Henry? He's busy I guess.

Apparently, you and Momo both have difficulty connecting two things which, though different, have similarities.  I know, full well, neither you, nor Momo, work for me.  However, the approach to problem solving may be shared between small problems and problems on a national scale.  Identifying a problem, and arriving at a workable solution, can apply to things as small as, "Hey, there's a friggin' fly in my peanut butter sammich" (problem), to, "That damned Hitler just invaded Poland"  (problem).  "Pull it out" (solution), "Let's kick his ass" (solution).  Both workable.  There does not even have to be a remote similarity to compare two things.  I once read a quote where someone compared quantum physics to visiting isolated tropical islands.  The similarity was...  You alter a photon by observing it.  It changes from a wavy particle, to either a wave or a particle, simply because you observe it.  And the tourists that flock to a tropicla island, just to observe the beauty, change the very nature of the tropical paradise.  It takes a broadened mind to be able to connect unrelated items sometimes.  Perhaps you and Momo can work on it a bit.

Y'all have fun for the next few days.  Off with the wife, to the Ozarks, for another mini-vacation.

Jay,

Thanks for the concern posted yesterday. I understand that from your perspective (and perception) this all looks dubious. That's fine. I will not be getting my ass kick by any of you lot any time soon though, that's simply wishful thinking on your part.

Douglas Rushkoff has a response to the line of thinking displayed in here, we'll call it mainstream maybe, as you have suggested. I share his opinion that not understanding the obvious and legitimate grievances of this movement is foolish. I'll let his article stand as a reply to your "don't bother" message and hope it explains my opinions somewhat. I mean, I'm not going down there to occupy anything, but that doesn't mean I don't see a need and a purpose behind it all.

Here's the guts of it I suppose:

 

Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem.

Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street's many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud.

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking's defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

Heh, ass kicked... not even on the Libya thread bud. You bringing some one in to relief pitch? Things are looking really good on that front BTW. I like the quality of the interim government spokespeople responses so far. I'm collecting a few for later ;-)

Hey Brendan. Thanks for the elephant ass posts. Very drunk right now (holidays party) but am trying very hard to post coherently before bedwise. First, why no love on made-up answer from you and mono? thot that kicked ass,

As to elephant ass posts, OF COURSE you think that would rile me )or any other conservative). This is because you and your ilk and the occupier douches and momo and ALL of your specious generation and those that follow have been taught that cleaning up someone else's shit is beneath you.

Been a father, Alan? I know momo is a mom -- she has lectured us so. What I don't understand is how you all have never learned that EVERYONE has to clean up someone else's shit at some point. The high point, of course, is cleaning up your child's. The low point, I can tell you, is cleaning up your friend's. Your best man, as he lay dying of cancer. Another high -- cleaning up my dad's, right now, at age 86. He lives with me and my wife and daughters.

Think the OWS occupiers have anything to teach me or my contemporaries about hardship? I love Alan for the work he does, without need or concern for consepation. Mike, I know from his posts, is all about service. I doubt he pulls in $100K a year, and I bet he's among the happiest among us. I love and admire all the servicemen and women I know and have served with -- not because they're canny investors, but because I know if I was in the shit with them, they'd have my back.

I WAS in the shit. Got a crater in my right ass cheek to prove it -- not because I was running, but because Charles happened to have my ass covered on two sides, even though I was in enfilade, on a particular day in 1969. I do not give a shit that you don't know what that means. I know what it means.

As far as the elephant ass job -- trust me, I wish some of the jobs I jave had to do were as easy. I lost buddies who were not doing the easy-as-shit, cushy elephant ass job. Given the choice, from 1964-1966, I would have chosen the elephant ass job. But since no one offered it to me, I chose the same old job again, until 1969. That's when half my ass was blown off.

Please trust me when i say these OWS folks are pusses. I saw exactly ONE servicemen in all the coverage of OWS rallies. What does that tell us>? I guarantee that every fuckin Marine on the line right now wants to go home (hoo-rah!) Mike will say the same of every foot soldier. Those guys don't WANT to be where they are, but they understand the need. OWS fags have no concept of hardship want, deprivation, harsh conditions. A BUNCH OF PUSSIES.

So. When you can explain what actual PROGRESS that are making, please let me know. You have parroted their stated goals. Theoir goals don't mean shit. When the civil rights marchers stated THEIR goals, they got their heads caved in, they were lynched, had dogs sicced on them, were firehosed and beaten. But you know what? They got the fuckin job done and more power TO EM! OWS are a bunch of crybabies, wannabe liberal jerkoff losers. Argue that they're not -- I dare you

Henry,

Whooooa-kay, buddy.  And you tell me that I prattle on with "amusing insanity"?  What the hell were you drinking tonight?: Absinthe with an anti-freeze chaser?

I want to thank you for all that you have done for our country.  Thank you for getting your butt shot off, and for all those times that you stuck your head up an elephant's ass defending the Constitution.  Now please go and get some sleep.  I suggest black coffee and Mexican food first thing in the morning.

The Occupy movement is changing tactics to keep up the pressure. They are, apparently, going to directly challenge bank fore closings across the country, called the "Occupy our Homes" project. I saw this on Rachel Maddow yesterday.

Banks are expected to repossess some 800,000 homes this year, down from more than 1 million last year, said RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio. But the number of U.S. homes that received a first-time default notice during the July to September quarter increased 14 percent compared to the second quarter of the year, according to the firm.

So the tactics are changing, mirroring the depression era Hooverville and skirmishes over evictions that led to the strong regulation of banks. This has all happened before, if you don't heed history, you are doomed to repeat it I suppose.

What if OWS threw a strike, and no one came?

As the Washington Post reports:

Occupy Oakland plans West Coast port shutdown, but port workers don’t support it

By Elizabeth Flock

A month after Occupy Oakland protesters angered port workers by shutting down the city port during a city-wide strike, protesters are calling for a larger West Coast port shutdown Dec. 12.

“We present this call to you because we believe it is time the occupation movement begins to work together to carry through coordinated, pinpointed actions. ... We will blockade all of the West Coast Ports on December 12th in solidarity with longshoremen, port workers and truckers in their struggle against the 1 percent!” the official West Coast Port Shutdown site read.

But port workers and operators say they are not in support of the shutdown, which is planned for ports in San Diego, L.A., Oakland, Portland, Vancouver, Tacoma and Seattle.

The Port of Oakland has already sent an open letter to the community to ask that the shutdown be prevented. In the full-page ad, which ran Sunday in the Oakland Tribune, the Board of Port Commissioners calls the shutdown a “bad idea.”

“Another shutdown will only make things worse – diverting cargo, tax revenue, and jobs to other communities,” the letter read. “It will hurt working people and harm our community.”

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents workers at the Port of Portland and has supported the Occupy movement in the past, says it will not support a “third-party strike like the one planned for Dec. 12.

Lol. Little bit sad, isn't it? This movement to support the masses is being told by the masses to bugger off. Just goes to show the real disconnect between these pampered know-nothings and real working people.

Local aside: Today was the 2nd day an occupier tried to bum change off me. And I use that word advisedly. I told him what I told the last one: "But if I give you money, that means you might be able to stay that much longer. No thanks." The first guy told me to go fuck myself. This guy just laughed and said, "No problem gramps -- it still beats working." I kid you not.

Henry & Mike, think positive.

Repugnicans won't get near the white house for A LONG TIME. Because being corrupt, hypocritical and unelectable 1%ers is not where it's at.

Mitt Romney, the only "reasonable choice" has recanted everything reasonable he has ever said to satisfy the ignorant Tea Party true believers.

“I am personally of the belief that money plays a much more important role in what is done in Washington than we believe,” Romney says in the clip. “I personally believe that when campaigns spend the kind of money they are now spending [...] I think that’s wrong.”

“To get that kind of money you’ve got to cozy up to all of the special interest groups, who can go out and raise money for you from their members,” he continues. “And that kind of relationship has an influence on the way you’re going to vote. These kind of associations between money and politics in my view are wrong.”

Mitt

His views at the time were similar to the present-day “Occupy Wall Street” movement — a movement he has described as “dangerous.”

With the clearing of New York's Zuccotti Park, the movement's birthplace, cities are finally taking back their citizens' public spaces. The true 99 percent is finally speaking up

Henry, you premature ejaculator, don't you think a recant of that driveling statement is now due? When can we definitively say you were "off the mark" on the death throws of OWS? What do you need? Two years? Three?

I'll avoid mocking your rant, as I've had my moments as well, but I will hold you to account on the "nothing to see here" baloney. You started it after all, for what reason, who can say, GRAMPS.

As an aside though... if your daughters are living with you, would that not make them lazy and coddled? Just checking.

Republicans... it's a hard life I guess. Being swallowed by the elephantine assitude can't be easy.

Brendan,

Okay.  I guess maybe I was going a bit too fast for you.  Let me try to slow it down a bit.  The reason I mentioned my approach to problem solving in the workforce was because, it seems to me, I believe it is a logical, simple way to tackle problems.  There are two simple steps.  1.  Identify the specific problem.  2.  Propose a reasonable, workable solution.

My original questioning of the OWS "movemnent" involved step 1.  I could find nothing in the statements of protestors which came across as anything but one notch above lunatic rants.  You provided a long list of statements which you say represents the concerns of at least one group of OWS supporters.  I already touched on the farm animal/farm size concern.  Here are a couple of other listed concerns:

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

Okay.  They identified what they believe to be a  problem.  However, they did not identify the specific problem.  Is the problem that students had to borrow money because tuition is too high?  Or is it that, as they say, education is a "human right" and should be paid entirely by the taxpayers?  If it is a "human right", to what level?  AS, BS, MS, PhD?  State schools, or all schools?  I mean, I'm sure there are a few people who would love to go to the Harvard Law School, or get a Medical degree from Vanderbilt, if someone else picked up the tab.  Heck, when I retire in a few years, I might want to go back and get a PhD in Wildlife so I could teach a few college classes, just to stay busy.  The University of Hawaii might rank high on the list of free universities.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

Okay.  So drug companies patent a drug, giving them exclusive rights to sell the drug for 14 years, (or 17 years, I forget) instead of giving the patent rights away, allowing every company on the planet to produce a cheap generic.  I know a little bit about this, since my father has over 250 patents, a lot of them for surgical tools.  And, he's told me how horrendously expensive it is to do the testing for approval.  I'll give you a specific example:  I went to visit my father a few years back, and in his garage, he had a big plastic bag/tube, attached to a base at both ends, with an air compressor attached to the bag.  I asked what the heck it was for, and he said, "This is pretty cool.  Look, one doctor stands in this side of the bag, one stands in the other side, then wheel a patient up to the bag and glue the bag to him and turn on the compressor.  That way, they doctors are in high pressure air, and when they cut into the patient, through the bag, to do surgery, the high pressure air prevents bleeding."  He told me one of the worst parts of surgery, especially liver surgery, is the massive amounts of bleeding.  He said, during one of the trials, they did liver surgery on a pig.  They cut into the pig's liver with the comperssor off, and blood started pouring out of the liver.  But when they turned the compressor on, the blood ran back into the pig.  A couple years later, I asked him whether they ever did anything with his invention.  He said they had done several experimental surgeries, and other testing, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to test it in hospital settings, but they still had not recieved the approval.  And the decision had been made to abandon the project.  I give you all this to point out a couple things.  1.  Getting approval is expensive.  2.  A lot of stuff is tested, at a high cost, without ever getting approved.  3.  Some person/company has to think it is worthwhile to invest a lot of money to attempt getting approval.  4.  They invest because they expect a new product to pay back the investment and generate a profit.  5.  If there is no expectation of profit, why would anyone do the research, or invest in the testing in the first place?  (They wouldn't.  Ding, ding, ding!!!  Right answer.)  So, a patent gives a company a couple of years to recoup their investments, before any company can take their ideas and profit from it.  (My father never could understand why a copyright lasts forever, but a patents only lasts 17 years.  Why do Shakespeare's words belong to him forever, but my father's original ideas only belong to him for just over a dozen years? )

Okay.  I got off track a bit.  So, originally, I asked what OWS stood for, because I could make not sense of the scattered, random ramblings of the protestors.  And I asked you for some specifics.  And I also explained how I handle situations in the workplace when problems come up.  You provided me with a list of concerns.

1.  The list of concerns still seems scattered, non-specific, and lunatic fringe.

2.  There is not a single proposal for a solution to any of the problems listed.

Therefore, this is noting but bitching and moaning.  Without a solution, you're just complaining.

You want a good document as a blueprint?  Take the Declaration of Independence.  It starts off with a long list of complaints against the King.  But then it proposes a solution (we no longer accept the King, and we're gonna kick his ass out.)

Until OWS gets a reasonable message, with reasonable, specific complaints, and proposes reasonable, specific solutions, they're still just a bunch of nouveau hippies, shitting in the park.

Now...  To lighten the discussion slightly....  A couple photos from the recently passed mini-vacation:

Okay Alan, tuition fees. An abomination. All education must be free of cost onto the level someone can achieve (that is, depending on one’s brain, not on anything else). All schools.

I don’t see why anyone could have a problem with that. If you have say why (without using the words “hippie” or “lunatic”—they don’t leave the impression that you want to debate).

Medicine: you advocate to kill humans by denying them the right to medicine here, because you find this is the best possibility to pay the work of developing medical innovations. I suggest to find other ways to pay this work.

Nice pictures. You seem to have had luck with the weather, too.

By the way, Alan: if you want to lighten the tone, don’t demand again that I find it funny whenever the shitty arseholes here call me a genocidal mass-murderer, will you?

Okay, Momo.  Public schools, or private schools?  Or both?  I mean, if I am capable of achieving a medical degree at Vanderbilt, one of the most prestigeous private schools in the nation, does Vanderbilt have to accept me, and does the taxpayer have to fund my education at a private school?

Medicine:  You advocate killing a hell of a lot more people than I do.  Removing any incentive for developing new drugs can only lead to one outcome.  No more new development.  I suggest proffit is the only reasonable way to attract investors.

The weather:  Actually, I came back a day too early.  I wanted to get some pictures of snow.  It snowed the day after we got back.

I don’t know what you want private schools or universities for anyway. It is a society as a whole that profits by having as many people as possible with a good education, and it’s society as a whole that’s got to pay for it.

“I suggest proffit is the only reasonable way to attract investors”

Bullshit, Alan. Firstly, it is not true that profit is an exclusive incentive. It is especially untrue for medical innovations—think of Jonas Salk. Secondly, I don’t say the work mustn’t be paid, so where is the problem?

You should have taken a few days off to enjoy the snow, perhaps. Why don’t you?

Solutions for Alan:

RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, any official position of the City of Los Angeles with respect to legislation, rules, regulations or policies proposed to or pending before a local, state or federal governmental body or agency must have first been adopted in the form of a Resolution by the City Council with the concurrence of the Mayor; and

WHEREAS, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission rolled back legal restrictions on corporate spending in the electoral process, allowing unlimited corporate spending to influence elections, candidate selection, and policy decisions, thereby threatening the voices of “We the People” and the very foundation of our democracy; and

WHEREAS, corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution, and The People have never granted constitutional rights to corporations, nor have We decreed that Corporations have authority that exceeds the authority of “We The People”

WHEREAS, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in a 1938 opinion stated, “I do not believe the word ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations”; and

WHEREAS, money affects the quality and quantity of speech and is NOT, in itself, speech; and allowing corporations with great wealth to use it as speech effectively drowns out the protected free speech of the People in our diverse society;

WHEREAS, the Citizens decision supersedes state and local efforts to regulate corporate activity in their elections;

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, with the concurrence of the Mayor, that by the adoption of this Motion, the City of Los Angeles hereby includes in its 20 I 1-20 12 Federal and State Legislative Programs SUPPORT for a Constitutional Amendment and other legislative actions ensuring that only human beings, not corporations, are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not speech, and therefore the expenditure of corporate money to influence the electoral process is no longer a form of constitutionally protected speech.”

Item posted from this source.

The ONE demand. (Best TV rant ever)