Category — consumer warfare

…Of course you do.  But just in case you don't, or haven't been motivated enough to do anything about it, here's a lovely little metaphor to hammer it home.

(You know why corporations have more freedoms than you do?  Because they're fighting for theirs.)

Mine is brief, because I felt weird sharing more of my story that that.  I also feel that the details of how we're different matter less than the many broad ways in which we're the same:  We are ALL suffering because our government, in spite of claiming status as the biggest and best democracy in the world, won't provide us decent health care, reasonable safety-nets, and protection from the people who, before we had a strong socialist* government, had no problem treating the 99% as straight-up slaves, including withholding access to education and weapons as a way to control us. 

The answer is not "less government" — but it's not surprising that the supporters of the 1% want it to be.  They've lamed the horse, and now they want us to let them shoot it, so they can go back to being lords and having serfs and never having to worry that "the rabble" will have any real influence.  These are people who want to use most of humanity as their own personal cattle, to buy and sell and work and kill as they see fit.  A government they don't own gets in their way.  So first they own it, then break it, then try to get people cheering for abolishing it altogether. 

But the 1% should fear the 99%, not the other way around.  Maybe it's been too long since we reminded them why.

*Socialist = with public works, public health, public schools, public emergency services and public courts that enforce the law evenly among everyone.  All things that level the playing field, and which the 1% are of course eager to do away with (except when they can work it so the public pays for those services, but the 1% benefit most from them).

Those complaining about the Occupy protests being Class Warfare are right.  Finally, it's turning to a war, with both sides aware that they're fighting it.

Thus far, it's been Class Genocide, with one side pooling their immense resources to safely corral and eradicate the 99% from afar.  By controlling the media, they've managed to keep the people they're attacking — depriving of food, shelter, education and rights — from ever realizing or acknowledging that they're under attack.  Like "safari hunters" who shoot caged lions, with enough money the 1% can make it cheap and easy to pick off their opponents like fish in a barrel.  It's been war-without-ever-leaving-your-mansion, winning without risking so much as a profit-margin. 

Until now.  Now the jig is up, and though they've been under attack for at least a decade already, the 99% are grabbing some weapons and getting ready to make this a real, honest fight.

Of course those who've been winning effortlessly for so long don't like it when their prey starts fighting back, turning the easy massacre into a real battle in which, oh yeah, they're massively outnumbered.  Now they might lose something; now, if they want their protected status and special privileges, they may actually have to pay for them.  It's not nearly as profitable to mug a person to their face as it is to sneak into their house while they're out working two jobs and swipe everything, is it?  When someone is facing you and the deal is open on the table, they might fight back, and they might even win. 

Cowards don't like warfare.  They prefer psyops.  They like missions that involve keeping people too scared and hungry to fight back, and "battles" where you can shoot everyone while they sleep.  But the cowards are in for it, if the 99% have woken up.

I'm not a fan of battles in general.  But Class Warfare beats the heck out of Class Massacre.

U.S. Federal Statue

Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242
Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S.

This law further prohibits a person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation or custom to willfully subject or cause to be subjected any person to different punishments, pains, or penalties, than those prescribed for punishment of citizens on account of such person being an alien or by reason of his/her color or race.

Acts under "color of any law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within the bounds or limits of their lawful authority, but also acts done without and beyond the bounds of their lawful authority; provided that, in order for unlawful acts of any official to be done under "color of any law," the unlawful acts must be done while such official is purporting or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties. This definition includes, in addition to law enforcement officials, individuals such as Mayors, Council persons, Judges, Nursing Home Proprietors, Security Guards, etc., persons who are bound by laws, statutes ordinances, or customs.

Punishment varies from a fine or imprisonment of up to one year, or both, and if bodily injury results or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire shall be fined or imprisoned up to ten years or both, and if death results, or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

…Furthermore, not part of the statute, but FYI most police officers sued for violation of Federal law can't be defended (have their legal defense paid for by) the tax payer (i.e. their department). 

Hey, they have no problem using the rules against you.  In light of some of the crap going on lately, it's important to know how to use them in your own favor.

(Can anybody tell I'm writing a story with an anarchist character in it?  ;)

Word-clouds made of transcriptions of toy commercials aimed at boys and girls, respectively.  Click pic to go to article.

But the reasoning behind all the women-must-do-this-work and men-are-excused-from-this-behavior talk is that we're born with those differences, you know.  "Girls" are "naturally" interested in homemaking and relationships and superficial beauty, and "boys" "naturally" want to go off to war and compete with each other. 

Surely these messages being delivered 24/7 from birth couldn't have anything to do with our tendencies.  It's all inborn, and therefore morally neutral!

::facepalm::

Love,

Ultimate Battle Power Transform Girl

We don’t believe folks like Steve Jobs who claim “Open systems don’t always win.” We don’t believe that it’s ethical for body measuring companies to block users access to their information.  We don’t believe that Zeo shouldn’t be ripped open and hacked–hell, do that and we may just give you a job.

We do believe that you own your data, can take your data with you, and get to decide what to do with it.  We believe that you should be able to hack your SD Card data and get at your raw brainwaves. We believe in the power of open source software that anyone can modify to their own needs.  And we believe in our users ability to set us straight when we go off course.

From "Privacy Activists Rejoice, ZeoDecoderViewer is in Alpha!"

Yaaaaay, Zeo!  I love when a company I've raved about does rave-worthy things after the fact, thus making me look either smart or psychic. 

To clarify all the ways in which this is awesome:

• The ZeoDecoderViewer can process & show polyphasic nap data!
  
• It's free!
• It lets you see your sleep data on your own computer, without uploading it to the Zeo website!
• It's exactly the kind of thing most electronics companies refuse to do, because they want to "lock customers in" instead of giving them what they want!

Nice work, Zeo!  I really hope I get time to try this soon…if any of you do, please drop a comment & let me know what you think?

Thanks!

In Michigan as well as elsewhere, I've heard the attempted anti-union argument that "teachers make too much money anyway".  Now, I know a few teachers (experienced, in difficult subjects like science) and they do pretty well, so it's easy to see how some people might find that argument (i.e. "teachers make too much money, so there's something wrong with unions") at least a little convincing.

Thanks to my iFriend zentiger (via kataplexis), today I can kill it dead for good.  Behold, simple high-school math:

Suppose that teachers are making too much money. OK, that's fine. Let's treat them like babysitters, and pay them less than minimum wage. Say, $3/hour. The conversation wandered from there, but I decided to put some numbers on it and see what happens.

Now, teachers don't work full-time; around 180 days a year for around six and a half hours a day. (Lunch? No, you don't get paid for lunch. Or grading. Or planning.) On the other hand, teachers deal with ~30 students at a time, so that's something — your average babysitter deals with one, or maybe two, at a time. Let's call it 1.5.

Now let's do some math. $3/hour/1.5 kids is, shockingly enough, equal to $2/hour/child. And each day is, as we know, 6.5 hours, so it looks like we should have (in a given day), $13/child. Multiply that by the (sadly small estimate of class size) 30 kids each teacher deals with, and we're at $390/day. $390/day * 180 days/year = $70,200/year. That seems like a reasonable introductory salary for a schoolteacher, no? If not, where did I go wrong in my math? I mean, I'm doing this all in my head, so I might have screwed up somewhere.

This result is especially interesting given that, according to salary.com (I don't actually know if this is a good source), the median salary of a high school teacher is $53,558. If that website is accurate, it looks like we're paying our teachers, on average, $20,000 per year less than we'd pay a 14-year-old for the same service. Oh, and the teachers also, y'know, educate our children. So that's a plus.

What the hell, America?

As someone who has been involved in the protests in Madison for the past six days, I find the news media coverage of the momentous events in this town to in no way portray the reality of what is going on here. In their attempts to constantly be balanced, the news media seem to have lost all ability to be accurate.

via From the Front Lines in Madison, WI | Common Dreams.

Information is power.

"Wow, really?" a family member said recently, in response to the news that Afghanistan was now the longest-running war in American history.  "That's funny…you just don't hear that much about Afghanistan."

No.  No, you don't — and furthermore, it was "hearing about" Vietnam that directly contributed to ending that war.  People started protesting because journalists started (disobeying the government and) bringing back pictures of the atrocities being committed there, which were then shown on the national news.  The protests eventually sapped all political will to keep the war going.  (Financial damage is key:  Wars make money, tons of money for the right people.  But protests cost it — in damage, cops, courts, lost work, boycotts, and political donations.  You can almost see, if you read up on things that protesting has worked for, when the money-balance tipped.) 

There aren't many American protests of Afghanistan, especially compared to Vietnam, and it's not, I hope everyone is smart enough to realize, because this is the world's first miraculously atrocity-free war.  It's because American journalists have been pretty thoroughly cowed this time.  The shocking news, the graphic pictures, may make a few blogs and Wikileaks, but the mainstream news sticks with a) Lady Gaga and b) discrediting Wikileaks, pretty much exclusively.

I remember when I realized for the first time that American media was censored:  It was when I read a speech by John Paul II, the then-Pope of all Catholicdom, and in it he described very frankly why, according to Christian values, Capitalism the way America practices it is evil.  This was on the Vatican's own website.  I was confused, and did some searching — and yes, actually John Paul II had that opinion over most of his tenure, and he wasn't quiet about it.  Jesus said "feed the poor", "heal the sick" and was pretty clearly against allowing wealth to coagulate into the top 1% of the population while everyone else struggled…hence, American capitalism flies in the face of Jesus' teachings, and the head of the Jesus-worship clan was not okay with it.  (Other prominent Xtian scholars remain not-okay with it — one speaks on-camera in "Capitalism: A Love Story", for instance.)

Number of times I have ever heard the John Paul II's opinion of capitalism talked about on a major American media outlet:  Zero.  And the only possible way that could be true is that Americans are being flat-out censored.  So ever since then, I've known it, and just kept that knowledge under my hat with a whole bottle of salt for use whenever I'm around mainstream media.

I don't suspect I'll get much argument from most thinking people on this, so rather than hammer on the point, I'd like to offer a little salve:  The Independent (a British news company) ran a brilliant article yesterday, describing "The Under-Appreciated Heroes of 2010".  I highly recommend everyone read the article, but for now I'm going to do what blogs do best:  Condense the pertinent information from the article into bits you have time for, even if you can't read the whole thing.  It's amazing, even in snipped form. 

Also, let's face it — something like this may be taken down eventually, or Americans may lose access to it.  In those cases (and they happen — and recent changes to government powers and oversight of the Internet will make them happen more), it's important to have "backup data".  I'm happy to devote some virtual-estate to this.

So here you are — see if you've heard the juice on these heroes (an especially interesting exercise if you're not in the U.S.) and enjoy having your mind blown at least once, I promise.  And Viva la fuck censorship!!  ;)

(Snips under the cut)

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I know it's Donald Rumsfeld and yes, I would slap him if I ever met him…but he actually didn't do a bad job stating the epistemological truth, there.  There are knowns; known unknowns; and importantly, unknown unknowns.  Socrates (or his fans) would have said that the more you're aware of the probable existence of unknown unknowns, the more clearly you can edge the map — marking not just the islands you know you haven't been to, but also the places your map doesn't even attempt to cover — the wiser you are.

Mind you, I don't think Rummy had a fucking clue what he meant when he said that.  I think serious pondering of that idea for about ten minutes has to result in an unwillingness to conduct a fucking war, for one thing.  The sheer number of unknown unknowns involved, the unbelievable likelihood of screwing yourself in the long run, you'd think would paralyze any red-button-pusher with half a working synapse.

But I digress.  Hell, I begin by digressing — is there some kind of extra credit for that?

It's Monday morning.  This past weekend was full of ups and downs…I'll call it "brilliant" overall, with the caveat that brilliant things are blinding, can hurt, can make you walk into a wall when they shut off.

Sleep-wise, I slept 8 hours Thanksgiving night, after getting no naps that day.  Woke up feeling sore and sluggish; ew.  After that, I managed to get two naps on Friday and Sunday, and sleep 4.5 hours at night — going to bed at 11:30, and waking up at 4am feeling fine.  On Saturday I only got one nap, and I tried to sleep 4.5 hours but slept six instead (my body was Not Playing Games about getting the rest it needed, in the face of all the running around and emotional upheaval).

Still, it wasn't anywhere near the failure I had feared…my schedule survived, and I have every reason to expect that I can pick this week up like nothin', get right back to it.  Woot.  

I did get way too much food and not enough exercise, but such are holidays I suppose…it occurs to me that humanity has been doing the feasting-in-the-winter thing for hundreds upon hundreds of generations by now, and it's entirely likely that it's just not that bad for us anymore.  ;)

This morning, I decided to pursue a little education with my three pre-work hours…I watched "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train", a documentary of Howard Zinn — which I really enjoyed; I've read some of Zinn's work but after learning more about him, I'll totally read more:  awesome guy!  Then I followed it up with "Capitalism: A Love Story" — I know that Moore's movies express a biased point of view, but I also know that it's the opposite bias of the one I hear 90% of the time in other media (taking this opportunity to metaphorically slap anyone who claims that mainstream media equals a lack of bias) — which I'm not sure I'll be able to watch all of, but it's definitely food for thought.  I do think it's funny that Moore is seen as so slaveringly radical, when everything I've ever seen of his is a pretty basic rallying cry for more democracy.  It's not PhD-level, but then again neither is anything I've seen from the opposing view.  And it's not radical…radical is saying, in all seriousness, that it might be completely fair to get some fucking guns and tell the banks that if they want these houses, they can come take them the old fashioned way.

I still have nightmares about foreclosures in Michigan. 

And I think I have actual Survivor's Guilt; I can't look that way without shuddering, without the organic food going sawdust in my mouth.  I feel like I left my family in a war-zone, even if I left to get help.   It's slowly occurring to me that it's not an accident that I stopped listening to NPR, have been avoiding news almost completely, and avert my eyes from for-sale signs as if they burn.  It's stupid on a level, but on another level, it ought to say something that this economic climate is actually bad enough to cause PTSD.

…

And this is why documentaries before 7am are not always a good idea.  ;)