I dream of a Star Trek world. This think tank will focus on creative actions designed to initiate a global paradigm shift towards a world where racism, poverty and war will be a thing of the past.
Cinco de Mayo has its roots in the French occupation of Mexico, which took place in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the Mexican Civil War of 1858, and the 1860 Reform Wars. These wars left the Mexican Treasury nearly bankrupt. On July 17, 1861, Mexican President Benito Juárez issued a moratorium in which all foreign debt payments would be suspended for two years. In response, France, Britain, and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz to demand reimbursement. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew, but France, at the time ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to establish a Latin empire in Mexico that would favor French interests, the Second Mexican Empire.
Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large French force and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat. Moving on from Veracruz towards Mexico City, the French army encountered heavy resistance from the Mexicans near Puebla, at the Mexican forts of Loreto and Guadalupe. The 8,000-strong French army attacked the much smaller and poorly equipped Mexican army of 4,500. Yet, on May 5, 1862, the Mexicans managed to decisively crush the French army, then considered "the premier army in the world".
The victory represented a significant morale boost to the Mexican army and the Mexican people at large. In the description of The History Channel, "Although not a major strategic win in the overall war against the French, Zaragoza's success at Puebla represented a great symbolic victory for the Mexican government and bolstered the resistance movement." The description of Time magazine was: "The Puebla victory came to symbolize unity and pride for what seemed like a Mexican David defeating a French Goliath." It helped establish a much-needed sense of national unity and patriotism. (read more)
"BOSTON — Three additional people were taken into custody Wednesday in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings last month, according to Boston police and a federal law enforcement official."
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international industrial union that was formed in 1905. The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain.
The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union," contends that all workers should be united as a social class and that capitalism and wage labor should be abolished. They are known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their managers and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented. IWW membership does not require that one work in a represented workplace, nor does it exclude membership in another labor union.
The Wobblies differed from other union movements of the time by its promotion of industrial unionism, as opposed to the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor. The IWW emphasized rank-and-file organization, as opposed to empowering leaders who would bargain with employers on behalf of workers. This manifested itself in the early IWW's consistent refusal to sign contracts, which they felt would restrict workers' abilities to aid each other when called upon. Though never developed in any detail, Wobblies envisioned the general strike as the means by which the wage system would be overthrown and a new economic system ushered in, one which emphasized people over profit, cooperation over competition.
One of the IWW's most important contributions to the labor movement and broader push towards social justice was that, when founded, it was the only American union (besides the Knights of Labor) to welcome all workers including women, immigrants, African Americans and Asians into the same organization. Indeed, many of its early members were immigrants, and some, like Carlo Tresca, Joe Hill and Mary Jones, rose to prominence in the leadership. (read more)
- As for the crisis of our own lives, in 2009 Matt Taibbi assigned blame to the banks, calling Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Reverend Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan, referring to the Emergency Manager which was wrapped around the face of his city, said “he’s for the corporations that suck the life out of people.” Banks, insurance companies, and corporations belong to the total circuit of capitalism whence the sucking originates. When Alan Haber, the first president of SDS, spoke last winter at the Crazy Wisdom Book Shop and Tea Room in Ann Arbor about his experiences at Occupy Boston and Occupy Wall Street, he concluded his remarks by reminding everybody that “Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks...”
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Munich. His destination was a castle in Transylvania, a country wedged between the Danubian Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. It was a dark and stormy night when he arrived.
“Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things of the world will have full sway?” asked the landlady of a nearby hotel, and she implored him to reverse his course. Other commoners then warned him it was a witch’s Sabbath. Heedless, he persisted to the castle where pure terror awaited him in the personage of a bloodsucking monster. Count Dracula was at once as smooth, polite, and persuasive as President Obama, and as terrifying, shape-shifting, and diabolical as George W. Bush. He was undead—a zombie, or a werewolf—and lived only as long as he was able to suck human blood...
Operation Northwoods was a series of false flag proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962, but were rejected by the Kennedy administration. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit perceived acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.
Operation Northwoods proposals included hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government. It stated: The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.
Several other proposals were included within Operation Northwoods, including real or simulated actions against various U.S. military and civilian targets. The plan was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and sent to the Secretary of Defense. Although part of the U.S. government's Cuban Project anti-communist initiative, Operation Northwoods was never officially accepted; it was authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then rejected by President John F. Kennedy.
The plan called for U.S. personnel to disguise themselves as agents of the Cuban government and to engage in terrorist attacks on the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. It also called for terrorist attacks within the United States that would be conducted by pro-U.S. forces disguising themselves as Cuban agents.
One aspect of Operation Northwoods involved the proposed hijacking of an American passenger plane. The JCS proposed that a real plane containing American passengers would be hijacked by friendly forces disguised as Cuban agents. The plane would drop down off the radar screen and be replaced by a pilotless aircraft, which would crash, purportedly killing all the passengers. Under the plan, the real passenger plane would be secretly flown back to the United States.
James Bamford wrote on Northwoods: Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war. (read more)(solving the mystery)
There really isn't much reason to beat around the bush, I imagine. By now you have noticed the manipulation and bias within the media. You've watched as your government has sold you down the river. Corporations have buried their money into your politics and now influence the decisions of your government. The banks continue to grow more ruthless and unethical in practice. All in the name of profit. Your future, your children’s future...it means nothing to them. The only desired outcome is maximum profit, obtained with the least possible expense. And whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, you already know this.
Is this what it has come to? A price-tag on life? A world coursing with greed, intoxicated on monetary gain and material conquest? Why have we allowed this?
Ladies and gentlemen, these are questions you should be asking yourselves. The world around us has been manipulated, coerced in a direction where human life is outweighed by profit. Corporations and bankers now influence the policies, regulations, and even the decisions made by our own governments who have sold us down the river. They took our dreams. Our futures. They took them from you. From all of us. And in their own arrogant, condescending fashion they expect you to roll over and accept it.
They pass into law further restrictions on your personal rights and freedoms. They want to shut you up! To keep quiet! Keep you alone and all of us divided. Marketing has you chasing an image, telling you what you need to do, what to think and say...how to feel, how to dress. How to be you. Who are you? Do you even know? Can you honestly tell me that you are happy with life as it is defined for you? Open your eyes! It's all out there in front of you. Stop trusting these crooked politicians. They don’t care about you! They don't care. The will of the people is not a profitable investment.
All the while you chase the dream life they created for you, waving it in front of your face like a carrot on a stick. Stop it! Stop being guided through life! We need to quit letting the decisions of a few control the lives of the many. We need to take our future, our children’s future...back into our hands.
When did we become so careless?
So wreckless, apathetic and submissive?
When did we lose our connection with others, with community and family?
Stop focusing on our differences and start acknowledging and building upon our common grounds. Start sharing, connecting, teaching one another and learning from each other as well. Build our bond as human beings. Find your strength in unity. Find your voice...and then let it be heard. Because, my friends...what you have to say does matter. We just need to get off our knees, stand on our own two feet, and remind them just how much we do matter!
Become the change that you want to see. Build the future together! A decent future. A future where life is cherished, rather than spent worshipping money. Where justice, fairness and liberty is doctrine. A world invested in education, ingenuity and creativity rather than war and conquest.
Rid yourself of your cynicism, your ego, your fear. Instead open your hearts, your minds and your eyes. Broaden your horizons. Respect others for their own opinions, just as you can expect the same in return. It's time to change our ways. To evolve and break free of this vicious cycle. It’s time to educate ourselves on the issues affecting us and to work together to create progressive, effective solutions.
Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. Winston Churchill,
corrected on this error once, responded to the young man who corrected
him by saying "Young man, that is the kind of impudence up with which I
will not put!
And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
Be more or less specific.
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies endlessly over and over again.
No sentence fragments.
Contractions aren't always necessary and shouldn't be used to excess so don't.
Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.
Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous and can be excessive.
All generalizations are bad.
Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
Don't use no double negatives.
Avoid excessive use of ampersands & abbrevs., etc.
One-word sentences? Eliminate.
Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake (Unless they are as good as gold).
The passive voice is to be ignored.
Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words, however, should be enclosed in commas.
Never use a big word when substituting a diminutive one would suffice.
Don't overuse exclamation points!!!
Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth-shaking ideas.
Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed and use it correctly with words' that show possession.
Don't use too many quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
If you've heard it once, you've heard it a billion times: Resist
hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly. Besides,
hyperbole is always overdone, anyway.
Puns are for children, not groan readers.
Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
Who needs rhetorical questions? However, what if there were no rhetorical questions?
Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
Avoid "buzz-words"; such integrated transitional scenarios complicate simplistic matters.
People don't spell "a lot" correctly alot of the time.
Each person should use their possessive pronouns correctly.
All grammar and spelling rules have exceptions (with a few exceptions)....Morgan's Law.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
The dash - a sometimes useful punctuation mark - can often be overused - even though it's a helpful tool some of the time.
Proofread carefully to make sure you don't repeat repeat any words.
In writing, it's important to remember that dangling sentences.
I have seen sentences beginning with "and" a lot; must be a new thing. I do it too.
Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."
Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10 view camera.
His subjects include Buster Keaton, Marian Anderson, Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound, Isak Dinesen, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andy Warhol, and the Chicago Seven. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. By eliminating the use of soft lights and props, Avedon was able to focus on the inner worlds of his subjects evoking emotions and reactions.
He would at times evoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject's character and personality that were not typically captured by others. (read more)(photos)
Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit. It's no longer an overstatement to note that the youth today that are raised and taught through network television are intellectually dead by their early teens.
The dumbing down of humanity is represented by another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real. Thus, though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on a conscious level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers. This is where the manipulators use our own emotions as strings to control us. The distortions and directions we are being moved to are taking place in the subconscious, often undetected.
Propaganda techniques were first codified and applied in a scientific manner by journalist Walter Lippman and psychologist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) early in the 20th century. During World War I, Lippman and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of Britain. Edward Bernays said in his 1928 book Propaganda that, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." (read more)
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in mid-20th century Europe. Fascists seek to unify their nation through a totalitarian state that promotes the mass mobilization of the national community, relying on a vanguard party to initiate a revolution to organize the nation on fascist principles. Hostile to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and communism, fascist movements share certain common features, including the veneration of the state, a devotion to a strong leader, and an emphasis on ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, and militarism. Fascism views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation and asserts that "superior" nations and races should attain living space by displacing weak and inferior ones.
Fascist ideology consistently invoked the primacy of the state. Leaders such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany embodied the state and claimed indisputable power. Fascist movements emphasized a belligerent, virulent form of nationalism (chauvinism) and a fear of foreign people (xenophobia), which they frequently linked to an exaggerated ethnocentrism. The typical fascist state also embraced militarism, a belief in the rigors and virtues of military life as an individual and national ideal, meaning much of public life was organized along military lines and an emphasis put on uniforms, parades, and monumental architecture.
Influenced by national syndicalism, the first fascist movements emerged in Italy around World War I, combining elements of left-wing politics with more typically right-wing positions, in opposition to socialism, communism, liberal democracy and, in some cases, traditional right-wing conservatism. Although fascism is usually placed on the far right on the traditional left-right spectrum, fascists themselves and some commentators have argued that the description is inadequate. Following the Second World War, few parties openly describe themselves as fascist and the term is more usually used pejoratively by political opponents. The term neo-fascist or post-fascist is sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far right with ideological similarities to, or roots in, 20th century fascist movements respectively. (read more)
Corporatocracy is a term used as an economic and political system controlled by corporations or corporate interests. It is a generally pejorative term often used by critics of the current economic situation in a particular country, especially the United States. The term has been used by liberal and left-leaning critics, but also some economic libertarian critics and other political observers across the political spectrum. Economist Jeffrey Sachs described the United States as a corporatocracy in his book The Price of Civilization. He suggested that it arose from four trends: weak national parties and strong political representation of individual districts, the large U.S. military establishment after World War II, big corporate money financing election campaigns, and globalization tilting the balance away from workers.
The term was used by author John Perkins in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where he described corporatocracy as a collective composed of corporations, banks, and governments. This collective is known as what author C Wright Mills would call the Power Elite. The Power Elite are wealthy individuals who hold prominent positions in Corporatocracies. These individuals control the process of determining society's economic and political policies.
The concept has been used in explanations of bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs, as well as complaints such as the exploitation of national treasuries, people, and natural resources. It has been used by critics of globalization, sometimes in conjunction with criticism of the World Bank or unfair lending practices, as well as criticism of free trade agreements. (read more)
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