Who IS that masked man?
Julian Assange: no wonder I love this man
Oh Julian, the Sexy Jedi look suits you.
Actually, you have to respect that; the man is under house arrest (still no charges laid, please note) and still he comes out in solidarity at the OccupyLondon protest, mask and all. And here’s me, staying up till 4am removing all my ID and sign-in apps from my iPod and thinking about taking off my nail polish to be less recognizable. Live and learn!
We are all Anonymous now. The institutions that we’ve built, paid for, worked in, with, and against, have become like those sentient robots in the old movies: we built them to help us, and instead they’ve enslaved us. They’ve taken away our very humanity, so that we really ARE anonymous, so much so that there’s a general push on the part of our organizations to force us to carry identification at all times, because the institutions control the access to indentification and thus to identity itself. They first depersonalized us and then told us we had to carry our serial numbers at all times. Without ID, you essentially don’t exist and you cannot claim any rights in our current climate. Not when things like the Patriot Act exist, when the governments of most Western nations collaborate with bloody dictators to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. Go on, carry your driver’s license, and realize that ICBC is collaborating with the Vancouver Police Department to provide face recognition software so you can be tracked, even while obeying the law. Just in case the government needs something on you. And don’t forget that the gap between the richest 1% and the rest is larger and growing faster in BC than it is in the US, and that Canada has more billionaires per capita than any other nation.
Long ago I wrote about the Manual of Afghani Jihad and the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said that if our world had anything as spiritually compelling as those documents, we would solve most of the world’s problems. Alienation would be a thing of the past instead of the universal constant.
Well now alienation is a weapon.
Anonymous and similar groups have answered that call. Here is their manifesto, in video form, from that pinko muckraker Charlie Chaplin. Why not? We’ve heard from George Carlin and Fran Lebowitz on Occupy Wall Street. Why not Charlie Chaplin?
Dude has it going on.
While we’re at it, let’s hear from Oscar Wilde on Occupy Everywhere:
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
– Oscar Wilde
Occupy Comics!
Here’s a slideshow of Occupy Vancouver shots from News1130 (and hey, if you’re done with your Nony mask, I could really use one! Hint! Hint! I’ll be the one walking around without a Nony mask!):
Vodpod videos no longer available.Nice work.
There’s a fantastic roundup of shots on TheCrunchyBanjo, far better than I could ever do, so DO take a look through them all. Here’s just one:
Occupy Together at Occupy Vancouver by Max Hirst
And an aerial view of the protest:
Occupy Vancouver from the roof of the Rosewood
and a rather poignant Anon:
How IS Bobby McGee these days?
Let’s see what the Powers That Be have to say about this…hmmm, how about asking the head of the Bank of Canada, a former Goldman Sachs-er:
Demonstrations like the Occupy Wall Street protests, which will hit Canadian cities this weekend, are a “democratic expression of views’’ and “entirely constructive,’’ Mr. Carney said.
“It makes it more tangible, the challenges that that economy is facing, and it makes it more important to demonstrate success on issues such as financial reform,’’ he said.
The words that Mr. Carney applies to the civil disruption carry extra weight because the Harper government is pushing for him to become the next chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a group charged with co-ordinating the overhaul of international banking regulations. There is widespread fear that, the more time that passes, the tougher it will be to muster political enthusiasm for reforms, against which the financial industry is lobbying furiously.
Mr. Carney has been a fierce critic of the industry backlash and has vowed to counter it.
What is this? I can’t even…I think my brain just broke. Even the 1%ers are on our side.
Here are some cool, free-use logos for the 99%. If you see Conrad Black using them, well just take them away from him. He’s a stateless, convicted felon desperate enough to try anything, tho, so be prepared for ninja moves. Slooooow ninja moves.
I am the 99 percent
The 99% has a significant sub-percentage of hipsters. Well, what else are you going to do but protest if you’re an over-educated, underemployed or unemployed person who cares about what the world is coming to and worries that if you don’t speak up NOW, you may miss your chance forever? You protest. And then you party.
Radically awesome.
and now, more from My Imaginary Boyfriend, Julian Assange.
Want to know what the future looks like, Vancouver? It looks like OccupySpain, that’s what it looks like. And this is what THAT looks like:
Spain looks pretty occupied to me
raincoaster 
0.8% of the Canadian population is worth $1 million or more.
By the time the last Baby Boomer is 65-years old only 1% of them will have $1+ million.
The financial industry has been selling a lie to the masses for 30+ years. Most people believed the hype and gave their money to the banks. How did that work out for you? How did that work out for them? Even the people who tell you that you need $2 million to retire won’t even have that when they retire! The price of broad commodities has outstripped stocks for the last 40 years. The millionaires don’t make their millions from the stock market, so why do all the financial planners sell the rest of us the lie? The banks won’t make you rich and the stock markets are built upon decades of credit fraud. Keep your money out of both (unless you are an expert at short selling!).
To protest “the rich” is inherently inane.
To show global solidarity for those protesting against a banking system which knowingly and willfully committed crimes, and a fully aiding and abetting political system, who together caused a massive global economic crisis, with only positive repercussions (ie. bonuses) to the top 1%, that is respectable behaviour.
As for the politicians…you only have yourself to blame if you think any one of them will ever do anything above and beyond self-escalation.
Banks are businesses, their goal is money.
A politician’s sole purpose is to gain power, and then to preserve that power.
Two parasitic peas that feed each others egos.
Have no illusions, these old white boys are entrenched like nothing else.
You might be 90, or your grand-children might be 90, before an honest financial and political system is put in place. But you have to start somewhere.
Iceland did it in 4 months in 2009 with a mere 3,000…protesting on Saturdays only.
They let their “too big” banks fail — with no burden to the tax payer — and now their economy is stronger than the US’ or Canada’s.
Remember, those in power will always fear change.
Viva.
I”m totally in favour of letting the banks fail. Where’d you read otherwise?
Dude, you’re preaching to the choir: check out the Anarchy tag here.
It’s general facts for those who are uninformed and might land on this site seeking more info about the situation.
If you wish to assert facts, cite your sources. My sources, linked to on the blog, are the Civil Disobedience guide which was current as of September 23rd of this year, and the head of the Bank of Canada, quoted in another article on this site.
“The institutions that we’ve built, paid for, worked in, with, and against, have become like those sentient robots in the old movies: we built them to help us, and instead they’ve enslaved us. They’ve taken away our very humanity, so that we really ARE anonymous, so much so that there’s a general push on the part of our organizations to force us to carry identification at all times, because the institutions control the access to identification and thus to identity itself. They first depersonalized us and then told us we had to carry our serial numbers at all times.”
Perhaps this explains the popularity of the zombie archetype in our modern popular culture. A refection of how that sense of alienation and depersonalization runs so deep…
People (academics, intellectuals) have been saying what you suggest here for decades. Since the 1940s. It’s the foundation of the critical theory perspective that inspired perhaps the most important Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. In The Malaise of Modernity Taylor spoke of the “iron cage” and “instrumental rationality”, an element of our social order which continues to function efficiently regardless of its actual benefit to the social world.
We’re reaching a critical point, where the rational assumptions of the society we created have produced harmful and irrational effects…But the bias is deeply embedded. It amounts to a paradigm — a world-view. And changing world-views is harder than it seems…
Yes, that’s a great catch! I’ve been meaning to talk about zombies and alienation for a long time, too long. You saw Shaun of the Dead, of course.
Looks like I’ll have to read the Malaise of Modernity. Sounds like just my kind of thing. And of course Brave New World, too.
I keep telling people that networking is the “New Paradigm” on how we earn a living and to do it smarter and not work as hard to get there. http://www.whatanasshat.me/tomcat It’s up to you to take charge of your future, we have the social network of people to make happen my friends. Positive and forward thinking ……..
The Cat
That’s total MLM spam, but I’m leaving it up to make fun of you. Link edited out.
Paradigm spam…Too much!! Indeed, Shaun of the Dead is good stuff. Can’t believe you haven’t read Huxley’s classic yet! Hand in hand with 1984 to my mind. Would be a good fictional complement to Taylor’s philosophy, which in the Malaise of Modernity incarnation is quite digestible for the intellectual “non-academic” (i.e. non-pedant).
Oh no, of COURSE I’ve read it. I just haven’t re-read it recently. And definitely to be read with 1984. I think reading the two of them when I was 16 made me what I am today.
“I think reading the two of them when I was 16 made me what I am today” = “like”.
@raincoaster: “If you wish to assert facts, cite your sources.”
Sure — mathematics is my source.
Should I cite the ancient Greeks or the modern Germans/French?
Or do you want some homework?
Start with these:
S&P 500 history and TRUE historical returns;
Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act;
Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act;
Stats Can;
Merryl Lynch World Wealth Reports
Ibbotson Reports.
Viva.
The source for numbers is never “mathematics.” Mathematics is the grammar of dealing with numbers, not the source.
Links, please. Also: how in hell do you get any information out of Stats Can? It’s like trying to sip from Niagara Falls.
I’ll leave the “Which came first — numbers or math?” debate alone. Thanks.
S&P 500 history and TRUE historical returns:
http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/FINANCE/SandP500Hist.html
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0040&FundIntExt=INT#hist=tab%3A1
Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act,
Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act:
http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/8000-4100.html
Stats Can:
Click to access t364-eng.pdf
Merrill Lynch:
Click to access 114235.pdf
Ibottson:
http://corporate.morningstar.com/ib/asp/detail.aspx?xmlfile=1409.xml
Bank Marketing:
http://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2011/09/15/gen-ys-2-million-retirement-price-tag
Hope that feed you for a while.
I’ll let you connect all the dots…unless you REALLY want me to post all the math.
As for finding info on the internet…it’s insanely easy.
I don’t know why everyone isn’t massively learned by now.
Just takes effort.
Viva.
Pingback: Calvin and Hobbes on Occupy Wall Street « raincoaster