Occupy movement turning to shareholder meetings

Looking to build on the Occupy Wall Street movement, activists say they're turning to corporate shareholder meetings this spring to vent their anger over economic disparity in the United States and to promote an assortment of other causes.

A group called 99% Power -- a reference to those not among the top 1 percent of earners -- says it plans actions at 36 shareholder meetings, with the first big push coming at Tuesday's Wells Fargo & Co gathering in San Francisco.

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Alan Watts - A Conversation With Myself

A 1971 television recording with Alan Watts walking in the mountains and talking about the limitations of technology and the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe with a single tracked mind.

Occupy 2012 and the Doomsday Cult of Profit

One thing that became abundantly clear was that neither the Aztecs nor the Mayans were any more concerned about 2012 than the Catholic priests were concerned about the rapture. Several prominent shamans and tribal elders actually told me that they do not believe there is any pragmatic science behind the western interpretations of the 2012 prophecy.

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Russia Stunned After Japanese Plan To Evacuate 40 Million Revealed

A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with Japan over the disputed Kuril Islands during the next fortnight states that Russian diplomats were “stunned” after being told by their Japanese counterparts that upwards of 40 million of their peoples were in “extreme danger” of life threatening radiation poisoning and could very well likely be faced with forced evacuations away from their countries eastern most located cities… including the world’s largest one, Tokyo.

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2012: The Year of the Cooperative

The United Nations has named 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, and indeed, co-ops seem poised to become a dominant business model around the world. Today, nearly one billion people worldwide are cooperative member-owners. That’s one in five adults over 15 — and it could soon be you.

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Shocking photos show Swedish Minister of Culture celebrating with ”n*g*er cake”

A macabre scene with racist undertones took place on Saturday when Swedish minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth attended a tax funded party for the Stockholm cultural elite. The self-proclaimed "anti-racist" Liljeroth declared the party officially started by slicing a piece of a cake depicting a stereotypical African woman.

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OWS Insight

From Responses to “I Fought the Law:

Yesterday I wrote about a sense that Occupy was under triple attack from academia, the police and the Law. There were a good deal of mostly hostile responses on Facebook. While I don’t agree with most of them, as you’ll see, I thought it was fair to post them in the interests of transparency. They are long but all the more reason not to limit the audience.

There was a great deal of discussion about Jodi Dean’s New School keynote, its use of theory and her questioning of the organization of Occupy. The length of these comments suggest that a nerve was touched–or, to be fair, that I was wildly wrong.

Rhetorics aside, at the heart of it is a central issue: does the horizontal leader-less strategy of Occupy continue to be beneficial (we all agree it was so at first, I think) or not? I continue to think that the process is the energy of the movement. If leaders are appointed, Occupy becomes just another political party or a pressure group like Moveon.org. And it would just disappear into the fringe. Others seem to be repelled by the process.

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Thousands of Honduran farmworkers occupy land

Thousands of farmworkers have occupied 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares) of land around Honduras as part of a dispute with large landowners and the government, activists and officials said Wednesday.

Activists say the seized territory is arable public land that small farmers have the legal right to grow crops under Honduran law. The large landowners who have been farming the land say they bought it legally from the government. A land dispute between small farmers and landlords in the northern Aguan Valley has led to dozens of deaths among farmworkers in recent years.

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"Television": Lacan on the unconscious

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Slavoj Zizek on How to Read Lacan

... A century ago, in order to situate his discovery of the unconscious in the history of modern Europe, Freud developed the idea of three successive humiliations of man, the three “narcissistic illnesses,” as he called them. ... Today, a hundred years later, a more extreme picture is emerging: the latest scientific breakthroughs seem to add a whole series of further humiliations to the narcissistic image of man: our mind itself is merely a computing machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy is merely the user’s illusion of this machine. Consequently, with regard to today’s brain sciences, psychoanalysis itself, far from being subversive, rather seems to belong to the traditional humanist field threatened by the latest humiliations.

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Nonetheless, in the case of psychoanalysis, the memorial service is perhaps a little bit too hasty, commemorating a patient who still has a long life ahead. In contrast to the “evident” truths of the critics of Freud, my aim is to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has arrived. On reading Freud through Lacan, through what Lacan called his “return to Freud.” Freud’s key insights finally become visible in their true dimension. Lacan did not understand this return as a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware.

Lacan started his “return to Freud” with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best known formula: “the unconscious is structured as a language.” ...

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