TODAY’S NEWS : January 31, 2012
RON PAUL AND THE CULT OF DEATH
From What Really Happened.com
By Mike Rivero
I really shouldn’t be allowed near a keyboard when I am recovering from a cold and juiced up on Nyquil.
It’s Sunday afternoon. Claire is upstairs working on music and I am laying on the futon, having watched the original 1933 version of King Kong which has just been released on Blu-Ray, and I am dozing. Down at the bottom of the hill is the Aloha Stadium and as today’s Pro-Bowl gets underway the sounds of the cheering crowds drift up the hillside.
In my dreams, I mingle the sounds of the game with the images of the native cult on Skull Island, screaming and chanting as they prepare to offer up a village child as a living sacrifice to their deity. In my dream I see a modern stadium filled with my neighbors and friends, cheering as an innocent human sacrifice contemplates the final moments of his or her life. Above the hapless victim stands the Witch Doctor whose power and influence grows with each drop of spilled blood. The crowd roars its approval as the final act brings an end to innocent life.
It is at this point that a burst of fireworks and the over flight of a formation of military jets just over our roof brings me back to the present. As I listen to the sounds of the crowds, I imagine that they sound exactly the same way as those crowds in Rome who roared while slaves fought to the death in the Colosseum or Aztec Shamen tore the hearts from still-living victims.
In a moment of clarity, it occurs to me that we have a death cult taking center stage in America. However, because it comes dressed in the latest fashions, we fail to recognize it as such. Movies like King Kong teach us to see grass skirts and a bone through the nose and skulls on poles as the signs of primitive barbaric rituals. But that is silly. Barbarism knows no fashion sense. Atrocity always arrives dressed in the latest styles.
As I listen to that crowd caught up in the symbolized and abstracted warfare of a football game, I could easily equate that sound to the cheers that greeted Adolph Hitler’s call for war. From there it is a short leap to imagine the same crowds cheering as Newt Gingrich, or Mitt Romney, or Sarah Palin, or Michelle Bachman all call for endless war across the face of the globe, reveling in the blood lust and hoping, like the Skull Island witch doctor, to hold away over the people with images of blood and horror just as the Roman Emperors did.
Can you not see it? Can you not see the almost universal love and worship of death inherent in the present US political system? Obama says all options are on the table with regard to Iran. All options, that is, except for peace.
As our roads crumble, and our schools close, and our quality of life collapses, still the attention of the nation’s leaders remains focused on war and killing. They love it, They are entranced by it. They glory in it. Death excites them, and the more horrible it is, the more orgasmic they are to contemplate it! No amount of other people’s money is too great to spend, nor any number of other people’s children too many to sacrifice.
There is nothing but greed in our leaders’ domestic policy; their hearts are in their weapons! Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia; on and on and on, without pause, without satiation. In their minds they are gods incarnate, able to bring death to whole cities with the flick of a finger.
Throughout history, no death cult has ever survived. Some flame out very quickly, like Jonestown. Others, like the Nazis, or Pol Pot, take a bit longer to commit sociological suicide. Rome lasted longest of all. But eventually they all fell and as they neared their end, the devotion to the cult of death become ever more fanatical; the thirst for other peoples’ blood unquenchable. There is the warning we must heed if we are to turn aside from the current cult of death and the priests and priestesses who rule it.
The United States is not a nation comfortable in the 21st Century. Our rulers yearn for the easy days of the 1950s and the height of the cold war when America were conditioned to wet themselves upon hearing the word “Commie”, then hurl their money at the Cult of Death, and their babies onto the enemies’ bayonets. Worse, our leaders long for the world of the middle ages, before the Magna Carta made torture illegal. Our leaders long for Skull Island, where they can offer up your children as a living blood sacrifice to their Cult of Death with your obedient approval and worship.
We are on the wrong path.
There is, of course, one candidate who is not caught up in the cult of death. A certain doctor who spent 30 years of his life bringing new babies into the world, and by those very actions, demonstrably a man who reveres and worships life. The American Cult of Death hate that man, of course, because the first rule of any death cult is that like all cults it must appear to be the only possible way of life. There can be no alternative view of the world, no safe refuge where one can escape the blood rages.
When people ask me why I still want Ron Paul as President it comes down to a very simple explanation. Ron Paul is the only candidate out there who embraces and celebrates life, while all the others are priests and priestesses of the American Cult of Death, ready to extend their thumbs over the sand of the Colosseum, and whose stated intentions are to end life, everywhere they can.
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Is Israel on the Road to Self-Destruction?
From My CATBIRD SEAT
Veteran journalist Hart, is still hard at work. ZIONISM, THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS is an epic three-volume journey through the propaganda lies and the documented truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of what has come to be called the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Our current leaders have made Israeli Judaism just a post-traumatic syndrome, while they lead us to self-destruction.
by Alan Hart
One very well informed and courageous Israeli who thinks the answer is “Yes” is Merav Michaeli, a radio and television presenter who also writes for Ha’aretz. She is completely without fear when it comes to telling it like it is.
On 2 January this year, for example, she wrote: “The Israeli government doesn’t want peace. There’s nothing new in that. It has been the proven way since the establishment of the state.”
The headline over her latest article is Israel’s never-ending Holocaust.
Merav Michaeli
One of her main points is that Israel has never confronted the trauma of the Nazi holocaust and has “turned it into a placard in the service of the national trauma, to reinforce the constant existential fear and the aggressiveness that comes with it.”
Because what she wrote is so important, and in my view ought to be read by all peoples of all faiths everywhere who want to understand why the Zionist state is what it is, I am going to quote her at some length.
Israelis mark Holocaust Memorial Day in Jerusalem
She wrote:
The Holocaust is the primary way Israel defines itself. And that definition is narrow and ailing in the extreme, because the Holocaust is remembered only in a very specific way, as are its lessons.
It has long been used to justify the existence and the necessity of the state, and has been mentioned in the same breath as proof that the state is under a never-ending existential threat.
The Holocaust is the sole prism through which our leadership, followed by society at large, examines every situation.
This prism distorts reality and leads inexorably to a forgone conclusion… that all our lives are simply one long Shoah (experience of persecution and extermination – my amplification not Merav’s).
The ‘Hitlers’ are always there:
Just a week ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the nth time that there is no shortage of those who want to exterminate us completely. In other words, there is no lack of reasons to continue to reinforce the fear of the Holocaust – which, according to his father, historian Benzion Netanyahu, has never ended.
So it is that we don’t have any rivals, adversaries or even enemies. Only Hitlers. This is how the Holocaust is taught in school, this how it is that Israeli students are taken to visit death camps – and how it came to be that, as Ha’aretz reported on Friday, just 2 percent of Israeli youth feel committed to democratic principles after studying the Holocaust.
That’s the way it is with traumas. Because of our human limitations, a trauma that is not dealt with makes us constantly see yet another trauma approaching – even when whatever is coming has no connection to the previous trauma and may even be a good thing. Trauma leads to belligerence and a strong tendency to wreak havoc on one’s surroundings, but first and foremost on oneself.
What we consider rational is actually a frightened, defensive, aggressive pattern. Our current leaders have made Israeli Judaism just a post-traumatic syndrome, while they lead us to self-destruction.
I imagine that most if not all Arabs and other Muslims everywhere would welcome the prospect of Israel self-destructing, but in my Gentile view it is not actually a prospect to be welcomed. Why not?
If there comes a time when it seemed to them that the Zionist state’s self-destruction was imminent, Israel’s leaders would respond in the same way as they would if their state was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield.
As readers of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews know, that response was put into words by Golda Meir in the course of one of my BBC Panorama interviews with her when she was prime minister.
In a doomsday situation, she said, Israel “would be prepared to take the region down with it.”
The question arising is something like this. Is there any power on Planet Earth that could assist Israeli Jews to save themselves from themselves – perhaps I should say save themselves from their deluded leaders?
The more I think about this question, the more I am convinced that there is only one power that could do it – the Jews of the world. But that must be the subject of another post and I will welcome thoughts from others before I write it.
About the author: Alan Hart View all posts by Alan Hart
Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. His Latest book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, is a three-volume epic in its American edition. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthorRead: Alan Hart’s Appeal to the American People
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ISRAEL WENT TOO FAR
From American Free Press
JANUARY 21, 2012 POSTED BY DAVE
• American officials irked at brazen Zionist assassinations
• Mini-state’s false flag terrorism puts Americans in danger
By Ralph Forbes—AFP Southern Bureau
Over the weekend of Jan. 14-15, the White House announced it was abruptly canceling the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Israel in a long-planned exercise that had been sold as a display of support but was really meant to be a show of force, directed at Iran. The reason, according to U.S. government insiders, was that a series of false flag ops carried out by Israel had put Americans in harm’s way. Top U.S. brass had finally had enough.
Officials in the White House, Pentagon and State Department are reportedly fuming at the latest ill-conceived assassination, which was designed to drag the U.S. military into a ruinous war with Iran. The hit carried out against Ahmadi Roshan, a Sharif University of Technology chemical engineering graduate, involved a motorcycle rider, who placed an explosive on the scientist’s car. When the bomb was detonated, Roshan was killed instantly in broad daylight on the streets of Tehran.
Since at least 2003, the U.S. and Israel have been waging a covert war against Iran. In this latest incident, though, Israel acted alone and deliberately planted conspiracy theories so that the Iranians would blame the U.S.
Richard Silverstein of the Israeli news outlet Tikkun Olam put an end to the uncertainty when he reported: “My own confidential Israeli source confirms today’s murder was the work of Mossad and MEK.” (The People’s Mujahedin of Iran [MEK] is a terrorist organization that advocates the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran.)
And by no means was this the first time Israel has tried to frame the U.S. According to a report by Mark Perry in Foreign Policy: “A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of terrorist organizations to fight their covert war against Iran. The Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in a false-flag operation.”
American intelligence officers were stunned by the chutzpa of the Mossad. The CIA’s report “sparked White House concerns that Israel’s program was putting Americans at risk,” reported Perry.
Former Central Command Chief Gen. Joe Hoar said of the Israeli operation: “While false-flag operations are hardly new, they’re extremely dangerous. Israel is playing with fire. They get us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not.”
An intelligence officer summed up the general feeling among many U.S. officials when he told Perry: “This was stupid and dangerous. Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it were their blood and not ours. You know, they’re supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don’t think that’s true.”
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Putting Israel First
( HAHAHA….PPlease…)~~ Xaniel777
From AntiWar.com
by Justin Raimondo, January 30, 2012
The War Party’s Achilles’ heel
The campaign to lure the US into attacking Iran has one big problem to overcome before the War Party can taste success: the rather obvious fact that such a war would benefit Israel, and not the United States. This is why Israel’s partisans in the US constitute the spearhead of the pro-war agitation, why AIPAC has made this a consistent theme for the past few years, and why the billionaire Sheldon Adelson, aside from funding the Newtster, has poured untold millions into the same project.
Hardly a day goes by without some Israeli government official reiterating, once again, that Iran represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, and threatening to strike the first blow if Uncle Sam fails to wake up in time, while Israel’s amen corner dutifully echoes the same line.
How to get around this is the problem at the heart of the War Party’s current project, and in order to do so they are employing the deadliest weapon in their well-stocked arsenal: the accusation of “racism,” the most toxic accusation anyone can make about someone in the current political climate. Specifically, they are accusing war opponents of “anti-Semitism.”
After all, if Israel is the Jewish state, and that state’s very existence is threatened by the specter of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program (which US intelligence has stubbornly failed to detect), then opposition to US military action is “anti-Semitism,” pure and simple.Israel and its more vehement partisans in this country have demanded the US attack Iran, even going so far as to raise the specter of another Holocaust if America fails to act.
However, one argument they have failed to make is significant by its absence – they have failed to show how it is in America’s interest to launch a military strike. Indeed, they have neglected this part of the equation rather ostentatiously, and yet one can hardly blame them for this oversight for the simple reason that such a case would be impossible to make.
An attack on Iran would deprive the world economy of a significant portion of its energy needs, and would likely result in an economic catastrophe in this country – to say nothing of the costs of the war, in blood and treasure. War-weary Americans are not in the mood for another invasion and occupation in search of nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction.” This is the War Party’s Achilles’ heel.
Today’s war propagandists have figured out a way to make the issue of American interests, as opposed to Israeli interests, go away, and that is by policing the language of the debate. Are you calling someone who wants to pursue Israeli interests over and above those of his or her own country an “Israel firster”? Well, then, you are “anti-Semitic,” you are employing the oldest “anti-Semitic tropes” and echoing “neo-Nazis,” who – James Kirchick assures us – are the originators of the phrase.
This is the argument made by “progressive” Spencer Ackerman in a recent issue of the Tablet, in which he joins the neoconservative assault on Glenn Greenwald, M.J. Rosenberg, and four bloggers over at the Center for American Progress who got slapped down for daring to wield (or imply) this supposedly “toxic” phrase.
“One unexpected consequence of the book’s publication was the visit from an agent of the FBI, who had been sent to make some inquiries about its author.” There’s just one problem with this argument: it isn’t true. Ackerman cites Kirchick as the authority in this matter, but as a researcher the man Time columnist Joe Klein called a “dishonest prick” and a cheap “propagandist” leaves much to be desired. Kirchick claims the phrase originated with Willis Carto’s Spotlight newspaper, a cesspool of anti-Semitism, but this is false: it originated, as one can see here, with Alfred M. Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew who wrote several books in the early 1950s and 1960s, notably What Price Israel?
Lilienthal’s 1953 book was brought out by Henry Regnery, the noted conservative publicist and pioneer publisher, whose press also printed a number of other anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian works, including Freda Utley’s Will the Middle East Go West? – which presciently argued American support for Israel would alienate the Arab world – Road to Beersheba, a novel by Ethel Mannin which dramatized the plight of a conquered people imprisoned in their own land, and a collection of photographs and text by the Swedish photographer Per-Orlow Anderson, They Are Human Too, which, in Regnery’s words, “brought us face to face with the tragedy of the Arab refugees, whom he photographed crowded into the inhospitable Gaza strip.” Which brings to mind the old saw about “the more things change.” Yet another example of the changeless nature of our politics was described by Regnery, who reported in his Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher:
“This was,” continues Regnery, “one of the less serious calls by government agents of one kind or another that frequently followed the publication of a book that displeased some group or individual of influence.” Our witch-hunters will surely characterize Regnery’s sardonic remark as evidence that he, too, was another one of those awful “anti-Semites” – after all, he was implying the Zionist lobby had enough influence to call out the dogs of the FBI and sic them on a mere photographer.
Yet Regnery’s views, and those of his attendant authors, were hardly considered “subversive” back then: indeed, theirs was the standard conservative position on the state of Israel, which, back in the day, was an ally of the Soviet Union and a proudly socialist state.
It is inconceivable, of course, that the Regnery Publishing Co. of today would put out anything remotely resembling Lilienthal’s work: not with the conservative movement of 2012 dominated by warmongering neoconservatives and nutty Christian Zionists who see support for Israel as divinely ordained. In 1949, however, when Lilienthal wrote “Israel’s Flag is Not Mine” for Readers Digest, his critique of Zionist propaganda was shared by mainstream conservatives as a matter of course:
“Are these people acting as Americans? Europe’s recovery through the Marshall Plan is the keystone of our bipartisan foreign policy, which the Communists are trying to sabotage. Any boycott of British goods, organized or unorganized, helps this destruction.”“Today we see Zionists boasting of ‘Jewish’ political strength, Zionist picket lines around British consulates, Zionists demonstrating against Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin when he arrives here to sign the Atlantic Pact, New York stores plastered with posters screaming ‘Do Not Buy British. Made Goods.’
It wasn’t any neo-Nazis, but Lilienthal, a political conservative and a devout Jew, who was the first to raise the question of “dual loyalty.” The “Israel Firster” meme originated, not with the neo-Nazi fringe, but with conservative Jews who, like Lilienthal, objected that:
“My one and only homeland is America. I am proud of my belief in the age-old Judaic concept of one God in Heaven and one Humanity here below. But my faith does not pull me into a feeling of narrowly tribal kinship with all others who worship God in this way. Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, or see youth groups raising Israel’s flag beside the Stars and Stripes. I am outraged. For Israel’s flag and anthem are symbols of a foreign state; they are not mine.”
The Kirchicks, the Ackermans, the Goldbergs – and also the Cartos – want us to forget this heritage, which has been buried under the landslide of pro-Israel propaganda, because it challenges the premises of both the Israel-Firsters and the anti-Semites.
In short, the “neo-Nazi” origins of the “Israel Firster” meme is a myth that depends on ignorance of the real history of American Jewish opposition to Israeli nationalism. Like all war propaganda, it is based on blanking out whole portions of the historical record in favor of a black-and-white version of events.Lilienthal was no fringe character: a diplomat who worked in the State Department during the war, he served in the US Army in the Middle East, and was later a consultant at the founding conference of the United Nations.
His opposition to Zionism as a political movement was initially shared by many if not most American Jews: see Jack Ross’s new book, Rabbi Outcast, for a biography of the most well-known figure in this movement, Rabbi Elmer Berger, which also serves as a detailed history of the American Council for Judaism, the organizational expression of this tendency.
These Jews did not think it extraordinary that they would oppose the claims of a foreign government on their loyalties, and they warned – presciently, as it turned out – that American Jews would face charges of harboring dual loyalties because of the Zionists’ insistence that all Jews somehow owed allegiance to Tel Aviv.
So don’t worry, Glenn – you can still use “Israel Firster” without being tainted by the stain of anti-Semitism.
Yet why use the term at all? Isn’t it just a nasty epithet, one that doesn’t illuminate any valid point about our impending war with Iran?
In a word: no. The advocates of war with Iran are finagling to set up the debate in terms of whether or not we will act to prevent another Holocaust – in which case opposition to bombing Tehran will be characterized as enabling mass genocide. Here is where the neoconservatives and the “responsibility to protect” “progressives” on the left will meet and merge.
They must not be allowed to get away with it: the Language Police don’t have a warrant when it comes to “Israel Firster,” and appeasing them can only constrict the debate so that the essential motive of the pro-war forces is obscured.
And, no, it won’t do to argue that Israel’s interests are not served by a US war with Iran: after all, if we aren’t allowed to argue in terms of what’s in America’s interests, and the interests of its people, then we are hogtied from the word go.
That this “argument” is based on fantasy – the fantasy that Iran is indeed busy cooking up nukes, and is determined to wipe Israel off the map – is being obscured in a barrage of lies and phony “intelligence” similar to that which dragged us into attacking Iraq.
But war propaganda and facts don’t mix: indeed, they are mutually exclusive. The idea behind any effective campaign designed to push us into war is to whip up an emotional storm, and a key part of this hysteria is smearing antiwar writers and politicians as “anti-Semites.” In the America of 2012, where political correctness is the Iron Rule, even the accusation – no matter how unfounded – of racial or religious bigotry is toxic, and the War Party hopes to poison the debate over Iran by injecting it into the discourse.
NOTES IN THE MARGI
I note that Freda Utley, mentioned above, who died in 1978, was the mother of Antiwar.com writer and conservative activist Jon Basil Utley. Here is a passage fromWill the East Go West?:
“It would seem only too obvious that we are in danger of alienating not only the Arabs but also the far larger Islamic world, because our most-favored-nation treatment of Israel does give grounds for the accusation that she is ‘the spearhead of Western imperialism which still endeavors to divide and rule.’ The Arabs see that Israel is subsidized by huge, tax-free donations by American-Jewish citizens and by United States grants far larger than our economic aid to the Arab States, which, in spite of Israel’s small population, have made her militarily the most powerful State in the Middle East.
This leads the Arabs to the false suppositions that America controls Israel, and that we are thus responsible for what she does. As I found during my brief visit to the Middle East, it was difficult to convince the Arabs that, although we pay the piper, we do not call the tune. Americans for sentimental reasons may like to hear music that evokes memories of King Solomon’s temple; but the tune that Israel plays with our permission, if not at our bidding, so grates on the nerves of Israel’s neighbors that they are tempted to call in a Soviet ‘policeman’ to throw both the piper and the sentimental visitor out.”
Complete text here.
Read more by Justin Raimondo
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The Greatest Threat – January 26th, 2012
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Adelson, Gingrich, and the Selling of America – January 24th, 2012
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Extremism in ‘Defense’ of Israel – January 22nd, 2012
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The Return of the Smear Bund – January 19th, 2012
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The Gingrich Doctrine: ‘Kill Them!’ – January 17th, 2012
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THE REBIRTH OF THE OCCUPATION ~~ OWS PT. 2
From DesertPeace
January 30, 2012
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Chippy Dee Adds….
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OWS is taking its’ act on the road – they are going to be in a different city park every Sunday. They’re “Occupying Town Squares”. Today they were at Wash. Sq. reaching out to people. Loads of NYPD were on hand but seemed to be behaving. Weather was quite cold but bright and sunny. (Related report after photo essay)
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Photos © by Bud Korotzer
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The 1% responds…
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Dreaming Big OWS Organizers Plan Spring Offensive
BY NATHAN SCHNEIDER
It’s bizarre how often nowadays one hears Occupy Wall Street talked about in the past tense — bizarre, especially, if one was at the strategy meeting of OWS’s Direct Action group on Jan. 8. Around 150 of the movement’s most restless radicals sat on the hardwood floor and in folding chairs at 16 Beaver Street, a block from the Charging Bull in downtown Manhattan.
The purpose was a big-picture strategic discussion about where the movement’s tactics had taken it so far and where to go in the coming months. As if to match the scale of the conversation, huge sheets of paper were spread across the center of the room, which scribes markered up with the gist of what was being said.
There was no lack of confidence to go around — just the kind of infectious naivété that drove some of these same people to take and hold Zuccotti Park back in September. They reviewed their favorite things about what they’d done since then: moments that captured the world’s attention and, especially, the ones in which they shed their own fear and had enough fun to want to continue.
For better or worse, a lot of this is still fixated on defying the NYPD, rather than really challenging the economic order or movement building A lot of them spoke highly of the barricade-removing hijinks of New Year’s Eve, which was fun if you were there but didn’t play very well in Peoria.
“We’re somewhere between a movement and a revolution,” concluded Austin Guest, a 31-year-old with sideburns on only one side of his thick, brown beard. He added that, if they wanted to, they could bring down Bank of America in six months. Whenever there was a break, someone would jump up on a chair and start telling radical jokes. Why do anarchists only drink coffee?
How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Somebody else would already know the punch line and shout it out, while others burst into laughter until they could hardly breathe. This was not the mood one would expect to find in a bygone movement.
Nor would one expect the litany of upcoming actions reeled off by a woman named Tammy, who, as part of the Interoccupy project, was helping to coordinate occupations nationwide. There would be “Occupy the Dream” protests on MLK Day. On Jan. 20, Move to Amend would be organizing actions throughout the country against corporate personhood.
There was Occupy Education on March 1, a global day of action on May 12 and actions against the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago later that month. Other people added more: an Egypt solidarity march on Jan. 21, a day recognizing violence against women on Feb. 14 and a mobilization in D.C. marking the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4.
In the minds of many, the crown jewel was the global general strike that Occupy Los Angeles called for May Day— though pulling anything close to that, given the state of organized labor in the United States, would seem next to impossible. “I’m totally in love with the general strike,” said one middle-aged man, describing himself as an artist who for years has lived below the poverty line. “To me it’s analogous to seeing the face of God.” He also suggested bringing 10,000 people to Battery Park to watch the sun set on the summer solstice, led by Native American shamans.
After the open brainstorming, the facilitator, a tall man with a blond rattail, tried to guide the meeting toward specific “throughline projects.” These, he explained, are big ones that the whole group can put its energy behind, that would string the isolated days of action into an overarching story, disrupt the pillars of support for corporate power and liberate more space that a new kind of world could fill. Breakout groups discussed what these projects might be.
One group centered its discussion around mounting occupations of foreclosed homes and defunded schools. The group that attracted the most people was devoted to shutdowns: banks, ports, malls, you name it. A New Jerseyan named Chris, who started the famous We Are the 99 Percent blog, called for balancing these disruptive actions with making the movement “a healing force.” Lots of fingers wiggling high in the air — this went without saying. People had already been talking about setting up childcare enters, schools, kitchens, free clinics and worker-owned co-ops, especially in the public spaces they’re hoping to re-occupy in the spring.
From start to finish, there was almost no talk of the presidential elections — what virtually everyone else in this country thinks of when they think of politics for the year ahead. The closest those at the meeting came was one quick mention of protests at both parties’ conventions and a call for voter noncooperation.
By omission, it seems, this movement intends to create a countervailing narrative to the election-year joust among the powers that be, to get people thinking about a whole different kind of politics. It’s no small task to compete with an election that will spend more money spent in it than ever before imaginable; the movement will need to offer people something more hopeful, more compelling and more tangible than any presidential candidate can promise to deliver.
In order to do so, some believe that the movement needs a national coming-together, an Occupied convention to hammer out points of unity. A group working to develop what it calls the “99% Declaration” — controversial for its embrace of legislative demands and representative politics — has called for a “National General Assembly” in Philadelphia on July 4, with delegates elected through its website. The General Assembly at Occupy Philadelphia has countered by passing its own “National Gathering Process Proposal,” which insists that it would only host such a convention if it were planned and peopled by the other Occupy GAs.
One of that proposal’s drafters, Nathan Kleinman, explained to me at the Jan. 8 meeting, “This is not about the gathering itself, this is about how to organize one.” As always in the movement, process takes precedence. Kleinman is also one of the creators of Interoccupy, where conference calls are now being used on a daily basis by Occupy activists around the country to work together on a variety of projects.
Another national convergence is also in the works, with the same organizers as the occupation at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. (Though it has now joined the Occupy fold, Freedom Plaza was actually being planned months before Occupy Wall Street was first called for in July.) Dubbed “NOW DC” — the National Occupation of Washington, D.C. — it’s supposed to begin on Mar. 30 and run for as long as one month. Several of those behind it met in New York on Jan. 7 (at the office of this newspaper) to start setting NOW DC in motion. They also came to 16 Beaver the next day. While Occupy Wall Street was still deciding what to do for the next few months, this group was well into discussing how to do it.
“The Occupy movement isn’t really into planning the way we are,” said Kevin Zeese, a onetime Ralph Nader campaign manager, during the NOW DC discussions. And he’s right. Even while meeting to plan and strategize, those at 16 Beaver weren’t ready to do away with the improvisational, reactive free-for-all that had brought Occupy Wall Street to the world’s attention in the first place. An organizer with a red, white and blue bandana over his long, curly hair pointed out that their most carefully planned marches had tended to stay on the sidewalks, where police wanted them. “We took the road only when we didn’t plan ahead,” he said. “Let’s just remember that.”
Nathan Schneider is an editor at WagingNonviolence.org, where an earlier version of this article was published.
Source
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Britain warns Russia not to block UN effort over Syria
{ XANIEL’S NOTE : BRITAIN SHOWING THEIR TRUE COLORS ONCE MORE AS IT DOES IT’S MASTERS ( ZIONIST ISRAEL ) BIDDING. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, MUCH LIKE THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, PROVES TO THE WORLD THAT THEY CAN’T WIPE THEIR OWN BUTT’S WITHOUT ISRAELI PERMISSION !! AND THEY ONLY GET PERMISSION AFTER THEY DO THEIR MASTERS BIDDING WELL. They use the score card method I think !?!?} ~~ Xaniel777
From Refreshing News
January 30, 2012
Posted by pooja
Downing Street warned Russia on Monday not to block efforts at the United Nations to bring a peaceful resolution to unrest in Syria.
Foreign Secretary William Hague was on Monday flying to New York to lend Britain’s support to an Arab-backed draft resolution calling on the country’s authoritarian leader Bashar al-Assad to step down and pave the way for a transfer of power.
The Arab League’s secretary general Nabil Elaraby will on Tuesday brief Security Council members, including Mr Hague, on the findings of its recent mission to monitor the Assad regime’s response to widespread protests against his rule.
The suspension of the mission at the weekend was followed by an upsurge in violence, with reports of at least 62 deaths as regime forces stormed rebel strongholds in the capital Damascus and around the country.
Western powers including Britain and France are pushing for the adoption this week of the resolution tabled by current Security Council member Morocco, which would give international backing to an Arab League timetable for the transition of power in Syria to a unity government, followed by free elections.
But Russia was on Monday resisting a swift vote, saying it wanted to “study the recommendations and conclusions of the observer mission in detail” before moving to a substantive discussion in the Security Council.
Deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov last week signalled that Moscow may wield its veto to block the draft resolution in its current form. In October, Russia and China blocked a Western-backed draft resolution condemning Assad’s government for its crackdown on protesters.
Downing Street said: “We believe that the UN must act to support the people of Syria and that Russia can no longer explain blocking the UN and providing cover for the regime’s brutal repression.”
A spokeswoman added: “There is hope to agree a UN Security Council resolution this week and to make it very clear to President Assad and his regime that the killing must stop.
“We’ve been working in New York to support a text drafted by Arab members of the Security Council, which promotes a regional approach to the crisis.
“The Foreign Secretary is travelling to New York to show support for the Arab League and their work to bring a peaceful and Syrian-led solution to the current crisis.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry says it has invited Syrian authorities and opposition for talks in Moscow.
The ministry said in a statement on Monday that Syrian authorities have already agreed to come. The ministry is hoping that opposition leaders will send their reply in the coming days. The opposition has balked at holding talks with the regime, saying the violence must end first.
END
To Choodle into the Armageddon Sunset.
From SMOKING MIRRORS
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Dog Poet Transmitting…….
May your noses always be cold and wet.
As they crank up the inevitable engines of war in search of deeper darkness, the brainwashing continues apace; not that it’s all that hard to wash a fundie’s brain, since that system already functions like sending a tank top to the dry cleaners.
The flavor of the month is about to change, well, it did change, sort of, last week or so. Anyway, what Red Adelson wants, Red Adelson gets, until he changes his mind. We’ve got revolving front runners, kind of like if a bunch of meth-infused 6th graders started to go nuts on a merry go round; or would that be Ritalin deprived? I don’t quite get how Romney’s wife makes 6.2 million off of around ten million- except for the “possibly much more” comment, when Uncle Mitt only makes 3 million off of 37 million at Goldman’s Nut Sacks.
So the deal is, keep flipping the front runners so that the Obama Bo Bama Banana Dana, Murder and Poverty Express can “keep on choodlin” into the Armageddon Sunset. He’ll be accompanied by disclaimers which state he doesn’t support Israel, which should keep his support relatively high among those who believe the crap on the surface, when even the surface says that is a lie. Anyway, any fool knows there isn’t going to be any election. Then again, there hasn’t been an election in a long, long time.
Some people get upset about senior citizens eating cat and dog food. I guess they haven’t seen all the creative things that Haitian families can do with mud. Given that some houses are made of adobe, you could almost make an argument for Haitians living in gingerbread houses; metaphorically speaking. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions in Clinton-Bushligula and other unsavory financial holding tanks of interest gathering donations, bobbing like Mylar balloons over the bed of a terminal cancer patient, endlessly circle the starved and blasted landscape below. Exactly why do these funds from so many sources still remain unavailable after so many years? Why did all that money that went to rebuild Iraq either disappear or remain locked up in Rothschild war profiteering battle field banks? Gee, you have to ask?
Well, it’s fairly obvious that we need a row of inhabited lampposts, in a modern day flashback to Spartacus and the boys, along the golden roads to Rome redux; blow me once, shame on me. Oh well. “We who are about to die salute you”. That should be, “We who intend to live refute you” but the script girl spent the previous night in a hot-tub, jacked down on Quaaludes. The speed of stupidity equals ignorance squared by inert mass to the tenth power.
Onward we trudge through the mud and the blood and the bullshit and high waders aren’t the solution. A kayak might work but then there’s all those things that live below the mire line. The good and bad news is that anything will burn if the fire is hot enough. Can I get witless? Darling, you are.
Word has it that they are erecting a statue in the West Village, of Harris Milstead snacking on poodle shit. That’s what the American wet dream is all about. When your mind is a Petri dish, this is the kind of thing modern art aficionados lose their lunch over. Harris will probably be snacking on that too, if it happens and the whole thing will be art; managed and ministered by the usual suspects who handle art the way they handle dead gerbils in the aftermath and possibly in the afterlife as well. I suspect in that latter case the gerbils are no longer dead and have been reverse Bonzaied.
Johnny can’t read anymore but he can definitely jerk off. Contrary to folk wisdom it does not make hair grow on the palms of your hand. It does make it grow backwards inside your head though, until a trap door spider takes up residence, giving a whole new meaning to, “feed your head”. Of course, if this was just a movie it would probably be funny but it’s real life. Real life calls for real solutions, like creating a nationwide energy retrieval system from wiring the bouncing legs of all those teenage girls text messaging the universe. No wonder the aliens never land. Would you come here if you had a flying saucer? I didn’t think so.
There’s going to be so much food for the moon soon that the moon is going to turn pink from Pepto Bismol overdosing. It’s just like what happens if you drink a couple of quarts of carrot juice every day. The people who can afford that deserve to turn orange. Then they can move to Denver and become celebrities. Yes, shit for brains is finally home on the range, where the deer and the antelope are going to be on barbecue standby for that big refrigerator grill, replicating all across the wide prairie; abandoned urban lots, woodland clearings, road side pullovers and under the over passes. Dead in the flood drains is the new under over.
Meanwhile, Porky Pig’s extended family is running the show. Of course, Porky’s been supplementing his daily crack allowance with oxycodone and he’s got one rabid silver back gorilla of a habit on his bacon location. This has, quite ‘frankly’ made him less sensitive and sympathetic to the needs of others. I guess you can say that goes for the whole extended family of porcine, reptilian hybrids, tending the massive flocks of “Idiocracy” rejects. The mental health graph of public well being now only goes from neurotic to batshit crazy, with ‘insane’ being the median. There’s a drive by pharmacy in your future, coming to the corner block of your street, real soon. Well, there would be if you had a future.
Of course, it’s not all bad and worse. There is some good and better. It’s hiding in foothills and abandoned mountain ranges, in places where the minerals have already been sucked dry. It’s deep in jungles and on islands with no beaches and there are islands of consciousness too, connected by invisible webs of resonance that span the globe and vibrate into the hearts and minds of those who might well have read a book in the last year or two. It’s out there and in there but not necessarily in the first place you show up, to see if it matches up, with whatever demonstrations you put into place to get it to reveal intrinsic nature.
No and yes, there are good things seeking to be born into a world, where the children of what has yet to make an appearance, will dance on the mountaintops for joy in a new morning of rebooted time, where innocence is celebrated and broken hearts are made whole by the adhesive of a resurgent love but… later for that. Right now we must, perforce, look into the gaping maw of demagogues and deviants who have ridden the high speed trains of collective, insensate puerility and rampaging appetite to doomsday’s break.
We are on the plains of apocalyptic resolution, where countless legions of Teletubbies march into the teeth of the cosmic, thresher combine. You won’t have to ask again why the sky is blue. Barney the Dinosaur is waving that construction flag into the single lane bypass. Ronald McDonald is at the other end. You got to go slow during this unfortunate bottleneck but there’s a sense that, somehow, this indicates one last opportunity to simply stop the car, get out and pick your way over the plastic barriers and then through the rebar forest until you can climb the kudzu hill and make it into the woods, if the snipers don’t get you first.
I always thought when we got to Brave New World, there would at least be a ready source of Soma but I suspect that’s par for the course. Brave New World without Soma is a ripoff, to say the least. I guess you all know that Aldous Huxley got shot up with LSD on his death bed and allegedly said, “Now I see”?
Of course, the same got attributed to Sam Kinnison as well, when those drunken idiots in a pickup truck crashed into him and then got out and started moaning about the damage to their truck. Actually, what Sam said was, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” then he said “But why? ‘Okay, okay, okay.” then again, Sam wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Nietzsche also was reputed to have said something to the effect of, “Now I see”. I’m guessing there are many other examples and variants. What do you think you will say, given the importance of the moment?
Hmmmm… well, we have indeed come to the end of another transmission and I’ll see you at the next one if there is one. Meanwhile, keep in mind that things are not what they appear, nor are they generally what you hear. Everything happens for a reason, even if you don’t know what that reason is.
End Transmission…….
END
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, by Ophiel, is a good place to start. Dion Fortune’s 
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