Saved (Public Feed)

Reflecting on his newly self-released $5 internet-only special. ‘I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.’

‘Nobody wants a recession. Nobody wants historically high poverty rates and unemployment rates. Curiously, it’s the Occupy Wall Street folks who are most passionate about making whatever changes are necessary to ensure the next recession doesn’t happen. The financial industry, on the other hand, is fighting any effort at common-sense regulation tooth and nail.’

‘In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.’

Solid gold, legitimate questions.

‘Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!’

‘We should not underestimate, however, the difficulty of prosecuting high-ranking officials in large corporations. This case may be an exception, but senior corporate officers rarely have sufficient personal involvement to be charged with crimes. To reach the boardroom, where policies are formed that can lead to tragedy, we must be willing to hold corporations criminally responsible.’

‘No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.’

‘What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?’

‘The teachers’ role, then, is not only to teach students what to learn, but to teach them how to learn. And you can’t teach the learning process from the top in the way that you can teach content from the top (“here’s what I know; here’s what they need to know”). You have to meet students where they are and create steps to the path. It isn’t just the teacher’s responsibility to do so — it’s the teacher’s primary responsibility. And it’s a responsibility that needs to be very sensitive to the ways in which students learn at every developmental level, from the time they’re born to the time they enter a classroom.’

‘the church’s desire for “answers” has not served it well. Whether that was the church insisting that Galileo recant his position that the earth was not the center of the universe or whether it’s trying to come up with easy ways for Americans to not have to think critically about how we live and consume and participate in the capitalist society which is willing to let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’

This barely talks about Occupy Honolulu and instead focuses on our homelessness problem, which is a huge one.

Eric Harvey on Occupy Bloomington: ‘The fact that the Bloomington protest was small but well-intentioned and pretty well-executed is a good sign that the non-violent performance of democratic citizenship is infiltrating the everyday lives of people everywhere, to the degree that many people might be viewing these protests as a DIY set of actions that anyone can do.’ ‘Further, I think the more that people see similar-looking YouTube tableaux of quiet kids sitting with locked arms being shoved around by black-suited mean-looking authority figures—particularly with the idea that this is “citizen journalism”—the more that they’re going to (maybe) start thinking more generally about the way that state power functions in American society, and maybe (just mayyybe) want to do something about it. And that’s something I hope continues to flourish, even to a small degree.’

‘No. Of course not. The rule is pure theater.’ The writer suspects that the real reason is to keep passengers undistracted in case of emergency.

‘Most of the biggest Occupy Wall Street camps are gone. But their slogan still stands.’

- Consuming more than you create - Watching your own vanity metrics - Starting the day responding to others - Prioritizing the wrong activities - Relying on multi-tasking to 'save time'

About our current political situation.

‘Every image of a human, ever, is of a human reacting to something.’

A lot of good advice, or at least a perspective to be well acknowledged.

An overview of the job market for millenials.

‘What we need to do is to build meritocratic selection processes, and then go our of our way to tell people about them. We should emphasize the objectivity of the selection process and our efforts to weed out all forms of bias.’

‘For example, there are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, “bad apples.” What both of them have in common is that they occupy, as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.’

‘So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.’

On China’s satirists and what happens to them.

Just how dangerous (and lethal) pepper spray can be.

A software synthesizer I’d very much like to try.

‘Thanksgiving is a one of our better ideas. We, theoretically, reflect on how fortunate we are to have what we have. The day after Thanksgiving would be a great day to start thinking how we might start addressing wrongs perpetuated on anybody trampled in the process of putting together the comfort and security we are so thankful for. Instead, we’ve turned it into a symbolic date for acquiring shinier objects in anticipation of how we can best miss the point of our next major holiday. Perhaps worse, it infects Thanksgiving itself, turning the holiday into, effectively, a paean to culinary gluttony in preparation for commercial gluttony.’

This irks me. Boys that care more about their music or their TV show or their friends than the girl who expresses undying love for them aren't taking that girl for granted -- they're just not into that girl! Or perhaps I'm wrong, and this hits too close to home and confronting it makes me uncomfortable.

‘Calepin is a hosted blog publisher that watches your Markdown files stored in Dropbox.’

‘This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement — even if it adopts specific demands — remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.’

‘As CD sales plummet and famed shops close, brave entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent the model. Is it too late?’