I don't know if anyone out there in the ether realizes this, but ...

The recent arrests of the occupy movement have focused on the legal and journalistic constituents of the movement. 100% of those who are arrested are legal counsel, video streamers, known bloggers, or avid twitters, despite their being less than 5% of protest population. The police are singling them out.

And as they are held for 2 or 3 days, some of them have $50,000 bails for a misdemeanor offense. Or they are threatened to have their retina's scanned (which is what happened in New York City). Why do they want to scan retinas? Makes you wonder if the drones used in the middle might actually be used for some purpose in the United States?

Am I paranoid?

Click here for the source blog where this awesome summary of how Money is really government debt that is used as a medium of exchange and facilitate the purchase of goods, payment of wages, and payment for services.

David Graeber’s Debt The First Five Thousand Years is a brilliant and powerful book; and even, I would say, a crucial one. Graeber does several things. He shows how the notion of “debt” has been integral to any notion of an “economy.” He traces the history of debt, both as an economic concept and as a metaphor for other forms of social engagement, back to the Mesopotamian civilizations of thousands of years ago. He traces the changes in how debt is conceived, and how economic exchange is organized, in various Eurasian civilizations and societies since then. And he contrasts these relations of economy and debt to those that existed (and still exist to some extent) in non-state societies (the ones that anthropologists tend to study)

[SOURCE: Shapiro blog |  | 19 November 2011]

From February 2007 to April 2011

Click on the picture to go to an interactive timeline.

[SOURCE: St. Louis Fed

Click here for the Wall Street Journal blog entry by Robert Frank.

“I’ve never been a ‘job creator,’ ” writes Nick Hanauer, who helped start several start-ups, including aQuantive, which was sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. “I can start a business based on a great idea and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.”

It’s this “feedback loop” between mass consumers and businesses that creates jobs.

“When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution,” he writes. “In fact, it’s the other way around.”

The spending of the rich can’t make up the difference for a gutted middle class. Hanauer said his biggest expense is his jet, which doesn’t support many American jobs since it was made in France and fueled with oil from the Middle East.

The answer, he says, is to tax the rich so their money can be used to improve the purchasing power of the middle class.

Charles A. Pierce writes his take on the recent NBA events.

Here's my favorite snippet:

Another way you know that it wasn't really about economics is that the league's economic public case for its position became more and more preposterous as the weeks went by, and even the public began to notice that it was being taken for a fool. The hilarity hit high tide for me when David Stern started going around explaining that 22 of his 30 franchises were losing money.

Tell me, do you suppose that when Stern sat down and chatted with the Nike corporation, or with the People's Republic of China, to name only two of the wildly successful authoritarian operations with which the league does its business, the first thing he explained while pitching the NBA to them was that 73 percent of his league was in the red? Did you, at any time, expect to see Herb Simon, the shopping-mall billionaire who owns the "small-market" Indiana Pacers — a team that he bought for $11 million and which is now estimated to be worth $269 million — swiping the leftover bourbon chicken off abandoned plates in his various food courts unless the players surrendered to him a chunk of their dough?

Of course you didn't, because your mother didn't raise a fool when she raised you.

(Can the NBA produce financial documents testifying that Simon and his fellow plutocrats were perilously close to selling apples on Fifth Avenue? Yes, because almost anyone could, if they hired Philip K. Dick to do their accounting.)

And the third and most important reason why you know that the lockout was not really about economics is that there was a lockout at all. Because 30 years of propaganda — thanks, Ronnie! — have convinced most people under 50 that unions are for losers, it eluded many of the people covering these events that lockouts are, and will always be, things willed into being exclusively by management. They are not natural phenomena. They are never truly unavoidable. They don't "just happen," and they certainly do not occur because "both sides" are at fault. Lockouts occur when management believes that unions are too strong, and they occur when management believes that unions are too weak, and they occur when management doesn't want a union to exist at all.

Lockouts are not devices of economic correction. That's just a byproduct. Lockouts are attempts by management to exercise control over their workers. Period.

[SOURCE: Grantland.com | Charles A. Pierce | 28 November 2011]

The idea of transference means "the action of transferring something or the process of being transferred" . The branch of psychology called transference neurosis is "the redirection to a substitute of emotions that were originally felt in childhood" . I got this idea from the television series Law & Order that I will watch sporadically throughout the year, when I have time.

The show deals with human psychology and the devolution of unresolved social and personal issues becoming transformed into monstrous consequences. The particular show involved an older gentleman who transfered his traumatized notions of his mother having an affair with a jew into a hatred for jews in general. The man thought his secretary mother was raped by the jewish owner rather than becoming a willing accomplice, unable to admit that life is more complicated, irrational, and hypocritical then what he might have wanted. The man devolved when his mother died and he carried out a series of 7 deaths against hebrews -- which is a rather extreme end to this set of events, but then what do you expect from a tv show that needs to attract eyeballs. To be fair, the show did a good job evincing the characters involved in the script.

But it got me thinking about transference. This might be an innate human mechanism of dealing with very painful events. We redirect the challenging emotions towards a substitute, for whatever reason, and there are many different reasons. The mind makes its own connections and hypotheses of events; therefore, the mind finds and accepts its own substitutes.

Emotions are like water. Some persons control their flow of water at a regular constant drip. Others spray all over the place at different irregular intervals, or rush out, and some even turn off the spigot for most of their entire life. But when emotions fill an underground reservoir of pain, the deposits accumulate and grow. Soon the enormous amount of water has to go somewhere, and where it goes may or may not be the choice of the water carrier. Drainage systems have to be installed, and they are usually installed without any plan, on an as needed basis. So after a while, the drainage system becomes dysfunctional and has to be rebuilt or re-routed. This involves having to make decisions and choices that are difficult because of historical associations and various other personal attachments. However, whatever decision that is made, dictates the drainage construction and infrastructure (or lack thereof) that proceeds afterwards.

Ignoring the inevitable is the most frequent strategy. Lacking any absolutely necessary reason to change or reassess, the human species will merely drift, carrying on the current traditions and practices with which we have become imbued.

19 attempts to evict versus 200 occupations.

We report you decide.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ UPDATE ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Click here for the source of the map provided by Daily Kos. The 200 events stem from the 4th of October when the Kos post occurred.