am listing below some simple procedures for those wanting to be Medical Support for future protests:

1. Are you a Protester or will you be providing Medical Help?

If you decide to provide medical help, you need to identify yourself in that way. We used bright orange vests with “MEDICAL” stenciled on the back. These were worn the ENTIRE PROTEST and you CANNOT be seen yelling, protesting, carrying signs, etc. This clearly identified us as being a “non-combatant.”

You can be sure the police have many ambulances and a medical team only a block away from the line of protests. They have everything you need to care for the injured, however they will not break their line because of the opportunists “rushing” them. ( as was shown in the video.)

You have to build TRUST, yes TRUST, that you are NOT going to harm them or act in anyway to “break” the police line.

2. Are you willing to get arrested to help a fellow Protester?

If you truly care for an injured protester, you will need to be willing to face arrest. In the many protests myself and many others provided assistance in, we were never charged, but were taken “in custody” in order to secure the passage of a wounded comrade across the police line; this is to allow for rapid medical care.

3. Do you have 5-6 other friends who are willing to help out?

Taking the path to provide aid at the front of a protest is not for one or two people. You need a “primary caregiver” and then 4-5 others who will act as a guard, to prevent protesters from rushing the police line.

In the case of this one individual (in the video) you would have seen a line of orange vest aid workers between the injured person and the crowd. They hold hands and stretch out to provide a shield from mingling of “protesters” from the “Medical Team” This means you will have you BACK to the officers, and face your own crowd and shouting “Medical Emergency, DO NOT CROSS” as loudly as possible. This provides a buffer so that the caregiver can render aid without being surrounded with protesters.

4. Can you hold STRONG when you are called a collaborator?

When you form your own line, facing your own crowd, you may now be seen as a part of “THEM” the “1%.” This can be a bit dicey, and you have to BELIEVE in your duty to help the fallen comrade. You have to hold back the protesters so the police will feel “Secure.” If you can hold the line, maybe even get the crowd to back off or be quiet, you will allow the commander of the police force an opening to do the right thing and allow the victim to cross over the Police Line.

5. Can you stay focused on the injured, and leave your politics at the police line?

IF you can maintain a line of helpers to keep a secure area, you can then check your fallen comrade.

1. Check to see if they are conscious. ”Are you OK?” ”What is your name?”

2. Check for breathing.

3. Feel for a pulse at the wrist. Is it FAST -or- SLOW? STRONG -or- WEAK?

6. Can you Calmly Speak to the Police?

Adrenaline will be pumping on all sides of the police line. Everyone will be very tense.

Your action is to face the line of police and say so they can hear you , not “yelling” but firm, “I have an injured person here who needs Medical Assistance. Who is the Officer in Charge?” You may need to ask several times.

If the Commander or Officer in Charge asks you what you need you will say firmly and with confidence:

“I have an injured person. They are unconscious.

They have a pulse and are breathing but need a Paramedic Immediately.

We need a backboards and straps.

Can THIS ONE PERSON cross the line for medical treatment?

I am willing to go with them if needed.”

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH...

IF… your other volunteers are holding back the crowd.

IF… the crowd backs off or quiets down.

IF… the Officer in Charge believes you (sometimes it is obvious.)

THEN you MAY get assistance.

The usual method is as follows:

The police will allow a backboard to cross the line between officers.

You will roll the wounded comrade on their side, place the board under them.

You will secure the person to the board with the straps.

THEN you will say to the Officer in Charge. “We are ready to transfer care.”

IF the Officer in Charge believes you have things under control, 3-4 people from the protesters side will lift the backboard up, and pass it carefully between the officers in the police line, and into the hands of the ambulance crew.

The Officer in Charge MIGHT allow you to cross with your patient. It depends on the mood of the crowd and the ability of your people to hold your line.

ONE THING YOU CAN COUNT ON….

If the crowd of protesters do not respect your authority and back down so you can render aid, then YES, the Police will throw flash grenades, etc and not heed your call for help.

IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT YOUR MOVEMENT

YOU NEED TO BE RESPONSIBLE AND BACK OFF IF SOMEONE IS INJURED

AND LET THE TEAM WORK

If you cannot establish this MINIMUM SOCIAL CONTRACT within the group of protesters, then ANY OF YOU may be the next wounded comrade with no-one to help.

KEEP IT REAL!
NO-ONE GETS HURT!

DO NO HARM!

Source:
Safety for Medical Caregivers during a Protest. Occupy Oakland. http://www.occupyoakland.org/2011/10/safety-for-medical-caregivers-during-a-protest/#comments

Your Bravest Children

2011-10-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

by structural adjustment

To the Mothers and Fathers of America:

This may not be clear to you yet, but those protestors out in the streets are your bravest children. They now hold the front for all of us in the centuries-old battle against tyranny. Many are fighting the corrupting influence of money in American politics, others against a system no longer functional for a majority that will only grow.

Some do not know exactly what they want--only that something has gone terribly wrong in a country in which they would like to believe.

They have not articulated one focused message, or one set of demands--and they do not need to. This is not a battle of right against left, red against blue, or liberal against conservative. It is not made-for-TV politics. It is a battle of right against wrong. America has lost, in its political discourse and behavior, the ability to distinguish between the two. Many of its practitioners seem not to care.

Those who support this movement in all its myriad shapes, sizes, sexes, colors, ideologies, income levels, and nationalities--have no sound bite. They get the problem, in general, and are massing to change it. Like the old thinker, they would rather be approximately correct than precisely wrong.

They give their nights, their sleep, their weekends, and their comfort to fight an uncertain battle for you, for all your children. They face police lines and mainstream scorn. They face the indifference of the vast armies of complacency and distraction, who keep waiting for the channel to change, the web page to update, and this movement to end. They face cynics who believe nothing will change, they face the often well-intentioned defeatists who believe nothing can change. They face politicians who patronize, tell them they don't understand--that they, the politicians, support the movement, even as they make plans with their police forces to clear them.

On Tuesday, October 25th in Oakland, California, Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine and Iraq veteran, standing beside another veteran, a naval officer in dress, was critically injured by a weapon used against him by a police officer from one of 17 jurisdictions in the San Francisco Bay Area. A group of occupiers running away from the scene, amidst police flash grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets, rushed back when they saw Scott Olsen lying still on the ground. As they rushed in to pick him up--a dozen of your bravest, America--an unidentified officer tossed, from behind police ranks, another flash grenade at their feet. A handful of these unarmed protestors persisted, carrying Scott Olsen, dazed with a fractured skull, away from the police line, shouting for medics as the explosions and smoke recalled the nightmare of American battlefields.

Like this, the guns have again been turned back on your bravest children, most fighting only for the core values they were taught as children: people in need should be helped; democracy should be uncorrupted; citizens must gather in peace; and this country belongs to all of us, not a political elite increasingly indistinguishable from a financial and industrial corporate elite. Like all of us, they see clearly and abhor this crony capitalism now ascendent. They are doing something about it.

These are not trouble-making hippies, America--you mistake them as such at your peril. These are your better angels, trying to save you from yourself. They are your child that cannot help tell the truth, the sometimes inconvenient one that thinks of safety last and justice first. They are fighting the war that rages inside you when you see the circus on TV, in print, or online and can only shake your head. You ignore them, laugh at them, demean them, or discount them at your peril. They may be our last hope of transformation for this country reeling from war, from a crisis of confidence, from scandal, division, corruption, and poverty. Let no demagogue--especially talkers at the service of money and power--convince you, a thinking American, that these are not patriots of the truest kind.

So go out and support your children, America, and with them the fundamental ideas upon which this country was founded. Take a walk by the protest in your town at night, in the morning--drive by or bike past. Stop and talk to someone for a minute. Listen and watch. Gather your friends and neighbors. Everyone has their own place and their own role.

For every Scott Olsen, now lying in a hospital bed in critical condition, there should be 100,000 witnesses, who by their presence lend this movement strength and legitimacy.

As long as they occupy the centers of our cities, big and small, we--who wish to create a more perfect union--have an opening to change something vital, such as removing money from politics once and for all. It is possible. It has been done elsewhere. These children have brought the season of democracy, the days and especially nights of renewing democracy, and they need your protection.

Even your bravest children need to feel your strong hands on their back.

---------

a concerned American

Jugo de arándano con vodka ~ Cranberry vodka

2011-10-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

Los franceses tienen una palabra, flâneur, que significa "aquél que pasea por una ciudad para vivirla"

Anoche mientras sentía una brisa suave en mi mejilla me transporté a los pasillos de concreto y piedra del centro de Cuernavaca, en la avenida Guerrero. El ruido, el tráfico y la muchedumbre existían en función de un aire vivo que jugaba entre las antiguas columnas de piedra y los puestos de cremas. De vez en cuando me acariciaba, pero yo no lo sabía. Esas caricias eran besos, sellos que debían ser abiertos sólo con el transcurso del tiempo. Y anoche abrí uno.

Yo antes era Cuernavaca. Yo era sus calles- y sí las caminaba- desde Chipitlán hasta el centro. Una vez llegué hasta Vista Hermosa con un amigo. El grafiti, los baches, las rutas, todas esas cosas fui yo.

Yo antes era también el centro, su zócalo y su fayuca. Era sus puestos de playeras negras de rock pesado, metaleras, piratas. Era también la moda underground que se estrenaba en ciertos círculos de jóvenes, pero no de los que vivían en Vista Hermosa. Ellos no, porque yo también era la tierra de la preparatoria número uno que se levantaba al son del sonido del ska, aquél sonido libertador y problemático. Más problemático aún eran los deliciosos pulques de don Abel, que también los fui.

~~~

The French have a word, flâneur, that means "he who walks the city in order to experience it".

Last night, I felt a soft breeze on my cheek and I remembered the stone and concrete passageways on Guerrero Avenue in downtown Cuernavaca. The noise, the traffic, and the crowds existed in relation to a rare kind of air that played in between the old stone pillars and the open-air cosmetic stands. Every now and then the air caressed me, but I didn't know that then. Those caresses were actually kisses, seals that could only be opened with the passage of time. And last night one was opened by me.

I was Cuernavaca once. I was its streets, and I walked them from Chipitlán to downtown. One time I made it to Vista Hermosa with a friend. The graffiti, the potholes, the public buses, I was all those things.

I was also its downtown, its plaza, and its black market. I was its bootleg heavy metal shirts. I was the underground style that reared its head every now and then among certain groups of young people, but not the ones from Vista Hermosa. Not them, because I was also the dirt that was kicked up during ska's liberating and problematic beats at public high school number one. Even more problematic were don Abel's delicious pulques, which I also was.

Protest sign seen at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

It's wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn't aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly-rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon.

This is what happens when educated people can't find jobs.

Guy proposes to girlfriend using human microphone

2011-10-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

Why Occupy Wall Street will fail

2011-10-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

By Brett Arends

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The public has every reason to be angry at what’s going on in this country, and every reason to protest. But will the Occupy Wall Street movement succeed in changing anything? Don’t count on it.

Here are five reasons I think these protests are doomed to fail.

1. They are in the wrong place.

Why are they down in Lower Manhattan? Do they think that’s where the power — and the money — really is? Folks: When people talk about “Wall Street,” it’s just a figure of speech.

Even in the days of J.P. Morgan Sr., the real action didn’t take place in the company offices at 60 Wall St. It took place in the old man’s library. Uptown.These days the real movers and shakers aren’t anywhere near Zuccotti Park. They’re out in places like Greenwich, Conn., home of the hedge-fund honchos.

I called the town offices there to see if they’d had any protests.

“Oh, no,” said the polite young man who answered the phone, his tone somewhat surprised. “There’s been nothing like that here.”

It’s hopeless.

If these people were on the ball, they’d at least be moving down south to “Occupy Palm Beach” for the winter.

2. They don’t have an agenda.

And they can’t have one. Talk about a herd of cats. Occupy Boston is a camp of about 100 tents, and on a brief walk through I noticed posters, placards and stickers for 9/11 “truthers,” anarcho-communists, “Jewish Labor,” “stop the marijuana laws,” “stop the U.S. war against Islam” and so on. Some quasi-Buddhists had set up a “sacred space,” and were burning incense. Elsewhere, a sign denounced a new school project out in the suburbs.Tough to rope all this into a 10-point plan. Or a 100-point plan. Sorry, but it’s reminding me of the days watching the old University Left crowd — right down to the weird sweaters and vegan cooking.

In Boston, one man sat on a deck chair with a sign that simply declared, “Financial markets always make bubbles and crashes.” What’s that, the Hyman Minsky Front? For all I know, he was an investment manager on a lunch break. Famed Boston investor Jeremy Grantham, who’s been making the same point about bubbles and crashes for years, has his offices about 100 yards away.

You want to group these people into an agenda? How?

3. The weather’s turning.

It’s been unseasonably warm and dry out there till recently. Now the rain’s arriving. Wait until the temperature drops and the frosts move in.According to Weather.com, the average lows drop to 42 degrees for the month of November and 32 in December. Good luck with that. How’s that tent working out?

These protesters made a couple of big blunders.

The first is that they started protesting over the summer, leaving themselves just a couple of months till the weather turns. They should have started in the spring.

They’ve been lucky so far, but it won’t last. Read more on MarketWatch’s Occupy Wall Street blog.

The second is that they made it an outside camping event. I still don’t understand it. You can hold a protest march at any time. People can show up, protest and then go home for a hot meal, a shower and a good night’s sleep in their own bed. Net result: Lots of people can take part. But how many people can — or want to — camp out in downtown Manhattan for three months?

Especially after Halloween.

When the cold and rain really come in force, a lot of these people are going home. Then the opponents of Occupy Wall Street will declare victory.

4. Money talks.

Actually, these days money shouts, and it will drown out whatever anyone else says. The 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling has opened the floodgates to unlimited spending on elections by anybody, anytime — including, of course, any corporation.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, there are now 156 super political action committees that have taken advantage of the ruling. Political operative Mark McKinnon told me last week that he expects them to raise about $1 billion, mostly anonymously. McKinnon, who helped run the Bush-Cheney campaigns of 2000 and 2004, called the amount of corporate spending today “absolutely pornographic.”

And no industry spends like Wall Street. The finance sector is the biggest source of campaign contributions, year after year. Politicians suck up to the banks for the same reason Willie Sutton once robbed them: That’s where the money is.

In 2008 bankers gave half a billion dollars to political campaigns — up from $350 billion in 2004.

And they are so outraged even by the toothless Dodd-Frank regulations that they have shifted the majority of their contributions to the Republicans. If they can’t stand Dodd-Frank, what’s the chance they would tolerate real reform?

We’re still a year away from the next elections, and they’ve already handed over $97 million in (disclosed) political contributions. That includes $5 million so far to Mitt Romney and $2.5 million to Barack Obama. How tough do you think politicians are likely to be on Wall Street?

No matter how much anger these protesters channel, the golden rule will prevail: Those that have the gold will make the rules.

5. We’ll forget about it.

Sure, people are paying attention to Occupy Wall Street now. But just wait till something interesting happens on the Kardashians. Or there’s a bust-up on America’s Top Pastry Chef. Or some child pretends to get trapped on a balloon.

OWS will go as stale as last month’s bread. Look! Over there! Monkeys running amok in Ohio!

Many optimists believe the new media world of the Internet and Facebook and Twitter puts more power in the hands of “the people.” I think instead we’ve sleep-walked into a nightmare world of mass attention-deficit disorder and easy distraction.

Nicholas Carr, in his 2010 book The Shallows, shows in alarming detail how the Web is rewiring our brains towards superficiality.

The information age? The democracy of media? In the age of the Internet, and “infinite media,” I see a world that is increasingly mean-spirited, anti-logical, and misinformed. (Or, to put it more bluntly: Mean, stupid and wrong).

And it’s left an open road for propagandists.

I got one of those mass circulated emails recently telling me how Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler boss, had a “new book out” slamming Obama. It contained all sorts of brutal quotes.

The only problem? Iacocca’s book came out in 2007. His quotes were about President George W. Bush. Someone had simply doctored all the quotes and blasted out an email, that quickly went all round the Web.

For each recipient who caught the lie, a hundred won’t. Was it an amateur propagandist who sent out this email, or a professional? We’ll never know.According to the U.S. Labor Department, there are now about 280,000 public relations managers and specialists in America. The number of reporters: Just 45,000: That’s six flacks per reporter. Good luck with that.

In six months’ time, or maybe just six weeks, everyone will have forgotten about OWS.

Do I see no positive news for these protesters? I hate to be entirely negative, so I am happy to offer some good news as well.

If you really think the banks have a free hand to make money at the expense of the rest of us, you can just go out and buy their stocks right now and make a fortune.

After all, they’ve collapsed. Bank of America’s stock (XNYS:BAC - News) has been halved since the start of the year. At $6.40, the shares are trading at a third of book value (according to FactSet Research), about where they were at the absolute lows in March 2009. (Bank of America just reported $6.2 billion net income in the third quarter, returns on average equity of 22% and Tier One capital — a measure of balance-sheet strength — up to a decent 11.5%. Make of it what you will.)

Citigroup Inc. (XNYS:C) has lost a third of its value this year.

Even the Vampire Squid itself has covered its stockholders in red ink. Shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (XNYS:GS - News) have lost a third of their value this year. The stock is trading below book value.

Contrarians, ho! According to the most recent surveys, big institutional money managers are massively underweight bank stocks. They won’t touch them with a 10-foot pole. They’re terrified. This is often a contrarian buying indicator. Not always, but often.

If you really do think these guys have the government in their pocket, it should be a one-way bet.

Source:
Brett Arends. "Why Occupy Wall Street will fail". MarketWatch. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-occupy-wall-street-will-fail-2011-10-19

Mensaje de la Secretaría de Salud ~ Message from the Secretariat of Health

2011-10-22T12:01:00.000-07:00

A partir del mes de agosto la Secretaría de Salud recomienda a toda la población en general que después de bañarse no olviden secarse bien la panza, ya que el dengue se reproduce en llantas viejas y húmedas.

Todos por un México más sano

~~~

This August, the Secretariat of Health reminds you to dry your stomach well after bathing to avoid the spread of dengue. Dengue spreads in old and damp tires.

Together for a healthier Mexico.

Como dijo la enfermera IMSS gangosa...

2011-10-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

En el hospital 35 una enfermera GANGOSA dice:

"Famidiades ded señod Fednandez, se des infodma qued señod ha muedto"...

Se le acerca la esposa y dice: NO ME JODA!! ...

Y le contesta la enfermera:

"No me joda, ni mejodadá, ni mejodó...
Se mudió!!!

OWS + Tea Party = Win

2011-10-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

At a time when Americans seem more divided than at any point since the Civil War, two grassroots protest movements, the Tea Parties and Occupy Wall Street protests, signal the possibility of a major realignment in American politics along the lines of massive shared opposition to the domineering financial sector and its corrupt counterparts in government…

Washington Bails Out Wall Street

Since the very beginning in February 2009, I have defended the Tea Party movement against its detractors in the media and government. Just weeks before they spread like wildfire across the nation, while working through my senior year of college, I sat in front of the television in the Fall of 2008, watching with bewilderment as Congress passed a “$700 billion” bill (which has turned out to be more like $3 trillion in addition to another $10 trillion+ privately loaned out by the Federal Reserve) to bail out Wall Street banks.

As a teenage conservative raised on right-wing talk radio, I had always opposed government welfare programs for the poor. Private charity to help those in need, was in my opinion, not only a good thing, but according to the religious values I professed: an absolute moral imperative. But I didn’t believe charity should be legislated any more than any other private moral belief, just like many Democrats would oppose legislating private moral views about drug use, or Pat Robertson’s sexual mores.

But here I was in 2008 watching with horror as the government acted to redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth– not to people in need, not to the poor, the sick, the suffering, the hungry– but to already extravagantly wealthy Wall Street banks. If redistributing wealth to the poor by government decree, however well-intentioned, seemed misguided, inappropriate, and offensive to my sensibilities about the proper role of government, seeing wealth forcibly taken from middle class and working poor Americans and handed to big corporations was positively egregious decadence and corruption of the highest order!

At least the welfare statists who believe in a publicly-funded “safety net” for the poor have the good intentions of helping people in need. What can be said about the intentions of someone who takes hard-earned money from a struggling middle class household and hands it to the CEO of AIG (which turned around and handed out multimillion dollar bonuses to its top executives)? And I wasn’t the only American outraged by what Congress did.

Outraged Americans in both major political parties were melting the switchboards in DC ahead of each bailout vote, expressing their firm opposition to making Middle America pay for Wall Street’s mistakes. Already long disenchanted with the Bush Administration, many pundits in the conservative blogosphere and talk radio were blasting the bailouts as corporate welfare that Congress had no business passing.

The beginning of the Tea Party

By the time the trillion dollar economic stimulus package had passed the following February, anger, confusion, and dissent toward Washington’s radical economic interventions had reached a fever pitch. I was sitting in a computer room on campus, headphones on, stifling laughter as I watched footage from earlier that day: Rick Santelli on CNBC raging against the bailouts and calling for a modern day Tea Party. I knew instantly that it would be the start of something big.

Whatever its detractors will say, when the Tea Party movement began spreading to cities across America with protests that February, even bigger ones on “Tax Day” in April, and then positively massive demonstrations by July 4th, it was a completely leaderless, spontaneous, grassroots movement driven by the individual initiative of local groups of hardworking Americans opposed to Washington’s bailouts.

I defended them writing:

‘This Tea Party movement arose out of a frustration at an out-of-touch, out-of-control, out-of-solutions, out-of-money Federal government. Unlike the vague hope and change promised by the Obama campaign in 2007-08, the Tea Partiers had some very specific, very practical, very sane policy proposals to reign Washington in: these were 1) an end to corporate bailouts, 2) a balanced budget, 3) term limits, 4) a “read the bills” act, 5) and a full, public audit of the Federal Reserve bank.

… For goodness’ sake, you’d think any honest liberal would have been thrilled that a bunch of white, middle-aged, middle class Christians were standing up and raging against the malfeasance of corporate America, asking for more transparency and accountability, demanding some more regulation and oversight of the world’s most powerful and secretive private corporation [that would be the Fed], and trying to ensure that Congressional seats are more accessible to every day Americans, not just the wealthy, entrenched establishment.’

While many politicians have since tried to capitalize on the Tea Party’s momentum by branding themselves as “Tea Party” while advancing the same old domestic “Moral Majority” and foreign nation-building agendas, the original Tea Party phenomenon was a move away from these narratives and goals, a stricter focus on fiscal policy and true reform to an economic and political system that nearly all Americans agree is broken, unfair, and unjust.

Common Ground between “right” and “left”

Throughout 2010 I would repeat the same line to all my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and an interviewer from The Guardian at Rand Paul’s Senate victory celebration: “The Tea Party started as a movement to protest the bailouts Washington handed to rich Wall Street bankers. People on the ‘left’ should be thrilled that white, middle age, middle class Americans have made the unearned excess and unfair privilege of corporate America one of their primary issues. Listen: Michael Moore, this big ‘lefty’ just released a documentary all about how evil those bailouts were. Then you’ve got all these people on the ‘right’ who agree with him. Both sides are starting to say the same thing. If we’d stop being so suspicious of each other and listen, we might discover that we’re on the same side!”

I just couldn’t believe that people like my grandmother and my best friend’s mom were out in town halls protesting corporate greed while all my hipster friends from school were sitting at home with a Pabst Blue Ribbon fiddling with their iPhones and playing Wii. It made no sense. I was incredulous that the “left” had so quickly dismissed the Tea Parties as racist and fascist instead of joining them on the streets and in the public discourse as one unified voice against the corporate special interests that had secured financial favors from an insulated, out-of-touch Congress.

Yet after several centrally-planned-and-orchestrated false starts, including the reactionary, dead-on-arrival “Coffee Party” and the MoveOn.org-sponsored American Dream Movement, the “left” and those more aligned with the Democratic Party have finally joined the anti-establishment, grassroots fervor sweeping this country (and the entire world it would seem). The Occupy Wall Street movement is definitely the real “leftist” counterpart to the Tea Party movement, just as grassroots, just as leaderless, just as spontaneous, just as earnestly angry about a system that rewards the malfeasance of entrenched special interests by punishing the hard work and innovation of “the little guy” in Middle America.

This is some pretty serious shared common ground between the most vocal and active wings of the two major political factions in America. Both “sides” agree about the problem. Perhaps neither side is entirely sure about the solution, but both sides seem to intuit that the problem revolves around the financial sector. Getting the Republicans to that place was a true ideological revolution on the part of the Tea Party movement and the 2008 presidential aspirations of Congressman Ron Paul, whose obsession with the financial sector’s misdeeds is finally looking less fringe and more reasonable to the average American. Getting the Democrats– with their reflexive suspicion of big corporations– to the same place shouldn’t have been this hard.

But one thing is clear, and that is this: the now-not-so-silent majorities on both sides of the partisan divide are moving in the same direction, toward completely accepting and internalizing their distrust and disdain for the financial sector and its grip on power in this country. The next step is to have a conversation, a real conversation. No screaming. No yelling. No accusations. No preconceived suspicions of the worst in each others’ motives. The next step is a conversation about how deep this problem goes, the exact nature of its causes, and the precise policies that will effectively solve the problem and reform our broken economic and political system.

Are you willing to listen to me? I’m ready to listen to you.

Source:
Silver Underground. http://silverunderground.com/2011/10/stop-yelling-and-pay-attention-the-grassroots-left-and-right-are-saying-the-same-thing/

Norman Finkelstein

2011-10-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

Véan este video:

Dice la niña (porque no se oye bien):

"During your speech you made a lot of references to jewish people, as well as certain people in you audience - not jewish people in general - but certain people - especially in your audiance - to nazis. Now that is extremely offensive, when certain people are German, and they are also extremely offensive to people who have suffered under nazi rule."

Y lo demás sí se escucha bien.

Why Occupy? #OWS in graphs

2011-10-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

What OWS (Occupy Wall Street) is about. No feelings, just the cold, hard facts.

From the source:

Everyone works hard not to get cheated out of their fair share. In the past 30 years, due to gains in technology, productivity rose but salaries when adjusted for inflation decreased for the middle class. The extra wealth accumulated at the top 1%. They then use that wealth to influence politicians and get bailouts and all sorts of other favors. When wealth that is concentrated in the hands of a few is one of the main influences in politics then society is no longer a democracy it is a plutocracy. That is what the protest is about. We all work hard and we all want to be treated fairly and we want the rule of law to be restored such that it applies to everyone in society and that the wealthy are not exempt from their actions. Corporations are needed; unethical behavior and corruption aren't needed.

Source:http://imgur.com/a/U4FR4

Occupy your money ~ ¡Ya Basta!

2011-10-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

Please read for a non-violent and effective course of action against the banks that helped wreck this country's middle class and its economy.

If you bank with Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America, take your money out of their hands.

It's not illegal to close your account and keep your money in a credit union.

Banks can lend money based on the money we keep with them, so let's start putting limits to their power, because the government won't do that for us.

¡Ya Basta!

We have a republic, if we can keep it.

Dylan Ratigan says it how it is ~ Dylan Ratigan dice la verdad

2011-10-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

Dylan: What are you talking about $4 trillion?

Karen: $4 trillion, I’m saying…

Dylan: We owe $70 trillion. [cross-talking 04:29] a $4 trillion solution, which is basically just a way for the Democrats to avoid dealing with this until 2017. I’m not here to talk about plans to deal with this till 2017. I’m saying we’ve got a real problem, and I’m tired of Republicans and Democrats who either want – Republicans who want to burn the place to the ground and Democrats, with all due respect, who want to offer a plan that gets it through the end of their second term of their presidency, and then screws me and my kids when it’s over! And until we do that, we have to deal with the extraction that is at foot, it is the reason the financial markets are behaving the way they’re behaving, it is a mathematical fact! This is not some opinion; this is a mathematical fact. Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren’t doing it, Republicans are not doing it, an entire integrated system, financial system, trading system, taxing system, that was created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work on our entire country right now. And we’re sitting here arguing about whether we should do the $4 trillion plan that kicks the can down the road for the President for 2017, or burn the place to the ground, both of which are reckless, irresponsible, and stupid. And the fact of the matter is until we actually, and I’m sorry to lose my temper, but I tell you what, I’ve been coming on TV for three years doing this, and the fact of the matter is that there’s a refusal on both the Democratic and the Republican side of the aisle to acknowledge the mathematical problem, which is that the United States of America is being extracted. It’s being extracted through banking, it’s being extracted through trade, and it’s being extracted through taxation, and there’s not a single politician that has stepped forward, Susan, to deal with this.

Susan: Yeah, but there’s only one right now, the leader of the free world, whether you like it or not, the President of the United States is arguably one of the most powerful individuals we have out there, and he’s our President.

Karen: But, Susan, what you’re saying is exactly the point that Dylan is making. It’s not about one guy; it’s about all of them.

Susan: No, I actually disagree. I think Dylan – it is about one guy.

Dylan: I agree with her. It is about one guy.

Karen: What would you like him to do? What do you want him to do?

Dylan: I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, “People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it. But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy, ‘I’m working with a bought Congress’, I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did, and I’m going to go to the people of the United States and I’m going to say, ‘You’ve got a bought Congress,” and until we get rid of the bought Congress, which is Jimmy Williams constant point, which is get the money out of politics, and until a President says that’s the problem and says he’s going to fix it, there is no policy that I can possibly see no matter how brilliant your idea may be or your idea or my idea or her idea or your idea at home, is that idea will not happen as long as there’s a capacity to basically fire a politician who disagrees with me by taking funding away from him. Is that a fair assessment?

Jimmy: Money in politics is the root of all political evil. It is corruption at its worst. And until we step up and kick that out of the park, it’s going to be the same system all the way.

Dylan: And only the President can do that.

Jimmy: No, no, no, Congress has to do it, too. Congress has to do it, too.

Dylan: But I’ll tell you what, how bad does it have to get? How much money has to be extracted? How many things have to be heard?

Karen: [cross-talking 07:59] tax. Okay, physically, what do you do?

Dylan: You go and give a speech to…

Karen: Right now.

Dylan: Yeah, right now. You say…

Karen: And then what happens tomorrow?

Dylan: Tomorrow, what happens is you begin the process of actually investing in solving the problems, so I come out and I say, “How?” I create an infrastructure bank with 2% blending immediately. There’s – once I explain to people the problem, once I explain to you that you have cancer, once you understand how screwed up your trade, tax, and banking policies are, believe me, you will have no issue when I incorporate an infrastructure bank that I fund with repatriated offshore money that I bring in and then use to create 2% direct lending to every business in America because when you realize that the banking system is fully corrupt and defrauding us, and I come out and say that, which is what I want my President to do, then at that exact moment I say, “You know what, we’ve got a screwed up situation here, people. You all know it, and now I’m going to admit it.” And as a result, not only have I admitted it, but we’re going to begin the process of solving it like grown ups. They did in World War II, they did it after the Civil War, they did it in Latin America with the Brady Bond; we are not seeing it happen now.

#OWS: What the Media Can't See About America's First Web-Era Movement

2011-10-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

#OWS: What the Media Can't See About America's First Web-Era MovementOCT 13 2011, 1:18 PM ET 98Occupy Wall Street is a pluralist protest that's better at asking questions than offering answers. By cherry-picking messages and images, its critics are missing the bigger picture.

When the now-national demonstrations against the Wall Street / Washington status quo began in New York last month, it was easy (too easy, it turns out) to write the whole thing off as a hackneyed, vapid hipster fest. The most confident early appraisals were essentially exercises in verbalizing the eye-roll: In mainstream news coverage, new-to-CNN business anchor Erin Burnett's first reported segment on the story was called "Seriously?!," a heading that said everything she needed it to. On the (non-libertarian) right, National Review editor Rich Lowry quickly gratified anyone who might happen to hate being surprised by Rich Lowry, identifying the protestors as a "a juvenile rabble" and "woolly-headed horde," "the perfect distillation of an American Left in extremis." Some on the (old-school) left, meanwhile, showed acute disdain, too, with political cartoonist Ted Rall -- author of Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back from the Right -- writing that "for me and other older, jaded veterans of leftist struggle, [Occupy Wall Street's] failure was a foregone conclusion. ... yet another opportunity to agitate for real change was being wasted by well-meant wankers."

... this non-movement movement was doomed before it began by its refusal to coalesce around a powerful message, its failure to organize and involve the actual victims of Wall Street's perfidy (people of color, the poor, the evicted, the unemployed, those sick from pollution, etc.), and its refusal to argue and appeal on behalf of a beleaguered working class against an arrogant, violent and unaccountable ruling elite--in other words, to settle for nothing less than the eradication of capitalism.

Now, weeks later, The New Republic has set out to fill a remaining gap on the anti-OWS spectrum, declaring in a behind-the-paywall editorial for the magazine's November 3 issue that liberals should oppose the movement -- chiefly on account of "the protestors' apparent allergy to to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic norms," but also on account of their "creepy" ways of trying to reach, and speak with, consensus. Yes, TNR is castigating Occupy Wall Street for its putative group-think in a collective statement published under the byline "The Editors." But don't be too distracted by the irony. There's an important issue here: The more we want to take the revolutionary (vs. reformist) strains in OWS rhetoric seriously, the more we'll have to ask a question that real revolutionaries have ended up with some grim answers to, from the Jacobins of the 18th century through the Bolsheviks and Maoists of the 20th: How is society going to work after the Revolution?

The thing is, it's only theoretically an important issue. No one at any Occupy Wall Street demonstration across the country today is actually overthrowing capitalism or America. No one is doing anything to precipitate the overthrow of capitalism or America. No one is even plotting actions that could at-all plausibly threaten to precipitate the overthrow of capitalism or America. True, a bunch of OWS protesters in New York did listen attentively as the Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek spoke to them about how awesome it would be if American capitalism came to an end, and how in China people are at least still able to dream of a better world, unlike us, and how blah blah blah. But Slavoj Zizek always talks that way, to the -- let's be clear -- relatively few people in the world who are seriously interested in what he has to say. We shouldn't be shocked that a guy like him would show up at demonstrations like this, nor should we attribute more significance to an appearance like that than it deserves. By all means, let's oppose Slavoj Zizek. But let's not pretend that opposing Slavoj Zizek is somehow opposing the philosophical underpinnings of Occupy Wall Street. You're not going to scratch the surface of signs reading "I Have a 4.0 GPA and $20,000 in Debt; Where's My Bailout?" or "We Want Our Country Back, Bitche$" or "I'm for Regulating the Banks; Apparently That Makes Me a RADICAL" and find Slavoj Zizek. You'll find real people with real stories trying -- with varying degrees, and kinds, of success -- to speak to the economic and political circumstances that determine their lives. Some will be confused, sure, maybe ridiculous; but many have already shown themselves to be, whether ultimately right or wrong, informed, smart, and serious. Why summarily "oppose" them? Why not, say, engage them in conversation? There's no good reason to suspend criticism about Occupy Wall Street, or necessarily to buy into any one of its zillion messages; but there's no good reason, either, just to pick our favorite things to hate about Occupy Wall Street and then tell ourselves that the whole multifaceted, rapidly changing movement must be those things writ large.

Douglas Rushkoff has an intriguing take on Occupy Wall Street that wouldn't have been intuitive to most of us a few weeks ago but may now seem more and more plausible. He thinks it represents the emergence of a new, distinctive, and authentically 21st-century type of social movement, one that a residually 20th-century media is still having a hard time getting its head around:

... we are witnessing America's first true Internet-era movement, which -- unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign -- does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint. Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem. ... this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Of course, however well we might understand Occupy Wall Street now, in September and October, we can't really anticipate what the movement will turn into, let alone what a "21st-century social movement" is capable of turning into. Occupy Wall Street could, as far as we know, develop a more traditional organizational hierarchy and "narrative arc." It could fragment into different camps with different policy priorities, or with no policy priorities. It could end up being co-opted by one or more of the interest groups that's already joined with it in apparent solidarity. Who knows. But that's all the more reason why we shouldn't try to write the book on Occupy Wall Street anytime soon. Instead, let's follow this story as it evolves. Let's take advantage of Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, and other social media to see it and understand it in ways we haven't been able to see and understand mass-dissent movements in the past. Let's be like the Internet.

Source:
JJ Gould.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/-ows-what-the-media-cant-see-about-americas-first-web-era-movement/246618/

We are the 99% ~ Somos el 99%

2011-10-05T01:47:00.000-07:00

I am 62 years old.

I have worked honestly and hard my whole life (since I was 14) because that is how you "realize the American dream".

I was a home builder and designer.

In 1980, the "savings and loan crisis" force me out of work and out of business. (The gov't helped the banks survive...)

I slowly rebuilt my life and business.

In 2007, the "sub-prime mortgage crisis" crushed me again. I lost my home, my wife, and my belief in that "American dream". (The gov't saved the banks again...)

We are the 99%

occupywallst.org

~~~

Tengo 62 años.He trabajado duro y honestamente toda mi vida (desde los 14 años) porque así es como se realiza el "sueño americano¨.

Yo diseñaba y construía casas.

En 1980, la "crisis de ahorros y préstamos" afectó mi negocio y me quedé sin trabajo. (El gob. ayudó a que sobrevivieran los bancos...)

Poco a poco reconstruí mi vida y mi negocio.

En 2007 la "crisis de las hipotecas subprime" me aplastó de nuevo. Perdí mi casa, mi esposa y mi creencia en aquel "sueño americano". (El gob salvó a los bancos otra vez...)

Somos el 99%

occupywallst.org

What if America truly were a Christian nation?

2011-10-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

by Tom Ehrich

What if America truly were a Christian nation?

Not a Southern Baptist nation, or an Episcopal nation, or a Roman Catholic nation. Not grounded in the doctrinal and ecclesiastical isms that have grown up over the centuries. But a Christian nation, doing what Jesus did.

Well, we wouldn’t be arguing about sex, that’s for sure. Jesus devoted no time to matters of sexuality.

We wouldn’t be leading cheers for any particular economic system, capitalist or socialist, for in his many teachings about wealth and power, Jesus saw both as snares and delusions.

We wouldn’t be taking votes on who gets medical care, or who gets to live, or who gets to learn, or whose rights matter more, or whose race or religion can’t be allowed to breathe freely. For Jesus gave healing to all who asked, defended the lives of sinners, taught all who were eager to learn, welcomed all to his circle — even outcasts, lepers and children. He had no regard for his own tradition’s finely tuned boundaries.

We wouldn’t be loading great wealth onto the already wealthy, but rather would be asking them to follow the lead of biblical tax collector Zacchaeus and to give away half of what they have.

We wouldn’t need as many lawyers, because generosity would trump tax-reduction strategies, parables would trump rules, property would be shared as needed and people would be forgiving — not suing — each other.

If we were a genuinely Christian nation, we would be gathering the harvest of this abundant land and sharing it with the hungry of our own land and of many lands. We would forgive our enemies, speak truth to power and go forth to serve and to sacrifice, not to rule.

We would stand with the poor when predators circled around them. We would stand with sinners when the self-righteous picked up stones. We would join hands with nonconformists and strangers.

We would become God’s beacon to the nations. And when the tired and poor followed that light to our borders, we would greet them with open arms and make room for them in our communities.

That’s what Jesus did, and that is what it would mean to be a Christian nation.

So to those who insist that America be a Christian nation, I ask: Is this truly what you want? Do you want the I-was-hungry-and-you-gave-me-something-to-eat of Matthew 25? Do you want the Sermon on the Mount? Do you want to shine God’s light in the darkness?

Your behavior says no.

Your shouts against generosity say no.

Your penchant for oppressive culture says no.

Your willingness to shower wealth on the few while the many suffer says no.

Your hostility to freedom says no.

So stop pretending. At least be as honest as the hedge fund manager who paid himself $8 billion last year. It’s “all about the Benjamins,” not the Gospel. It’s about stifling any freedom but your own. It’s about imposing your cultural preferences on others. It’s about turning your fears and appetites into law. It’s about you, not about Jesus Christ.

That’s the nature of politics, of course: one “you” versus another “you.” That’s fine, and it’s why we formed a democracy, so that our various interests could compete fairly. Just spare us the religious posturing.

If America became a Christian nation, doing what Jesus did, you would be aghast.

Source:
Tom Ehrich. "Tom Ehrich asks if we really live like Christians". State Journal-Register. http://www.sj-r.com/features/x1461788336/Tom-Ehrich-asks-if-we-really-live-like-Christians

Glow in the dark surfing ~ Fosforescencia y surfeo

2011-10-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

Red Tide Surfing San Diego 2011 Bioluminescence from Loghan Call on Vimeo.

The water glows because there are tiny creatures called plankton in the water that are bioluminescent, which means the plankton give off light as a result of chemical reactions in their bodies. Other animals such as lightning bugs are also naturally bioluminescent.

~~~

El agua resplandece porque hay millones de pequeños animales que son bioluminiscentes. Esto significa que sus cuerpos producen luz como consecuencia de procesos químicos. Otro animal bioluminiscente es la luciérnaga.

Source:
Bioluminescence. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence
Bioluminiscencia. Wikipedia. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminiscencia

Smurf Sighted in the Wild ~ Avistamiento de un pitufo en su hábitat natural

2011-10-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

The Smurf is actually the result of a symbiotic relationship between two organisms. We believe that Smurfs put their 'embryos' in the button of a developing mushroom. From a distance, Smurfs seem like they are wearing a hat and pants but as you can see this is a fallacy. The fungus provides camouflage and protective epidermal layers for the creature, while the creature provides nutrients and mobility for the spreading of spores.

Smurfs are believed to be a hunter gatherer society. As you can see, this little guy is returning from a successful venture. It is generally difficult to spot a Smurf; they are very apprehensive and cunning. Sadly though, it is rumored that they are hunted for their medicinal properties. It's hard to determine but it is thought that there are not many colonies of Smurf left.

~~~

El pitufo es, en realidad, el resultado de una simbiosis entre dos organismos. Se cree que el pitufo deposita sus embriones adentro de una seta joven. Desde una distancia parece que el pitufo porta un sombrero y pantalones, pero las apariencias engañan. El hongo le proporciona camuflaje y capas protectoras a la criatura a cambio de nutrientes y movimiento que facilita la distribución de sus esporos.

Se cree que los pitufos son una sociedad cazadora-recolectora. Como se puede observar, este espécimen regresa de una caza fructífera. Por lo general es difícil avistar un pitufo ya que son muy cautelosos y astutos. Lamentablemente, se dice que se cazan por sus propiedades medicinales. Es difícil determinarlo, pero se piensa que no restan muchas colonias de pitufos.

Source:
Nate Hallinan. http://natehallinan.com/gallery/Smurf/Smurf.html

Dignidad rebelde ~ Rebel dignity

2011-10-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

Al pueblo de México:
A los pueblos y gobiernos del mundo:

Hermanos:
No morirá la flor de la palabra. Podrá morir el rostro oculto de quien la nombra hoy, pero la palabra que vino desde el fondo de la historia y de la tierra ya no podrá ser arrancada por la soberbia del poder.

Nosotros nacimos de la noche. En ella vivimos. Moriremos en ella. Pero la luz será mañana para los más, para todos aquellos que hoy lloran la noche, para quienes se niega el día, para quienes es regalo la muerte, para quienes está prohibida la vida. Para todos la luz. Para todos todo. Para nosotros el dolor y la angustia, para nosotros la alegre rebeldía, para nosotros el futuro negado, para nosotros la dignidad insurrecta. Para nosotros nada.

Nuestra lucha es por hacernos escuchar, y el mal gobierno grita soberbia y tapa con cañones sus oídos.

Nuestra lucha es por el hambre, y el mal gobierno regala plomo y papel a los estómagos de nuestros hijos.

Nuestra lucha es por un techo digno, y el mal gobierno destruye nuestra casa y nuestra historia.

Nuestra lucha es por el saber, y el mal gobierno reparte ignorancia y desprecio.

Nuestra lucha es por la tierra, y el mal gobierno ofrece cementerios.

Nuestra lucha es por un trabajo justo y digno, y el mal gobierno compra y vende cuerpos y vergüenzas.

Nuestra lucha es por la vida, y el mal gobierno oferta muerte como futuro.

Nuestra lucha es por el respeto a nuestro derecho a gobernar y gobernarnos, y el mal gobierno impone a los más la ley de los menos.

Nuestra lucha es por la libertad para el pensamiento y el caminar, y el mal gobierno pone cárceles y tumbas.

Nuestra lucha es por la justicia, y el mal gobierno se llena de criminales y asesinos.

Nuestra lucha es por la historia, y el mal gobierno propone olvido.

Nuestra lucha es por la Patria, y el mal gobierno sueña con la bandera y la lengua extranjeras.

Nuestra lucha es por la paz, y el mal gobierno anuncia guerra y destrucción.

Techo, tierra, trabajo, pan, salud, educación, independencia, democracia, libertad, justicia y paz. Estas fueron nuestras banderas en la madrugada de 1994. Estas fueron nuestras demandas en la larga noche de los 500 años. Estas son, hoy, nuestras exigencias.

~~~

To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples and the governments of the world:

Brothers and sisters:
The blossoming Word will not die. The hidden face who gives that blossom a name may die, but the Word that came from the depths of history and of the earth can no longer be cut down by the arrogance of power.

We were born of the night. We live in her, and we will die in her. But the dawn tomorrow will be for the many, for all those who weep in the night, for those for whom the day is denied, for those for whom death is a gift, and for those for whom life is denied. For everyone, the light. For everyone, everything. For us, pain and anguish, the joy of rebellion, a future denied, the dignity of insurrection. For us, nothing.

Our struggle is to make ourselves be heard, and bad government screams arrogance and deafens its ears with its cannons.

Our struggle is caused by hunger, and the gifts of bad government are lead and paper for the stomachs of our children.

Our struggle is for a dignified roof over our heads, and bad government destroys our homes and our history.

Our struggle is for knowledge, and bad government distributes ignorance and disdain.

Our struggle is for land, and bad government gives us cemeteries.

Our struggle is for just and dignified employment, and bad government buys and sells our bodies and our shames.

Our struggle is for life, and bad government offers death as our future.

Our struggle is for our right to sovereignty and self-government, and bad government imposes laws of the few on the many.

Our struggle is for freedom of thought and movement, and bad government builds jails and graves.

Our struggle is for justice, and bad government is full of criminals and murderers.

Our struggle is for history, and bad government proposes to forget us.

Our struggle is for the homeland, and bad government dreams with the flag and the language of foreigners.

Our struggle is for peace, and bad government announces war and destruction.

Housing, land, employment, food, education, independence, democracy, liberty, justice and peace. These were our banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our demands during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our requisitions.

Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice

2011-10-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

by Walt Whitman

Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten’d—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet;
Those who love each other shall become invincible—they shall yet make Columbia victorious.

Sons of the Mother of All! you shall yet be victorious!
You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.

No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers;
If need be, a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.

One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian’s comrade;
From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another, an Oregonese, shall be friends triune,
More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.

To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come;
Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.

It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection;
The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly;
The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron;
I, extatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.

(Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
—Nay—nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

Porphyria's Lover

2011-10-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last l knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While l debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string l wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
l am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
l warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And l untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
l propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And l, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

For some, this poem is about "a male psychopath living in a remote cottage, probably in Renaissance Italy, who has strangled his mistress and is sitting with her head propped upon his shoulder." (Bowbrow, Fisher. 2003)

However,

Porphyria is an incurable blood disease that disables and kills thousands every year. Its discovery dates back to the mid-1700s, well before Browning wrote "Porphyria's Lover." It is often referred to as mental illness or the Royal Disease, which, given Porphyria's tidy golden hair, means Porphyria could have been royalty inasmuch as that description would not likely be associated with Victorian lower class. Symptoms of Porphyria's disease are repeatedly described within the poem by Browning, e.g. blood loss ("gone so pale"), muscle weakness ("too weak to set her passion free") and light sensitivity which explains why she arrived at night ("rain set in early tonight") — and so on. Victims of Porphyria's disease suffer a horrible death, thus Porphyria's lover committed the highest act of love; he set his lover free from a grisly death.

Sources:
J.T. Best. "'Porphyria's Lover': Vastly Misunderstood Poetry". Victorian Web. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/porphyria/best1.html
Jerry Bobrow & Stephen Fisher. CSET Multiple Subjects. 2003

Sonic Youth - Teen Age Riot

2011-10-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Songwriters: Kim Althea Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee M Ranaldo, Steven Jay Shelley

You're it
No, you're it
Hey, you're really it
You're it
No I mean it, you're it

Say it
Don't spray it
Spirit desire, face me
Spirit desire, don't displace me
Spirit desire
We will fall

Miss me
Don't dismiss me
Spirit desire

Spirit desire
Spirit desire
Spirit desire
We will fall
Spirit desire
We will fall

And everybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather
And what's a man do to but work out whether it's true?
Looking for a man with a focus and a temper
Who can open up a map and see between one and two

Time to get it
Before you let it
Get to you

If here he comes now
Stick to your guns
And let him through

And everybody's coming from the winter vacation
Taking in the sun in a exaltation to you
You come running in on platform shoes with Marshall stacks
To at least just give us a clue

Ah, here it comes
I know it's someone I knew
Teenage riot in a public station
Gonna fight and tear it up in a hypernation for you

Now I see it
I think I'll leave it out of the way
Now I come near you
And it's not clear why you fade away

Looking for a ride to your secret location
Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation, for you
Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that's rockin'
And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that'll do me for now

It better work out
I hope it works out my way
'Cause it's getting kind of quiet in my city's head
And takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now

You better look it
We're gonna shake it
Up to him

He acts the hero
We paint a zero
On his hand

And we know it's down
We know it's bound too loose
Everybody's sound is round it
Everybody wants to be proud to choose

So who's to take the blame
For the stormy weather
You're never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze

It's time to go round
A one man showdown
Teach us how to fail

We're off the streets now
And back on the road
On the riot trail

Chilean demonstrators splattered riot police in paint on August 25, 2011. Demonstrators in Chile want fundamental reforms to public education in order to make it more accessible to the general public.
Photo: Victor R. Caviano/AP

Blacktip sharks attack shoal of fish ~ Tiburones punta negra atacan un cardumen

2011-09-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

The video taken at the Kuredu Island resort in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. The way the fish move as a collective is mesmerizing.

About the sharks:Blacktip sharks are generally shy and rarely attack humans. Their average length is 1.5m. Blacktip sharks are known to leap out of the water and spin 3-4 times at the end of feeding runs. During these jumps they can attain speeds of 6.3 m/s.

~~~

El video fue tomado en un resort en la isla Kuredu en las Maldivas situado en el oceano Índico. Es impresionante cómo se mueven los peces en relación a los tiburones.

Acerca de los tiburones del video:Los tiburones punta negra son tímidos y rara vez atacan a los seres humanos. Miden un promedio de 1.5m. Se ha observado a los tiburones punta negra realizando saltos fuera del agua en donde giran su cuerpo 3 o 4 veces al cabo de una cacería. En estos saltos logran velocidades de 6.3 m/s.

Sources ~ Fuentes:
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvfY8-3ktNA&
Blacktip Shark. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacktip_shark

In an Age of Fops and Toys

2011-09-24T23:01:00.001-07:00

by Ralph Waldo EmersonIn an age of fops and toys,Wanting wisdom, void of right,Who shall nerve heroic boysTo hazard all in Freedom’s fight,—Break sharply off their jolly games,Forsake their comrades gayAnd quit proud homes and youthful damesFor famine, toil and fray?Yet on the nimble air benignSpeed nimbler messages,That waft the breath of grace divineTo hearts in sloth and ease.So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, Thou must,The youth replies, I can.

WAR AGAINST THE GATEKEEPERS OF EDUCATION

2011-09-12T23:31:00.000-07:00

A call to arms!

College students: Get a textbook for your class, put it up online and share it with your classmates for free.

Public education is becoming too expensive for students. It's time students fought back!

Keep your methods on the DL, don't get caught, don't be stupid, don't use public file sharing networks.

Don't buy books you don't need to buy!

Students of the world unite!

Manul Chao

2011-09-12T22:48:00.000-07:00

Pallas's Cat or Manul

This feline is the size of an average domestic cat and lives in the grasslands common to India, Pakistan, western China, Mongolia, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Its habitat comprises a large area, yet the manul is a threatened animal because people hunt it for its fur. The manul eats small rodents, and is a solitary creature. It owes its unique appearance to a relatively undisturbed evolution. Notice its round pupils and thick hair. It is also very stocky compared to other felines. This cat is a window in time: the geography of its habitat has allowed it to exist as it has for 12 million years. In other words, you're looking at a cat that looks the same now as it did 12 million years ago.

~~~

El gato de Pallas o el gato manúl

Este felino es del tamaño de un gato doméstico típico y vive en los llanos de la India, Pakistán, China occidental, Mongolia, Afganistán y Turkmenistán. Aunque el hábitat del manul cubre un gran área, el manul está amenazado como especie ya que la gente lo caza por su pelaje. El manul come pequeños roedores y es una criatura solitaria. Debe su apariencia a una evolución sin mayores disturbios. Note sus pupilas redondas y su pelo grueso. También es fornido en comparación con otros felinos. Hace 12 millones de años el manul mantenía la misma forma. La geografía de su hábitat ha permitido al manul mantener su forma de vida por 12 millones de años. A través de este gato podemos ver a través del tiempo hacia nuestro pasado.

Photos: Tambako the Jaguar
Source: Manul – the Cat that Time Forgot. The Ark In Space. 20 April 2011.

San Clemente 7/24/09 ~ South Swell 8-10+ ft.

2011-09-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

Modern Samurai Cuts BB Gun Pellet in Air

2011-09-11T02:32:00.000-07:00

The samurai, Isao Machii, displays unbelievable accuracy.

Imagine being fired for telling your colleagues what the rules are at work

2011-09-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

A Wisconsin Department of Transportation worker was fired when he informed his colleagues about a policy on giving out free ID cards for voting. Wisconsin law requires voters to show photo ID at the voting booth, and the photo ID is free... if you ask for it. Otherwise, it's $28. A memo was previously sent out to DMV workers instructing them not to offer the ID card free of charge to customers unless they specifically requested it.

The body of the worker's email is below:

"Do you know someone who votes that does not have a State ID that meets requirements to vote? Tell them they can go to the DMV/DOT and get a free ID card. However they must ask for the free ID. a memo was sent out by the 3rd in command of the DMV/DOT. The memo specifically told the employees at the DMV/DOT not to inform individuals that the ID’s are free. So if the individuals seeking to get the free ID does not ask for a free ID, they will have to pay for it!!

"Just wanted everyone to be informed!! REMEMBER TO TELL ANYONE YOU KNOW!! ANYONE!! EVEN IF THEY DON’T NEED THE FREE ID, THEY MAY KNOW SOMEONE THAT DOES!! SO TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!"

Source:
Patrick Marley
Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel
Link: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/129469023.html

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

2011-09-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

Patients Deserve to Know What Drug Companies Pay Their Doctor

2011-09-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein
ProPublica, Sep. 7, 2011, 9 p.m.
Original source

Your doctor gives you an expensive new drug to control your cholesterol, or recommends a certain brand of artificial hip, or says you need a stent to open a clogged artery.

He's the expert. But how do you know his expertise is untainted? The makers of the drug, the replacement hip or the stent may have paid your doctor to deliver promotional talks extolling the virtues of the product. Or they could be paying him, or her, to consult on marketing plans.

It doesn't necessarily follow, of course, that this kind of moonlighting influences the treatment you receive. And many doctors don't accept these kinds of payments. But if yours does, wouldn't you like to know that?

As it stands, doctors don't have to tell you if they're working with the makers of the products they're prescribing you. They don't have to tell you whether they own stock in those companies or do research on their behalf.

There's no place for you -- the patient -- to find out whether your doctor is prescribing more drugs or medical devices made by companies with whom he has a relationship.

Understanding such ties can be important. Many brand-name drugs are wildly expensive, and some carry an array of dangerous side effects. Sometimes similar drugs, either those made by competitors or generics, are cheaper or have fewer risks.

Patients largely trust their doctors to do what's right for them. But a recent string of scandals has raised questions about whether patients need to know more. Pharmaceutical and medical device makers have paid billions of dollars to settle accusations of kickbacks to doctors and improper marketing of their products.

Many physicians say the close ties between drug and device firms and doctors lead to new and more effective medications, life-saving innovations and a better-educated profession. Although this is certainly true, the relationships also can cause physicians to -- consciously or not -- downplay side effects and poor research outcomes, studies show.

Earlier this summer, for example, the Spine Journal devoted an entire issue to repudiating the research of several spine experts that supported the widespread use of a Medtronic bone growth product used in spinal fusions. The articles charged that the researchers, who had substantial financial ties to Medtronic, overstated the benefits of the product, Infuse, and ignored its risks.

Only recently have some tools become available to help patients learn about their doctors' financial ties before they are in the exam room.

Several companies, pressured by Congress or required by legal settlements, have started to reveal the names of the doctors they've paid to deliver promotional talks or serve as consultants.

By 2013, every drug and device company operating in the United States will have to do the same, under the health-care reform law passed last year. They'll also have to say if they've paid doctors for consulting, research, even a dinner.

We've looked at the data from 12 companies, which make up 40 percent of U.S. drug sales, and found some surprises among pharma's favored speakers and consultants.

Many of the doctors who received the most money hadn't published much in the way of research, and many didn't have associations with academic medical centers. Some had no credentials beyond a medical license. And some had been sanctioned for misconduct by their home state medical boards.

Among the top-paid speakers from that sampling was Santa Monica pain physician Gerald Sacks. Since 2009, he has earned at least $522,113 giving promotional talks and consulting for four companies, according to the data.

Sacks, an anesthesiologist, isn't a leader in prominent pain medicine societies, and several top pain physicians told us they hadn't heard of him. He doesn't work in an academic medical center such as UCLA or USC. He hasn't published much research. We tried to talk to him about what he was paid for, but he didn't return numerous messages.

Sacks' slides from a 2008 educational talk and 2009 presentation before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration describe him as the director of pain management at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica. A hospital spokesman said Sacks has never held that title and that his pain clinic is not part of the hospital. He does have the ability to admit and treat patients at St. John's.

Drug firms have a pretty fair idea of whether their investment in doctors like Sacks pays off. They pay millions to researchers who buy data from pharmacies and track the prescribing habits of doctors. Pfizer, which gave Sacks at least $318,250 for speaking in 2009 and 2010, according to its data, could find out if and how often he gave patients Lyrica and Celebrex, two of the company's pain medications. Firms can also track whether and how often the people who attended such talks prescribed the drugs that were discussed.

But not everyone who would like to examine the data is allowed to. The middlemen who collect this information refused to sell the data to us.

That leaves it up to patients. ProPublica has created a database, Dollars for Docs, which allows you to check whether your doctor is being paid by any of the 12 companies currently disclosing this information.

Because all companies won't reveal their payments until 2013, you might also want to ask your doctor directly about them. It's worth inquiring whether cheaper versions are available, perhaps older or generic drugs. Does the drug have more side effects than competitors' drugs? In some situations, it might be worth asking whether non-drug solutions should be tried first.

Of course, checking the rolls of paid promotional speakers is just one consideration when picking or assessing your doctor. You can also look at your state's medical board website to see if a doctor has been disciplined or criminally convicted. You can talk to other patients about the thoroughness of the doctor's exams and openness to questions.

If you have a smartphone, you can access our database from anywhere -- even while sitting in your doctor's waiting room.

The Strange Man with the Strange Bird

2011-09-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

There once was a strange man with an even stranger bird who moved to little Billy's apartment complex. The man and his bird lived deep inside the underbelly of Billy's apartment complex. Sometimes you could see the man walking about his apartment, but only sometimes. But the man's bird you could always see. Always.

It stared and stared from the window. The instance you tried staring at the bird, you would have found that the bird was already ready and staring back at you. That frightened people and made them look away. They knew the bird was always watching. It was always watching. Always.

It wasn't all bad When the man and his bird arrived: there were fewer rats and pigeons in the apartment complex, and the raccoons that made a lot of noise eating things in the garbage quickly learned to stay away, all because of the man's bird. And so, everybody began to think that the man's bird was a hunting bird. But things changed.

The man's bird didn't stop with rats or pigeons. Every now and then someone's pet cat appeared dead with its bellycut open and its heart missing from its chest. No one could prove that it had been the bird, but nothing like that had ever happened before, and so the man and his bird were suspected by the neighbors of doing awful things. Neither the man nor his bird cared to defend themselves from these accusations, and everyone thought they were all the more stranger for it.

One late afternoon, little Billy and his sister were playing in the parking lot of the apartment complex. The man's bird was staring, as usual, from the second story window into the parking lot. Little Billy noticed that the bird's window was open. Suddenly, a great shadow appeared. Little Billy's sister was gone! The man's bird was gone too! Then Little Billy heard his sister scream a bone-chilling scream. Little Billy was scared, but he followed the noise. As he hurried, he thought he saw some blood on the apartment's white stucco walls. Little Billy's parents and neighbors also ran out of the apartment building toward the noise. They found the strange bird perched on top of a dead man. His eyes had been clawed out and eaten, and his throat had been ripped out. They found his pants around his ankles and he had no underwear on. Between his legs was just a bloody hole. Billy's sister was shaking and crying, but she was otherwise unharmed. The bird had wasted no time.

The strange man appeared among the crowd and the strange bird flew from the dead man's body to perch on the strange man's shoulder. Then the strange man appeared to give the bird a small meaty treat that the bird gobbled immediately. The neighbors couldn't find anything to say, so they said nothing. The strange man nodded at the silence and went back up to his apartment. The police later came and cleaned up the mess.

The strange man and the strange bird continued to live as they had. Every now and then, mean and scary people from around the neighborhood appeared dead with their eyes clawed out and their throats ripped open, and every now and then, the police would come by and clean the mess. Nobody bothered the strange man nor his bird, but sometimes the neighbors left them food, for thanks. Because they knew that the bird was always watching. It was always watching. Always.

Chalk drawing on black paper by Chrys Rorigue

Sunbeam - Rayo de sol

2011-09-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about publishing on the Internet is the affordable informality of the medium. There is an identifiable capacity for a publication to engage in self-reflection. And so I'll take this advantage.

Calypso is named after the ship belonging to the excellent ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. It is from this ship that Cousteau and his men dived into the world beneath the surface. And so, on this blog we navigate oceans of time and space and explore our reality's surface. With another vehicle, the SP-350 Julie, we dive into the worlds beyond that singular surface.

---

Una ventaja de publicar en la Web es que la Web se presta a la informalidad. Además hay una capacidad identificable para que una publicación pueda tomar y expresar consciencia de sí mismo. Y por tanto aprovecho de esta oportunidad.

Calypso se llama así como la nave del supremo explorador oceánico Jacques Cousteau. Desde esta nave Cousteau y sus hombres buceaban en un mundo que se halla por debajo de la superficie. Y así, desde este blog navegaremos oceanos de tiempo y espacio explorando la bella superficie única de nuestra realidad. Con otro vehículo, el SP-350 Julie, miraremos más allá de esta superficie.

Smart but crazy people, these.

2011-08-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

United States. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba. 13 March 1962.

Link to PDF: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf

Hombre con 24 dedos sin deformaciones

2011-08-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Fuente: Yahoo! News

"Bank of America. We'll help you out."

2011-08-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

A Bank of America lobbyist tells presidential candidate Rick Perry that he has their support.

I wonder what Perry will have to do in return.

When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross (or words to that effect)

2011-08-18T23:34:00.000-07:00

The quote "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross." has been attributed to both Huey Long, a populist Louisiana politician assassinated in 1935,¹ and Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.²

It was actually a professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School who gave origin to the quote in a New York Times article published 12 September, 1938.

Below is a re-print of the article (1938-09-12):

DISGUISED FASCISM SEEN AS A MENACE
Prof. Luccock Warns That It Will Bear the Misleading Label 'Americanism'
When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, "Americanism," Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University said yesterday morning in a sermon at the Riverside Church, Riverside Drive and 122d Street.
    "The high-sounding phrase 'the American way' will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties," he said. "There is an obligation resting on us all to dedicate our minds to the hard task of thinking in terms of Christian objectives and values, so that we may be saved from moral confusion.
    "For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudice and hysterical appeal to fear. We have touched a new low in a Congressional investigation this Summer, used by some participating in it to whip up fear and prejudice against many causes of human welfare, such as a concern for peace and the rights of labor to bargain collectively."
    Professor Luccock, who preached on the theme "Keeping Life Out of the Confusion," continued:
    "There is, of course, the peace of the cemetery. If you want that you can have it. But you will pay for such complacent serenity with blind eyes which do not see the world's fear and agony; with deaf ears, into which the still sad music of humanity never comes; with deadened nerves and unsensitized conscience.
    "We will never be brought to confusion, even in such a baffling and muddled world as ours, if we have a faith in a God of love as the ultimate power in the universe. The words 'God is love' have this deep meaning: that everything that is against love is ultimately doomed and damned."

Bibliographie
1. "Huey Long". Wikipedia. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#Assassination
2. "Sinclair Lewis". Wikipedia. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Lewis
"Fascism comes wrapped in the flag". Everything Shii Knows. http://shii.org/knows/Fascism_comes_wrapped_in_the_flag

My thoughts on Texas governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry

2011-08-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross.

- Author unknown

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. (22) Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ (23) Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

- Matthew 7:21-23

Pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of profits

2011-08-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

Borders Bookstores closed all of its stores some months ago. It seems recent that I heard about it on the news. There was a Borders store in downtown San Francisco, in Union Square. That's gone. I remember one we as a family happened to go to every now and then, and read books and later eat outside inside a food court. Now that's gone too.

I understand the reason why Borders closed. It's because they could not be sustainable in the face of more efficient money-making machines such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Borders could not compete anymore and had to close its doors.

Even knowing why things happened as they did, it still saddens me that I can no longer go to those places as I remember them because now I will have to see something different: a cold, uncaring reality. The warmth that I had, empty, taken from me by an invisible hand we all have no problem with.

At least one can see God's hand in nature when he makes an appearance at a concert.

En paz

2011-08-14T21:58:00.000-07:00

por Amado Nervo

Muy cerca de mi ocaso, yo te bendigo, vida,
porque nunca me diste ni esperanza fallida,
ni trabajos injustos, ni pena inmerecida;

porque veo al final de mi rudo camino
que yo fui el arquitecto de mi propio destino;

que si extraje la miel o la hiel de las cosas,
fue porque en ellas puse hiel o mieles sabrosas:
cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas.

...Cierto, a mis lozanías va a seguir el invierno:
¡mas tú no me dijiste que mayo fuese eterno!

Hallé sin duda largas noches de mis penas;
mas no me prometiste tú sólo noches buenas;
y en cambio tuve algunas santamente serenas...

Amé, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz.
¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!

First public performance of Rage Against the Machine

2011-08-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

Full concert footage of RATM's first ever public performance at The Quad, Cal State Northridge, Northridge, CA on Oct. 23, 1991.

Setlist:
1: Killing In The Name (Instrumental)
2: Take The Power Back
3: Autologic
4: Bullet In The Head
5: Hit The Deck
6: Township Rebellion
7: Darkness Of Greed
8: Clear The Lane
9: Clampdown
10: Know Your Enemy (alternate version)
11: Freedom

I'm surprised by how little the songs were changed once they signed on to a major label.

Rock on!

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing (or words to that effect)

2011-08-10T00:17:00.000-07:00

This quote is bogus, and [it's supposed author William] Burke never said it. It is a pseudo-quote, and corresponds to real quotes in the same way that urban legends about the ghost hitch-hiker vanishing in the back of the car and alligators in the sewers correspond to true news stories.

A good read. (Note: Thorough, academic and rigorous.)

Source: Porter, Martin. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

Times like these / Tiempos como estos

2011-08-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

- Edward Burke

London Calling

2011-08-08T19:22:00.000-07:00

by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared, and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look to us
Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out, and draw another breath
London calling, and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking, I saw you nodding out
London calling, see we ain't got no high
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes

The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
'Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

Now get this

London calling, yes, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
After all this, won't you give me a smile?
London calling

I never felt so much alike

Untitled

2011-08-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

- Henry Miller

A Day in California

2011-08-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

This is mostly Southern California.

A Day in California from Ryan Killackey on Vimeo.

Untitled

2011-08-05T01:06:00.001-07:00

And remember the tinman
found he had what he thought he lacked

- Tracy Chapman

Sleep Now in the Fire

2011-08-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

by Zack de la Rocha

The world is my expense
The cost of my desire
Jesus blessed me with its future
And I protect it with fire
So raise your fists
And march around
Just don't take what you need
I'll jail and bury those committed
And smother the rest in greed
Crawl with me into tomorrow
Or I'll drag you to your grave
I'm deep inside your children
They'll betray you in my name

Hey, hey
Sleep now in the fire

Hey, hey
Sleep now in the fire

The lie is my expense
The scope of my desire
The party blessed me with its future
And I protect it with fire
I am the Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agent of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire

Hey, hey
Sleep now in the fire

Hey, hey
Sleep now in the fire

For it's the end of history
It's caged and frozen still
There is no other pill to take
So swallow the one
That made you ill
The Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields overseer
The agent of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
To Sleep now in the fire

A CALL TO RENEGADES: SHUT DOWN WALL STREET

2011-08-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

This is an exercise in free speech. As is this blog.

Tengo palabra y derecho.

Ameneh Bahrami

2011-07-31T11:37:00.000-07:00

Iranian sentenced to blinding for acid attack pardoned

An Iranian man who was ordered to be blinded for carrying out an acid attack on a woman has been pardoned by his victim, state television has said.

Ameneh Bahrami had demanded qisas, a rarely used retributive justice under Sharia law, but the report said she had forgone that right at the last minute.

A court had backed Ms Bahrami's demand in 2008 that Majid Movahedi be blinded.

He attacked Ms Bahrami in 2004 after she had refused his offer of marriage, leaving her severely disfigured.

Rights group Amnesty International had lobbied against the sentence, calling it "cruel and inhuman punishment amounting to torture".

Mother's praise
The state television website reported: "With the request of Ameneh Bahrami, the acid attack victim, Majid (Movahedi) who was sentenced for 'qisas' was pardoned at the last minute."Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteI had no intention of taking his eyes from him,” Ameneh Bahrami. The Isna news agency quoted Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi as saying: "Today in hospital the blinding of Majid Movahedi was to have been carried out in the presence of an eye specialist and judiciary representative, when Ameneh pardoned him."

Isna quoted Ms Bahrami as saying: "I struggled for seven years with this verdict to prove to people that the person who hurls acid should be punished through 'qisas', but today I pardoned him because it was my right.

"I did it for my country, since all other countries were looking to see what we would do."

Ms Bahrami was quoted on Iranian TV as saying: "I never wanted to have revenge on him. I just wanted the sentence to be issued for retribution. But I would not have carried it out. I had no intention of taking his eyes from him."

Mr Dolatabadi told Isna that Ms Bahrami had demanded "blood money", or compensation, for her injuries.

He praised her "courageous act" of pardon, adding: "The judiciary was serious about implementing the verdict."

Ms Bahrami said she had never received any money from the man's family, saying she was seeking only compensation for medical fees, which she put at 150,000 euros ($216,000: £131,000).

She said: "He won't be freed. He has a sentence, which he has to serve for 10-12 years of which he has done seven. Unless the full compensation is paid, he won't be freed."

Isna quoted Ms Bahrami's mother as saying: "I am proud of my daughter... Ameneh had the strength to forgive Majid. This forgiveness will calm Ameneh and our family."

Source: BBC

Like a Rolling Stone

2011-07-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

by Bob Dylan
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but know you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you'd better take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

Why saying "shit" is a no-no, and saying "poop" is okay.

2011-07-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

by intoto

[Editor's note: I didn't write this, but I thought it was a pretty interesting.]

It's called "It Hits the Fan" and was originally on in Season 5.
It offers a realistic explanation of the origin of the swear word. Shit did become a "cursed" word at about the time of the plague, and the Pope did send out his soldiers (Knights) to figure out why God was cursing the people. The area around London was a hotbed of language at the time and various words for shit ... poop, feces, dung, manure, scheisse, shite, skite ... were being incorporated into the language. Contemporaries of Geoffrey Chaucer and Chaucer himself wrote essays on how the language was being corrupted by these new words. Basically the complaint was a common one in history ... "all these God-damned foreignors! Speak English!" When speaking English meant speaking like this:
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfOMU&feature=relatedThere was also a strong class system in place. Because the incorporation of new words was often by people of the lowest classes, that by proximity were forced to incorporate new words into the working language to be able to communicate with one another, the people of the upper class considered these new words "vulgar," just as they considered the people of the lowest classes vulgar. In fact, the word vulgar at the time meant "lacking in good breeding" although the origin of the Latin word meant "common."
Whether or not there was ever a Papal edict declaring certain words "cursed" by God, and therefore anyone uttering those words would be also be cursed or damned by God, and that saying those words was ever a crime punishable by death ... is not really known. However, there was definitely a sense of urgency about the plague. When half the people die in a relatively short period of time, and disease is not understood, the survivors put a special emphasis on not repeating the behaviors of those who got sick and died. Probably among those behaviors was avoiding rats and fleas, and that was a good thing, but when the people didn't know for sure what to avoid, they surely avoided many things that were "wrong" to avoid because they had nothing to do with the plague.
Many "traditions" become rote after time and the origin or original purpose for those "traditional" behaviors becomes lost on subsequent generations ... often because the "reasons" why something was done were not included in the explanation for doing or performing an act.
The Catholic Church and surely other churches gave sermons in front of congregations of people that had a foul stench because for hundreds of years, bathing appears to have been "optional" ... rancid breath and body odors were common among the common people and so the clergy incorporated incense into many of the rituals and ceremonies they performed for the people. To not offend the paying customers by telling them that we are doing this because 'you people stink', they probably told them that God wanted the incense as an offering. Well, after the people started bathing, the incense part of the rituals stayed in the ceremonies ... despite the fact that is served no useful purpose anymore. The stupid lie to cover up the truth became "the reason" and no one questioned it, because it was God's will, and you don't question God's will.
My favorite modern update on this phenomenon goes like this:
A woman wants help from and wants to teach her teenage daughter to prepare the family's traditional Christmas meal. Part of that process is to cook a large ham the day before Xmas. So, as the mother is showing and telling her daughter what to do, she gets to a certain step that baffles the daughter. The mother tells the daughter to cut off the two ends of the ham. The daughter sees the big chunks of meat cut off that the mother lays on the side of the ham and asks, "Why are you cutting off the two ends of the ham?"
The mother stops for a second and thinks about it. It definitely increases the surface area (more space to glaze) and reduces the mass of the ham so that it probably cooks a little faster, but it also increases the probability of losing internal moisture. But these explanations won't do. The mother remembers and tells her daughter, "You know, I'm not quite sure why we cut off the ends of the ham. That's the way my mom taught me how to do it when I was your age, and I just figured it made the ham somehow better. I never asked her 'Why'."
The daughter then says, "Well, why don't we give grandma a call and ask?" So, with a sense of glee, they do just that.
But grandma doesn't have the answer. "It is funny that you ask that, because I remember wondering that myself when my mother taught me how to prepare the Xmas ham."
The grand-daughter chimes in ... "Grandma, do you have great-grandma's number? I can conference her in to this call and we can ask her."
So, they do that, and after exchanging pleasantries for a minute or so, the mother, daughter and grandmother reveal the purpose of their call. The grandmother relays to her mother, "You know mom, the girls are preparing the Xmas ham and they got to the point where they cut off the ends of the ham, and Brittany asked Liza why we cut off the ends of the ham, and since Liza didn't know, they called me and asked. But I didn't know either. All I know is that is how you taught me how to prepare it. So, mom, why do we cut off the ends of the Xmas ham?"
Great-grandma chuckles and laughs for a few seconds. "Oh, this is precious. Honey, do you remember that little stove we used to have?"
And fortunately, for this little bit of tradition, great-grandma was still alive. Unfortunately, for humanity, the contrary is often the case. The reasons why rote behaviors get passed down from generation to generation long after they have lost their original meaning is that events and circumstances conspire to lose that original justification. Then it just becomes "tradition" ... and we keep doing it because we have always done it.
And that is the story of cursed words, generically. The specific reasons for segregating certain specific words is lost. Some can be generally understood. People don't want to introduce sexual terminology to children before they are ready to take on that reality. And, for a long time, keeping children ignorant of their sexuality did seem to work to keep children from experimenting at too young of an age. A young girl who gets pregnant before her hips have grown to the point where she can give birth could very well die in childbirth ... and they often did. So, the warnings and even condemnations did serve some purpose.
But the "cursed" words involving other body functions ... well, differentiation between words like "poop," which is deemed OK, and "shit," which is not OK ... is basically a load of bull. It is that way because of tradition.
So, I told my sons those kinds of explanations, and said that even though there is no logical reason for why some words are bad and some are good, society still accepts the basic idea that there are bad and good words. So, you can be judged harshly for saying those words in the wrong context or around the wrong people. In fact, you can even be arrested and fined. Because people are stupid.
And because, "Well, we've always done it that way", or "It just is that way" ... is often, really, the answer. And even though that is stupid, you still have live on this planet with billions of other people and try to eek out a happy life. So, you should choose your battles wisely.

intoto (_) 70 points 2 hours ago* (86|16)

My Farewell Letter to Facebook (posted my last week on Facebook)

2011-07-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Some of you may have wondered why I’m leaving Facebook.

It took me a while to articulate the reasons, but this is why:

1) I am tired of feeling slightly jealous.
2) I don’t like not being able to control what I see on my wall.
3) I am tired of too much information
4) I don’t like Facebook’s encroachment on my real life

1) Some of you lead incredibly amazing lives, and I’m happy for those of you who do. What happened is that since so many of you have incredible lives, my brain stopped processing each of you as individuals and lumped you into a group. Unconsciously, you became an abstraction- albeit one of a person leading an incredible life.
Listen, I like you people with incredible lives, I really do. And I want to keep liking you, so the best thing I can do is to turn off that abstraction by leaving Facebook. I look forward to the stories we can share in person.

2) I’ll be blunt. I really really don’t care if you’re now friends with someone, or if you joined such and such group, or if you like something. Again, this isn’t personal. If you told me in person, I would go, “Oh, really? That’s cool! You know it reminds me of…” or some such. But there are over 600 of you doing the same thing, so it’s not just you. It’s 600 of you.

3) I think this point ties up the previous two points. What I look at is information on Facebook. I see 600 “avatars” of you, each doing the same thing. You all have become a mass to me, one with familiar names and faces. Because there’s no room in my life for a mass of people, I need to collectively shut you off. Remember though, that individually, I love you all.

4) I hate thinking that something would make a good wall post or that this would make a good profile picture. Nothing sucks more than being on vacation somewhere in the rainforest trying to get away from it all, and thinking about posting something to Facebook.

I think that I’m lucky to have been connected to you through Facebook, but now I realize that Facebook is in some way, dangerous. We’ve accepted its presence in our lives without question, and we’ve changed our habits to accommodate it, and not the other way around. I think I now understand celebrities who fight to live their lives away from everyone’s prying eyes. The only difference is that with Facebook, we willingly become celebrities of our own familiar audiences and give up our privacy as a result.

If any of these reasons don’t work for you, try this one: I’m keeping it simple, peeps. Facebook doesn’t make it simple for me because I’m a complicated man, and no one understands me but my women. ;)

Peace

Monkey business

2011-07-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

I think that monkeys know what they do when they steal from us.

To them, we're big scary monkeys.

We aren't exactly the most friendly of species, at least not in relation to other species.

So the smartest thing they can do is to take our stuff.

Picture this: Boy and girl are out on vacation somewhere tropical. Boy sets camera down and monkey comes by and takes it. Boy and girl are distressed because their camera goes away.

Little monkeys aren't going to mess with big monkeys. Would you mess with a gorilla? I didn't think so. But if there were a big gorilla you didn't like and was bothering you (which isn't true because gorillas like to be left alone and rarely bother anyone), what would you do to keep the gorilla from bothering you? Now, if you're a monkey, all you really know is that if you hurt another animal enough, then it will stay away from you. If you can get the big monkeys to stay away from you, then you have succeeded in establishing your territory.

That's the primer on monkey business with humans. Human monkey business on the other hand is extremely complex, but what it comes down to is that some (human) monkeys want to be left alone from other (human) monkeys.

photo: appurupai

Google is the Borg

2011-07-20T23:31:00.000-07:00

Love for Google+
Google+ is very robust. It hasn't crashed and it already has 10 million visitors. Let me repeat: 10 million users. Google+ accomplished in two weeks what took Facebook about two years, and it's still invite-only. This is where the real social network is at. Even Mark Zuckerberg seems to think so. After all, he was one of the early adopters, along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But those are just objective facts.

My subjective opinion is that Google+ is amazing. It is one of the good things in life, like the fact that an African-American can become President of the United States. It truly feels like a social network for our age and our age group because it's done right: the interface is clean, simple, and useful. Also, the level of freedom and privacy Google+ provides is amazing. It's like real life, where you can share racist jokes with one group of friends, and support equal rights for all with another. The one thing I would like is the option of hiding chatty people. This is one of the reasons I left Facebook. I *really* don't need to know every detail of your life. It's *your* life, and please don't make me live it; I have my own to live. Google+ is in Beta, which is a little scary, but it constantly surprises me with how much everything works. It feels like a brand new machine.

The difference between Direct and Indirect Evidence

2011-07-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

Jurors of Casey Anthony's murder trial found no direct evidence linking Casey Anthony to the murder of her daughter. There was plenty of circumstantial evidence though. But how can you tell the difference. Unless you are a juror in a trial, you probably won't see the instructions. Below, I post model instructions from Connecticut.

There are, generally speaking, two kinds of evidence, direct and circumstantial. Direct evidence is testimony by a witness about what that witness personally saw or heard or did. Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence, that is, evidence from which you could find that another fact exists, even though it has not been proved directly. There is no legal distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence as far as probative value; the law permits you to give equal weight to both, but it is for you to decide how much weight to give to any particular evidence.

Circumstantial evidence of an event is the testimony of witnesses as to the existence of certain facts or evidence or the happening of other events from which you may logically conclude that the event in question did happen. ***Assume that it is a December night, the weather is clear, there is no snow on the ground, and you retire for the evening. You wake up the next morning, you look out the window and you see snow on the ground and footprints across your lawn. The evidence that the night before there was no snow on the ground and the next morning there was snow on the ground and footprints across your lawn is direct evidence. That direct evidence, however, is circumstantial evidence of the fact that some time during the night it snowed and that some time thereafter someone walked across your lawn.

There is no reason to be prejudiced against evidence simply because it is circumstantial evidence. You make decisions on the basis of circumstantial evidence in the everyday affairs of life. There is no reason why decisions based on circumstantial evidence should not be made in the courtroom. In fact, proof by circumstantial evidence may be as conclusive as would be the testimony of witnesses speaking on the basis of their own observation. Circumstantial evidence, therefore, is offered to prove a certain fact from which you are asked to infer the existence of another fact or set of facts. Before you decide that a fact has been proved by circumstantial evidence, you must consider all of the evidence in light of reason, experience and common sense.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judge-h-lee-sarokin/casey-anthony-jury_b_898550.html

Things that amazed me this weekend

2011-07-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

- 3D Televisions

I'm not kidding. Have you seen these things? The picture quality is so clear and so good, it jumps out right at you... in 3D! Unbelievable!

Seriously, after at staring in awe at a 54" Samsung screen, I felt I absolutely needed to be immersed in High Definition glory from then on or I'd feel like I'd be living a pale shadow world. Anyway, the experience impressed me. Here's why:

- I went to the store to see what was new in consumer electronics, and I saw a television capable of reproducing 3D images (with user glasses). I seriously had no idea these things existed

- I experienced a part of history. I have something in common with the people who first saw heard about the radio, or television, or color television.

- I usually don't get excited by newer television models. I still have the old television I found in the I-House laundry room when everyone was moving away. That was four years ago. I really don't watch TV. But really, I think 3D televisions are something different.

- It's because 3D televisions are from the future. It's one of those things like flying cars, but that actually came true. (Flying cars are too impractical, by the way. We have flying buses [airplanes] and I think that's all we need.)

- The power shakeup in the News Corp. empire

It's incredible how fast things can go wrong for powerful people. It's humbling to watch and gratifying to be reminded that there are consequences for bad behavior. For those who don't know, an old London tabloid called "News of the World" was caught having hacked into the phone accounts of private citizens in the UK and possibly in New York in order to gain information for publishing purposes. (News of the World belonged to News Corporation, which owns Fox. "News of the World" was shut down because of the hacking case.) So the editor of "News of the World" when all the hacking was going on became the CEO of the publisher of all the News Corp. papers in the UK. (The publisher is called "News International" and the CEO, "Rebekah Brooks".) She resigned and was arrested today for her role in the hacking scandal.

- Japan winning the women's World Cup

I'm almost sorry I had written off Japan in the second extra time. Japan doesn't disappoint when they play. The heartbreaking Paraguay/Japan match in the men's World Cup 2010 also comes to mind. Japan lost that one, but they played with such spirit. This is a team to watch.

Test post for the mailing list II

2011-07-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

Hello!

You are receiving this message because you know or have known me personally, or know someone in my family personally.

I have deleted my Facebook account and am no longer using that service. Before I left, I was able to gather all your e-mails.

You are receiving this because I would like to stay in touch with you somehow. I will not sell you anything or ask you for money: I'm doing fine, thank you. I am just exploring new ways to stay connected using technology. Please bear with me as I make a few adjustments. You might receive a few extra e-mails here and there, but I promise that should be the extent of it. Afterward, you will receive an e-mail any time I update my blog found here: www.flordelapalabra.com . Please be aware that you may encounter the occasional swear word; musing about religion, philosophy and life; and attempts at writing. I hope you understand at least one Romance language (meaning I hope you paid attention in Spanish class) because hey, I speak Spanish. Tampoco me voy a quedar callado. (Translator's note: "And it would be a shame for me not to use it".) (Editor's note: The translator, being the author, can take certain liberties a professional translator doesn't.) (Nota del traductor: El editor es un chiflado.)

If you are frantic and cannot bear to receive one more e-mail from anyone, feel free to remove yourself from this list. If you do not like me and do not wish to hear from me directly ever again, please let me know so I can remove your name and contact information from all my records. I will also disavow any knowledge I may or may not have had of you. You will cease to be in my mind and be one with the universe. Or you can just mark these and related messages as spam. No one has to be the wiser.

If you've read this far, thank you for reading.

Happiness,

Jonathan

Test post for the mailing list

2011-07-16T00:56:00.000-07:00

Google is providing great services for people interested in controlling how their content is published to an online audience. Basically, you can now be your very own social network. By being able to visualize your contacts and how they are related to you, you can take control over the content you publish. This means that Grandma doesn't have to see you holding a red cup in every picture, but she can see the pictures of your funny cats.

Either way, it's interesting to note what is being served out there. Makes me realize that Facebook has serious problems. One is that there is no internal privacy control that's easy to use; anyone can see anything. Two is that the numbers have grown too large for individual users; it takes skill and effort to manage 500 individual "friends", but it's much easier to manage 5 large groups. Three, Facebook is too big. Google+ gives the impression that it's small. At most it seems that there are about 10 people on at any one time on the Stream. Finally, Facebook became a corporation. Think about it. It sold out, literally, on everyone.

Anyway, consider me sold on Google+. At some point, they'll have to leave it alone, though and let the users figure it out.

An observation on language

2011-07-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

You know when you know you're right and you think the other person's an idiot, and you call them that?

Well, I don't think Jesus ever talked to the Pharisees in anger. He didn't call them idiots. No, he spoke the truth, and he condemned, which itself is a process of evaluating, considering, and judging. So Jesus seemed like a man who was always aware of what he was saying while keeping it classy.

There was no vulgarity in his language. At least not that we know.

So it should be like that. If you are ignorant and vulgar, just speak with conviction, as strong as possible-not as loud as possible- as much as you can. Make yourself heard and hopefully someone will correct you. If you are not vulgar, don't let it be known that you are just from the way you speak. It's unbecoming.

Also, a good thing to remember is that ideas have a language of their own, so it's best to mind the type of language that comes out of your mouth.

Regarding Radical Christians

2011-07-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

There's a book these guys should read that has a part about a guy who everyone thinks is going to be a religious and political leader and overthrow the government to establish a righteous political regime, but it turns out he doesn't care at all about the government and just teaches people to be good to each other and to not get caught up with criticizing others about their sins, while simultaneously criticizing professional clergy and the religious establishment. I can't remember what it's called, though. If I remember, I'll be sure to follow up.

posted by The World Famous at 3:53 PM on July 14 [115 favorites]

Source:
http://www.metafilter.com/105548/Rick-Perrys-Army-of-God#3814562