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NOTE: It is important to separate hunting down terrorists who attack our country and deserve justice (which Ron Paul is 100% for), and not confuse justice with occupying entire countries for a decade under the guise of the "War on Terror" or "Spreading Democracy". Terrorists are individuals and small groups, so why are we picking fights with entire nations? BILLIONS for Defense, NOT A PENNY for Empire. This speech is called "Imagine" and it was given by Ron Paul on March 11, 2009. The original text of the talk is below: Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests." Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence. Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but inst

David Graeber begins after 12:50

The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 - Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29."  That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans - even as they face massive wealth inequality - are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints. 

Hundreds of protesters attended a rally after which they planted 558 crosses, representing the 558 uninsured Oregonians who die each year because they lack health care.  The group marched peacefully in two large groups along the sidewalks stopping for traffic. They proceeded without incident, and without a single police officer to escort or obstruct them to Pioneer Square. Following his apology for misleading citizens in a statement regarding the alleged rape of a teenager Police Chief Reese said: "Our Incident Commander Mike Leloff met with protestors before a march and asked if they wanted a police escort. When they told him no, he asked that they self-police their event and obey the law; police would only respond if there were complaints. The march participants agreed, and the event proceeded without any problems, or a police presence" An Occupy Portland Video Collective collaboration. Subscribe here for more daily updates. All content on this channel marked with a creative commons licence is available for derivative, non-commercial works only. Email occupyportland.mediacoalition@gmail.com to join our group of volunteers. www.occupyportland.org occupypdx.orgwww.occupytogether.orgwww.occupytomorrow.com

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:

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break Silence Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." "Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land." "At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minist

The point of all of this is, if you add up all of the MBS-related liability out there, the banks as it stands are facing an Armageddon of claims from all sides. It can't possibly be less than a trillion dollars, and it's probably much, much more. But the Obama administration's current plan is to let them all walk after paying a few shekels apiece into a $20 billion kitty.

I can't always remember their names, but in my nightmares I can see their faces. As the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections from 1992 until 1995, I oversaw five executions. The first two were Thomas Dean Stevens and Christopher Burger, accomplices in a monstrous crime: as teenagers in 1977, they robbed and raped a cabdriver, put him in the trunk of a car, and pushed the vehicle into a pond. I had no doubt that they were guilty: they admitted it to me. But now it was 1993 and they were in their 30s. All these years later, after a little frontal-lobe development, they were entirely different people.

With a Rand study showing an increase in crime after some medical marijuana dispensaries were shut down, L.A. needs a better policy toward such facilities.

If thousands of us hang in there day after day, week after week, we may be able to create a spectacular revolutionary experience that fires up the public imagination and eventually maneuvers Obama into doing something that he has so far not had the guts to do: agree to a bold, decisive stroke against the financial corruption of America. Now that would get the American people behind us and cheering us on from coast to coast. If we can achieve that, the sky will be the limit … further demands will follow and a new America will be born.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT For years, the Yes Men have been tinkering with side-splitting mischief as a way to fight injustice. Our latest film about those efforts, The Yes Men Fix the World, won lots of awards and was released all over the planet... but it simply did not fix the world.  So a year ago, we decided that showing what we do wasn't enough: we needed to help people to actually do it themselves. We called our idea The Yes Lab for Creative Activism. It's a factory for meaningful mischief, and a system for helping organizations and individuals carry out Yes Men-style actions on their own, to get media attention for important issues. But the Yes Lab is more than that: it also aims to help YOU take action on issues of social importance. Today, after a year of testing and nearly a dozen successes, we're proud to announce that the Yes Lab is ready for prime time! It's got a set of cool tools in development, that will soon help YOU get involved in new Yes Lab projects, and even to launch them. And it's got a new home at NYU, with space, lots of eager participants, and an ambitious new structure that will soon be cranking out many new projects. The trouble is that in spite of all that, we still have zero budget for the first round of projects themselves! And that's why you're reading this now. We're asking for $10,000, to make the all-new Yes Lab the lean, mean, change-making machine it can be. Any amount raised over $10,000 will bankroll projects beyond the first round.

A whopping 70,000 questions poured into Change.gov over the past week, in response to the Obama transition team's call for citizen queries to the President-Elect. After votes from about 100,000 people, the top ranked question asks Obama whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government. I've been working with activist Bob Fertik to organize support for the question, and several progressive bloggers urged readers and Obama supporters to vote for it last week. Digby, who has written extensively about the Bush administration's abuse of the rule of law, recently reported on the progress:

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books. Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Educational researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have found that schoolchildren can independently develop strategies for solving complex mathematical tasks, with weaker students proving just as capable as their stronger classmates. Researchers in mathematics education worked with approximately 1600 8th grade high-school students in various German states. Following an introduction to the general topic by their teachers, the school children were given a workbook of geometric tasks that they had to solve on paper and using a computer over four school periods. Calculating the surface area of Gran Canaria was one of the real-world, free-form assignments the students had to tackle. The workbook material included explanations and examples of various problem-solving approaches. The teachers took a back seat during the session but were on hand to answer questions from the children, who worked in pairs. After testing the students' skills before and After the session, the researchers recorded a significant improvement in their capabilities. The students learned to apply mathematics more effectively, the researchers said. The students were also able to call on these skills in a further test three months later. "We expected students who were weaker at math to benefit more from a greater degree of guidance through the module," said professor Kristina Reiss.  "But we didn't see a significant difference between these and stronger students." The researchers also found that there were also no differences between boys and girls. "We now know that students - also those who are weaker in math - have the skills to master even very complex subject matters at their own pace," said Reiss. Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

CAMBRIDGE - Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the "Great Recession"? The term, after all, is predicated on a dangerous misdiagnosis of the problems that confront the United States and other countries, leading to bad forecasts and bad policy.

I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file - "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.