Where is the OCCUPY movement today?

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly

Climate Change/Chaos is real, and British doctors are divesting to save Gaia (occupy.com)

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Let's make our democracy real (occupy.com)

What ever happened to the Occupy Movement? It's alive and well (occupy.com) trying to organize for the common good.

Some say the new .com appearance of the movement is tapped by the NSA to better know whom to keep an eye on.

 

So it's better to be anonymous rather than trying to be a Facebook-activist being tagged and followed by one's iPhone and other electronic eavesdropping equipment.

Can we all at least agree on backing Israel? (AP)

Little to nothing is said about Israel, but as for the many other arms of the military-industrial complex -- excluding the massive weapons sales of the U.S., Israel, and other UN Security Council members and the wars they arm, fund, salvage, and indebt through the IMF and World Bank and the Fed (a collection of 18 major banking institutions and many hundreds of other banks -- there are many actions.

Thank You for Your Service: How One Company Sues Soldiers Worldwide

With stores near military bases across the country, the retailer USA Discounters offers easy credit to service members. But when those loans go bad, the company uses the local courts near its Virginia headquarters to file suits by the thousands.

// Read more

Parasite #1: The Shadow Banking System

Despite the 828-page Dodd-Frank Act, the derivatives pyramid has continued to explode to a value now estimated to be as high as $2 quadrillion.

// Read more

Investor Sues Three Banks Accused Of Rigging Price of Silver

HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Nova Scotia have been accused of attempting to rig the daily global price of silver in the latest price fixing scandal to rock the banking industry.

// Read more

- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/british-doctors-vote-divest-fossil-fuels#sthash.5Rw8yViE.dpuf

Chris Hedges and Lawrence Lessig on getting money out of politics: 3 parts (occupy.com)

"The IMF was here" - leaving debt and slums in their wake by design (occupy.com).

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Parasite #1: The Shadow Banking System

Despite the 828-page Dodd-Frank Act, the derivatives pyramid has continued to explode to a value now estimated to be as high as $2 quadrillion. More
 

Investor sues three banks accused of rigging price of silver

HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Nova Scotia have been accused of attempting to rig the daily global price of silver in the latest price fixing scandal to rock the banking industry. More

Thank You for Your Service: How one company sues soldiers worldwide

With stores near military bases across the country, the retailer USA Discounters offers easy credit to service members. But when those loans go bad, the company uses the local courts near its Virginia headquarters to file suits by the thousands. More
 

Welcome to the global Occupy community (commons.occupy.com)

When is social media too much? (cartoon)

Seth Auberon, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Tomorrow (thismodernworld.com)

If teens have been peddled to and become addicted and obsessed with social media, what are they really after? It used to be "being part of the group." Now it's all about money and FAME.

Stimulating the brain's reward centers with addictive devices (thismodernworld.com)

In a day and age obsessed with social media and spying technology, it's hard to picture life without them.

Is that good or bad or neither? According to Andrew Keen, author of the book Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, the Internet, and particularly social media, is changing society in a way that is worrisome. (Christians agree).
 

Keen has long been known for the position he has taken on the addictive Internet, claiming that it is having an adverse effect on society and people personally. After voicing this position in his book The Cult of Amateur, he has been given nicknames like the "Net's supreme cyber-grump" and the "Antichrist of the Silicon Valley."

Speaking to WebProNews he explains that, while he supports the Internet and social media, he is concerned that the public nature of the social age is resulting in "losing something essential about what it means to be human." 

(The National, Feb. 2014) How are teens being affected by social media? Research suggests the impact is emotional - bullying, obsession with money and fame (defined as likes), and sexting.

"One of the problems, I think, with social media is that it isn't very social. It's really just an aggregation of individuals," he says. As he explains, many of our actions on social networks aren't pro-social. The movements that have developed are not coherent, viable movements. For example, Occupy or the movements in the Middle East, are atomized and radically individualized not "social" movements. Most social networks, instead, represent "just an aggregation" of people.

To avoid a potential harmful impact, Keen says the Internet needs to become more civilized and habitable. He also suggests that government regulation regarding privacy protections against spying could help prevent the concerns from getting worse.

• The problem is not loving Facebook; it's hating it but still using it: Top 10 Reasons to Quit Facebook (Diggnation Daily)

The Dharma Body Meditation

Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Dhammakaya USA

THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take? (video)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; ThriveMovement.com

The world is waking up, but what on Earth will it take to finally THRIVE?

Coachella Music Festival 2014 starts (watch)

Amber Larson, Dev, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Youtube.com/user/Coachella (Ch. 1, 2, 3)

Watch the California desert festival streamed live on youtube both weekends.

Art, music, lovemaking, yoga, desert communing, shouting, contemplating, staying hydrated

These are the LINKS to Day 1, Channel 1. Channel 2. Channel 3. More

 

Girls of Coachella rave and barf on lawn

We can think, think, think, but sometimes we just have to dance. What is dancing? Rhythmic movement to cues coming in through other senses. Such movement makes us human, bonding large groups. Go tribal, go rural, go aural, but go. It need not make sense to the CPU. As long as the senses can sense it, our bodies can make sense of it. It's part of what the body is for, and there are many beings without bodies for lack of use. So use it. Schedule

Colbchella: Dancing to "Get Lucky" with Colbert (Daft Punk)

 

• VIDEO: Japan's "Penis Festival" goes totally nuts
• The radical vaginal art of Favianna Rodriguez (Berkeley)
• Weekly Progressive Events (OC)
• Hey, US Military-Industrial Complex, I'm not a bug splat
• 9-foot case with Sasquatch body goes on tour in US
• DNA shows that Sasquatches (Yakkhas) mated with human females, not accepted by mainstream media (MSNBC via LiveScience.com)
• Sasquatch is human relative, scientific study shows
• How our brains see something that can't be seen
• Top 10 Beasts and Dragons: How Reality Makes Myth
• Bigfoot, Nessie, Kraken: Cryptozoology Quiz 
• Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena

Losing Zen Buddhist activist Matthiessen (NPR)

Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR, April 6, 2014)

Bhumi/Gaia is a precious thing, nurturing and full of intelligence (NASA/colourbox.com)

 

Zen (counterpointpress.com)

Author Peter Muryo Matthiessen has died in New York at the age of 86 from acute myeloid leukemia. He was a novelist and naturalist, who wrote 33 books, among his best-known being The Snow Leopard and the novels Far Tortuga and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was made into a Hollywood film.

He is the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the categories of Fiction (for Shadow Country) and General Nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, which also won for Contemporary Thought). 

 

He was also a political activist, a Buddhist teacher, co-founder of The Paris Review and, briefly, a spy.

 

In his first nonfiction book, Matthiessen staked out the territory he would revisit the rest of his life -- the destruction of nature and natural peoples at the hands of humankind. Wilderness in America, published in 1959, is a history of the extinction of animal and bird species in North America:

Species appear, and left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climactic change, has ever extinguished another.

Wilderness in America led to a series of assignments from The New Yorker that in turn led to a series of books....

 

Matthiessen traveled to New Guinea in 1961 with Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared and may have been the victim of headhunters (or so the legend goes). He wrote about trips to Africa, the Himalayas, South America, and Antarctica. 

 

But he said he never intended to write nonfiction. "Fiction is my first love, and that's the way I began," he said. "And frankly, when I began nonfiction, I did it for money."

 

McKay Jenkins, the author of The Peter Matthiessen Reader and several nature books, says that's astonishing. "That's kind of like Babe Ruth wanting to be remembered as a pitcher," Jenkins says. "Matthiessen is held in such high regard as a nonfiction writer by nonfiction writers that they sometimes say, 'How is it possible that this guy can be such a virtuoso fiction writer, and give his equally substantial body of nonfiction work such short shrift?' Because all the rest of us are trying to do what we can to mimic his nonfiction work."

 

Matthiessen was remarkable in a lot of ways. He was born in Manhattan in 1927 to a wealthy family. After a stint in the Navy, he attended Yale, where he began writing short stories -- and where one of his professors recruited him into the CIA [like someone somewhere did Barry Obama, Johnny Kerry, Bush Sr., Karl(yle) Rove, Dick Cheney...and the even the fleeing Dalai Lama. The Company gets around.]

In 1953, Matthiessen co-founded what would become one of the most important literary magazines of the 20th Century, The Paris Review. But he did it as a cover for his CIA activities -- the only adventure in his long life that he said he ever regretted.

 

"I was a spy," he said. "When I went in there, it was the end of the Cold War -- Russia was a great menace out there in the distance. It was considered very patriotic to join the CIA. I didn't know my politics were going to veer leftward, and that I would really come to despise the CIA."

 

Matthiessen's politics led to a lifelong career as an activist. He wrote books about union [American farmworker] organizer Cesar Chavez, the American Indian Movement...

 

After Matthiessen's second wife, Deborah, died of cancer in 1972, he embraced Zen Buddhism and eventually became a priest and teacher. In his 1978 book, The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen wrote about a spiritual journey in the remote mountains of Nepal, and the impossibility of capturing experience in words:

The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind, but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. LISTEN

Peter Muryo Matthiessen [was] a two-time winner of the National Book Award, a longtime Zen practitioner, and Bernie Glassman’s first Dharma successor. He [was] an active Zen teacher in Sagaponack, New York.

• Unlocking the mysteries of the Earth (BBC)
  The BBC's Nick Higham talks to Dr. James Lovelock, the author of Rough Ride to the Future, which predicts the Earth's future…
• Gaia creator rows back on climate
  …the Earth was like. But in a hundred million years, it sank back to normal." Dr. Lovelock is the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that…

• The Way of the Knife: Mark Mazzetti on KPFA today
• The Way of the Knife: Life in the CIA (or Why just spy when you can kill like an independent mercenary army for multinational capitalist corporations?)
• AUDIO: A nonbeliever tries to make sense of the visions she had as a teen (Barbara Ehrenreich on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, WWHY/NPR)
• When life gives you raspberries, make pie!

From burning bras to hot... (Int'l Women's Day)

Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; SCPR.org; KPFK.org

Feminists marching braless in bullet proof vests (Wisdom Quarterly/femen.org/en)

If I burn it, it's not that I'm nostalgic (#NotYourMothersFemisim); I just overdid the surgery.

From Burning Bras to Hot Debate: Is feminism doing right by women today?

Women Under [Early] Buddhism (GR)

(KPCC) Who qualifies as "feminist" nowadays? The days of bra burning may be gone, but there’s still plenty of fire around feminism now. 

 

Take the unretouched Lena Dunham and body-less Mindy Kaling fashion mag covers: Were they beautiful or boo-worthy? Or Beyoncé, a pop star so beloved by men and women alike that she's called "Queen Be": Is she all about Woman Power or just a powerful brand?

 

Even First Ladies can’t escape the heat, applied equally to matters grand and, very often, small: Are Michelle Obama’s arms and Hillary Clinton’s sags and Twitter tag praiseworthy, problematic, or something else altogether?

 

Not in my police state you don't, missy!

Heated debate over these questions plays out all over media. This isn't necessarily bad if it's leading to more conversations and awareness. But the flip side is that too many different voices make solidarity impossible and could hurt (or even doom) “the movement.”  In 2014, is there even a movement anymore? 

 

If yes, what is it now? If there’s no single, unified feminism, should there be one? Who qualifies to be feminist at all?

 

Do we take feminism for granted?

On Thursday, March 27, 2014, join Wisdom Quarterly at KPCC’s Crawford Family Forum for some lively talk about pop culture, politics, and doing/being women “right.” There will be an audio-visual show of items with the most recent media buzz. Panelists will give their insights, and audience Q&A is invited to dive into what’s going on with American feminism today. Moreover, how is it likely to play out in the future?

Men are a vital part

You're invited, Peter. Put away the toy.

Male allies, non-sexist men, enlightened guys, and precious children with a chance of being raised beyond patriarchy are vital to the world movement for gender equality. If women hate men, stay home; it only harms the cause. We are ALL upset with patriarchs, sexists, rapists, and brutes. Nowadays, most males can at least behave in a fair way. Let's make it the norm, the natural way of thinking, of feeling, of working together as one humanity. Come stand up for freedom, for sexual equality, and for fairness.

  

March 8th International Women's Day, Los Angeles: Rock, Rap, & Speakout versus Poverty, Prisons, & War -- 2:00 pm, MacArthur Park, Wilshire Bl. between Alvarado and Park View, LA 90057, Metro exit: Westlake/MacArthur Park (globalwomenstrike.net).

• To help plan March 8th events or to stay informed: (323) 276-9833 or la@allwomencount.net 

The new women of International Women's Day? (Wisdom Quarterly/dailyfiasco.com)

 

Is there a problem with feminism today?

On March 27, KPCC's Crawford Family Forum hosts a conversation on the precarious state of feminism today. Shape that event by sharing insights on the role feminism plays -- or fails to play -- in your life. Learn more about the event, RSVP free, or follow the conversation on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #notyourmothersfeminism. Everything you share will be read by journalists only [and their clandestine NSA minders], and responses are confidential unless journalists are told that they may publish them.

 

MODERATOR: Joanne Griffith: writer, journalist, host of weekly show "The Archives" on BBC Radio 5 Live - @globaljourno 

 

PANEL

USA (femen.ks@gmail.com)

Roxane Gay: writer, professor, contributor to Salon, Buzzfeed, New York Times Book Review; author of forthcoming Untamed State and Bad Feminist. - @rgay
Kristina Wong: internationally presented solo performer, writer, cultural commentator; shows include "Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Going Green the Wong Way," "Wong Street Journal" (premiering in 2015). - @mskristinawong
Mona Ebrahim: multimedia professional, designer, writer; author of 101 Reasons Why I’m Glad I Wear Hijab

RISE until March 21, 2014

Lindsey Horvath: Vice President of Communication, NationBuilder; Former West Hollywood City Councilmember (2009-2011); women’s empowerment and anti-violence advocate - @LindseyPHorvath
Wendy Carrillo: journalist, POWER 106 FM "Knowledge is Power" host, politics and culture commentator - @wendycarrillo

• The Crawford Family Forum
• 474 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91105
• Admission FREE, RSVP required
• Thursday night, March 27, 2014
• 6:30 pm door, 7:00 pm program

• Sexually aggressive in bars? It's not because he's drunk
• The position of women in Buddhism (BuddhaNet)
• Beyoncé album reignites feminism debate
• Event: Wonder Women! Untold Story of American Superheroines
• Is it brave or even beneficial for Lena Dunham to be nude on HBO's "Girls?"
• A lesson on what it means to be a feminist, from someone born after 1990 
• NEXT: Water crisis — Survival of the wettest (March 19) 
• Latino police awarded $3.5 mil in OC discrimination case
• When Hollywood Advocates ­- Should People Listen?

Int'l Women's Day L.A., downtown MacArthur Park (KPFK.org)

"At Berkeley" (new film)

CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Frederick Wiseman (zipporah.com); KPFK.org

"At Berkeley" is a documentary film by Frederick Wiseman about the University of California at Berkeley -- the oldest, most prestigious, and most radical member of California's ten-campus public university system.

Berkeley is one of the finest research and teaching facilities in the world, excelling most of the world's private institutions while rivaling Ivy League schools. This film shows the major aspects of university life with particular emphasis on the administrative efforts to maintain the academic excellence, public role, and the economic, racial, and social diversity of the student body of America’s premiere public university.

(Mandy Whittles) "Berkeley in the Sixties" documentary of the student movement in Berkeley in the 60's. Uploaded for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only.

 

Berkeley in the Sixties

All of this is taking place in the face of drastic budget cuts imposed by the State of California, big business (represented by its hand selected Board of Regents), and competing colleges. The goal of the film is to show how a major American university is administered and to suggest the complex relationship among its various constituencies -- students, faculty, administrators, alumni, the City of Berkeley, the State of California, and the federal government.

 

In a more abstract way, the film looks closely at Berkeley’s intellectual and social mission, its obligation to the state, and to larger ideas of "higher" education. It illustrates how decisions are made and implemented by the administration in collaboration with its various constituencies. Tickets

Rave review (The New Yorker)
Jordan Moore (Nov. 13, 2013)
Frederick Wiseman, one of our greatest and most prolific documentarians, always delves deeply into his subjects. And for his latest, "At Berkeley," that’s truer than ever. He found one of California’s great treasures, U.C. Berkeley, such a rich subject that it required a four-hour film. It is receiving some rave reviews, including one from astute film critic David Denby of The New Yorker. Laemmeles is proud to open the movie at the Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

 

REVIEW (Oliver Lyttelton, The Playlist, indiewire.com) Over the years, veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman has covered what sometimes feels like almost [every] kind of institution and every aspect of life in America (and occasionally, life abroad too). "Titicut Follies," "Juvenile Court," "Zoo," "Racetrack... More