Archive for November, 2011
Occupy Goes Suburban
Photo: Andreas Praefcke (CC)
The Occupy movement has spread to rural areas, so it should come as little surprise that it has also spread to suburban areas. Kevin Fagan writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Gerri Field stood with hundreds of protesters in front of Tiffany’s in Walnut Creek this week, railing against economic injustice at the top of her lungs and drawing approving honks from passing cars with her sign, “Heal America, Tax Wall Street.”
For two sunny midday hours, the crowd did its best to “occupy” the busiest intersection in town, Mount Diablo Boulevard and North Main Street, singing “This Land Is Your Land” and denouncing corporate greed and the ultrarich 1 percent.
Then it was time for lunch. Time to put the signs away. No thrown bottles at police. No tear gas or cops in sight. And certainly no tents. “Camping? My idea of camping is a room in the Hyatt,”…
Fox News On Police Pepper Spraying: ‘It’s A Food Product, Essentially’ (Video)
Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly break down the tumult between police and students at UC Davis: the police sprayed the sit-in protesters with a “food product.” O’Reilly adds, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” Hear that? Violent police crackdowns are basically a big, fun, good-natured food fight!
Freak Accident Turns Macho Rugby Player Into Gay Hairdresser
A tabloid-y tale from the U.K.’s Metro, but one that raises a host of interesting questions: Could a completely opposite person (with a different sexuality, even) be waiting, hidden, inside each of us? And can an injury really bring on this sort of change?
Former rugby player Chris Birch suffered a stroke in training and woke up to find he was gay. Mr. Birch was straight and engaged to be married when he suffered a freak accident in the gym. The 26-year-old tried to impress his friends with a back flip but broke his neck and suffered the stroke.
When he woke up, he underwent a drastic personality change that included an attraction to men. ‘I’d never even had any gay friends. But I didn’t care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings,’ he said.
Mr Birch broke off his engagement and found a boyfriend. He also…
South Korean Lawmaker Uses Tear Gas to Protest Free Trade with the U.S. (Video)
Now, why would a member of parliament in South Korea object so strongly to a free trade deal with the United States? Haroon Siddique reports in the Guardian:
An opposition MP set off a teargas canister in the South Korean parliament in a failed attempt to prevent the ruling party passing a free trade deal with the US.
Proponents said the deal, the largest US trade pact since the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), could increase commerce between the two countries by up to a quarter. But the opposition claims it will harm South Korean interests, putting jobs at risk …
Occupy This: Poetry Survives the Trashing of the People’s Library
Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
One of the clearest indicators of a fascist mentality is its contempt for ideas it disagrees with. The Nazis staged mass book burnings, and some religious zealots followed in their footsteps, in our country, by burning rock and roll records they considered the “Devil’s Music.” The war on Sarajevo began with the burning of its world acclaimed library by right-wing nationalists who found the city too multicultural for their tastes.
Here in New York, our liberal but opportunistically Republican Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, supports the New York Public Library. He also supported the right of that fanatic, fundamentalist minister Terry Jones, to burn the Quran to protest Islam. “I happen to think that it is distasteful. I don’t think he would like it if somebody burnt a book that in his religion he thinks is holy,” he said a year ago, “But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you…
Occupy Minneapolis Forms Human Chain To Defend Foreclosed Home, Police Retreat
Shocking police confrontations with the Occupy movement are not limited to the coasts, don’t ya know. Protesters in Minneapolis challenged the police directly to protect a woman’s home and won:
November 19th, 2011: Following two arrests and an incident in which a police officer tried to run down an occupier with a squad car, Occupy Minneapolis formed a human chain around Sa’ra Kaiser’s foreclosed home, preventing the officers from boarding it up, and ultimately forcing the police – who had no legitimate legal pretense for preventing occupiers from being there in the first place – to give up and leave.
Six Degrees Of Separation? No Way – Only 4.7!
Photo: Chad J. McNeeley (CC)
We all know Facebook is changing the world’s social behavior, but what would Kevin Bacon think of this? From the New York Times:
The world is even smaller than you thought.
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.
The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population. The findings were posted on Facebook’s site Monday night.
The experiment took…
Occupy-Themed Best Buy Marketing Campaign
Have you been curious how the Occupy movement would be co-opted? Occupy Best Buy combines the red-hot protest movement with Black Power fist iconography in an effort to get people pumped up about buying plasma screen TVs or whatever it is they sell at Best Buy. Definitely the worst of the occupations to spring up so far. Best Buy claims that no affiliation with the web site, though one would suspect that it’s a viral marketing effort:
Plants That Point To Hidden Ruins
BLDG BLOG delves into the beauty of how plant life can reflect what is buried in the earth below, and could even be used to find the location of hidden treasure:
I absolutely love stories like this, and I swoon a little bit when I read them; it turns out that “plants growing over old sites of human habitation have a different chemistry from their neighbors, and these differences can reveal the location of buried ruins.”
The brief article goes on to tell the story of two archaeologists, who, in collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: “Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads.”
The idea that your garden could be more like an indicator landscape for lost archaeological sites—that, below the flowers, informing their very chemistry, perhaps even subtly altering their shapes and colors, are the…
America’s Concentration Threatened By Adderall Shortage
Is Adderall the crystal meth of the middle and upper classes? Well, both drugs became huge at around the same time. The Fix writes that prices are skyrocketing and panic and withdrawal are setting in across the nation as pharmacies’ shelves run short:
When Jay V.’s pharmacist told him about the nationwide Adderall shortages last weekend, he reacted as any economically rational finance professional would, and attempted to bribe her. Whatever the cost, “it’s cheaper than cocaine,” his reasoning went. And even if it isn’t, you can’t put a price on never having to go back to doing bumps in the work bathroom to get through late night deal committee meetings, can you?
Jay’s pharmacist said she was reserving her supply for regular customers, but that the price had doubled and the clock was ticking.
If addiction is the kind of thing you think about a lot, it’s easy to overlook its significance in…
Alien Skeleton Unearthed In Peru?
A mummified skeleton with huge eye sockets and triangular head almost as large as its body has been discovered in Peru, and at least some scientists (of indeterminate repute?) believe it to be “extraterrestrial,” writes io9:
Behold a giant-headed alien mummy that turned up in Peru. Stare into the all-knowing eye sockets of an alien that somehow wound up on Earth many years ago, and was mummified by the locals. But what was is it doing here?
Website RPP is claiming that Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist working at the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, has discovered remains of something that isn’t human. Measuring at 20 inches tall, the tiny remains were originally believed to be that of a child, but Spanish and Russian doctors disagree, saying:
“It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to…
Darth Vader Claims Land In Ukraine
Daft news story of the day, courtesy of Reuters:
Welcoming the local authorities’ move to the dark side, Darth Vader has asked for a land plot in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa to park his space ship.
An Odessite dressed as the Star Wars villain visited the mayor’s office this week to claim a free land plot citing Ukrainian legislation which grants every citizen the right to own 1,000 square meters of land.
His visit followed a decision by city authorities to grant attractive land plots along the sea coast to a group of people for free, prompting public concerns about corruption, according to local media…
Lobbying Firm’s Memo Lays Out Plan To Undermine Occupy Wall Street
Wall Streeters may publicly scoff at the Occupy movement via jokes about bathing and drum circles — however, behind the scenes it is apparently being taken quite seriously. Wondering how the empire plans to strike back? It’s already been laid out, MSNBC reveals:
A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by MSNBC.
e proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.
CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific…
The Quest To Invent A Sarcasm Detector
Sarcasm levels are ever-increasing in our modern world — perhaps a century from now, communications will contain more sarcastic expressions than sincere ones. So what is the value of being tongue-in-cheek? It involves more intelligence and creativity than straight-talk, and machines cannot (yet) understand or imitate it with complete accuracy. Thus irony may be our last and best weapon in the inevitable war against the robots. Smithsonian Magazine reveals:
For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance.
Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco.
Sarcasm so…
Most Americans Have No Idea What OccupyWallStreet Is About
I suspect the percentages are reversed here in New York, but out there in the USA Today-reading American heartland, OWS doesn’t mean much according to a new poll:
A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows that the “Occupy” movement has failed to capture the attention of a majority of Americans, indicating either ambivalence toward it or lack of interest.
The poll finds that 56% of Americans surveyed are neither supporters nor opponents and 59% say they don’t know enough to have an opinion about the movement’s goals.
The survey, however, does show an increase from 20% to 31% in disapproval of the way the protests are being conducted…
[continues at USA Today]
A Song For The 99%
South African folk singer Brendon Shields offers up a song for our times from his forthcoming album Truth and Recession:
Joe Rogan: What Is Reality?
The inimitable Joe Rogan brings his wisdom to the nature of reality in this video made out of rants from his podcast:
UC Davis Pepper Spraying Video
The police use of pepper spray on peaceful protesters at the University of California Davis campus on Nov. 18 has seen many column inches devoted to it this weekend, but it’s still shocking to see the video (thanks Miles Jaffe for sharing):
