Occupy Wall Street update

Today, 8 December 2011.

Occupy the Police State. Jason Leopold, Truthout: “Important questions have been raised about what role, if any, the federal government has played in dismantling the Occupy encampments around the country and what the protesters and civil liberties groups say is ultimately an attempt to stifle dissent … ‘It’s eerily disturbing how history is once again repeating itself. Law enforcement is beginning to look increasingly like a civilian branch of the military and local government officials trample upon the rights of citizens and doing so in ways that are becoming more violent’”: here.

Los Angeles and Occupy LA Agree: It’s Time to End Corporate Personhood. Brooke Jarvis, YES! Magazine: “On December 3, just two days before Occupy L.A. was evicted by police, the General Assembly of the occupation passed a unanimous resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood. Today, the City Council of Los Angeles also voted, also unanimously, for a resolution making the same appeal … When L.A. and Occupy L.A. are making the same unanimous demand, it’s clear that the desire to take on corporate power in politics is gaining traction”: here.

The Wars of the One Percent. William J. Astore, TomDispatch: “… Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity…. we’ve chosen to create a ‘warrior’ or ‘war fighter’ caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice…. Here’s an American fact: the 99% are far too remote from our wars of choice and those who fight them. To reclaim the latter, we must end the former. And that’s a war of necessity that has to be fought – and won”: here.

Occupy Wall Street’s Hunger Strikers. J.A. Myerson, Truthout: “Three Wall Street occupiers began a hunger strike Saturday, demanding that Trinity Church lend a vacant lot it owns to Occupy Wall Street. The protest, recently dispossessed of Zuccotti Park, which had been its home for nearly two months, wants a temporary plot elsewhere, and is petitioning Trinity to let it use its land…. Eventually everyone needs food, and if Trinity Church wants to make sure these young people get fed, all it has to do is offer them space it’s not using”: here.

So, the Walmart heirs alone are worth the same amount as roughly a third of Americans; here.

Ex-Greek PM George Papandreou on Greece’s Fiscal Crisis and Why He Backs Occupy Movement: here.

Japanese government spends disaster money on whaling

This video is about saving the life of a humpback whale.

From daily The Morning Star in England today:

Tsunami money funds whale hunt

Japan: Tokyo is spending 2.3 billion yen (£19 million) from its tsunami reconstruction budget to fund the country’s annual whaling hunt in the Antarctic Ocean, a government official revealed today.

Greenpeace blasted the funding decision, saying that it was depriving disaster victims of desperately needed support.

Japan’s annual whaling expedition left Shimonoseki in southern Japan on Tuesday. It aims to catch 900 whales.

This video is about humpback whales mating.

From British daily The Independent:

Japan abandons humpback whale hunt after international outcry

By Carl Freire in Tokyo

Published: 22 December 2007

Japan has suspended its first humpback whale hunt in seas off Antarctica since the 1960s, its government said yesterday, backing down in an escalating international battle over the expansion of its hunt.

Japan dropped the planned taking of 50 humpbacks at the behest of the United States, which chairs the International Whaling Commission (IWC), said Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura. He said the suspension would last a year or two but that there would be “no changes” to Japan’s stance on research whaling itself.

Japan dispatched its whaling fleet last month to the southern Pacific in the first major hunt of humpback whales since the 1960s, generating widespread criticism. Officials said yesterday they had not harpooned any humpbacks.

The move defuses for now a high-profile row with Australia, though Japanese officials deny they were influenced by Canberra’s anti-whaling position. Australia announced on Wednesday that it would dispatch surveillance planes and a ship to gather evidence for a possible legal challenge to the hunt.

It was unlikely, however, to quell the increasingly bold high-seas protests against Japan’s scientific whaling research programme, in which it kills 1,000 whales, mostly minkes, a year in the Pacific.

See also here.

Reaction from Greenpeace: here; from IFAW: here.

Australian scientists studying humpback whales sounds say they have begun to decode the whale’s mysterious communication system, identifying male pick-up lines and motherly warnings: here.

Rudd misleads Australia over whale watching program: here.

January 2012: New research is shedding light on the sale of skin blubber and meat from whale bycatch. In South Korea, commercial and subsistence whaling have been illegal since 1986, but domestic sales of protected common minke products are allowed if the whales are caught accidently: here.

US anti-corporate protesters arrested

This video from the USA is called Occupy Wall Street – The Revolution Is Love.

This is NOT from my old blog archive, but from now, December 2011.

Police arrested more than 60 people in Washington on Wednesday for shutting down the heart of the US corporate lobbying industry as part of a week-long union-backed campaign: here.

Related articles

• Tense Confrontation In Milwaukee Police Brutality Protest – YouTube (rwswj.wordpress.com)
• 3 Occupy Wall Street Protesters Win $50K Settlement Over “Thought Crime” Arrest (intel–blacklisted-activist-post-news.blogspot.com)
• SFPD subpoenas organizers’ Twitter accounts (indybay.org)
• Pentagon officer gets restraining order against anti-drone activists (rt.com)
• FOCUS | Occupy Lives, and Changes Lives (readersupportednews.org)
• Police arrest live streammer from NYC at SF Protest (indybay.org)

Rare red-breasted geese in the Netherlands

5 December 2007.

Two rare red-breasted geese, usually migrating much more to the east, have been photographed near Heusden in the Netherlands.

See also here. And here. And here. And here.

Iraqi women much worse off under Bush than under Saddam

This video is called Everywoman – Iraqi women – Part 1.

Part 2 is here.

November 16, 2007.

From Dutch daily De Pers:

Fear imprisons women

by Eva Ludemann

The Iraqi capital Baghdad has become safer, so say the United States army and international media. However, not for women.

‘Women get less and less rights’ says 53 years’ old Seyhaa, who has founded the Turkmen Women’s Organization in Baghdad to counter the pressure by religious extremists. ‘… From fear of reprsisals, parents will not let their daughters go to school anymore. Women do not dare to go to their work anymore. We can no longer decide how we dress and where we are going.’

According to Houzan Mahmoud of the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, the war has set back her country for decades in its development. ‘Saddam was a cruel dictator; however, society was progressive. Maybe women were not politically active; however, they played major roles in business and had good university jobs. They cannot do that anymore.’

A big problem for women is that they cannot appeal to the Iraqi authorities to guarantee their safety. The militias threatening the women are intertwined with the police and intelligence services. They are also linked to Iraqi political parties. Like the Badr-militias of the Shi’ite Supreme Islamic Council (ISCI), one of the main parties in the Iraqi government. …

The coalition armed forces in Iraq also do little to help the women, as that would be against their political aims. For instance, the USA has made the ISCI into an ally in the fight against the pro Iran militias of Muqtada Sadr. There are even not yet confirmed reports that the United States armed forces arrest female family members of suspected rebels, in order to pressure those rebels. Those women, after their release, may be killed by their own families, as family honour is supposedly stained by their ‘immoral’ stay amidst United States male soldiers.

German composer Buxtehude in Utrecht cathedral … (but is it Buxtehude?)

24 November 2007.

Today, again to the cathedral of Utrecht, for a classical music concert.

This time, it was Actus III of “Das jüngste Gericht” (The Last Judgment), by German composer Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707). However, the German language Wikipedia doubts whether Buxtehude is really the author of this music. The words are fire and brimstone about sinners and their eternal damnation in hell, according to seventeenth century Christian theology.

There were many more vocalists and instrumentalists than at earlier concerts I have heard here.

There were, for solo singing, two sopranos, one alto, a tenor, and a bass. Also, the big choir of the cathedral.

The orchestra, directed by Remco de Graas, consisted of six violins; six alto violins; two cellos; two double basses; one viola da gamba; one bass lute; one bassoon; one clavichord; and an organ of the church.

The big orchestra and choir meant that this time, the music had to be played at a different place than I had heard at earlier concerts with less musicians here. It came from where the altar used to be before the sixteenth century iconoclasm of the Reformation. This made for some acoustics problems.

Numbers in ancient Egypt

29 November 2007.

From The Times, in London, England:

Why a Nile tadpole means a great deal

Ancient Egypt’s awkward numerical system was based largely on the natural world

George Hart

Recording numbers and quantities was one of the first requirements of the bureaucracy as soon as hieroglyphs had been invented. Items to be accounted for varied from enemies slain in battle and prisoners to how many jars of beer or bunches of onions were needed to accompany the Pharaoh into the afterlife. Inventories of equipment used in temples were kept meticulously and any damage noted down.

The system of writing numbers was logical but cumbersome and took up a lot of space. A vertical or horizontal stroke indicated numbers 1 to 9, a hobble for cattle 10 to 90, a coil of rope 100 to 900 and a lotus 1,000 to 9,000. For higher numerals 10,000 was represented by a finger raised for counting and 100,000 by a tadpole – of which myriads would emerge in the pools left by the Nile’s annual flood. The concept of a million was confined to royal propaganda to convey the sense of the infinite number of years for which the Pharaoh and his monuments would exist. The notation took the form of a god with his arms raised to support the sky.

Where do you find hieroglyphs? See here.

How to read hieroglyphs: here.

Nubian pharaohs: here.

In a landmark article in the March/April 2010 issue of BAR, Orly Goldwasser, professor of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained how the very first alphabet, from which all other alphabets developed, was invented by illiterate Canaanite miners in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai peninsula. Inspired by Egyptian pictorial hieroglyphs and a desire to articulate their own thoughts in writing, these Canaanites created 22 alphabetic acrophonetic signs scratched into the rock that could express their entire language: here.

Joan Jett interview about rock ‘n roll, women, and the Iraq war

19 November 2007.

This music video from the USA is called Joan Jett -Bad Reputation.

This music video is called Cherry bomb by Joan Jett.

From British daily The Guardian:

Queen of noise

While her friends were into the Osmonds, Joan Jett was strumming along to T Rex. When a woman plays rock’n'roll, she owns her sexuality, she tells Laura Barton. Perhaps that’s why male critics find her so scary. …

The name of Joan Jett has long been tinged with notoriety; the original female rocker [in The Runaways during the 1970s], she has not only enjoyed a successful career with hits such as I Love Rock’n'Roll, Crimson and Clover and Bad Reputation, earning herself a place in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time – one of only two women to make the list – but she has also been an inspiration to generations of female musicians, from the riot grrrl movement of the early 90s to Britney Spears, who covered I Love Rock’n'Roll in 2002, and now to the cluster of female fans who wait, flushed-faced, to meet her this evening in Brighton. …

In fact few record labels would touch Jett. “It’s hard to imagine, now, the resistance,” she says. “It wasn’t only about girls and rock’n'roll but also my image was so much harder than other girls in rock’n'roll, with the black hair and the leather jacket. We still have all the rejection letters; 23 of them.” The labels gave a variety of reasons: “They’d say, ‘You have no songs’,” Jett gives a lop-sided smirk, “and the tape we sent had I Love Rock’n'Roll, Crimson and Clover, Do You Wanna Touch Me and Bad Reputation. So they didn’t only miss one, they missed four hits … And we’d get a lot of, ‘Drop the guitar, stop hiding behind the guitar, change your image, sing softer songs.’ It was you’re not allowed to be edgy and you’re not allowed to be hard if you’re a girl.” She looks puzzled. “I’m so confused about that.”

Jett and Laguna summoned a new band, The Blackhearts, and decided to form their own label – a gamble that paid off in 1982 when her cover of The Arrows’ I Love Rock’n'Roll occupied the US No1 spot for seven weeks. This week she releases a new album, Sinner, and a cover of a track by The Sweet called AC DC: “It’s a little provocative,” she says with a knowing smile. “It pushes the envelope,” – as indeed does its video, featuring Carmen Electra, whom Jett has been rumoured to be dating.

Another track, Riddles, which samples a speech by Dick Cheney, “is sort of about doublespeak, the 1984 aspect of what’s going on in the world.” Speaking openly about American politics is, she says, “a calculated risk … You saw the reaction to the Dixie Chicks [see also here]! I mean it’s pretty frightening to me to consider the fact that on one hand you live in the Land of the Free and that dissent is part of democracy, and then to be singled out for speaking out when you do.” …

In 2004, Jett joined Howard Dean‘s campaign group as he ran to be the Democratic candidate. “I Googled all the candidates, and I found Howard Dean’s record as governor of Vermont: he’d been governor for 11 years, and worked very well with Republicans and Democrats. He got universal healthcare for all children under 18. He got prescription benefits for the elderly. And he was against the Iraq war, way before anyone else was saying it was wrong.

See also here.

The rise of the rock goddess: here.

We Need Rock! We Need Choice! Music Needs a Woman’s Voice: here.

Related articles

• Bella Donna: Joan Jett (bellasugar.com)
• Joanna Colangelo: Joan Jett IS Rock ‘n’ Roll (huffingtonpost.com)
• Do You Wanna Touch by Joan Jett (songlyricsexplained.com)
• The X Factor – Jennel Garcia Loves Rock & Roll (hulu.com)
• Get the Real Joan Jett Smoky Eye Look (bellasugar.com)
• Joan Jett’s first PETA print ad; honored with activist award Nov 4 (born2bjetthead.wordpress.com)
• The Runaways (mrmovietimes.com)
• Joan Jett Honoured For Animal Charity Work (contactmusic.com)
• Joan Jett unveils PETA advert (contactmusic.com)