Tag Archives: Occupy Wall St.

October 8, 2011 · 5:37 pm

The Attraction in Manhattan

I didn’t plan to write about the Ocuupy Wall Street demonstrations today, because I don’t want to start sounding monotonous.  No matter how clever your point, if you say it over and over again it starts to sound like a chant, and chanting is the thing I like least about mass

George Washington, Occupying Wall St.

protests.  So, I’ll just link to this Keith Olberman thingie and move on.  Two things in the last 24 hours made me look at events from new angles, so here I am writing about OWS again.

First, facebook is amazing.  I added a friend, because she is a facebook friend of my cousin Dean and follows my Aunt Bernice’s fan page, and she wrote back, informing me that we are cousins!  Well, knock me down with a feather.  So I checked on her home page, and she is all over the Occupy Wall Street thing, so not only did I discover a long lost relative but we also have some political opinions in common.  Hi, Ellen!

The other thing was an article I read over on Huffpo bringing up an aspect of the demonstrations which, once you think about it, is pretty obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it before.  Tourists in New York are heading down there by the busloads.

It’s totally natural.  Tourists are always in that area anyway – Wall St., Battery Park, the site of the World Trade Center, ferries to Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island, and much, much more.

It is an area of great historical importance.  New York, of course, was the first capital of the United States and it was right there at 26 Wall St. where George Washington was sworn in as the nation’s first president on April 30th, 1789.

So, when tourists come to see a bit of American history, it’s no surprise that they want to see a bit of American history in the making.

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October 2, 2011 · 8:23 pm

Occupy Wall Street – A List of Demands

For those who don’t know what the protests are all about, or those who are complaining that the dirty hippie anarchists don’t have a clear list of demands, look here.

Now, it's nationwide. This was in San Francisco.

 

It’s pretty straightforward stuff.  Limit the powers of corporations.  Start regulating the banks again.  A bit of campaign reform (repeal citizens United.  Free air time on NPR for candidates – I really like that one).  I never really understood what this Glass Steagall act was all about, but they spell it out pretty clearly.  And, very importantly, right there in the opening paragraphs, they lay special emphasis on the non-violent intentions of the demonstrators.

That was on display on the Brooklyn Bridge as well.  Although I must confess to being a bit of a hothead myself and  thought it was quite thrilling to see the protestors actually blocking traffic, it turns out that the police actually told people they could walk in the street and then arrested them for it.

Of course, the police deny that but, as anybody who has ever had any dealings with the police can tell you, the police lie.  Chronically.  They lie if they want to arrest you, they lie to entrap you, they lie about your rights, they lie about their rights, they lie to the press, they lie under oath on the stand.

So, the protesters who are actually present and protesting are better human beings than I am, all around.  And that’s good.  If these protests remain non-violent then teachers, retired people and all sorts of working class regular people who don’t really relish the idea of breaking windows and hurling bricks at the police from behind barricades of burning tires will be more willing to join in.

They are part of the 99%.  If they become part of the protest movement, then it will become unstoppable.

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September 27, 2011 · 8:49 pm

Wall St. Street Party and Other Stuff

Both the best and the worst thing about Twitter is the 140 character limit.  Basically, everything is a slogan, everything would fit on a bumper sticker or a T-shirt.  Or, it’s a link, which sort of means we are on line throwing business cards at each other to ignore.  I kind of think I like it, but

They really should call this show "Dancing With Famous People's Embarrassing Relatives

I sure am glad I’ve got my blog.

Re: Occupy Wall Street, it’s apparently still going on and the MSM is still not reporting it.  However, rumors that it is leaderless are unfounded.  It has a leader.  His name is Kevin.

Full credit to the people who are there, risking the pepper spray and the beatings but, with all due respect, I have a suggestion about strategy.  The word protest has negative connotations.  Call it a street party, get a few bands to show up, byob, byom, bring some Frisbees, pretty soon you’ll have hundreds of thousands.  It’s New York City, at any given moment there are a couple hundred thousand people withing walking distance of Wall St. anyway.

I’m really jazzed about this CERN thing.  Scientists are busy trying to debunk it, because it just CAN”T be true,  it’s against Jesus Einstein.  Really, it’s not, not anymore than crazy old Uncle Albert made Newton irrelevant.  I have a theory about that, it’s called the “good enough” theory.  See, Newton was supplanted by Einstein who was supplanted by Bohr, and now they’ve got these warp speed neutrinos making monkeys out of all of them.  But all we need to know, to get us through life without falling out of windows or stepping in front of speeding automobiles, we learned from Newton.  Scientist’s may eventually make a spaceship out of neutrinos, but Newton is good enough for those of us who remain on Earth.  Everybody wins.

It’s encouraging news that the Saudi king plans to allow women the right to vote, but just today a woman was sentenced to 10 lashes – for driving.  The only country in the world where the form of government is single family ownership (they are the house of Saud, it is Saudi Arabia – I would love to have a country called Watsonstan),  still has a long, long way to go before they can be considered normal.

I support gay rights, totally.  I consider myself a pretty tolerant person.  But I disagree with most gay people about the whole nature/nurture thing.  I suspect that upbringing may actually have quite a bit to do with it.

Consider Chaz Bono (I haven’t seen him on DWTS.  In fact, I’ve never seen  DWTS, because we don’t get it here.  However, I hope it doesn’t wind up like Bristol Palin, where people keep him on way past the point where he should have been cut, just because they are fans of his mom).  Anyway, Sonny and Cher named their baby Chastity after a character Cher played in a movie – a character who had gender issues.  That strikes me as a gaywish on the part of the parents.

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September 26, 2011 · 6:52 pm

Dreams From My Father, Revisited

A few random comments on different subjects tonight.

A  group called FAIR had a great idea, which I saw quoted by Riley Waggaman over at Wonkette, and I’m now giving to you 3rd hand, about how the Occupy Wall St. protesters could get a bit

One of these is the personification of ultimate evil. The other is Lord Voldemort

more media attention.  They should just rename themselves “The Tea Party” and CNN would have a news van down there lickety split.  After all, they are protesting Wall St. corruption, so there really is no conflict.

While speaking to the recent conservative conference in his state, Florida Governor Rick Scott (who really does bear an unfortunate, but perhaps not coincidental) resemblance to Lord Voldemort, made a joke about Obama reading from a teleprompter.  Of course, he read the joke from a teleprompter.

Here’s my paranoid conspiracy theory of the day, which doesn’t really involve a conspiracy at all, but it seems that the term “conspiracy theory” is applied lately to any hypothesis  (how is Bigfoot a conspiracy?), so here it is: when I read Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” back in 2008, one line stuck in my head.  It was while he was living in Indonesia and his stepfather, Lolo Soetero, had just got out of prison, where it’s entirely probable that he was tortured, and Obama wrote about how quiet and subdued he seemed.  Then he (Soetero) offered the future president a bit of life advice.  “It’s always better to be strong than weak.”  That line has been tumbling around the largely empty spaces inside my brain ever since and I just recently realized why it bothered me.

If I were writing my autobiography, I would likely change a few words here and there, especially with close family members.  It’s not lying, it’s just trying to present things in a good light.  Admirable stuff, in a way.  And “it’s better to be strong than weak” doesn’t sound exactly like something someone would say if they’d been in prison and horribly tortured, because being strong in those circumstances doesn’t  do you a damned bit of good.  It just means you get tortured longer.

So, I suspect that maybe he said something like “it’s better to be on the strong side than the weak side” or, even worse, “it’s better to be with the winners than the losers.”

I could be totally full of shit with this, I’m basing it on nothing more than “that’s what I would have said,” but it bears thinking about.  Even though Barry has been acting a bit more like a fighter in the last couple of weeks, there are still plenty of indications that he’s taking the side of Wall St. and the megarich against the American people.  He proposed a great jobs program, but proposals don’t cost anything.  Bradley Manning is still in jail.  Marijuana is still illegal.  Guantanamo still exists.  Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and George Bush have not been tried with war crimes.

I hope I’m wrong.  I like Obama.  Nonetheless, it’s stuck in my mind.

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