Horror Novelist Stephen King Tells The 1% To Stop Being Selfish Pricks
Preach it, Stevie. Tell it like it is, my main man.
Source: clockworktardis
Video: Portland Police Action during Occupy Portland May Day Protests
by Adam Rothstein (I know Adam, so if anyone has any questions, pass them along)
It’s been a long day out at the various May Day events, and we are still processing all of our video and photos from the day. However, two videos have surfaced that are such egregious examples of the Police violence that was unleashed against protesters today, that we wished to publish these videos without delay.
The first shows a woman being thrown to the curb, and her head being slammed into a bicycle. It was taken during the General Strike march, between 12 and 2 PM on May 1. After the police see the camera man filming, they charged him with police horses, to which he reacts, understandably upset at almost being trampled.
The second piece of footage shows police attacking people standing on the sidewalk, throwing them to the group, and then assaulting a young woman, including pulling her hair very forcibly. Then, they drag another person across the Light Rail tracks. Again, in this situation, the camera man was attacked while in the process of documenting the arrests.
It is very troubling that this sort of violence is used to attempt to enforce traffic infractions. Furthermore, the threatening gestures made towards the media, on a day when several members of the media were beaten by police and arrested, is very concerning.
We thank our media people who braved this violence, so that the people can see what their police force is paid to do to the citizens of Portland. The first video is by OPMC’s Mike BH, and the second is by a person whose name I unfortunately forget, but who stopped by the media van, concerned that this video would be seized by the police if he were to be arrested.
Source: portlandoccupier.org
Occupy May Day Protests Across US
The Occupy Wall Street movement has attempted to breathe new life into its campaign against inequities in the global financial system with a series of May Day protests around the United States.
Thousands of people turned out in New York for a day of action that culminated in a confident march down Broadway in the evening sunshine towards Wall Street, the crucible of the protest that began last year with an angry backlash against banking excess.
The stated aim of bringing business in the commercial capital of the US to a standstill went unfulfilled, but as rain gave way to a bright spring afternoon, traffic ground to a halt around Lower Manhatttan as theOccupy movement’s most anticipated day of action in months took hold.
There were isolated clashes with police as officers clamped down on perceived violations, but by early evening the mood was broadly good-natured. There were flashpoints, however, at protests elsewhere in the United States.
In Oakland, California, scene of several violent clashes between activists and police in recent months, the situation threatened to boil over again when police fired tear gas, sending hundreds of demonstrators scrambling. Police arrested four people.
Officers also fired “flash-bang” grenades to disperse protesters converging on officers as they tried to make arrests, police said. Four people were taken into custody.
Source: Guardian
“If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.”
(via egyptianmuslima4life)
Source: weheartit.com
![sustainablesex:
(via Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back To City Trees : The Salt : NPR)
“We don’t have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores [here],” she says. “What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it available for free.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m24vyr87W81rpm4r7o1_1280.jpg)
(via Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back To City Trees : The Salt : NPR)
“We don’t have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores [here],” she says. “What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it available for free.”
Source: NPR
Alternative building material - hemp, hempcrete, hemp plaster, hemp insulation. Check out Steve Allin’s hemp building website, as well as the international hemp building assoc.
Source: aiisagulko
Financials Lead US Stock Losses
By MATT JARZEMSKY
NEW YORK—U.S. stocks traded lower as a Friday report that employers added fewer jobs than expected last month cast doubt on the pace of the labor market’s recovery.
All 10 S&P 500 sectors retreated Monday, with financials tumbling the most. Bank of America BAC -3.09% and J.P. Morgan JPM -1.33% were among the biggest decliners among Dow components.
Nonfarm payrolls grew by 120,000 in March, the Labor Department reported. The result snapped a three-month streak of 200,000-plus job growth. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected, on average, an increase of 203,000.
Looking ahead, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is slated to speak at a conference in Georgia after the market closes. Investors are watching for signals about the prospects for more monetary stimulus efforts. Tuesday, Alcoa AA -0.36% is due to report first-quarter earnings. The aluminum maker’s report signals the unofficial start of the corporate earnings season.
Crude-oil futures slid 2.3% to $100.99 a barrel, while gold futures rose 0.7% to $1641.80 an ounce. The U.S. dollar lost ground against the yen but edged higher against the euro.
In corporate news, shares of AOL AOL +45.40% soared after the company said it agreed to sell more than 800 patents and related patent applications to Microsoft,MSFT -0.60% and grant Microsoft a license to its retained patents in exchange for $1.06 billion in cash. Microsoft shares slipped.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Credit Reform
However, the current system allows the three major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax) to play favorites with consumer data, ensuring that only themselves and a handful of companies can provide credit-related products and services to consumers. Sometimes, the bureaus simply price out the competition. Other times, they outright withhold data from companies perceived to be competitive threats.
For example, in 2009 Experian stopped making the most popular credit score — the FICO score — accessible to consumers. Why? Because in a credit bureau’s ideal world, there would be no competition in the credit scoring business. Withholding data from FICO and thereby preventing consumers from accessing the FICO score would help devalue its importance and make it easier to supplant with in-house alternatives. Consumers’ understanding of their finances was merely acceptable collateral damage in a quest to dominate the market.
What can be done? As I see it, there are essentially two routes forward from here — in addition to the status quo, of course, which I don’t consider an option.
One possible approach — advocated by Occupy Wall Street – essentially calls for greater transparency. This plan for credit reform is based on the belief that the entire process should be open, equitable, and easily understood. Instead of three separate credit scores, each person should have just one, it says, and everyone should know exactly how it’s calculated. Credit bureaus should also be barred from business practices that promote conflicts of interest and must make sure that their scores are not somehow biased against any consumer group.
All this sounds reasonable on the surface. And I believe OWS is on the right track in drawing attention to both our broken credit system and the troublesome conflicts of interest that dictate credit bureau business practices. Sure, if all banks used the same credit score, it would be exceedingly simple for consumers to determine a) their credit score (of course); b) whether they would get approved for financial products; and c) what interest rates they’d likely be offered.
But the group’s suggestions would lead to other problems. For one thing, such transparency would likely have the unintended consequence of killing inter-bank competition and stagnating innovation in the industry. That’s because underwriting sophistication — the ability to accurately gauge the risk associated with lending money to a potential customer and adjust rates accordingly — is the main differentiating factor between banks. Whoever can most accurately predict consumer risk generally makes the most money. Creating a single “objective” lending criteria would essentially end that competitive endeavor.
This would lead to a perverse secondary effect: The most financially responsible consumers wouldn’t be able to get the best deals. Why? Well, since no credit score is perfect at predicting the future, a portion of the people identified as highly responsible by any given scoring formula will inevitably default on their obligations. After all, there will always be some people who go bankrupt for unforeseen reasons. With no incentive for the industry to continually refine it’s lending criteria, however, the very best customers would have to be content getting terms capped by a glass ceiling designed to mitigate the risk of their compatriots.
The answer to this, of course, is to maintain the competitive nature of the underwriting business, but at the same time to eliminate the conflicts of interest and require that credit bureaus operate in a manner conducive to meeting the needs of consumers.
That’s easier said than done, you might say. But all the government would need to do is require credit bureaus to sell their data at a uniform price to any company that has customer consent to access it — rather than allow them to withhold it for business reasons and thereby hurt consumers. The companies that, in turn, created the best derivative credit scores would get the most business – both from consumers looking for additional insight into their finances and from banks looking to calculate risk – and we’d be in the midst of a race to the top, rather than a freefall toward the bottom.
Creating such a system would, of course, require some action from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But that’s what the CFPB was created for, right? Credit reform is indeed needed, and an approach focused on increased competition and the elimination of cronyism seems like the best course of action for bringing it about.
Odysseas Papadimitriou is a former senior director at Capital One and is the current CEO of the credit card comparison website Card Hub.
How do people feel about his proposed alternative solution?
Source: TIME
You Can’t Leave Occupy Wall Street by Max Bean
My last post was called “ Why I came to Occupy Wall Street and Why I Left,” and I caught a lot of grief from my readers for not giving them what the title promised: I explained why I came to OWS — that’s the easy part — but I didn’t really say why I left. It’s going to take a whole series of posts to properly explain why I stopped working on the movement, but I think it’ll help ease the suspense if I write a few words about what it even means to “leave” Occupy Wall Street. That verb, I’ll be the first to admit, was an inappropriate one.
My first month at OWS was characterized by a wild optimism, a hope unleashed. I lived in a state of constant excitement, running on so much adrenaline I would forget to eat and dropped ten pounds in two weeks. I was surrounded by dozens of others in the same state of mind. I remember one day in late October, crossing Broadway at Exchange Place, wolfing down some street food and barely tasting it, and some girl I’d never met crossing in the other direction said to me, “That’s how you know an Occupy Wall Street protestor: He’s trying to eat lunch while running through the street.” And it was true: We were all running around like maniacs, working our hearts out, because finally we’d found something worth working our hearts out for.
Like many in my generation, it seems, I had waited my whole life for a social movement whose dimensions and ambitions were commensurate with the shortcomings I saw in the world around me. By now, I am convinced that OWS is not that movement. Maybe it will grow into that movement, or maybe that movement will grow out of it. Then again, maybe that movement will never come. But this rise and fall of hope has left me and so many others not less hopeful, but more. It has been suggested that the excitement generated by Obama’s election and dashed by his presidency was re-channeled into the Occupy movement; and so many of us who have stepped back from the movement in recent weeks have departed only to search for a better movement — or else to build one. The shroud of despair, it seems, once torn, is not quickly mended.
Source: The Huffington Post
It’s a bit sad when I consider that one of the kindest things humanity could do for the earth and all the things existing on earth, would be to develop virtual reality to the point that humans no long need to act upon and harm the earth to achieve all of the freedoms, experiences and luxuries we so desperately seek. I picture the Matrix, but instead of the outerworld being dreadfully decayed and infested with mechanical design, it is green and flourishing with life.
Question is, how many resources would be required to devise of , build and power such a matrix? Think it could be possible and sustainable?
(via sushisaid)
Source: pleatedjeans
If we have a few rich and powerful men on the pinnacle of fortune and grandeur, while the crowd grovels in want and obscurity, it is because the former prize what they enjoy only in so far as others are destitute of it; and because without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the moment the people ceased to be wretched.
Source: anthony-john534
The 10-metre wide, helium-filled inflatable turbine, called the Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT), is able to produce more than twice the power that a conventional tower turbine can generate at the same height. Prototype by Altaeros Energies, a wind energy company formed out of MIT
This is a huge breakthrough for 2 reasons:
- The higher the altitude, the stronger the winds! As you get farther from the land the wind finds less resistance and goes at higher speeds which only means more power.
- This allows unprecedented mobility and flexibility to wind farms. You could practically chase the wind. Moreover, it would let you prevent major damage to your wind farm in case of hurricanes or severe storms. You would just have to ground your turbine-blimps and the next day you would be operating like nothing happened.
Pros and cons? What are people’s thoughts?
Source: wired.co.uk
