Occupy protesters should make themselves familiar with the USA Patriot Act. Section 802 expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include persons who engage in acts of civil disobedience to coerce or affect the conduct of government by intimidation of the civilian population. Furthermore, the US Department of Defence training manuals, until an amendment in 2009, equated protest with “low-level terrorism”. Although the DoD changed the wording two years ago, human rights lawyers and activists have lingering concerns about whether the sentiment and intent has caught up with the change.

File this under #opEducate: Learning is active. You learn things by seeking them out. You learn by asking questions. You learn by doing. Converse to this is being taught. Being taught is passive. You don’t seek out information, you are presented with it and must accept what you’re presented if you are to be taught. This is a fundamental problem with schooling. Schooling doesn’t encourage learning. Schooling is all about being taught; about assimilating the information that has been prepared for you. It’s fairly easy to see that this behavior has become ingrained in other aspects of life outside of schooling.

I’ve long been interested in language and its influence on thought, and various manipulations thereof. Lately I’ve been getting more frustrated with the use of certain abstractions in our language and how they make people think about the world from a top-down perspective. I’m talking about things like “the market”, “the economy”, “the state”, and even “society”. I feel that if we are going to ever move to a more horizontal power structure, we (and yes, this is a “collective” we) need to stop thinking of the world in these terms. And to stop thinking in these terms, we need to stop speaking in these terms. Yes, realize that these institutions are out there, but realize that “the economy” doesn’t dictate what we do. We dictate what “the economy” is.

So, I guess I have a mission now.

A a bit confused by the take in this article. In it, he praises CA governor Jerry Brown for vetoing a bill that would have required drivers to give 3 feet of space when passing a bicyclist OR slow down to 15mph in the event that is impossible. He’s happy it got shot down because of the costs involved?

Thus, this bill would have imposed a huge cost on auto drivers–and, as Brown pointed out, could lead to more auto-to-auto accidents–while doing little for bicycle safety.

What costs are these, exactly? And while I’ve stated elsewhere, I do not support the notion of legislation circumscribing behavior, but this isn’t a prohibitory law. It’s not telling you that you can’t pass bicyclists. It’s telling you to stop having the typical motorist antagonism towards bicyclists and give them the same space you would when passing another car. 3 feet. 1 yard. It isn’t that hard to do.

Maybe he’s worried about the costs of the citations for non-compliance. This isn’t any more expensive than the alternative. I mean, the typical cost to a motorist when they kill a bicyclists is usually just a traffic citation anyway.

Jobs. No, not Steve, I’m talking about those things that the politicians all seem to think they can just create by the sweep of a legislative pen and return the country (the world!) to some golden age of hollow prosperity long-forgotten. Worse even than the politicians believing that is the media’s parroting of it, because everyone that keeps abreast of world events via mainstream media outlets now believes it as well.

But how is a job created? Are there embryonic employment opportunities out there waiting to be fertilized by government seed money? And how do you create jobs tailored to the job seekers, who themselves have been tailored for specific career fields their entire lives by an educational system designed to meet the needs of “the economy”? Obviously, those are the very jobs that dematerialized in the first place. And of course, creating jobs means creating employment. Or rather, the opportunity to be employed. To have a boss. To be integrated back into the system. When politicians talk of creating jobs, they aren’t talking about opportunities for self-employment. There is no mention of abolishing – or even relaxing – licensing and permitting fees or self-employment taxes. No mention of the patent system that allows incorporated non-people to aggregate and hold on to economic power to the exclusion of everyone else. Ahh, but I see I need to stop here as I’m already drifting. I’ll continue this (or diverge into something else) at a later time.

This really irritates me. As if university weren’t already primarily a white-collar vocational school in this country. Florida public schools have already nixed “Liberal Arts” as a major, now there is pressure to get rid of anything that doesn’t have a direct career path. This is why you can’t base a society on economics alone; it doesn’t actually promote freedom.

Syrian revolution - just in time to give the US Army someone else to invade! And how can we ignore this bit of good news:

Just as significantly, Iraq remains an ally of the United States, an enemy of al-Qaeda and a force for relative good in the Middle East. It is buying $12 billion in U.S. weapons and has requested that an American training force remain in the country next year. It recently helped get two U.S. citizens out of prison in Iran.

All of this happened because the United States invaded the country.

Yay! Maybe we can sell $12 billion worth of weapons to the Syrians, too! I hear all those US defense contractors are hurting lately.

Tea Party in uproar over “Undeath Panels”. Austerity measures run amok.