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A Republican For Gay Marriage? Yes!
Posted by Tom Sawyer, Friday, February 10, 2012Hedges vs Graeber on “Diversity of Tactics” at OWS
Chris Hedges recently wrote "Cancer in Occupy" after some recent incidents of property damage by members of the Black Bloc anarchist movement at Occupy events (and some idiot who burned an American flag in Oakland .. not sure if that was BB, maybe an undercover cop), writing Black Bloc "is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state". In response prominent Occupy organizer David Graeber wrote, "Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges" .. here's an interesting passage from Graeber's letter to Hedges-As one of the authors of the original [OWS] Gandhian strategy, I can recall how well aware we were, when we framed this strategy, that we were taking an enormous risk. Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.” (One reason the civil rights movement was an exception is so many Americans at the time didn’t view the Deep South as part of the same country.) Many of the young men and women who formed the famous Black Bloc in Seattle were in fact eco-activists who had been involved in tree-sits and forest defense lock-downs that operated on purely Gandhian principles—only to find that in the US of the 1990s, non-violent protesters could be brutalized, tortured (have pepper spray directly rubbed in their eyes), or even killed, without serious objection from the national media. So they turned to other tactics. We knew all this. We decided it was worth the riskI recognize what Graeber says about the incapability of the media to accurately report on OWS, and its a somewhat maddening dilemma. Is it even a realistic goal to win hearts and minds thru our corporate media lens? But then if the only other option is resorting to petty vandalism and throwing rocks at police then that's pretty fucking useless as well, and has no legs in terms of a sustained movement in this country. Where does that lead? What can these tactics ever gain? It's a dead end in my opinion. Hedges is right. OWS gained its strength thru non-violence and is losing strength now. Thoughts? - mab
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, February 10, 2012
Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution
Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, February 9, 2012Here are thoughts about Religion by some fairly dumb people Part One:
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, February 9, 2012More on Santorum, the boys and other stupid stuff
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, February 9, 2012Red state of Georgia has declared war on religion
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, February 9, 2012for the Rick “Christian Sharia” Santorum campaign:
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, February 9, 2012Attention of Civic Members
Posted by Michael Butler, Wednesday, February 8, 2012For those who still think for themselves
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Wednesday, February 8, 2012Adbusters: Total Incarceration, Compliments of the land of the free
Adbusters quotes Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians ..In American prisons scattered across the various countries of the world, but outside the United States, prisoners are regularly raped, hung from hooks, subjected to waterboarding, burned, attached to electrodes, deprived of food, water or medicine, attacked by dogs, or beaten until their bones are broken. When on American military bases or on American territory, they are subjected to sensory deprivation or other systematic mistreatment of the senses. A hat is put on them to stop them from hearing anything, a hood to stop them seeing anything, surgical masks to prevent them being able to smell, thick gloves to neutralize their sense of touch. Or they have “white noise” inflicted on them, or else violent noise and total silence alternate at irregular intervals. They are prevented from sleeping, either by having a strong electric light kept on day and night, or by subjecting them to interrogation that can last for up to 24 hours at a time, for 48 days in succession. Or they are forced to pass from extreme cold to extreme heat, and vice versa. None of these techniques, it is alleged, cause the “deterioration of bodily functions” that would constitute torture.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Religion… It’s all about being afraid
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Tuesday, February 7, 2012Cancer Clusters in America
This is an interactive map from Worldlifeexpectancy.com showing cancer rates by county and state - Black cancer cluster areas cover the south from Virginia to North Florida to Oklahoma to Louisiana. Maine also fares poorly as does Montana, Alaska and Ohio. The group says, "We believe there are many lifestyle factors that contribute to America's cancer problem, but if there were no environmental factors cancer death rates would be more evenly distributed across the country than they are. We [believe] environmental factors have been poorly investigated in the past and strongly support more rigorous testing in the future" - mab .. read morePosted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, February 6, 2012
Phil Rockstroh: A Journey To The End Of Empire, It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black
Rockstroh ..a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass .. In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison? Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege?a beautiful essay - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Apple Connection | Common Dreams
Why target just Apple? They are only one of many. They are more concerned than many.Posted by Michael Butler, Saturday, February 4, 2012
Atheism in the US. The last big taboo. FT, Julian Maggiani
Posted by Alexander Harper, Friday, February 3, 2012RELIGION-The number one cause of blindness in the world
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, February 3, 2012Dangerous
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, February 3, 2012A good place to find some truth
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, February 3, 2012Pro-Romney PAC surges with $30M – mostly from investors
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, February 3, 2012TRUTH
Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, February 3, 2012Deja Vu in France – a tale of two Mitterands – FT, Philip Stephens.
Posted by Alexander Harper, Thursday, February 2, 2012At Hearing on “Fracking,” Capitol Police Arrest Director of “Gasland”
Sari Gelzer at Truthout ..On Wednesday, House Republicans ordered Capitol police to arrest Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Gasland," along with his crew. The group was attempting to film a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment that was to discuss hydraulic fracturing, also known as "fracking" .. Fox faces a court hearing on February 15 on charges of "unlawful entry." As an independent filmmaker, Fox called on congress to make all meetings and hearings accessible to independent journalists. "The truth that fracking contaminates groundwater is out, and no amount of intimidation tactics - either outright challenges to science or the arrest of journalists - will put the genie back in the bottle," he stated.we're being China-fied in the US - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, February 2, 2012
Pesticides Blamed for Bee Decline
Jonathan Owen reports in The Independent ..Compelling new evidence from the US government's top bee expert that modern pesticides may be a major cause of collapsing bee populations led to calls yesterday for the chemicals to be banned. A study published in the current issue of the German science journal Naturwissenschaften, reveals how bees given minute doses of [Bayer's] widely used pesticide imidacloprid became more vulnerable to infections from a deadly parasite, nosema. Bee experts described this as clear evidence of the role pesticides play in the plight of bees. Although research into the furry insects may seem like a very academic exercise, bees are vital to human survival. More than 70 of the 100 crops that provide 90 per cent of the world's food are pollinated by bees, and Albert Einstein once predicted that if bees died out, "man would have no more than four years to live.".. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Adbusters: Spiritual Insurrection, the Ultimate Culture Jam
We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.- Adbusters
And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?
Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.
In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, January 31, 2012
