What's Wrong With Woodrow Wilson? Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-11). A: He was a fucking fascist, that's what's wrong. (Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)
Modesto Police Shoot Francisco Moran and Rita Elias. Modesto Anarcho!'s MySpace Blog (2010-10-04). On Friday night, Rita Elias, 31, died after off-duty sheriff's detective Kari Abbey, shot and killed her after an hour long argument. Kari Abbey, a 6 year veteran to the force, and a detective of four...
(Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)
Under Surveillance America. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-16). Federal Bureau of Investigation files indicate that Ernest Withers, prominent photographer of 1960s Civil Rights activism, was also a federal informant. According to the Washington Post, he provided photographs, scheduling information and biographical sketches on Civil Rights leaders to the FBI. Whether Withers was trying to cash in on information...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Nothing new under the sun. John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-10-06). Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama's most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting.How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Homesteading in Haiti: Very Adverse Possession. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-12). Emily Troutman reports from the hills near Port-au-Prince: Six months ago, this land was nothing but crickets in the grass. Now, it's Haiti's new frontier, a landscape of squatters whose greatest hope is a home of their own. Gray and blue shacks and shanties extend for miles. Small gardens and...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Event: The Prospects and Ethics of Political Reform. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-27). What: As we near election time, candidates for office will inevitably present themselves as an alternative to the status quo that plagues us. But what types of reform in practice, if any, are consistent with a libertarian political philosophy? The first article we will study is Ron Paul’s “My Plan...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Event: ‘For the Bible Tells Me So’ Movie. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-22). What: 1919 Hemphill, a local DIY collective, is hosting a screening of the documentary For the Bible Tells Me So (2007) as part of its long-time movie series Conscientious Projector. A recipient of numerous international awards, the film documents the turmoil Christian families with a gay child face and “sometimes...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Grieving Student Suspected of Using Marijuana Reinstated. DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-10-12). Narco-Statism Vs. Compassion and Human Decency (Cont'd) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Getting Away With Murder. Center for a Stateless Society (2010-10-12). Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont'd) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
What's Wrong With Woodrow Wilson? Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-11). A: He was a fucking fascist, that's what's wrong. (Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)
Modesto Police Shoot Francisco Moran and Rita Elias. Modesto Anarcho!'s MySpace Blog (2010-10-04). On Friday night, Rita Elias, 31, died after off-duty sheriff's detective Kari Abbey, shot and killed her after an hour long argument. Kari Abbey, a 6 year veteran to the force, and a detective of four...
(Linked Monday 2010-10-11.)
Under Surveillance America. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-16). Federal Bureau of Investigation files indicate that Ernest Withers, prominent photographer of 1960s Civil Rights activism, was also a federal informant. According to the Washington Post, he provided photographs, scheduling information and biographical sketches on Civil Rights leaders to the FBI. Whether Withers was trying to cash in on information...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Nothing new under the sun. John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-10-06). Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama's most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting.How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Homesteading in Haiti: Very Adverse Possession. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-12). Emily Troutman reports from the hills near Port-au-Prince: Six months ago, this land was nothing but crickets in the grass. Now, it's Haiti's new frontier, a landscape of squatters whose greatest hope is a home of their own. Gray and blue shacks and shanties extend for miles. Small gardens and...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Event: The Prospects and Ethics of Political Reform. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-27). What: As we near election time, candidates for office will inevitably present themselves as an alternative to the status quo that plagues us. But what types of reform in practice, if any, are consistent with a libertarian political philosophy? The first article we will study is Ron Paul’s “My Plan...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Event: ‘For the Bible Tells Me So’ Movie. justino, DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-09-22). What: 1919 Hemphill, a local DIY collective, is hosting a screening of the documentary For the Bible Tells Me So (2007) as part of its long-time movie series Conscientious Projector. A recipient of numerous international awards, the film documents the turmoil Christian families with a gay child face and “sometimes...
(Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Grieving Student Suspected of Using Marijuana Reinstated. DFW Alliance of the Libertarian Left (2010-10-12). Narco-Statism Vs. Compassion and Human Decency (Cont'd) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
Getting Away With Murder. Center for a Stateless Society (2010-10-12). Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont'd) (Linked Tuesday 2010-10-12.)
My first audio commentary for the Center for a Stateless Society. Check it out, over there.
Tweet, tweet! I'm a dangerous anarchist bird!
I’ll probably be producing a couple of these per week, with Brad Spangler backing me up both as writer and as alternate reader.
It’s a bit creepy voicing this, given the arrests of Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, and the raid on Madison’s home, since I was doing much the same thing for a couple of evenings: listening to Pittsburgh-area police scanner traffic over the internet, and repeating interesting information to several relevant hashtags on Twitter.
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I am absolutely tickled to learn that I was “largely responsible for organizing the riot[s]” in Pittsburgh around the G-20 summit and related protests. From Flopping Aces, crossposted from Peter Lajoie’s blog:
Another Anarchist who was largely responsible for organizing the riot from Twitter was Mike Gogulski of nostate.com. A self-described, “Future stateless person,” Gogulski is an unabashed anarchist who no longer lives or works in the U.S. but has vowed to overthrow the current system of society. Through Twitter on his cellphone he was able to coordinate fellow protesters’ movements by tweeting where police officers were, where they were going, and what they were planning to do. Anyone who wanted to see these tweets just had to look at a feed entitled “#resistg20.”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed possible to exhibit astounding levels of cluelessness by picking up a few scattered bits of information, and then doing your own little paint-by-numbers in between.
For Peter’s benefit, I’ll point out a few things wrong with what he wrote:
Rioting policeman assaults citizen at G20 protest in Pittsburgh. Photo by Foo Conner.
What I was doing for a large number of hours was monitoring a Pittsburgh-area police/fire/EMS radio scanner linked up to an internet audio feed, and then repeating information I heard there to Twitter. For example:
And so on. Some of these tweets were picked up by others on the #resistg20 hashtag and who had followed me, and repeated to others, some of whom may have been subscribing to their tweets or hashtags via their mobile, er, cell phones.
Who knows what effect any of this had. Hopefully, getting information on police movements, plans and locations out via Twitter to a few folks on the scene helped some avoid getting gassed, beaten, subjected to head-splitting sonic weapons emissions and/or arrested.
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Feeling safer yet, America?
How’s that Obama-charged hope working out for you?
Pittsburgh Indymedia G20 channel.
Twitter users to follow: @g20actionalert, @resistg20. Hashtags: #resistg2o, #reportg20
Live streaming police/fire/EMS G-20 ops radio traffic from Pittsburgh area here.
G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh 24 September 2009
Resistg20 organizing hub, comms hub. (Lovely, one of their Twitter accounts has been suppressed)
Recent tweets from @resistg20:
1. 40 cops, w/ bus, headed towards friendship park #resistg20
2. From #Pittsburgh to #Greece, fuck the police.
3. A comms facility was raided, but we are still fully operational please continue to submit reports #resistg20
4. RT @heidilore: RT @resistg20 37th and butler, police deployed smoke and gas #resistg20 #g20
5. denny and liberty has 200 protesters rallying #resistg20 #g20
6. Standoff with pigs #resistg20
7. 37th and butler, police deployed smoke and gas #resistg20 #g20
8. TEAR GAS
9. police threatening chemical dispersal at 38th and liberty #resistg20
10. police have given a dispersal order at 36th and liberty and no can hear the order #resistg20 #g20
11. g20pgh: police have given a dispersal order at 36th and liberty and no can hear the order
12. march heading south on 39th #resistg20 #g20
13. no way to get from “strip district” to downtown. use 16th st bridge #resistg20
14. Water cannons on lm38th and liberty. Be careful #resistg20
15. Please remember to Call in your reports to 412-567-1420 as we are having trouble receiving sms. Good luck out there! #resistg20
16. student march has ended at arsenal park #resistg20 #g20
17. student march is making a left onto liberty, police helicopter overhead and cops on the streets watching #resistg20 #g20
18. student march is making a left onto liberty, police helicopter over head and cops on the streets #students and #workers SHUT THE CITY DOWN
19. Police are staging at 21st and smallman near arsenal park #resistg20
20. police staging at 21st and smallman near arsenal park #resistg20 #g20
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It’s not often I feel compelled to write a book review, but reading Gene Callahan’s Puck was quite an adventure!
Described simply as “A Novel” in its subtitle, Puck is really something quite more than that. A fictional story, yes, but also a tour of some of the “weirder” aspects of Gene’s universe — and mine.
Pick, pock, puck!
I won’t try to describe much that goes on, save to say that the story takes places in two parallel(?) universes, and sometimes in the spaces between them. You got your swords ‘n’ wizards fantasy adventure, you got your romance, you got your mystery and intrigue, you got your modern psychological drama, you got your science fiction — everything, indeed, that one could ask for in a modern novel.
But there’s more…
Puck is a book on several different levels. It’s loaded with references to mythology, anarchism, religious traditions, history, the odder bits of physics and a whole bunch of classical literature to boot. I consider myself a fairly learned guy, but Mr. Gene has been treading this planet a bit longer than I have, and his learning shines through brilliantly. To paraphrase another great novelist: this book is like a mirror; if a monkey looks in, no Korzybski looks out.
From page 105:
[Doc and Sophia] shared several passion-filled years, but by the time Doc was finishing graduate school — when the loudest political voices in the Village were proclaiming that AIDS was a government plot against the gay and minority communities, and were fighting pitched battles with the police over control of Tompkin’s Square Park — he had grown disillusioned with what he had come to regard as the posturing of bored, rich kids. It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for their grievances, but rather that he now perceived their activism as more a palliative for their own boredom and frustration than as a real attempt to address the injustices that were their purported motivation. He suspected that their protests were a contemporary manifestation of the same impulse that had motivated Uncle Franz’s Cabala studies. The radicals he knew seemed to believe that if only they could arrange their political slogans in accord with some occult formula, then the ruling elite peacefully would release the reins of power, liberate the masses, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and sow flower gardens over the obsolete missile silos.
Read with caution, ready to remember just how flimsy your paradigms are, and just how liable they are to slip, like flimsy masks, off the face of reality.
Puck you! Puck me! Puck everyone!
At least for the moment, Jason Talley still has Twitter access.
I’m unlikely to be able to follow this closely, so follow Jason on Twitter (@JDTalley) and Pete (@peteeyre) if you haven’t already. Also, tracking the #MHD tag on Twitter is a way to get the news, especially if the boys go silent.
From Jason’s tweets, reverse-chronological:
Gak.
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I’m really overdue for this.
I want to express HUGE gratitude and give big, big thanks to the people of the Language of Liberty Institute and the others who made the LLI Liberty and Entrepeneurship Camp in Martin, Slovakia possible.
You are:
At the camp, I made a bunch of new friends, met several new co-conspirators, a collaborator, a couple of secret society bothers, at least two business partners and a handful of new comrades.
None of this would have been possible without your dedication and perseverance. I have great luck to have been able to ride along in the wake of the energy you mustered and deployed, and to have thus made such connections.
Major thanks to all of you for making the week in Martin something amazing — something brilliant.
Milý súdruh Dušan! Okrem toho, že Ti srdečne ďakujem, poprosil by som, aby si mohol viezť moje poďakovanie aj Barborke, ktorá nás dala takú dokonalú a povznášajúcu demonštráciu slobody (i naozaj šikovnosti a zručnosti) v akcii! Zároveň ďakujem Tvojmu synovi aj ostatným zamestnancom hotela. Súčasne, uvidíme sa, kedy môžeme sa rozprávať na tému toho obchodého nápadu… že?
