October 9, 2011 archive

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The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street Sunday 10.09.11

Cartnoon

To Love a Duck, Episode 17, Season 1

Occupy Wall St. Livestream: Day 23

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

OccupyWallStreet

The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza 😉

“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author

Yesterday afternoon Occupy Wall Street expanded from the over crowded Liberty Park with an orderly gathering at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village

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Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators streamed across the threshold of Washington Square Park on Saturday afternoon after a spirited but conflict-free march from the financial district.

As a throng of protesters filled the historic public space, at the heart of Greenwich Village, a chant rose up – from voices young, old and in-between – casting their movement as an intractable majority fed up with the nation’s financial inequities.

“We are the 99 percent,” they yelled, referring to the movement’s slogan. Some banged drums. Others poked placards with various slogans toward blue skies on an unseasonably warm October weekend. Septuagenarians were in the crowd; one man walked a toddler on his feet.

Gothamist has some great updates and pictures

H/T to Yves Smith at her blog, naked capitalism, for this video:



If you go to YouTube to watch this video, there is an interactive transcript that follows the dialog.

On the Real News Network, Michael Hudson discusses some possible ideas for reforming finance to deal with the concerns raised by the OccupyWallStreet movement. I’ve noticed both here and on some news stories I heard in passing on MSNBC on Friday that the OccupyWallStreet movement has already succeeded in expanding the space of what is now being discussed as remedies.

What’s the matter with Mike Bloomberg?

Old Man Bloomberg Tired Of Occupy Wall Street’s Attempts To “Destroy Jobs”

In his weekly radio address, billionaire autocrat Michael Bloomberg took the opportunity to criticize the groups of students, labor unions, and other demonstrators who haven taken to Lower Manhattan to protest the state of our economy. “They’re trying to take away the tax base we have, because none of this is good for tourism,” Bloomberg said, apparently unaware that the tourists are eating it up and that some of the protesters are tourists themselves. He also claimed that those in Zuccotti Park were “trying to destroy the jobs of working people in this city.”

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Bloomberg began talking about the protests after a caller who claimed to live above Zuccotti Park said the park was “unusable” and complained of the group’s “incivility.” The mayor said “he couldn’t agree more.” According to the Times he also compared the protests to those in Vietnam for a second time in a week, noting that today’s anti-war protesters are respectful of veterans. “The Vietnam War, which was my generation, we treated our vets who came back terribly, just terribly,” he said. So, these protests are analogous to Vietnam in that they’re both pointless, job-killing nuisances?

He needs to allay the fears of his billionaire bankster buddies who are afraid that they might have to join Bernie Madoff in a federal prison.

On This Day In History October 9

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

On this day in 1967, socialist revolutionary and guerilla leader Che Guevara, age 39, is killed by the Bolivian army. The U.S.-military-backed Bolivian forces captured Guevara on October 8 while battling his band of guerillas in Bolivia and assassinated him the following day. His hands were cut off as proof of death and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1997, Guevara’s remains were found and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, military theorist, and major figure of the Cuban Revolution. Since his death, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol and global insignia within popular culture.

As a medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was transformed by the endemic poverty he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region’s ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara’s radical ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raul and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and travelled to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the successful two year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.

Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included instituting agrarian reform as minister of industries, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.

Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled “Guerrillero Heroico”, was declared “the most famous photograph in the world.”

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

Secret US memo made legal case to kill Anwar al-Awlaki

Document provided justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama – to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.




Sunday’s Headlines:

Euro crisis spreads and puts the world economy at risk

Rupert Cornwell: Capitalism’s heart occupied – where will it all lead?

‘Crisis level’ floods threaten Bangkok

South Sudan’s Kiir in Khartoum for key talks

TEPCO orchestrated ‘personal’ donations to LDP

Obama gets shitty with a pervasive “for profits” industry.

Read all about it from Charlie Davis.  Also, see Jeralyn on how Obama shatters campaign promises.

I’d like to point out that the cannabinoid  receptor is amoral, at best, and physiologically essential, at least.

In recent years, it has been strongly implicated in the canonical fast inhibitory feedback of the HPA (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal) axis.  

In English, when you become stressed, your brain pumps out stress messengers to alert your kidney-associated glands to produce a massive stress response on demand.  The powerful, powerful molecule produced (compound F, in humans, also known as cortisone (Kendall’s compound E)), goes straight to the brain, and makes animals do crazy, crazy shit if left over-pumped and unchecked (See for yourself: it’s coming to theatre near you soon!).  

Fortunately, the endocrine system is designed to shut itself off (under normal stress conditions; again, coming to a theatre of the mind near you!).  It’s like a box with a button:  When you push the button, a hand comes out in order to push the button to retract the hand and close the lid again.  

No, wait, evolution is not that stupid.  A lot of crazy and worthwhile shit happens in between button-pushings.  Unlike politics, apparently, button-pushing is NOT the main goal of the endocrine system.  However, it’s important to turn the system OFF, lest it run in undesirable directions (see your theatre’s listings!).  The cannabinoid receptor is the fast shut-off switch, quite literally, for the stress system, and probably the political system, as well.

I could write a fucking book on the subject.  Oh, wait: I fucking DID!

A more-intelligent-than-me brother-like person, who, unlike Richard Feynman, somehow failed to inherit my genes for smoking and drinking and bongos, etc., last night expressed to me his utter contempt for the Obama administration’s  (and government-in-general’s) effrontery in fiddling with people where it has no fucking business, much less knowledge.  Technocrats my ass.  These people are fucking stupid.

GET OFF ME!  And enforce some actual meaningful fucking laws!  Can Eric Holder fog a fucking mirror?  We more or less concluded.  We are the 99%.

We concluded that the administration were either protecting Pharma’s patents on synthetic cannabinoids or protecting the banks’ drug cartel money laundering.  We all know who Obama is, at this point.  Not just the 99%, but the whole 100% know who Obama is.  We are the knowledgeable, and we are watching every fucking move.

Perhaps the Constitutional-Interpreter-in-Chief whose non-existent scholarly writings can only be interpreted through his apparently fuck-all knowledge of post-Dark Age scholarship on “human freedoms” should shut the fuck up about the doctor-prescribed and self-administered medicine in primates, on whom (dare we say?) I could also write a fucking book.  

Politics: It’s a pervasive for-profit industry.