fuck yeah Synesthesia

CISPA, the bill in Congress that would end privacy on the internet, has gone through a tricky legislative maze that has a lot of people confused. Here’s the deal: CISPA is now tucked inside of Senate bill S.2105, which has bipartisan congressional support, is being actively supported by the Obama Admin., and is scheduled for a vote in early June. It’s alive and well, and on a clear path to becoming law.

The Senate goes on recess next week, which means we have exactly 3 days to make calls before they leave for a week and then come back for the vote. The most important thing we can do with that time is to try to get meetings scheduled with our senators while they are in their home states over the recess. This is a proven grassroots strategy that was key to killing SOPA. We can beat CISPA if we do this.

We really need your help this time. We can’t email our supporters about this because of an ongoing deliverability issue with our system, so we’re counting on our friends and allies to spread this in other ways.

Here’s the site we put together — use it to call your senators and request a meeting ::

Privacy Is Awesome.

Good guy Sen. Wyden said yesterday that this bill would create a “cyber industrial complex […] that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans’ private data.” He’s right, and our best shot at stopping it from becoming law is getting this strategy spread out far and wide right now.

I Called all 3 of my representatives. My list of advice for the call:

• Tell them who you are. (“Hi. My name is _. I’m a student/worker/employee/ect with ____, and I oppose the the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act [CISPA] which is being passed under Senate Bill S.2105, which would do to the internet what China and Vietnam have done to the internet, censor it and kill the business that goes on over it.”)

• Be very respectful (these guy’s/lady’s jobs normally sucks).

• Be passionate, tell them internet neutrality and freedom are important to you, the economy, and the future.

If you do all this you’ll start getting personally written letter to you in the mail from your representatives office (I have gotten 3 since I started doing this) that express support for the statements I have made, which I think (fingers crossed) have influenced the decisions of my representatives.

Writing emails does nothing, a respectful phone call about how a representative can gain or lose your vote is huge. A handwritten letter is even better.

Who is my representative is an awesome resource for finding your representatives office numbers by zip code.

For those wondering why CISPA is so bad: The EFF’s Explanation of CISPA

Also, sign the ACLU petition to oppose CISPA and unfettered access to Americans’ internet activity.

First they came for the Educators, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a teacher

Then they came for the Free Press, and I did not speak out— Because my media of choice was safe.

Then they came for the Homosexuals, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a ‘gay’.

Then they came for the Internet — even if I still knew what to say, I have no where left to say it.

Source

Really, really good article. How did I miss this?

“We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt… Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

“But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008.

“There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie…

“It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an ‘economy’ is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.”

Actually, Graeber is understating the case, in at least two ways. First, the lies have been with us far longer than just a single decade. They go back at least 30 years, to the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the later of whom became known as “Tina” for her favorite catch-phrase attack on the imagination: “There Is No Alternative”. Second, it was not just a failure of nerve, and a failure of imagination. It was a failure of reason and of democracy as well. It was, in a sense, an inevitable failure, since those three decades have seen us create enormous deficits of reason, imagination and democracy which made it impossible for us to mobilise the necessary resources at the moment they were needed most.

sexdrugstapas:

Societies come together slowly, but can fall apart quickly, say researchers who applied the tools of evolutionary biologists to an anthropological debate.

Using archaeological records and linguistic analyses rather than fossils and genes, they created an evolutionary tree of political…

occupyjacksonville:

from www.sundancechannel.com

1. The Occupy Movement blames everything on Wall Street. This is false for many reasons. First, there are many culprits in the economic crisis and corporate takeover of government, including the government itself. We understand that. Wall Street is a symbol of the excess and corporate dominance in our daily lives, not the only cause. Wall Street is a good rallying point, but if journalists and talking heads would look beyond the surface, they would find more. How about looking at the signs online while in your warm offices and you will see signs at Occupy Rallies and elsewhere about many different issues.

2. “They have no agenda.”  Josh Barro, a “research scholar” at the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute has derided Occupy Wall Street (obviously doing little “research”) for not having an agenda.

But as I wrote in a response to this nonsense in his National Review article,

“You talk to one representative and now you are an expert? Have you been to an encampment or event? There are several clear goals that the Occupy Groups have, and if you had bothered to do research and looked at the various declarations of these groups (online, so you don’t even have to visit a camp to learn) you would find goals such as:

Protect homes from unlawful foreclosures
Repeal Citizens United
Single payer health care
Forgive and reduce student debt obligations
Make college more affordable for families
End foreign wars and bring our troops home
Reinvest in education and infrastructure
End indefinite detentions
Repeal the patriot act
End corporate personhood
and so on.

Perhaps the reason you don’t know of these goals is that you are too lazy to look them up and main stream reporters such as yourself refuse to report on them.

If you want to refute what I say, why not have me debate you and your ignorance.”

Perhaps I am being unfair to him and should forgive his inability to understand a movement that doesn’t fit into his “liberal versus conservative paradigm”, a leaderless movement full of capable people, and a movement that has many goals and objectives but isn’t as narrowly focused as Republican Senators are on bringing down Obama and nothing else.

3. They are all unemployed hippies who are aimless but at the same time violent anarchists, and other demographic falsehoods. The population of the Occupy encampments changes from day-to-day and city to city. I have seen different surveys of the group, but the highest unemployment stat on the movement I have seen is 30%. We are employed, part-time workers, unemployed, retired, homeless, rental unit owners, entrepreneurs, students, vets, and so on.

The actual number of hippies in the movement is quite low, and what’s wrong with hippies anyway? Do hippies make right-wingers uncomfortable or jealous that these reporters and pundits chose a life defending the 1% while hippies are free of such nonsense and don’t have to lie and misrepresent facts for living? I know it’s hard for people in the media to understand that there is not one type of person involved with the Occupy movement, and it makes the movement hard to stereotype. But they keep trying.

4. The Occupy Movement is disorganized. This is false. With few resources and no corporate or political party backing, Occupiers have daily and weekly general assembly meetings. We have declarations, clean camps, feed people, make the media contacts available to us (somehow, the Today Show hasn’t called Occupy Tucson), and so forth. We have no central committee, and I know that is hard to understand for inflexible minds reporting news for the 1%.

Yes, we don’t fit the standard non-profit organization, or the Tea Party (paid for by Koch), but if you go to the camps and talk to the organizers, there is a lot of order for an underfunded, non-aligned, independent organization. People say we are disorganized because they don’t understand our organization and want to marginalize us.

5.   Occupy Movements caused their own troubles and the violence. Little of the violence was instigated by the protesters, and at least in LA, much of the violence has occurred to Occupiers after they were in custody. To blame movement activists for being violent when they are attacked is like blaming a rape victim for injuring their assailant, something Republicans and many others have done. Don’t buy it when someone tells you that being hit by batons, or being pepper sprayed or being hit by rubber bullets is the fault of the occupiers. If the police would let us occupy or surrender in peace, there would be little to no violence.

6. We’re Anti-capitalist.  Not true. While some may hold this view, it is more accurate to say that we are all against the rigged system. We are against a system that gives more tax cuts and affords tax loopholes to billionaires and millionaires and increases fees on the lower classes. We are against a system that passes laws to deregulate industries and gives corporate welfare in free rent, under-market prices for mining rights, military projects we don’t need to help contractors profit off of our tax dollars while they target cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, education and other social programs that help the vast majority of the people. We are against the selling off of valuable assets that only benefit the 1% such as the Rosemont Copper mine in Arizona and we are against the selling of our education system for profit while damaging that system.

Many of us own businesses, promote local enterprises and are for responsible capitalism that doesn’t damage the environment.

Can we ever really ever truly understand a movement that is in progress? Only by being at an Occupy rally or meeting can you have the slightest understanding of the full implications and people in the movement. We must work for the benefit of the 99% forever, whatever the falsehoods told about the Occupy Movement.

Peace,
Tex Shelters