Cold And Dark

I'm one of the lucky New England bastards without power (since Saturday afternoon).

National Grid's outage status map has refined their estimate to November 3...
It feels like camping without choosing to camp.

The Road

There is something odd (and bleak) about seeing all your stuff—the objects in your life and your home—rendered useless by the electrical grid.

UPDATED: November 2...I have power!

Saturday Soundtrack

A doubleheader.

Reverse the corporate coup d'état

Charlie Rose set aside his centrist bullshit—and his scotch—long enough to talk to Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges about #OccupyWallStreet.

Part 1


Part 2

Republicans Craft Consensus On Job Creation

Image from Rising Hegemon.

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear (cont.)

#OccupyOakland gets gassed and flash bombed.
From this account, it sounds as if the local media is in collusion with the police actions.

Also.

Clampdown

As the media's "dirty fucking hippie" rhetoric declined, and the coverage began to highlight how the national narrative changed from "the deficit will kill us all" to "let's talk about unemployment and income inequality," powerful people started freaking out.

So now, in addition to the media's ready-made "protesters are dirty vandals who poop in parks " narrative, they also have "the protesters are violent anarchists who make the police deploy flash bombs and tear gas."

Here we go...buckle up.

Update: Boston's morning news has at least 3 separate stories about sanitation problems at #Occupy locations and a couple of vandalism reports...I think the new scripts arrived.

Suck It Up Whiners!

Tom Tomorrow

Monday Soundtrack

EXP


Up From The Skies

Memento Mori

Memento Mori  "Remember you will die."
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

An allegorical and symbolic approach to the philosophical theme (Hellenistic origin) of the transience of life and the imminence of death ("memento mori") which, by eliminating the disparities of social class and wealth, restores equilibrium to the vagaries of fate. The upper part of the composition shows a level with a plumb-line, an instrument used by workmen to check the level of buildings. The axis of the plumb bob is death (the skull), while below it is a butterfly (the soul) balanced on a wheel (Fortune). Beneath the arms of the level, which are opposed and perfectly balanced, are the symbols of poverty to the right (the knapsack, the beggar’s stick and the cloak) and the symbols of wealth to the left (the sceptre, purple and the crown).

Occupy Pompei

Night of the Hunter

I imagine Charles Laughton and James Agee had fun crafting this seriously creepy film.

It drips with malice, both for and from Robert Mitchum's character. Initially, his hatred and anger simmer just beneath a grifter's facade—that is until he's denied or exposed. But what's always disturbed me about Mitchum's portrayal of Harry Powell is that it's so stylized (and repugnant), it often reads as dark humor (maybe just me).

More...



Later in the film, when Harry Powell, silhouetted by a pre-dawn sky, sings Leaning On The Everlasting Arms, I am absolutely terrified.

Also...



Great film.

Blink(?)

Matt Taibbi

Anyway, the hysterical responses from the Rushes of the world are just more signs that these protests are working. I never thought I’d see it, but some of the dukes and earls high up in America’s Great Tower of Bullshit are starting to blink a little bit. They seem genuinely freaked out that OWS doesn’t have leaders or a single set of demands, which in addition to being very encouraging is quite funny.

This may be true. There seems to be frustration that the OWS movement hasn't been lured into the co-option trap that America uses to defuse a genuine grassroots threat to its power, or capitalism in general.

It may seem counter-intuitive to maintain a large and leaderless movement, but it does make it more difficult to flog a specific target in the media—think Cindy Sheehan, Jesse Jackson—isolate and smear the "leader" and ignore the movement all together.

You smell like bacon to us

William Powhida

His blog.

Not That It Matters, But...

With 9.1% unemployment, debt should never prevent this government from flooding the economy with nearly interest free money.

The real issue is the rhetoric about debt—real debt (and who created it) is and was always a lie.

What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

Matt Taibbi

What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that's a story our media won't want to or know how to handle.

                                       .               .               .

They're going to try to identify fake leaders, draw phony battle lines, and then herd everybody back into the same left-right cage matches of old. Whenever that happens, we just have to remember not to fall for the trap. When someone says this or that person speaks for OWS, don't believe it.

Taibbi makes a good point.

The sheer power that will be exerted against OWS by the moneyed and political class will only be enhanced by the media's resistance to framing this movement in a different way. The left vs right script is already written—the media is too co-opted (and lazy) to write another one.

Capitalism Besmirched...How Dare They!

Tom Tomorrow

Sunday (Night) Soundtrack

Herbie Hancock Chameleon (part 1)


Herbie Hancock Chameleon (part 2)

One of the records I had to sneak on to the turntable at house parties in 1974.

This Is What Large Protest Movements Do

They get people thinking again.

If we hadn't deregulated banks and markets, we wouldn't be facing the kind of disaster that we've seen over the last three years. If we hadn't drastically reduced tax rates for the wealthy, we wouldn't have seen pension funds dry up and middle class wages stagnate. If we hadn't given corporations more and more political clout, we wouldn't be where we are—in a broken system that serves them, not us.

But what if is a game for suckers. The question isn't where we went wrong, it's what we do about it.

The occupy movement is a withdrawal of consent. It's not a war on capitalism. It's an acknowledgement that we are doing capitalism badly, and in a way that does not serve to help real people in their real lives. To repair the system will require government to step up and take action.

From here.

Home Front

I've reached my apartment's capacity for plant space.

Now the challenge is to keep them healthy with the 6 hours of daylight granted to New England in the winter.

Saturday BLR

I love these things.



Momma gets a what, what...

Friday BLR