Land Fillharmonic

Becoming What You Hate, Green Party Threatens Romney Swing Vote

The Romney campaign has been counting on capturing the swing voters in the swing states, conservative stump slamming early in the campaign and tweaking the rhetoric to a final faux liberalized approach later in the rounds to draw in those on the fence.

But the fence sitters won't have it. They have decided to vote Green. Polls show that a majority of people believe in global warming and that something needs done. They have realized and believe that the climate is important, that unfettered saber rattling and the push for more fossil fuel use is not the future they want.

The main stream media wants us to take the middle of the road approach, as always and the middle is always further right than the constituency aplomb.  

Are we dependent on the mainstream media? No, though we are victimized by the adulterated commercialism, exploitation of ignorance and purveyance thereof.

Alternate means of self-determination are running from the "box" and achieving goals by creativity and self learned talent.  The education, security, military and corporate complex of hand me down economics can only drive labor overboard with endless demands on the financial non-existence of the middle and lower classes.

Green canvassers this year are finding a greater interest in the Green Party.

Taxes and the shared burden are not exemplified by those who push the free market anarchy that has recently killed the economy and burdened the impoverished with greater responsibilities in supporting the rich lifestyle infrastructure.

Romney is going the way of the old guard in Russia, perhaps he should run from himself. He has become what he hates?

August 1774 MA Farmers Rejected financial domination

from http://www.prodsyse.com/conflict/Nonviolence&AmericanRevolution.pdf page 13

"2. Advances for Freedom and Democracy Associated with the American Revolution, 1765-1800

“The American Revolution”, according to Keyssar,50 “produced modest, but only modest, gains in the formal democratization of politics. ... Overall, the proportion of adult men who could vote in 1787 was surely higher than it had been in 1767, yet the shift was hardly dramatic. ... By 1790, ..., roughly 60 to 70 percent of adult white men ... could vote”, compared to “probably less than 60 percent” before.
Important advances achieved by the American Revolution included (a) the widespread adoption of written constitutions with locally elected governors and councils replacing those appointed in England and (b) bills of rights explicitly guarantying certain rights to individuals and limiting the powers of governments. This trend was partly a response to the Coercive Acts of Parliament of 1774, which closed Boston harbor and
changed the Massachusetts colonial charter without consulting the colonists, giving the crown-appointed governor the power to appoint and remove many public officials including judges, justices of the peace, and marshals.51
Introduction of State Constitutions: Farmers in Massachusetts, who were already concerned about the possible confiscation of their property for inability to pay taxes or to repay loans, feared that the new rules would make these public officials less responsive to local concerns and more susceptible to bribery. Beginning in August 1774, when circuit court judges arrived in rural towns all across Massachusetts, they were met by thousands of angry farmers who filled the streets and refused to permit the judges to hold court under the new laws. Judges were asked to resign or at least to ignore the new act and hold court only under the Massachusetts charter of 1691. Each declaration of judges was put to a vote of the locals to determine whether it was acceptable. Under this onslaught of citizen resistance, most of the courts were closed although a few were allowed to operate under the 1691 charter.52
This resulted in a power vacuum in Massachusetts, which was filled53 “[o]n June 19, 1775, [when] the Massachusetts Congress elected a 28-member council that replaced the governor as executive. With this one alteration, ..., the Massachusetts Charter of 1691 became the first state constitution.” The Coercive Acts did not officially affect the other 12 rebellious colonies. However, believing the acts threatened them as well, by 1777 all 13 had adopted new constitutions consistent with their declared independence.54 Facing a King and parliament attempting by fiat to eliminate 150 years of democratic tradition, the colonists agreed to instead to eliminate Britain from their colonial charters. After the war, painfully aware of their vulnerability as 14 independent states (including Vermont, which had previously been disputed between New York and New Hampshire) and of the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation, revolutionary leaders crafted the current US federal constitution and subjected it to vigorous debate in all the states.

While these were not the first written constitutions in history, they started a trend that has provided written constitutions for nearly all of the world’s advanced industrial democracies and many totalitarian and authoritarian nations. One of the few exceptions is Great Britain, which is a constitutional monarchy without “a written constitution. There is no agreed mechanism [in Britain] for changing the (unwritten) de-facto constitution and not even agreement about what it actually contains.”55
Bills of Rights: Ten of the early state constitutions included bills of rights,56 as had colonial charters since 1639 and the English Bill of Rights57 of 1689, updating the Magna Carta58 of 1215. Major US constitutional documents were translated into many languages and disseminated widely. These included the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and state constitutions. After the war, the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution of 1787 were also translated and distributed widely. They had a profound effect on constitutional thought around the world, especially in Europe in part via their impact on the French Revolution,59 including the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” of 1789. Rutland says, “Three months before the French acted, James Madison had already fulfilled a pledge he made during the ratification struggle over the Constitution drafted in 1787” by introducing in the first US House of Representatives 16 proposed amendments, 10 of which had been officially approved by 1791. These became the US Bill of Rights.60
Keyssar reports that the post-war period saw several liberalizations of the right to vote in different states as disfranchised revolutionary war veterans successfully pushed for suffrage in spite of their inability to meet property requirements.61 A study of these changes may help explain the apparent contradiction between Sharp’s comment that violence tends to concentrate power and Keyssar’s observation that the American Revolution contributed to a modest growth in the percent of the population eligible to vote.62


In sum, the American Revolution produced modest but important gains for freedom and democracy. Furthermore, the evidence summarized in this essay suggests that most of these gains were obtained through nonviolent discussions, motivated in part by the political exigencies of the war and facilitated by the accompanying turmoil. However, without the previous 150 years of democratic experience, the colonists might not have found it so easy to agree to disagree agreeably. In particular, the claim that the revolutionary war itself directly advanced freedom and democracy seems inconsistent with the weight of the available evidence.

Ted Kaczynski created by Harvard Mind Experiments

Source link https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91721-oops

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab090310.mp3 Story on Ted about 4 minutes in.
> Be Careful What You Plan For

Transcript:

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:10 I'm Jad.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:13 I'm Robert.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:14 On this episode of Radio Lab four oops'. Starting with a tree.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:25 Then we've got a goose that went ...

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:29 And an entire town that went ...

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:31 And a Harvard professor-

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:34 That really went oops.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:34 Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:35 Now, we should just say before we start oops can be a misleading term. Really what we're talking about here is something Greek.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:43 Where you try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:48 Right, and our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception, and we ended up talking with a professor named Ruben Gur.

Ruben Gur: 00:04:58 Yes? Hello?

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:59 Hi is this professor Gur?

Ruben Gur: 00:05:00 Yes, speaking.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:01 He's a psychiatrist that works at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'd called him to talk about his research on self deception.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:06 Self deception.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:07 It's fascinating stuff, and I'm not going to go into it now because somewhere along the way the conversation took a really weird turn.

No.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:14 Oh yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:16 Get out.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:17 Yeah, yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:17 It happened when he began to tell me about some studies.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:20 Strange studies-

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:22 Done by a ... What was the guys name?

Ruben Gur: 00:05:24 His name is hanging ... I don't remember. Hold on a second, Murray was his name.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:34 Henry Murray.

Robert Krulwich: 00:05:37 The reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what?

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:40 What? I built it up. Don't you want to know more at this point?

Robert Krulwich: 00:05:41 Yeah, no. Tell me why.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:45 Okay, I'm going to let it unfold, because we were so interested in what Ruben Gur told us that we found the guy.

Alston Chase: 00:05:50 Hi.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:51 How's it going?

Who knows a whole lot about professor Murray. His name is Alston Chase.

Alston Chase: 00:05:55 Very windy day today, isn't it?

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:57 He lives in a remote cabin in Montana, in the woods, in the foothills.

Alston Chase: 00:06:03 Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the second World War. During the war, he went to work for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:19 A couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country.

Alston Chase: 00:06:26 During the Korean War-

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:29 There were some GI's, he said, who'd been captured in Korea, and afterwards-

Alston Chase: 00:06:33 After the Korean War-

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:34 ... they refused to come home.

Alston Chase: 00:06:35 ... they appeared to have betrayed their country.

Speaker 12: 00:06:39 Renounce their own country and disappeared behind red China's bamboo curtain.

Speaker 13: 00:06:43 Now, does anybody want to go home?

Speaker 14: 00:06:45 No.

Alston Chase: 00:06:46 The CIA and the military establishment was very much concerned that the communists had found techniques for brainwashing.

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:57 Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. Murray himself developed a style of interrogation.

Alston Chase: 00:07:07 Stressful interrogation was the term used.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:10 That the army could use on its pilots.

Ruben Gur: 00:07:12 Yeah, they developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent onto mission.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:17 Then, says Ruben Gur, he'd run them through a battery of tests ...

Ruben Gur: 00:07:20 To see if they break, and if they didn't break then they were fine to fly.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:24 This kind of psychological training was almost a new front in the cold war. In the 1950s Murray is back at Harvard, and he's thinking of ways to fine tune his techniques, and this is where things get interesting.

Alston Chase: 00:07:37 He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20 some odd-

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:40 Sophomores mostly.

Alston Chase: 00:07:43 The students were told to write an autobiographical essay.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:45 Like a diary, and he told them, you know what-

Alston Chase: 00:07:47 Make it very personal.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:48 ... write your deepest thoughts in there.

Alston Chase: 00:07:50 Highest aspirations, and hopes-

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:52 And while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies.

Robert Krulwich: 00:07:57 Quite a class.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:57 Go ahead. After the students were done he said to them "Now I'm going to pair you up into groups of two."

Alston Chase: 00:08:01 To debate, or discuss, what they'd written.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:05 Students were like, okay we'll share, no big deal. But-

Alston Chase: 00:08:11 They were duped. They were walked into this very brightly lit room-

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:17 Which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one way mirror.

Alston Chase: 00:08:19 ... put in a chair, strapped in, electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:27 To measure stress basically.

Alston Chase: 00:08:29 They were also filming through the mirror.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:32 Then, instead of a classmate in walked a total stranger.

Alston Chase: 00:08:36 Older man-

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:36 This guy was holding their essay. They didn't know it, but Murray had trained him-

Alston Chase: 00:08:40 To do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:45 He just tore them apart piece by piece.

Alston Chase: 00:08:49 Using the essay to mock the students aspirations, and thoughts. Then after this was done the students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:07 That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over.

Alston Chase: 00:09:14 People became tearful, and miserable, and he was proud how he destroyed people.

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:19 What kind of a person is this?

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:22 Like why did he do it?

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:23 Yeah.

Alston Chase: 00:09:23 Why Murray did it, there are any one of a number of explanations and they all could be true. One is it was grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:33 Also, this was the Cold War, he was fighting communism, maybe he thought it was justified.

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:37 Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:40 Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair.

Alston Chase: 00:09:44 For about 30 years, with a woman not his wife, and they had a sexual relationship that border on, in fact was, sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interests in these was intensely personal.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:00 Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:06 His code name was Lawful.

Alston Chase: 00:10:08 They gave each of these students a code name.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:11 Because he was considered so conventional.

Alston Chase: 00:10:13 He was-

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:14 Really still just a boy.

Alston Chase: 00:10:15 Graduated high school at 16.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:16 Was living a thousand miles from home, two shirts and two trousers to his name.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:21 And Lawful apparently was an especially lonely kid.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:24 The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lawful's essay which he saw as highly alienated.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:31 When Lawful walked into that room, sat across from that stranger-

Alston Chase: 00:10:35 The guy really made a job on him. He was young so he was barely growing a beard. The first thing that the guy tells him is what is this on your chin? Something trying to look like a beard.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:47 Then the guy opens up Lawful's essay and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all of the students Lawful had been hooked up to all of these stress monitors.

Alston Chase: 00:10:55 I analyzed his data compared to all the other participants, and he had far and away the strongest response physiologically.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:03 You mean like his heart beat the fastest and all that?

Alston Chase: 00:11:05 Heart beat, everything through the roof.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:12 Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years. Decades later, a lot of the subjects were still upset.

Ruben Gur: 00:11:19 Considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their 20s.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:23 Lawful never forgot it.

Ruben Gur: 00:11:25 That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about professor Murray after he left Harvard.

Robert Krulwich: 00:11:33 So what happened to this guy?

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:36 Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math, and then he became a household name.

Robert Krulwich: 00:11:45 What do you mean?

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:46 Well, I mean this ...

Speaker 12: 00:11:48 The FBI raid began just after noon, in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:56 Turns out that Lawful's real name-

Ruben Gur: 00:11:58 Theodore Kaczynski.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:00 No?

Ruben Gur: 00:12:01 Oh yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:01 Get out.

Ruben Gur: 00:12:02 Yeah.

Speaker 12: 00:12:03 The FBI dubbed him the unabomber. In nearly 18 years he found targets all over the country.

Speaker 15: 00:12:09 His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23.

Speaker 16: 00:12:13 Blew my arm off to the side like this, and the first thing I thought was why did they do that.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:20 Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent very infamous acts?

Ruben Gur: 00:12:28 Well, I think he probably would have, if it hadn't been for that experiment he still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana regardless. I think the evil twist was done there.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:45 Years later while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski.

Alston Chase: 00:12:50 In one of his letters he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious and I wrote it back "Can you tell me a little bit more about it?" And he said, "Well I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms."

Jad Abumrad: 00:13:19 Ruben Gur is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Alston Chase is the author of the book Harvard And The Making Of The Unabomber.

Heres one more, from Ben Zimmer. What is the Coopertino effect?

Ben Zimmer: 00:13:46 The Coopertino effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spellchecker too much. It will give you a suggestion, and very often it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take.

Occupy LA Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Cheryl Aichele 

PRESS ADVISORY

WHO: Members of Occupy Los Angeles

WHAT: Kick Off a Campaign to End Political Repression of Occupiers and Activists after U.N. Letter

WHEN: July 3, 2012, 8:30am – Noon

WHERE: 8:30am Court House at 210 Temple Street; 9:30am Board of Police Commissioners meeting at 100 W. First Street; 10am LA City Council meeting at 200 N. Spring Street. Pershing Square after that.

WHY: The U.N. has contacted the Obama Administration in regards to Local Law Enforcement Repressing Occupiers’ Rights and Occupy LA is fighting back

PRESS RELEASE

OCCUPY LA FIGHTS REPRESSION AFTER US IGNORES UN PLEA TO PROTECT OCCUPIERS’ RIGHTS

Members of Occupy LA Kick of a Campaign to End Political Repression of Occupiers and Activists

LOS ANGELES – Over six months after Envoys of the United Nations wrote a letter to the Obama Administration, the U.S. government has yet to response to requests regarding local repression of the Occupy movement. Members of Occupy LA plan to push the issue with local and federal governments after alleged increase of Rights violations by LAPD.

Occupiers feel LAPD has targeted them in attempt to silence their dissent and stop their actions. Courtroom witnesses have been threatened with arrest; Occupiers have been arrested for chalk art; and say they are victims of police misconduct.

The day before Independence Day in America, Occupy LA members gather for court support for Anthony Lascano, an Occupy activist, who the courts unexpectantly took into custody on Monday afternoon.

A Judge has set Lascano’s bail at $75,000. An amount Occupiers says exemplifies increase political repression and Human Rights violations against Occupiers by LAPD, the so-called Justice System, and the U.S. Government.

Occupy activists plan to occupy the courtroom for Lascano’s bail hearing, City Council Chambers, and the LAPD

Board of Police Commissioners meeting Tuesday morning in protest  of said repression.

Occupiers claim the LAPD have made 11 Occupy arrests in three weeks for chalking.

In a letter dated June 4, Carol Sobel, a First-Amendment-Rights lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild, explained to the Special Assistant for Constitutional Policing for the LAPD that the 9^th Circuit unanimously held that “no chalk would damage a sidewalk” in MacKinney v. Nielsen from 1995.

“Given that this decision is now 18 years old, there is no excuse for these arrests,” states Sobel in the letter.

Occupiers say LA’s current graffiti laws do not reflect the Constitutional ruling yet. Activist point out that elected officials and police officers are sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution. However, many Occupiers feel individuals of these entities systematically repress their Rights.

The City of Orlando recently spent $200,000 defending a chalk-art arrest of an Occupier in Florida. The city lost that case and activists say that the City of Los Angeles could waste up to $2.4 million dollars defending the 11 chalking arrests this month.

Occupiers believe the LAPD selectively enforces the graffiti law against them while the City’s own Parking Enforcement officers use chalk on the tires of vehicles they wish to monitor for time restrictions.

The activist also say, that the police did not arrest any activists at this weekend’s anti-Walmart protest in downtown organized by Labor and other community groups.  From photos of the event, it clearly had plenty of chalk art written on the pavement surrounding the actions.

So far, the activists know of no arrests of children for the summer activity of chalking on cement. Activists argue the chalk comes in packaging marketed for sidewalk art us and that water-soluble chalk does no damage.

Members of Occupy LA allege that City Officials violate California Civil Code 52.1. They say LAPD — under the color of law— interferes with their exercise and enjoyment of their Rights by threats, intimidation, and coercion.

To avoid prosecution, the City required dozens of Occupy LA arrestees to take a First-Amendment-Rights class administered through the City Attorney’s office.  Now, Occupy LA says it is the City that needs a lesson in the First Amendment. 

For Real?

Election Integrity: Where It Isn't, Who Can Help, HCPB Locations, Potential

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