Where Do We Go From Here? Occupy Wall St.

Where Do We Go From Here? Occupy Wall St. from Ed David on Vimeo.

DC Douglas' "Why #OccupyWallStreet? 4 Reasons."

READ: http://tinyurl.com/why-ows
WATCH: http://www.DCDouglas.com
LEARN MORE: http://occupywallst.org/
Actor, voice over talent and non-political figure D.C. Douglas chimes in with his take on OWS - Occupy Wall Street.

Google: US law enforcement tried to get videos removed from YouTube
The technology giant's biannual transparency report reveals a 70% rise in takedown requests from US government or police

Neuroscience and Justice - Edge Master Class 2011 - Michael Gazzaniga [7.16.11]
Asking the fundamental question of modern life. In an enlightened world of scientific understandings of first causes, we must ask: are we free, morally responsible agents or are we just along for the ride?

Albany & NY State Police Defy Governor, Mayor; Refuse to Arrest OWS Demonstrators
Occupy Albany protesters in New York’s capital city received an unexpected ally over the week: The state and local authorities.

Syntagma, 20th of October


Semper Fi: Occupy Marines Bringing Reinforcements To Occupy The Nation
#OrganizeMarines states: “Security forces/police should be seen as potential recruits to our cause and message, not as adversaries. Ultimately, they are accountable to the people. Defensive strategies never win. Do not respond to verbal attacks or hostile propaganda from Nay-Sayers by using the language of the opponent. Reframe.”

Tear gas! Thrown at Occupy Oakland!


Veteran shot in the face by rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland protests

Veterans for Peace member Scott Olsen was wounded by a less-lethal round fired by either San Francisco Sheriffs deputies or Palo Alto Police on October 25, 2011 at 14th Street and Broadway in Downtown Oakland
http://www.occupyoakland.org/

Chemical bomb thrown at Occupy Portland - #OccupyMaine

A video of Occupy Maine made on 10-23-11 at Lincoln Park in Portland, Maine. A chemical bomb had been thrown over the fence early that morning and discussions were going on about moving the main tent further back from the perimeter of the park

Anarchists welcome Westminster’s new ‘protester lanes’ - London protester lanes introduced
Anarchists across Britain’s capital have welcomed the introduction of new ‘protester lanes’ which fit neatly between existing bus lanes and the marginalised, implemented to cope with a huge increase in protest marches.

Reintroduction of Death Penalty Possible Due to Lisbon Treaty
Europe’s citizens demand wide discussion

Top Ten Occupy Wall Street Cartoons

America the Baffled: One in Four Americans Doesn't Know The Country From Which We Broke Free

EU Politician Wants Internet Surveillance Built Into Every Operating System
from the they-just-haven't-thought-this-through dept
The two European politicians behind the Declaration, which seeks to extend the already intrusive Data Retention Directive, were Tiziano Motti and Anna Zaborska. Motti now wants to go even further by monitoring and storing all Internet activity in the European Union.

Ridiculed crystal work wins Nobel for Israeli
Three decades after Daniel Shechtman looked with an electron microscope at a metal alloy and saw a pattern familiar in Islamic art but then unknown at a molecular level, those non-stick, rust-free, heat-resistant quasicrystals are finding their way into tools from LEDs to engines and frying pans.

Bolivia: Coca-chewing protest outside US embassy
Indigenous activists in Bolivia have been holding a mass coca-chewing protest as part of campaign to end an international ban on the practice.

Part I: Motives for Mind Control
This essay is the first in a series of three on mind control. It discusses some of the motives for mind control and why it continues. Part II of the series, "Resisting the Mind Control State” describes some methods to protest and resist mind control abuses and atrocities. Part III, "Mental Firewalls" discusses some of the techniques victims have developed to survive the ongoing torture operations.

Living Murals

Living Murals from Noora Ojala on Vimeo.

Living Murals -animation is MA graduation work from Noora Ojala, University of Art and Design Helsinki 2008.
Do it to yourself. Arts in the street bewilder, esthetically perfect, clumsy, childish, agitprop, trendy, classic, sabotage and everything that I cannot imagine. Brasil, nowadays graffiti leader in the world, offers most unique and colorful works on its bleeding streets. Animation is constructed from street art what describes the brutality and dreams of the life. It has the full tones of everything what stand between those two, and in the background stays the huge jungle of metropolises, these cities what has grown wildly in last decades and the flood of poor people moving in to the city still seems endless. This story is made under the Brazilian sun, in its shadows and feverish tempo of life. Music is made by carioca MV Bill. A highly respected member of his community and media figure, MV Bill is the symbol of political speech that makes a musical chronicle of the war on the Brazilian favelas, the initial step of an urgent discussion about violence, prejudice, and citizenship.

~ Reminder: Protest action against debt 'haircut' to commence in Syntagma Square at 7pm local time today ~

The War You Don't See - John Pilger

John Pilger investigates the media's role in war. He traces the history of 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of WWI to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Raoul Vaneigem: The decline and fall of work

The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth's energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive.

Humor as a weapon of mass resistance

Humor As Weapon, Shield and Psychological Salve
By Nichole Force

Humor As Weapon, Shield and Psychological SalveHumor has long been recognized as more than mere fun and games. It presents an alternative means of expressing criticism about injustices, arrogance, pretentions or hypocrisies that can’t socially (or legally) be expressed otherwise.

Court jesters could say things to the royals “in jest” that others would have been beheaded for uttering. When King James I of England had trouble fattening up his horses, court jester Archibald Armstrong reportedly suggested that His Majesty make the horses bishops and they would fatten in no time.

[...]

An example of gallows humor can be seen in the Soviet-era joke in which two Russians debate who is greater, Joseph Stalin or Herbert Hoover. “Hoover taught the Americans not to drink,” says one. “Yes, but Stalin taught the Russians not to eat,” replies the other. Placing a comical spin on dire circumstances that are outside one’s control was an effective coping mechanism long before the Germans named the phenomenon, and continues to serve the oppressed, victimized and suffering today.

Gallows humor often is viewed as an expression of resilience and hope that has the power to soothe suffering. When the minority has few tools to combat an oppressive majority, gallows humor can be used as a sort of secret, subversive weapon. The danger that ridicule poses to those in power is captured by the Italian phrase Una risata vi seppellirà, which translates to “It will be a laugh that buries you.”

The fear of the weapon of humor was alive and well in Nazi Germany, and it was dangerous business. The legal code of the time reflected Joseph Goebbels’ interpretation of the political joke as “a remnant of liberalism” that threatened the Nazi state. Not only was joke-telling made illegal, but those who told jokes were labeled “asocial” – a segment of society frequently sent to concentration camps. Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goering, referred to anti-Nazi humor as “an act against the will of the Fuehrer… and against the State and the Nazi Government,” and the crime was punishable by death. Article III, section 2 of the 1941 code (the Reichsgesetzblatt I) stated: “In cases where it is not specifically provided for, the death penalty will be imposed whenever the crime reveals an unusually low mentality or is especially serious for other reasons; in such cases the death penalty may also be imposed against juvenile criminals.” Since Nazi informants could be within earshot at any given moment, it was important to hold one’s tongue and suppress any witty desires. A Nazi prosecutor revealed that he determined the severity of punishment for a joke based on the following theory: “The better the joke, the more dangerous its effect, therefore, the greater punishment.”

~ more... ~

Tactics That Tickle: Laughing All the Way to the Win
“Because, after all, isn't laughing the best way to show teeth that bite?” – Philippe Duhamel

Ridiculing Politicians Is Always Good. Especially The Ones In Government
R.F. Wilson writes: Let’s face it, very few people have a high opinion of politicians. They view them as unreliable, deceiving, pompous and self-centred and believe that the vast mjority of them aren’t capable of doing anything. And it’s not a secret that most folks are of the opinion that the ‘servants of the people’ should be under constant watch by the public and the media and that they should be ridiculed by comedians the moment they sweep in to power.

Ridicule: An instrument in the war on terrorism - Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 7
Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general.

Laughter as a weapon
Jokes have power – but too often those who wield it, abuse it

QuotationsBook.com
"Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least." ~ Twain, Mark

Arab comics find laughter the best weapon in war on prejudice
The comedian Maysoon Zayid introduces her act by declaring she is a Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy, adding: "I just want you guys to know I am a virgin by choice … and that is my father's choice.
"My father has spent the majority of my life terrified that I will accidentally lose my virginity so there's a list of activities I am not allowed to do: there is to be no horseback riding, not even on a carousel."

About The Army
Roll up, roll up - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and foes - welcome to the unparalleled, the unexpected, the perfectly paradoxical, the grotesquely beautiful, the new-fangled world of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).

On the Death of a Politician - (2009) - Hilaire Belloc
Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept : for I had longed to see him hanged.