Sarah Wrote That | politics

Change.org petition to get Discovery Channel to air the climate change episode of Frozen Planet. [earlier]

A few hundred protesters began to sprint towards the Nile. It is in these moments that built-up fear and tension, the natural state of the Square, take form. →

- Christian Vachon’s letter from Cairo on The Awl.

The UC Davis English department is calling for the disbanding of the UCPD →

This just erupted on my Twitter feed, but the site’s not working—I’m thinking because it’s getting tons of traffic. However, StudentActivism.net has posted a copy of the message:

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the UC Davis campus community.

Badass.

-R

According to a friend in the department, “say it don’t spray it!” became a chant at today’s rally. Reclaim UC has pics:

More pix at Democratic Underground and News 10.

Reblogged from STFU, Conservatives

Sea Poem for Occupy

From the sand cliffs where the math
confronting us takes on the blue
of distance, you can watch for days

and not know what is rolling in.
Something has to be done—here is
a blackberry if you need it—

we have seen between tides so long
that we can time our footprints
to the kelp heaving when the sharp

fins near behind the wave. It’s
everyone I want to lift,
and it’s my feet that are slipping.

Ferdinand Schröder’s caricature of the defeat of the revolutions of 1848
Düsseldorfer Monatshefte, August 1849 [Wikipedia]

In The Guardian, John Harris compares this year with 1989, 1968, and 1848. Gary Sick is inclined toward 1848—when most of the threatened institutions retained the means to remain largely intact.

American Censorship Day →

bijan:

A few weeks ago, I went to Washington DC with a number of other venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to meet with various members of Congress and in President Obama’s administration to discuss important legislation (here and here) that was being pushed through the process.

It’s an awful bill that is vague, poorly written and even worse it is a bill to protect a few special interests (ie Hollywood) and will sacrifice what the Internet stands for, namely an open place that is decentralized in its soul.

Read on →

Register opposition on Open Congress and Change.org

Reblogged from Bijan Sabet

"Our economic injustices are chronic, and so then must be the protest."

- Dana Spiotta

15 Nov 2011 18:37

Occupy Wall Street: you can't evict an idea whose time has come →

spiers: Guardian:

At 2.43am, the New York Observer reported that photographers with credentials were barred from Liberty Square. Seconds later the director of editorial operations at Gawker reported that a CBS news chopper were ordered out of the sky by the NYPD. New York Times journalist Jarid Malsin went to jail in zipties. And 20 minutes later, we heard the NYPD was cutting down trees in Liberty Square, and from our office space we could hear the deployment of a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a sound cannon. To be certain, we could see and feel that this operation had been planned carefully to exclude all media coverage, sending out a loud message about how dissent will be treated in this democracy.

Reblogged from Spiersblr

"Mr. Bloomberg met daily with several deputies and commissioners, and as more business owners complained and editorials lampooned him as gutless, his patience wore thin."

-

This meme, of journalists describing elected officials (or, nonsensically, municipalities) as moving to dismantle these protests because their “patience wore thin” is particularly irksome. Because, and any competent editor/reporter should know this, the right to peaceably assemble isn’t subject to the “patience” of an elected official. To describe it this way is to accept that citizens are allowed in any public space only at the sufferance of their government, and at least for now in the U.S., that simply isn’t true.

(Police Oust Occupy Wall Street Protesters at Zuccotti Park - NYTimes.com)

If anything looks—and is—gutless, it’s giving in to those who are lampooning one as gutless.

Reblogged from evanfleischer

Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist →

Marilynne Robinson:

I have always identified the United States with its best institutions and traditions, its best thought, believing, and having seen, that they could act as a corrective to the less admirable aspects of the culture. I have profoundly enjoyed the wealth of experience that has been offered to me, and I hope I have made some use of it. Yet it seems to me, on the darkest nights, and sometimes in the clear light of day, that we are losing the ethos that has sustained what is most to be valued in our civilization. This may sound alarmist. But it is true, to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, that fear is very much to be feared, not least because it is a potent stimulant. Nothing is so effective at foregrounding self-interest. Yet fear is the motive behind most self-inflicted harm. Western society at its best expresses the serene sort of courage that allows us to grant one another real safety, real autonomy, the means to think and act as judgment and conscience dictate. It assumes that this great mutual courtesy will bear its best fruit if we respect, educate, inform and trust one another. This is the ethos that is at risk as the civil institutions in which it is realized increasingly come under attack by the real and imagined urgencies of the moment. We were centuries in building these courtesies. Without them “Western civilization” would be an empty phrase.

[via @AlexanderChee]