Yet another brave police action against a man with a knife

Sorry but I have to disagree.

I am out tabling every other day or so on a non-partisan issue.

And Locally, people are fed up.

More and more people are saying "I no longer vote."

At first I thought maybe I was just out on a day when so many other disgruntled folks were out and about.

But then, getting bored, I started asking people why they won't vote any more.

And I keep hearing: 'Well, once I was told that voting for the Lesser Evil is required,' I couldn't deal with it any more. Lesser Evil is still evil."

Obama got the nation's Highest Office back in 2008 because his handlers had him chirping out the progressive speaking points of Dennis Kucincih. That had appeal for a lot of people.

Hells, Bells, my RW tea bagging neighbor voted for Obama. (A stat every Democratic voter, and especially Dem Leadership should understand - American public is right now 32 to 34% for the "D" party, 22 to 26% for the "R" Party and the rest of us are simply looking for someone, anyone who will quit the insane wars, quit the insane War Against Some Drugs, return the jobs to the USA, etc.. That last group now has more people than either "Major" Party!)

But then by mid-December 2008, before his even being inaugurated, it was announced his choice for Treasury was RICO-candidate Tim Geithner, and it became immediately obvious that his puppet strings extended to the Big Financial People. And Big Military etc.

Stop for a wondrous moment of joy - flash mob in Hong Kong

If you wanna enjoy a bit of Chicago street art -

Seems some savvy (and funny) social critics are taking to leaving their cartoons plastered in the street, and on the walls and lampposts of the Second City.

Great photos of what is going on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jaime-rojo-steven-harrington/a-chicago-humorist-named-_b_4989768.html

Progressive Zine 'In These Times' Discusses CNN's "ChicagoLand"

In These Times disses CNN's "ChicagoLand"
From the article:
The team behind "Chicagoland" (including producers Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin) clearly understand the beauty, diversity and vibrancy of Chicago neighborhoods, including low-income minority and immigrant neighborhoods like Roseland, Little Village and Albany Park. They offer lovely and energetic scenes showing the rich culture, complex identities and physical attractions of these areas, including murals, marching bands, youth plays and street food. And they do feature some inspiring local leaders—but rarely those who resist Emanuel or his policies. Criticism of Emanuel is largely offered in quick sound bites, while those who are profiled as full characters are politically neutral and therefore “safe” for Emanuel and his backers.

In its first episode, Chicagoland spotlights Asean Johnson, the precocious pint-size Chicago public schools student who has become a mascot of sorts for the Chicago Teachers Union—his mom is a member—in its battle with Emanuel. Aside from Asean and his mother, however, Chicagoland doesn’t spend time on other parents and teachers who vehemently reject the way Emanuel and his handpicked school board are remaking the Chicago educational system with privately run non-union charters. It doesn’t fairly feature strong African Americans who are critical of the mayor, despite the historic and crucial role of Black leaders in Chicago and the fact that Emanuel’s popularity among Black residents has plummeted. Though Chicagoland gives screentime to teachers union president Karen Lewis, by highlighting her more incendiary remarks and using some poor quality video, it portrays her somewhat more as a caricature than a thoughtful and popular leader.By contrast, Chicagoland allows Emanuel ample screen time to joke around with Black school kids and highlights his mentorship of a young African-American man. And it allows him to repeat his favorite trope about kids who look longingly at downtown from afar but never go there. Emanuel talks of plucking kids from poverty and bringing them into the shiny new Chicago, full of digital startups, bike lanes and hip restaurants.

The mayor may well be sincere in this mission, symbolized in Chicagoland by poor high school students’ visit to the exclusive downtown eatery Alinea, where chef Grant Achatz earnestly invites them to drop by any time. But that doesn’t excuse the way the mayor has disrespected, ignored and actually attacked vaunted institutions and bases of power in marginalized Black and Latino neighborhoods, including laying off the parents of the kids he claims he is trying to save. After all, we never hear about Emanuel’s widely known nickname, Mayor One Percent, in Chicagoland, though we do hear him making a pointedly defensive reference to serving “the 100 percent.”

More at abve link.

About the writer:

Kari Lydersen

Kari Lydersen, an In These Times contributing editor, is a Chicago-based journalist and instructor who currently works at Northwestern University.

The Grand Old USA - One Poor Sad, Sold Out Nation

For the last week, I have been busy "tabling" for a local political matter. It is not a partisan issue, so I don't have to worry that much about any labels I might normally use when tabling.

When talking to people about my issue, I try to avoid the issue of who should be chosen as the Sheriff of the county, as that is one contentious issue. On Saturday, I thought two middle aged women might be having an actual cat fight right in front of my table, while they hissed and spat epithets over the rather pathetic bios of both men now in the running for that office. It was a relief when their spat ended.

But one thing startling to me is the number of people who don't vote. So far, not one of the many Latinos that I have queried has answered in the affirmative when asked about voting. If Democrats think this base will help them, they might stop and consider the fact that many households probably won't have a voter in them until the kids reach voting age.

Also many other people smile and say, "I don't vote." They offer this fact with an air of "I have other important things to do."

But it is the third group that I find so worrisome. "Vote! Yeah right! Like voting for a lesser evil is not still evil!"

Or "Vote. Yeah right." Sardonic grin, look of sympathy flashed at me. "We get as our choice only the few names from a list of people who are willing to do as their Corporate Owners and Masters tell them."

Anyway, The One Big Money Party has succeeded. Many Americans no longer see our elections as being elections, but simply propaganda devices that still ensure the few remaining non-thinkers can content themselves with the idea that we are a democracy.

Whether The Democrat Leadership or The Republican Leadership will be the victors in the declaring the spoils of this dead and dying nation, I really don't know. It has taken decades to bring us to this, but it is where we are now, and the situation creates a darkness in my soul which I can no longer dissolve.

When I select a huge folder for my anti virus program to scan,

What is it scanning?

The virus program tells me it has scanned files but not processes. Does that mean executable programs are not scanned?

I notice that Real Player is running all the time, even though I don't use it often. Why?

And being leery of Real Payer, I have asked the virus scanning system to scan the folder it is in, but I guess it isn't scanning Real Player?

Onn edit: I looked through one of the scan logs and realized it is RealPlayer Download - ad now that makes some sense as the Download program might legitimately need to be on most of the time I am on the internet.

NSA likes Cookies as much as Cookie Monster -

If you run a computer that is hooked into the internet, then the NSA may be interested in you, especially if any cookies of your Tweets, FB posts etc have triggered such interest on their part:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/

From the article:
Blaze, the University of Pennsylvania surveillance expert, says the potential use of man-in-the-middle attacks on such a scale “seems very disturbing.” Such an approach would involve indiscriminately monitoring entire networks as opposed to targeting individual suspects.

“The thing that raises a red flag for me is the reference to ‘network choke points,’” he says. “That’s the last place that we should be allowing intelligence agencies to compromise the infrastructure – because that is by definition a mass surveillance technique.”

To deploy some of its malware implants, the NSA exploits security vulnerabilities in commonly used Internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The agency’s hackers also exploit security weaknesses in network routers and in popular software plugins such as Flash and Java to deliver malicious code onto targeted machines.

World's premier science journal posts article abt dangers of modern day chemicals

With mercury still in vaccines, including the flu vaccine, and with so many other toxins surrounding us in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil our crops are grown in, this troubling report comes to us from The Lancet:

http://download.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laneur/PIIS1474442213702783.pdf?id=baak8dkBlaiXPhJTjuTsu

From the article's summary paragraph:

330
www.thelancet.com/neurology
Vol 13 March 2014
Review
Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity
Written by Philippe Grandjean, Philip J Landrigan

Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency.

Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane,
tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy.

Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity.
####

And you are discussing simply the physical reality of what happened in this instance and when.

The larger "gestalt" of the situation is this one:

Here is a Senator who has declared publicly that it is perfectly noble and good for the NSA and its illegal operations to have the "go ahead" to spy on ALL Americans, but now she is protesting when such crimes are committed by the CIA against her and her staff.

Your computer or my computer is mere fodder for the illegal meta data gathering done by the NSA that Feinstein professes to support. But her computer and that of the staff is not fodder for any alphabet agency to investigate.

So is her outrage real? Or is it a totally contrived event to make the public think that here is a dedicated civil servant who loves us having out freedoms?

Or is it some combination of the above?

I'd be willing to judge her outrage as being real when she starts harping on the many deplorable and illegal techniques utilized by the alphabet agency personnel. One example: how the FBI's officers entrap the mentally ill into the purchase, under their specific direction, of items that can be used for detonation, and then that personnel outs their victim and declares they have saved us all from yet another terrorist attack.