Cutting-edge “activists, journalists, and bloggers” were still fawning over God Emperor Barry after he personally cluster-bombed their conference rooms to Formica splinters from Air Force One last Sunday, an act 84% of survivors praised for its decisive progressiveness. “Half my face got blown off, but I appreciate the remaining half so much more now. Like with Healthcare and The Economy, I think He’s taken courageous steps toward helping us all appreciate just how much we have in this country,” one attendee gushed, ineffectually applying a glossy pamphlet to stanch the blood before splashing to the asphalt, departing this vale of tears half-beaming and clutching a first-run campaign button.
Obama blamed the attack on Al Qaeda, Congress, Cyberterrrists, Iran, My Predecessors, Sky Pirates, Tea Partiers and WikiLeaks and called it a day.
Three by-the-grace-of-Eris-unscathed Netroots Nationals responded to the announcement by backing the God Emperor up every step of the way, taking it personal and making it personal with the velveteen touch of a dandy fop, and uttering nonsensical advice, respectively.
I got no beef with joking around about murder, rape, vicious stereotypes, all manner of human folly and misfortune – hell, even genocide and cataclysm are fair game for yuks (it’s a coping mechanism, right?) – but typically dude tying you to the train tracks makes a funny, he’s the only one cackling ‘less minions are in attendance.
“The Jonas Brothers are here, they’re out there somewhere. Sasha annd Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”
Admittedly, this bit has some stuff going for it – pop topicality (Jonas Brothers are apparently Disney’s latest mindboy controlband), implied acknowledgment/flip dismissal of horrors perpetrated, intimations of thoughtcrime – but look who’s writing his material. Shit’s right up there with Bush Jr.’s “WMDs must be around here somers” routine and Hitler’s classic, “So, The Holocaust walks into a bar and says, ‘Ouch!’”
G0d Emperor’s schtick deserved to bombtankgo over like a lead balloon crash and burn pithy, multidimensional heckling, or at least crickets… but that’s minions for ya.
You don’t need to be a Weatherman to book a speaking gig at Pitt, but it does help.
The Council of Graduate Students in Education said in its January newsletter that Ayers confirmed his participation in the group’s Spring 2010 Conference with a March 26 keynote speech. The newsletter does not say what Ayers might discuss, explain the format of his speech or whether it is open to the public.
The newsletter describes Ayers as a scholar who “has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise.” It does not mention his affiliation with the revolutionary group that bombed a Pittsburgh building and 11 others in the 1970s.
Oh. Guess he’s one of those anarchists-for-total-government Beck mentioned the one time, except he doesn’t like drug laws or wars, aside from back in the day (which was way different from today and just CRAZY, you don’t even understand) when he and some anti-war pals declared war on The Gumint and tragically blew some stuff (including, yes, the lobby of Downtown’s Tomb-of-Mausolus-knock-off-topped Gulf Tower and a wee lil’ bit of the Pentagon)/themselves up.
I only caught bits of the hubbub back in ’08 (I recall being at a Halloween party at which this dude told me about it and was all like, “How dare the Republicans smear Obama thus?” and I was diplomatically all like, “Yep, that’s pretty silly,” which it is), but apparently anarxist Ayers was pals with Obama at one point, except he wasn’t, that was just some campaign shit, they just sat on a bus together in Ayers’ living room sharing a cup of coffee, but regardless, Barakhenaton should be honored and admired for talking to lots of people, or something, as Ayers explains.
University officials tried to downplay the speech by refusing to disclose its location or even the time.
“It could be anywhere, anytime,” spokesman John Fedele said. A program for the event said Ayers would speak between 4:15 and 5:30 p.m.
“It’s a bold move on Pitt’s part,” said Lucy Rankin, 20, of Erie, a film and religious studies major.
Many students weren’t aware of the speech.
“That would be interesting. Probably a lot of students missed it,” said Mike Sayers, a psychology grad student from Redondo Beach, Calif.
Ayers, 65, was the second member of the Weather Underground to speak at Pitt this month. Mark Rudd, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society and Weather Underground, spoke March 3 in the Public Health Auditorium at the invitation of Pitt’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS.
The Weather Underground, sometimes known as The Weathermen, formed in 1969 as an offshoot of SDS and issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the government in 1970. The group carried out more than a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974, one of which killed a policeman.
“We thought we who lived in the metropolis of empire had a special duty to oppose our own imperialism and to resist our own government’s imperial dreams,” Ayers wrote this month in his blog.
About 100 students attended Rudd’s speech, along with others “from the far left to moderate Democrats,” said Jordan Romanus, the Pitt SDS chapter president.
He was surprised to learn about Ayers’ talk. “That’s news to me. That’s news to everybody in my group,” he said. “There’s no fliers … nothing on campus.”
Romanus, 22, of Waynesburg doesn’t believe there’s a fascination on campus with aging ’60s radicals.
“I can’t speak for the other organization but we brought him in to talk about student organizing. We don’t advocate bombing or killing anybody,” said Romanus. “Shutting down Columbia (University) for four days was effective.”
The SDS virtually shut down Columbia University in New York from April 23 -27, 1968, during an anti-war protest.
Asked whether his group planned to try any such thing at Pitt, Romanus said: “No, I want to graduate.”
Ayers spoke in December at Penn State Altoona. His appearance there drew complaints from people in the largely Republican area, said Marissa Carney, a university spokeswoman.
“The college did receive several e-mails and phone calls over the fact that we were hosting William Ayers,” she said. “There were some protests … but we proceeded, and there were no problems.”
Pitt received calls of concern about yesterday’s speech, Fedele said. No protesters appeared.
Prior to COP15 I noted the painfully obvious stargate-Climategate association (on the 13th it was reported that Henrik Svensmark, who studies how changes in our star may affect changes in our climate, collapsed during a debate when his pacemaker tweaked out). On 12/9/09, the day after the LHC’s record-breaking collisions “of more than 10 billion protons per bunch at a total energy of 2.36 trillion electron volts, or TeV, per collision” (2+3+6=11, 2+36=38=11) a mysterious spiral (clockwise in all the photos/footage I’ve seen, like the An Inconvenient Truth spiral) showed up over Norway on the eve of Barakhenaton’s rather less dazzling Nobel War Prize acceptance speech.
The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky.
Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre – lasting for ten to 12 minutes before disappearing completely.
Onlookers describing it as ‘like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it’ and ‘a shooting star that spun around and around’.
Yesterday a Norwegian defence spokesman said the display was most likely from a failed Russian test launch.
Dig overviews of spiral speculation from Strange Eye and Freeman. William Henry, Mark Gray and Whitley Strieber bring eschatology and “stargate metaphysics” in Obama’s speech to the table on Henry’s Revelations podcast. Richard Hoagland calls it a “torsion message“. Benjamin Crème, predictably, pins the spiral on Maitreya. The nearby European Incoherent Scatter array is a prime suspect for some, while the MSM proffers a mundane Bulava ICBM malfunction.
This morning I attended the Mass Meditation for Peace on Flagstaff Hill in Oakland. If you haven’t participated in an outdoor mass meditation before, I highly recommend it.
The attendees meditated to the chanting song of two Mayan elders. Later, 15 Burmese monks walked around the people meditating, encircling them and saying prayers.
Sarah Bauer, a therapist from the Pittsburgh Center for Complementary Health and Healing, organized the event with the aid of others associated with the Thomas Merton Center, which helps coordinate the efforts of various activists in Pittsburgh.
She said the message came from a Vietnamese Zen master whose philosophy was “peace in oneself, peace in the world.”
Meditation, she said, allows for people to feel silence and peace within themselves, to pray for change they want to see and then “have it emanate out.”
For all my dilettantish enthusiasm for consciousness studies and all things esoteric, my actual meditation chops, never great to begin with, have been pretty rusty lately. The presence of so many others proficient in the art helped me slough some attention-rust this morning, whether or not the consciences of any nation-state puppet heads or central banker puppeteers kicked in as a result. The synergy, alignment, harmonization and oneness the globalists prattle on about, abusing these terms as euphemisms for centralized control, refer to real processes and states (pardon) of being; you just need to turn down the prattle a bit in order to experience them.
Thanks to everyone present this morning for facilitating this.
Now, with regard to the prattle,
But words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control.
Burroughs, “The Limits of Control” 1978
I showed up at 5:15 at the August Wilson Center for a 5:30 press conference with Michael Froman, courtesy of G20 Voice. Froman was late, so I ended up watching Barakhenaton address his subjects and the world, an activity I can’t recommend to non-fans of gallows humor. As expected, and as I scribbled onto a Three Rivers Community Foundation G-20 Guide, he patted Himself & co. on the collective back, declaring that, “Our coordinated stimulus plans played an indispensable role in averting catastrophe,” and that, “We can’t wait for a crisis to cooperate,” and that, “… we will continue our stimulus efforts until our people are back to work,” as no-frills serfs, and that, “I’ve called for a new era of engagement that yields real results for our people — an era when nations live up to their responsibilities, and act on behalf of our shared security and prosperity,” which apparently includes “a new World Bank Trust Fund” and throwing the IMF $500 billion more with which to wreak its usual usurious havoc. He also announced that we have, like, a Coalition of the Willing Iran-wise, and that, “… with respect to the military, I’ve always said that we do not rule out any options when it comes to U.S. security interests.” I refrained from giggling throughout the news conference, but admit I nearly lost it when he said, “We went into Afghanistan not because we were interested in entering that country or positioning ourselves regionally, but because al Qaeda yada yada,” then bragged about how, “… the minute I came into office we initiated a review, and even before that review was completed, I ordered 21,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.” Still, not a chuckle from any of the journalists assembled in the August Wilson Center, not even when he said of protesters, “They object to free markets. One of the great things about the United States is, is that you can speak your mind and you can protest; that’s part of our tradition. But I fundamentally disagree with their view that the free market is the source of all ills,” then began his next sentence with the adverb “ironically”. He also reassured those with climate concerns that the fossil fuel subsidy reform maybe kinda hashed out over the past two days will “… help us combat the threat posed by climate change,” and that the G-20 is “… acting to address the threat posed by climate change.” Thanks, guys! Though Obama did use the phrase, “global economic cooperation and governance” once and “new framework” three times, he at least showed restraint in not mentioning “9/11,” “anarchy”, “freedom” and “the planet Krypton”.
At 6pm, Obama’s old college chum, former President and CEO of CitiInsurance,
Senior Council on Foreign Relations Fellow and now Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs, Michael Froman dropped by to take bloggers’ questions, all of which were climate-related (and answered with the same vague commitments to do something somehow, at some point, moving forward, but cautiously), save mine, which pertained to central bank and G-20 secrecy. Froman basically responded there was no time for the G-20 to discuss trifles like central banks submitting to audits and “coming clean”, as Obama insisted Iran do about their nuke program, and that the G-20 isn’t secret because, look, I’m here talking to you, Obama just said a bunch of stuff, and a lovely Leaders’ Statement was issued summarizing all the stuff the G-20 discussed in secret. There were many cameras in the room, and I was assured the press conference was being recorded, so I decided to save batteries on my mp3 recorder and not take any notes. Of course, now the only media I can find of this thing are some flickr photos and a blog post about his responses to some of the climate questions. Until video or audio corroboration surfaces, you’ll just have to take my word, or not, that Froman conveyed what I said he conveyed, much as we’re asked to take on faith what was and was not discussed in the sanctum sanctorum of the Convention Center. As above, so below, I suppose.
Awful stuff went down in Oakland yesterday after I hightailed it to Fe Gallery,
but, as of 11:11 Friday, far as I know, no one in this city has been directly killed by either the G-20 or their Starship Troopers. Obviously, that’s not saying much.
Just glad I can say it.
Abide in loving awareness, get your story out there and cuídate.
UPDATE 9-26-01
Jessica Silver dropped by today with the footage and photos she shot and which currently inhabit this and the previous post. If you liberate them, please give her credit.
