Saturday, 29 October 2011
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Self-Reported Gun Ownership in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993
Majority of men, Republicans, and Southerners report having a gun in their households
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/Self-Reported-Gun-Ownership-Highest-1993.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/Self-Reported-Gun-Ownership-Highest-1993.aspx
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Occupy Canada
Occupy Toronto: Disorganization On Day Two As Protesters Assemble And Talk
Occupy Vancouver protest stretches into Sunday as protesters set up camp
Group Occupies downtown Edmonton park as protest stretches into second day
Update: Occupy Calgary draws several hundred protesters
No arrests made by police during peaceful downtown event
Social concerns occupy 'Peggers
Rally supports Wall Street protesters
Gallery: Occupy Windsor Protest
As part of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, peaceful protesters marched the streets of downtown Windsor Saturday, chanting and brandishing signs calling for "people over profit," though the objectives of the group remain murky
Occupy Montreal protesters have no plans to leave Victoria Square
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Occupy+Montreal+protesters+have+plans+leave+Victoria+Square/5558582/story.html
Demonstrators hear speakers, pitch tents at Occupy N.S. event
Friday, 14 October 2011
David Scharf: The Forest, The Big Brother State
The Forest
The Big Brother State
The Forest from David Scharf on Vimeo.
The Big Brother State
The Big Brother State from David Scharf on Vimeo.
Joseph E. Stiglitz: To Cure the Economy
NEW YORK – As the economic slump that began in 2007 persists, the question on everyone’s minds is obvious: Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can’t implement an effective recovery strategy. And, so far, we have neither.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz143/English
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz143/English
The Instability of Inequality
NEW YORK – This year has witnessed a global wave of social and political turmoil and instability, with masses of people pouring into the real and virtual streets: the Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting Chilean students; the destruction in Germany of the expensive cars of “fat cats”; India’s movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in China; and now the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York and across the United States.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini43/English
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/roubini43/English
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Conch Shell, The People’s Microphone
“The People’s Microphone” was used during union protests in Wisconsin.
Visible throughout the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, is a technique dubbed as “The People’s Microphone”. It has been deployed nationwide, and is becoming the dominant vehicle for group interaction and communication. So what is it?
“New York City requires a permit to use “amplified sound.” Since Occupy Wall Street does not have a permit, police have interpreted that to mean even the use of an electric bullhorn. As a response to such limitations, a phenomenon known as the “People’s Microphone” has evolved, where a person making a speech pauses while the nearby members of the audience repeats the previous phrase (somewhat) in unison.” The entry adds, “The (People’s Microphone) effect has been called “comic or exhilarating – often all at once.” Some feel this provided a further unifying effect for the crowd.”
Advocates of this new method claim that it is a work-around to restrictive city ordinances, and serves as a ‘progressive communication’ tool which allows groups to speak and achieve “community consensus”, and that the audience is asked to listen in a whole new way and to actually help transmit the message to others. They will tell you that accuracy and transparency are the crucial elements to the People’s Microphone.
NLP device: ‘call-and-return’
OWS’s new People’s Microphone is quite simply a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) application or technique. Its consensus arrival method, also known as “call-and-return”, has now become the audio device of choice- spreading across the country as quickly as the protests themselves.
Crowd participants slowly repeat each phrase the leading speaker is saying to them, with a series of hand signs used to provide the speaker and the group with feedback.
To the casual observer, this new system of communication may appear as compelling, as it is metaphoric. It might also remind you of the infamous ‘pass the conch’ scene from the Nobel Prize-winning novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
It is a very slow and tedious process, often resulting in very few actual issues being fleshed out. In most cases, it takes triple the amount of time to convey the same amount of information that a normal speaker would accomplish by talking directly to the audience. But this can only be done when the group is forced to repeat the words of the speaker, so the speaker is forced to talk slowly, using fewer words at once. In this way, it is also a mesmerizing and extremely hypnotic group communication tool.
In this way, such NLP methods can also be used to promote ‘group-think’ and could be described as collectivist mind control education at its very finest.
Successful NLP systems like this are commonly used by sales people in business, as well as in advertising and of course politics, working in restricted bloc of words, and often with restricted vocabularies.
Group moderators insist that this is done so that ‘everybody is safe’, and that the group is ‘doing things properly’. Any interaction with a speaker can only be done by employing a series of parochial child-like hand-signs, normally reserved for children attending school in K-8 grades.
There is certain appeal to ‘being part of the community’, where group leaders will ask the crowd for a ‘temperature check’ in order to determine “how ‘the bloc’ feels about what someone has said”, and if what someone is in consensus with “the bloc”. The audience will offer up a hand signal of waiving both hands to show their approval.
Once a consensus is identified, it’s typical that members of “the bloc” will feel that they are part of the collective, and thus, “part of the change”.
Unfortunately, in this type of system most of the group have little idea of what they are actually repeating, or who and what they are supporting with their hand signals, waving their hands, or making a triangle sign to communicate.
Watch as the speaker in the following video explains to his ‘bloc’ the collective will be banning any applause, because the clapping of hands might drown out someone within the collective who is trying to be heard. See this unfold in the bizarre Occupy Atlanta video below:
The Conch Shell
Ralph and Piggy discover the conch shell on the beach at the start of the novel and use it to summon the boys together after the crash separates them. Used in this capacity, the conch shell becomes a powerful symbol of civilization and order in the novel. The shell effectively governs the boys’ meetings, for the boy who holds the shell holds the right to speak. In this regard, the shell is more than a symbol—it is an actual vessel of political legitimacy and democratic power. As the island civilization erodes and the boys descend into savagery, the conch shell loses its power and influence among them. Ralph clutches the shell desperately when he talks about his role in murdering Simon. Later, the other boys ignore Ralph and throw stones at him when he attempts to blow the conch in Jack’s camp. The boulder that Roger rolls onto Piggy also crushes the conch shell, signifying the demise of the civilized instinct among almost all the boys on the island.http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/themes.html
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Poll Questions #2
(1) The official OWS website has publicly formed an alliance with a number of Democrat organizations. Will the movement ultimately be subverted by establishment Democrats?
[] Yes
[] No
[] Yes
[] No
How to Liberate America
How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services? David Korten introduces a landmark new report, “How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule.”
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/liberate-america
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/liberate-america
What Can Stop the One Percent?
Naomi Klein: There's only one thing that can block the wish list of the one percent, and it's a very big thing: the rest of us.
If there is one thing I know, it is that the one percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.
And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”
Wall Street Occupiers, the Future Depends on You
Video: For more than 15 years, David Korten has called for an end to the Wall Street economy. Why he hopes the Occupy movement will finally change the game.
David Korten's Take on #OccupyWallStreet
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/wall-street-occupiers-the-future-is-in-your-hands
David Korten's Take on #OccupyWallStreet
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/wall-street-occupiers-the-future-is-in-your-hands
Where The 99 Percent Get Their Power
Why is this protest spreading when others have fizzled?
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/where-the-99-percent-get-their-power
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/where-the-99-percent-get-their-power
Donate your organs and we’ll pay your funeral: New NHS plan to tackle shortage of volunteers
- 'Reasonable' funeral costs of between £1,500 and £5,000 could be met
- Report also recommends bigger payouts for egg and sperm donation in fertility treatment
Organ donors should have their funeral expenses paid by the NHS, according to a proposal to encourage millions more to sign up to the register.
The desperate shortage of suitable transplant organs has left 8,000 people in the UK on a waiting list for a life-saving operation. And while it takes an average of three years for a suitable donor to become available, three people on the list die every day.
With a typical funeral costing thousands of pounds, the proposal for the NHS to pay ‘reasonable’ costs of between £1,500 and £5,000 could be an incentive for many to join the Organ Donor Register.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2047611/NHS-Donate-organs-pay-funeral-costs.html
1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?
Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)
If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.
But then why not kill Bill?
Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll
Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll/
Why the GOP candidates won't talk about foreign policy?
The Elephants in the Room
Barack Obama's Republican challengers haven't thought very deeply about foreign policy. It shows.
The World According to the GOP
What do the 2012 Republican candidates have to say about foreign policy?
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/the_world_according_to_the_gop
Can the #OccupyWallStreet movement survive?
To understand how movements get hijacked, check out this fantastic video
Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.
Related topic:
Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.
Related topic:
The Only Major Country Where Mass Protests Actually Work
Read 16 facts about China that will make your mind melt >
Do We Need Banks, Or Can We Cut Out the Middleman?
Banks Are So Big They Are Killing the Economy … and Own the Politicians
Resource curse
The resource curse (Paradox of Plenty) refers to the paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like minerals and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
The zealous pursuit of dirty oil is transforming Canada into a corrupt petro-state
~ Andrew Nikiforuk.
(Andrew Nikiforuk is an award winning Calgary-based journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of The Continent.)
http://www.andrewnikiforuk.com/
Alberta now suffers from too much of a good thing or what some wags call "the paradox of plenty."
The whole sorry predicament confirms what many citizens still find impossible to accept – that Alberta is just another troubled petro state.
For decades, economists have thoroughly documented that governments that run on oil revenue don’t behave normally. They not only lose their civil discipline, but eventually stop representing taxpayers altogether. The state, in short, becomes oil fettered, oil stained and oil obsessed. Political scientist Terry Karl defines the unhealthy addiction bluntly: “Oil revenues are the catalyst for a chronic tendency of the state to become over-extended, over-centralized and captured by special interests.”
... Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz have commented on the peculiar and often destructive character of petro states. In an essay on Russia’s petro rulers, Peter Rutland, a U.S. scholar, recently noted that resource wealth also poses a hefty moral hazard: “The society (and its leaders) start to think that it is richerthan it really is, and fritters away the energy rents in excessive consumption or infrastructure investment. Social inequality and political instability tends to increase."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
The zealous pursuit of dirty oil is transforming Canada into a corrupt petro-state
~ Andrew Nikiforuk.
(Andrew Nikiforuk is an award winning Calgary-based journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of The Continent.)
http://www.andrewnikiforuk.com/
Alberta now suffers from too much of a good thing or what some wags call "the paradox of plenty."
The whole sorry predicament confirms what many citizens still find impossible to accept – that Alberta is just another troubled petro state.
For decades, economists have thoroughly documented that governments that run on oil revenue don’t behave normally. They not only lose their civil discipline, but eventually stop representing taxpayers altogether. The state, in short, becomes oil fettered, oil stained and oil obsessed. Political scientist Terry Karl defines the unhealthy addiction bluntly: “Oil revenues are the catalyst for a chronic tendency of the state to become over-extended, over-centralized and captured by special interests.”
... Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz have commented on the peculiar and often destructive character of petro states. In an essay on Russia’s petro rulers, Peter Rutland, a U.S. scholar, recently noted that resource wealth also poses a hefty moral hazard: “The society (and its leaders) start to think that it is richerthan it really is, and fritters away the energy rents in excessive consumption or infrastructure investment. Social inequality and political instability tends to increase."
Perhaps the first major symptom of "petrolization" are low taxes. Oil states, such as Wyoming, Alaska and Saudi Arabia run on hydrocarbon revenue and tax their citizens lightly or not at all, notes Karl.
Even Alberta Finance, which can't balance a provincial budget, still proudly proclaims on its website that the province has the lowest personal taxes in Canada and among the lowest business taxes.
The curse of oil
The paradox of plenty
One day soon poor countries may actually benefit from their natural resources
Monday, 10 October 2011
views on the motive and timing for the new fees
Bank of America and other financial institutions have announced they intend to charge customers for their debit-card use.
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the Fed Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Protests: Both Conservatives and Liberals Are Right … Just Looking at Different Sides of the Same Coin
(1) The government created the mega-giants, and they are not the product of free market competition
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-and-occupy-the-fed-are-two-sides-of-the-same-coin.html
An entire system of global trade is at risk
Next month’s G20 summit must go beyond the usual rhetoric. Confidence in the eurozone’s banking system has to be restored through recapitalisation of its banks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8813441/An-entire-system-of-global-trade-is-at-risk.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8813441/An-entire-system-of-global-trade-is-at-risk.html
Occupy Wall Street: The Class War & The Nationalist Solution
Actress Roseanne Barr expressed the sentiment of a lof of Americans when she problaimed on Russia Today's Max Keiser show that if she were President "part of my platform is, of course, the guilty must be punished and that we no logner let our children see their guilty leaders getting away with murder. I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the the worst of the guilty. I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the abbility to pay back anything over $100 Million of personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount than they should, you know, go to the re-education camps and if that doesn't help, than being beheaded."
http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-los-angeles/occupy-wall-street-the-class-war-the-nationalist-solution
http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-los-angeles/occupy-wall-street-the-class-war-the-nationalist-solution
Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers
Ellen Schultz argues that many large employers have plundered employee pension plans over the past decades. She also talks about the crisis this "theft" has created. Hosted by the National Retiree Legislative Network.
http://www.booktv.org/Program/12833/Retirement+Heist+How+Companies+Plunder+and+Profit+from+the+Nest+Eggs+of+American+Workers.aspx
http://www.booktv.org/Program/12833/Retirement+Heist+How+Companies+Plunder+and+Profit+from+the+Nest+Eggs+of+American+Workers.aspx
City Bankers Plan Christmas Parties In War Memorial Park
Fury at City bankers' plan to hold Christmas parties in war memorial park
Upmarket party organisers want to host banquets with live music among memorials to merchant seamen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/08/christmas-parties-war-memorial-park
Upmarket party organisers want to host banquets with live music among memorials to merchant seamen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/08/christmas-parties-war-memorial-park
Global crisis heralds loss for Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs is expected to make its first quarterly loss since the depths of the financial crisis, underlying how the current market turmoil is hurting Wall Street's biggest banks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8815822/Global-crisis-heralds-loss-for-Goldman-Sachs.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8815822/Global-crisis-heralds-loss-for-Goldman-Sachs.html
Michael Bloomberg: Occupy Wall Street is trying to destroy jobs
The New York mayor says the protests are 'not productive' given the importance of financial services to the city's economy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/bloomberg-occupy-wall-street-jobs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/bloomberg-occupy-wall-street-jobs
Occupy America:
Occupy America: protests against Wall Street and inequality hit 70 cities
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/occupy-america-protests-financial-crisis
NINE WALL STREET BIG SHOTS WHO CASHED IN ON THE CRISIS
With Americans across the country realizing that they are not the only ones fed up with the CEOs, bankers and policymakers responsible for the current damage to the U.S. economy, now is a good time to read up on the Wall Street executives who profited most from the bubble and federal bailout.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/nine_wall_street_big_shots_who_cashed_in_on_the_crisis_20111009/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Truthdig+Truthdig%3A+Drilling+Beneath+the+Headlines
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/nine_wall_street_big_shots_who_cashed_in_on_the_crisis_20111009/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Truthdig+Truthdig%3A+Drilling+Beneath+the+Headlines
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Friday, 7 October 2011
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