What Occupy could have looked like — if Hollywood organized it in 1933

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I am reading a delightful book about Fred and Adele Astaire, one that offers a little insight into a long-vanished world.  Along the way, the book mentions Eddie Cantor.  That reference reminded me of a song I always liked:  We Can Build A Little Home, from 1933′s Roman Scandals.  As was the case for all Eddie Cantor movies, it was a nice little bit of fluff, with silly songs, and pretty girls (including Lucille Ball, in her first film).  The premise is that Cantor is a sweet, naive young man who lives in a corrupt town, run by rich plutocrats.  The latter seek to evict the solid, working-class citizens, so as to profit from their properties.  Homeless, a whole neighborhood ends up camped out on the streets.

In other words, it’s a complete “Occupy” scenario.  But while Occupy quickly degenerated into a sleazy, disease-ridden, parasite-ridden, drunk-ridden, alcohol-ridden, violent street orgy, 1933 Hollywood envisioned a much sweeter way of protesting:

Occupy’s profoundly evil face revealed

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We knew Occupy was a turfed up protest.  We knew that Occupy quickly degenerated into drug-fueled, dangerous debauchery.  We knew that Occupy is ugly.  But I don’t think any of us realized in the beginning quite how ugly Occupy would prove to be.

It turns out that it’s so ugly that it supports child sex slavery.  That is not a typo.  It’s a fact.  As best as I can tell, the Occupy mindset is that law enforcement is inherently evil.  Law enforcement opposes child sex trafficking and slavery.  Therefore Occupy, as part of its “principled” stand against all law enforcement, supports child sex trafficking and slavery.

No matter how jaded one gets, it turns out that it’s impossible to anticipate the directions in which completely evil people will travel.

When it comes to playing politics, not all Marines are subject to the same rules

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Sgt. Gary Stein was discharged from the Marines because he created a web page critical of President Obama.  Despite the fact that I agree with Sgt. Stein’s political views, I think the Marines did the right thing. One of the things that makes our military great is the fact that it is a non-partisan institution.  Sure, we know that individual service members have political views — often strong ones — but the military presents itself as assiduously non-partisan.  Our American military, including the individual men and women serving within it, supports America as a whole, not specific parties within America.

To address the tension between serving ones country and losing ones First Amendment speech rights within that same country, the Department of Defense came up with a fairly decent compromise:  If you’re presenting yourself as a private citizen, you have full First Amendment rights.  When you are actually wearing that uniform, however, you represent the American military and your powers of speech, while presenting yourself to the public as a service man or woman, must be consistent with the military mission and therefore be non-partisan.

Not all Marines, however, seem to be subject to the same scrutiny as Sgt. Stein was.  The Mellow Jihadi has come across a group of Marines and other members of the Armed Forces who have actively embraced the Occupy philosophy, including creating a web page advancing the far Left occupy agenda.

The Mellow Jihadi, who takes seriously his responsibility to remain non-partisan, even as he shares with his readers interesting stuff from all over the world, asks in a polite and non-partisan way “Please tell me if this the way Marines (active-duty or not) should be treating their uniforms.”  As I understand it, the answers he’s received from people associated with Occupy Marines have, apparently, been non-responsive, unless you consider obscenities and threats adequate answers to the question.

The Department of Defense Directive regarding political activities while in uniform actually provides a pretty clear answer to the Mellow Jihadi’s question:

4.1.2. A member of the Armed Forces on active duty shall not:

[snip]

4.1.2.10. March or ride in a partisan political parade.

[snip]

4.1.2.15. Attend partisan political events as an official representative of the Armed Forces, except as a member of a joint Armed Forces color guard at the opening ceremonies of the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, or other political parties recognized by the Federal Elections Committee or as otherwise authorized by the Secretary concerned.

It is no defense to the conduct of the people in the Facebook page to say that OWS isn’t partisan but is, instead, a “people’s movement.” Because OWS has a clear political agenda, that in itself makes it partisan. In effect, by having clear, consistent policy goals, OWS has turned itself into a political party.  As for the fact that some of the people in the photos may be former or fake service members . . . well, the former group should be ashamed of itself and the latter group is committing a fraud on the public.  Neither group has anything to boast about.

My parting question:  Will these protesters, assuming they are still (and actually) active duty, be subject to the same sanctions that saw Sgt. Stein discharged (not very honorably) from the Marines?  Or in Obama’s America, is all political speech by men and women in uniform to be treated equally, except that some (that favorable to the Obama agenda) will be treated more equally than others?

I’d laugh at the self-parodying OWSers, but I do think they’re dangerous

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Zombie has a new post about Occupy’s latest stunt:  The movement’s geniuses, inspired by Earth Day,

[I]llegally took over an entire farm and transformed it into…a farm!

So proud are they of this revolutionary act that they showed off the farm to the media yesterday, so naturally I had to check it out.

Go here to enjoy Zombie’s photo essay.  Before you laugh too hard at these silly people, though, remember that they have the power to destabilize things.  The fact that they’re stupid, ill-informed, and venal is infinitely less important than whether they are successful at manipulating an alternately compliant and credulous media into making them seem like the cool, hip thing to do.

San Francisco OWS reveals its socialist, anti-American, antisemitic, anti-Israel core beliefs

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Zombie has another superb photo essay, this one about the OWS protest of Shimon Peres’ San Francisco visit.  If you haven’t already checked it out, please do.  My favorite part is the bit with the San Francisco motorcycle cop.  You go, guy!

Please remember when you read Zombie that Zombie is the new media.  Part of dis-empowering the anti-American, socialist, antisemitic, anti-Leftist old media is to support the new media.  By the way, it’s no coincidence that in describing our shiny, rich, famous old media, we use precisely the same adjectives that we use to describe the violent, aggressive OWSers on the street.  Different appearance and tactics, but same ideology and goals.

Comparing the Tea Party and the OWS movement, side by side

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When Obama came to San Francisco, two of my favorite photo-essayists attended the street protests, which marked the rare coming together (sort of) of Tea Partiers and OWSers, all of whom are discontented with Obama.

Here’s Zombie.

And here’s Fund47.

I’d add more but anything I say would be redundant, as their posts are vivid and comprehensive.

The Passover story writ large in the elites’ approach to the Tea Party and the OWS movement

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Over the years, I’ve written more than 10,000 posts.  (Yeah, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it.)  They do tend to run together in my mind, but there are a few standouts.  These are the posts in which I felt that I offered an insight or analysis that is genuinely helpful to considering a serious issue of the day.  One of my all-time favorite posts in this vein is Pharaoh, the Ten Plagues, and Iran.  In it, I tackled Mr. Bookworm’s complaint that Passover is a barbaric holiday, because it celebrates the massacre of the First Born Egyptians.  Certainly, the Pharaoh’s intransigence, despite the many plagues sent to bedevil his people (plagues that surely brought death in their wake) culminates with a mass die-off in Egypt.

The death of the innocent Egyptian first born is certainly tragic, but the Bible story, I said, has a much larger and more important point:

Sheltered in his lavish palace, Pharaoh might worry about a populace starving and frightened, but that was irrelevant as long as that same populace continued to fear and worship him.  The people’s suffering, ultimately, was irrelevant to his goals.  It was only when the price became too high — when Pharaoh’s power base was destroyed because his citizens were destroyed — that Pharaoh was convinced, even temporarily, to alter his evil ways.

From that point, I drew analogies to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and current day Iran.

Today, Duane Lester found proof that, when it comes to the current crop of Leftist elites, in government and in the media, the same thinking holds true:  they do not care if the people suffer; they only care if the elites suffer.

So next time you hear some Progressive speaker go on and on and on about “the people,” ask him which worries him more:  massive mob violence on the street aimed at bringing down the capitalist system, or a single conservative loon who might get too close to someone in D.C.

No, you weren’t imagining the strident class warfare in Obama’s SOTU speech.

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We tend to find what we’re looking for.  Since conservatives know that Obama comes from a socialist background, has advanced policies that are antithetical to capitalism, and has defeated opportunities and initiatives that are supportive of capitalism, we’re going to assume that, in any speech he gives, ordinary statements are actually code for a socialist agenda.  Having this predisposition (“to a hammer, everything is a nail”) can damage ones credibility.  Monomania is not normally associated with reliable analysis.

Except that, with regard to Obama’s recent State of the Union speech, I can tell you with a certain amount of assurance that all those conservatives who saw in it a strident call to class warfare, the end of an American system based upon equality of opportunity, and the destruction of the free market were probably right.  Or, if they weren’t right, they’ve met an equal, although completely opposite, monomania that manages to read the same message into Obama’s speech.

(Come on, Bookworm, spit it out!  What are you saying?)

What I’m saying is that the Occupy crowd is thrilled with Obama’s speech, which they see as a high level articulation of their beliefs and agenda:

Linking the dominant themes in Obama’s nationally televised address Tuesday to the mantras of the Occupy Wall Street movement would have been unthinkable five months ago. But in having its message echoed in the State of the Union address, the Occupy movement reached a milestone in changing the national conversation.

“Once you say the definition of my campaign is fairness, you don’t have to say anything else,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, an expert on social movements who directs UC Berkeley’s Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. “It is the central tenet” of the Occupy movement, he added.

[snip]

Obama never specifically mentioned Occupy – and probably won’t, analysts said, because the term remains politically divisive. For some, the dominant images of Occupy are of street activists confronting police and committing vandalism, as has occurred several times after Occupy demonstrations in Oakland.

“He won’t, because given half a chance, the Republicans would try to link him to everything that’s gone on with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations,” said James Miller, a professor of politics at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Still, analysts found Obama’s speech full of several Occupy-related themes: The president said he would not reward multinational corporations who “remove jobs from this country” and demanded “no bailouts, no handouts, no copouts.” Obama even outed himself as a member of the monied class when he said that “we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes.”

“Tax reform should follow the ‘Buffett rule,’ ” Obama said, referring to billionaire Warren Buffett, who has volunteered to pay more taxes. “If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

When Obama said Tuesday that “if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up,” Rosenthal said, “it’d be hard not to say that he was alluding to the Occupy movement.”

(Read the rest here.)

Apparently while Occupy the White House was a bust from the sidewalk point of view, it worked perfectly when it came to occupying the Oval Office.

 

Occupy’s cost

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Not only is the Occupy movement ugly, divisive and violent, it’s also expensive:

The news spotlight has moved elsewhere, but Oakland continues to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for the Occupy protests.

Every week for the past month, more than 100 cops, or roughly one-fifth of the city’s patrol force, are called in to work the Saturday night Occupy demonstration held downtown.

Estimated cost: about $50,000 a week.

City officials now estimate their overall Occupy tab is up to $3 million and counting – this at a time when up to 400 city workers will likely be laid off Feb. 1 for lack of money.

How low can you go? If you’re the Occupy movement, there is no bottom limit.

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Zombie has put up a short post explaining just how debased the Occupy movement really is.  Please disseminate Zombie’s post widely, as this is the type of story that might help otherwise disinterested Americans understand that the Occupiers are not a grass-roots movement made up of people who lost their jobs recently but are, instead, hard-core Leftists with a deep hatred for all things American, or even all things decent.

Madison Rising walks into the lion’s den and emerges triumphant

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I’ve blogged here before about Madison Rising, an almost-heavy metal rock group that several vets formed.  Despite its hard guitar licks, pulsing beat, and gravel voiced singing, the band’s orientation is definitely conservative.  It’s songs are pro-military, pro-American, pro-capitalism and anti-OWS.  It’s not necessarily my kind of music (I’m a bit old for it), but it’s definitely my kind of band.  (Kind of like Taylor Swift:  Her music doesn’t float my boat, but I really admire her because she is a classy gal in an often debased industry.)

I learned recently that I have a “one degree of separation” relationship with Madison Rising.  The band’s manager is Richard Mgrdechian.  Back in 2006, he wrote a very good book called How The Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order.  I have a copy of the book in my office, courtesy of Rich himself.  When he first published How The Left Was Won, Rich was still living in the Bay Area.  I met him for coffee (he’s a really nice guy), and he told me about the impetus for the book.  Rich gave me permission to post several interesting passages at my blog, which you can see here, here and here.

You can see where I might have a strong interest in Madison Rising, given that it’s a band I admire, managed by a man I like. Just the other day, the band added to the list one other reason for me to like it:  it walked into the lion’s den, performing at an OWS rally — to the great delight of the OWSers, who had no idea what the band was singing, but who knew they liked the music:

In a story you will NOT hear or read about in the mainstream media, it appears Madison Rising truly did “occupy” the Occupiers and those in attendance were completely oblivious to the fact that they were being entertained by a pro-American, pro-military, pro-capitalism (you get the picture) band. In fact, they absolutely loved the music; they were dancing to it, cheering them on, and even tweeting how “tight” this band was as they performed songs like American Dream, Honk if You Want Peace, Before the Hyphen Came, and Where Was The Media Then. Perhaps they were too stoned to pay any attention to the lyrics or could it be they are just that clueless? My guess is both!

You rock, guys, truly you do!

 

 

Race and protest movements *UPDATED*

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It’s not only conservatives who have noticed that the waning OWS movement was pretty much whiter than white.  Black activist preachers have noticed the same thing and are trying to mobilize their congregants to get out there to camp on sidewalks like homeless people along with the white drug-addicted, violent OWSers:

The Rev. Harold Mayberry stood before his First African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation Sunday morning in Oakland and outlined how it was time for members to connect with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Nationally, many African American leaders have acknowledged a disconnect between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the larger black community.

Mayberry is among nearly two dozen prominent African American Bay Area pastors trying to bridge that gap at the community level through a growing national effort that is ramping up today – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – called Occupy the Dream.

[snip]

“This is a great leap forward to involve local pastors,” said James Taylor, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Francisco and an expert in African American studies. “The general critique of Occupy is that it has lacked a specific agenda. But this could be a sign of maturity for the movement.”

In February, the pastors will ask their congregants to withdraw a small amount of money – at least $30 – from their bank accounts and deposit it in either a credit union or a minority-owned bank.

If that symbolic move doesn’t get the attention of “Wall Street banks,” as Mayberry described the nation’s largest financial institutions, then in March, Occupy the Dream will ask larger African American-dominated institutions, churches and black professionals to begin transferring greater amounts to credit unions.

“I ain’t got no problem with people becoming millionaires – I wouldn’t mind joining the club myself,” Mayberry told his congregation. “My problem is when you are so insensitive to people who have not been able to raise themselves up to the level where you are – and you snuff out their dreams.”

I just heard from a friend who lives in and functions in the welfare/drug community.  (I’m not kidding when I say that I have contacts in all walks of life.)  There’s a black market of food stamps there. My friend is dining on roast beef tonight because another friend traded his food stamps with him for weed.  All these people have a few things in common:  they’re white; they’re drug users (mostly post); they rely heavily on welfare programs because of their drug use, whether we’re talking about impairment from actively using drugs or from decades of past drug use; and they support the OWS movement.  They are explicit that they see OWS as a way to ensure a continued flow of welfare benefits.

Is this really the milieu to which black pastors want to sink their congregants?

UPDATE:  This video of Valerie Jarrett giving a rousing political speech at a historically black church (after which the church hosted a voter registration guide) seems apropos.  At least Michelle Obama limited her black voter drive speech to the BET awards, a venue that doesn’t get the tax benefits extended to a church.

Is there something missing from this story about the OWS attempt to shut down the Port of Oakland?

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As I was up early, I listened to KSFO’s Brian Sussman show.  A man called in, identified himself as someone who works at the Port of Oakland, and described with some amusement the eight or so luxury buses that pulled up, disgorging a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s, completely with mass-produced signs, who then set up trying to block the port.  He was pretty sure the bus company was Galactic, which is amusing, because this company offers “party” buses.  I wonder if the Galactic people knew what party they were hosting.

What’s peculiar is that I read the SF Chronicle’s account of this morning’s strike, and the Chronicle makes no mention of the buses, instead describing the protesters as walking to the site from BART:

Carrying signs saying “Shutdown Wall St. on the Waterfront” about 200 protesters marched the three blocks from the West Oakland BART Station to the port entrances before sunrise today.

Was the caller making it up?  Did the reporters not see the buses?  Did the reporters see the buses but ignore them, deliberately or because they failed to understand their import?  I don’t know.  I’m just asking questions here.

Adam Carolla gets it

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Okay, this is seriously NSFW, since Carolla is exceeded only by Jon Stewart when it comes to F-bombs (except without the little “beeps” that let people pretend Stewart isn’t really swearing).  If you can, though, ignore Carolla’s language and listen to it when you get the chance.  Adam Carolla applies — gasp! — logic to America’s economic situation and the OWSers.

Interestingly, he talks about envy, which has always existed.  What’s different, and what Carolla nails, is that in Obama’s “hope-filled” America, people couple envy with dependence.  Rather than using their envy to power their own engines, they use it to whine and beg.  That’s so not the American way.

Anyway, watch it and see what you think:

Dissin’ Liberty

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Bruce Bawer, American expat extraordinaire, posted an especially insightful post over this weekend, in which he notes that the peculiarly American assumption that all people want to be free just may be a tad naive.

He cites Jewish writer Tuvia Tenenbom’s (“I Sleep in Hitler’s Room”) observation, upon traversing the former East Germany, that most of the people Tenenbom encountered longed for the “good times” living under the East German dictatorship. In the Middle East, we see peoples offered the light of freedom only to turn further toward the darkness. As Bawer points out, we should know that not all people want to be free: after all, the masses that marched in support of the Nazis and Communists hardly marched for the cause of freedom. Read it all…Bawer makes excellent points in support of his thesis.

We, as a nation, have existed on the premise that all people (like our forefathers) want to be free. This (false?) premise has driven much of American foreign policy. It may also blind us to what is really going on in our own country with regard to the Liberal/Left, the Democrat party and the OWS movement.

I believe that I can understand the pull of serfdom for many people. Just think of all of the difficult life decisions that are taken away from the individual serf: as wards of the state, they don’t have to worry about where they will get their food (of course, they can forget about shopping at Whole Foods as well), whether they will meet their financial needs (albeit at a subsistence level), understanding politics, moral values, education, finding a job…etc. It is, in other words, regression to the mind of a child. They can simply exist for the moment of the day: no responsibilities but, also, no hope. Like vegetables, if you think about it.

So, what do you think? Is what is happening today a defining struggle between those of us that want to be free and those that seek a return to childhood? Is it as simple as this? Because, if it is, then we really are witnessing the final death struggle of the American Republic.

A pepper spray series

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From Zombie, who comments on the gaggle of giggling girls who gleefully relive their pepper spray experience,

and

From Castra Praetoria, who’s been pepper sprayed a few times himself (but all in the line of duty),

and also

From James Taranto, who notes that a lack of actual aggression doesn’t mean that the protesters weren’t engaging in the type of activity that calls for police crowd control of the physical variety.

Chicago redux *UPDATED*

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I can’t remember if I wrote it here, but I know that, in lunches with Don Quixote, I’ve discussed the parallels between the OWS protests and the Chicago convention in 1968.  Rather than gather my slightly fragmented thoughts, I’ll just pass the baton to Bruce Kesler, who ably discusses the issue.

UPDATE:  Charles Martel’s reminiscences about Chicago in 1968 were too good to hide in the comments section:

I was in Chicago during the 1968 convention. I was part of a Los Angeles-based group called Monitor Training School. We went around LA in 1967 and 68 training protest marchers how to avoid or resist violent confrontations with the cops and provocateurs like the Students for a Democratic Society.

(One of my betes noires was a USC student named Mike Klonsky, a rabid violence freak whose m.o. was to try to pry his way into a group of peace marchers and instigate an angry response from the police. Our tactic was to surround him and the four or five lapdogs that were always trailing him and seal them off from the rest of the marchers. If his name rings a bell, Klonsky is still rabid and is one of Bill Ayers’s closest friends.)

Anyway, I drove with two friends to Chicago to teach people what we’d been teaching in Los Angeles. We held daily sessions in Lincoln Park, on the city’s north shore, where we vied with some guy who was teaching people how to form a giant conga-like line where they supposedly would swish their way around the cops, all the while proclaiming “Wa-shoi! Wa-shoi!”

I digress: The comparison between the two events has one or two significant differences. While the scene in Lincoln Park had its share of derelicts and grungy hangers-on, drawn by the prospect of dope and the free nooky that Abbie Hoffman kept pimping, the majority of demonstrators were well-fed, well-educated college kids out to experiment with rebellion. If the rebellion failed—the election of Dick Nixon says that it did—there was always graduate school or Daddy’s bribe of a nepotistic office job once Junior or Missy came to their senses. The economy was not on the skids like it is now, and the higher education bubble was still a pipe dream.

Fast forward 43 years: The job prospects for the OWS people are pretty dismal, both because of the economy in general and the demonstrators’ own remarkable lack of higher-order thinking skills in particular. Yes, many of the Chicago ’68 kids were ditzes, but they still operated with far more cognitive functionality than their descendants.

In any case, almost everybody at the park had a place to sleep or stay while they were in Chicago. Some hopped the train to head up to Evanston or some other suburb, while others drifted back to nearby college dorms or crashed with friends and relatives. The Yippies tried to confront the cops over sleeping overnight in the park, but the Chicago cops were not like the weenies in present-day Oakland or Los Angeles. They were perfectly happy to apply billy clubs and drop tear gas canisters with abandon. The Yippies wisely quit contending the issue after one teary, bloody night.

If the Democrats decide to set loose the hounds of OWS on the GOP convention in Tampa, it will backfire even more royally than Chicago 1968. Some of the more cynical and manipulative leaders at Chicago (I remember sitting in an office somewhere in downtown Chicago with some of the best minds of the New Left, fascinated by intelligence that had been seduced by the pursuit and prospect of total power) knew that a reaction to the demonstrations very likely would result in Nixon winning the presidency. To their Marxist minds, however, that simply meant that the “contradictions would be heightened,” leading to oppression, leading to a revolt by the awakened masses.

Our current Marxists, who are far more febrile and syphilitic than their 1960s forebears, probably think that history is now finally on their side. No more need to heighten contradictions when you can go in for the kill. OWS-type clamors in Tampa will cause such a police overreaction and such an awakening that they will sweep Obama back into power. But what will really happen is the same thing that happened after Chicago: Voters, disgusted by what they see, will vote for a Republican.

Throw in one other consideration: In Chicago, I ran across two demonstrators who were armed. One was a crazy girl from Berkeley, named Gail, who packed a small pistol (we later persuaded her to leave it where she was sleeping and never carry it on the streets) and a black guy who was a street tough hanging around for dope and sex. These days, as the petulance escalates, there will more armed thugs among the demonstrators. Gangbangers, union members and anarchists all have access to good weapons and the motive to want to see pig blood flow. If/when that happens, they will create a firestorm that they cannot control.

#OWS: Making the journey from evil to feral

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When my son was very little, he always asked me, “Are lions bad?”  What he really meant to ask is “Are lions evil?”  I always explained to him that lions aren’t bad, because they don’t make moral decisions.  They are animals, acting according to instinct.  Evil means understanding right or wrong.

I’m beginning to think that, when people choose Leftism, they are making a moral decision that is evil.  However, once having sold their souls, they revert to a feral state that no longer bears any relationship to rational human behavior or morality.  That theory would explain the occupiers’ entirely voluntary decision to reside in a place like this:

As the weather turns, the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan, have been forced to confront a simple truth: packing themselves like sardines inside a public plaza, where cigarettes are shared and a good night’s sleep remains elusive, may not be conducive to good health.

[snip]

Dr. Philip M. Tierno Jr., the director of clinical microbiology and immunology at NYU Langone Medical Center, said the conditions could leave park-dwellers susceptible to respiratory viruses; norovirus, the so-called winter vomiting virus, which can lead to vomiting and diarrhea and which could quickly overwhelm the limited bathroom facilities in the area; and tuberculosis, which is more common in indigent populations and can be spread by coughing.

Even some camping in the park have grown concerned in recent weeks with the living quarters. Damp laundry and cardboard signs, left in the rain, have provided fertile ground for mold. Some protesters urinate in bottles, or occasionally a water-cooler jug, to avoid the lines at public restrooms. Food, from orange peels to scrambled eggs, is often discarded outside tents.

[snip]

Demonstrators do maintain a medical tent, filled mostly with over-the-counter medications and alternative treatments, like herbal remedies. Some have spotted shamans walking the premises, Mr. Carey said, though licensed doctors and nurses often take volunteer shifts in the tent as well. Some strap flashlights to their heads, like workers in a mine shaft, because the site becomes so dark at night. (The tent has no electricity.)

[snip]

Although condoms are often available on-site, Dr. Tierno said the protest’s evolution to private tents, from sleeping out in the open, had raised the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. The site’s pounding drum circles, he added, could lead to hearing damage. He compared conditions at Zuccotti Park to those in a hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca, in which whole groups of people have come down with respiratory infections in a short time — and those experienced by the flower children of the 1960s, when, he said, communal living situations created problems with sanitation and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

Yes, #OWS is antisemitic. Bill Whittle explains why. And I explain why there is no 99%.

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This is as pithy a summary as any I’ve seen about the antisemitism permeating Occupy Wall Street, and binding together the Left, the Islamists, and the White Supremacists:

(If the video isn’t showing up, watch here.)

By the way, why is no one commenting on the fact that the so-called 99% are not a monolithic block, but range from the 1% crazy guy eating food out of a garbage can, all the way up to the 98% gal who was raised in poverty, but worked her way up to splendid financial independence?

This whole 99% versus 1% thing is insanely stupid.  The American reality is that we don’t live in the Middle Ages, we don’t live in a totalitarian dictatorship such as North Korea or Cuba, we don’t live in pre-Revolutionary France, or in any other time or place where the vast majority of citizens are or were a monolithic block of nasty, brutish and short lives, rules over by a few vastly wealthy despots.

Yes, there are some vastly wealthy people in America, although the ones such as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are singularly disinterested in political power, instead just wanting toys (Ellison) or to save the lives of Third World children (Gates).  Mostly, America represents a rare economic continuum.  There is no 99%.  Instead, in America, we have the 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% . . . 50%, 51%, 52%, 53% . . . 87%, 88%, 89%, with the vast majority living in the middle of the percentage bell curve, a bell curve that has nothing to do with either Wall Street wealth or Zuccotti homelessness or even spoiled brat student loans.

Hat tip:  Ed Driscoll

Front page on the San Francisco Comical: Occupy Oakland destroying small businesses

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You and I have long known that the Occupy movement is destructive, not constructive.  The MSM, however, was very excited, largely because they too knew it was destructive.  Their problem was that they assumed it would destroy “Wall Street.”

By the way, there’s an amorphous concept if ever I heard one.  While many businesses have headquarters in New York, and the stock exchange is located there, and there is, of course, a street named “Wall Street,” the fact remains that American business isn’t magically confined to this one street.  American business is a dynamic enterprise with ownership and control spread through America and even the world.  The Progressive focus on “Wall Street,” as if it’s spring 1929 all over again, is just more evidence, if we need it, that the Progressive movement is hopelessly locked in the past.

But back to the businesses that the Occupy movement is successfully destroying.  It must be serious if the San Francisco Chronicle, cheerleader to all Leftists, writes a front page story about the way in which Occupy is destroying, not evil “Wall Street” people, but little Mom and Pop businesses instead:

Kevin Best and Misty Rasche remember when they had waiting lists for a Friday reservation at their bistro in the historic Old Oakland business district.

That was in 2007, before the recession hit and a series of angry protests that would come to define downtown Oakland.

Most recently, business at their B Restaurant & Bar has been harmed further since Occupy Oakland tents went up at City Hall on Oct. 10. Best and Rasche worry that the collateral damage from the protest may be the final blow for their restaurant.

“If we go two more months like this,” Best said, “it’s a wrap.”

[snip]

The damage done by a small element of Occupy Oakland could have long-lasting effects on a downtown already struggling to overcome a bad reputation for business.

“Many, many Oakland residents … feel that this is disrupting every effort this city has made to have economic development,” said Councilwoman Pat Kernighan. “This has set us back 15 years.”

In the week before Wednesday’s general strike, three businesses pulled out of downtown lease negotiations, including one with 100 employees and another needing 35,000 square feet of space, said Joe Haraburda, president and CEO of Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

At the same time, the tents and civil unrest have pushed some restaurant receipts down 50 to 60 percent, he said.

Read the rest here.  I have nothing to add.

Wondering when Occupy will wear out its welcome

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I’m noticing signs of “Occupy” ennui.  Even those who were enthusiastic about the movement at first seem to be getting bored.  On the “real me” facebook, there’s been (at a guess) a 75% drop-off in posts from limousine liberals applauding the 1%.

Was it the endless, self-serving demands that the government write off student loans, meaning that the yuppified liberals I know would bear the burden?  Was it the escalating number of rapes?  Was it the rampant drug use?  The feces and vomit?  The crazy people?  The riots?  The hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of dollars in law enforcement overtime, all of which the limousine liberals will ultimately fund?  The formerly supportive local businesses that have been trashed or simply destroyed economically?  The short attention span that characterizes the American people?  I don’t know the reason, but I’m getting the feeling that Occupy is wearing out its welcome.

I’ll certainly be sorry to see Occupy go.  I love the way Occupy exposes people to the core selfishness of the Left.  It’s the Left that has, for years — nay, decades — characterized conservatives as greedy, selfish, racist, violent, etc.  The implication, of course, is that Leftists are the poster children of altruism, selflessness, brotherhood and peace.  It’s been truly inspiring to see the demands for a free ride, the segregation at Occupy encampments, the riots, and so forth.  Few things are more pleasant than seeing a Fifth Column unmasked.

I’m also enjoying what I perceive as the ripple effect.  For example, CrossFit OneWorld is a fitness blog.  Its readership doesn’t go there for politics, it goes there to learn how to maximize strength, stamina and overall fitness.  (All of which are very good things.)  Three days ago, though, the readership got an insight into the glories of Occupy Oakland, because one of the regular bloggers got the opportunity to play backup to Oakland law enforcement as it confronted the product-toting young’uns protesting violently against commercialism.  By way of apologizing for missing out on an exercise update, this same blogger explained to his presumably apolitical readers precisely what kind of foolishness prevented him from getting on with his life.  It’s this kind of trickle-down information, from ordinary people inconvenienced by or exposed to Occupy, that’s going to make disinterested Americans aware of the real ugliness behind the Occupy movement.

One more thing, which is a kind of Darwinian one that makes me look like a nihilistic b***h, but I’ll say it anyway:  I don’t feel compassion for these young people.  Yes, they are certainly misguided and it’s our obeisance to Leftist culture over the past 40 years that has created all these little Frankstein’s monsters.  But knowing that there are root causes, or even feeling somewhat responsible for the root causes, doesn’t mean that we can allow the fruit of the poisonous tree to lie on the ground, spreading the rot ever further.

If you ever watch WWII documentaries, what you’ll see is that, by the end of the war, whether on the Western or Eastern fronts, the Germans were throwing 16 and 17 year old boys into the front lines.  Had today’s Leftists been in charge of the War back then, they would have called an immediate ceasefire, since these youthful products of more than a decade of Nazi indoctrination knew not what they did.  Of course, had that happened, those youthful Nazi enthusiasts would have claimed victory, and gone on their merry way, enslaving and slaughtering ever larger numbers of innocents.  The tragic fact is that, when a culture becomes completely corrupted, there is no more room for compassion.  Compassion is for the time after victory.  You cannot let it prevent you from achieving victory.

Preparing for another cold day at the pool Open Thread

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By the time I returned from the pool yesterday, I was too tired and cold even to turn on my computer, let alone write anything.  I’m leaving in a couple of minutes for another cold day — although, having learned my lesson, I’ve doubled my supplies.  I should be more comfortable today, even though it’s due to be colder (and wetter).  This time, as part of my Open Thread, I’ve got a perfect Mark Steyn paragraph, one that explains that the way in which various cities (and corporations) have fallen in line with the Occupy movement isn’t just because they’re craven, but because, at bottom, they have the same goals as those street protesters:

I don’t “stand with the 99%,” and certainly not downwind of them. But I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class. It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot.

Yeah, what he said!

More later, assuming my fingers aren’t too frozen to type.