“Under current law, it is a crime for a private citizen to lie to a government official, but not for the government official to lie to the people.”
—Donald M. Fraser (via knowapower)
September 2011
29 posts
“
As we circle Union Square, about twenty NYPD officers haul out orange plastic nets (the kind used to fence off construction sites) and close off the road, diverting the crowd. But the detour, too, was closed, leaving us only one other option: straight down Broadway. The lighthearted carnival air begins to get very heavy as it becomes clear that we are being corralled. The main group, about 150 protesters, keeps on down the street, but the police are running behind with the orange nets, siphoning off groups of fifteen to twenty people at a time, classic crowd control.
A new group of police officers arrives in white shirts, as opposed to dark blue. These guys are completely undiscerning in their aggression. If someone gets in their way, they shove them headfirst into the nearest parked car, at which point the officers are immediately surrounded by camera phones and shouts of “Shame! Shame!”
Up until this point, Frank and I have managed to stay ahead of the nets, but as we hit what I think is 12th Street, they’ve caught up. The blue-shirts aren’t being too forceful, so we manage to run free, but stay behind to see what happens. Then things go nuts.
The white-shirted cops are shouting at us to get off the street as they corral us onto the sidewalk. One African American man gets on the curb but refuses to be pushed up against the wall of the building; they throw him into the street, and five cops tackle him. As he’s being cuffed, a white kid with a video camera asks him “What’s your name?! What’s your name?!” One of the blue-shirted cops thinks he’s too close and gives him a little shove. A white-shirt sees this, grabs the kid and without hesitation billy-clubs him in the stomach.
At this point, the crowd of twenty or so caught in the orange fence is shouting “Shame! Shame! Who are you protecting?! YOU are the 99 percent! You’re fighting your own people!” A white-shirt, now known to be NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, comes from the left, walks straight up to the three young girls at the front of the crowd, and pepper-sprays them in the face for a few seconds, continuing as they scream “No! Why are you doing that?!” The rest of us in the crowd turn away to avoid the spray, but it’s unavoidable. My left eye burns and goes blind and tears start streaming down my face. Frank grabs my arm and shoves us through the small gap between the orange fence and the brick wall while everyone stares in shock and horror at the two girls on the ground and two more doubled over screaming as their eyes ooze. In the street I shout for water to rinse my eyes or give to the girls on the ground. But no one responds. One of the blue-shirts, tall and bald, stares in disbelief and says, “I can’t believe he just fuckin’ maced her.” And it becomes clear that the white-shirts are a different species. We need to get out of there.
” —JEANNE MANSFIELD, “Why I Was Maced at the Wall Street Protest,” in the Boston Review.
Jesus H. Christ.
(via inothernews)
An atrocious abuse of power.
“In times of stress, be bold and valiant.”
—Horace
#iloveny
Somehow, even after a decade in this town, I find myself wandering the streets with my eyes lit up in awe, a smile tugging at my cheeks, a glow in my chest - still amazed at just how beautiful and vibrant and wondrous it really is. I marvel at the pulse of life that courses through its concrete veins and have to quell the urge to wrap my arms around it in a big juicy bear-hug. New York you are magical and all I can do it float through you with delight. I love you.
“Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman.”
—Carl Jung
My new blog, chronicling my move from NYC to San Francisco →
holyshitimmovingtosf.tumblr.com
From my cross-country road trip to adjusting to a new world. Come along for the ride, it’ll be a terrifying adventure!!
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (via loveyourchaos)
“The moment you feel you are no longer dependent on anyone, a deep coolness and a deep silence settles inside, a relaxed let-go. It does not mean you stop loving. On the contrary, for the first time you know a new quality, a new dimension of love—a love that is no longer biological, a love that is closer to friendliness than any relationship. That’s why I am not even using the word friendship, because that “ship” has drowned so many people.”
—Osho (via loveyourchaos)
“
Confronting Disappointment September 7, 2011 : 2:30 PM
On Friday afternoon, as brave and committed activists continued their non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House in protest of the tar sands pipeline that would lead to a massive increase in global warming pollution, President Obama ordered the EPA to abandon its pursuit of new curbs on emissions that worsens disease-causing smog in US cities. Earlier this year, the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that the levels of pollution now permitted — put in place by the Bush-Cheney administration— are “not legally defensible.” Those very same rules have now been embraced by the Obama White House.
Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.
” —Al Gore
How many world leaders are women? →
blogs.ft.com
With presidential elections coming up next year in both the US and France, what are the chances of the two poster girls of the right – Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National, and Michele Bachmann, queen of the Tea Party – joining this list?
Light pink- acting heads of government / state, Dark pink- full-term heads of state / government via
How Nature Makes Soil, And You Can Too (Video) →
treehugger.com
I also highly recommend watching this.
Ninety-Eight Percent Of Gaza's Children Experience Or Witness War Trauma →
sciencedaily.com
Most children in the Gaza Strip have been tear gassed, have had their homes searched and damaged, and have witnessed shooting, fighting and explosions. Many have been injured or tortured as a result of chronic war that spans generations, says a recent Queen’s University study.
According to the study, there is a pattern of violence against Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip that has serious and debilitating psychiatric and psychological effects.
“Gaza has been an occupied territory for a long time, and still is; Israel controls its borders, its air and water access. It has been described as a vast open-air detention centre” says Queen’s community health and epidemiology researcher John Pringle. “Bombs are being launched into Gaza during this latest eruption of Middle East violence, but are being ignored in light of other crises.”
“I want a soul mate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.”
—Henry Rollins (via hardlygolden)
“Everyone runs away to California once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.”
—Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life (via orphicfiddler)
GoodGuide Transparency Toolbar - When you shop online discover how products perform on issues that matter to you. →
toolbar.goodguide.com
Information on issues that matter to all of us at the moment of purchase is key to shift our consumption patterns, raise our awareness, and accelerate the transformation towards a sustainable economy. GoodGuide now brings realtime information to online retail stores. Genius. Powerful.
August 2011
28 posts
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening[…]Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
—
Alice Walker (via dahlias-y-rosas)
I fucking hope so.
(via afractalparticle)The girl next to me on the subway today had scars up and down her arms. “WE ME” was freshly carved in and I could see faint remnants of old pains etched in white along her forearms. She broke my heart.
There was a dullness in her eyes that you only see in people who are tired of life’s pain. I envisioned her pushing over that edge of self-mutilation, channeling her sadness into blood, just to feel something again. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her that things would be ok. But I suspect for her they won’t be. Not if that’s where she had traveled to. Not if she’d already given in to that kind of release. It’s hard to return from that precipice.
It crushes my soul to recognize the deepness of pain. It makes me wonder why people have different tolerances for the lows that life brings. I understand depression. I understand desperation. I wish I could achieve the impossible feat of bringing people out of their misery. But, in reality, I must focus on keeping myself from yearning for nostalgia and falling into my own patterns of self-medication.
Keeping my face turned to the light; braced against darkness.
Today's note from the universe.
Living in time and space, Erin, just might be the scariest, most heartbreaking, and lonely path an angel could ever choose.
Until, of course, they realize that being scared doesn’t mean they can’t make a difference, broken hearts can still love just fine, and that feeling lonely doesn’t mean they’re actually alone.
Then they’ll laugh an angel laugh, fluff their wings, and dare a new dare all over again.
Love your halo,
The Universe
Your Body Literally Glows With Light →
truthlovebeauty.tumblr.com
The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day.
Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels which can be seen with the naked eye. In fact,…
“Homosexuality can be found in more than 1500 species [of organisms] around the world, yet there’s only one that shows homophobia.”
—youtube comment (via incolumis)
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
—Jack Layton (1950-2011), leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, in a letter he asked his partner Olivia to share with Canada on his death (via undercovernun)
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
—J.D. Salinger (via nevver)
“We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a ‘suspect’ but uncontroversially the ‘decider’ who gave the orders to commit the ‘supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’ (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.”
—Noam Chomsky, on the killing of Osama bin Laden (via lasso)
“To what extremes would you go to bring about your heart’s fondest wishes, to manifest your greatest desires, and to live your boldest dreams?”
Sometimes I’m terrified at the pulsation of life that I can feel running through me. It gears me up in unimaginable ways and causes me to make the best (and worst) decisions. I feel sometimes like I’m flying towards joy and whenever there’s the slightest hiccup in that course I am taken aback and left scratching my head with my feet on the ground. Sometimes I find myself aiming at my feet - sabotaging myself with a shot of lazy incapacity - and I have to shake my head hard, pulling out cobwebs and forcefully refocusing myself on my goals.
What’s easy is to float through this life. This city. Hedonistically. Lushly.
What’s easy is to be a whirlwind of laughter in other people’s lives. And to simply be content with my abundance.
But a smart person once told me: “whenever I stop being scared, I know it’s time to move on.” And I’ve stopped being scared of life here. There’s a strange feeling that I have this wild and boisterous city somehow under my thumb. And it’s time to throw myself for a loop again. Time to pull the rug out from under myself and explore the truths that come with new concrete, new oceans, new greenery, new loves and new pains.
Time to remove the security blanket of comfortability and to immerse myself in the terrors of life.
I have a feeling that what I’ll find won’t be the end of my life here, but instead the expansion of my universe to encompass new horizons.
And I’ll spin out love from my fingertips and draw smiles on the faces of children and men and women across the land. And I’ll let my heart burst sometimes and fight this armor that protects the tenderness of my soul. And I’ll take on all my fears with a terrified bravery, and a willingness to fail coupled with a single-minded inability to accept that I ever could.
And my dreams will come true only because I have given them up and given myself wholly to life to spin a bigger and brighter future than I could ever have imagined.
manifesto
My hunger for life is insatiable, my thirst for joy unquenchable; I will swallow my dreams whole, I will devour my most glorious future & wipe my lips with the hem of the gods; I will soar across the land on winged feet, leaving kisses on foreheads as I fly away; I will dip my toes in the oceans & splash laughter across our souls; I will love love LOVE till I’ve exhausted my inexhaustible heart; I will lose myself in the wonderment of the universe; I invite you to join me.
:secrets from my notebook. →
caitsmeissner.tumblr.com
Tears in my eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone write about me before…
This evening watching a private rehearsal of a band assembled for a midnight cabaret on Wednesday at Saachi & Sacchi, which is in an enormous fancy building off Houston with the best view of New York City I’ve ever seen & a rooftop garden run by my beloved E-town:
Piano, upright bass, drums, violin, trumpet, vocals, accordion. Before being played the accordion unfolds and wheezes the extra air from its lungs. Old man accordion. I assign each instrument a personality. The way pets begin to match their owners, so do the musical bodies. The sounds are of another era. Tango? I cannot place it, but it feels ancient. I see things— two lovers dance with a sinister fire between them burning up one another beneath the hum of a full moon. The red belly of a long flamenco skirt as the woman lifts the fabric and it smiles from the bottom up. Or, perhaps, a long narrow boat on a canal in Venice, stuffed full of colored paper flowers, some blossoms on top who’s petals diminish from the water flying off the ore as it rows in and out of the water like a man entering and exiting a woman. Standing at the helm of the boat is a man, still like a statue, a decoration. The singer, back here in the basement room at the bottom of a world-premiere advertising agency in New York City, flirts with the accordion player during the break between takes. She loves when he shakes the long note out and laughs shyly when she does it again, just to humor her.
“Put the accordion in the forefront.” The composer says his fret board is loose and is afraid the bass will explode. “Can I do fills?” The violinist asks, but the composer is seeking simplicity and bristles at the suggestion. Sparse is the actual word he uses, though the song to an untrained ear sounds far from sparse, full of flourishes, layers and conversation between each instrument. In the corner is Erin, who has welcomed everyone into this space like a ball of sunshine tumbling down a grass hill. She is big and bright. Everyone loves her and so do I. She sits perched on a tall stool opposite of me and takes some photographs, hums along. To see her so deeply in life lately moves me. She takes it between her teeth and rips it open. I am sure when it rains, the sky found its way into her mouth and she’s broke it open, too, watering us all, helping us grow.
thanks universe:
“Never regret love, Erin. No matter how blind, it improved your world view. No matter how foolish, it made you wiser. And no matter how generous, it made you more.”
