Soldiers say: "Give WAR a Chance!"

PFC Sandoval edited by Ashley Wells (Wisdom Quarterly)

(Kristinamgarcia) Ignored by the VA, left homeless and cheated out of college tuition promises... now police arrest us at Occupy Boston.

Thank goodness for Veterans for Peace. Today is Veterans Day, a day set aside to remember the sacrifices families have and are making to promote free trade, hegemony, and imperial rule.

I remember a time on deployment. The troops in Iraq were tired of sitting around. They were tired of hearing peacenikshippy diplomats say, "Give peace a chance." We really thought there were WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). We were lied to.

Bush, Dick, and Colon (not pictured because he's a party pooper) (rense.com).

The fresh meat, rushed through training, were fond of saying: "Give war a chance." They really thought it was funny. I thought it was funny. Listening to metal There is an OG punk song that goes, "Let's have a war so you can go die."

It's about dying for stupid reasons. Colin Powell rewriting reports, Bush doing everything Cheney ordered him to, Ashcroft singing, Rumsfeld talking so much [nonsense] and no one calling him on it. Condoleeza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Phyllis Schafly, Laura Bush, the women were no better.

What do we call those who delight in war, "demons"?

War was desirable and planned for in great detail before inventing a reason to illegally starting to bomb with no congressional declaration. An unelected president signs the country up for an unwanted war...and we're still there. His father's friends told him to.

Raping, drinking, looting, pillaging, killing, all in a day's work.

• US soldier convicted of killing Afghan civilians for sport
  
• VIDEO: US soldier convicted of killing Afghans for sport

Wall Street: "Sleep Now in the Fire" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly, Democracy Now!, Michael Moore, Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine once hired Michael Moore to produce their video for the song "Sleep Now in the Fire" eleven years ago. They chose Wall Street, shutting the stock exchange in the process as police overreacted to a music video.

Moore was arrested while everyone else ran away. But the story lives on because just today, he was banned from filming a news piece for a cable news agency. Apparently, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) now owns the street outside the exchange and determines who can be interviewed on the street.

Moore was interviewed on Democracy Now! this morning recounting the story to Amy Goodman. While he could have gone down to Occupy Wall Street a block or two away, Moore said he was going to Wall St. whether or not the news crew was coming. More than a decade later, one sign in this video says it all: "I CAN'T BELIEVE WE STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS CR*P."

Plaza renamed for man murdered by BART police

• Occupy Oakland [brutally] raided by police
  

Occupy IRAN (comic)

Wisdom Quarterly, Gildedageperiod89, ABC News
(gildedageperiod89)

Since the people of Iran cannot hope to occupy Tehran -- due to our imposition of military dictators backed by a draconian clandestine force on the people after pulling down (illegally subverting, deposing, and replacing) the Shah in 1979 -- the US military-industrial complex is likely to do it for them.

The fast and furious plot to occupy Iran
(AJ) Washington is looking to increase sanctions on Iran as a result of the plot to kill a Saudi ambassador. Iran's supposed "threat" could simply be the US government's way of distracting Americans from problems at home. No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum -- piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism -- Washington brought us all down to Earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia. More

Iraq: No Immunity for US War Crimes
(b12partners.net)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (ABC) - The prospects of the U.S. keeping a modest [just 40,000 or 50,000 "trainers"] military force in Iraq after the Dec. 31 deadline to withdraw nearly all troops was thrown into question Tuesday when leaders in Baghdad suggested that American soldiers would NO longer have immunity from prosecution [for US war crimes] as of 2012.



Washington has long been working under the assumption that immunity from prosecution was a crucial component of the pact that was signed with Iraq three years ago involving any U.S. soldiers who stay behind to train [the way we "advised" during our war on Vietnam] national forces.

Need to borrow more money on credit for the imperial war machine? Xie-xie!

However, Iraqi leaders, after a meeting with President Jalal Talabani, said that while they would welcome training and military equipment, "there is no need to give immunity for trainers." [So I guess it's on to Iran, an indefinite occupation, and further immunity from our war crimes there.] More

The US War on Iraq was created by Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice,
Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and Presidents Barry/W/Herbert Bush (dear kitty)

Scientists translate dreams into YouTube videos

Gallant Labs UC Berkeley, Wisdom Quarterly, The Consumerist

(GallantLabUCB) Left clip: segment of Hollywood movie trailer subject viewed while in fMRI machine. Right clip: reconstruction of segment from brain activity measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Translating brain activity into YouTube videos
Phil Villarreal (The Consumerist, Sept. 26, 2011)

BERKELEY, California - Science is getting closer to letting people see through the eyes of others. UC Berkeley scientists have designed a way to read brain activity and reconstruct YouTube videos.... broadcasting the mental images people create, meaning you could soon watch others' dreams.

• It would be amazing to hook up Buddhist saints (Noble Ones) or at least monastics and asking them to meditate or "see" nirvana. We know those who have seen it exist.

(Meggito/Flickr)

The Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley had people watch videos while hooked up to an MRI machine, then matched the data and brain activity to shapes, movement, and colors. The computer model the researchers created blurry, dreamlike images. More

• AUDIO: SCPR's Patt Morrison to cover topic in depth
  
• Now you can see images from someone else's mind
• UC Scientists "see" images in people's minds (ABC News)

Procedure
1. Record brain activity while subject views hours of movie trailers.

2. Build dictionaries (regression model) to translate between shapes, edges, and motion in these movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points in the brain at which brain activity was measured.
3. Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.

4. Build a random library of approximately 18,000,000 seconds of video downloaded at random from YouTube (that have no overlap with the movies subjects saw in the magnet).
5. Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity.
6. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity.
7. Average those clips together. This is the reconstruction.

• See related video. See the related (Nishimoto et al., 2011, Current Biology) scientific paper. More information: gallantlab.org
• PUBLIC RADIO VIDEO: Roasting Charlie Sheen (X-rated)
  

Revolution Picnic (L.A. Rage and Communism)

Wisdom Quarterly

Many concert goers at L.A. Rising -- with Rage Against the Machine (RATM), Muse, Rise Against, Lauryn Hill -- consider the American Communist Party a revolutionary force.

The FBI and CIA, between yawns, might disagree. But immigrants from native Buddhist countries (Tibet, Siberia, Vietnam, Burma, Khmer Cambodia, Laos, etc.) are almost sure to be offended by any mention of a Red Army. For anyone who has suffered under Chinese and Southeast Asian dictators has a very bad image that has tainted Communism forever. But in the US, things are kept Revolutionary Lite.

Things are lightweight because the Revolutionary Communist Party is an infiltrated organization. ANSWER LA is very proactive. But the powerful message of fairness lives on. It's what motivates young adults, many of them diehard fans of RATM, have their heart in the right place:

Seeing the hypocrisy of American-style supercapitalism, they embrace the symbols and general ideas of the only force considered large enough to challenge the corporate-ruled, consumer imperative we are seduced into living by in the USA. Before discounting "Communists" altogether, there is one remarkable voice interested in freedom, social justice, and a better society: Michael Slate.

Is Rage Against the Machine Communist?

• LA Weekly on "LA Rising," Memorial Coliseum concert

Review: LA RISING with RATM and MUSE

(LA Times) Those concerned about the misguided energies of Rave kids, of the chaos that somehow manages to collide with mass-market electronic music at every turn, should be thankful that the Rage kids -- those in the Coliseum on Saturday night [July 30, 2011] who are obsessed with the collected music and ideas of Rage Against the Machine -- haven’t yet combusted in the streets of L.A.

Revolution can be a Picnic

Dan Bluemel (L.A. Activist)

KPFK radio host Michael Slate [spoke] at the Revolutionary Communist Party’s 2010 Anti-Fourth of July picnic held in Echo Park, Los Angeles. While most Los Angeles residents celebrated the Fourth of July by throwing parties, attending fireworks displays, and expressing their national pride via red-white-and-blue accoutrement[s], another group had a different theme: revolution. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) hosted an “Anti-Fourth of July Picnic” in Echo Park [on July 4, 2010]. It was one of many held around the country. People gathered to eat food, listen to speakers, as well as participate in games. More

1. SHOW 7/22/2011-Pelican Bay, Abortion
2. SHOW 7-15-2011-War Neocons, DSK's victim, Pelican Bay strike
3. SHOW 7/8/2011-Amanda Marcotte, Pelican Bay Hunger Strike
4. SHOW 7/1/2011-Afghanistan, Pelican Bay Hunger Strike
5. SHOW 6/24/11-PZ Myers, Filmmaker David Zeiger, Grammy protests
6. SHOW 6/17/11-California Prisons, Anti-Abortion Billboards
7. SHOW 6/10/2011-Ethan McCord and Keith Knight

Amazing Weekend for Los Angeles

Los Angeles is gearing up for a weekend of delightful overwhelm:

• Buddhist Geeks' The [First] Conference
• Shinzen Young keynote address at Geeks Conference
• MUFON Conference

• X Games and X Fest take over downtown
• (AdultCon going on at the Convention Center)
• L.A. Rising: Rage Against the Machine/Muse/Rise Against concert

Macs hit by Malware, iPhones could be next

Unless Apple, Inc. acts fast, Macs are no immune from malware, and iPhones could be hit next. It has taken steps to stop a malware "phishing" program (Image: cutcaster.com).

(NPR, June 6) Apple's computers have been able to avoid most serious hacking attacks, but that era may be over. As Steve Jobs and his colleagues prepared for this week's developers conference, the company was also taking steps to stop a malware "phishing" program.

The ploy, says technology columnist Rich Jaroslovsky of Bloomberg News, uses an infected website to install a piece of software on Apple computers. The software then pops up a new window, with an urgent message about a security vulnerability.

As Jaroslovsky tells NPR's Renee Montagne, the rogue window includes "a scary-sounding message that tells you that your computer is infected, and that you need software to eradicate the infection — and to please give your credit card number." More

Technology
CALLING THE INTERNET POLICE
Hackers Target FBI Affiliate, Post Passwords Online
The hacking collective, Lulz Security, also recently targeted Nintendo, Sony, and PBS.
Nintendo: Server Breached, No Data Lost

FBI Partner Attacked By Hackers, Passwords Taken