It has been known for some time that all elements heavier than hydrogen are all exclusively produced by stars and some elements such as gold are only created in massive explosions that generate those high energy gamma bursts that if pointed directly at the earth would fry us from many light years away. The fascinating thing that comes to mind is that everything besides the hydrogen in our bodies is all made by stars. The ash of their fusing hydrogen into heavier elements are the building blocks of life.

Recently it was discovered that a proto star was actually creating water which was then being ejected by the stars polar jets at 200,000 kilometers per hour, or about 80 times faster than bullet’s from a machine gun according to Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The really amazingly cool thing about this discovery is that it seems to be a pretty typical rite of passage for proto stars and so while it is probably a short lived stage in a proto stars life cycle, it is perhaps critical in the seeding of space with the elements required for life and for further star formation as well.

If this is true, that it is typical for young stars forming to regularly produce oceans of water, (the equivalent of the amazon river basin per second from each polar jet), then I think we’ve moved a little closer to credibility when you make the assumption that the universe is probably teaming with life. It just seems a much safer bet to say; yes, all the conditions for life exist everywhere we look there are the precursors of life including the primordial precursors to proteins found in exotic asteroids called “carbonaceous chondrites”, it seems very likely given the number of opportunities the universe presents, that life is common.

The Most Amazing Fact

I know, you’re saying; “That’s radical Mr. Badweather”. You’re getting to be as much an anarchist as that crazy catholic friend of yours Fr. McKenzie who is an anonymous supporter who thinks we couldn’t really change the direction the world is going without those willing to risk arrest in the digital world as well as those willing to risk being arrested for traditional “brick and mortar” civil disobedience. He’s convinced that “In a technocracy, hacktivism is both an inevitable development as well as completely necessary if we are to bring those democratic principles to the forefront of humanities cultures and allow it to continue to influence the earth in the general direction of democracy.” As crazy as this seems, it does seem to be working judging from the poor response of late to all the austerity talk and its being roundly rejected by many countries, Iceland, Ireland, Greece, France, and it looks like Spain as well.

Fr. McKenzie says he doesn’t get it, but that he thinks Americans have lost the gene that codes for “dissent” in a large swath of the population leading to a kind of “hyperapathy”. I keep telling him that it’s just like a lot of deer caught in the headlights of a declining American empire and we can all see the gravy train of “civilization” is in serious danger. I think we don’t want that much change and many people would rather continue as a plundering nation if the alternative is to live on a quarter of what we’re used to in order to really save this place. Like Upton Sinclair said; “It’s hard to make a man aware when his paycheck depends upon his ignorance.”

We need our radical’s because the rest of us aren’t disobedient enough to really change things. We need those brave enough to show us the way forward, they are our fire and our indignation and without them we will get just about nowhere in this. We need people that believe a new way of doing things is possible, yeah, like a new world, because we need that raw imagination and determination and willingness to place their bodies in harms way for all of humanity’s benefit. Instead of slamming the black bloc and anonymous occupiers, “liberalists” or “neo-libs”, whatever they really are these days should be hugging them and dialoguing with them rather than attempting a purge of occupy. That won’t work at all.

Beside, when people want to complain about how black bloc makes us look, they’re not taking into consideration that no matter what, the media is going to disparage the movement. It has to. What we need to do is actually have a little loyalty, (conservatives are beating the crap out of us on this value) and ask the person a simple question. Ask them how the broken windows compare to a crashed global economy and the starving billions that this economic violence put at great risk and if they thought enough was being done to bring the fraudsters and perpetrators of the greatest theft in the history of the world to any kind of justice? Ask them which of them is more important to talk about and spend actual resources on and find out real answers about?

We all need to connect the dots between all of our issues and see how we’ve all been divided and conquered by the wealthy. Mostly just because of the money. These vast piles of money and power just must be (it seems) in complete control once someone possesses large amounts of it. Once you possess large amounts of money it seems that you begin hoarding it to the detriment of your fellow human beings and even manipulating our political process with nothing other than greed in mind and then eventually a thirst for even more power over others.

Most of us aren’t hoarders and most hoarders aren’t billionaires but the somewhere less than 1000 people on earth are endowed with the incredible luck of being in the right place at the right time and having that “killer instinct”. I argue that billionaires are an abomination well beyond the power of any king ever in history. They are an artifact of runaway capitalism, or rotten to the core vulture capitalism and deregulation. No king in history ever had the power of people like Pete Petersen or David and Charles Koch to actively engage in perverting the truth, confusing citizens and completely buying our elected officials who then look out for their business interests.

Now… I don’t know any other way to put this. You are lilliputian in stature.

You need a lot of friends if you’re going to go after these giants. We NEED: your radicals, your anarchists, your black bloc, your non-violence, your civil disobedience, union people, environmentalists, peace activists, atheists, actual christians, gay rights activists, anti-drug war activists, immigrant rights activists, women’s rights activists, we all are getting nowhere tinkering at the margins for the last 35 years and not coming together on the first thing that has needed to happen all along:

End the drug war.

The left died when they bought into the bullshit that the war on drugs was a noble cause. Police unions, big pharma, prison unions all contribute to the election campaign of democrats. Instead of freedom what we got was a police state and systematic scapegoating of a significant portion of our population; our blacks, latino’s dirty hippies and the poor.

I want to be clear about this. This is my opinion. I don’t push my own agenda at the OWS table but I think most occupiers are supportive of legalizing, decriminalizing or otherwise ending the failed drug war. There are the few who attacked me for posting (on my own facebook page) stories and links regarding ending this failure of public policy but they don’t represent OWS anymore than I can. This is what I believe. You aren’t going to change anything without a broad movement that draws most of us into it.

Watch this video documenting the “war on drugs” as the New Jim Crow:

The New Jim Crow

Still don’t believe it? Let’s see what W.E.B. DeBois thinks:

… its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims

There is only one fight and that fight is for equality.

Whether you are a woman, black, latino, gay, lesbian, bisexual, a weed head, poor, or any number of other “others” the wealthy so love to polarize Americans against and get to clean their toilets, flip their toxic burgers, fill their for profit prisons, build their war toys, and watch fighting each other over the scraps that they throw us occasionally. Corporatism always requires a loser, a scapegoat to build hate towards. Hate blinds us. Makes us suckers just waiting to make some bastard rich.

And we’re not going to end the slavery without a fight.

And by fight, I mean in the non-violent sense of the word. I personally will always believe that solidarity and non-violent civil disobedience is going to be more powerful than a few broken windows, but we will get nowhere fast if we allow the conditioning of the wealthy to inform our actions and relationships and to dictate to us the marginalization of our “undesirables”, radicals, and anarchists who just don’t fit inside the “PR” bubble we want for occupy to live in so we are “attractive” to the “middle class” so they’ll come out and protest with us…

Next time someone says anything about broken windows? Ask them to compare the relative crimes; “Hmmm, broken windows… banksters crashing the worlds economy and 1.5 billion starving people… Broken windows… starvation on a global scale… yeah, I think I’ll still be able to be friends with the window breakers, and I’m interested in seeing the fraudsters put in a cell and fed bread and water for the rest of their life with one hour per week for recreation (whether they need it or not). Yes I know, that seems harsh but so does crashing the global economy and putting about a billion people at risk for starvation…

We need to re-weave all our stories into the fabric of community, pick up the banners of our brothers and sisters fights and we need to start right now asking ourselves; “Who doesn’t belong at this table?” instead of “who belongs at this table.”

A Tale of Two Cities: Ciudad Juarez and El Paso

5 Ways Law Enforcement Has Bungled Drug War Raids

Labor is the wellspring from which all capital flows
- Fr. McKenzie

There are some things I think about when I’m asked why people aren’t flocking to occupy to change or save the world. And I think it’s because they really don’t want it to change that much really [1]. People are very comfortable in their delusions. We are now living through one of the most important periods in earth’s evolution. What we do in the next five years is going to either change things forever for the better, or we are going to begin experiencing the full wrath of mother nature and the continuing economic / environmental collapse. And it is not a question of jobs, or the environment. We need both. We need our jobs lean, green and meaningful. We must demand action in the proper direction now. We must demand it of ourselves and our leaders and we have nearly no time left for living in a lie. Time is up, it is do or die. Time to get moving, sitting this one out isn’t an option.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

Think about how much of the world has been destroyed by soulless businessmen and their willing lackeys because of greed. My life is nearly over at 51 years of age. I have Cystic Fibrosis and I need real health care and a pension just to make it to 65. I’m willing to step aside for the kids, or work like hell to help them avoid having to follow in these terrible footsteps that have been left them. The jobs are never coming back, and we seem to be all out of compassion in the US of A. There are lots of us that feel like the only way out is revolution but it’s more like evolution. It is the death of naivety that we need. The wholesale plunder of the earth by vulture capitalists is finally happening on a global scale and humanity is staring down the barrel of major societal change, poverty and perhaps even fascism. My guess though is that speeding up the biosphere to the point where many species, including humanity’s own physical form, might not be able to evolve fast enough to adapt isn’t going to work out so well for us or our institutions fascist or otherwise. Now you may not believe in evolution, but just like oxygen, you use it regardless. Interesting thing about the truth, it doesn’t need your belief in it in order to exist. Our world in the future will be increasingly difficult for a farming civilization to exist. We’ve essentially done what all civilizations do to the surrounding area. Denude it of trees, become dependant upon agriculture and then perish as a civilization due to famine or war. It’s just gone global. I think it means our biosphere will be favoring the hunter / gatherer humans again.

So, whatever your issue is, whether it is the legalization of drugs to end the failed experiment in American totalitarianism, or the massive environmental damage that we are doing to our earth daily [2], or the failure of old white grumpy men to understand women’s issues enough to legislate fairness, or lets see, the billions that are struggling with poverty and hunger in the world at the hands of corporate conglomerates, or if you’re fighting for animal rights, or local food security, or immigration rights, or you want to see the media do some real reporting for a change, or if you just want to end war period…. Have I left anyone out? We’re all in this, every last one of us regardless of worldview, color, gender, political affiliation, religion, etc. etc. etc. And May Day is the perfect day to start fighting for a common cause.

Strike at the root! And the root is Wall Street!

All roots of this multi headed beast of wealth extraction, death and destruction dealing hucksters from hell lead to Wall Street [3]. Any one holding the misguided idea that we need them to keep us safe is not paying attention to reality, they’ve been the ones making us unsafe from day one. They’ve lied, cheated and stolen our wealth, our land, our government and our children’s futures. They’re counting on us acting like deer in the headlights and hoping we cannot find our way forward through this mess of mis-information, infighting, and the general post industrial miasma of pure bullshit delivered directly to your “living” room constantly… the place where your mind goes to die for the evening.

Wall street pulls the strings and tells you what to be, where to pay, how to play, what to say and what to think. They tell you to think; “what a pathetic bunch of people thinking they can change the world by protesting”. Well, it’s true… that is if you never got off your couch and stop listening to the lies and join us in resistance. Let me ask you a question; “Look around you. Is this the world you want for your children?” Do you really want to be able to say when they ask you what we’re going to do about this, that it’s up to them to figure it out? Because you’ve got yours already? Is that what you think? Truth is, they’ll eventually take every last crumb from everyone even you. We will all pay for our inaction on this one. But our children will pay most dearly.

Here’s a truth; this system is rotten to the core and crashing hard with no one coming to save us but ourselves. As the effects of climate change become more intense going forward and really get to making things difficult for your children, remember the radicals you threw under the bus that tried to tell you the truth all along. We’re still here, we still need you to stand up and take responsibility for the world and start working with us to rebuild real community.

We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”
- Ancient Indian Proverb

What we’re leaving behind for our children is slavery plain and simple. Without a guarantee of a good education, one free of indoctrination into the culture of greed, our kids stand zero chance of having even an understanding of what prosperity is let alone having it. And that’s just the beginning of how we have virtually sold our kids and ourselves into slavery. We have as a society thoroughly abdicated our responsibility in so many excruciating ways. Our leaders probably believe that you will do nothing as our world falls apart and they pick the carcass of capitalism clean while we bicker over the scraps. Best case scenario for the plutocrats emerging as the neo-overlords of earth. Keep us cheap and expendable.

And Obama isn’t going to stop this sell out. The only way we can fix it is do what Iceland did and forgive the mortgage debts of the people, charge the banksters with fraud and write a new constitution bringing our democracy into the modern age [4]. But that’s not all. We need to embrace sustainable thinking and redevelop our next boom market around stopping the death of our planet instead of continuing to expect clean safe food from corporations like Monsanto. That’s right, our earth is dying and we are the ones killing it. It’s called the holocene mass extinction event [5]. Look it up.

So, tomorrow, May 1st, wake up and join the few of us that have had enough of the wealth extraction the banksters call the free market and the lies and obstructionism our ‘leaders” call governing and show them who the boss here really is.

I’m going to leave you with yet another quote, one of my favorites and I don’t even have to fact check it.

It ain’t over til it’s over
- Yogi Berra

[1] – Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse

[2] – Occupy May Day: Why Environmentalists Need to Show Up

[3] – The Self-Made Myth: Debunking Conservatives’ Favorite — And Most Dangerous — Fiction

[4] – What Happens to Countries that Defy World Financial Order: Iceland

[5] – Holocene Extinction Event

I want to talk to my democrat friends who are in the fight to help Obama win in 2012. One person, even if he’s the president, can’t really change things in America. But I still believe the work you’re doing is important to do. I also want to talk to my friends in Occupy Wall Street, this involves everyone. We’ve been dealing with a lot of issues lately, particularly the question of whether the 99% spring is a co-opting of the movement, moveon.org, etc. which has pushed people to having that conversation so I think all this is relevant to the movement as well.

Regardless of the fact I no longer consider myself a democrat and that I think it is important to work outside the system, I am still proud of the fact that I was a significant part of Obama’s election in 2008. I was the head organizer of the Indianapolis ACORN office at that time, I found and trained all the initial people and together we built a GOTV operation that in the end employed almost 400 registrars and registered 24,500 new voters in Indianapolis. The last time Indiana went blue was 1967 and it’s only done that three times. So that isn’t something that I’m going to look back on and think; “What a waste of time…” Organizing is what it is and politics is the art of the possible. I do not think it was foolish. I did what I thought was the right thing. I would do it again because at the time, it seemed like the right choice and in fact I still believe it was.

I want you to know, that I hope Barack Obama wins if the alternative is Mitt Romney if for no other reason than the fact that Mitt will appoint terrible supreme court justices. I think I and many other people will prefer Obama’s pick for the highest court in the nation.

I look at the long haul. I’m willing to fight all your fights with you, I always vote for who I think will be best for the country, not just my own personal views.

On the issue of health care, I’m hopeful and grateful for the work that has been done by everyone but I know there is much more to do. I have serious health issues, reforming this system matters to me personally. I’m of the belief that “some disassembly may be required”, but that doesn’t mean I think we can’t save some parts of the world as we know it. We just have to sort through it all together and see what’s important to us.

So please don’t treat me like a dirty hippie pariah for saying that I’m not happy with Obama. I’m not an “herbal tea bagger”, I don’t think he’s evil, I’m just justifiably dismayed and righteously angry at the failure of so many of his campaign promises. The system seems to have absorbed him.

I’m just sick of being marginalized in my own country for having chosen the safer alternative recreational drugs over alcohol [1].

Obama made a campaign promise he’s not keeping. He promised to leave states alone when it came to medical marijuana [2]. He needs to stop siding with the special interests on the drug war [3] and start listening to his people [4]. We need to end the racism that the war on drugs has become. It is the modern version of jim crow [5][6][7] as well as a monumental failure of public policy. Not to mention the fact that the last three presidents have all done drugs.

If I could have $10 dollars for every time I lost a job, was driven from an activist group, driven from the leadership council, or denied medical care for my being a “dirty hippie”, I would have enough to take all my close friends out to dinner. I’ve known I lived in a police state since I was 12 years old. I realized then that I would eventually be in prison for my beliefs.

It’s time to stop demonizing weed heads as well as addicts, self medicators and responsible users, and recognize these rights and stop the prohibition and demonization of things that should be regarded as either health care issues or protected rights.

And this isn’t limited to just the democrats, it’s happening within Occupy as well. People are using either our beliefs or politics against us in an effort to “purify” occupy so this isn’t a behavior that is at all uncommon, it is in fact the root of our problem. This bullying behavior and taking advantage of the natural lines of marginalization (society’s scapegoats) almost completely without hesitation instead of democratically reaching an inclusive consensus regarding the issue or issues is just the way we do things in America. We’ve forgotten how to even function as a people within a democratic framework. The same things that happen to any group inevitably happens to occupations. Infighting and factioning over the same old tired lines of societal division. The real argument within Occupy now is reform or revolution. Which naturally, depending upon where you are in the world (economically or geographically), is a very good question. I’ve been saying for some time that the answer is both. We need you inside the system and we need us outside the system. I believe that whatever anyone says about the right / left dichotomy, the truth is that this is a battle between compassion and fear. I’m always going to fall on the side of love and inclusiveness and empowering everyone rather than building an economy based upon hoarding and manufactured scarcity.

Let’s stop pretending that this is all just the silly talk of a burned out, weed head, acid casualty, unless you want to apply that same label to the spate of Latin American and Mexican leaders calling for legalization of drugs[8]. Being thrown under the bus for 35 years, working in social justice for decades, and fighting the real war on poverty all this time, I know the difference between something important, and something we can negotiate away in a compromise. Ending the failed drug war isn’t one of them. Obama’s dismissal of the recent call to begin negotiating the de-escalation of the drug war is a huge failure of statesmanship on his part [9]. Not to mention his refusal to consider pushing to change marijuana from schedule 1 (dangerous drug with no medicinal value) to schedule 2 (having medical uses)[10], a patently false statement. We’ve known for a long time cannabis has many health benefits as well as anti cancer properties[11]. One of the problems politically is that it is inconvenient in that big pharma won’t make much of a profit from legalizing marijuana, farmers will. So they’re against legalization naturally. Obviously the states see it differently, since it is the largest cash crop in California as well as many other states in America.

I’d like to lay to rest the idea that I think the dems and the repubs are the same. They’re not. There is a huge difference between the left / right, brain structures, our ideas, our morality, all of it, very different [12][13][14]. But it’s just not enough. So please understand; I’ve just reached the place where I know that voting will never get the job done.

Will I vote for Obama in November? Probably. Because of the SCOTUS thing… we need more than ever to impeach several activist judges and I do believe that Obama will appoint more impartial judges than Mitt would. That’s pretty important. Does this make me not really an occupier? No. I believe that participating only during presidential or state elections is a way to keep things the same. A fine adjustment upon politics, not entirely useless, just not “sweeping” enough. We won’t change the nearly complete capturing of our government and its agencies by corporations by voting. As Emma Goldman said; “If voting changed anything, they’d make that illegal”. Only a real movement can save us now.

Change is the nature of life

Humans have quite simply, sped the world up just a bit. Its rate of change is increasing to the point that our institutions and maybe even our bodies are unable to keep up [15]. Our bureaucracies, suffering from entrenchment and already painfully slow, are now hopelessly mired in obstructionism, greed and corruption. No one single person is to blame and it pretty nearly doesn’t really matter who is president. Our system of government is just not representative enough, responsive enough, distributed enough. We’ve lived mostly authoritarian lives even though we all believe we’ve been free, it really amounts to a facade. We don’t teach democracy in school. And our workplaces do not foster it. Even our college degrees prepare us to work and live in a mostly authoritarian environment. The attempted purification of occupy of it’s radical’s, weedheads, homeless people, etc. was not surprising really, most of us have no actual experience with democracy or decentralization and so the intolerance at the root of American culture naturally dominates us at a level I would call subconscious. The only way to avoid the “purge” as I like to call it is to stay vigilant. We are prone to witch hunts.

The real truth

We’re all to blame for what is happening and no one person can stop and heal the damage to our earth and our communities. In fact, aside from death, stop is about the only thing we seem unable to do. Life goes on as they say.

But we all know the 1% do not want change. You and I and our children need things to change desperately and quickly and we know that voting is not going to save us from this calamity borne ironically of our viral success. The only thing that has a chance to deliver the change we need is a global movement towards democracy that protects the rights of all people everywhere. In the words of the international workers of the world: “An injury to one, is an injury to all”.

In the future, understand that when I criticize Obama for things like his deplorable record on bringing Wall Street to justice for the mortgage fraud and collapse of the world’s economy in 2008, or not closing Guantanamo, or signing the NDAA legislation, I’m not a hater, I love my freedom but no more than anyone elses. I’m just trying to give the president and all our “elected” officials the vocal majority they need to move further towards the center and really change things. Do I think that will be enough? No. Building a movement, Occupy Wall Street, or the American Spring (or whatever we choose to call this movement) is a critical step we need to take in order to move our society back toward our values. Our organizing and protests have already improved the national conversation and turned our country’s political discussion towards what really matters and this has already helped Obama and will likely continue to do so. And while I think good rhetoric is important, our problem is that it seems that Democrats pay the lip service but have no spine and don’t fight for the policies needed to implement our shared values. But most of us think that the system is hopelessly broken and only a structure built outside the system can ever have any hope of influencing it. Can you see how many decentralized groups working for change will only help?

The current system of wealth extraction the 1% like to call capitalism is fatally flawed without the concept of debt forgiveness[16]. We need a modern equivalent of the biblical jubilee which was specifically designed to prevent the concentration of lands and wealth into a few hands. Even slaves were freed after 7 years[17]. Any president that tries to change this will either not succeed, be absorbed, or be killed trying to do the right thing. Thus the need for a leaderless, decentralized movement [18][19]. Thus the need for all of us to pitch in. No single person has ever made the difference, the system needs to change and I still believe a better world really is possible. To achieve fundamental change it has always taken many of us working together for a long time to move things in the right direction [20]. But there is no doubt in my mind, we can take our lives back from corporate control and guarantee at least the possibility of freedom and prosperity for our children in the future if we work together. It just seems to many of us like there is nothing to do but build alternative ways forward that work. Locally. Outside the “system”. You should help us do that when you’re done working on the election of 2012. It will help all of us recapture the community that we lost quite a while ago.

When November has come and gone and we know who Wall Street voted for and Obama has the bully pulpit for another four years, the work to save our world will remain there for us to do. While you’re doing that, I and many others will be building power at the grassroots in our communities working to take this fight past november. I hope to see you there working with us for the rights that we all know that we have, not by legal decree, but by the fact we are alive. After November the roots of our problem will remain greed, corruption and inequity. No justice? No peace.

Obama can’t do anything without active, vocal, citizens pushing him in the right direction. So let us heal the rift in the left that the war on drugs really is, and join the middle and the moderates on the right in civil debate. Don’t let the vitriol of the far right invade our conversations too. Let’s stop marginalizing people throwing the weed issue and every other important issue under the bus and what ever you do, don’t stop working for a better world in November.

Supporting documents and opinions:

[1] – Get the Facts: Marijuana is Safer Than Alcohol

[2] – Obama’s War on Pot

[3] – The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal

[4] – ExileNation.org

[5] – Dyan Ratigan, How Greedy Bastards Turned The War on Drugs Into A Race War

[6] – Occupy the Dream: The Mathematics of Racism

[7] – Hidden History: The DEA, Nixon’s Pills, and Black People

[8] – At Latin America summit, Obama to face push for drug legalization

[9] – Obama Dismisses Latin American Leaders’ Calls for Drug Legalization in Colombia

[10] – Medical Marijuana Group Appeals DEA Rescheduling Decision

[11] – The Feds Finally Recognize The Anti-Cancer Potential Of Cannabis — 36 Years Too Late!

[12] – The Strange Conservative Brain: 3 Reasons Republicans Refuse to Accept Reality About Global Warming

[13] – How the Fundamentalist Mind Compels Conservative Christians to Force Their Beliefs on You

[14] – The Root of the Conservative War on Contraception Comes From a Deep-seated Anxiety

[15] – Transitions and Tipping Points in Complex Environmental Systems – NSF

[16] – What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber

[17] – Jubilee (biblical)

[18] – The Starfish and the Spider: 8 Principles of Decentralization

[19] – SOPA/PIPA and the Decentralization of Protest

[20] – 6 People You Need to Start a Revolution

Co-ops are pretty much the answer we’re looking for, they’re democratically organized and so they serve not only our purpose of replacing corporate goods with our own, but also increasing activism in general and building community all at the same time. Getting all this put in place will be the fight of our lives I imagine.

Lets get to work!

The barter economy — coming soon to a backyard near you

The Ripple Project

American Worker Cooperative

Money Cooperative Economy in the Great Depression

Cooperatives Over Corporations

The “I” in Union – (the freelancers union)

We Have Everything We Need Already: Community Control of Education

Permaculture Visionary: “We Don’t Need to Wait for Permission” to Transform Our Societies

To check to see if your mac is infected with the flashback trojan:

In Terminal.app, run:

cat ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

and

codesign -v /Applications/Safari.app

If you get anything about “DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES” on the first and/or “code or signagure modified” on the second, then you are infected. Any other responses (including none) means you’re fine. ~janreid1

go to this thread to read why you should just use terminal to do this check instead of downloading and installing software from a website other than apple:

HT5228 how to check for flashback infection?

Occupy Quad Cities, in solidarity with global calls for a general strike, will hold an International Workers Day Rally at LeClaire park in Davenport, IA on May 1st. All are welcome to join us and demand justice for workers everywhere.

There will be speakers on workers rights after which we will convene the Occupy Quad Cities General Assembly to make decisions regarding our planning of upcoming actions, organizing outreach and the promotion of global calls for workers of the world to join the general strike. All are welcome to attend.

We will be meeting up at the bandshell.

Join this action on facebook here: Occupy Quad Cities: OCCUPY MAY DAY – GENERAL STRIKE

Join the national action here: Occupy May Day – General Strike Worldwide Event

here is a flyer you can pass around:

From their website: Exile Nation

An Oral History of the War on Drugs & The American Criminal Justice System

A film by Charles Shaw

The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other country. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America’s criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government’s 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of “out of sight, out of mind.”

The Scorched-Earth Politics of America’s Four Fundamentalisms

Report: Minority Students Face More Disclipinary Actions In Public Schools

Congress Votes to End Protesters’ Rights

One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’

LulzSec Leader Was Snitch Who Helped Snag Fellow Hackers

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Bowles-Simpson Commission Report

BP Settles While Macondo ‘Seeps’

The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom

Bank of America in Trouble?

Whitewashing Gay History

Is the Era of White Privilege Nearing an End in the US?

Annual Causes of Death in the United States

OCCUPY WALL STREET: MATRIX AS THE ‘CORE’ ELEMENT

2011-11-05 The Global Square: an online platform for our movement

call4coders

RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us