Nathan Schneider: Ask not who’s co-opting you, ask whom you can co-opt

Schneider at Waging Nonviolence ..

Rather than arguing about whether the 99% Spring is co-option or not — spoiler alert: it is — Occupiers can be strategizing about how to co-opt it back even more. How can all these newly-trained troops be mobilized into Occupying? What specific actions can they be drawn into to practice what they’ve learned? How can people in the movement further turn these people’s attention to structures of oppression, rather than to stump speeches and delegates? These are questions that call for creativity — which fortunately the movement, if it still in fact has its mojo, shouldn’t have a problem delivering. If the movement really does have something better to offer than the liberal and reformist bloc, now’s the time to prove it

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 20, 2012

Cigarette makers stage counterattack in emerging markets

Posted by Michael Hamilton, Friday, April 20, 2012

IASC: The Hedgehog Review – Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) – Under the Sign of Satan: William Blake in the Corporate University – Mark Edmundson

Posted by Harry Sifton, Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Democracy Now: SDS Founder, Veteran Activist Tom Hayden on Participatory Democracy from Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street

.. read transcript
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 15, 2012

You’re On Your Own, Kids | Common Dreams – Robert Scheer

Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, April 13, 2012

The “Suicidal State” and the War on Youth

Posted by Michael Butler, Thursday, April 12, 2012

AlterNet: Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey

Posted by Michael Butler, Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Nathan Schneider: How to succeed in reoccupation without really trying

Schneider in Waging Nonviolence ..

For lots of organizers, I’ve noticed, the operating presumption is that occupation — something comparable to last fall but somehow surely better — constitutes a prerequisite to further political action. Consequently, a considerable amount of the energy of the most talented organizers in New York (as well as, evidently, in Oakland and San Francisco) has been directed toward failed reoccupation attempts .. What if the first thing people thought of when they heard the word “Occupy” was, “Oh, those are the kids trying to take down the most dangerous bank in America and who saved my friend’s home from foreclosure”? Do stuff like this, and you’re creating a dilemma for the whole society. You’re asking everyone to choose sides — not about a little occupation, but about major features of everyday economic life. Do I want Bank of America to foreclose on my neighbor or not? Do I want my kids to spend their post-college lives enslaved by debt or not?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, April 11, 2012

OWS.org: Wall Street #Occupied

Occupy Wall St dot Org ..

For the first time since our movement against economic inequality and political corruption began, Occupy Wall Street is literally occupying Wall Street. As of 3am eastern time [April 10th], over 40 Occupiers are sleeping on Wall Street near the corner of Broad across from the New York Stock Exchange .. On April 6, [at Union Square] NYPD gathered once again for the nightly ¨eviction theater¨ only to find Occupiers had moved to the sidewalks and erected a sign declaring their legal right to do so. When police moved in arrest them, Occupiers on livestream read the law permitting sleeping on sidewalks as political protest. In Metropolitan v. Safir, the U.S. District Court covering New York City ruled that ¨ the First Amendment of the United States Constitution does not allow the City to prevent an orderly political protest from using public sleeping as a means of symbolic expression." The police backed down. The tactic quickly became a model for other Occupations

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Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, April 10, 2012

David Sirota: Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need New Roads

Sirota ..

Instead of beefing up public transit, cities build neighborhood-destroying highways, cars fill up those highways, cities then build more highways to alleviate traffic, and then yet more cars flood the roads, creating even more traffic .. But what happens when America suddenly tones down its love affair with the automobile? At that point, could we still justify destroying neighborhoods to make room for bigger roads? Could we still pretend that more roads are truly necessary? Could we still overlook the fact that road construction creates fewer jobs than public transit projects?

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Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 8, 2012

Adbusters: #PLAYJAZZ, Tactical Briefing #28

Adbusters ..

Our Spring offensive is building toward a climactic May uprising… time to come out of winter hibernation and play jazz like we’ve never played it before .. one of the softer aesthetic moments of our Spring offensive could well be the #LAUGHRIOT on May 18, the day the G8 leaders meet in Camp David. There is something totally ludicrous, absurd, even insane about the eight most powerful people in the world deciding to do the people’s business people behind closed doors and razor wire fences. This veneer of legitimacy is our tragedy turned to farce. As Aristotle observed, to laugh is uniquely human… Imagine the scene: first a few hundred of us, then a few thousand, then millions of people across the world — each in their own way, some individually, some collectively in flash mobs, offices, parks, encampments — all breaking out in uproarious laughter on May 18

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Canary Party and Grassroots Autism Organizations Call for Firings of Health Officials in the Wake of New Autism Numbers

This is a press conference held recently in NYC that a group my brother Mark is involved in organized to respond to the new autism numbers (one in every 88 kids) - here's a portion of the press release

Canary Party Chairman Mark Blaxill, speaking on behalf of [The Age of Autism, AutismOne, Autism Action Network, Autism File, The Canary Party, Center for Personal Rights, The Coalition for Safe Minds, Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy, Focus Autism, National Autism Association and Talk About Curing Autism], representing tens of thousands of families, have committed to the public and to officials that, “We are not going away. We cannot. We all live with autism every day in one way or another. We will not stop pushing until we get accountable leadership and until we reverse this devastating epidemic.”

-mab
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, April 7, 2012

Brian Moench: Autism and Disappearing Bees, A Common Denominator?

Moench in Common Dreams ..

studies [show] autistic children and their mothers have a high rate of a genetic deficiency in the production of glutathione, an anti-oxidant and the body’s primary means of detoxifying heavy metals. High levels of toxic metals in children are strongly correlated with the severity of autism. Low levels of glutathione, coupled with high production of another chemical, homocysteine, increase the chance of a mother having an autistic child to one in three. That autism is four times more common among boys than girls is likely related to a defect in the single male X chromosome contributing to anti-oxidant deficiency. There is no such thing as a genetic disease epidemic because genes don't change that quickly. So the alarming rise in autism must be the result of increased environmental exposures that exploit these genetic defects .. as participants in modern society we are all now exposed to over 83,000 chemicals from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the consumer products we use. Pregnant women and their children have 100 times more chemical exposures today than 50 years ago. The average newborn has over 200 different chemicals and heavy metals contaminating its blood when it takes its first breath. 158 of them are toxic to the brain

Moench is President of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment - Utah has the highest rates of autism in the country - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, April 6, 2012

Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus

Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, April 5, 2012

‘Dark Girls’ Documentary

Posted by Michael Hamilton, Thursday, April 5, 2012

ARIZONA book burning and more nazi-like behavior

Posted by Michael Hamilton, Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Occupy San Francisco Creates Social Center in Vacant Church Building

from Occupywallst.org ..

In another sign of the Occupy movement's diversifying tactics and growing spring momentum, yesterday Occupy San Francisco liberated a vacant building owned by the Archdiocese of San Francisco and announced plans to establish a permanent occupation -- including a social center, shelter, and food bank -- on the site .. Most recently (as of 1am Pacific time), police had surrounded the building with barricades to prevent supplies from getting inside. Occupiers have announced they will serve breakfast at 9am and are inviting everyone to join them! Local media described the action as a ¨well-organized takeover.¨ Speaking to local press, a representative of Occupy SF stated, "There is no reason why any building should be vacant when people have no housing. We ask that the archdiocese do the right thing and allow these services in these buildings." In part directing their message at Church officials, Occupy SF hung a large banner quoting from the Bible: "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses."

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, April 2, 2012

Mark Blaxill: Lies, Damned Lies and CDC Autism Statistics

The CDC just announced that 1 in 88 kids are now born with autism (1 in 54 boys; 1 in 256 girls) -- this is an article my brother Mark wrote at Age of Autism when in December of 2009 the CDC announced 1 in 100 kids were born with autism ..

We’re facing a national public health emergency of historic proportions. Bigger than swine flu. Bigger than polio. Bigger than almost anything one can imagine except AIDS .. Following last week’s release of the latest CDC autism surveillance report, no amount of methodological obfuscation (“autism prevalence has clearly gone up but there are no real incidence studies”), epidemiological nihilism (“we simply can’t know without large scale, well-controlled, prospective studies”) or social deconstructionist nonsense (“autism is an intolerant invention of modern society”) should escape scorn. Anyone with a brain, a conscience and an ounce of integrity must acknowledge that we face a crisis. Meanwhile, those who would accuse the autism parent community of “denialism”, unscientific reasoning and irresponsible irrationality need to explain how their own theories, so dependent on the evidence-free suggestion that rates are rising because of “better diagnosing”, deserve to be considered respectable scientific speech. There is no more unscientific position in public health today than the fiction that rising autism rates come from better diagnosing. Let’s be clear, the only evidence for better diagnosing is wishful thinking. Our public health institutions deserve no credit for a job done better; quite the contrary, they deserve an investigation into their negligence

i'll post his response to the latest news as soon as its online - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 31, 2012

Nathan Schneider: What does leaderless look like?

Schneider at Waging Nonviolence ..

For those closely involved in Occupy Wall Street, it seems fitting that the words “take me to your leader” are conventionally said by an alien; they’re about that hard to process, and that weird. Yet one hears this sort of thing a lot. It remains a common refrain among sympathetic well-wishers outside the movement that leaders in the traditional King-Gandhi-Chavez mold are necessary for civil resistance movements, or even that they’re inevitable. But within OWS, leaderlessness — or horizontality, or, as it is sometimes said, being “leader-full” — is non-negotiable. It’s at the very core of why many people in Occupy find the movement so revolutionary, and so empowering, and so right. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s clear how exactly one is expected to behave in a leaderless movement. What does truly leaderless leadership look like?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, March 26, 2012

FOCUS: Right-Wing Hate Groups Exploding in Size and Reach

Frightening, the implications of this growth of hate groups. They are both the under-belly and the obvious side to a most dangerous trend. Politically they are the beginning of the end of democratic society. No one Democrat, Republican or Blue, Red can ignore the peril of these movements. They will either end in Civil War or another type of Slavery. "You have a Republic, if you can keep It". mb
Posted by Michael Butler, Sunday, March 25, 2012

Bullying case calls for smarter sentence than 10 years in prison – CNN.com

Posted by Michael Butler, Sunday, March 25, 2012

AlterNet (2)

A new NSA "listening post" for phone calls and emails?; Is Homeland Security "taking over" university and college campuses?
Posted by Ian Alterman, Thursday, March 22, 2012

NYT (10): National News

Gay marriage survives New Hampshire repeal; SCOTUS (i) expands rights of accused re plea bargains, (ii) questions First Amendment claim of man who accosted Cheney, (iii) allows eminent domain claim against EPA; With even some Republicans maligning House GOP budget plan, Dems see wedge; Students in AR band together to create PAC to protect Dems; Study shows how House members benefit personally; Super-tight race for NYS Senate seat; White teenager who drove over and killed black MS man gets life sentence; NY Jets get Tim Tebow.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Thursday, March 22, 2012

Corporate-Driven Report Exemplifies Failed Thinking on US Education | Common Dreams

Posted by Michael Butler, Wednesday, March 21, 2012

NYT (8): National News

U.S. may restrict fracking mortgages; Not surprisingly, fact check shows Romney lying about Obama energy policy; GOP plans two-week PR assault prior to SCOTUS debate on health care bill; Bloomberg takes harsher tack toward OWS; Both Justice Dept. and grand jury step in in FL shooting of black youth; Study finds children eating too much sugar; Computers may win in chess and Jeopardy, but, so far, not re crossword puzzles.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Tuesday, March 20, 2012