You know, I shouldn't have to write this, really. I shouldn't. I'm over fifty, anglo caucasian, professional, comfortable, and sedentary (well, I work in the garden and take walks, but...) I'm enormously privileged by The Current State of Things. Mind you, I'm a long, long, way from the top 1/10th of 1 percent. Not even close to the top one percent or even the top ten percent. I'm probably hovering comfortably at the upper end of the 60-80% quintile, if you count my esposo as well as mysel...

We finally have their attention. Sort of. The media, the mouthpieces, the pundits, the pols... all commenting on, demanding of, speculating about, what the Occupy Movement (or the 99% Movement, or just the Movement) means. What are the implications. What will it do to the next election cycle? What will it do to the willingness of pols to regulate, or the implications for law enforcement, or censorship on the 'net, or... ...whatever their personal interests are. Well, that's legit, to a p...

Dear (names redacted), I remember a conversation we had many years ago about why you wanted to go to the Police Academy in (redacted.) You, (redacted), were just home from Iraq and out of the Army after two hitches. You'd joined up right out of High School and you were hoping that police salary and benefits would allow you to stretch your military educational benefits to get some kind of degree. You thought that the skills you'd learned in the military would transfer naturally to law enforce...

Based on Go Rin No Sho and lessons of history Strategy is the design for achieving victory; tactics are the brushstrokes that execute the design. Successful strategy is simple: Use your strengths against your opponent's weaknesses. The recipe for defeat is the mirror of this: Allowing the opponent to send his strengths against your weaknesses. To begin strategy, analyze the opponent's qualities, and determine how they may be regarded: Strength, or weakness? How you regard them determines ...

To the Mayors, Police Departments, and Other Civic Authorities in Occupied Locations: How it Works: The people in the streets pay your salaries. They vote for you. You work for them. How it Doesn’t Work: The Koch Bros., the banksters, and their helots do NOT pay your salary. They don’t vote for you. All they do is bribe or threaten you. That may have been enough in the past. I assure you, it will not be so in the future. How it Works: Your FIRST, and MOST IMPORTANT responsibility as m...

The morality (and legality) of war has been a subject for ethical and political debate for many centuries. Many of the world's most widely-observed religions profess high values for peace and nonviolence, yet ultimately come to some compromise regarding war as a tool of self-defense, or defense of the weak and vulnerable, etc. And politicians find ways to use these justifications in pursuit of statist interests or economic interests, and by that time all of the many arguments about what is, an...

I love history. I read history for fun, and not just "popular" histories but dusty textbooks, articles, analyses, dissertations, and other stuff. Amateur historians often develop our own theories of history: How history happens, what is history, how you can tell, and so forth. My theory is that history has a cycle: Like a wave, it has amplitude and frequency. Frequency describes the speed with which humans build new social and economic and political and cultural structures. Amplitude desc...

The strength of this movement rests in two things: Unity and distribution (or decentralization, if you prefer.) With that in mind, I've borrowed some conceptual tools from one of the most enduring and powerful distributed human institutions I know: TWELVE STEPS FOR OCCUPIERS We admitted we were individually powerless over the corporate/political alliance that has made our futures desolate. We came to believe that the collective power of the 99% could restore us to hope. We made a decision t...

For a number of years, now, I've been using a laundry product. I'll call it "Brand X." Its function is to pre-treat stains, and I kept using it, after an initial trial, because it worked very well, was convenient to use, didn't contain anything overwhelmingly toxic, and was reasonably priced. Every few months I'd go to Target and buy four or five bottles, and stash them in the shelves in the laundry room, and when I got down to one bottle, I'd put it on the list for the next Target run. This...

...to bail out B of A. And, incidentally, you don't have $75 trillion to bail out Chase. Bank of America, with the collusion of the Federal Reserve, is attempting, as we speak, to put $74 TRILLION in crap paper "assets" into a federally-insured system. Which means that we --you and I-- will be ON THE HOOK when that worthless paper fails, and the US Government must pay out on the insurance and/or bail out the bank and the holders of the crap paper. Chase has $75 TRILLION of the same kind of c...

::sigh:: I don't know why I bother. You guys (and yes, the majority of you have a Y chromosome) never listen to me anyway. But, being a pacifist, I feel compelled to do the best I can to ensure that the transition to a post-hierarchical world is as bloodless as possible, so I continue to try. You think I'm indulging in hyperbole. I don't. I think that en route to a world in which power is decoupled from wealth and invested in community, we will see some violence, and if it escalates not ev...

TO: OWS, and all of the Occupiers and all who support the Occupation Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. I have tears in my eyes as I type this. For nearly ten years, I have been sinking into a morass of cynical endurance, certain that the death spiral that has been engulfing my country since 1980 was largely irreversible in my lifetime, and that my grandson's life would be absorbed and darkened by the destruction and the need to rebuild on the ruins. At times...

That's a paraphrase of a comment from a friend of mine upon the latest announcement from Netflix that 'Sorry, no, really, we're really sorry, we won't change our name to Qwikster after all, and we realize we totally hosed up and we're hoping you'll forget all about that little incident and keep right on using our core services so we won't gain enough momentum in our downward spiral to make it past the s-bend. Really.' I forwarded a copy of the statement from Netflix to my friend John, for a la...

Everybody seems to have an agenda item for the Occupation movement. Election reform. End corporate personhood. Ban the GOP. Ban greed (good luck). Whatever. From the inspired and sublime and wonderful to the puckish and peculiar, everybody has a suggestion or an idea on how to "harness the power" of the movement. Well, me too. Here's my suggestion: Just KEEP GOING. Keep getting bigger. Keep occupying more cities. Keep communicating. Keep creating cool signs and getting pictures of t...

Get. A. F--king. Clue. Get a clue, "mainstream media." Get a clue, political punditry. Get a clue, talking heads. Get a clue, politicians. Get a clue, helots of our Beloved Oligarchs. Wise up. Why are we pouring into the streets? Why is Union after Union looking out the window and sighing with relief "Finally!" and grabbing their umbrellas and their homemade signs? Why is the movement spreading from city to city to city? "What do they want?" the editors holler in frustration. "They do...

I realize that for some decades now, the pervading ethos of your respective professional cultures has been a combination of "scratch mine and I'll scratch yours" and "honesty consists of not biting the hand that feeds." By these lights, you consider yourselves to be upright, thoughtful, ethically-actuated representatives of the People, and of the Fourth Estate. Why, after all, should you not? When you are surrounded by those for whom "What's in it for me?" is a reasonable, even a sage and res...

This bothers me. A lot. It bothers me a little that people have mean, loutish, ignorant thoughts and beliefs. Not a lot. Because some of my beliefs, when I'm alone in the dark, taking my soul out and looking at it... well, there's a little of the mean, the loutish, the ignorant in me, too. I'm a human being, it's in the DNA. But I was raised to believe that stuff like that is shameful. That expressing stuff like that will make ordinary people (who have their own Inner Mean Louts, but und...

Background: While I am not addressing this directly, it is a tangent that resulted from hearing that the “biggest applause line” at the September 7th GOP debate was the reference to Rick Perry signing 231 death warrants. Human beings perpetually re-invent ourselves. We learn. Things we experience now combine with things from our past, or our genes, or our life circumstances, to transform us, slowly or quickly, into the next iteration of ourselves. We do this to ourselves, either thoughtfull...

Dear friends, You've been kind to me on the occasions I've ventured to participate in your discussions in the past, and I need a little kindness today. My godfather, my dear Uncle Joe, is in the hospital again. He is 94. His feeding tube stopped working and various complications developed and so the Little Sisters of the Poor had him hospitalized. Maybe he will stabilize and be with us a while longer, maybe not. A couple of months ago he had a stroke that severely impaired his communicatio...

I'm fortunate in that I don't normally spend time in places and ways that will bring me into contact with Baggers and the like. But yesterday I ran into an old acquaintance and during the course of the conversation she trotted out the talking point: "Well, social security is just another way of saying welfare, really. It's an entitlement, like welfare. And welfare shouldn't be the basis for our society, the Founders believed in independence, not depending on the government." Holy moley rock...

Do you need an iPad? Or a Kindle? Or both? Some other digital reading device? A netbook? Do you still need your desk-based computer at home? At work, even? AND your smartphone? How smart does your smartphone have to be? What about your iPod? Regular, Nano, Shuffle? Is your laptop obsolete? Where do you get the content for on that 50" screen in your living room? A cable? A cable box? A digital HD/Internet connection? How many ways can you access the Cloud, and how much time and ef...

Dear Admin Strategists: Sure, you can get away with ignoring the Progressive Left. You're absolutely correct: We'll vote for Obama no matter what. There's no viable primary challenger or third-party candidate who's any kind of threat to him, and you know it and we know it. On some level, most of us still appreciate what he represents from 2008 even while we are trying not to let our disappointment and rage work us into an aneurysm. The GOP is putting the most astonishing collection of craz...

The handbasket has finally reached the bottom of the slope, and at the rate it was traveling it was a foregone conclusion it would smash to pieces and leave us dazed and wounded in the wreckage. But there is always another basket and another slope. Of course, it's all the evil government's fault, right? Government is the root of all evil. All government is corrupt and deadly. Government is the problem, not the solution. Government is the vampire that saps your lifeblood, steals YOUR hard-e...

In the pre-Information age, we actually had smarter riots than we've had for the last 100 years. In France of the 1790s, for instance, what were the targets of the mob? The Bastille. The estates and chateaus of the wealthy. Monasteries and other parts of the Church that had colluded with the aristocracy for centuries to grind the poor. Riots-- classic street mobs, not labor conflict or bonus marchers or other purposeful, directed civil disobedience that flared into violence-- have apparent...

"Tax rich people at 80%! That's totally, TOTALLY unfair! How can you penalize someone for being successful and creating jobs? When YOUR tax rate is only 18%! UNFAIR! They'll leave the country!" blah, blah, blah... more of the same, my heart bleeds, yadayadyada Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Because, seriously, you don't know what you're talking about. You just don't. Using numbers like "80%!" to scare people into thinking that someone with a $10 million annual income will pay the government $8 ...

(Note: In early March, The World's Most Irritable Cat, about whom I've occasionally posted on DU, took the Last Road after 18 years of keeping us, his devoted staff, firmly in line, and being hoovered daily. We miss him terribly. But it was finally time...) The Concept: Get a new kitty. Preferably one that won’t hiss at everyone, attack unprotected flesh, shove his water dish (and water) all over the floor, and appropriate and relocate random household objects. A nice kitty, this time. T...

(Link) Quelle surprise. Nothing represents the wipe-the-floor-with-people-until-they're-used-up mentality of the Murdoch empire quite so graphically as the news that amid "shock" and "surprise" and "in the wake of the hacking scandal" the tab rag News of the World is going under.... but WAIT! Is it REALLY? Well, apparently not. It's just firing a lot of people with seniority and benefits, putting a lot of suppliers out of work, consolidating expenses and operational overhead, and moving the...

(Link)/ Maybe U.S. investment bankers need to unionize. Reports today indicate that Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs will be laying off a sizable chunk of U.S. bankers and hiring in other countries, starting with 1,000 new employees in Singapore. We're used to hearing about jobs in industries like manufacturing moving overseas, but now Wall Street? Is no industry safe or is something different going on here in the case of Goldman? First, let's look at the news, via Charlie Gasparino at Fox Busi...

Wind shifted and drove the fire back up the Valle Caldera and they fear that it may shift back and threaten the town. No immediate threat. I'm listening to podcast from KRSN (local Los Alamos radio.) This wildfire blew up to between 40K and 50K acres within less than 24 hours, fueled by tinder-dry conditions from the worst drought in recorded history of the region. The Bandelier National Monument trailhead area is not threatened at the moment but the wilderness area is afire, and the fire is...

I didn't give a rat's ass when the pointy knickers story broke. I didn't give a rat's ass when he first denied it. I didn't give a rat's ass when it looked like it was a conspiracy by RWackadoodles to "get" him. I didn't give a rat's ass when the media escalated to a full 24-cylinder tizzy. I didn't give a rat's ass when he came clean. I still don't give a rat's ass now that everyone who DID give a rat's ass is clutching pearls, hyperventilating about betrayal, hollering Itoldjaso, or other...