"As they were throwing out the books, a fellow OWS librarian asked one of the NYPD patrolmen why they were doing this. His answer: 'I don’t know.'"

William Scott:

The NYPD first barricaded the library by lining up in front of it, forming an impenetrable wall of cops. An officer then announced through a bullhorn that we should come and collect our books, or they would be confiscated and removed. Seconds later, they began dumping books into trash bins that they had wheeled into the park for that purpose. As they were throwing out the books, a fellow OWS librarian asked one of the NYPD patrolmen why they were doing this. His answer: “I don’t know.”

Five minutes after it started, the raid was over and the People’s Library’s collection was once again sitting in a pile of garbage. Yet just as the trash bins were being carted off, a man stepped out of the crowd with a book in his hand to donate to us: Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. We joyously accepted and cataloged it, placing it on display under a new sign for the library that we made right then on a blank sheet of paper. A true people’s library, after all, doesn’t depend on any particular number of books, since it’s ultimately about the way those books are collected and lent out to the public.

Uh-oh, that doesn't sound like The Tea Party Way! Forget your precious books, protesters, and go home!

"You want to make a difference you do it the Tea Party way and protest during the day and then go home and go to work the next day."

Someone somewhere in America:

Croni-Capitalism is a real thing but is was created by Big Governemnt that over extended it's Constitutional powers by bailing out banks and corporations and creating a Lite American Facsim. Croni-Capitalism is not caused by Capitalism, again it is caused by Big Government tampering with Capitalism when it should not be involved in the free market. Instead OWS is blaming Capitalism, and the private sector and demand either anarchy or a bigger federal government with more regulation on the private sector, this is uneducated, unethical, and honestly idiotic in all senses of the word. Nothing positive will come from this movement, NOTHING. You want to make a difference you do it the Tea Party way and protest during the day and then go home and go to work the next day and get officials elected that support your cause, not impeded on individuals rights to use public property and safety by occupying and destroying public property and creating mass chaos. This movement will not last, it will not make a lasting impression, it is an astroturf movement created by the Candadian group Adbusters and now funded by Workers of the World Party, The American Communist Party, George Sorors, ect ect.

"There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs."

"What they are attempting to do is funnel you back into that dead system. The power of the Occupy movement is that it won't go there. ... There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs."
- Chris Hedges

(h/t Louis Proyect)

"Our daily lives have lost all directness, all authenticity; we are full of lies and conformity."

Edward Carpenter, from Angel's Wings (1898):

I say the scramble for existence has so far dominated society in the past, that the mass of men have worked, not to create, not to create round themselves a world answering to the world within; but simply in a negative way, to avoid penury, to avoid starvation, to satisfy one or two beggarly needs, to please their masters. But such work expresses nothing—nothing but what is beggarly. The time is coming when man will rise into command of materials. He will not work from Fear but from Love— not from slavish compulsion but from a real live interest in the creation of his hands. Then, at last, and after all these centuries, his Work, his very Life, will become an Art—it will be an expression of himself; it will be a word of welcome to someone else. Everything that a man creates, be it only the simplest object for the use of himself or his neighbor, the installation of his house or garden, or the speciality which he supplies to the community, will be touched by the spirit of beauty. It will be the free product of his own nature, of his own activity—the expression of that harmony within which alone makes true work possible. It will have the same beauty that every leaf, every flower of the field, every bird's nest in the angle of a bough has— the beauty of joy and of freedom in the great comradeship of Nature. While men labor as they do to-day—without hope, without interest, without love, without expression, in sordidness and weariness and squalor of mind and of body, the ban of Ugliness inevitably rests on everything that is produced. In this December sea of ugliness that surrounds and engulfs all modern life, the Fine Arts, so-called, like so many cranky, summer-rigged yachts, toss aimlessly about, with no certain destination or purpose, but in a heroic endeavor at least to keep afloat! The art of Expression, which is the very art of Life's Navigation, has been lost. Our daily lives have lost all directness, all authenticity; we are full of lies and conformity; we do not express ourselves in our social life, when we walk, when we speak, when we work at our trade; how then shall we suddenly learn to do so when we retire into our studios and lock the door!

Letter To the Editor of the L.A. Times

I wish I was smart enough to write this. But I didn't.

The best (least) I can do is to take the time to sign it!

"There is a cold dead blue spot where my patriotism used to be."

OHollern:

I don’t feel any pride at being an American anymore, or at least not much. There is a cold dead blue spot where my patriotism used to be. The Stars and Stripes don’t stir me any more than the flags of Belize or Tonga. It is the banner of an increasingly repressive and reactionary power that, on issue after issue, is on the wrong side of history. Old Glory may as well be a freakin’ Goldman Sachs logo, as far as I’m concerned, or ExxonMobil, or the shadow of a predator drone on its way to kill people who’ve never harmed me or wished me any ill-will at all. As James Howard Kunstler often puts it, we live in a country that is increasingly not worth caring about, a giant strip mall owned and operated by piggish elites. The flag represents unappetizing figures like Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, or bland military bureaucrats like David Petraeus, or unctuous cretins like Joseph Lieberman, or mean-spirited trolls like Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell. US Inc. is the personal property of nefarious elites in the Carlyle Group and the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street, and the satanic fossil fuel industries. It has little to do with you or me anymore. We are just accessories, just flotsam and jetsam adrift with the polluted tide, “lagging indicators” who are trapped in a big machine that is quite intentionally mashing us to bits.

I feel like an indentured servant in some harsh foreign fatherland that doesn’t care if I live or die.

[...]

At some point during the poisonous heart of darkness that was the Bush-Cheney years, some fundamental change took place. Our country became their country. You know who I mean by they. The rest of us got heaved into the dog ditch to fight over table scraps.It wouldn’t be so bad, I guess, if we had some countervailing or compensating virtues. We don’t. All of this ugliness exists in a cultural void. We camp outside of department stores for that abomination called Black Friday, for heaven’s sake. It just doesn’t get any lower than that, dear friends and comrades.

[...]

Thank God for OWS. It’s the most refreshing and hopeful development in the last thirty years. It may be our last chance for salvation.

"Our own national leaders ... are now making war upon us."

Naomi Wolf:

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality.

[...]

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

How not to cook a Thanksgiving turkey

[source]

"Backpedaling and obfuscation ... used by the powers that be every time there is an act of police violence."

"There is no place on our campus for administrators who order the use of force against peaceful protesters."
- Nathan Brown

"I’m never shocked when powerful people abuse others. I’m shocked when they don’t."

[source]

Katehi is calling for the study of new protocols to handle student protests. The only protocols that need to be studied are inside Katehi's head and involve her willingness to abuse power!

Mel:

People pursue power in order to take the things they want without having to consider other people. They pursue power to lessen the likelihood of having to suffer any consequences for acting on their most violent, greedy, selfish desires.

[...]

I’m never shocked when powerful people abuse others. I’m shocked when they don’t.

Katehi should take her violent impulses elsewhere (preferably to a shrink). They don't belong in education. UC Davis physicists agree, Katahi must go.

Chancellor Linda Katehi
November 22, 2011
UC Davis

Dear Chancellor Katehi:

With a heavy heart and substantial deliberation, we the undersigned faculty of the UC Davis physics department send you this letter expressing our lack of confidence in your leadership and calling for your prompt resignation in the wake of the outrageous, unnecessary, and brutal pepper spraying episode on campus Friday, Nov. 18.

The reasons for this are as follows.

• The demonstrations were nonviolent, and the student encampments posed no threat to the university community. The outcomes of sending in police in Oakland, Berkeley, New York City, Portland, and Seattle should have led you to exhaust all other options before resorting to police action.

• Authorizing force after a single day of encampments constitutes a gross violation of the UC Davis principles of community, especially the commitment to civility: “We affirm the right of freedom of expression within our community and affirm our commitment to the highest standards of civility and decency towards all.”

• Your response in the aftermath of these incidents has failed to restore trust in your leadership in the university community.

We have appreciated your leadership during these difficult times on working to maintain and enhance excellence at UC Davis. However, this incident and the inadequacy of your response to it has already irreparably damaged the image of UC Davis and caused the faculty, students, parents, and alumni of UC Davis to lose confidence in your leadership. At this point we feel that the best thing that you can do for this university is to take full responsibility and resign immediately. Our campus community deserves a fresh start.

Sincerely,

Andreas Albrecht (chair)
Marusa Bradac
Steve Carlip
Hsin-Chia Cheng
Maxwell Chertok
John Conway
Daniel Cox
James P. Crutchfield
Glen Erickson
Chris Fassnacht
Daniel Ferenc
Ching Fong
Giulia Galli
Nemanja Kaloper
Joe Kiskis
Lloyd Knox
Dick Lander
Lori Lubin
Markus Luty
Michael Mulhearn
David Pellett
Wendell Potter
Sergey Savrasov
Richard Scalettar
Robert Svoboda
John Terning
Mani Tripathi
David Webb
David Wittman
Dong Yu
Gergely Zimanyi

Ditto the UC Davis English Department:

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.

GO ALREADY!

"She has shown herself to be manifestly unfit for the job of educator -- and to be a gutless prevaricator to boot."

Sir Charles of DC:

The police and the military have fundamentally different missions. The military when deployed, no matter how much we like to sanitize things, is basically intended for the purposes of killing people -- it is designed to bring overwhelming deadly force to bear. The police, by contrast, are supposed to preserve peace and order by using the minimal necessary force -- and should be trained at all times to remember that they are dealing with their fellow citizens. Turning cops into paramilitary outfits is a policy mistake of the highest order and an affront to the idea of living in a free society.

[...]

Ultimately, politicians determine the mission and the tone set for the police to do their work. When civilian authorities embrace the excessive use of force, police will act accordingly. In this regard, ultimate authority for the UC Davis debacle lies with Chancellor Linda Katehi and there will be no resolution of this matter that is satisfactory -- no matter how many sacrificial lambs get thrown to the wolves -- until she resigns. She has shown herself to be manifestly unfit for the job of educator -- and to be a gutless prevaricator to boot. She belongs on the scrap heap.

"The point right now is to break the collective imagination out of it's Matrix-like cocoon and force people to choose a pill."

"Open you eyes. Time to wake up.
Enough is enough is enough is enough."

troutsky:

Everyone wants Occupy to come up with "concrete actions" and pragmatic demands. I am going to go with theatrical, symbolic actions and demanding the impossible. Full employment and National wages and pensions for all. Just to get us started. A democratic economy with fossil free production. Anything I am missing? The point right now is to break the collective imagination out of it's Matrix-like cocoon and force people to choose a pill. That's a Real choice.

"A militarized university under a belligerent, violent and cruel chancellor."

"We are outraged that the administrations of UC campuses are using police brutality to suppress dissent, free speech and peaceful assembly."

The board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations:

This week, we have seen excessive force used against non-violent protesters at UC Berkeley, UCLA, CSU Long Beach, and UC Davis. Student, faculty and staff protesters have been pepper-sprayed directly in the eyes and mouth, beaten and shoved by batons, dragged by the arms while handcuffed, and submitted to other forms of excessive force. Protesters have been hospitalized because of injuries inflicted during these incidents. The violence was unprovoked, disproportional and excessive.

We are outraged by the excessive and unnecessary force used against peaceful protests.

We are outraged that the administrations of UC campuses are using police brutality to suppress dissent, free speech and peaceful assembly.

We demand that the Chancellors of the University of California cease using police violence to repress non-violent political protests. We hold them responsible for the violence and believe it can only result in an escalation of outrage that holds the potential for even more violence.

Police brutality damages the University's public image, and, more importantly, it damages the climate for free expression at UC. We condemn the assault on the legacy of free speech at the University of California.

We call for greater attention to the substantive issues that motivate the protests regarding the privatization of education. With massive cuts in state funding and rising tuition costs across the community college system, the Cal State network, K-12, and the University of California, public education is undergoing a severe divestment. Student debt has reached unprecedented levels as bank profits swell. We decry the growing privatization and tuition increases that have been the frequent -- and only -- responses of the UC Board of Regents.

Signed,
The board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations

"We demand that the Chancellors of the University of California cease using police violence to repress non-violent political protests. We hold them responsible for the violence and believe it can only result in an escalation of outrage that holds the potential for even more violence."

The 1% have the pepper spray guns, the 99% have the truth!

The police-state at work in California!

"You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation."
- Nathan Brown

Gonzalo Lira:

A police-state uses the law as a mechanism to control any challenges to its power by the citizenry, rather than as a mechanism to insure a civil society among the individuals.

[...]

In a police-state, the citizens are “free” only so long as their actions remain within the confines of the law as dictated by the state. If the individual’s claims of rights or freedoms conflict with the state, or if the individual acts in ways deemed detrimental to the state, then the state will repress the citizenry, by force if necessary.

A very powerful letter was written by Nathan Brown, UC Davis Professor, to the UC Davis Chancellor:

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

[...]

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

Read the whole thing.

"You have destroyed the greatest enemy to freedom, and the greatest ally of the ruling class: Apathy."

Redditor Aniadrift:

People will tell you that you fight in vain, that you are accomplishing nothing, that you have no direction, that your actions are pointless. But your actions are far from this. You have destroyed the greatest enemy to freedom, and the greatest ally of the ruling class: Apathy.

I see these people out in the streets and I know now that this movement cannot be stopped. That this is the climax of a decades-long battle for the soul of humanity itself. Cynics will laugh at me for saying this, and the loyalists will call me a dirty hippie and a criminal and all the other things they have grown fond of calling us. But these people do not matter. To history, they will be irrelevant. To history, there is only you. Ignore the loyalists, ignore the cynics, keep fighting. Shut them down. Shut the entire god damn system down. No one can stop this. I love you all.

"American Dream = Park Place, American Reality = Park Bench"

Charles Davis:

Shaking from the cold at 3 in the morning on a park bench a few blocks from the White House, warmed only by a paper-thin prison blanket an empathetic passer-by had gifted me, I couldn't help but think: man, am I a bad ass or what?

Well, not really. Mostly I thought about being cold and whether my overwhelmingly witty sign – American Dream = Park Place, American Reality = Park Bench – made it all worth it. And then I thought about how this is what homeless people in the imperial capital go through every night. And how no one cares. And then I was kind of sad.

All power to the Occupiers!

"You cannot evict an idea whose time has come."

[source]

Occupy Wall Street:

We will push back against billionaire Michael Bloomberg and any politician who wantonly tramples on proud American freedoms: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the freedom of Americans to peaceably assemble and petition for change.

We will overcome the obstacles placed before us. We will not be deterred. We will persevere. Our message is resonating across America, and our cause is shared by millions around the world. We are the 99%, and we want to live in a world that is for all of us — not just for those who have amassed great wealth and power.

You know why the Occupiers are going to win? Because their protest is both passionate and amazingly articulate!

Some Occupy Wall Street snark:

New York, NY — The NYPD have been occupying Liberty Square since 1:00am Tuesday morning, with the brand new occupation now set to enter its second day in just a few short hours. But will anyone listen to them when their message is so incoherent?

"What are their demands?" asked social historian Patrick Bruner. "They have not articulated any platform. How do they expect to be taken seriously?"

Critics of the new occupation allege that meddling billionaire Michael Bloomberg is behind the movement. Others question the new occupiers' militant posture, concerned about the potential effects on the neighborhood.

"I suppose they have a right to express themselves," said local resident Han Shan. "But I'd prefer it if instead they occupied the space with the power of their arguments."

They can clean the protesters out of Zuccotti Park, they'll never clean the scum up on Wall Street.

N.Y. Times commenter patois:

I hope this makes those who were not already convinced realize that the rights of all Americans, the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and laws under which this country was founded are all under siege. More to the point, the enforcement and application of these laws have now been bought by the 1%.

Sanitation trumps democracy in New York City. Make no laws respecting the right of the people peaceably to assemble, except sanitation laws. Way to go, New York, N.Y.

N.Y. Times commenter Mr. JP:

Money has bought our nation out from under our feet and it belongs to who knows, certainly not the 99% and we know it. They may have peace and quiet and empty parks but the bottle is just stoppered and the pressure will build until the voiceless have had enough of being misled.

"Are corporate profits more important than life on Earth?"

Rand Clifford:

Advocates call the Alberta tar sands, “oil sands”. Well, not “oil”, we are talking about bitumen. Tar. And we’re not talking about an “oil pipeline”, Keystone XL would be a highly-pressurized (1440 pounds per square inch) pipeline to squeeze along fiendishly-toxic, corrosive and abrasive “dilbit” (diluted bitumen) that has already taken almost as much fossil energy to extract as the dilbit contains. That’s an Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) from hell.

[...]

Many climatologists have said that if the carbon-bomb tar sands are extensively exploited it is “game over” for the biosphere.

From virtually every angle, the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline are a hideous danger to life on Earth. Corporate profits are about the only beneficiary, leading to the ultimate question: Are corporate profits more important than life on Earth?

"Saturday needs to be about the players, about Penn State and not about the scandal that has engulfed our community."

Still in denial over at Penn State.

"They got a gigantic game."

"We have learned ... to live comfortably with all these floating and empty signifiers such as Democracy and Politics or The Left."

Troutsky:

We have learned in our post-modern world to live comfortably with all these floating and empty signifiers such as Democracy and Politics or The Left. I am ok with indeterminancy, but not with the lack of debate and discussion which has been the hallmark of the last 40 years. So now when a Moment or Event opens up, citizens have no consensus on what consensus means or what citizen means. They are all fill-in-the-blank questions and there is a great deal of talking past one another. The Right, being brain dead, doesn't have this problem,they just round up a posse for Liberty and ride out into the sunset.

The Left can begin by defining itself as anti-capitalist and working out from there.

"Ask yourself if you’re content with your relatively high quality of life being possible thanks to the poor quality of life of others elsewhere."

Mickey Z:

So, are you or are you not part of the 99%?

To assist with this appraisal, I suggest you ask yourself if you’re content with your relatively high quality of life being possible thanks to the poor quality of life of others elsewhere.

Ask yourself if you’re content with your relative freedom being possible thanks to the oppression of others elsewhere.

Ask yourself: If our way of life is so sacred, so ideal, so worthy of being defended by any means necessary, why do we need so many homeless shelters, alcohol and drug rehab centers, rape crisis hotlines, battered women’s shelters, and suicide hotlines?

If America is the world’s shining light, why are its citizens left with no choice but to organize in a desperate attempt to protect human, environmental, civil, and animal rights?

Why can’t we drink the water or breathe the air without the risk of becoming ill from corporate-produced toxins?

If America is the zenith of human social order, why does our vaunted way of life provoke terror as a tactic and an emotion?

Republicans' True Colors Never Fade

John McCain says an overseas profit repatriation tax holiday would give a worthwhile boost to the U.S. economy. He said at the Reuters Washington Summit,

If you brought $1.5 trillion back to the United States of America, it's bound to have some positive effect somewhere. I don't see how it would not. Even if they buy more yachts and ... corporate jets and all that, it's bound to have some effect.

Pay attention, Super Committee...

"People worship their oppressors."

"Don't we know what a troll is yet? Rush Limbaugh is there to make sure the conversation never gets to anywhere that it matters. ... I'm embarrassed by this country a lot, by its stupidity and shallowness. I'm disturbed by how people worship their oppressors. And that's what fascists get you to do."
- Barry Crimmins

"It baffles me that people ... still think it’s individuals in foreclosure who need to be lectured about 'personal responsibility.'"

Matt Taibbi:

But from what I’ve seen, most foreclosures involve ordinary people with jobs who bought houses when the economy was good, but are caught now in the triple death-trap of an underwater home, rising costs of living, and declining wages and opportunity. And as far as personal responsibility goes, those people who bought that home-ownership ticket, if they missed payments, they’re all taking the foreclosure ride right now.

What we have on the other hand, however, is a bunch of financial companies who consciously created huge volumes of bad loans, dumped them on retirees and foreigners and union stiffs, then doubled down on the problem by creating mountains of new liabilities based on those bad loans via synthetic derivatives. Then, when it all blew up, they came to us and asked us to buy the whole pile at full retail prices, clones and all.

Which we did, flooding them with bailout cash. This allowed them to instantly jack their annual bonus pools back up into the $150 billion range while the rest of the country waited out mass unemployment and a foreclosure epidemic.

So these people created giant masses of these defective loans, pumped the global system full of toxic debt, asked for the biggest government handout in history when it all went wrong, then walked away in the end even richer than before, forcing the rest of us to deal with their messes.

It baffles me that people can look at that behavior and still think it’s individuals in foreclosure who need to be lectured about "personal responsibility."

"Inhabit an inner landscape wherein no state, corporation–nor any type of extant system holds dominion over your essential self."

Come home. Surf blogs. See new pieces by favorites OHollern, Rockstroh, and Crimmins. Yes!

Here's some Rockstroh:

The stakes are great. Much has been stolen from us: essential qualities, more valuable than money. As the populace of the corporate/consumer state, we have been induced, by means of small bribes and hyper-authoritarian coercion, to sign a social contract that sells our essential nature on the cheap i.e., to be defined (hence diminished) as a consumer, a commuter, an employee, a Republican, a Democrat, a member of a demographic group, a cipher, a sucker, a bystander in one’s own fate.

Don’t let any system define you, narrow, then appropriate, your innate and essential self towards exploitive agendas, as does the present societal set-up, for the incommensurate profits of a self-serving few–who, in turn, insist that your objections to the situation are unreasonable, outrageous, untoward–too crazy to be uttered in decent company. In short, a system in which its operatives demand that you stay in your place and not question the motives and actions of your betters.

In contrast, a radical sensibility insists you must inhabit an inner landscape wherein no state, corporation–nor any type of extant system holds dominion over your essential self–that you inhabit a landscape that is best navigated by your own interior lode star. Therefore, you have no obligation to justify your existence to any man or system. To even attempt to do so would deliver an injustice to your heart, for this is a state of being as impossible to quantify as a flight of imagination–yet it exist within as immanent as the architecture of desire.

Catch a recent Crimmins interview here.

"There are no innocent victims of drone attacks."

Glenn Greenwald:

Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.

"People should merely understand things as they are, should call them by their real names, should know that the army is an instrument of murder, and should know that the levy and maintenance of the army – precisely what the kings, emperors, and presidents are concerned about with so much self-assurance – is a preparation for murder."
- Leo Tolstoy, Thou Shalt Not Kill (1901)

"The demand for industriousness and also for saving, self-denial, is made not upon the capitalists but on the workers."

[source: original]

"Hence still today the demand for industriousness and also for saving, self-denial, is made not upon the capitalists but on the workers, and namely by the capitalists. Society today makes the paradoxical demand that he for whom the object of exchange is subsistence should deny himself, not he for whom it is wealth."

- Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1857

(h/t :Lady Poverty)

"Questions of fact cannot be resolved on the basis of ideological commitments."

Noam Chomsky said that.

"The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger in the heart of the country."

Transcript.

"Well, now the world is indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat, again in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The plutonomy is where the action is. It could continue like this, and if it does, then this historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. The Occupy movements are the first major popular reaction which could avert this. It’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long hard struggle.'
- Noam Chomsky

"If we scale up big enough we might be able to take care of the whole street population of Manhattan.”

Jon Friesen (interviewed by Chris Hedges):

"Everyone is being taken care of here. As long as you’re nonviolent, you’re taken care of. And when you do that you draw all sorts of people, including those people who have problematic behavior. If we scale up big enough we might be able to take care of the whole street population of Manhattan.”

N.Y. Times:

From Los Angeles to Wall Street, from Denver to Boston, homeless men and women have joined the protesters in large numbers, or at least have settled in beside them for the night. While the economic deprivation they suffer might symbolize the grievance at the heart of this protest, they have come less for the cause than for what they almost invariably describe as an easier existence. There is food, as well as bathrooms, safety, company and lots of activity to allow them to pass away their days.

[...]

At a food tent here in Los Angeles, the homeless are often the first in line when a pot of stew comes out, many of them wandering over from Skid Row.

“If you are hungry and are in need of a meal, we will serve you as long as you do not disrupt the occupiers,” said Michele Watson, one of the managers of the food tent, on a soft and sunny day that was a reminder of why so many homeless people have settled in this city. “We don’t turn anyone away. I don’t care what your address is.”

Nice to know that the 99% does indeed include the homeless!

"Men are rational, practical, survivors; while women are stupid, inefficient and sentimental."

Yan Basque on The Walking Dead, Episode One, which I watched last night.

1. One woman at the camp near the end of the episode, whose character is only onscreen for this one scene, is so stupid and useless, she doesn't know that in order to respond to someone on a CB radio, you have the push the button. Seriously. I'm pretty sure most people have seen enough of those things on television, whether they've actually used them or not themselves, to understand this simple concept. And if they didn't, why wouldn't someone at the camp teach them how to use it?

2. Lori, Rick's wife, has already been established as a bad mother in the incredibly, blatantly, offensively sexist opening dialogue, where Rick and Shane talk about "the difference between men and women" (in which we learn, among other things, that women are responsible for global warming, because they don't know how to use a light switch). When we finally meet her, we see that her being a bad mother isn't just Rick's opinion, but is in fact true. (This is demonstrated by he way that she walks away from her son, which Shane then scolds her for in the tent.) And not only is she a bad mother, but she's also a bad wife, because she's cheating on her husband, whom she left in a coma back at the hospital.

3. The only interaction between men and women in the entire episode (not counting a few encounters with female zombies) is in that one scene at the camp. In includes: a man taking the CB away from the silly woman who can't figure out how to use simple technology; Lori trying to express herself and show some leadership, but being immediately put in her proper place by a man who knows better; Shane treating her like shit, insulting her, telling her she's a bad mother, and bullying her into admitting that he's right - all of which we could dismiss as characterization of him as an asshole and not necessarily representative of the views of the producers of the show, except that, of course, her reaction to all this is to make out with him, because that's apparently what turns women on.

4. In an earlier scene between Rick and Morgan, the guy who's staying at his neighbour's house, Rick points out that all the photo albums are missing from his place, which is evidence that Lori was alive when she left, as a burglar wouldn't have stolen these. Morgan laughs and says his wife did the same thing. "I'm out there packing stuff for survival and she's gathering photo albums." Silly women!

That pretty much sums up the show's take on men and women: men are rational, practical, survivors; while women are stupid, inefficient and sentimental.

One of the commenters writes: "you could see the whole thing as a damming indictment of what a world regressed to traditional gender roles would look like."

No, it's misogyny.