November 25, 2009 archive

Protest the Troop Buildup on an Intersection Near Your Home

I just got in from protesting the war during rush hour. I live by a busy intersection, so I can just walk out and get a fairly good audience with the people driving to work. I stood on the sidewalk right next to the road from 7:30 to 9:00 with a big sign that had a peace sign on one side and “The war is not worth it” on the other. I plan to do it again at quitting time today. And then I am going to do the morning and afternoon rush hours ever day until Obama makes his announcement next week. We the citizens can help set the frame for Obama’s announcement. We should demonstrate resistance before he has even said anything, so the backlash will be even greater when he tells us he’s sending more troops.

So I hope others will join me and make up a sign, very legible from a distance, and protest where they live. You don’t need a big group to protest. A single sign can remind people of the war. All you need is a big audience. High-traffic intersections are excellent. So please, for the Iraqis and Afghans, make a sign and protest. If you wait around for the big organized protests, you will have waited too long. This is something you have to do on your own. Protesting with a small group of friends is fun too.

And if you’re already doing it, keep up the good work!

Busted Open Thread

Study: CEOs cashed in before Wall Street meltdown

The CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the two investment banks that collapsed during last year’s financial meltdown, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even as the company’s shareholders lost everything, says a new report from Harvard Law School.

The top five executives at Bear Stearns made a total of $1.4 billion from bonuses and equity sales between 2000 and 2008, while the top five executives at Lehman Brothers made around $1 billion during that same period — the period during which the companies ran up the bad investments that would see them collapse in 2008, according to “The Wages of Failure” (PDF), a report from Harvard Law School’s Program on Corporate Governance.

How to deal with cointelpro and/or stalker harassment

Cointelpro creeps and stalker exes do insist on coming back like a bad smell. Whether their job is to destabilize a group or to harass an individual, they share certain goals – to turn individuals against a group, and vice versa. To isolate victims with the clever use of psychology and information warfare. To cut someone out of the herd and run them down in every psychological manner possible.

It’s difficult to fight against this type of psychological warfare at first because it is based on the erosion of trust. One of the first reactions is naturally to overcompensate with a lack of trust. This is when they start calling you “paranoid”. A refusal to put up with very real psychological abuse which is hidden from the rest of the group by opportunism, circumstance and contrivance creates anger and insecurity, which the creeps then focus upon at the group level.

Over the years I have discovered that the best way to deal with hidden and not-so-hidden harassment from these directions IS directly, and without drawing anything or anyone else into the confrontation beyond the lies that the attacker has decided to incorporate. It is certain, as in carved-in-stone kind of certain, that the one aspect of this type of psyop which cannot be hidden is the attack itself. Info-warriors are always good for a thousand words, but their actions (or lack thereof!) NEVER lie.

A simple focus on the way you are being poorly treated by THIS INDIVIDUAL – backhanded compliments, rudeness, blatant lies, concern trolling – completely invalidates their agenda. Never draw others into it except to clearly show where the person’s credibility is in question. It’s tempting to make statements about other people or groups, but it’s important to realize that no matter how much your attacker is trying to speak for those people or those groups – and hopefully force your negative reaction to include them, IT’S NOT ABOUT THEM – it’s ONLY about you and your attacker.

Simple, clear, direct statements to the attacker should be your only response going forward:

YOU are lying to me. YOU are insulting me. I sent a very straightforward and comprehensive answer in good faith to this question the last time you asked it, which YOU completely ignored. YOU are pretending to ask me for help, but you have never once offered any help yourself, or you have devalued anything I’ve done for you in good faith in the past. YOU have gossiped about me. YOU have spread lies and rumors about me. YOU have treated me with a lack of honor and respect.

Not necessarily the group you pretend to represent. Not necessarily the people you pretend to speak for. YOU, yourself, and whatever sock puppets you’re using.

Nothing says “Fuck off, cointelpro stalking scumbag” like this.

By focusing on the extremely poor way the individual is treating you, it completely destroys whatever other false reality they are trying to create.

For example: an attacker can, via a sockpuppet email account, claim to be the CEO of Muckety Muck Corporation and state that he’s had a big come-to-Jesus session with the movers and shakers of Anti-War Group X as he presents his second thinly disguised delivery of condescending schadenfreude at your lack of steady employment, but whose word do you really have for any of that?

It is a waste of time to try to deconstruct these statements unless they can be immediately proven to be lies. What ultimately determines the credibility of a person’s information in the immediate is HOW THEY ARE TREATING YOU. If this IS an attack, then depend upon it – the attack will be part of the equation. Certainly misunderstandings happen, but if a pattern of repetitive problem behavior eventually emerges, dealing directly with it is a response that is reasonable, understandable, and extremely defensible if the resulting drama is somehow brought to the attention of a wider group.

An individual can’t really do anything about groups that have been infiltrated at high levels and/or turned, except move on and continue to act in a manner which gives the lie to what’s being said. People are easy to manipulate, especially these days – and today’s psyop jackasses have raised that manipulation to an art form. However, the one thing you CAN do in your defense is make it very, very clear to these twisted creeps that you are 100% out of the shit-taking business.

Since what they are in is 100% in the shit-GIVING business, this is a bit like firing them. It can be quite cathartic on that level alone. ;-7

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread

36 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Obama, Singh boost hopes of climate deal

AFP

2 hrs 24 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama sought to boost hopes of a landmark deal at the Copenhagen climate summit, as a new report showed the crisis facing the planet is deeper than previously thought.

Obama, hosting India’s leader at the White House a week after visiting top global polluter China, said recent progress meant the world was “one step closer to a successful outcome in Copenhagen.”

Countries must “reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty,” he told a press conference with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Twenty Thousand Years of Memory 20091125

You do not know what it was like.  What you now know of as central Europe was cold as cold could be.  My people lived there.  We were Neanderthals.  Most moderns think that we were stupid.  We were not.

Nor did we look “odd” to you.  The skeletons that you moderns found were from our elders, and after three or four hundreds of years, of course they look primitive.  I assure you that they were not.  They were our elders that passed on the genetic trait of longevity that I have.

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

hmmmmm


via videosift.com

Have you had enough?

Have you had enough of the lies?  The politics?  The broken promises?

Have you had enough of the Obama administration providing cover for the Bush cabal, watching as he pushes some of their arguments in court, and trying to implement indefinite detention?

Have you had enough, knowing that Xe, i.e. Blackwater, is still working for the Obama State Department?  That the Obama administration worked behind closed doors to undermine REAL health care reform by promising the industry they would be able to retain profits?

Have you simply had enough?

(crossposted at Daily Kos)

Pique the Geek 20091129: American Scientists. Robert Milliken. The Oil Drop Experiment

One of standard measurements that we take for granted these days is the charge of a single electron.  This is a vivid example of how scientific knowledge has exploded during the past century.  In 1870, there was no concept of an electron, and atoms were just very crudely becoming accepted.

After the turn of the previous century, it was generally accepted that there were atoms, and that electrons were likely a part of them, but no one knew much about them.  We still have not all of the answers, but Robert Milliken elucidated the intrinsic charge of the electron in xxxx.

145th Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre of Nov. 29th, 1864


Chief Black Kettle:

I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.


BOMBSHELL! Blackwater’s secret war in Pakistan exposed

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Can anybody explain why Bush/Cheney Accountability is NOT happening?

    Jeremy Scahill blows the lid off “Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan” in an article just published in The Nation. This story brings together an amazing array of bad actors: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Stanley McChrystal and Blackwater. It should come as no surprise, then, that the outcome of this team working together is a jaw-dropping tale of war crimes that continue to be carried out.

The entire story should be read . . . .

Jim White at Firedoglake.com

Bold text added by the diarist

     Quotes from Scahill’s article, commentary and more below the fold, but I SERIOUSLY urge you to read Scahill’s article in it’s entirety first.

Jacob Marley had a tennis bracelet

NPK has a diary on the rec list, (where this diary does not belong) that got me thinking. The kind of filth NPK describes won’t go away. It has to be dealt with to have any hope of transforming a life. That is the conclusion I’ve reached after listening to a few faith leaders and health professionals, so here goes nothing:

 

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