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My name is Patrick Meighan, and I'm a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom "Family Guy", and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Being Peace" when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protesters who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted "We Are Peaceful" and "We Are Nonviolent" and "Join Us." As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA's First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family's dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as "30 tons of garbage" that was "abandoned" by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

An exploration of how the growth of social media sites-like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook-have become tools for protest and revolutionary change in the U.S. and abroad.

Economic meltdown, pro-democracy revolts, protest camps - it's kicking off everywhere. But was all this catalysed by new social media and technologies as many claimed? Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent who witnessed much of the unrest at first-hand, tells Liz Else that it's a lot subtler than that

Occupy Wall Street: The Beginning Joe Rogan on Occupy Wallstreet:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjMcDXGkR8I Network -- Corporate Cosmology:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqEcLlp_Big THE CORPORATION [1/23] What is a Corporation?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y What CNN doesn't want you see ever again:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_2aTzC_4kY Poll: Americans Distrust Governmenthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEEnEp0Lbg Elizabeth Warren: Death of the Middle Classhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBf70qX1sBw Dylan Ratigan (rightfully) loses it on air:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIcqb9hHQ3E GREEN WAR:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ864ucbR_4 Network - Mad as hellhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ELleCQvew In the House, In a Heartbeat - John Murphy:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST2H8FWDvEACategory:News & Politics

AFTER months of speculation over whether the Arab spring would spread to the Palestinians, it has spread, in a way, to the Israelis. Rothschild Boulevard, a pleasant, leafy thoroughfare that meanders through Tel Aviv, with offices and commodious flats on either side, has oddly become a colourful encampment, seething with talk of people-power and social revolution. The tent-dwellers, a mixed bunch but with a preponderance of young, educated, middle-class families, are demanding-above all-affordable housing. Their protest, now into its third week, has sparked sleep-outs and demonstrations around the country. The movement seems to be growing daily, despite the torrid summer heat.

Not just media outlets, but numerous Democratic pundits, heap mockery on the grassroots activism

ludicrous

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr.  At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression.  It is highly recommended. DATA The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.  Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself. In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site.  It doesn't read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?), just the html text.  After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points. It's a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn't have seen otherwise.  For instance, I found this adorable little rascal, pictured below, mucking up the algorithm, as the first version of the code assumed all the ages would have two digits.  I found that he, and the sign his mom made for him as a confessional to her son, hit me a ton harder than any of the more direct signs of despair in this economy: