All Discussions - Occupy Together Forum

An alternative to a world of greed and money

wilson12 — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:55:43 -0600

Wouldn't you dream to live in a world where everyone can afford the things he needs. Everybody gets a fair value back for the work he's doing and everyone in the community has an equal good standard of living. No one has to work 12 hours a day to get through live.

Well this world doesn't have to remain a dream. What's needed is a system that prevents single individuals from collecting all the riches of a community for themselves leaving the others with nothing. And it has to assure your workforce doesn't get stolen by some official institutions who will spend the taxes they collect for insane wars.

Well that system is closer to you then you might think, together we can make it real. But first let's have a look at our current situation.

At the moment things don't look to good for our financial system, the collapse of our currency may happen soon. Well, since the whole system was a rip off anyway it probably isn't sad it'll be gone. (Of what value is money when banks can get it printed infinitely, only you are supposed to work and earn it? It should be obvious who is the master and who the slave in this game.)

But what's next, after the Dollar / Euro or whatever currency is gone. Should everybody just sit around jobless or wander the streets in search of food without any means to buy any of the goods that still exist in the shops just like before the collapse? Wait till the Banks print new bills and the same corrupt system starts over again just like before?

No there is an alternative! A system which let's you generate your own currency. You yourself give it value and it's a fair system where counterfeiting is nearly impossible.

In the monetary system you worked for money. You can then spend that earned money for services and goods. The new system works basically the same, only that you don't use money anymore. Instead it works like this. You help somebody you like, preferably a friend of yours. Normally you wouldn't take money for this because you know he will help you as well when the time comes. This time the two of you will write a favor note. You write on a peace of paper what kind of favor you did for him, how many hours you helped him and your friend will write on that paper what skills he has to return a favor to you. In the end your friend will sign the paper to confirm he really received the favor. Now you get to keep that favor note. When the time comes you need a favor you can present it back to him to get the favour, but you can also trade this favor note with another person.

In example you helped your friend Joe painting his house for 4 hours. He'll write a favor note stating that he received this favor from you and since he happens to be an auto mechanic he in return will work on your car for 4 hours. But he is also able to help you gardening your backyard or clean your pool or put up a satellite dish. He will write all of that on the note which you keep. A week later you need help with your computer. You know Frank could help you. He's a computer expert and he also knows Joe. So you ask Frank for his help and you can offer him your own favors in return plus the skills of Joe who's favor note you own. Since Frank has a problem with his car he will be happy to take the note of Joe to fix up his car. He'll present it to Joe who will remember how well you helped him painting his house an he will be happy to help Frank instead. After Franks car has been repaired Joe gets his favor note back and destroys it since the favor has been returned. If repairing the car has taken more then 4 hours Frank will now simply write a favor note to Joe for the extra hours.

This way everybody got the services he needed, no money was involved in the transaction and over time you get to know a lot of people, their skills and since everybody helped each other you'll make a lot of new friends.

Now some people might say one hour of work from a computer expert is worth more then one hour of a mechanic. I don't think so. Everybodys lifespan is limited. One hour of your life should be just as much worth as an hour of your friends lives. Everybodys life is of equal value and when everybody does his best according to his talent it's a fair deal to me. Of course it's up to you how you come about with your friends you could bargain out different rates if you like.

If you practice this favor system for a while your Name will become your own brand. Depending on how well and reliable you work everybody will be happy to accept your favor notes. Your reputation will build up depending on what a nice helpful person you are. What a contrast to the previous system where the biggest ripoff got to be the wealthiest person in the end. In the favor system an insincere person won't last long, nobody will like to do business with him or accept his favor notes. The society will clean itself of crooks like it naturally should be.

This system will work better and better as people get used to it. And in this way the people who lived side by side to each other without contact will gradually turn into a lively community where help, support and honesty belongs to the daily routine.

You can also trade goods against services. In this system no one can collect endless riches because if a favor note hasn't been used for 10 years nobody will remember the original favor has been fulfilled back then. They naturally wear out after a view years since the return favor obviously wasn't needed. Also there is no interest in favors and nobody can be made responsible to pay back favors somebody else received. This way nobody can get into huge debt anymore.

You will no longer ask yourself 'Why am I doing this job?' You will know why you do it because you yourself wrote down the favor you received up front on a note with you signature on it. After the favor has been returned you just destroy the note. You payed back the favor and nobody can come to you with a fake note because you remember it's already fulfilled.

After a while you will help each other on a regular basis. Your neighbors have become your friends. You won't need to use favor notes anymore. Everyone will automatically keep track in their head of who deserves a favor from whom.

The favor system is designed to work in your local area. Doing business with the people you know and like also is the only guaranty to not get ripped off by the faceless puppet masters who sit on top of every country. You'll be surprised how much you can accomplish when not half of your workforce has been taken away from you to finance wars.

How to make it real?
Spread this idea by e-mail as far as you can. Mail it to your friends that you think might be open to it. Talk about it to people. Discuss it with your friends and family. The more people know about it the sooner it will become reality.

But most important of all, use it! Try the favour system with your friends. Test it out in real life. You might find some ways to still improve it. You are free to write your favor note in the way you think is right.
Just make sure you don't put any legal terms on it, because lawyers with their rotten morals would spoil the whole spirit of the system. It's a system of trust and sincerity, based on your values not on laws. If someone isn't willing to treat his friends fair he will be singled out naturally by this system.
Make sure to not give any binding statements on the note. Just write down the facts what service you received by whom, how many hours, date, what you could do in return and your signature or some sign which you use instead of your signature where you can tell it was written by you.

It's a system of love and friendship instead of greed and extrusion.

This way we will break the power of the banks. We'll simply don't use their money anymore!

"What if....."

Sandcat7 — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:00:49 -0700

What if we don't like ANY of the 2012 candidates?

I mean - NONE of them? You want to vote out whoever's currently in office or in Congress, etc., but what good is it when they just pick MORE ignoramuses to take their place? That's what I see happening now. They're ALL part of the greater problem. They're ALL self-serving, greedy do-nothings.

So imagine if the entire country held a "voting strike". (Yes, I know that could never happen... there will always be those who think the ignoramuses running for office are just fine). But imagine a scenario in which, somehow, the entire country of citizens decides to just boycott the entire election.

What would happen if, on election day, NO ONE showed up at the polls? Not a single, solitary person? Do they have a contingency plan for that? What do you think they would do next? Schedule another election? Go on TV and chastise us? Call out the National Guard? Leave existing elected officials in office? Or just pick whoever THEY like, and appoint them? (Which - let's face it - is pretty much what they already do. Our votes don't really count for squat anymore, anyway - U.S. elections are pretty rigged.

Anyway, I just thought I'd put that out there. It's what I wish we could do in 2012, because I don't see a single solitary person running for office who has any leadership qualities whatsoever, just their own personal desires for personal gain. What happens to the rest of us is not their concern

S21: Occupy the Nukes | OWS Environmental Solidarity

no_nukes — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 21:22:51 -0600

"This should be the largest rally against nukes in decades.
Come hop on the bus." - OWS Environmental Solidarity

(facebook) https://www.facebook.com/events/382655568472992/

Occupy the Nukes
Friday, September 21 at 9:00am in EDT at Union Square

Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity, in cahoots with our friends at Shut Down Indian Point Now!, will be riding to Washington on Friday September 21 to Occupy the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our message is simple, No Nukes, Renewable Energy for the 99% Now. Our bus will be departing from Union Square at 9am on Friday. Call in sick or tell your personal Mr. Burns you've gone to take a stand against the nuclear industrial complex. Please RSVP to this address: tomsiracuse@hotmail.com and please provide your phone #.
For more info on where we're headed check out: http://coalitionagainstnukes.org/ai1ec_event/rally-no-nukes-no-war/?instance_id=385

Rally: NO NUKES – NO WAR / Occupy the NRC | CAN | September 21, 2012 | Rockville, Maryland

no_nukes — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:36:19 -0600

Rally: NO NUKES – NO WAR / Occupy the NRC
http://coalitionagainstnukes.org/ai1ec_event/rally-no-nukes-no-war/

WHEN: September 21, 2012 (all-day)
WHERE: NRC Headquarters
11545 Rockville Pike
Rockville
Maryland

Rally for a NUKE FREE future / Occupy The NRC @ 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland, This will include a peaceful protest outside the building and a public meeting inside the building if possible. This Rally will have a NO NUKES/NO WAR theme and Speakers will address the numerous nuclear issues across the country from Vermont Yankee to Indian Point to North Anna to Palisades to Davis Besse to Fermi to Hanford to San Onofre and beyond! Speakers will also address the crime against humanity enabled by the NRC when they allowed Depleted Uranium, previously considered Nuclear Waste to be used in bombs being dropped around the planet by the US military. 2pm -5:00pm (confirmed)

more: http://coalitionagainstnukes.org/ai1ec_event/rally-no-nukes-no-war/

**
#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

NUCLEAR FREE CONVERGENCE on DC September 20th, 21st and 22nd

no_nukes — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:58:21 -0600

Coalition Against Nukes

JOIN THE COALITION AGAINST NUKES FOR A NUCLEAR FREE CONVERGENCE ON OUR NATION’S CAPITOL
September 20th, 21st and 22nd

SEPTEMBER NO NUKES convergence on Washington D.C.
It’s time to really FOCUS on nuclear power issues BEFORE the 2012 presidential election! The Coalition Against Nukes is organizing an anti-nuclear convergence in Washington, DC, Sept. 20-22, 2012 to FULLY EXPOSE the nuclear crisis in Japan and its relevance to the insidious nuclear industry in the United States. This is a GRASSROOTS effort and we need YOUR INVOLVEMENT for these events to be successful! We must maximize AWARENESS before the election to bring attention to the dangers of nuclear power. We would like to engage the pro-nuclear presidential candidates in this discussion and welcome the participation of all anti-nuclear candidates, especially the likely Green Party nominee, Jill Stein. We are also seeking the support and endorsement of high profile members of the film, arts and music industries. It is time to step up and demonstrate your true colors for a Nuclear Free future! Your action is needed NOW MORE THAN EVER!!

more > Coalition Against Nukes http://coalitionagainstnukes.org/no-nukes-rally-in-d-c/

#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

#OccupyNuclear

no_nukes — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:24:34 -0600

#OccupyNuclear :)
| FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/groups/OccupyNuclear
| BLOG http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupynuclear.html
| NEWS: The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
#OcNuke #nonukes #ows

ANTI NUCLEAR PROTEST EVERY MONDAY 6PM LA SAN DIEGO, SAN JOSE, SF, FRESNO, SACTO, OAKLAND

no_nukes — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:23:40 -0600

ANTI NUCLEAR PROTEST EVERY MONDAY 6PM LOS ANGELES, SAN DIEGO, SAN JOSE, SAN FRANCISCO, FRESNO, SACRAMENTO, OAKLAND - MEET: TOWNHALL

Anti Nuclear Protest EVERY MONDAY 6pm Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Oakland - Meet: Townhall 6pm
STOP San Onofre + Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant EARTHQUAKE ZONE 8,5-9,0 Richter Scale

NO WE DO NOT !! WANT TO EVACUATE ALL OF CALIFORNIA FOR 10 MILLION YEARS BECAUSE SOME MORON HAS BUILT SAN ONOFRE AND DIABLO CANYON NUCLEAR PLANTS INTO THE WORST !!! WORST !!!! POSSIBLE EARTHQUAKE LOCATION WORLDWIDE.....!!!

http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/10482

***
#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | #nonukes | #RE_TOOL
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

ANTI NUCLEAR PROTEST EVERY MONDAY 6PM LA SAN DIEGO, SAN JOSE, SF, FRESNO, SACTO, OAKLAND

no_nukes — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:23:19 -0600

Wage Labor and Capital

typenamehere — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:16:06 -0600

Marx's analysis of the conflicting forces of wage labor and capital. Great read, check it out here http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm

Also available as an audiobook on librivox.

OCCUPY NUKES hiroshima day AUGUST 6 | OWS Environmental Solidarity Working Group

no_nukes — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:16:36 -0600

OWS Environmental Solidarity Working Group calls for OCCUPY NUKES, a national day of action against the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. On August 6th, Hiroshima Day, take action against a part of the war machine–nuclear warheads, which number 10,000–that takes up $7.6 billion of the Obama FY 2012 budget.

The 99% have tools to transform this waste and danger into structures that meet our real needs: true sustainability, (true security,) just food production, jobs, renewable energy, affordable housing, education, and economic justice. We awaken in order to do so on August 6.

Occupy Nukes will take place in New York City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Los Alamos, NM, as well as in solidarity with what activists do all over the world at this time to remember the U.S. government’s use of nuclear warfare, to oppose its continued use of nuclear warfare (as with depleted-uranium weaponry), and to radically turn from nuclear technology and dirty power.
To participate in New York City, our direct action will meet across from the (eastern face of the) GE Building (30 Rockefeller Plaza), at the steps that descend into the sunken cafe area. Be there at 5:30pm, August 6. Wear black.
Details for participating in the New Mexico actions and the action in San Francisco can be found here:http://www.occupynewmexico.org/august-6-national-day-of-action-against-the-u-s-nuclear-weapons-arsenal/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=august-6-national-day-of-action-against-the-u-s-nuclear-weapons-arsenal and here: http://nukefreenow.org/.

Aug 1 BlogTalkRadio Interview of OWS Author Robert Sheppard, On His New OWS Novel, Spiritus Mundi

robertsheppard — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:20:32 -0600

Invitation to Listen to BlogTalkRadio Interview of Author Robert Sheppard, On His New Occupy Wall Street Novel, Spiritus Mundi, Aug. 1, 10 AM PST

All are welcome to listen in on the Internet to the scheduled Interview of well-known author Robert Sheppard by Host Robert (Bob) Rose, discussing Sheppard's global epic Occupy Wall Street/World War III/United Nations Parliamentary Assembly Novel, Spiritus Mundi. Tune in Aug.1 at BlogTalkRadio:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/icdrrose

“Robert Sheppard's new novel “Spiritus Mundi” is a new twist on a well-loved genre. Robert leaves no stone unturned in this compelling page turner you’ll experience mystery, suspense, thrills, and excitement. Robert touches on sexuality and spirituality in such a way that the reader is compelled to ask themselves “what would you do if faced with these trials?” Robert is a master at taking the reader out of their own lives and into the world he created. If you’re looking for a “can’t put down” read pick up Spiritus Mundi!” May 20, 2012

Nicole Breanne, Content Coordinator, Ranker.com
______

“Read Robert Sheppard's sprawling, supple novel, Spiritus Mundi, an epic story of global intrigue and sexual and spiritual revelation. Compelling characters, wisdom insight, and beautiful depictions of locations all over the world will power you through the book. You'll exit wishing the story lines would go on and on.” May 13, 2012

Robert McDowell, Editor, Writer, Marketer, Editorial Cra, The Nature of Words

______________________________________________________

“Robert Sheppard's exciting new novel, Spiritus Mundi, is an unforgettable read and epic journey of high adventure and self-discovery across the scarred landscape of the modern world and into the mysteries beyond. Its compelling saga reveals the sexual and spiritual lives of struggling global protesters and idealists overcoming despair, nuclear terrorism, espionage and a threatened World War III to bring the world together from the brink of destruction with a revolutionary United Nations Parliamentary Assembly and spiritual rebirth. This modern epic is a must read and compelling vision of the future for all Citizens of the Modern World and a beacon of hope pointing us all towards a better world struggling against all odds to be born.” May 19, 2012

Lara Biyuts, Reviewer and Blogger at Goodreads.com and Revue Blanche
_____________

Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read About the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com/
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexual Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com/
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com/
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com/
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/

All the Best.

Robert Sheppard
Author, Spritus Mundi, Novel

Listen to BlogTalkRadio Interview of Author Robert Sheppard, On His New OWS Novel Spiritus Mundi

robertsheppard — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:14:11 -0600

Hello Occupy Together

DarryllxH — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:34:11 -0600

Hello Occupy Together,

My name is Darryll H.
The Occupy community of Harrisburg, PA has maintained a physical Occupation at the Pennsylvania's Capitol Building since 10-15-2011. #OccupyEverything

The Chevy Volt is a faliure.

mando61 — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:31:10 -0700

Has anyone been following this story. The new GMC came out with the new Volt a while back. It won all kinds of awards. Much of the motoring press said it was a wonderful car. But know one is buying it. Why? I did a search and I found out it only has an electric range of about 40 miles! Then when the battery gives out it goes right to a tiny gas motor which makes the underpowered car only get 35 MPG. But the main reason no one is buying it is because the car costs $37,000! After all the Gov rebates it comes to about $30,000 . And this is not a luxury car at all. It is more like a Chevy Malibu. Folks know that they can get a nice BMW 3 series for that kind of money. Also GM cars usually have terrible resale value. EV cars in general are a really bad idea. Even the new Nissan Leaf only can go 100 miles on a charge. Then it must charge for several hours to go 100 more. So I checked some more. Even with all the technology that we have the new EV cars do not go any farther than the GM Impact did 25 years ago!!! How can this be? If you remember the Impact was also a terrible faliure. Costco even had plug in stations for them. I know that Obama wants folks to go green and buy these cars but what is the towing capacity on these cars? How could you take your family on vacation to Yeallowstone or the Grand Canyon from San Diego? How could you go anywhere? The truth is EV cars are still not ready yet. They are still many years off before folks will want them. Here in the greater LA area they just will not work. IMHO I think the hybrid cars like the Prius are still the best cars to go green. What do you think?

Tar Sands Blockade Calls For Non-Violent Direct Action In Texas To Stop The Keystone XL Pipeline

no_nukes — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:01:49 -0600

http://tarsandsblockade.org/

The Tar Sands Blockade is a peaceful direct action designed to pressure the state of Texas to reject the Keystone XL pipeline and to inspire communities along the pipeline’s path to organize their own direct actions to block the pipeline. The Gulf Coast portion of the pipeline is phase 3 of the much larger cross-border pipeline from Canada. Stopping this one project will be a major blow to dirty energy and will help steer the south toward a clean energy future.
We are focused on building a broad coalition in Texas and Oklahoma, in communities across the south impacted by tar sands production. By working with diverse groups, our goal is to bring 1,000 people to Texas to participate in this action. Many action participants will be engaging in civil disobedience for the first time, and we are committed to providing resources to make this the accessible, empowering, and effective action we all need. We know that, from Texas to Alberta, we will win the fight against Big Oil by uniting with all communities impacted.

A Call for Nonviolent Direct Action to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline from the Tar Sands Blockade
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2012/06/25/tar-sands-blockade-calls-for-non-violent-direct-action-in-texas-to-stop-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/

Texas—This summer, environmental activists from across the country will be converging in Texas to blockade the Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Tar Sands Blockade will be coordinating nonviolent direct actions along the pipeline route to stop the zombie pipeline once and for all. We are working with national allies as well as local communities to coordinate a road show that will travel throughout Texas and Oklahoma as well as a regional training effort for activists interested in getting involved in the blockade movement against the Keystone XL.

***
NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
The Robert Cherwink Daily #RCdaily
#RobertCherwinkDaily
http://tinyurl.com/RCdaily

#BigOil #KXL #environment #climate #climatechange #energy #wind #solar #biofeul #electric #renewable #sustainable #RE_TOOL
#activism #ows #occupy #occupywallstreet #occupywallst #99power

Independence From Entergy Rally & Action | Sage Alliance | Brattleboro VT | July 1 2012

no_nukes — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:32:46 -0600

Independence From Entergy Rally & Action
http://sagealliance.net/actions/vermont-yankee-action-7-1-12

Location: The Common, Brattleboro VT http://goo.gl/maps/vhZ7

When: Jul 1 2012 - 10:00am to 5:00pm

We are not going away until Entergy shuts down & safely decommissions VT Yankee!
The Action starts at the Brattleboro Common at 10am on Sunday July 1st. Map to Brattleboro Common: http://goo.gl/maps/vhZ7

RALLY & RIDE: Come by foot, car, or bicycle. After a 45 minute Rally, school buses will be leaving the Common for the Vermont Yankee gates. A small donation will be requested before boarding the bus. Alternatively, we encourage people to join a bicycle procession from the Common to Vermont Yankee in Vernon. This is a relatively flat 8 mile ride. All riders should be able to keep pace with a large group of Adult riders.

Click here for a map of Brattleboro public parking. No fees on Sundays. At the conclusion of the action (around 3pm), the buses will return to the Transportation Center parking garage on Flat Street.

ACTION: Once assembled near Vermont Yankee there will be a procession to the reactor gates involving much theater and costuming. Then some of us will engage in non-violent civil disobedience (CD) action. People engaging in the CD will need to have had nonviolence training, and be in affinity groups. Supporters are most welcome!

more: http://sagealliance.net/actions/vermont-yankee-action-7-1-12

**
#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

No Nukes Action Committee - UPCOMING EVENTS SF BAY AREA, LA, WEST COAST

no_nukes — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:30:51 -0600

UPCOMING EVENTS SF BAY AREA, LA, WEST COAST
No Nukes Action ‏@nnac_news
http://nonukesaction.wordpress.com/

June 30th 10AM: General meeting at Revolution Cafe (1612 7th Street Oakland, CA). Open to public, but mostly planning for Chieko Shiina tour!

July 6th to July 19th: State-wide Anti-Nukes Tour with Ms. Chieko Shiina in San Diego, San Clemente, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Marin County, Bohemian Grove, SF!

July 10th: An evening with Chieko Shiina, a Fukushima survivor, サン・ルイス・オビスポ郡　フクシマを生き延びる椎名千恵子さんを囲んでの夕食会 http://wp.me/p1Avt7-da

July 9th, LA: 原発再稼動を決めた日本政府に対する“福島被災者”の思い http://wp.me/p1Avt7-cY

July 7th, San Diego "Fukushima Update: Special Visitor from Fukushima!"　「原発いらない福島の女たち」の椎名千恵子さんがサンディエゴを訪問します！ http://wp.me/p1Avt7-cP

< #OccupyNuclear | #nuclear #nukes #nonukes #antinuclear #nukefreecal #NoNuclear

KNOW NUKES Y'ALL SUMMIT Jn28-30: Chattanooga http://knownukesyallsummit.org/ < #OccupyNuclear

no_nukes — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:53:19 -0600

KNOW NUKES Y'ALL SUMMIT

The South is ground zero for the attempted nuclear power revival,
and is becoming a nuclear waste dump for the world.

Environmental groups are gathering to learn and to teach
one another and the public about

NUCLEAR ISSUES
in the SOUTH

June 28, 29, 30
University of Tennessee
at Chattanooga
University Center

http://knownukesyallsummit.org/ < #OccupyNuclear #nukes #nonukes #antinuclear #genpatsu #nukefreecal #ows

No Nukes Action Committee General meeting June 30 Revolution Cafe Oakland

no_nukes — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:42:08 -0600

No Nukes Action Committee General meeting June 30 Revolution Cafe Oakland http://nonukesaction.wordpress.com/ < #OccupyNuclear @nnac_news #nukefreecal #ows

A Collective Framework for Future Subversive Movements: The Social Co-Op

lamebuffaloinabook — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 06:45:17 -0600

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to present definitively a unique framework in which the Occupy movement of concomitant popularity, and other similar movements, may certainly succeed. This theory is predicated upon the collective adoption of social cooperation- that is, if one is in need of food, it is given to them, if one is in need of water, it is given to them, if one is in need of a book, it is given to them. This framework devalues the utilization of assemblies, and operates under the pretense that if the principles of social doctrine which these movements support are implemented, they will have succeeded.

Introduction: It is the purpose of this work to introduce a theory of social cooperation. In actuality, it would be more correct to say that this work constitutes the redefinition of a theory of social cooperation- one based upon the principals of collective, communal interaction.
Throughout New York City, it is not uncommon to witness the Occupy movement. Many passers-by treat it as a spectacle of sorts; perhaps discussing matters amongst themselves, or the police. The police are there, in hordes as well- at least, that is, the last time I witnessed it. They surround the streets at every turn, they have roped off the protesters with yellow tape, and attached to their belts, amongst the standard tools of the trade, if you will, are hundreds of economical handcuffs- a rather ironic implementation. It is in the zip ties that they carry by the hundreds that they have debased the progress of society. It is in the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the fractured skulls, the beaten women, men and children, that they have debased progress.
The hindrance of progress is not uncommon, so please, do not get too incensed about it. It has happened and will continue to happen. The society which we inhabit is not a unique instance, either. It is but another failed facet of the human experiment. Mostly, its' failure lies in its reinforcement of division- the segregation of human beings factually into classes, the subjugation and social rectification of the masses, all serve in praxis to divide.
What is the true nature of our society? It is one of division. You see, those that have been educated will continue to educate their offspring, in whatever manner they see fit. Those that have not been educated will continue to constitute the mass of society. Those who have been educated have manipulated the system to their advantage. But, no manipulation is exercised without subsequent manipulation of the self. Thusly segregation occurs. Those who possess, the "Bourgeois", the "rich", the "1%", such semantics are merely talking points. No true progress has ever been made on the basis of semantics alone. It is the implementation of the ideology either deriving or derivative of the semantics, that constitutes a basis therefore.
Within the various factions of the U.S. Occupy movements, there is little to no ideological consistency. These are factions that are met with police resistance at every turn, people are being hurt, there are some instances of vandalism which have occurred. These are certainly not favorable conditions for progress to be made.
To clarify, when I say "progress", I mean explicitly the eradication of the wage/commodity system of economics, I am referring to the need-based communal cooperation of society, organized regionally, I am referring to a system which may most aptly be characterized as Democratic Utopian Maoism, or, at the individual level, social co-ops. I am writing as to the necessity of such eradication, and implore each individual who may read this to consider the following argument for doing so.

You have come to be, in some way, disillusioned with society. Be it through the immensity of student debt, be it through empathic concern for the state of humanity, be it through whatever, you have sought to express your displeasure. You have done so through assembly. You have gathered in public places to express a vague, often ambivalent and ephemeral ideology with little to no basis amongst the actual members of the assembly for the said ideology you which to express. Such assembly is thus not expressing an ideology. That is to say, by gathering in public places, such movements as the Occupy movement do little to nothing to accomplish nothing.
Consider the true nature of our society. There is no such thing as social freedom within our world. We are all universally free to do as we wish, there is simply a vast body of idiots regulating our freedom, impugning upon it at every turn a reduction, until there is little left but shit.
Money is the reason your parents get up and go to work. Money is the reason your parents bought a house. Money is the reason you went to college. Money is the reason you get up and go to work. Money is the reason you eat. Money is the reason you drink. Money is the reason you read a book. Money is the reason.
But you see, rather curiously, money isn't real, and we have chosen it as superior to what is real, or at least a dominant majority has designated it as such. You don't have to get up and go to work, you don't have to answer telephones, or type, or write copy. You don't have to buy a house to have shelter. You don't have to pay to learn. You don't have to have money to eat. Money is not inherent to the biological process of food consumption. It is just that simple. Money is not reason.
When you live in a society in which the common response to such complaints is "You need money to live", "That's just the way it is", "Our world works that way", there is no reason. At least within the realm of public discourse and societal thought.
Those that conform to such societal ideals, it is important to note, although they maintain a sensibility of consciousness, of life, they are not alive. They have not thought.
You do not need money. You do not need to go to work. You need to eat and sleep and drink water and masturbate or fuck. You need to think to truly live.
So, you gather on the streets and the cops beat the shit out of you. They dissemble your encampments and perhaps inflict bodily harm or otherwise upon you. What do you do?
You publish internet memes with the address of perpetrating police officers. You gather again in public places, and the cops beat the shit out of you again.

You do not need to do this. If you truly want to accomplish something, all you need to do is accomplish it. Implement a new societal framework within the interconnected lives of all protesters. There is a vast body of human beings involved in these protests. Utilize it, and implement a form of community cooperation as a progressive solution to your complaints. Take advantage of social media. Turn it against the corporations. You complain of conspiracy to debase internet freedom. If each protester was to set up 10 accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr alike, and subsequently establish a seemingly viable personality for each 10 accounts- and subsequently, like 100 items monthly which are commercial in origin, to which these individuals have no connection, to which they have no attachment, the efficacy of this marketing tool would be instantaneously ruined. There would be no need for legislation legalizing government and corporate correspondence, because such correspondence would be useless.
The above example works as follows.

I am a protester. I set up 10 accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. To each account, I like 100 different pages. I smoke, so I like non-smoking political initiatives. I do not play or enjoy football, yet I like ESPN, ESPN Mobile, the NFL, and perhaps the AF/NFC. Do you see? You feed them random input, so thusly they will only have random, decorrelating material as a basis to sell shit to you.

There is one true way to overthrow a dominant, externally pervasive hierarchy- by violent revolution. There is, correspondently, one true way to overthrow a dominant, internally pervasive hierarchy- by exercising the process of thought.

Think. You must overcome the human experiment by thinking, so that we may then conclude the experiment.

To all occupiers, to all protesters, to all sign holders, to all who have been beaten, to the prisoners, to those who have been arrested and are pending trial, to those who have been searched, to those against whom evidence has been falsified (such as in the case of myself), disband your Occupy encampments.

Disband these assemblies, and organize through the tools of social media your ideology. Cooperate communally amongst one another. Do not go to work. Do not pay the bills. Survive on your own. Recruit the bodies of those more willing and able where you are not. Feed each other, teach other. Do not attempt to communicate to the general public these ideas through the process of assembly. Communicate, and articulate amongst yourselves your own successes, through the disbanding of your place in society.

In short, implement the co-op, and you will succeed. Yell to those who are deaf, and you will surely not communicate.

To quote the wisdom of French graffito anonymity, "Do not beg for the right to live- take it."

-Thomas Evans

Can we consider removing the only real obstacle to freedom and progress we all have?

Lilraine — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:53:20 -0600

I think a lot about a world without money. I know a lot of people who truly believe it couldn’t be done, and that a perfect world is impossible. Well, Yes, a perfect world IS impossible, but life without money, I believe, is not.

A world without money would not be a perfect world. But it would be a vastly better world for all of us. It could be a world where the system works with Mans imperfections instead of against them. This would lessen the negatives by turning them into more positives. Indeed, perfection – Utopia- is not the goal. The goal is for everyone to truly be able to live a better, more fulfilling life, to fix all the current problems we can fix without the hinderance of cost. And all it could take would be to give of your skills and knowledge freely.

We give money its value. Originally the value of the dollar (and most if not all other currencies) was based on the gold standard. But we give gold its monetary value too! Gold is a metal. A metal so pretty that people like to adorn themselves with it. It gives us a sense of status in our communities, and that’s fine. It’s a solid material object -static and tangible. But give it a monetary value and it’s price will fluctuate from time to time. Amazing.. how a solid, tangible, physical substance can be made to have a virtual worth. The gold doesn’t change, nothing happens to it, but suddenly it’s worth more or less than it did the day before. The stock market, the way I see it is even worse because stocks are as virtual as their worth.. no matter how much you have, you dont really have it until either you cash it out or sell it.

Really, it doesnt matter what standard we use to base the value of our currency on… the value system is man-made and virtual, not tangible.. not real. We created this system, it didnt and doesnt occur naturally in any other species, so that means we devised it and likewise we could conceivably change it.

Even in a world without money, there will always be a few ‘bad apples’ in society. “Bad” will never go away entirely. It’s opposite exists and therefore to some degree, so must it. The way we live now serves mostly to encourage the negative. It’s a fertile breeding ground for greed, deceit and self-serving behavior. Greed is there… it exists.. and the only way to get the things we’re greedy for is with money. Money can be turned into anything, and because it’s so convenient that way, there are people willing to do anything to obtain it. This is why we have the vast majority of our crime: drug violence, muggings, bank robberies, car theft, insurance fraud, illegal insider trading, identity theft, the very corruption of the financial system itself, etc, etc.

In a money-less society, crime in general would be greatly reduced, and many.. like those listed above.. would disappear entirely. And I truly think if we put our minds to it, we could come up with such a system.. like a resource based economic system such as The Venus Project or Zeitgeist Movement or Freeconomy Community envision.. then it could eventually nurture a true shift in values where we may no longer live and think in 'every-man-for-himself' terms.

Cape Downwinders organizes march to Pilgrim Station Sunday - Plymouth, MA - May 20, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m

no_nukes — Sun, 20 May 2012 01:20:02 -0600

PLYMOUTH - The organization Cape Downwinders, whose mission is to “take action to protect the lives and welfare of the residents of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket against the threat of death or injury resulting from the use of nuclear energy…” is staging a march to the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. Where: Staging area 1 Elliot Lane, Plymouth, with a 1 mile march to the gate of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station When: Sunday, May 20, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. According to a press release announcing the march, Cape Downwinders holds that the Nuclear Regulation Commission is considering Entergy’s application for re-licensing the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station for an additional 20 years, without implementing critical lessons learned in Fukushima, Japan. Cape Downwinders says that groups of concerned citizens will gather in Plymouth to demand that the Pilgrim nuclear power plant’s 40 year license must expire (it’s due to expire in June). The General Electric Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor is the same design that failed at four reactors in Japan. Loss of offsite electricity was the cause and, according to NRC officials, a similar accident could happen here. The nuclear waste spent fuel pool was designed to hold 880 highly radioactive rods and currently holds 3,270.
**
** Read more: Cape Downwinders organizes march to Pilgrim Station Sunday - Plymouth, MA - Wicked Local Plymouth http://www.wickedlocal.com/plymouth/news/x624592079/Cape-Downwinders-organizes-march-to-Pilgrim-Station-Sunday#ixzz1vN7ooey6
**
#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

SHUT SAN ONOFRE RALLY AT UTILITY COMPANY OFFICES -- MAY 23 - SAN DIEGO

no_nukes — Sun, 20 May 2012 01:17:01 -0600

SHUT SAN ONOFRE RALLY AT UTILITY COMPANY OFFICES -- MAY 23 - SAN DIEGO
**
** Date/Time: Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 4pm to 6pm
**
** Location: Sempra Energy Offices, 101 Ash Street San Diego, CA 92101
**
** (And at offices in Irvine, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fresno.) Parking: Free parking available at Horton Plaza parking garage (validate at machines in the mall). Trolley Stop: Civic Center station, two blocks away.
**
** http://ShutDownSanOnofre.org
** Shut San Onofre (facebook) https://www.facebook.com/ShutSongs
**
** Shut San Onofre | SEMPRA Denies Activists Access to Deliver Letter | M23 Rally
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/2012/05/san-onofre-sempra-denies-activists.html
**
** http://youtu.be/Qo0jdRl7Z8A
**
#OccupyNuclear - #OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | #RE_TOOL NOW!
#nonukes #antinuclear | The #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke
http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/p/occupy-nuclear.html

Occupy Nuclear • #OccupyNuclear

no_nukes — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:40:58 -0600

OCCUPY NUCLEAR | NO NUKES | RE-TOOL NOW
The OcNuke Daily < #OccupyNuclear >
http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke

tweet your activist URLs using #OccupyNuclear to have them published there!
shoutouts: #OcNuke

!! BE SMART --- BE NON-VIOLENT !!

creek_water — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 17:17:51 -0600

DEAR FRIENDS: WARM GREETINGS !!
BELOW IS A FLYER FOR FOLKS WHO PLAN TO GO TO CHICAGO THIS YEAR, AND ALSO FOR THOSE WHO WILL BE THERE "IN SPIRIT" ONLY PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COPY + DISTRIBUTE !!
#####################################################################
I'V BEEN A PEACE-ACTIVIST SINCE THE LEGENDARY 1960s: THE OCCUPY-MOVEMENT IS THE STRONG-EST MOVEMENT WHICH I'V SEEN IN THE USA SINCE THAT TIME: WE HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO QUICK-LY BUILD A PEACE-FULL + JUST SOCIETY, BUT ONLY IF WE'R SMART !!
AND WE ALSO NEED TO BE BRAVE ...
IF U GO TO CHICAGO, BE SMART: DON'T GIVE THE POLICE ANY EXCUSE TO ATTACK U !!
BECAUSE THAT IS JUST WHAT THE 1% WANT U TO DO: THEY WANT YOU TO DO SOME-TING STUPID, TO GIVE THE POLICE AN EXCUSE TO ATTACK, BECAUSE THEY KNOW THAT ***ANY*** VIOLENCE MAKEs US LOOK BAD !!
WHAT-EVER HAPPENs, DO NOT BREAK ANY WINDOWS + DO NOT GRAFFITI ANY BUILDINGS:
HANG-ING A BANNER IS KOOOL, BUT NOT SPRAY-PAINT'N GRAFFITI ... PLUS: BE AWARE THAT THERE MIGHT BE POLICE-PROVOCATEURS IN THE CROWD: IF U SEE ANY-BODY BREAK A WINDOW, THEN GET RIGHT UP IN THEIR FACE,
AND MAKE THEM PROVE THAT THEY'R NOT A COP !!
################################################
IT'S WELL-KNOWN THAT THE POLICE HAVE ALREADY
INFILTRATED OCCUPY-ACTIONS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=8grjG6X4mCQ
A STANDARD CROWD-CONTROL TACTIC WHICH POLICE USE TO DIS-
CREDIT US BY ACTUAL-LY START-ING, {IE, "PROVOKE-ING"} VIOLENCE !!
###############################################################
BE SMART: THE FIRST GUY OR GAL TO BREAK A WINDOW JUST MIGHT BE A COP !!
WE HAVE BIG LOTS OF ACTUAL + POTENTIAL SUPPORT, BUT WE LOSE IT IF OUR ACTIONS IN CHICAGO DE-GENERATE TO SENSE-LESS, NEED-LESS VIOLENCE ...
DO NOT ATTACK THE POLICE: BE SMART: IF POLICE ATTACK YOU, DO NOT ATTACK BACK: THIS IS HOW WE WIN SUPPORT: THE 1% ARE FEAR-FULL + PARANOID, BECAUSE THEY KNOW THAT WE ARE STRONG AND
THAT WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN !!
BE SMART: DO NOT RESPOND TO POLICE-VIOLENCE, OR TO POLICE PROVOCATION ...
NON-VIOLENCE IS WAY-MORE EFFECTIVE + POWER-FULL, BECAUSE WE WIN WAY-MORE SUPPORT WHEN WE'R NON-VIOLENT, *** WHAT-EVER ELSE HAPPENS !! ***
########################################
BE SMART: DO NOT PROVOKE VIOLENCE !!
SINCERE-LY, MARK.CREEKWATER@GMAIL.COM,
CROSS-USA WALKER-TO-SUPPORT-OCCUPY

MOVEMENT NEEDS A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

Nevada — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:06:07 -0600

Movement needs a presidential candidate. Any ideas? We must move ahead dynamically, with every tool we have.

Kory Quinn harkens the past with new anthem.

MRH — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:28:37 -0600

In the spirit of the 60's. A great song!

http://koryquinn.bandcamp.com/track/stand-with-each-other

#M1GS MAY 1ST GENERAL STRIKE!!

MundusVultDecipi — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:26:13 -0600

Tommorow is the big day. Any relevant links, photos, videos, or news updates you would like to share with everyone please post here. I will try to edit this post as events unfold to establish a succinct and accesible record. I reccomend using storify.com to create your own timeline of tommorow if you want to keep an online record. This website is the perfect utility for events of this magnitude.

'Occupy' Promises 'Biggest Shut Down The City Of New York Has Ever Seen,' Blockade Of San Fran
Source: http://cnsnews.com/blog/dan-gainor/occupy-promises-biggest-shut-down-city-new-york-has-ever-seen-blockade-san-fran

Ahead of May Day, David Harvey Details Urban Uprisings from Occupy Wall Street to the Paris Commune
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/30/ahead_of_may_day_david_harvey

Mayday Checklist
Source: http://occupywallst.org/article/may-day-checklist/

Mayday Directory
Source: http://occupywallst.org/article/may-day/

Twitter Accounts to Follow:
@OccupyTheBridge
@OccupyMayDay
@OccupyGenStrk
@OccupyGenStrike
@OccupyMay1st
@NYCgenstrike
@StrikeEverywher
@BayAreaStrike
@Timcast
@JoshHarkinson
@AllisonKilkenny
@OccupyWallSt

Hashtags to Follow
#M1GS
#Mayday
#GenStrike
#OccupyM1
#May1st
#M1NYC

Websites for Updates
http://www.occupymay1st.org
http://www.strikeeverywhere.net
http://www.maydaynyc.org
http://www.strikemay1st.com/

Anti-nuclear Protest - "2nd Peaceful Protest at San Onofre" - April 29

no_nukes — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:25:20 -0600

KEEP SONGS SHUTDOWN FOR GOOD

2nd Peaceful Protest at San Onofre CA, April 29, 12 to 3pm
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/2nd-peaceful-protest-at-san-onofre-april-29-12-to-3pm/

Residents Organized for a Safe Environment
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/

flyer: http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/a29-san-onofre-flier-1up-v83.jpg

San Onofre Power Plant Still Leads the Nation in Safety Complaints - Voice of OC | Orange County's Nonprofit Investigative News Agency: OC Coast
http://www.voiceofoc.org/oc_coast/article_0d87a1f0-88c7-11e1-9b63-001a4bcf887a.html#.T5CDtQuzl1o.twitter

< #OccupyNuclear | #nuclear #nukes #nonukes #antinuclear #occupy | #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke

A29 Peaceful Protest at San Onofre CA #NUCLEAR Plant | #OccupyNuclear

no_nukes — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:49:34 -0600

KEEP SONGS SHUTDOWN FOR GOOD

2nd Peaceful Protest at San Onofre CA, April 29, 12 to 3pm
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/2nd-peaceful-protest-at-san-onofre-april-29-12-to-3pm/

Residents Organized for a Safe Environment
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/

flyer: http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/a29-san-onofre-flier-1up-v83.jpg

San Onofre Power Plant Still Leads the Nation in Safety Complaints - Voice of OC | Orange County's Nonprofit Investigative News Agency: OC Coast
http://www.voiceofoc.org/oc_coast/article_0d87a1f0-88c7-11e1-9b63-001a4bcf887a.html#.T5CDtQuzl1o.twitter

Rally Against Nuclear Power at San Onofre on April 29th
OB Rag: http://obrag.org/?p=58755

< #OccupyNuclear | #nuclear #nukes #nonukes #antinuclear #occupy | #OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke

#A29 2nd Peaceful Protest at San Onofre CA, April 29, 12 to 3pm

no_nukes — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:18:07 -0600

KEEP SAN ONOFRE NUKE SHUTDOWN FOR GOOD

2nd Peaceful Protest at San Onofre CA, April 29, 12 to 3pm
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/2nd-peaceful-protest-at-san-onofre-april-29-12-to-3pm/

Residents Organized for a Safe Environment
http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.wordpress.com/

flyer: http://residentsorganizedforasafeenvironment.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/a29-san-onofre-flier-1up-v83.jpg

Rally Against Nuclear Power at San Onofre on April 29th
OB Rag: http://obrag.org/?p=58755

rc's blog: http://rceezwhatsup.blogspot.com/2012/04/rally-against-nuclear-power-at-san.html

*** info for that day at http://www.copswiki.org/Common/A29SanOnofreProtestAndRally
*** On April 29 We Commemorate:
26th Year Anniversary of Continued Chernobyl Meltdown
33rd Anniversary of the Three-Mile Island Disaster
Recognition of the Continuing Fukushima Meltdown
And we Stand for Permanent Decommissioning of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS)

San Onofre Power Plant Still Leads the Nation in Safety Complaints - Voice of OC | Orange County's Nonprofit Investigative News Agency: OC Coast
http://www.voiceofoc.org/oc_coast/article_0d87a1f0-88c7-11e1-9b63-001a4bcf887a.html#.T5CDtQuzl1o.twitter

#OCCUPY #NUCLEAR | NO #NUKES | RE-TOOL NOW
#nonukes #antinuclear | The OcNuke Daily > http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke

May Day Observations on the Global Causes and Solutions of the World Econ. Crisis- @Spiritus Mundi

robertsheppard — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:14:03 -0600

Note: The following is an excerpt from the Occupy Wall Street Novel, Spiritus Mundi, by Robert Sheppard in which the global root causes and solutions of the World Economic Crisis are analyzed and solutions put forth. They appear in Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, which may be accessed at the following links:

http://www.occupytogether.org/discuss/#/discussion/2384/out-of-africa-afrolit-edenic-love-chpt-31-of-spiritus-mundi-ows-novel-by-robert-sheppard-free-on
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/

Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Below appears a discussion led by the character Garry Bonoir, who is a key Occupy Wall Street leader as well as a labor union organizer affiliated to Change to Win and the AFL-CIO, and leader of the Counterforce Alliance addressing the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union to promote the Occupy World Street Manifesto and the Occupy Earth Manifesto: http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-occupy-earth-manifesto-the-counterforce-spirit/ It contains a detailed analysis of the root causes of the modern crisis in an unbalanced globalization which can only be solved by new international institutions, including creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a global version of the European Parliament, rebalancing the process of the globalization of the economy away from the interests of predatory global capital and towards the interests of workers, consumers, peoples and an internationalized social safety net:

Themes: 1) Revolution versus Reform in the Occupy Wall Street Movement
2) Causes of the World Economic Crisis Harming the 99% Globally: Unbalanced and Invidious Globalization
3) Solutions for the 99%: A Rebalanced Globalization in Favor of the 99%, Global Labor Union Movement, A Global Green New Deal, A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly for Global Democracy in Global Governance

From Chapter 31, the Occupy Wall Street Novel by Robert Sheppard:

“And you Mr. Bonoir, oh I mean Garry, what is the nature of your participation here at the Pan-African Parliament? I hear both you and Robert will be giving speeches over at the Gallagher Estate, so what are you here to talk about?” asked Eva, trying to help out Christina in being a good hostess and keeping the conversation flowing.

“Well, I’m here representing the American AFL-CIO and its sister progressive labor faction Change to Win in their Global New Deal Initiative (GNDI) including the Global Labour Organizing and Collective Bargaining Initiative (GLOCBI), and the main message I am trying to deliver is similar to your own with the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly----that we need new institutions and strategies of rebalancing and adaptation to the overwhelming reality of Globalization, especially in the wake of the World Financial Crisis, which tells us that the wrong kind of imbalanced globalization is threatening the world with economic and social breakdown. The West has sold out its own people in this Crisis and not only mortgaged its soul but in a Faustian compact has sold credit default-swaps to the Devil!---it is financially, morally, politically and spiritually bankrupt!....And, without a globalized New Deal the peoples of the world face the grimmest consequences.

We are the vanguard of the Economic Democracy Movement, promoting and fighting for the concept of Economic Democracy, both at the national level and like Professor Sartorius’ work at the international and globalized level with the UNPA; that is, our goals include keeping many of the benefits of the free enterprise market-based system to allow the American people and the peoples of the world to set the game rules for the marketplace, financial and economic system to re-take control over their economic destiny-----ensuring a strong Social Safety Net, Social Contract and fair distribution of economic production and wealth, and to make sure that the abusive externalities of the financial system do not undermine the well-being of the people for the benefit of the unscrupulous elites. We are The Counterforce, part of the “People Power” movement sweeping the world, forming the counterforce to both corporate greed and exploitation, and to oppressions of undemocratic, despotic and illegitimate regimes and states, including displacement of dictators in Latin America, Asia, the Stalinistic one-party dictatorships of the former East Bloc, those of the Islamic World with the recent ‘Arab Spring’ and we are also part of the International Labor Movement and the resistance of the peoples of the West to the destruction of the American Dream and the European Social Contract resulting from the corporate and financial abuses leading to the World Financial Crisis, including our people power actions such as “Occupy Wall Street,” which our unions have supported and led. In short we are The Counterforce, Global Democrats, democratic and worker activists, fighting for a fuller and less corrupt political and economic democracy in our national homelands such as the USA and the European Union, for safeguarding of the livelihoods of the working and middle-classes, and fighting for a globalized democracy and a democratically based system of global political and economic governance to reflect the reality of the globalized economy to which all of our destinies are irrevocably tied.

Our initiative grew out of our participation in the International Forum on Economic Globalization and Trade Unions under the sponsorship of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and coordinated with our brother organizations across the world such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU),the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU) and the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Specifically, the message I am here to deliver is that just as in 1929 we have suffered a massive failure of the Circulatory System of the Global Economy, a massive stroke and heart attack whereby the circulation of purchasing power to the middle and working classes has been blocked because of a chronic inordinate and dangerous maldistribution of income and over-concentration of ownership and wealth in the capital owning classes that prevents the consuming classes—the middle, lower-middle and working classes---from being able to sustainably continue their consumer participation in the economy. The critical difference this time however is that in 1929 the Circulatory Failure of aggregate demand was within national economies, whereas in the much more globalized world of today the Circulatory Failure is within the circulatory system of an internationalized and globalized economy that functions across the world as a whole and not within any one nation. Even the well intentioned efforts at expanding the money supply—Quantitative Expansion or QE Initiatives are unlikely to have the effect intended in a globalized economy since the aggregate demand stimulated will flow in purchasing power to the low-wage developing economies like China rather than to US or EU-based production and employment, and our cross-border capital markets will channel the newly created money-supply again to the low-wage/high-profit developing economies rather than to investment in the US, EU and the developing world. Meanwhile sovereign debt crises in the EU and Federal and State budget crises in the US states will keep eroding aggregate demand.

The key to restoring circulation of aggregate demand and sustainable effective purchasing power to the middle and lower classes despite the real estate bubble is to have Global Collective Bargaining, along with parallel means to raise worker and middle class incomes, including bolstering the Global Social Safety Net rather than de-funding it in the face of deficits. Most needed are Global Unions and globalized labour organizing, collective bargaining and industrial action capable of confronting and negotiating with Multi-national corporations on a unified collective global front across all their global subsidiaries, including the “Big Stick” of last resort of effective global strikes against all global units and subsidiaries of any multinational enterprise that remains unresponsive, to redress the outrageous loss of net income to the working and middle classes and redress the loss of the effective balance of power of employees against multinational employers of the last fifty years. In the first New Deal a national solution to this collapse of the economic circulatory system was found in the construction of national labour unions and collective bargaining coupled with the social welfare safety net of the nation-state—the NLRB and labor laws, Social Security, Unemployment insurance, Workers Compensation and so forth. The trouble after 2008 is that the nation-state is no longer capable of providing the same solution because the economy is no longer national but global. National labour unions have no bargaining power in a globalized economy and a generous social safety net of the nation-state has proven unsustainable in competition with cheap-labour in developing countries often without such benefits and safety nets, allowing multinationals to export jobs and eliminate the social safety net in the nations they have turned their backs on.

Because there is no system of effective global governance, and certainly no global state to balance the abuses of global capital there is, of course, no “Global Social Safety Net” to replace the failing national social safety nets. To remedy all of this we need a newer “Global New Deal” to restore the viable circulation of purchasing power between the social classes and enable the evolution of a global social safety net, or the whole system will break down, as it just did in the World Financial Crisis exploding out of the Sub-Prime Crisis. This is similar to the idea of the ‘Social Contract’ in the European Union which also needs to be part of a Globalized New Deal. With regard to the dislocations in the industrialized economies which are the natural and unavoidable result of the process of Globalization, we need a “No Worker Left Behind Policy,” analogous to the phrase utilized in education. We are making an Exodus from the old industrial economy and moving towards a Post-Industrial economy, a “Trek” as you South Africans would put it---------the migration of a whole people. We must make sure that no worker or person is left behind in that transformation, just as we resolved that in education there shall be “No Child Left Behind,” or left to the wolves.

That means we need just as much of a Globalization Safety Net as we needed the Social Security Safety Net that was part of the New Deal during the previous crisis of the 30’s. No person should ever be “unemployed.” Any jobless person should be in a mandatory re-training and re-education program funded by the government with a minimum subsistence stipend for participation at all times as a condition or aid, and the nation should thus be incessantly re-investing in its “Human Capital” at all times. If we can’t find an analogous solution at the global level for what the US New Deal and the European counterparts did following the 1929 crisis at the primarily nation-state level the whole global economy will implode—and explode!----just remember the result of the melt-down after 1929 was not simply the Great Depression but also the rise of Hitler and a World War between the Fascist, Communist and bourgeois nations. The race is on to find a Global New Deal before all of that blows up. Without it people are sure to go into the streets with a powerful ‘Occupy Wall Street’ or ‘Fight Back’ populist countermeasures, good in themselves, but which may become either ineffective, mindlessly destructive or the occasion of unjust brutal repression if they are not channeled into realistic constructive change. Indeed, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement needs to extend its scope of action up Manhattan Island at least as far as the United Nations to demonstrate in the streets for Robert’s United Nations Parliamentary Assembly as a first step to getting a global handle on the abuses and failures of global financial governance. Unless they realize that the Global Financial Crisis and the abuses of Wall Street are rooted in globalization and can only be cured through global governance they are sure to remain impotent and ineffective.

The failure in global economic circulation is also reflected in the imbalance of the manufacturing economy and the service economy and in the imbalance of the financial economy and the real economy. The sale of goods is highly globalized, but the manufacturing sector is shrinking rapidly in the “post-industrial” developed west. The advanced economies on the other hand are expanding in the much less globalized service sector, but services are much less portable and exportable. Hence the need for a Global New Deal which opens the service sectors globally to balance the loss of jobs in the advanced countries, and the growth of unions in both manufacturing and service sectors globally to bring wages up. Without this the result will be the gutting out of the middle classes by the labor-rate arbitrage of globalization. Ultimately the deficits are unsustainable, and without a Global New Deal advanced nations will either turn back to protectionism or demand-failure depression.

And in the absence of the Global New Deal the only “service sector” America is consistently succeeding in exporting is War! Contrary to the empty dream of the unrepentant Neo-Liberals or Tea Party fantasists, going back to the pre-crisis status quo ante is not an option---just as going back to the pre-1929 status quo ante was not an alternative at the nation-state level as Roosevelt proved against the Coolidge-Hoover right who disastrously attempted it in the first stage of national recovery. And I repeat at the top of my lungs----This is not because it is morally or idealistically right, which may have its appeal to a sensitive minority, but is the result of the hard-headed conclusion that the alternative simply will not work!---which is ultimately the stronger argument for the majority and for the recalcitrant vested interests who have to be dragged in the right direction by the heels.

“That all sounds very good and humane Garry, but won’t all those New Dealesque measures cost a lot of money? What with this “Quantitive Loosening” of the money supply to finance these things by a monetary hat trick aren’t we in danger of undermining the value of the currency by inflation and devaluation?” asked Christina.

“Money is the Supreme Fiction of our times. Sometimes obsession with it makes us forget that Life and Death are the Supreme Realities. Some of the monetary Neanderthals want to go back to the gold standard to keep our money real and to head off so-called populist tampering with its value. But really we should just accept that money is just an invented tool that should be used in the service of life and not an absolute in itself. We can’t go back to the age of treating the Chairman of the Federal Reserve as a plutocrat’s tin God, and Oz-like defending the Pluto-cryptocratic Elite by shouting to the people “disregard that man behind the curtain!”

Yes, money is a fiction, but we must still choose and use our fictions carefully, flexibly and pragmatically in the service of life. To insist on balanced budgets and hard money in a time of systemic crisis is to bow to the narrow vested interests of the wealth holders of the present rather than the wealth creators of the future. That’s a Hooveresque recipe that will only prolong this depression or crisis or whatever you want to call it. Fetishing a balanced budget and a strong dollar, yen or euro will only cultivate a monetary and fiscal “Upas Tree of Java” which will poison and devastate all life around it. Sure we need to keep from going overboard with hyperinflation in managing this fiction of money and use some self-restraint to adjust its healthy relationship to reality and life, but let’s not forget the fundamental principle that money is an invented tool in the service of humanity and life and not an idol or fetishized Golden Calf that we should set up for false worship.

Money is simply a flexible tool and catalyst enabling social economic interaction and measured exchanges of the fruits of human productivity. William Jennings Bryan, though no perfect man, is well remembered for his ringing phrase: “Thou shalt not crucify my people upon a cross of gold!” When the market economy of its own contradictions, vulnerability and intrinsic instability goes off the track and is derailed in systemic crisis passive wealth holders have to, as they say, “take a haircut” for the good of the whole economy and its future health and we can’t let the dead hand of propertied wealth and their obsession with fetishizing money strangle the recovery and the full re-mobilization of human productivity. We have to focus on the big picture and the long-term enlightened interest of the whole community and the community of nations of the world.”

robertsheppard April 27 PermalinkEditFlag+1 -1

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Let me give you a little background to explain what I mean, if I can tax your patience for a few minutes………….It is no accident that the Taft-Hartley Act in the United States that set up the basic framework for national industry-wide collective bargaining occurred as a response to the last general economic crisis of this magnitude---the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. That showed that the free market by itself, contrary to false-idealizing Free Market ideologues then and now, would not respond to any quasi-divine “Invisible Hand” and achieve a magical balance of interests in the distribution of income and benefits from industrial enterprise. That “invisible hand” was “invisible’ for the very good reason that it was not there and in large part did not exist!------Or the working and middle classes discovered that the only occupation of such an invisible hand was in invisibly picking their pockets for the benefit of the capital controlling classes.

The New Deal in America and socialist reforms across Europe and the world recognized that the power of overly-concentrated industrial and financial capital would not only result in abuse of power but in positive self-destruction unless constrained by the balancing power of both a regulating strengthened democratic state and, equally importantly, through the balancing power of legally protected and flourishing labour unions which would ultimately utilize their enhanced bargaining power within that marketplace to win a fairer distribution of the benefits of productive enterprise vis-à-vis exploitative ownership and capital, and a strengthened social safety net, both within and emanating from the enterprise, and as part of the state.

Thus it was only with the New Deal in the US that unions won national legal protection and sponsorship and were able to organize nationally and collectively organize and confront the new national-scale industrial enterprises like General Motors, US Steel and Ford, threatening them with effective strikes and shutdowns if they failed to reach equitable settlements. The result of all this is what we now call the “Social Contract.” Corporations made good profits, yes, but were also forced to provide their workers through collective bargaining union contracts with health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits and severance pay, and they were forced to pay taxes, including new progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, and corporate taxes to support Social Security, welfare, Medicare and Medicaid, Food Stamps, universal primary and higher education and other public benefits of the social safety net underpinning and making possible the sustainable free marketplace. Thus the New Deal and analogous socialist reforms in Europe in the last crisis resulted in a workable tri-partite balance of power and benefits between capital, labour and the state.

Where did all this break down? It ended with the progressive Globalization of the world economy after the Sixties. What we call “union density” or the prevalence of unions in the labour marketplace plummeted from that time. In the Fifties around 30% of American workers were unionized, including strong national unions with strong bargaining power in key industry sectors such as steel, automobiles, transportation, and other industries where a strike could bring things to a general halt. Now after fifty years of globalization only 12% of American workers are unionized, and only 8% in the private sector. The bankruptcy of General Motors and other firms in the new World Financial Crisis saw the final dismantling of the union pension plans and health plans and a rolling back of wages----in short a complete gutting out of everything that was won by the ordinary worker since 1929. But likewise 2008 also proved incontrovertibly that if aggregate workers’ wage benefits are cut back over and over, shrinking as a percentage of GDP, and thereby their ability to service their inflating mortgage loans and maintain their consumption disintegrates into default, then the whole financial system will come tumbling down Humpty-Dumpty after them.

Why? Well we’d need an encyclopedia to include all the contributing causes but we’d find the asymmetrical and unbalanced Globalization of the economy is at the root of most of them. Ownership and capital moved with freedom across national boundaries in a globalizing world and new industrial capacity was relocated readily to developing countries where wage and benefit rates were miniscule. On the other hand, what happened to labour unions? Labour unions did not go international with their companies. General Motors workers in Shanghai should by law or practice be part of the same union and collective bargaining as those in Detroit, and if the company fails to deliver higher benefits in all its subsidiaries a global strike should effectively shut down the enterprise worldwide until it changes its mind. Rather than eliminating health and pension benefits of UAW workers in American in bankruptcy proceedings, the real solution is to make those same benefits mandatory for the GM workers in Shanghai and Brazil, or at least relative to their proportionate compensation. And any company like Wal-Mart that engages in union busting should be broken up and banned from international trade or the international sourcing of supplies and operations by the collective action of national governments secured by international treaties and labour organizations to that effect—and likewise the same fate should be given to phony communist unions and company unions that are in bed with or in the pocket of the state and employers and don’t have the freedom or incentive to organize and fight for their members rights and interests.

A case in point, illustrating the tragedy of the creative genius of globalized American capitalism is the saga of Apple Computer’s iPod, iPhone, iPad. Here we can be rightly proud of the creativity and innovation of Steve Jobs and Apple, creating products, like Edison’s light bulb, movie camera and phonograph, which have literally changed and re-shaped the world. Yet what is the result for the American worker? Almost no iPhones and iPads are manufactured in the United States, and the power of unions to bargain fairly with the colossus of capital is virtually non-existent in this sector at home and abroad. Instead, almost all iPads and iPhones, phenomenally dominating their markets, are made by subcontractors like Foxconn in China, which employs over one million workers in such dismal conditions that a national scandal has erupted in China over the mass suicides of Foxconn workers subjected to inhuman conditions on endless assembly lines that would make Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times look humane and utopian in comparison. Apple Computer was found recently to have more cash-on-hand than the Federal government! Yet most of that cash is idle and not even being reinvested in Apple so as to create new jobs in its own company or anywhere.

Where are the global unions that would represent Apple workers and Foxconn workers alike globally in a common union with common collective negotiations backed up by the power of global strikes backed by consumer support such as to force global improvement in their dismal wages and working conditions such that they get a fair share of the pie and that the global social safety net is sustainably maintained? When are Foxconn and Apple workers going to stop commiting suicide and begin going on global strikes for the better wages and working conditions they deserve, with supporting boycotts of Apple customers if they don’t comply? Here we see the market in capital and products being effectively globalized, but the necessary counterbalance of global union organization and redress of a vacuum of collective bargaining power being strangled in its cradle. The resulting severe imbalances from such unbalanced and one-sided globalization is now recognized as completely unsustainable, and threatens not just the well being of the workers and middle-classes themselves, but the viability through them of the entire financial system and economic system.

Looking beyond Capitalism - Proposals for Immediate Action

slave — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:24:17 -0700

I just contacted a Spanish activist with significant research and practice background in the movement proposing a new project for setting up a global resource center to help establish an alternative economic system based on sustainable economic principles replacing capitalism. Below are the details of the letter. I would appreciate any constructive comments / criticisms. In fact I call for suggestions on how we can implement such a project pooling the resources of those who would like to move beyond protest and calls for reform but would not want to wait for "the revolution" either.

I am a fellow activist with several years of experience in the movement (since early 1980's) with focus on finding an experimental alternative to the economic system of capitalism. I do not like to be categorized into "socialist" or "communist", etc. because these do mean different things to different people nowadays. But I do come from a "science" background and have found the analysis of Marx and Engels for the most part "scientific" and valid as many of their predictions attest.

I decided to contact you because I am active in the OccupyWallStreet (OWS) movement which got some of its momentum from the fellow Spaniards whose Indignant movement I have been following online for about 1 year. I am particularly impressed by the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and the establishment of the autonomous worker's councils and the idea of Horizontalidad as opposed to any state control of the means of production under any guise. Are there similar ideas being discussed / planned / implemented in Spain currently? Are there discussion forums or groups in the forefront of this that I may join for exchange of ideas or at least for further research?

My vision is to help bring this issue of implementing a new alternative economic system into reality, (i.e., without waiting for a "revolution" or the ultimate collapse of capitalism) starting locally and immediately. I understand it may be a controversial issue even among people like you but I think it is a valid option that should be seriously investigated (i.e., by scientific research and experimentation) considering the significant changes in the world (e.g., significant improvements in science and technology, and the much more destructive and self-destructive nature of capitalism in its final growth phase under globalization) that may make options previously considered "utopian" by some (e.g., the worker's councils, scientific egalitarian communalism, etc.) a possibility. In addition, such initiatives are desperately needed by increasing masses of people many of whom are skilled and resourceful even in areas of science and technology (i.e., the necessity and possibilities exist and growing).

I believe this is a tremendous opportunity for a true "renaissance" in the most basic human values by delivering the economic system that could foster and develop those values. An economic system based on common ownership, cooperative production and shared exchange and distribution based on need and ability to produce (this is in contrast to the economic principles of capitalism). Accordingly, my intention is from the start to help establish working channels that demonstrate such an economic system, where we work cooperatively owning the content commonly and exchange and distribute the results in a shared arrangement so as to enable the establishment of "communal prototypes", semi-autonomous units of the future global economic system that through their increasing local and global numbers and interactions outcompete the self-destructive capitalism in an "organic" and evolutionary manner - i.e., "revolution" through evolution (the survival imperative), by primarily economic means / not political means.

So specifically, this project is about establishing a resource center for establishing a new economic system - i.e., the focus will not be so much on criticizing capitalism for its growing dysfunctions and crimes rather on finding credible and practical solutions outside of capitalism based on the new economic principles through scientific research, and expmerimental implementation funded by the movement (i.e., by common ownership). The best experimental ideas and regions for successful projects could be cooperatively determined for effective resource allocation. Similarly, labor / skills / resources / etc. could be more efficiently implemented across the globe for specific projects. This project may serve as a "think thank" for the movement where the participants can "brainstorm" and consider the viability of certain ideas both strategically and tactically. By having a global / international vision and capability the movement could "cross-polinate" and hopefully use some of the best ideas in the world. This would also be in the spirit of planned production (minimizing wasteful energy and human oppression) instead of the anarchy of production under capitalism. Furthermore, it would provide a significant model for horizontal organization serving as a potentially powerful means for sustainable change.

I would appreciate any help you can provide with this respect. In fact I would think our Spanish comrades could be among some of the more immediate beneficiaries due to their seemingly more advanced state of crisis and heightened social consciousness as well as historical precedence.

Potential Arrests coming-White Hats report!

CSPANwonk — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:18:38 -0600

It looks like arrests may be starting on a big level according to the above information which has been pretty good. Joseph Ackermann who just resigned from Deutsch Bank was picked up two days ago and other arrests and warrants are outstanding. Also the UK Parliament has been advised and if true we should start seeing international arrests next week!

Alternative Energy Breakthroughs

CSPANwonk — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:44:16 -0700

It seems that special interests are trying to keep some innovations quiet but won't be able to do so for long. The E-Cat is one such invention that has sold 14 power plants to the military. It is totally clean, produces 800 times more energy than it takes to run, is small and costs about $100.00 to run every 6 months-peanuts. Rossi has partnered with NI to make the parts and is in talks to start manufacturing in MASS. Yes there has been information on Forbes, FOX, MSNBC, etc but the implications have not caught fire. This invention would quickly put oil out of business as it develops the capacity to provide alternatives for cars. Now they are working on home models. I have been watching this over a year on science blogs but since October it has really taken on a life of it's own. Another innovation is JOULE Energy. They are building a large plant in NM using bio-engineering to by pass biomass thus using carbon, sunlight and non-potable water(it eats carbon) that produces a synthetic diesel at 60 cents a gallon! It is 30 times more effiecient that any other biomass project, won the Wall Street Innovators Award in it's category and was second in all categories. Finally, there is Cerra who just won a NASA contract as it has turned hydrogen into a safe liquid that could be used in vehicles. This would cost about $1.50 a gallon. We have to let people know there are cheaper, safer technologies being held back and they are HERE NOW!

Halliburton 2012 First Quarter Conference Call for April

MysticBard — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:25:32 -0600

Halliburton 2012 First Quarter Conference Call
HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 5, 2012-- Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) will host a conference call on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, to discuss the first quarter 2012 financial results. The call will begin at 8:00 AM Central Time (9:00 AM Eastern Time).

The company will issue a press release regarding the 2012 first quarter earnings prior to the conference call. Halliburton's first quarter press release will be posted on the Halliburton website at http://www.halliburton.com. Please visit the website to listen to the call live via webcast. In addition, you may participate in the call by telephone at (703) 639-1108. A passcode is not required. Attendees should log in to the webcast or dial in approximately 15 minutes prior to the call's start time.

A replay of the conference call will be available on Halliburton's website for seven days following the call. Also, a replay may be accessed by telephone at (703) 925-2533, passcode 1565570.

Out of Africa, AfroLit & Edenic Love-Chpt 31 of Spiritus Mundi, OWS Novel by Robert Sheppard Free On

robertsheppard — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 02:03:23 -0600

Note: This is Chapter 31 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

To read Spiritus Mundi, the serialized Occupy Wall Street novel from the beginning in its proper order you can follow the Occupy sites that retain the original Chapters, including the OccupyTogether Book Club and the People’s Library of NYGCA or follow the Spiritus Mundi Wordpress site to Sample Chapters:

http://www.occupytogether.org/discuss/#/discussion/2208/a-failing-quest-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-of-spiritus-mundi-the-occupy-wall-street-novel

http://www.occupynetwork.tv/blog/departure-failing-quest-and-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-spiritus-mundi-ows-novel-robert

http://www.nycga.net/groups/peoples-library/forum/topic/departure-a-failing-quest-and-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-of-spiritus-mundi-the-ows-novel-by-robert-sheppard/

Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/ For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/ For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com// To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/ To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/

The Complete novel should also be available soon on Amazon/Smashwords to download as a complete e-book.

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Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard
Author’s E-mail: rsheppard99_2000@yahoo.com
Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com/
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexul Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com/
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com/
To Read Geopolitical and World War Three Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundigeopoliticalworldwar3.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com/
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com/
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/
For Discussions of World History and World Civilization in Spiritus Mundi: https://worldhistoryandcivilizationspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Eva Strong from Spiritus Mundi: https://evasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Andreas Sarkozy from Spiritus Mundi: http://andreasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Yoriko Oe from Spiritus Mundi: http://yorikosblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Robert Sartorius from Spiritus Mundi: http://sartoriusblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/

Who's Who in Chapter 31:

Robert Sartorius, is an OWS supporter and leader of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, marries Eva Strong in England
Eva Strong, is an OWS supporter and UN Parliamentary Assembly staff worker, marries Sartorius
Jack Sartorius, aka Jack McKensie, is an undercover CIA Anti-Terrorism agent in London, son of Robert Sartorius
Christina Senghor, OWS supporter and African Co-Ordinator for the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
Garry Bonoir, Canadian-American OWS and Labor activist, supporter of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, who addresses the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union in Midrand, South Africa.
Mrs. Gertrude Monghella, President of the Pan-African Parliament and supporter of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly
Wole Obatala, is a world-famous African writer and literary thinker, also is a member of the Pan-African Parliament of the African Union
Pieter Verhoven, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Witwatersrand in South AFrica.

OWS Themes: 1) Revolution versus Reform in the Occupy Wall Street Movement
2) Causes of the World Economic Crisis Harming the 99% Globally: Unbalanced and Invidious Globalization
3) Solutions for the 99%: A Rebalanced Globalization in Favor of the 99%, Global Labor Union Movement, A Global Green New Deal, A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly for Global Democracy in Global Governance

XXXI. Kenya to Midrand-Johannesburg, South Africa To the South of Eden

1

As Eva and Sartorius reveled in their short honeymoon vacation in the English countryside around Stratford their bent and drive to leave civilization behind was ever heightened, and they began to daydream about taking another longer honeymoon in another three months when Robert would have need to travel to the meeting of the Pan-African Parliament in their newly furnished headquarters in Midrand-Johannesburg, South Africa, where he would address the assembly and gain their endorsement and support for the Global Appeal, and urge a special urgent plea and Resolution that such a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly was desperately needed to provide a permanent and continuous forum for the discussions and treaty negotiations on Climate Change in light of the failed short-term effort in Copenhagen. Robert and Eva were determined to seize the opportunity to make an extended honeymoon safari into the Serengeti in time for the Great Wildebeest Migration at the high season. Robert had been an armchair romantic through the books of Hemingway and determined to make a pilgrimage climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and taking in the surrounding country. Eva had read Isak Dinesen and seen the movie Out of Africa and remained captivated by the memories of being swept away by the luscious landscape, which she shared in daydreams spoken out with Robert, as well as a lingering sexual fantasy involving the male figure of Robert Redford which mercifully remained unspoken between them.

Together they flew to Nairobi three and a half weeks ahead of the Midrand conference with great expectations, though seasoned travelers, half in a submerged dream of a Paradise Regained and a reconciliation with an estranged Mother Earth, and half in a muffled fear of some encounter with the “Heart of Darkness;” half in hopes of an odyssey completed in a refound Eden, and half in the yearned for and dreaded call of the wild and the call of the jungle. Was what they found anything like they had imagined? It was not that simple. It never is. It was their good fortune to be wrong; for being mistaken is of the essence of the traveller’s tale. What they had thought, what they had expected never turned out to be what they found, though seldom not right in some degree. Thus, they discovered that their journeying was not so different from their living of life, which was but another journey. And, so, much discovering and much revisioning, they made their way towards the Tanzania-Kenya border regions with aid of a guide and LandRovers, taking in the Masai Mara Reserve and, in Eva’s devotion to Isak Dinesen made a pilgrimage to the Ngong Hills, where they visited the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, featured from the movie----pitying poor old Lord Nelson who had only stone lions about him! Eva was enchantéd by the proud beauty of the Masai people as they drove their herds of cattle, goats and sheep from their enkang across the teeming plains. As they made their way from the Masai Mara across into Tanzania and towards the Serengeti they were overwhelmed by the teeming herds of elephant and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards, gazelle, enu and wildebeest.

They stopped periodically with their askari guide and took in the side of nature redder in tooth and claw, viewing at a safer distance the lion and cheetah kills as the big cats hunted the lame, the old or the newborn of the thronging rivers of migrating flesh. Drugged with the memories of the gorgeous aerial photography of Our of Africa Eva impulsively seized upon the idea of an air balloon foray across the Serengeti to meet the onset of the Great Wildebeest Migration and they succeeded in locating a tourist balloon rental company in the area. From their ecstatic vantage floating upwards and away from the Great Rift Valley towards eternity they looked down upon the upward shoals of innumerable birds taking flight in a single impulse, great herding rivers of flesh in migration, and the prides of lion, leopard and cheetah shadowing their rearward flanks. It was too beautiful to bear as Eva buried her face repeatedly in the hair of Robert’s open chest high in the observation basket, or looked upwards into the blue of his eyes framed against the crystalline blueness of the Serengeti sky, or downwards across the horizon towards the vast aquamarine blueness of Lake Victoria absorbing the late afternoon sun.

Seized by an impulse to speak what rose up in her heart she clutched Robert almost violently by the lapels of his coat in the balloon’s gondola and forced him to look her directly in the eye: “Robert, Robert!----I have to tell you something-----listen!------Understand me!-----Don’t you offer me a tame love, Robert---don’t you dare think of it!---this is what I want----look at it!----love is born wild and should live wild like all this before us, Robert; even should it die so……. A tame love is a dead love, and above all Robert, I want to be alive!..... like this, and I want you alive with me, wherever we are, wherever we go, whatever we do!----Promise me that Robert!...Promise me!-----and don’t forget your promise………...I’m deadly serious……..especially----especially when we get back to our life in London!” But she gave him no chance to reply or promise but clutched him fiercely and kissed him fiercely, pulling him down heavily onto her breast, high above the winds and the clouds and the wide Serengeti below.

The next day they shifted their ballooning location down country to one of the most spectacular sights of the migration when the herds gathered to cross the Grumeti River on the Tanzania side and the Mara River on the Kenyan side. As the herds crossed, Eva clutched at Robert instinctively as below them they witnessed the crocodiles lying in wait for any weak and feeble ungulates that might be unable cope with the strong currents or those lost in the swift current by their mothers. But the river crossing wasn’t the only spectacle. Just witnessing hundreds of animals on hoof across the plains in search of food and water was an incredible sight in itself. Particularly because they drew many of the most deadly and impressive predators---lions, leopards, hyenas and packs of wild dogs following the herds and giving the breathless lovers the hypnotically horrifying spectacle of seeing kill upon kill in action, from which drama it was impossible to withdraw one’s eyes until it was too late to escape participating in the suffering.
After several days on the Serengeti and the Masai Mara they drove back to Arusha to kit up for the assault on Mount Kilimanjaro. Taking in tents, warm sleeping bags and supplies they made their way upwards, the porters carrying in the duffel bags the high altitude kit: Gore-Tex jackets, polar fleece and thermal underwear; Balaclava, gaiters and Poncho; Sunhats, head-lamp, pain-killers and Immodium. The gear seemed absurd for Africa to Eva, but as they reached the highest altitudes of Kilimanjaro she thanked Robert’s foresight from his experience climbing the high Himalaya in Tibet during his stay in China.

Consulting with the guide Robert decided on the less arduous route over Marangu and Rongai---he felt the more difficult routes over Machame, Shira and Limosho might be too hard for Eva and spoil the beauty of the trip, and in truth he was happy to reconcile himself to the fact of being over fifty and the need to be more modest in pushing his own limits. They went slowly, taking heed of the Swahili invocation of their guide “Pole’, Pole’”……”Slowly, Slowly” ….and heeded it well, taking frequent stops and hydrating with four or five litres a day as they went. They passed the Shira Camp and the Moir Camp on their ascent up the Lemosho Trail and were amazed as the flora and fauna changed abruptly as they transited five climatic zones in the brief course of the rapid ascent, with arbitrary and sudden shifts in the weather at each successive layer. Each day they would climb high and sleep low, returning to a lower level to sleep to allow their bodies to adjust to the severe changes in altitude. They left the Lava Tower, the Barranco Valley and the Great Barranco Wall behind them. Then they made the final assault on the peak just before sunrise as they reached the Uhuru Summit just in time to see the sun rising above the crater and the marvelous plains outstretched in the mist below. Robert was almost ready to convince himself he could see the plane of Harry---Harry from Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro on the westward wing towards his eternity.

After they rested and ate beneath the peak with their guide and he called for them to prepare to descend, Robert and Eva waved him back, deciding upon one more view from the very summit before heading downward again. They made the last hundred meters upward hand in hand without the guide, and the cold wind blew cutting-cold against their lips, holding back both speech and breath. Atop the high summit they lifted their dark glasses and rubbed their cold noses and lips together as a kiss. Eva wobbled a bit on her legs and Robert pulled her back from the edge, holding her fast in his arms as he continued to gaze skyward. Where there is gravity, there is always a danger of falling, he thought. In cold space, out there somewhere above, between here and the infinite, there is a point of no return, a point where an escape velocity will carry you free. I want to break out, to break free, to leave this cycle of infection and death. If there were only a perfect rocket to mount heavenward from here and never go down again. These things he thought, but he did not speak them. Instead, his eyes, turning between the crystalline sky and the crystalline clearness of Eva’s eyes, spoke them for him as the wind blustered into them on the high summit. Neither spoke, but Eva read the thoughts in Robert’s eyes and answered him silently with the words contained in her own: I want to be taken in love, so taken that you and I, and death and life, will be gathered up skyward, inseparable into the radiance of what we would become….

Then wordlessly Robert took out the flare gun he held for emergencies, and tightening one arm about Eva, raised the other and sent the blue flare rocketing heavenward. Their eyes caressed the bright radiant rocket hurtling skyward with their joy reflected in the rising eyes of the other. Then the ascent, as each knew every ascent inescapably must, was gradually betrayed by the gravity which held them so fixedly beneath the rainbow-parabola of its hopeful trajectory, and they watched it fall earthward, burning still hotly, like the bright Angel of Death itself.
They closed their eyes and their foreheads pressed long into each other, the cold bluster about them. They wanted to stay on the peak longer, but Robert yielded to the advice of the returning guide after Eva began to show signs of disorientation from altitude syndrome and exhaustion and they headed down to the base camp at the lower level. Eva took a long sleep in Robert’s arms. When she awoke she found him reading from a book by Rilke. He read a passage aloud to her as she nuzzled her eyelids into the hair of his chest:

And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.

By the time they got back to Dar-es Salaam they only had a week or two left before they would need to get to the Midrand-Johannesburg convocation of the Pan-African Congress. Somehow Eva conceived a longing for the sea and wished to have Robert initiate her into the subaquatic realm of Scuba diving. They grabbed the Flying Horse Ferry out of Dar es Salaam and in a couple of hours found themselves in Stonestown, on the opposite island of Zanzibar, where they made arrangements for a stop for a couple of days at the Scuba resort east of the Jozani Forest and near the village of Padje.

While they waited for the resort bus to pick them up they wandered through the picturesque narrow and winding streets of Stonetown, set off against the more stately Arabic architecture of the late-Sultanate to British Empire period. There they discovered remnants of the darker history of Zanzibar as the principal Arab slaving port of East Africa, predating the arrival of the Europeans. In east Africa the main slave trade involved Arabs and arabized east Africans, often speaking Swahili who conducted slaving operations on the mainland and then often transported the taken slaves to holding and trading areas on Zanzibar for transshipment and onward sale into the diverse destinations across the Islamic world. Walking in Stonestown they encountered relics of the old slave trade finally abolished by the British, including holding pens for slaves in shipment.

There they browsed a plaque that contained a quotation on the Arab-East African slave trade from the great explorer David Livingstone who staged some of his expeditions out of Zanzibar and often encountered Arab and Swahili African slaving parties such as those under the command of the notorious Arab-African slaver Tippu Tip on his travels: "To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility ... We passed a slave woman shot and stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead ... We came upon a man dead from starvation ... The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves."

Livingstone estimated that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the Arab slave markets of Zanzibar, being East Africa's main slave-trading port under the Omani Arabs of the Al Bu Sa’id Dynasty and it is estimated that in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year before the coming of the British who abolished the trade. An historical exhibit Eva read with deep interest at one slaving site in Stonestown estimated that between 11 and 17 million slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 to 1900 and on into the Islamic world, dwarfing in total numbers even the Transatlantic slave trade of the Europeans of the Middle Passage.

After the Scuba resort bus picked them up and drove them up the lovely coast to Padje they had a fine meal and sleep and then rose with the sun to take in a PADI crash course for Eva to get her underwater on the first day. Fortunately Robert had given her some lessons back in London so she was up to the challenge. As the tides receded daily along the fringing reef they accessed the coastal lagoon by diving along to a deeper bay then boarding a dhoni. Once underwater the terrain was a flat shelf inclining down to about 18 meters until reaching a sudden drop over a short wall. The sea life was curious---at first sight the flat shelving reef seemed to be almost barren, then all of a sudden an outcrop or cavern would be mobbed by all sorts of creatures from sweepers and anthias to morays! Eva was ecstatic! At first she was a bit afraid and insecure, but with Robert’s presence to assure her and a bit more experience under her belt she took to it instinctively. The deeper caves were so alive and rich with fish, and a drop into the blue would instantly surround them in living undulating shoals of fish!—huge schools of barracuda, bronze whaler shark, blue-ribbon eels and leaffish, anemones and clownfish, butterfly fish and sand sharks. Eva couldn’t resist the temptation to remove her mouthpiece and kiss Robert deeply, enacting a game in which she would feign drowning and asphyxiation and he would come to her as a heroic rescuer and she would take the breath of life from his lips alone, holding him closely beneath the sea in a gratefulness for bringing her into this marvellous Otherworld, and their kissing and lovemaking continued long after they disembarked their diving dhoni and continued their nether explorations between their silk sheets.

Lovely as the waterworld was to Eva, she partook avidly also in the freedom and exquisiteness of their long walks along its caressing shore, with its dunes and sweeping low-calling birds. To her it seemed these walks at Robert’s side were themselves a poem of a deeper life. Thus, it did not surprise her that Robert would often sit alone, under the shadetrees, while she continued to stroll along the beach, writing his in his leather-bound notebook, which he was never without, inscribing and revising stanzas of poetry.

She returned to him on one of these intervals, after she had been gathering tropical flowers, and presented him with a bouquet, placing a poppy behind his ear as she nestled close to him, laying her head upon his breast and reading the poem that he had just written-----exuberating upon the beach, the sky, the face of the sea and the reflected sky, the life unseen in the waters below.

“How do you compose yourself to get into such poetry……?” she asked, “I am too jealous! Whenever I try I never succeed…….Maybe I am just a prosaic person!”

“You Eva?----Impossible! You are a living poem!”

“Enough with the flatterizing!” she said, “…………I’m serious. I can write my children’s books----maybe it is the drawing that goes with them that makes them flow, and the story follows from what takes shape in front of my eyes under my pencil and brush, but whenever I try poetry, real poetry, I hardly start before I crash to the ground.”

“It’s nothing mystical----maybe you are just overfretting yourself---I just look for the resemblances in things, that’s all.” he said.

“Resemblances?”

“Yes, just look for the simple resemblances, then connect them up. Take for example, a beach like this, extending as far as the eye can reach, bordered on the one hand, by trees, those palm stands, and on the other by the sea. The sky is cloudless and the sun already red. In what sense do the things of this scene resemble each other? There is enough green in the sea to relate it to those palms. There is enough of the sky reflected in the glass of the water to create a resemblance in some sense, between them. The sand is yellow, between the green and the blue. In short, the light alone creates a unity, not only in the receding of the distance, into the horizon, where differences become invisible, but also in the contrasts of closer sight. So too, sufficiently generalized, each man resembles all other men, each woman resembles all other women, this year resembles last year. The beginning of time will, no doubt, resemble the end of time. One world will resemble another, real or imagined. Opposites even, resemble each other. ……..

“………..I don’t do so much that is mystical. I just follow, search out and recognize, the resemblances, perhaps between two organisms washed up upon the shoreline, a stick of wood, a bottle cap, a piece of reality and something imagined, or between two imagined things, like when we go to church and say “God is good.” Both nature and the imagination are ceaselessly, in parallel, spinning out, spawning resemblances. I just gather them up and wire them together, like those giant dry cells in the old electrics class, in parallel series until some kind of current v flows in the circuit back to me. That is my way. It is just like Junior High School electrics class.”

“Well, I won’t ask you all of what else you were doing in Junior High School! I think it’s all just a kind of Narcissism, or worse! Your ego’s too loving search for images of itself………….and all of your horrible profound silences leaving a girl so terribly all alone and apart from you just when she can’t bear it at all! I’m going to short-circuit your body electric for you!......” she said, as she began to rub his crotch and thigh, “……I’m going to addict you to something healthier and a little less autoerotic!” she whispered with hottish breath and a brush of her soft, thick, plush lips against his overripe ear, pulling him down on top of her. Later they strolled along the beach, following the sunset over the channel, reveling in the incandescent reds and lavenders, crimsons and scarlets, listening to the rush of the evening wind, the long seacries of the gulls hovering, and to their own whispering.

Eva wrote later that evening in her Blog Journal: “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea with Robert at my side. The wind in my hair and the sun and Robert’s smiles and glances seemed like a kaleidoscopic feast of life itself. All became a part of me and of my love: the sea surf, the naked headland, the muggy sunny scene, Robert’s glances and strokes against my breasts and body, the wind from the sea, the sand, the eddies, the inlet’s cutting edge---all seemed an orison and benediction of our love. Onward we moved drunk on love and on life itself----the grass, the white sandy paths, areas of primrose, bayberries, reeds, yarrow, the gurgling creek, the undercreek, black shoals of mussels, the air and the sun, the waterline, the gulls, the crabs, a ruddy turnstone, the white blacklegged egret, the black mudflats, swallows, the twittering of birds in the shore trees and the eerie yelping of the gulls over the breaking waves, their beaks and their wings, blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed, the dash over the dunes and onto the grassy knoll where we made love hidden in a nest of brush and long-grasses, snail shells, cowries, minnows in the undertow……….all of these things emblematic of my love for Robert and of endless changing and unchanging life, triumphant over all impediments, the waves of change ever in motion and ever as eternal and eternally changing as the motions of the sea……….all of these things at one with a surging and endless upwelling of a life that washes under the disorder and confusion, the suffering and death, the perpetual moving, the beginnings and ends, and returns us ever again to ourselves alive…………….”

Finally, time dissolving away and with but a few days left they caught the ferry back to Dar es Salaam and boarded the next flight into Johannesburg and then drove a rental LandRover from Joburg out past Nelspruit then up N1 past Messina to reach the Kruger National Park. There they drove through stands of Mopane trees to the south of the Limpopo River and through the scatterings of Great Baobab Trees along the sandstone hills neighboring Punda Maria down to the Mphongolo river complex. Once there they took in the scattered herds of Nyala, Sable, Roan and Eland buck. Buffalo and elephant were also to be seen, all shadowed by predators like the lion, cheetah, leopard and packs of Wild Dog following at an opportune distance. The central region of Kruger Park proved by far the most game rich of the regions with some of the best and most lovely scenery. Robert and Eva followed along the River Sabi in the south and the Olifants River in the north through expanses of essentially grassland plain stretching west to the Lebombo Mountains which formed the boundary with Mozambique. It was so beautiful being lost by themselves beyond the reach of the crowds of people they has spent so many years jammed in with in London and Beijing. How lonely they had felt amoung those crowds of millions, and how little lonely when alone together in this intensely beautiful cradle of human origins. They followed the river valleys abundant in zebra, giraffe and Wildebeest, the grasslands also alive with the usual predators--lion, cheetah, hyena, leopard and vulture, competing for their dinner. Motoring to the south-west they spotted rhino, Sable, buffalo, Eland and Wild Dog packs. In fact Eva had never really been far from city life before, not counting the tame English countryside, and she reveled in the orgy of nature and freedom and in the intense pleasure of being alone with Robert in this vast new world.

A Country Wedding, A World Circumnavigated and Paradise Regained--Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the

robertsheppard — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 23:16:22 -0600

Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

To read Spiritus Mundi, the serialized Occupy Wall Street novel from the beginning in its proper order you can follow the Occupy sites that retain the original Chapters, including the OccupyTogether Book Club and the People’s Library of NYGCA or follow the Spiritus Mundi Wordpress site to Sample Chapters:

http://www.occupytogether.org/discuss/#/discussion/2208/a-failing-quest-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-of-spiritus-mundi-the-occupy-wall-street-novel

http://www.occupynetwork.tv/blog/departure-failing-quest-and-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-spiritus-mundi-ows-novel-robert

http://www.nycga.net/groups/peoples-library/forum/topic/departure-a-failing-quest-and-new-beginnings-chapters-1-4-of-spiritus-mundi-the-ows-novel-by-robert-sheppard/

Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/ For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/ For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com// To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/ To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/

The Complete novel should also be available soon on Amazon/Smashwords to download as a complete e-book.

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Introducing Spiritus Mundi, a Novel by Robert Sheppard
Author’s E-mail: rsheppard99_2000@yahoo.com
Related Links and Websites: Spiritus Mundi, Novel by Robert Sheppard
For Introduction and Overview of the Novel: https://spiritusmundinovel.wordpress.com/
For Updates on the Upcoming Movie Version of the Novel, Spiritus Mundi & Casting of Actors and Actresses for Leading Roles See: http://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com/
For Author’s Blog: https://robertalexandersheppard.wordpress.com//
To Read Abut the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Spiritus Mundi: http://occupywallstreetnovel.wordpress.com/
To Read a Sample Chapter from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundisamplechapters.wordpress.com/
To Read Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundifantasymythandmagicalrealism.wordpress.com/
To Read Sexual Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: The Varieties of Sexul Experience: https://spiritusmundivarietiesofsexualexperience.wordpress.com/
To Read Spy, Espionage and Counter-terrorism Thriller Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: http://spiritusmundispyespionagecounterterrorism.wordpress.com/
To Read Geopolitical and World War Three Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundigeopoliticalworldwar3.wordpress.com/
To Read Spiritual and Religious Excerpts from Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundionspiritualityandreligion.wordpress.com/
To Read about the Global Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly in Spiritus Mundi: https://spiritusmundiunitednationsparliamentaryassembly.wordpress.com/
To Read Poetry from Spiritus Mundi：https://spiritusmundipoetry.wordpress.com/
For Discussions on World Literature and Literary Criticism in Spiritus Mundi: http://worldliteratureandliterarycriticism.wordpress.com/
For Discussions of World History and World Civilization in Spiritus Mundi: https://worldhistoryandcivilizationspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Eva Strong from Spiritus Mundi: https://evasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Andreas Sarkozy from Spiritus Mundi: http://andreasblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Yoriko Oe from Spiritus Mundi: http://yorikosblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/
To Read the Blog of Robert Sartorius from Spiritus Mundi: http://sartoriusblogfromspiritusmundi.wordpress.com/

Who's Who in Chapter 30:

Robert Sartorius, is an OWS supporter and leader of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, marries Eva Strong in England
Eva Strong, is an OWS supporter and UN Parliamentary Assembly staff worker, marries Sartorius
Jack Sartorius, aka Jack McKensie, is an undercover CIA Anti-Terrorism agent in London, son of Robert Sartorius
Sarah, is Eva's daughter by a prior marriage
Little Gidding, is a villiage in England and ancestral home of the Sartorius family before their departure for America in the 1600's--Made famous in T.S. Eliot's poem, The Four Quartets
Dicky Drake, is the priest of the church in Little Gidding who marries Eva and Robert Sartorius

XXX. Little Gidding Paradise Regained

On the way to the wedding service Jack drove a rented black touring car, Isis and Sarah riding next to him in the front while Sartorius and Eva rode in the rear seat, all glorying in the beauty of the sun-drenched countryside. Months before Robert had let Eva in on the obscure and convoluted fact that Jack was indeed his son and Jack, Sarah, Robert and Eva had spent many a weekend together as a newly christened family, getting to know and by degrees to love one another with stuttering steps, and with Sarah overcoming the inevitable ambivalence of taking Robert as her new father, both longed for and half-resented and finally accepted, and taking to Jack like an older brother, or perhaps at times in view of their difference in ages like an uncle with Aunt Isis so often making up the party for horseback riding, canal boating or for wandering in the green forests of the countryside about her boarding school when they were all free for outings together.

Sometimes as they walked together on these outings Sartorius would look deeply into Jack’s eyes, which had a look of candor despite the ambivalence in their return gaze. At first he saw nothing but two expressionless blue irises full of glints and reflections, everything in short that eyes are said to be full of, and then, forced to admit that the reflections in Jack’s eyes were no better or worse than those that can be seen in any first-class puddle he would turn his eyes back into the pathway. But then he would be inextricably drawn back by something about the eyes, something inexplicably present that drew him back to the blue discs, again and again, holding him there. Then he would look again into Jack’s eyes as he talked or laughed and turned his head towards him, passing through the alternating brightening and dimming of the speckled light under the green canopy of the trees as they walked and he would see the blue-gray of Jack’s mama’s eyes looking back at him. Perhaps he was disconcerted to find a shadow of himself, as his eyes, Jack’s and his mama’s were distinguished by the same naively intelligent, sparkling, inept beauty as those of nearly all of the Sartorius clan, that had also shone in Sartorius’ grandmother’s eyes. Sartorius himself, if asked directly, would have had to confess: it is Jack’s mother who is looking back at me. Or perhaps I am looking back at myself. His mother and I had far too much in common.

The apparent harmony of the newly constituted family, while sincere and growing, naturally partially papered over many growing and adjustment pains between the generations as well as the lovers coming together. Jack on his part was, like Telemachus, deeply happy to be reunited with his wandering expatriate father, but not without inevitable faltering steps, the pain of ambivalence and buried wounds and resentments. While he cherished his reunion, while dining and drinking with his father in and out of the presence of Eva over several months they not infrequently quarreled over the pain of Sartorius’ exile, his neglect, and his failure to return to his son in the years of adolescence when Jack suffered his absence so painfully. Sartorius tried to apologise and to explain but Jack’s pain was buried beneath the level of understanding, and accusations would erupt from time to time, usually regretted on the morrow, but by slow fits and starts they gradually reconciled to each other and outgrew their buried pains and disappointments as new affections and bonds overgrew the scars of the past. By the time of the wedding, riding together in the touring car northwards, though not unremembering the past, they were prepared to embark jointly towards a newer common future.

Driving behind them on the day of the wedding followed Vanessa in her car with her son Bobby and then a short convoy of close friends and family. After they had left the urban environs of London they found themselves in the open country en route to Cambridgeshire and the small village of Little Gidding. When they had reached the open countryside Eva asked Jack to pull over and put down the top of the touring car and allow them to ride in the open air.

As they rounded the rolling hills and passed beneath the outcropping stands of elder trees she gloried in their immense clouds of cream-white flower heads nestled in their pinnate and serrated leaves. Looking more closely she saw that their elderberries were heavy, purple-black and ripe hanging from the violet-veined bunch-stems just as they had been on her country home when as a young girl she and her mother had made Elderberry Wine so long ago. She asked Jack to stop and she and Sarah went out into the woods and collected a basketful to take home with them to teach Sarah the art of wine making when she returned from her honeymoon.

While walking arm in arm with Robert in the elder woods she remembered making love to him the first time in the countryside and so many times thereafter and how he was so hard and forceful inside her and so far up inside and so gentle in his eyes afterwards. She wondered if she might be pregnant from his seed that he lodged up inside her womb-----she hoped so as Robert had taught her that love-making was a spiritual sacrament and an act of religious devotion and they had hoped that the fruit of their union would be a child of nature’s joy and beauty revealed in that act. She hoped in the unspoken recesses of her heart a child was coming forth in her belly as the very living presence of the sublime in nature arising from their love-making----a transcending of the mere cycle of birth and death.

As they walked further arm in arm in the elder woods they came across an open glade covered with a dizzying array of flowerpatches. She looked unusually charming at his elbow, from the very fact that she was not conscious of anything but of having a mind near her that asked her to be something better than she actually was. Strolling in a half-trance she picked wildflower after wildflower: Barren Strawberries, bluebells, broad-leaved willowherb and hellborine, cowslip and cookoopint, dog rose and Enchanter’s Nightshade,……goosegrass and hogweed, ……meadow vetchling and Oxeyed Daisy……...all too glorious to bear. Above her head she sensed the fluttering from branch to branch and the twittering warbling world of the Nightingale and Goldfinches. About the trunks of the trees she touched the sheafs of outward bulging fungus----bulbous honey fungus and Clustered Brittlestern alongside contorted growths of Parasol mushroom. Her eyes followed the lithe movements of a Grey Squirrel as it scampered over the fungus and up the damp side of the elder trunk, raising to flight a Silver-washed Fritillary.

She and Robert continued strolling and collecting talismans of such a glorious stand of growth and Jack and Sarah and Isis trailed behind, carrying their baskets of trophies. As she reveled in the angled sunlight of a small open glade she felt Robert’s eyes upon the billows her dress, fluttering out in a small waft of wind, and she loved and recalled without envy how sensitive Robert’s eyes were to women’s dress, which so well express the graces and charms of what they half-conceal, half-suggest. Eva didn’t think of it at first, but she then determined to collect several basketsful to fill the cars and their nuptial bedroom in which they would consummate and hallow their wedding that night. She thought he would like to be with the growths she had snatched with her own hand from such florid bounty of the nature as they had once shared as one together. It would be a proper act of consecration.

Walking through the glade Eva wondered at the strength of her love for Robert. How is it that the poets have said so much about their first loves, but so little of their last or later loves, she thought. Are their first loves the best? Or are not those the best which come from fuller thought, wider experience and a deeper-rooted affection? Are not the cured spirits and the aged wines more sublime than the new wine of mere youth?

As Eva and Sarah and Isis fanned out looking for flowers to add to their armloads Jack and Robert trailed along behind talking:

“It’s all so sudden Dad, are you sure you’re doing the right thing? Are you sure you 　know you love her?” he asked.

“I love her. She loves me. Love doesn’t rely on evidence. Love knows. Love makes life happen, it doesn’t wait for arguments and proofs and syllogisms. Believe me, she saved my life. A man without a woman is a dead man.” He replied, as they walked onwards.
　
After an hour in the elderwoods they remounted the touring car and proceeded on to Cambridgeshire. As they neared Little Gidding they followed the low rolling hills up and down like a ship cresting the waves of the open sea, passing stands of silver birch and weeping willow and the occasional small gurgling stream and understream. Rounding one turn along a riverbank they startled a Roe buck who sprinted up the slope and disappeared into the underbrush above.

Finally they reached Little Gidding, the florid and verdant village which was the ancestral home of Robert’s family, nestled in the lush and glorious Cambridgeshire countryside. Coming the way they were most likely to come, they turned from the highway into the country lane, then left the rough road and turning by the pig-stye rounded the corner to the dull but graceful façade. The plain and spare church of St. John appeared before them, nonetheless elegant in its simplicity, and surrounded by flowering heads of Queen Anne’s Lace, cow paisley and May-blossom hawthorn. In front of the church was the Table Tomb of Nicholas Farrar, the founder of the small religious commune of Little Gidding which was to grow into the Order of Christ the Sower in which the bulk of the Sartorius family took part but later left, transplanting themselves to the newly founded American Jamestown and Plymouth colonies after 1601, some returning but briefly during the Puritan Revolution. To the side of the church was the small ancestral graveyard in which Robert and Eva discovered the Sartorius family plot containing his forebearers back to the time of their participation in the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitalier from the 1100’s.

The priest in charge, the Reverend Dicky Drake, flanked by his two churchwardens Gemme de Val and Louise Jourlon received Eva cordially with a soft embrace and showed the party into the rectory, where they took some light lunch and refreshments entertained by a small ensemble playing from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

On the wall of the hallway of the rectory was a bronze plaque bearing the names of the priests and rectors who had given services, baptized the newborn and buried the dead at Little Gidding from the time of the very first rector----Robert de Hedlaya in 1223. Seemingly at the intersecting point of time and the timeless, of the world and eternity, Little Gidding appeared to Robert and Eva richly within time and radiantly outside of it.

The wedding service for Robert and Eva was simple, and the church itself, being small, held intimately the small handful of celebrants, most of whom were close friends and family. When all were gathered around the altar at the proper moment the organ began to play the familiar tune and Eva followed Sarah in her simple white wedding gown in a small processional past the brass baptismal font bowl to the place of union before the altar. The small procession passed the brass sconces upon which the candles burned along the length of the nave of the church, then passed beneath the large brass chandelier and the stained glass window bearing the image of the Crucifixion. Eva started to smile softly when she looked up above the large brass chandelier and read incised upon the chancel arch the inscription dating to the Knights Templars in 1185: 'O pray for the peace of Jerusalem' a quotation from Psalm 122,v.6 referring to the early relationship of the Little Gidding Church to the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. Beside them on the wall she read a grey cloth mounted on the wall embroidered with the words of T.S. Eliot:
“You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.”

Finally Rev. Drake began the service, stepping to the brass eagle topped lectern, accompanied by organ music and benedictions. He remembered to the assembled the sacred nature of marriage, a sacrament joining two souls in a unity of nature, heaven and earth----and of body and of spirit. He asked each present to have faith in the power of Christ’s love manifested in the love of man for woman and in the natural affinity, inclination and conjunction of their bodies, their senses and their spirits yearning for one another in flesh and in spirit as a waystation of their further yearning for unification with and in God. And he asked Robert and Eva to nurture the kernel of that faith to timely fruition from the seeds of the spirit planted on this day. Robert raised the thin white veil and gazed into Eva’s face before he kissed her. The look in her eyes was something more than soulful.

Robert and Eva spent the first days of their honeymoon in the magnificent English countryside after leaving Little Gidding, spending their first night as man and wife at Stratford-on-Avon in a quaint half-timbered inn and then riding a canal narrowboat through the Avon Ring. Before she first made love to him as his wife, in his hope and in his anticipation, the other women of his past became as nothing to him and she became everything to him. After they made love she became more than everything. Where she satisfied so deeply, there she created ever growing hunger and desire in him. Every consummation gave birth to an ever intenser desire for her. Reveling in the open air and sunlight of the lush countryside they drifted through the stands of Alder and Weeping Willow along the banks, every now and then opening onto the nestled and delightfully sheltered small villages of the venerable North Stratford Canal. They vagabondingly detoured along the lock-free stretch of the Grand Union and upon the neighboring flooded lakes up past the Hatton locks, taking in the split bridges and the ‘barrel-roofed’ cottages of the small isolated settlements along the route. Every now and again along the rural canal route they would tie up their boat at a place happily vacant of other human presence and Eva would leap out and run barefoot across the damp meadow grass happily chasing the Cotswold sheep with Robert laughingly at her heels. He would then catch her up in a hidden spot and throw her into a lay of long grass and soft rush and tearing off their clothes they would make frantic love with the scent of the wet grass in her hair and the sun passing in and out of the clouds wafting above them, angling warming afternoon rays upon their naked skin.

Then they drifted oblivious to the world in their edenic, romantic trance stopping at Mary Arden Cottage, Shakespeare’s mother’s house before continuing down the verdant wood-lined canal to Tewkesbury, stopping to take in the magnificent Abbey there where the canal negotiates its lock into the River Severn, and then diverting to another deserted canalway. From the drifting boat Eva held out her hand and caressed the growths on the embankment of the occasional stands of soft rush, great horsetail and lesser reedmace, and they would stop as their heart desired and walk in the underbrush of the ponds and estuaries along the route, picking handfuls of iris, brooklime, willowherb and marsh marigold, with which flowers Eva gloriously decorated the interior of their boat’s cabin and laid them lovingly upon the pillows of their floating nuptial bed within. They gloried in the absolute silence of some stretches, the overhanging trees above mirrored in the passing waters below, kissing and petting and playing tongues together in the sunlight of the upper deck, drifting arm in arm in and out of sleep, the silence broken only by the occasional outcryings of an errant mallard duck or moorhen.

Most lovely to her were the times when they would drift on the open lake in the light of the misting moon, and he would take her wordlessly. And in those times it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was rolling its dark dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling rippling billows, and ever at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the center of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, toching lower, and she was deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier of the ripples of her rolled away to some shore unseen, uncovering her, and closed plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft shudding convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, the consummation was upon her and onflowing, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was baptized, cleansed and borne reborn a woman.

Or their passions found their ways betimes from the plangent waters to the shores of light when they found a dark hidden clutch of glade-grass beside the lakeside on which to stretch out their lovemaking. She had found one of the sons of God from the Beginning, and he had found one of the most luminous daughters of man.

In the night’s shadows she traced with her hands the line of his loins and muscled thighs at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of an electric passion she released from him, drawing it into herself. She had established a new circuit, a raw current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of their bodies and drawn in a perfect circuit. It was the dark fire of an unknown electricity that surged outward from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction…..

When he rose from their makeshift bed of crushed reeds and grasses, he stood there against the pale dark sky in his strange whole body, that had its marvelous upwellings of an almost palpable,flowing, liquid energy, like the bodies of the sons of God who were in the beginning. These were the strange forthflowings of his body, rich in sex, more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought that there was no power deeper than the primal power of a man’s released natural desire, but now, behold, from the smitten rock of this man’s body, from the strange marvelous flanks of sweat and moistening thighs, deeper further in mystery than any mere animal desire, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches, quickening somewhere, within her and beyond, and into the nightime sky.

Those were the first of the many long strange nights. Alone together and adrift on the waters they made love. She met him with passion, fierce as his own, and knowing too, for she exacted her pleasure from him even as he took his own, and she opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries.

There are certain moments in life that should be arrested and protected from the flow of time, and not simply be transmitted in a snapshot or a painting or, as in this modern age, in a microblog, a Tweet, or a video-embedded web page. How much more vital if the person who lived those moments should be permanently present in their retelling and recollection, through the presence of living and speaking memory, though he may risk the wrath of a wagering Mephisto for daring to linger outside time indefinitely, at such an epiphantic stopping point and declaring his hope that it last forever, it was so fair. Such, Eva’s mind lingered after the love making with Robert, and she sucked long and long at the marrow of her happiness. She looked over the night waters and into the beautiful sky, serene and unfathomable, and the moon cast its fullness like manna made from light, nourishing her eyes and the earth’s roots.

Sometimes they made love in the small boat, drifting on the glazen waters in a hidden corner of a lake. To Sartorius’ mind it was an exquisite strangeness making love on the flowing waters. It was like holding Proteus, he thought at stray moments hours later, as though as they came together she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she were herself the incessant waves of the sea rising in a rush all around him.

One night in the boat Eva brought him some hot wine which she had prepared over a spirit lamp in the boat’s cabin and sat down opposite him. She sipped her wine in the pale moonlight and let her eyes drift shut. Sartorius stared: the two lanes of Eva’s thighs, entering the tunnel of her skirt. Where is the middle of women, he pondered; where is the center of their gravitational pull? Where lies the marrow in them, the marrow of life that holds us like captured comets turned and tamed into orbiting moons, or drives us like the teeming, surging salmon exhausting ourselves, overleaping weirs and falls and ever upward swimming through downward currents, to do or die, to forsake the free ocean to return to the very stream and place of our birth? In different places. In the pinkish pulp of the flesh inside their mouths we see at the beginnings and endings of long kisses or couplings; in the heft of the breasts that reduce us so absurdly to a recovered infancy, a reunion so longed for and so impossible; in the gap between the thighs, the lost homeland and place of indwelling so longed for and so sought, a promised land to end our so long exodus, yet so often a paradise that can only fitfully and fleetingly be regained, leaving us like Moses with our staff erect on the wrong side of the Jordan River, forbidden completed cohabitation with our dreams, or if entering, suffering that “little death” which takes us away from and beyond ourselves and makes us not us but something lesser and greater than ourselves, ending our own stories that others might begin anew.

When they tired of the boat they would spend a day or two in a country inn or bed and breakfast, wash themselves, stroll in the country air and retire early to their bed. One night they walked downward along the particularly warm, thick and palpable air of a wooded slope, buoyed up and lulled by the deep sweetness of the tapestried honeysuckle blossoms dense along the thickets at the woodside, then drifted arm in arm to their small room above the waters of the small lakeside inn. She washed first and went to the bed to wait for him, slipping between the sheets with a scissors kick as he disappeared into the bathroom to shower. When he came out his skin was rosy red from the hot shower and he had but a towel wrapped about his waist. Eva thought how beautiful he looked, like a Greek faun. Naked, he bent over her and kissed her ears before slipping into the sheets beside her. He saw the whiteness of her skin upon her breasts, which he kissed and nuzzled. His hands felt downwards from around her back, massaging in turn each of her vertebrae and releasing the tenseness of each in turn until he came to the small flat triangle above the tail of her back, which he rubbed languorously before letting his hands explore further. He took in each turn of her warm body with his fingers, from its firmnesses and bony corners, to its waiting softnesses. Most of all he grasped her waist, just where it narrowed above her hips. Then he lay the temple of his head up against the temple of hers, rubbing them together then pressing his forehead’s centre into hers, resting his exactly upon hers, as he rolled over on top of her, clutching her narrow waist as his thighs spread her thighs wider still as she moved respondingly beneath him.

Calila e Dimna,The"Assad" King

jastimi — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:01:57 -0600

Cult of Personality عبادة الشخصية

jastimi — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:53:55 -0600

This is what I think is the main reason for all this, not banks or politicians or the system or the laws, wipe the rich ..

OWS and Unions

mando61 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:10:49 -0600

I know Summer is right around the corner and OWS will again take to the streets. I know there are big plans for May Day and the rest of Summer. I also know that many of you will be standing with Labor unions both big and small. I just want you folks to think about something before you take to the streets. I know that one of the big gripes of OWS is that large corporations give millions to politics. Yup, that is just not right or fair. But, did you know that most Unions large and small take union dues from their workers and a portion of it goes to the Democratic National Committee. And they do this without even asking! So my point is this Summer when you stand with big labor they are doing the very same thing as the corporations are doing...giving millions (yes millions) to liberal politics. I know for a fact that this is true. I was in a Federal union for a short time. During election time my mailbox was full with democrat voting guides. Please think about what I have said. You really cannot have it both ways. Also, the GOP and the media and theTea Party will pick right up on it. Just food for thought.

Costco and the 99%

mando61 — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:54:21 -0600

Last night NBC did a a news segment on Costco and it's great success. They said that Costco has 60 million members! Holy Smokes! It also said they are building more and more stores. The the average card holder makes $100,000 or more a year. That would be the 99% . This in another reason I think the term "We are the 99%" needs to go. Because so many of the 99% are happy and doing just fine. If you make $100-500,000 a year, then you are the 99%.

Occupy Rap

oppositefear — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:19:48 -0600

if you here of any great good rap songs for the movement we can post them and create like a revolutionary digital library for them the song above is one of those political great good songs

Revolution Soundcloud

MundusVultDecipi — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:04:38 -0700

A mixtape of revolutionary music inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement featuring music from Immortal Technique, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, The Roots, Pharoahe Monch, Erykah Badu, Zion I and Maimouna Youssef to name a few.

Source: http://soundcloud.com/streetknowledge-1/music-is-the-weapon-vol-2

more music for the occupy movement

granpachuck6 — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:33:37 -0700

In the stone age during the anti war movement of the 60s&70s came a lot of great music and mabe with this music some new comers will become known,,one such would be Dan Skinner and the Sense,,their new release called "going all the way" was originaly written as a protest song over in England and now has been rerecorded and released and now is dedicated to the occupy movement and can be found on their web site www findthesense.com and to all a very occupy christmas..

The Occupy Nuclear Daily #OccupyNuclear

no_nukes — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:39:20 -0600

OCCUPY NUCLEAR | NO NUKES | RE-TOOL NOW
The OcNuke Daily < #OccupyNuclear >
http://tinyurl.com/OcNuke

tweet your activist URLs using #OccupyNuclear to have them published there!
shoutouts: #OcNuke

What Could Students Do?

welcometomyworld — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:14:34 -0600

I saw recently on the news that the student strike in Quebec is still taking place. Originally in my mind I had thought that a strike of a good scale would make schools lower or abolish tuition. It seems, given everything so far, that that just doesn't work. Even, I think, if there were merely hundreds rather than thousands enrolled in schools as a result of strikes and protests, schools survive. Why is the strike so ineffective? Keep in mind that most protesters are not at all violent, and this is probably some ploy to discredit the strikes.

Demand Sustainability!

marchelo — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:35:39 -0600

The concerns/problems/issues/corruption that is spoken out against all has one common thread that I think would make a solid and broad sound-bite, while also encompassing every major issue mentioned here and on the other Occupy_ sites:

We demand the end of that which is unsustainable.

The inequitable influence of money upon our democracy is unsustainable.
The concentration of our nation's wealth to fewer and fewer individuals is unsustainable.
The unchecked and under-regulated greed of Wall Street is unsustainable.
The subsidies given to Big Agro, Big Oil, and Big Pharma are unsustainable.
The rising cost of healthcare for average Americans is unsustainable.
The abuse of our natural resources in unsustainable.
The complexity of our tax code breeds loopholes and sweetheart deals which are unsustainable.
The application of human rights to corporations is unsustainable.
The dependance on debt to fund our country is unsustainable.

The list goes on and on. We do so much that is unsustainable, is it any wonder we are facing a crash?

We demand the end of that which is unsustainable.
This demand is self explanatory and impossible to refute. Something that is unsustainable must by its very definition come to an end. Why not end it now, before it gets any worse?
We have perpetuated this fantasy that our actions carry no consequences, and now that they are all coming to a head we can choose to end them on our terms, or wait for the whole mess to crash down upon us. Taking a stand of meeting these blatantly unsustainable practices head on will have broad support.

Looking ahead, the notion and execution of sustainability could be crucial to the movement's success. If the Occupy movement continues to grow as it has, the possibility of a general strike becomes more and more apparent. As more unions and individuals opt out of the current system, the desire to grind that system to a halt will be overwhelming and may well be inevitable. What will a general strike look like? Well, if its revolution scale, it will be a complete shut down of the basic functions the 99% of society provides. This means food production, power generation, server maintenance, and transportation systems may will be rendered inoperable.
Its a simple but profound idea: Stop everything and see who we are.

What if the 1% is counting on it? How might they profit from such chaos? The same way anyone in power benefits from a strike or a boycott- they count on people caving in once their standard of living has been sufficiently lowered; they wait the strike out.
I promise you, the 1% we protest is betting with all their money that the 99% will cave once society falls into chaos. If you think about it, its not a bad bet. If you can indefinitely provide for yourself from the fortune you have amassed, why bother with any of the movement's demands? Let the 99% crash the system. The 1% can provide all the basic necessities of their chosen lifestyle for themselves, they don't need our utilities and will not miss them when they are gone.
The best way for those in power to profit from such a collapse is quite simply to wait it out- let the protestors bring chaos unto themselves. In their eyes, they hold all the power and we only have demands. Should a protracted general strike become a reality, people may soon long for the former comforts of their middle-class indebted servitude once their quality of life reaches the breaking point. They will gladly except whatever terms necessary to restore the unsustainable life they once enjoyed. Just look at the terms being forced upon the people of Greece: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13940431
We can not let this happen.

The answer is beautifully simple, but profound in its effect: We must create a sustainable occupation.
A sustainable occupation does not rely on the current system whatsoever. If they cut power or if a strike shuts it off, we must be able to generate our own sustainable electricity. Even if it comes down to taking shifts riding a modified stationary bike to generate pedal power (and warmth come winter), we must be ready and creative with our solutions.
A sustainable occupation has a network in place to provide an uninterrupted source of food and water. We can start gardens, and connect with local farmers or urban homesteaders to build a working relationship (send volunteers to work the farm- they send food). Plan on grocery stores and pizza shops no longer being available.
A sustainable occupation can provide its own internet connectivity. Set up a network of mobile servers, expand non-electronic communications and create a reliable chain of information between each movement to provide assistance should they need it.

We must create a sustainable occupation, not only to outlast the 1% when basic services fail, but to create an example for the world that can serve as a model for the society to come. A society of individuals who have chosen sustainability over linear growth. A society of people who recognize that unsustainable practices must, by their very definition, come to an end.

Map of the Drone Strikes in Pakistan

admin — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:55:58 -0600

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=202193247307216271592.00047e8cdfc55d220dee7&msa=0