The American Uprising : Week One

If The Police & Army Won't Help Quell Protests, They'll Send In The Robots

By Darryl Mason

Extraordinary scenes from Wisconsin last week showing the birth of the anti-austerity/USUncut movement. An occupation, or #Occupy, of the Wisconsin State Capitol was supposed to be ended by police, but a police union representative instead announced hundreds of police would be joining the occupation.



During the first UKUncut protests, British students chanted at police who were beating them, "Your Jobs Are Next!" American cops seem to already know this.

So who busts an occupation when the police number themselves as occupiers? The Army? Or the Homeland security teams being trained by Blackwater/XE?

And so the American Uprising, or #Occupy movement, begins.

MSNBC :

A crowd estimated at more than 70,000 people on Saturday waved American flags, sang the national anthem and called for the defeat of a Wisconsin plan to curb public sector unions that has galvanized opposition from the American labor movement.

In one of the biggest rallies at the state Capitol since the Vietnam War, union members and their supporters braved frigid temperatures and a light snowfall to show their displeasure.

The mood was upbeat despite the setback their cause suffered earlier this week when the state Assembly approved the Republican-backed restrictions on union collective bargaining rights over fierce Democratic objections.

There was no violence. Protesters described the occupation as having "a party atmosphere." The better the party, the more peaceful the protests, the more people will join them.

And over the weekend, solidarity protests broke out across the country :

Rallies were held across the country Saturday to support thousands of protesters holding steady at the Wisconsin Capitol in their fight against Republican-backed legislation aimed at weakening unions.

Union supporters organized rallies from New York to Los Angeles in a show of solidarity as the protest in Madison entered its 12th straight day and attracted its largest crowd yet: more than 70,000 people. Hundreds banged on drums and screamed into bullhorns inside, while others braved frigid weather and snowfall during a rally that spilled into city streets.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker has introduced a bill that includes stripping almost all public workers, from librarians to snow plow drivers, of their right to collectively bargain on benefits and work conditions.

The mega-wealthy will be hoping that the people will fight amongst themselves, squabbling over economic scraps, protesters clashing with counter-protesters, lots of TV magnet violence, maybe some shootings, to keep the people divided, at each other' throats, instead of the 99% turning as one towards the top 1% and leaving them with no choice but to give up their wealth in this age of austerity.

But it's not going to be easy to blackmail, badname and breakdown these protesters. This time. It's not students at a G20 rally, this is mums & dads, teachers, police, firefighters, people who hold communities together. When they are threatened, communities feel threatened and those who never dreamed of protesting anything will spill out of their homes and into the streets.

Or into the State Capitol.

The mainstream media will learn quickly if they want the precious news site clicks and the YouTube views, they will have to deal with America Uprising fairly, if not be biased in their favour. Why go to CNN to see the protest you attended misrepresented or flat-out falsified when you can celebrate your day of action with your new revolutionary friends on Twitter, Facebook or look for yourself in the dozens of YouTube clips already uploaded by the time you get home from the rally?

It's going to be very hard indeed to portray this uprising as "fat privileged unionists getting rich off poor taxpayers". They're already trying to pump that puppy, but it's not working, unless you think Fox News is reality.

At least 15 million Americans who want to work are without jobs, more than 45 million need food stamps to survive. The old Left-Right distraction game doesn't seem to be working, it's harder than ever to slip agent provocateurs into calm protests to incite violence, particularly when governors admit this is a standard tactic, and the police, the firefighters and paramedics (who are themselves exempt, for now anyway, from being stripped of their collective bargaining power) are more than likely to remain on the side of the protesters. As we see in the above video, they are protesters.

Good thing the Pentagon has been live-field testing all 'non-lethal' crowd control weapons and all those unmanned aerial and ground vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan then, eh?

If the National Guard and the US Army refuses to fire on their own people when called to do so by state governors, they can always roll out the robots.

Believe It, They're Still In Control

By Darryl Mason

Yes, some of these children may be amongst the most instantly irritating children in the history of the universe, but they are discussing a "new reality" just on a decade away and this blog was supposed to be about New Realities, so here it is :



So it's marketing to marketing? Hey marketing people, this is how it's gonna be.

Who knows.

No doubt plenty of it is scripted, but there is a tribe of teenagers who expect, already want, this level of interaction and augmentation. They want to live in a fully wired world, where any question can be answered instantly, any digital product located, bought, downloaded in a second, or in whatever kids are calling one quarter of a second these days.

Well, that's what advertisers are hoping for. They're praying these kids as 20 somethings will be so easy to reach, their minds and emotions so exposed, so easily manipulated, their target market so convinced they are making purchase decisions for themselves because We Are In Control.

Oh yeah, don't forget, some will "get rich" just by letting marketers and advertisers monitor every aspect of their work, social, family and emotional lives in data-mining megaintrusions.

But what about those who don't want to interact with the crap peddlers trying to sell them yet more shit food, furniture kipple and assortments of augmented flurd they don't really need?

Nobody in marketing likes to talk about an Offliner youth movement. Teenagers & twenty somethings who don't want to be like The Implanted (those who let themselves be constantly monitored & data-mined in exchange for points to buy more useless shit) and don't care that they don't know everything about what's going on everywhere else. Who choose to be un-informed, or less informed. Only allowing in a few hundred useful, practical bits of information a day, instead of tens of thousands of trivial, instantly forgettable, utterly impractical slivers of info shrapnel.

The dream of marketers is to know not what you want to buy, but why you don't want to buy something. They want to know the moment you decide to buy something else, not just when you've made an expected purchase.

Offliners could care less about being constantly in touch with their friends and the world. They distrust advertisers more than the news media, who they already know, as children, are now mostly an extension of advertisers into their lives.

They find out what they want to know where advertisers cannot bombard their realities with ridiculous fantasies. The debt slave traps stepped into by previous generations of their families won't be slamming shut on their ankles. Money is not be desired by Offliners, but seen as merely a practical substitute when trading & swapping cannot bring them what they want, or what they need. And they want and need for little. They believe they cannot be brought and sold because they desire nothing beyond the very basics of survival. Pleasures and leisure are simple, and easy to come by. A lifestyle of being offline, out of reach.

Offliner children number in the millions already, and not just in countries where computers are expensive and internet networks non-existent, they number in the millions in the US, Britain, Australia, across Europe. They are raised with computers, but not by them. A computer and the internet is a replacement of the Encyclopedia Britannica that would have once filled a few shelves. There is much to be learned online, but practical experience is the stuff of admiration. Online novelty is fine, but their brains know what it is instantly and grow bored with it quickly. The funny non-ad ad that Goes Viral online means nothing to them. They don't care, they won't see it, they won't miss it.

When Offliners do have to register online online or supply mandatory details, names are fictitious, birthdates are wrong, preferences are fabricated, fake e-mail addresses are used, the only tracks they leave online are false leads, valueless information, worth nothing to the data-miners and therefore worth little in a digital economy.

For Offliners possessions are few, and few mementos are cherished, everything else is temporary, maybe gone tomorrow in a brutal storm, an earthquake, a flash flood, a holocaust of flames, a breakdown of government, a sinkhole economy. Practical information is valued most highly, but only just ahead of skills of entertainment.

Survival, fresh food, fresh water, fresh air, undigital fun, is all and everything.

Offliners will be all but impossible to reach by advertisers, at least until a marketing company begins painting laser billboards on the surface of the full moon.

The lifestyles and freedom of Offliners will look very appealing indeed by 2020 to many of the kids in that table-poundingly annoying video above.

The raw fight, and it's a fight for life, in front of marketers and advertisers, is to convince a generation of media-aware, salespitch suspicious kids that they are more important than the product advertisers are trying to flog to them. And the advertisers and marketers are starting the fight now.

The message in the above video is aggressively deceitful.

It is not about The People telling advertisers what they want, instead of advertisers telling people what they need and should want right fucking now, it's about marketers and peddlers of crap trying to convince The People that They Are In Control Now and They Run Everything and You Tell Us And We'll Do It!

The video is marketing. Pure marketing. It's trying to convince the kids who identify with the kids in the video that things are different now, that Generation Y & Z are too smart, not just smarter than their parents, so smart the advertisers are surrendering control, they're on the kids side now, they just want them to live better, more fulfilled lives even if they don't buy whatever it is they're still selling....

"Augmented reality will be the new reality".

Really? For how many?

I'm going to post this video, and a link back to this story, on this blog, again, but I'll schedule it to be published on February 27, 2016 and February 27, 2021.

Let's see then how much of the above video has become The New Reality.

My prediction is Offliners will become an extremely popular movement with those in their 20s by that time, the target market for that video, and while augmentation will prove popular for a while, simplicity will be more popular, a simple life, with less useless information will be the goal. It will be much harder by 2016, let alone 2021, to engage mass audiences in advertising sales pitches, regardless of the interactivity, and subtlety. Or augmentation.

Anyway, probably by the 2020s if your robot mates don't think something is cool, you wouldn't think about buying it anyway.

Why would you? That would be crazy.

I'll also come back and update this post on February 28, 2021 and see how much of my above rant turned out to be true.

A stunning aerial view of a shuttle launch AND free drinks :



Watching one shuttle after another launch from the same angle, or angles, decade in and out on TV gets a bit meh. Yeah, yeah, another space shuttle flight, let me know if it explodes.

It takes a view like this to remind you how far the human race has come since early experiments in powered flight only one century ago.

That, in the above video, that is a vehicle built by humans carrying other humans & cargo into space, to a fucking space station, peopled by men and women from an alliance of nations.

That's pretty damn awesome. don't you think?

Anyway, as you were.

"I'm George Clooney And I Drank The Bong Water"

Actor George Clooney on why he will never run for office :

"I fucked too many chicks & did too many drugs."

Clooney, 49, said a smart political campaigner would "start from the beginning by saying, 'I did it all. I drank the bong water. Now let's talk about issues'.

"That's gonna be my campaign slogan: 'I drank the bong water.'?"

Yes.

The Digital Imprints Of New Borns

It is no longer up to a child to decide if they want to have a digital life, or begin to leave online footprints as they become teenagers, that decision has already been made for them, for many from before they're even born :

Internet security company AVG surveyed mothers in North America (USA and Canada), the EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), Australia/New Zealand and Japan, and found that 81 percent of children under the age of two currently have some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online. In the US, 92 percent of children have an online presence by the time they are two compared to 73 percent of children in the EU5.

According to the research, the average digital birth of children happens at around six months with a third (33%) of children’s photos and information posted online within weeks of being born. In the UK, 37 percent of newborns have an online life from birth, whereas in Australia and New Zealand the figure is 41 percent.

Almost a quarter (23%) of children begin their digital lives when parents upload their prenatal sonogram scans to the Internet. This figure is higher in the US, where 34 percent have posted sonograms online, while in Canada the figure is even higher at 37 percent. Fewer parents share sonograms of their children in France (13%), Italy (14%) and Germany (15%). Likewise only 14 percent of parents share these online in Japan.

Seven percent of babies and toddlers have an email address created for them by their parents, and five percent have a social network profile.

More Here

Kurt Cobain was born 44 years ago.





I'm shocked to find I've never written about Nirvana or Cobain on this blog. How quickly we forget.

"Our Main Enemy Is Ignorance"

You won't see rapper M-1 getting a big Yo! Shoutout! from MTV any time soon, like it matters anymore anyway :

American economic devastation from space. The red dots are all the homes in Las Vegas now in foreclosure. 1 in 9 homes :



A Frightening Satellite Tour Of America's Foreclosure Wastelands

What is this?



Sea ice.

That damned Twitter :

''Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions. 'If we're constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn't have occurred before.''

Some people are just arseholes, whether they use Twitter or not. But not all arseholes on Twitter stay arseholes, some discover the things they think & believe are not all that attractive to others, and if they stay and want to communicate, they bend to apparently acceptable norms.

Then again, some raging fucksticks are beyond all hope. And other Twitterers often tell them so. Sometimes it impacts, sometimes it doesn't.

Volcanic shockwave, with car-sized chunks of debris :

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on the ammunition of information fueling the Global Revolution :

I think you can't discount how incredible the impact is of people having access to knowledge, so they are aware of different ways of living, and they are aware of different possibilities for the future, and they begin to have a belief that 'Gee, actually, this country is allegedly a democracy, and we all know it isn't – it's time to demand change.' And that's no simple thing – it's about Wikipedia, it's about blogs, it's about news headlines from overseas – that flow of information, and people having more of a consciousness about what's possible in the world."

The Legalities Of Dealing With Post-Apocalypse Aftermath

The New York Times chews through a legal manual published by the New York courts systems on just what judges, lawyers and police can get away with, necessarily so and otherwise, in the event of an apocalyptic nuclear attack, pandemic or biological terror attack. Interesting reading.

Some highlights :

Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations. Warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment.

(The manual) notes that the government has broad power to declare a state of emergency. “Once having done so,” it continues, “local authorities may establish curfews, quarantine wide areas, close businesses, restrict public assemblies and, under certain circumstances, suspend local ordinances.”

It details procedures for assuring that people affected by emergency rules get hearings and lawyers. It mentions that in the event of an attack, officials can control traffic, communications and utilities. If they expect an attack, it says, they can compel mass evacuations.

But the guide also presents a sober rendition of what the realities might be in dire times. The suspension of laws, it says, is subject to constitutional rights. But then it adds, “This should not prove to be an obstacle, because federal and state constitutional restraints permit expeditious actions in emergency situations.”

When there is not enough medicine for everyone in an emergency, it notes, there is no clear legal guidepost. It suggests legal decisions would most likely involve an analysis that “balances the obligation to save the greatest number of lives against the obligation to care for each single patient,” perhaps giving preference to those with the best chance to survive. It points out, though, that elderly and disabled people might have a legal claim if they are discriminated against at such moments of crisis.

After mentioning that houses or businesses can be commandeered to shelter victims or serve as medical dispensaries, it continues that “violations of individual property rights, if actionable, would generally be sorted out after the need for such actions has ended.”

...it conjures an image of the courts muddling through in an apocalyptic city. But it makes clear that it is in just such circumstances that it may be more important than ever for the courts to remain open to grapple with the legal questions created by the emergency itself.

You Can Read The Guide For Yourself Here

Bahrain : Key US Base Island In Gulf Explodes In Protests & Chaos

A shocking point-of-view video of attacks on pro-democracy, pro-reform demonstrators in Bahrain. At least five died in these attacks, with more than 500 wounded :



Bahrain is not Egypt. For one thing, its ports are home to the United States Fifth Fleet (excerpts) :

As riot police in Bahrain attacked hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators Monday with tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades, U.S. strategic interests in the Gulf appeared poised to receive yet another battering from the revolutionary wave that is sweeping the Arab world.

Just days after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, stripped Washington of its strongest diplomatic partner in the region, pro-democracy demonstrations in Bahrain threaten one of its most crucial military outposts in the centre of an arc of instability that now stretches from North Africa through the Middle East to South Asia.

Bahrain’s Shiite majority, which accounts for almost 70% of the population, is challenging the island’s Sunni king, Sheik Hamid bin Isa al-Khalifa. They want him to rewrite the constitution to give Shiites a larger share of power and economic opportunity, while demanding investigations into widespread complaints of torture and corruption.

Bahrain is the smallest and most volatile of the Gulf states, with a long history of animosity between a ruling Sunni elite closely allied to the Saudi monarchy and its Shiite majority, which has a religious affinity with Iran.

There are concerns large-scale Shiite unrest in Bahrain might encourage similar protests among Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority. But perhaps the biggest impact of any Shiite uprising would be renewed calls to end the significant U.S. military presence in Bahrain.

The tiny oil-producing state just off the east coast of Saudi Arabia is home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, headquarters for a U.S. Marine Corps amphibious unit and a crucial base for U.S. Air Force jet fighter interceptors and spy planes.

Bahrain gives Washington a base in the very heart of the Gulf from which it can protect and monitor the movement of 40% of the world’s oil through the Strait of Hormuz, spy on Iran and support pro-Western Gulf states from potential threats.

The Fifth Fleet, with 15 warships and an aircraft carrier battle group, has made Bahrain its headquarters since 1991. Just last year, the Pentagon launched a US$580-million project to double the size of its naval base in Bahrain. But all those plans could be swept aside if the political storm raging elsewhere in the Arab world suddenly engulfs the emirate.

The Full Story Is Here

Wikileaks Is Changing How History Of These Days Will Be Written

The notoriously easily distracted mainstream media seems far more interested in Julian Assange's broken condom than the near daily jaw-dropping revelations streaming from the American embassies cables streaming from Wikileaks.

When journalists say Wikileaks' CableGate "reveals nothing new" they are either downright lazy, insanely ignorant or are paid to say such things, to play down Cablegate's relevance, their importance, how they will allow historians to tell a truer version of this age of mammothic political change and chaos.

Journalist Greg Mitchell is now more than 80 days into a daily round-up of the latest CableGate revelations, you can find his blog here, but here's some excerpts of a list he recently compiled, all of which came from less than 1% of the total diplomatic cables Julian Assange will be releasing over the next 5 or more years :

-Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.

-Saudis (and some other Middle Eastern states) pressed U.S. to take stronger action against Iran.

-Yemeni president lied to his own people, claiming his military carried out air strikes on militants actually done by U.S. All part of giving U.S. full rein in country against terrorists.

-Shocking levels of U.S. spying at the United Nations (beyond what was commonly assumed) and intense use of diplomats abroad in intelligence-gathering roles.

-U.S. tried to get Spain to curb its probes of Gitmo torture and rendition. Saudi king suggested to Obama that we plant micro-chips on Gitmo detainees.

-Cables showed the UK promised in 2009 to protect U.S interests in the official Chilcot inquiry on the start of the Iraq war.

-Potential environmental disaster kept secret by the US when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere. "

-Iraqi government officials see Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state.

-Details on Vatican hiding big sex abuse cases in Ireland. Vatican cables so "inflammatory" they could spark violence against Catholics in UK.

-Oil giant Shell claims to have "inserted staff" and fully infiltrated Nigeria's government.

-Cable shows Israel cooperating with Abbas vs. Hamas during Gaza attacks.

-U.K. training death squads in Bangladesh, widely denounced by human rights groups.

-Cable finds U.S. criticizing the Vatican for not supporting population control methods. The U.S. ambassador there lamented, "the Vatican will continue to oppose aggressive population control measures to fight hunger or global warming."

- Hundreds of cables detail U.S. use of diplomats as "sales" agents, more than previously thought, centering on jet rivalry of Boeing vs. Airbus. Hints of corruption and bribes.

-Russia is a "mafia state."

-Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the"brink of collapse."

-Cables on Tunisia appear to help spark revolt in that country. The country's ruling elite described as "The Family," with Mafia-like skimming throughout the economy. The country's First Lady may have made massive profits off a private school.

-U.S. knew all about massive corruption in Tunisia back in 2006 but went on supporting the government anyway, making it the pillar of its North Africa policy.

-The U.S. secret services used Turkey as a base to transport terrorism suspects as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

All this before the release of cables that have helped spark uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain.

More Here

It's fascinating just how much more disturbing a horror movie can be when it is given a laugh track and re-edited to unfold like a Seinfeld episode :

The editor-in-chief of Rupert Murdoch's app-only digital 'newspaper' The Daily tries to rally his journalists to go after The Really Big Stories now "Egypt is over" :

Find me an amazing human story at a trial the rest of the media is missing. Find me a school district where the battle over reform is being fought and tell the human tales. Find a town that is going to be unincorporated because it's broke. Find me a story of corruption and malfeasance in a state capitol that no one has found. Find me something new, different, exclusive and awesome. Find me the oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota.

America's oldest dog? Now that's investigative journalism.

"No Money People Angry"

A little kid explains the Egypt January 25 Uprising better and more clearly than the US State Department and most mainstream media :

Now, Who In The Media & Western Governments Said Egyptians Weren't Ready For Non-Mubarak Rule?


news graphic from abc.net.au/news



In less than 30 days of mostly non-violent protests and direct action, the people of Egypt has brought the 11,000 day emergency rule of the US & Israel lackey Hosni Mubarak regime to an end.

For a revolution promoted (only partially correct, but it certainly helped rally worldwide support) as The Twitter Revolution, it seems appropriate the full resignation was less than 140 characters long :

"Hosni Mubarak has waived the office of presidency and told the army to run the affairs of the country."

Millions of Egyptians fought back against a torturous, tyrannical dictatorship and they won.

A great day in history, a stunning, joyous event to watch unfold live on the near flawless Al Jazeera live internet stream.

The sound of celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

I didn't think I'd watch this all the way through, but if you grow some of your own food in the city, well, this is like a vision of some kind of heaven, and 28 minutes just flies by :

A screengrab from a photo by Victoria Hazou of the Egyptian Uprising, part of this remarkable Big Picture collection of the January 25 to February 6 protests to force President Hosni Mubarak to quit the presidency and leave the country :

Carl Sagan on The Moon :



Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on The Moon :



Bill O'Reilly's 'premium content' site should be called 'Bill O'Reilly, Master Troll'.

Charlie Sheen's response to American media hysteria about his latest drug, booze, hooker & porn star related adventures :



(via @Reddit)