October 24, 2011 archive

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The Stars Hollow Gazette

Occupy Wall Street Monday 10.24.11

For more Info, other editions in this series can be found HERE

and up-to-date OWS Basic Info is HERE



Occupy the London Stock Exchange

A Movement in Slow Motion from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Wikileaks May Shut Down

LONDON – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday that financial problems may lead to the closure of the notorious secret-spilling site at the end of this year.

“If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year,” he said. “If we don’t knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue.”

The banksters have succeeded in starving 95% of wikileaks’ funds, and they have stopped posting new leaks, in order to concentrate on fund-raising.

The statement says that in order to ensure survival, WikiLeaks must “aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents.



from here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

WikiLeaks is under attack by the big financial services companies , but there are still ways you can beat them.

Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.

As a result of exposing U.S. embassies from around the world, five major US financial institutions, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and the Bank of America, have tried to economically strangle WikiLeaks The attack has blocked over 95% of our donations, costing tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. The attack is entirely political. In fact, in the only formal review to occur, the US Treasury found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to financial blockade .

From the wikileaks donation page, here:

http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

Cartnoon

The Night of the Living Duck

Occupy Wall St. Livestream: Day 38

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

OccupyWallStreet

The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza 😉

“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author

Occupy Wall Street: Naomi Wolf calls attention to the disturbing involvement of Homeland Security in her arrest

Naomi Wolf, political activist and author of “Give Me Liberty,” calls attention to the enormous power that the federal government can wield to prevent constitutionally guaranteed rights. “History shows they start with the Other and it gets closer and closer and closer and someday they come for you.”

Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly  with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.

The First Amendment and the Obligation to Peacefully Disrupt in a Free Society

by Naomi Wolf

Mayor Bloomberg is planning Draconian new measures to crack down on what he calls the “disruption” caused by the protesters at Zuccotti Park, and he is citing neighbors’ complaints about noise and mess. This set of talking points, and this strategy, is being geared up as well by administrations of municipalities around the nation in response to the endurance and growing influence of the Occupation protest sites. But the idea that any administration has the unmediated option of “striking a balance,” in Bloomberg’s words, that it likes, and closing down peaceful and lawful disruption of business as usual as it sees fit is a grave misunderstanding — or, more likely, deliberate misrepresentation — of our legal social contract as American citizens.

Some kinds of disruption in a free republic are not “optional extras” if the First Amendment governs the land, as it does ours, and are certainly not subject to the whims of mayors or local police, or even DHS. Just as protesters don’t have a blanket right to do everything they want, there is absolutely no blanket right of mayors or even of other citizens to be free from the effect of certain kinds of disruption resulting from their fellow citizens exercising First Amendment rights. That notion, presented right now by Bloomberg and other vested interests, of a “disruption-free” social contract is pure invention — just like the flat-out fabrication of the nonexistent permit cited in my own detention outside the Huffington Post Game Changers event this last Tuesday, when police told me, without the event organizers’ knowledge and contrary to their intentions, that a private entity had “control of the sidewalks” for several hours. (In fact, the permit in question — a red carpet event permit! — actually guarantees citizens’ rights to walk and even engage in political assembly on the streets if they do not block pedestrian traffic, as the OWS protesters were not.)

Sean Lennon and Rufus Wainright Jamming at #OWS-NYC

On This Day In History October 24

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 68 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1901, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. After her husband died in the Civil War, the New York-born Taylor moved all over the U. S. before settling in Bay City, Michigan, around 1898. In July 1901, while reading an article about the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, she learned of the growing popularity of two enormous waterfalls located on the border of upstate New York and Canada. Strapped for cash and seeking fame, Taylor came up with the perfect attention-getting stunt: She would go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Desiring to secure her later years financially, she decided she would be the first person to ride Niagara Falls in a barrel. Taylor used a custom-made barrel for her trip, constructed of oak and iron and padded with a mattress. Several delays occurred in the launching of the barrel, particularly because no one wanted to be part of a potential suicide. Two days before Taylor’s own attempt, a domestic cat was sent over the Horseshoe Falls in her barrel to test its strength. Contrary to rumors at the time, the cat survived the plunge unharmed and later was posed with Taylor in photographs.

On October 24, 1901, her 63rd birthday, the barrel was put over the side of a rowboat, and Taylor climbed in, along with her lucky heart-shaped pillow. After screwing down the lid, friends used a bicycle tire pump to compress the air in the barrel. The hole used for this was plugged with a cork, and Taylor was set adrift near the American shore, south of Goat Island.

The Niagara River currents carried the barrel toward the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, which has since been the site for all daredevil stunting at Niagara Falls. Rescuers reached her barrel shortly after the plunge. Taylor was discovered to be alive and relatively uninjured, save for a small gash on her head. The trip itself took less than twenty minutes, but it was some time before the barrel was actually opened. After the journey, Annie Taylor told the press:

If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat… I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.

She briefly earned money speaking about her experience, but was never able to build much wealth. Her manager, Frank M. Russell, decamped with her barrel, and most of her savings were used towards private detectives hired to find it. It was eventually located in Chicago, only to permanently disappear some time later.

Annie Taylor died on April 29, 1921, aged 82, at the Niagara County Infirmary in Lockport, New York. She is interred in the “Stunters Section” of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York.

Thom Hartmann’s Worst Show EVAH

Crossposted at Firedoglake.com and ThomHartmann.com

I had the misfortune of listening to a podcast of Thom Hartmann’s show on Friday, October 21 ’11.  I was afraid from the title (“Obama’s announcement of Iraq troop draw down”) that it would be a sickening gushfest over the Sellout-in-Chief’s latest political maneuvering, but was astonished at the sheer depths to which Hartmann has fallen in his attempts to bolster this tool of the banksters and war criminals.

I’ve listened to the show for 6 years now.  Thom was once the one I could always count on for honest reporting and commentary.   He would fearlessly tell the truth, regardless of whose ox was being gored, and let the chips fall where they would.  Since his move to Washington from Portland, though, I’ve noticed a steady slide into shameless partisanship and lesser-of-two-evilism.  I’ve written several pieces trying to get Thom to tell why he would so readily support O’Bushma at the expense of We the People and the truth, but he has not responded; instead, he keeps repeating the same mindless drivel about the Supreme Court, the healthcare-“reform” scam, and other meritless foolishness.

I am going to go over the second hour of this particular show and point out the many ways that Thom has sold out, and now just seems to be a tool of the Blue Shit branch of the Democratic Party.

Rhymes with “Krakatoa’s gonna blow.”

Hustlers control the flow,

They lost their bets and now you owe

The deepest hole that they bestow,

A parting gift, the final blow.

Making off with all that dough,

Their stocks have hit a high plateau.

40 something years ago

The middle class was on the go,

Now what you “own” is what you owe,

The underwater big chateau

How far is down, how low is low?

Don’t look up, watch out below!

Hopey Changey’s status quo

Is emptier than a Home Depot

In jobless ranks he’s called “no-show.”

Of course, he’ll ask you to forgo

Retirement, the afterglow.

While bettors bet the food yo-yo,

And savings earn a fat zero.

Whose woods these are I think I know:

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

The game’s been rigged to steal the show.

Angry protests grow and grow,

The cops responding with a blow

To the Charter’s final throe.

Tectonic plates begin to glow,

The sulphurous pyroclastic flow

Three times around the world will go.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

–Leonardo da Vinci



Yellow Road

Late Night Karaoke

The Next Round Of Insanity

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

And it isn’t the first time.

Dexia gets new bailout with €4bn Belgian deal

The Franco-Belgian bank Dexia has become the first casualty of the 2011 banking crisis, with its Belgian arm being bought by the government and Belgium, France and Luxembourg providing a €90bn (£78bn) guarantee for its financing.

The bank, which specialises in local government financing and provides backing for more than 40 private finance initiative projects in the UK, ran into difficulties after its €3.4bn of exposure to Greece sparked concerns about its ability to absorb losses on the positions.

Other banks no longer wanted to lend it enough money to keep operating and it is expected to be the first of many to need bailing out during the renewed crisis in the sector. Alastair Ryan, analyst at UBS, reckoned eurozone governments could end up owning 40% of the sector if €200bn is needed to prop up banks – as estimated by the International Monetary Fund. Austrian bank Erste yesterday warned it would make a loss because of the eurozone crisis.

The embattled board of Dexia, which in 2008 received €6bn of assistance from France and Belgium, met on Sunday before it was announced on Monday that Belgium would pay €4bn for the operations in its country. Dexia shares resumed trading after last week’s suspension and fell almost 5%.

What Atrios said:

The CEO only earned a couple of million euros in each of the past couple of years. Worth every penny!

Repeating the same failed policies over and over expecting different results = Insanity

Pique the Geek 20111023: All about Zebras

I know that this is sort of a subject about which I do not write often, since I am, for the life sciences, more botanist than zoologist.  But this topic was by special request from a friend, that friend indicating that zebras are her or his favorite animal.  So Zebras it is.

Actually, as I began doing research on them, I also became fascinated with them as well.  Not only are they extremely handsome animals, they have an extremely complex diversification into diverse subspecies, something that I vaguely knew but was very interested to learn more about as the research continued.

Zebras are uniquely African, except of course for those that have been taken away from there.  They are very much allied with horses and asses, but with some twists.  One of the most interesting thing is that the accepted scientific name for them is likely erroneous, but that comes later.