“A strike is an incipient revolution. Many large revolutions have grown out of a small strike.” —William “Big Bill” Haywood

Thanks to the popularity of my recent articles here at Fair Share of the Common Heritage, I found myself recruited to write something about the prospect of a U.S.-based general strike.

So, off I went, scanning news across the interwebs … My eyes widened when I read: “Social groups reiterated their call to a general strike for 24 hours November 14, asking the labor, productive and academic sectors to join the mobilization, guaranteeing it will be peaceful and with innovative forms of protest.”

But alas, it was an update from the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter, my heart jumped at these words: “Trade unions have called a general strike in protest.”

Great — but not for the US — as the article was in relation to Portugal. Then again, I felt excitement: “A 48-hour general strike to be held on Wednesday and Thursday is set to ground flights for two days and cripple public and many private services.”

That story, of course, was about Greece. Finally, I found: “Strikers at the car assembly plant ended their eight-day occupation of the plant late Friday night, under threat of police violence. About 1,500 police troops moved into the factory early that day to enforce a high court order to end the occupation. Workers continued with their strike, however, camping outside the factory some 100 meters away.”

Read More: Mickey Z on the Fair Share of the Common Heritage

Episode 10 — Apocalypse in Georgia:

Best-selling author Brad Meltzer and the team search for the true meaning of the mysterious Georgia Guidestones. Often called America’s Stonehenge, this granite monument is located on a remote hilltop outside Atlanta. Brad and the team examine the multilingual messages carved into the stones for any clues to the monument’s anonymous creator, who’s known only by the pseudonym — R.C. Christian. The Decoded team checks out rumors that the Guidestones are really the work of a secretive religious sect called the Rosicrucians, who’ve been accused of practicing alchemy and mind control.

Now here is a fun exercise for those interested in the intersection of power and language. Remember when Candidate Obama was against “dumb wars” in 2002? Below is a 2008 presidential campaign video made with  then Presidential Candidate Obama’s own words:

The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling.

This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages, with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. A “norma interna,” or confidential set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The guidelines, issued in the year of our Lord 1962, address a sensitive subject: sex in the confessional. The Vatican doesn’t put it quite that directly, preferring to use more guarded terminology to describe what happens when a priest leads a member of his flock astray before, during or after the confession — in other words, when he provokes a penitent “toward impure and obscene matters” through “words or signs or nods of the head (or) by touch.”

Read More: SPIEGEL ONLINE

Pope John Paul II used to beat himself with a belt and sleep on a bare floor to bring himself closer to Christ, a book published Wednesday says.The late pope had a particular belt for self-flagellation and brought it with him to his summer residence, according to the book, Why He is a Saint: The True Story of John Paul II.

“As some members of his own entourage were able to hear with their own ears, both in Poland and in the Vatican, Karol Wojtyla flagellated himself,” the book says, using the name the pope was given at birth.

“In the closet, among the cloaks, a particular pant-belt hung from a hook, which he utilized as a whip and one which he always had brought to Castel Gandolfo,” the book says.

The book was written by a Vatican insider, Slawomir Oder, with Italian journalist Saverio Gaeta of the Catholic weekly Christian Family. Oder is head of the Vatican committee investigating whether John Paul II should be declared a saint. John Paul died in 2005.

Read More: CNN World

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. “I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism,” Nairn says. “But once he became president … Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off … but he chose not to do so.” He continues, “In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year.”

Listen/Watch the Allan Nairn interview on Democracy Now!

#7. Office Space: While Idiocracy is often cited as the under-appreciated Mike Judge film that is most likely to come true, Office Space already has. After performing poorly at the box office, Office Space became a massive hit on DVD, inspiring many a wage-slave to rip their apron off and tell their boss to kindly go fuck himself.

The films protagonist, played by Ron Livingstone, takes office rebellion a little further than that and decides to rip off the company he works for. His scam involves stealing fractions of pennies from financial transactions that would usually automatically be rounded up to the nearest whole dollar. The idea is that the company would never miss such small amounts but that over a long period of time the pennies would add up.

The Real Life Event: Michael Largent, a 22-year-old who had presumably never seen the second half of Office Spacee where the scheme goes to shit, decided that this sounded like a pretty neat idea. In 2007, Largent used an automated script to open up 58,000 accounts with online brokerage firms. Once the account was opened, the firm would send micro deposits of a few cents to verify that it had opened properly. Soon Largent had gained $50,000 as well as the attention of the FBI.

Largent was bad at choosing source material. He stole the idea for his criminal conspiracy from a comedy about a failed crime, and opened his accounts under the names of cartoon characters including Hank Hill and Rusty Shackelford. He was eventually caught when the Patriot Act required the brokerage firms to take a closer look at the identity of their customers, and they presumably noticed one of them was named Spongebob.

Largent later said “that he needed the money to pay off debts” and stated that this was “one way to earn money,” proving that he was unskilled at generating aliases and defining the word “earn”. Instead of following the plot of a carefree comedy, Largent wound up spending his best years imitating the darker, more prison-rape themed scenes from Shawshank Redemption. Speaking of which…

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But here’s the trick: The steamy web seductress is a cartoon.

Turning the tables on Bollywood’s demure heroines — who’ve only recently started agreeing to lip-to-lip kisses on screen — “Savita Bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, recently married housewife who knows what she wants and how to get it.

Bored with her workaholic husband, she seduces door-to-door salesmen, neighborhood cricket players, even a not-so-subtle stand-in for the gray-bearded Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan — a move that earned her some flak from Indian entertainment channels.

Though pornography is illegal in India, Savita Bhabhi’s sexual misadventures, published on savitabhabhi.com with scripts based on fantasies submitted by fans, have attracted a huge following, according to one of the strip’s anonymous creators, who goes by the screen name Deshmukh.

“We get 60 million unique visitors every month. The average time a visitor spends on our site is more than 10 minutes,” the site administrator told GlobalPost by email. “Almost 70 percent of our traffic is from India, while the rest is from the U.S., U.K. and more than 80 other countries.”

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Among my fondest childhood memories is savoring a strip of perfectly cooked bacon that had just been dragged through a puddle of maple syrup. It was an illicit pleasure; varnishing the fatty, salty, smoky bacon with sweet arboreal sap felt taboo. How could such simple ingredients produce such riotous flavors?

That was then. Today, you don’t need to tax yourself applying syrup to bacon — McDonald’s does it for you with the McGriddle. It conveniently takes an egg, American cheese and pork and nestles it between pancakelike biscuits suffused with genuine fake-maple-syrup flavor.

The McGriddle is just one moment in an era of extreme food combinations — a moment in which bacon plays a starring role, from high cuisine to low.

There is: bacon ice cream; bacon-infused vodka; deep-fried bacon; chocolate-dipped bacon; bacon-wrapped hot dogs filled with cheese (which are fried, then battered and fried again); brioche bread pudding smothered in bacon sauce; hard-boiled eggs coated in mayonnaise encased in bacon — called, appropriately, the “heart attack snack”; bacon salt; bacon doughnuts, cupcakes and cookies; bacon mints; “baconnaise,” which Jon Stewart described as “for people who want to get heart disease but [are] too lazy to actually make bacon”; Wendy’s “Baconnator” — six strips of bacon mounded atop a half-pound cheeseburger — which sold 25 million in its first eight weeks; and the outlandish bacon explosion — a barbecued meat brick composed of 2 pounds of bacon wrapped around 2 pounds of sausage.

It’s easy to dismiss this gonzo gastronomy as typical American excess best followed with a Lipitor chaser. Behind the proliferation of bacon offerings, however, is a confluence of government policy, factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste that has turned bacon into a weapon of mass destruction.

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Many political observers in Alaska are fixated on rumors that federal investigators have been seizing paperwork from SBS in recent months, searching for evidence that Palin and her husband Todd steered lucrative contracts to the well-connected company in exchange for gifts like the construction of their home on pristine Lake Lucille in 2002. The home was built just two months before Palin began campaigning for governor, a job which would have provided her enhanced power to grant building contracts in the wide open state.

SBS has close ties to the Palins. The company has not only sponsored Todd Palin’s snowmobile team, according to the Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett, it hired Sarah Palin to do a statewide television commercial in 2004.

Though Todd Palin told Fox News he built his Lake Lucille home with the help of a few “buddies,” according to Barrett’s report, public records revealed that SBS supplied the materials for the house. While serving as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin blocked an initiative that would have required the public filing of building permits—thus momentarily preventing the revelation of such suspicious information.

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In 2003, gay marriage and marijuana were legalized in Canada on the same day. Coincidence or trend? Either way, suddenly, Canada changed forever and Canadians began enjoying their “new found” freedoms-north-of-the-border of the country that proclaims to be the true “Land of the Free.”

Soon, Canadians were not the only ones enjoying the newly forged liberties, as Americans raced across the border to marry same-sex partners and smoke marijuana in peace. AWOL U.S. army soldiers arrive seeking refugee status. To many, Canada had become a red-and-white beacon of freedom around the world.

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The year seems to be ending on a bad note for some of the male pop-stars on the international scene. Several of them are battling law-suits or the ire of fans. Heading the list is Michael Jackson, who was formally charged with child-molestation last week.

The singer has always been under a cloud of suspicion, following a similar court case some years ago but that time an out of court settlement was reached. This time round, the charges are believed to involve a 14-year old boy who has spent night at his famous ranch named Neverland … To show their support to his cause, friends and relative descended on his ranch.

The singer is expected to travel to Britain soon to fulfil unspecified contractual obligations and also to promote his latest CD, Number Ones, which has opened to dismal sales. But the Moonwalker should not expect a rapturous welcome, warn music industry experts.

Adding distress to the singers plight was the fact that his favourite pet, a chimpanzee named Bubbles tried to commit suicide. The chimp was rushed to the hospital in time.

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He says we can’t undo the damage we’ve done and that by the end of this century many places on earth will be unliveable. If that weren’t bad enough, most of the human race will be wiped out.

So, we shouldn’t waste our time trying to reverse climate change. Instead, he says we should focus on finding ways to survive the inevitable ahead. He lays it all out in his new book The Vanishing Face of Gaia.

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The movie isn’t going to win any awards (do Razzies count as awards) but if you like watching famous landmarks crumble, explode or get otherwise destroyed, you’ll probably be able to sit through this movie without wanting to slit your own throat. Though if John Cusack somehow uploads a virus into the Earth’s core that stops the apocalypse, I’m gonna really be pissed. Check out the trailer below or head to Yahoo! Movies.

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We’re excited to announce the Evolver.net teleseminar series, “Beyond 2012: Practical Tools for Your Transformation.” Please join us and explore concrete ways to make transformation real in our daily lives.

This teleseminar intensive is about how to take clear, practical steps to address the huge changes in food, consciousness, community, economy, health and intimacy that are taking place today. Evolver.net is the new social network for online collaboration and off-line activation, where you discover and share the new tools, ideas and projects that improve your life and change the world.

This series is devoted not just to understanding change, but to practical ways of making change — in how you eat, drink, love, build community, participate or not in global economic winds, cultivate self and community survive-and-thrive practices. We’ve assembled an extraordinary group of leading thinkers and practitioners for this series — from bestselling authors to inspirational teachers to groundbreaking community organizers — to be interviewed by Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

Among the topics covered, you will learn:

– How to live richly and abundantly in the face of (perceived) scarcity.

– How to find and build community that nurtures your gifts and returns you to what it means to be human in connection with others and with the web of life on this planet.

– How to thrive without dependence on corporations, atrophied institutions and governments.

– How to catalyze and utilize collective intelligence.

– How to create food where none existed and other secrets of urban farming.

– How to create new, thriving models of community.

– How to launch empowering microcurrencies.

– How to help lead the way out of our time of failed relationships and stunted sexual liberation, which causes confusion, failed marriages, private misery, wasting our precious emotional and psychic resources.

– Secrets of how to communicate with anyone — from a place of empathy, mutual empowerment and inspiration.

It all starts on June 4th. Please go here to meet the teachers and learn more about this exciting event.

Cheers,

Daniel, Ken, Adam, and the Evolver Team

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A “longstanding struggle” between admirers of Scientology and critics of the group prompted Wikipedia on Thursday to bar online edits from computer addresses “owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.”

An array of editors believed to have taken sides in a Scientology public-image war at Wikipedia have also been barred from tinkering with topics related to the church.

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The report is a devastating blow to the multibillion dollar international agribusiness industry, most especially to Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and related herbicides.

In a press release dated May 19, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, which describes itself as ‘an international association of physicians and other professionals dedicated to addressing the clinical aspects of environmental health,’ called immediately for the following emergency measures to be taken regarding human consumption of GMO foods.

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