The Resistance

[BO]

Thought we might need a thread for news of civil disobedience, resistance and beyond. 

My 12 yo son told me the other day that the baby boomers were responsible for the world going to shit. I told him he was right. There were a few of us who held to our youthful ideals, but truth is..the vast majority of the boomer generation turned out to be scumbags. 

But what caught my attention was the fact that my twelve year old was echoing a new sentiment. Nope, he doesn't blame me--not yet anyway. But, it is interesting that he's already looking for someone to blame. His eyes are beginning to see through the bullshit. He gets it. 

Here's to those that fight back...

[BO]

Name that tune:

She prays like a muslim with her eyes on fire.

I want a Muslim Terrorist Chia Pet for Christmas.

[waldopaper]

I got it! Rabia Basri!!

Gotta admit... at first, I was thinkin about somebody else...

Shine up the battle apple
We'll shake 'em all down tonight
We're gonna mix in the street
Strike at the stroke of midnight
Dance on the bones till the girls say when
Pick up what's left by daylight
When Josie comes home

[Cal]

I have the fascinating job of estimating timber yields & scheduling harvesting of the plantations making up the production unit I'm the planner for ... My departments job is a delicate mix of art and science and enough politcal wherewithal to make it all fly. The basic insurmountable problem we face which no one in management actually wants to come to terms with is that when we measure trees we estimate the size in cubic metres ... volume. When the harvesters come in & cut it down and cart if off it goes into trucks and over weighbridges and the offtake gets measured as weight in tonnes. Converting the tonnes harvested into the cubic meters we predicted would be a simple matter of applying an appropriate conversion factor ... except that the conversion factor depends on .... the water content of the tree ... which changes in standing trees on a daily basis and varies with the weather, the species and innumerable other variables. It gets worse once it's cut down. It loses moisture fast but at an unknown rate and nobody can really tell how long it's going to lie about before going over the weighbridge.
My "key performance measurement" is that I monitor all of this and get the prediction of tonnnes from the harvest to within 5% of what actually gets taken off. It's essentially an impossible feat, but corporate management absolutely don't get it. And we are sitting ducks for having our figures called into question by all and sundry .... as happened today ....

Where I am leading to with this ramble about my job is that the USDA website is a great source of information for me when I have to gather resources in our defence .... which is what I am doing this evening.

I stumbled across this on their website .... your forests are apparently being taken over by "extremely dangerous people" ... Thought I'd better warn you all so you can read what action to take should you encounter them.

[pan]

Yep......the unintended consequences of anti-marijuana laws being toughened by allowing for the confiscation of any and all property remotely connected to the industry - if they are going to take the land you are growing in on better not own that land to begin with.

If you haven't already - see The Union

[Mouse]

Hmmm, couldn't find the dangerous people Cal, but watching the movie, think I must have watched it before, sharing some walnuts with my dog Maisie who always has the munchies. What can one say? There was a wonderful moment here when they relaxed things. Then they got all cross about it again. However however however

[Mouse]

However, I don't think they are quite so keen on locking young people up here, or old codgers with arthritis. When I smoked it, during that window when the law was less strict, it loosened the lock on my tongue and chased that great shroud away that was hanging over my head. I was just reading Pelagius on the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and in AD 385 he wrote:

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they were exercising their freedom of choice; and as a consequence of the choice they made, they were no longer able to live in the Garden of Eden. When we hear that story we are struck by their disobedience to God; and so we conclude that they were no longer fit to enjoy the perfect happiness of Eden. And we should also be struck by the nature of that tree and its fruit. Before eating the fruit they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit they acquired this knowledge, and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom: by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions.

How is it possible, then, for an act of disobedience to God to bring such a blessing? When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden they were like small children: they simply obeyed God's instructions without considering the moral reasons for those instructions. To become mature they needed to learn the distinction for themselves between right and wrong, good and evil. And God gave them the opportunity to become mature by putting within the garden the tree of knowledge, by which they could learn this distinction. But if God had simply instructed Adam and Eve to eat from the tree, and they had obeyed, they would have been acting like children. So he forbade them from eating the fruit; this meant that they themselves had to make a decision, whether to eat or not to eat. Just as a young person needs to defy his parents in order to grow to maturity, so Adam and Eve needed to defy God in order to share his knowledge of good and evil. By defying God, Adam and Eve grew to maturity in his image.

http://www.pelagius.net/demetrias.htm

Nice.

[waldopaper]

It's 5:10 am and we just holed up in some 50s era no-tel about 100 miles from dc. dam am i wired. gotta get some Zs and then be outta here by 10am if we wanna get to the sanity by noon. wul- they dint have wireless in the 50s. shine up the battle apple. jah jah.

.

[waldopaper]

Wul ok we're back home. Not like I was thinking everybody (even here) would be all a-flutter with questions or anything... it's like- nobody even noticed we left... or went anywhere... or is particularly interested if we saw anything or not. (it's 8:49pm LT Sunday, October 31 2010) This, methinks, is fairly representative of our too-busy-for-anything Zeitgeist... which is what the "rally" was all about.

I was kinda wired-up about seeing (what I thought would be) the "slacker Woodstock." Mebbe I DID see it... but it was so (in my preconception) unremarkable, I didn't recognize it as such. I guess there were a lotta people there... at the actual appointed place and time. I mean. I don't know... because we were not at the official place at the appointed time... which pissed my daughter off considerably.

See, I figured the "peripheral" event(s) would be just- or more- "significant" than the actual "event" itself. Wrong. It was at the appointed place/ time... and then they all evaporated. We saw plenty of young folks carrying "signs" everywhere... long into the afternoon... but I think they were looking for someplace to eat or something. There were virtually NO old/angry hippies (except for me).

For sure, a lotta folk showed up- and I guess that was the exercise. I guess they beat the Glenn Beck "rally," in terms of population... and it seems like that was the whole idea. "We" (whoever that is) can mobilize and centralize a large number of people as well ad "they" (whoever that is- assuming it is the Teepers), so there. So what? I'm not sure. I'm not sure it matters to the head-stepping Nazi tools.

So this shit-stain of text is meant to convey what I observed... plus my own interpretation and evaluation. It was a 1000 mile journey to try to figure out what's going on. What's going on is that there are very different "mind sets" of humanoids in this North American bio-region, and each (if you were to break it down to two) is incapable of understanding the "other" (generally) because "they" seem so alien.

Bottom Line: I think the "Rally to Restore Sanity" did much to demonstrate "sanity," but nothing whatsoever to "restore" it. How could you possibly "restore" it? For a significant part (methinks about 37%), it ("sanity," that is).fucking GONE. I did not get the impression that these many folk realized how far GONE it really is. That's ny REALITY BASED conclusion. Kinda happy. Kinda grim.

Waldo peace out.

[BO]

Thanks, Waldo. From the perspective of seeing it on TV, it did look pretty unremarkable. Probably because the folks were so reasonable.

While the righties rage, the lefties chill. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

It's come down to a catch 22. To accomplish anything, the lefties need to adopt the righties tactics: lie, make threats and throw tantrums. So, watcha gonna do? Is it possible to adopt your enemy's ethic temporarily--just until you win the war--then go back to being a decent person? Probably not.

Oh well, I voted today. Looked up the voter's guide on our local progressive news site, and just copied down what they suggested we vote for. Ain't gonna make a shit worth of difference other than I can say, "fuck you" at the TV when they start complaining about the lack of voter turnout. Lots of progressive sites are asking, "Why bother?" Guess I couldn't let Tinkerbell die.

Been depressed lately myself. The realization that we live among so many idiots is really getting me down. That, and violence is really becoming an issue 'round here. Sociopaths galore everywhere you go now. Pretty much everything is going to shit at a rapid pace.

Good for you for getting out and supporting the cause. Whatever that might be?

[pan]

You have the potential of preventing Dino from going to the Senate - none of my votes would make any dint in the red state of Idaho. Actually, because Idaho is so thoroughly conservative Republican, there hasn't been as much whacko Tea Party stuff - they really can't get all that fired up to react against status quo when status quo is just like them.

Still haven't registered to vote in my new state. Need to do that one of these days. Would have liked to vote against Governor Butch Otter (still think his name belongs on a homocore, animal fetishist film star).

[pan]

Stewart equates the "craziness" of the TEAbaggers on the Right with the 9/11 Truth movement on the Left. He also is in complete denial about any possible problems involved with rabid Zionism. He is solidly a centrist - I imagine he was a big fan of Clinton triangulation.

Yet he is seen as the "liberal" voice in the media.

[pan]

from Chris Hedges:

The Phantom Left
The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for "moderation." And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power--masked, ruthless and unexamined--happily devour the state.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights--including habeas corpus--may have been revoked, but don't get mad. Don't be shrill. Don't be like the crazies on the left.