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Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs

‘A letter back then might simply ask one question. The reply would answer it. Just that. A letter might describe a single event, or pass on a single piece of news. I’m pregnant. Your father is dying. I was sent on patrol last night, and I survived. I love you. I still love you. I no longer love you.’

‘So it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.’

“It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion.”

‘The vast majority of the formally codified doctrines that the West shows aversion to are, in my opinion, absolutely contradictory to Islam. Instead of being concerned with Shari’a law in general, I think one should be concerned with precisely who is interpreting it and how.’

On Beyoncé's ‘Countdown’. ‘I’m so torn by this. On the one hand you have one of the most dynamic pop songs of the year. Something that roars with polyphony. One listen through and you feel like you could live in this shit, Matrix-like, deluding yourself in its universe endlessly. And on the other hand you’ve still got Beyoncé‘s mind-numbing conflation of feminist empowerment with consumerism and a conveniently male-approved sexuality.’

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.