UC Berkeley plans massive rally 11-15-11

OccupyBerkeley.org

Occupy Cal has not gone anywhere. Tents were destroyed and teenage students dragged away by "storm trooper" style police in jack boots. In outrage students are holding teach outs and a general student strike. People -- supporters, faculty, graduate student teachers, Occupy Oakland (who are marching to Cal in support), Occupy San Francisco, and UC students -- will not stand by for 1960s history to repeat itself as the country (empire) is again engaged in secret wars around the world and strip mining the planet from its base on Wall Street and anti-environment corporations (Monsanto, ADM, Halliburton

• Occupy Yale
  
• Student loans add to angst at Occupy Wall Street
• Bank of America expects $1.8 B gain from Chinese bank
• Is "Occupy Rose Parade" organizer former corporate lawyer?
• (Susan Swift) We can put a face behind the Occupy movement -- and it appears to be a wanna-be one percenter. Peter Thottam is the creator of Occupy Los Angeles and also the progressive force behind Occupy the Rose Parade.

  

  Thottam’s been planning this occupation disruption of the Rose Parade for the last six months — at least that’s how long he’s had the “Occupy the Rose Parade” Twitter feed going. Ironically, Peter Thottam is a Goldman Sachs alum, an Ivy-Leaguer, and former corporate lawyer from an international mega law firm, and recent MBA grad. Yale, Boalt Hall Berkeley Law, and UCLA MBA. Does this sound like a community organizer or a one percenter? While Peter Thottam’s CV reeks of Wall Street elitism, his bio depicts someone grabbing for the corporate brass ring. But he is strangely unwilling or unable to keep a job at such elite corporate employers as Goldman Sachs or O’Melveny and Myers.

"Imagine" - Joan Baez visits Occupy Wall St.

(michouberlin) "Imagine" (John Lennon) by Joan Baez

Folk singer Joan Baez serenaded hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters Friday, most of whom weren’t even born when she became famous for singing out against the Vietnam War.

Folk singer Joan Baez, #OWS, Foley Square, Manhattan on 11-11-11 (Enid Alvarez/NYDN).

The irony of Baez performing on Veterans Day was mostly lost on the demonstrators, who had marched from their base in Zuccotti Park to Foley Square, just up from City Hall, for the concert. More

Forgiving Hitlers, Building New World (video)

The Lakey Sisters, Wisdom Quarterly
Classic speech accompanied by new images courtesy of the Lakey sisters

One of the most inspirational speeches in recorded history was given, paradoxically, by a silent movie comedian named Charlie Chaplin. It beckons us to forgive our Hitlers -- Dick Cheney, the Bush Dynasty, B.S. Obama, Rumsfeld, Rove, Goebbels, Bill Gates, Ashcroft, Rice, Hillary, Stalin, Osama, Kaddafi, Thatcher, Saddam, Adolf... A new and better world -- full of fairness, compassion, and solutions -- is not built by opposing the previous bad, but by erecting the present good. Share these inspiring words around the world in many languages. It has been enhanced with new imagery.

German-Spanish-Chinese-Arabic-French-Hungarian-Dutch-Greek-Slovenian-Polish-Turkish-Finnish-Korean-Portuguese

• "Kristallnacht" anniversary: Germany, Israel sign pact

Police storm Occupy Oakland (video)

Marcus Wohlsen (AP), Huffington Post, Wisdom Quarterly, Occupy Oakland

Paramilitary tactics on a peaceful civilian demonstration? It's what US police have been waiting to unpack as they take us from Brave New World Order to Orwellian nightmare.

OAKLAND, Northern California - Shock and awe. Police in full riot gear with tear gas and three helicopters overhead cleared anti-Wall Street Occupy Oakland protesters this morning (Oct. 25) from the plaza in front of Oakland's City Hall where they have been camped out for about two weeks. TV news footage shows numerous people in plastic handcuffs being led away from the site by police around after the 5:00 am raid. The protesters did not appear to be resisting, although an officer did fire a [potentially deadly] non-lethal projectile from a shotgun at a protester who lobbed a bottle, authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle. More

• Occupy Together
• Occupy Berkeley: End the Monied Corruption of Democracy
• Occupy San Jose
  
• Occupy San Francisco
• Occupying the Message (Right-wing style)

This morning at 5:00 am over 500 police in riot gear from cities all over central California brutally attacked the Occupy Oakland encampment at the intersection of 14th & Broadway. Riot police attacked the peaceful protest with flash grenades, tear gas, and [deadly canon style] rubber bullets after moving in with armored vehicles. Apparently, the media was not allowed in to document this repression, and one was warned or allowed to leave. Police established barricades as far apart as 11th and 17th. Over 70 people were arrested, and the camping gear was destroyed and/or stolen by riot police. Contact the mayor and tell her what you think of her actions.

• Reconvene today (Tuesday, Oct. 25) at 4:00 pm at the Oakland Library on 14th & Madison.
• We're not finished. We have only begun.
• We will be protesting this planned atrocity at the next City Council meeting.

• Riot police occupy Oakland, evict protesters (CBS)

Occupy Berkeley in the Sixties (video)

Wisdom Quarterly, Occupy Boston, Occupy Los Angeles, AlJazeera.net, Occupy Wall Street

Joined by labor unions, protesters march from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park, NY (Reuters/AlJazeera).

UC Berkeley was occupied giving rise to a generation of activists (Criticalthinking007)

"You will respect my authoritay!" is the police mantra chanted around the country. Teachers, unions, professionals can all join students, activists, and elderly demonstrators. The mantra is the same. As now, so in the 1960s. Then it was illegal wars, racism, and a lack of civil rights for all. Today the issues are far more pressing -- a matter of survival. Having enough to eat as bankers give a new spin to the ancient "Let them eat cake" utterance that preceded the French Revolution commemorated by Bastille Day. Wall Street onlookers from on high giggle "Let them sip champagne."

• College students, nurses join Occupy Boston
  
• Occupy Wall Street: Los Angeles Branch
• Occupy Washington DC starts tomorrow
  

"People over Profits" as transport unions join Occupy Wall Street demonstration.

Power to the People
AlJazeera.net
A diverse group of powerful unions has joined demonstrations in New York's financial district, lending some focus, credibility and potentially hundreds of participants to a movement that began with a few university students.

The "Occupy Wall Street" protest movement, which began three weeks ago in New York's financial hub, was joined on Wednesday by a dozen US labor unions.

Among those who joined the clamor were members of the Chinatown Tenants Union and the Transit Workers Union, the liberal group MoveOn.org, [CodePink,] and community organizations such as the Working Families Party and United NY. More

(MORE)

Buddhist monk's "Hippie History" (video)

Seven Dharmachari (Wisdom Quarterly)

VIDEO: "Drugs are bad, m'kay?"

How does one go from college to drugs to a search for nirvana?

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Buddhist monk Ven. Rahula, Rev. Jim* (Back to the Future star Christopher Lloyd) from "Taxi" explains his roundabout path from Harvard University (with Tom Hanks), to peer-pressured premarital sex, to Woodstock, to the garage.

American (Sri Lankan Theravada) forest monk Ven. Rahula (Dhammatube)

The author of one of the most surprising and candid books on the "Buddhist" spiritual quest one may ever read (One Night's Shelter) is by Ven. Rahula. He is a former resident of West Virginia's Bhavana Society. He was once in line to succeed as its abbot when the noted elderly Sri Lankan scholar-practitioner Bhante G (author of Mindfulness in Plain English) stepped down. But he returned to the call of the open road after many years.


Meandering down from Afghanistan to the call of Acid (LSD) Full Moon Parties in Goa, India

Bhante Rahula recounts the "Hippie History" that led many in the West to seek a deeper spirituality through the Dharma (Pali, Dhamma) rather than the spiraling senselessness of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll.

• Download One Night's Shelter (FREE)

Baby boomers evolved from being fed up with endless American wars -- with Vietnam destroying the illusion that we were killing and conquering for any noble or humanitarian reason whatsoever -- via drugs towards interest in sharp mindfulness and blissful meditation.

The real renunciation of drugs is as much mental as physical

*Explaining the character of Jim on "Taxi"

Drugs Are Bad
Embodiment of the Sixties
Jim attended Woodstock ("500,000 people... Lucky for them I went, or it would have only been 499,999"). He said he kept finding God everywhere -- except "he kept ditching me." He spent a year of his life making a macrame couch. He was once traded from his commune to another commune for two goats and a Donovan record. Jim once claimed that instead of finding NIRVANA, his 1960's experiences only left him with recurring flashbacks of the original Mouseketeers appearing as visions hatching out of seedpods.

The lesson here is best summarized by South Park's Mr. Mackay: "Drugs are bad, m'kay?"

Final word: Children, drugs are bad. M'kay?

Against the Grain: Anarchy and Zen

David Kupfer (The Sun Magazine, June 2011)

Performers in New Delhi with innovative moves and the Buddha as backdrop (mayankpandey)

Actor Peter Coyote suggested we meet for this interview at his home north of San Francisco. Nicknamed “the Treehouse,” it has a striking view of Mount Tamalpais and is close to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. It is a long way from Hollywood, where Coyote has worked since 1980, appearing in more than ninety films and television programs. He says that he is “a Zen Buddhist student first, an actor second.” He will be ordained as a Zen priest in August.

Coyote has had an eclectic life, having done everything from farming to being a stockbroker. A self-described “socialist radical hippie anarchist environmentalist,” he’s seldom without an opinion on an issue and never one to hold back his views. Born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon in New York City in 1941, Coyote took his stage name from an experience he had while taking peyote in the Southwest. He has been socially and politically engaged since the age of fourteen, when he volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in Englewood, New Jersey. Coyote’s passion for progressive reform continued at Grinnell College in Iowa, where, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he helped organize a group of twelve students to travel to Washington, D.C., and protest nuclear testing. They fasted for three days outside the White House before President John F. Kennedy invited them in to talk with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

After college Coyote joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a guerrilla street-theater group still in existence today. He and some of his fellows from the mime troupe went on to form the Diggers, an anarchist group that “acted out” its ideas of what culture should be, questioning the core values of capitalism and distributing free food to runaways in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes feeding hundreds of people a day. They also ran a Free Store, a Free Clinic, and even (briefly) a Free Bank. The Diggers evolved into the Free Family, a network of communes around the country pursuing an alternative economy and culture.

Coyote is the author of the memoir Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, a portion of which won a Pushcart Prize. A new book, about what he calls the “present mass hypnosis afoot,” is currently in revision. More

What "Woodstock 1969" was like (video)

Andy Pietrasik and Christian Bennett (Guardian.co.uk) VIDEO: Woodstock 42 years later (Photo: Gawker.com)