Cowardice

Where will you be, what will you do tomorrow?

Do you have work, school, all those lovely obligations keeping people from joining in with this worldwide howl of rage and love? Do you care? Do you know what's at stake?

Sure, this is important, but we have to pay rent, eat, and keep up our grades. If we're too visible or outspoken, we could lose our jobs you know! Our responsibilities to keep ourselves safe within this system come before making it better. Certainly before even thinking of dismantling it, god forbid!

Where will I be tomorrow? I have to be at work in 3 hours. Do we want to be the gears or the bodies upon them?

I know what I want. But knowing is always a far cry from doing.

[edit.] WAH WAH WAH

It's a Full Moon

But too late for Halloween.

Godwin is Dead, Long Live Godwin

After World War 2, Allied Command forced some homosexual prisoners of concentration camps, survivors of the goddamned Holocaust, to serve out their time for their "crimes" after the war, no matter how long they had been in the camps or how they had suffered, some of them into the 1960s.

WIP Air and Water are Nice

I want you all to be environmentalists in your own right.
I want you to think about how we all treat our home.
So I want you to join me in a little exercise:

The Earth is our home. Now, we don't treat it too well despite this, cause its rather large, and we can't picture what we collectively as a species are doing to it.
So imagine your home. Whether you live in an apartment or on a couple of acres of land, this will work either way. But because this is an analogy for the Earth, I want you all to go one step further. Imagine all the water you use in a year and imagine only having enough air to surround your home in half a cube whose base is equal to the square footage of wherever you live.

Got that in your mind? Good.

Now imagine every single thing you use in a year.
Everything you throw out.
All the packaging you toss.
All the food you scrape into the garbage can.
All the bodily waste you produce.
All the cleaning chemicals you spray.
All the gas you burn to go somewhere.
And everything else you don't think about when you buy it, use it, and forget it the moment you lose interest.

Now imagine all that trapped with you in your home.
All the liquid waste goes into your water.
All the gaseous waste goes into the air.
And all the solid waste, stuffed into a corner and desperately hoped to be forgotten.
Actually, nix that, a good bit of the solid waste goes into your water too.

How long do you think you would last in that environment?

Got it?

Good.

Now imagine you and 7 billion other people doing the exact same thing.

How long do you think we will last in that environment?

It's not an idle question. We're living it right now. Think about it!

And now think what we can do about it!

Troy Davis Must Die

I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
That's what I learned in school...

Doin' What I Think I Should...

Troy Davis yesterday, Occupy Wall St. today.
But not every day for the next few months. Not even most of today. For the usual reasons. So it goes.

We're all part-time bodies upon the gears.

Freedom is Slavery.

The professor handed out the Catechism of the Knights of Labor and asked us for our reactions.
Gladys, an older woman, an immigrant from Latin America recounted her first experience with employment in the United States: she worked in a factory in Midtown Manhattan, she was obviously scared to give the exact location and name when pressed by our professor, but she had been exploited, paid less than minimum wage, told to work for 6 days a week, her employers had taken advantage of the fact that she had little grasp of the language at the time and that she knew even less about her rights within this system. She was nearly in tears with the whole class turning in their seats to listen to her in the corner as she described what she went through as slavery.

"But could you quit that job? You did get paid, correct?" The professor pressed.
"Slaves could not quit, they did not have that choice, you were free to leave, right? You could take another job if you found it?"

Gladys responded that yes, she did eventually escape that place, once she had learned enough and could find an employer that could use her language as an asset, rather than a shackle. She was clearly shaken by our teacher's seeming dismissal of her experience to prove what seemed like a semantic point.

"Ah, so you were not a slave then, strictly speaking. See, that's the difference, slaves could not choose to stop working, if they did, they would be beaten. Freedom, free labor means you work or you starve. That is the definition of freedom, in a capitalist system at least."

What a fucking asshole. But good point.

*Update*
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/britain-may-contain-up-to-60-million-slaves-201109134294/
I love these people.

Thinking Back

I don't put much stock in the conspiracy theories, but for everything else progressives and dissenters who don't subscribe to them put at Bush's feet, you'd think they'd be a little more inclined to believe them once the death count in the war on terror reached 2,977 people.

Spark Notes

Obama came into office wanting to cut entitlements (Social Security, Medicare/caid).

The Republicans, concerned with getting reelected by frothing, cretinous Teatards have taken a principled stand against raising the debt ceiling, something every single incumbent has voted for in the past.
Not voting for it could mean the collapse of the US economy with all the attendant damage that would do to the world.

Of course there are ways around that; Obama could simply declare it unconstitutional not to vote for it, citing the 14th Amendment, among other solutions, but he has decided not to bother with such routes.
Instead, he dangles massive spending cuts including to the aforementioned entitlement programs while asking for a pittance in tax revenue from the GOP, and of course military cuts are not even considered...
He's being the adult, the better man, he's compromising~

Of course, the elephant in the room is why all those who bankroll the GOP and the Democrats, the various corporate entities and the super-rich who would be harmed (but by no means be the worst affected) by a default on American debt would even allow their lackeys in Congress to actually implement such a threat.
And the answer is: they wouldn't (Boehner's postponed the vote, even). It's all theater, a convenient way for everyone (except the vast majority of the American people) to get what they want; less government handouts to the most vulnerable Americans, less money being paid by the wealthiest Americans, and maintaining a facade of the wise elder statesman, valiantly holding off the barbarians at the gates, while the barbarians get to pretend they're upholding real American values.
Oh, and they get to sack America again.

Needs Work

Your own... Chocolaty... Jesus...
Don't hear your prayers, he's candy to share...
Your own... Chocolaty... Jesus...
Don't get on your knees for prayer, he's always there...
At Zerelda Lee's Candy Wares...

BARACK OBAMA!

Doing all the things Bush wanted to do, free of blame or accountability since 2009.

How Concise

"The CIA funnels opium and other drugs into underworld organizations in return for said criminal enterprises' complicit involvement with the suppression of local socialist and revolutionary movements. Most notably, this happened during the Vietnam War when the CIA was buying heroin from Khmer warlords in Cambodia and selling it to the mafia so they could flood the streets of Harlem and other black neighborhoods with enough dope to keep the Black Panthers and other Black Power groups too stoned to fight."

-Anonymous, 06/11/11

They Hate Us For Our Freedom to Free Them With Freedom Bombs

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/15/afghanistan/index.html

The Value of Planning Ahead

I'm curious as to why Osama didn't take the Assange route and tuck away some incriminating documents concerning his job history at the CIA somewhere, ordering someone to release them should he ever be caught or killed.
Even if we did capture him and put him on trial, its not like we'd do any but the most superficial of trials, sort of like the one Saddam got that was cut off before they could get to his complicity and work for the US government.

Osama

The Taliban offered to hand Bin Laden over to a neutral third party nation for a criminal trial if we stopped bombing and provided evidence he did it.

Bush rejected that and said: "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty."

So we went ahead and declared war on a nation and a peoples that had nothing to do with 9/11, mostly ignoring Al'Qaeda's Saudi and Pakistani relations.

Meanwhile, we let him escape at Tora Bora because of an unwillingness to commit more troops to the fight, losing bearing on him for 10 years. And yet we continued to fight a war there predicated on capturing him and ending support for his terrorist network while he and his group slipped out of Afghanistan altogether.

In that decade,

1566 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan

At least 13000 civilians have died from direct American/Coalition actions

Tens of thousands more refugees have been created

We have spent $400,400,000,000+

Poppy production and consequently heroin manufacture has exploded

And those are just the more prevalent problems, not to mention the fact that "Al'Qaeda in Iraq" was one of the bullshit reasons we invaded that country.

We finally kill him (in Pakistan, shock of shocks) after most of you have seemingly forgotten about this fucking boogeyman and you all cheer!

I hope that price which we continue to pay, which your children will continue to pay was worth it.

Enjoy your corpse.