Citizen Awareness Campaign

lucidstrike:

I want a black bloc funeral. </final will>

anoncentral:

www.mainstreamrevolution.tumblr.com

anoncentral:

“Don’t give me lip son, I am the law!” Lawyer dons Red Square in solidarity with students and against bill 78!

May 28. 2012 - “Lawyers take to the streets with students for Montreal’s 35th consecutive night of protest”

Source: NationalPost

• An estimated 500 to 700 Lawyers protest against Bill 78

“We don’t want to break the law but we want to contest it,” explained Pierre, a 23-year-old articling lawyer who would not give his last name. He was among an estimated 500 to 700 lawyers, notaries and other legal professionals who marched in their black robes and in near silence from the Montreal courthouse to Place Émilie-Gamelin, where they were greeted by wildly cheering protesters gathered for their own nightly march.

There were several protests Monday night against planned tuition fee hikes and Bill 78. It was the 35th consecutive night of protests in the city and as of 9:30 p.m. police reported no arrests.

source: montrealgazette

Here’s an article in French lapresse

By: Occupy Canada

(via cultureofresistance)

(Source: empatheticvegan, via microcosmicmorganism)

President Obama and the Secret Kill List

Look at that Nobel Peace Prize winner. Executing people without trials and not even caring about collateral damage (or, as we might call them, murdered innocent civilians.)

(via fearandwar)

In case anyone was confused about how the Executive works (because apparently, according to Tumblr, Obama isn’t to blame but “institutions which can’t be changed”):

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

[…]

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

Read that last sentence again.

(via mohandasgandhi)

(via mohandasgandhi)

lazyyogi:

Silence is a passageway between worlds. When our mind stays silent, incredible aspects of our being emerge. Starting from that moment, a person becomes a vehicle of intent, and all his acts begin to ooze power.

Castaneda

Deb Roy is a father. He is also a scientist at MIT, an ingenious one at that. In an attempt to understand how humans learn language and relate to their environment in their early years he captures every moment of his son’s first moment on this earth. Using new software and human transcription called Blitzscribe he was able to track the development of specific words.

This break-through experiment will have far reaching effects that will impact new research into how we learn language, how we think and how we interact and learn through words.

But that isn’t all…

Roy is now taking the amazing research capability and team he’s developed and applying it to commerce. He’s on leave from MIT and has founded a VC-backed company called Bluefin Labs that applies these same high-powered analytics to relate, not the speech of a child to that of a father, but events broadcast on TV to conversations taking place in social media, the better to chart “engagement” with the State of the Union Address or Jersey Shore or a car commercial.

We are a step closer to understanding how our environment and what we are exposed to on a daily basis affects how we live and interact with our fellow humans.

A step forward indeed.

With the heating up of the summer comes the heating up of the fire within the people. The creeping corruption is becoming more and more apparent. Even now, Quebec, just north of the US is erupting in protests. The Middle East and Europe have been at it for some time. Now the last domino, the last piece of the puzzle awaits its turn. Its time for our time to shine.

thegrazing:

Canada student protests erupt into political crisis with mass arrests

More than 500 people were arrested in Montreal on Wednesday night as protestors defied controversial new law Bill 78

Protests that began in opposition to tuition fees in Canada have exploded into a political crisis with the mass arrest of hundreds of demonstrators amid a backlash against draconian emergency laws.

More than 500 people were arrested in a demonstration in Montreal on Wednesday night as protesters defied a controversial new law – Bill 78 – that places restrictions on the right to demonstrate. In Quebec City, police arrested 176 people under the provisions of the new law.

Demonstrators have been gathering in Montreal for just over 100 days to oppose tuition increases by the Quebec provincial government. On Tuesday, about 100 people were arrested after organisers say 300,000 people took the streets.

But what began as a protest against university fee increases has expanded to a wider movement to oppose Bill 78, which was rushed through by legislators in Quebec in response to the demonstrations. The bill imposes severe restrictions on protests, making it illegal for protesters to gather without having given police eight hours’ notice and securing a permit.

On Wednesday night, police in Montreal used kettling techniques – officers surrounding groups of protesters and not allowing them in or out of the resulting circle – before conducting a mass arrest.

Police immediately declared Wednesday’s protest illegal, but allowed it to continue for about four hours before surrounding protesters and making arrests.

Martine Desjardins, who represents more than 125,000 students in her role as president of the federation of university students in Quebec, said protesters had been “peaceful” on Wednesday’s march.

“It makes a lot of people angry,” she said. “We fear that tonight, because there will be more demonstrations going on, people will become a bit more violent, because as you saw yesterday, when you are peaceful, you get arrested.”

Police arrested 518 people at the demonstration, the largest number detained in a single night so far. Montreal police constable Daniel Fortier, who told reporters rocks were thrown at police, said most of those arrested would face municipal bylaw infractions for being at an illegal assembly.

“I was so so scared,” said Magdalena, one of those arrested, who asked that her last name not be given. She told the Guardian that she had been taking part in the protests since February, and that Wednesday night’s action had actually seemed particularly peaceful.

“This was one of the most jovial I’ve taken part in,” she said. “We were commenting how in good spirits we were, how everyone seemed in such great energy. There were families, children, women with strollers, which you don’t necessarily see at the night protests as much,” she said.

Protesters were allowed to walk freely and briskly through Montreal, she added, but that changed when they came to certain intersection, the pace of the march slowing dramatically. “We didn’t think anything of it,” Magdalena said. “All of a sudden you just smelled tear gas and could see smoke, and people were running.”

Magdalena said people from the front of the march came running back past her and her friend, who had been strolling with their bicycles. “We turned around and there was already a line of cops behind us. We tried to go on the other side but then there was cops there too.

Police officers then tightened their ring around the “hundreds” of protesters, she said, not allowing anyone in or out. Magdalena said this situation continued for an hour, before everyone in the group was read their rights. After that, it was another “hour or two” before she was detained with plastic handcuffs and led to a city bus. She said they were then kept on the bus for “hours and hours” and were not allowed to go to the toilet. “I have some medical problems, and I wasn’t feeling well. I really needed some water and I needed some sugar, and they were really awful, they said they didn’t care,” she said.

Magdalena said she was eventually charged with being part of an unlawful assembly, and given a ticket for $634, which she said she planned to contest.

Protesters have vowed to continue the nightly protests that began on 14 February when Quebec’s liberal provincial government announced it would introduce tuition fee increases over a five-year period. The Quebec government’s department of education, leisure and sport says fees would go up by $325 (£200) per year for five years from autumn 2012, a total increase of $1,625.

The protests have resulted in a backlash against the Quebec prime minister, Jean Charest, who has refused to back down over the tuition fee increase, and the new law.

Students have been boycotting classes over the past three months, arguing that the increases would lead to an increased dropout rate and more debt.

In response to the protests, the provincial government rushed through Bill 78 on 18 May. As well as the restrictions on protests, it suspends the current academic term and provides for when and how classes are to resume.

Some student organisers said that the introduction of the bill, far from cowing the demonstrations, had actually brought more support for their cause.

‘This draconian law has revolted me’

Mathieu Murphy-Perron, who has been helping to organise demonstrations against tuition fees since last year, said: “I would say that I’ve seen more individuals come out and say: ‘You know what? I was neutral on the question of tuition fees, but to bring this draconian law has revolted me and I will take to the streets with you.

“There have been more and more people who recognise that Bill 78 is a breach of the right of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and they’re not going to have it.”

Some legal experts argue that the bill contravenes Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. Montreal constitutional lawyer Julius Grey told the Vancouver Sun that Bill 78 was “flagrantly unconstitutional”. Opposition has come from the Quebec Bar Association and the Quebec human rights commission.

In an appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the US on Saturday night, the Grammy award-winning band Arcade Fire, who come from Montreal, wore symbolic red squares of cloth on their chests during their performance, in support of the protests.

Murphy-Perron said the red-hued, four sided shapes were visible “everywhere you go” in Montreal, adding that they show the “inter-generational aspect of this struggle”.

“You see red squares on buildings, on homes, on children, on teenagers, on students, on bluehairs, you see them everywhere.”

Desjardins said that she and other student representatives will meet with the government next week in Montreal or Quebec City to discuss tuition fees – the fourth meeting since strikes began.

In the meantime the daily marches would continue, she said, adding that protesters were also planning a protest in Ottawa, around 150 miles west of Montreal, on 29 May. Ottawa is in a different province from Montreal, and so safe from the clutches of Bill 78 – introduced only in Quebec.

“It’s something to ridicule the bill,” she said. “If we are restricted to have a demonstration in Montreal, or in the province, we are going to go outside the province, to Ontario, and have a big demonstration there.”

(via cultureofresistance)

Capitalism, as we have seen, is a class divided society based on exploitation. Under capitalism a tiny highly privileged minority rules over the large majority and lives off their labour. How do they get away with it ?

The answer, as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci pointed out, is by a combination of force and consent. In reality force and consent are very closely intertwined and mutually reinforce each other, but for the moment I shall discuss them separately.

The element of force is primarily exercised by the state, that network of interlocking institutions – armed forces, police, judiciary, prisons, government bureaucracies etc – which stands over society and claims general authority, including a monopoly of legitimate force.

(Source: johnmolyneux.blogspot.com.au, via anoncentral)

(Source: ktizzlemynizzle, via potasc)

spasticzombie:

I think I’ve said this before but I have this poster on my wall :3

(Source: weeptowaterthetrees, via occupyallstreets)

americawakiewakie:

Truth

amodernmanifesto:

NATO: Just why are people protesting?

The backstory:

1. NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — was formed in 1949 to make the world safe from communism and safe for capitalism. Today, NATO includes 28 nations, including many in the east previously…

inothernews:

WORST AMENDMENT   Getty Images freelance photographer Joshua Lott is arrested by police while covering protests on the first day of the NATO summit in Chicago.  It’s unclear if Lott has been charged; his photos from the protests have been published by numerous Getty affiliates, including the Los Angeles Times.  (Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images via The Guardian)

What part of “a free press” do police departments not understand?

Apparently just the core concept.

(Source: Guardian, via guerrillanetwork)