apple juice

Billed by organizers as "the largest rally yet to protest mass surveillance", Stop Watching Us was sponsored by an unusually broad coalition of left- and right-wing groups, including everything from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Green Party, Color of Change and Daily Kos to the Libertarian Party, FreedomWorks and Young Americans for Liberty.

via Thousands gather in Washington for anti-NSA 'Stop Watching Us' rally | World news | theguardian.com.

Maybe Stop Watching Us will become a great unifying political movement? Maybe Stop Watching us and Rootstrikers can get together and create some change in our system.

I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said: “Don’t vote, it encourages them,” and, “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.

From a barn-burner of an essay from Russell Brand about politics. We no longer have the luxury of tradition

His observations about left-ist political movements lacking excitement are pretty interesting:

As John Cleese said, there is a tendency to confuse seriousness with solemnity. Serious causes can and must be approached with good humour, otherwise they’re boring and can’t compete with the Premier League and Grand Theft Auto. Social movements needn’t lack razzmatazz.

The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism.

The amazing thing about this – besides the lack of precaution in speaking in public on a train – is that someone from the NSA calls up Heyden to let him know someone is listening in on his conversation! Yikes.

Former Spy Chief Overheard Giving Off-The-Record Interview from Acela Train

The episode came to a remarkable conclusion shortly after Matzzie noticed Hayden receiving a new phone call, and joked on Twitter that Hayden’s office must have heard what was happening and called to warn the former spy chief.

President Obama:

“We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.

If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.

In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.

Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

(Via ThinkProgress.)

…a president typically does not start speaking about invoking his powers of office, or hint that political struggle is coming, or suggest that his own history of inaction was tragically mistaken, if he intends to do nothing in the face of an epidemic of murder. This is the kind of speech that suggests a major change in administration policy is on the horizon.

I sure hope so.

Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? – NYTimes.com

“Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence. “

We have the same video games, movies, television shows, media, music and books as every other industrialized country.

It’s the ease of access to guns.

This was on monday:

Jason Kottke has rounded up all the required reading

Listen. Today is the day for action. I don’t want this to be the country my kids grow up in.

WWJD?

Seeing a Homosexual Agenda, Christian Group Protests an Anti-Bullying Program – NYTimes.com

“But this year, the American Family Association, a conservative evangelical group, has called the project ‘a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools’ and is urging parents to keep their children home from school on Oct. 30, the day most of the schools plan to participate this year.”