State of the Union

2012-01-28T01:24:00.000-05:00

2012-01-28T01:03:00.001-05:00

2012-01-28T00:47:00.000-05:00

2012-01-27T20:14:00.000-05:00

[Freedom Plaza on 1/22/12]

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2012-01-27T20:03:00.000-05:00

[McPherson Square]

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2012-01-27T19:38:00.003-05:00

McPherson Square on 1/22/12. Starting at noon on 1/31/12, the National Park Service will ban camping at both Occupy DC sites.

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2012-01-27T19:17:00.002-05:00

9:33AM on 1/22/12 at DuPont Circle. Person with can of soda and two bags of whole wheat rotini.

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2012-01-27T16:44:00.003-05:00

4:53PM on 1/19/12, at 17th and L, four blocks from the White House. 29°F. He was walking back and forth and raving in Spanish.

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2012-01-27T12:35:00.000-05:00

2012-01-27T12:10:00.001-05:00

2012-01-27T12:00:00.001-05:00

2012-01-27T10:53:00.002-05:00

[McPherson Square]

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2012-01-27T10:34:00.000-05:00

2012-01-27T10:19:00.000-05:00

2012-01-27T10:05:00.001-05:00

2012-01-27T09:23:00.002-05:00

2012-01-27T08:41:00.001-05:00

2012-01-27T00:17:00.004-05:00

1/19/12. Occupiers outside the Capitol Hilton Hotel, where there was a conference of American mayors. Later, there would be an incident between protesters and Oakland mayor, Jean Quan.

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2012-01-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T23:04:00.001-05:00

[Donald Arthur Kronos]

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2012-01-26T22:25:00.001-05:00

2012-01-26T22:03:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T15:39:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T15:19:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T14:40:00.003-05:00

[1/19/12 on K Street, right outside the Catholic Information Center, 3 1/2 blocks from the White House and half a block from McPherson Square, a site of Occupy DC.]

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2012-01-26T14:11:00.001-05:00

2012-01-26T13:24:00.001-05:00

[11:21PM on 1/22/12 at Union Station]

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2012-01-26T12:31:00.004-05:00

Propaganda from Monsanto, the company that have brought you Agent Orange, PCBs, Dioxin, cancer-inducing BST milk and genetically modified seeds.

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2012-01-26T12:06:00.001-05:00

2012-01-26T10:30:00.001-05:00

2012-01-26T10:13:00.000-05:00

2012-01-26T09:46:00.002-05:00

[ad inside Metro station]

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2012-01-26T09:25:00.003-05:00

6:08PM on 1/19/12, 28°F, 1 1/2 block from the Martin Luther King Library and two from the basketball arena. Under the blue tarp, an old black man.

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2012-01-26T09:04:00.001-05:00

[8:57PM, 1/19/12, Pennsylvania Avenue across from West Wing of National Gallery and within sight of the US Capitol. 28°F.]

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2012-01-25T15:28:00.003-05:00

[9:19PM, 1/19/12, Pennsylvania Avenue across from East Wing of National Gallery and within sight of the US Capitol. 28°F.]

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2012-01-25T14:55:00.004-05:00

[9:03PM, 1/19/12, Pennsylvania Avenue outside the Newseum and within sight of the US Capitol. 28°F.]

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2012-01-25T14:37:00.002-05:00

[Constitution Avenue, across the street from the National Museum of American History.]

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2012-01-25T14:10:00.001-05:00

2012-01-25T12:24:00.000-05:00

2012-01-25T10:55:00.005-05:00

Conception Picciotto inside her small tent at 5:50PM on 1/22/12. 30°F. Also, Conception from 2011, 2010 and 2009.

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2012-01-24T22:52:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T17:49:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T17:39:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T16:48:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T16:33:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T16:18:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T16:01:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T13:55:00.005-05:00

Shaun had these cards out, but without prices, so I suggested that he put out a price card, "Otherwise, people will think you're hustling them!" I also reminded him to state that they were handmade. I disappeared for a couple hours and when I came back to Market Square, he seemed all happy. "Did you sell anything?" I asked.

"Yeah, brother, and I have to thank you for helping me out!"

"What? I didn't do anything."

"Yes, you did," and he shook my hand and took off.

The next day, I found out that a bar waitress had bought a card from him, and instead of giving him $6, as requested, she gave him a twenty.

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2012-01-24T13:29:00.001-05:00

[Obituary]

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2012-01-24T13:17:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T13:01:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T11:25:00.001-05:00

2012-01-24T11:10:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T10:51:00.004-05:00

The Carpenters Union is protesting against Jim McIntyre, Superintendent of the Knox County Schools, but the man in photo is not a carpenter. He's hired by the union to man this protest, and it's a job he's glad to have, he said. Until March of last year, he worked as a plant manager. Such a position pays over $90,000 a year, on average.

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2012-01-24T10:30:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T10:01:00.000-05:00

2012-01-24T09:46:00.000-05:00

2012-01-23T23:00:00.001-05:00

2012-01-23T22:23:00.000-05:00

2012-01-23T22:04:00.000-05:00

2012-01-23T21:50:00.002-05:00

[Preservation Pub]

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2012-01-23T21:30:00.001-05:00

2012-01-23T20:59:00.001-05:00

2012-01-23T14:54:00.005-05:00

Waitress at Preservation Pub. A native of New Orleans, she's in Knoxville to go to school. The night before, she got so trashed she bought everyone drinks, then a handmade Valentine's card from a homeless man, sitting at a table just outside this bar. He asked for $6, she gave him 20.

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2012-01-23T14:43:00.000-05:00

[David and Charlie]

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2012-01-23T14:25:00.001-05:00

David was all blustery and acting tough but I could tell that he was really mellow at heart, a big pussy, really, and I mean that in the best way.

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I was interviewed by James Feltzer

2012-01-18T18:16:00.004-05:00

on December 28, 2011. The MP3 is now available. I'm not big on talking over the phone, and the interviewed was conducted via Skype, which is phone-like enough, so I drank two big cans of Forster just to loosen my tongue a bit. I hope I didn't ramble too much.

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2012-01-18T18:12:00.001-05:00

This blog will be dormant until next Monday evening, as I'll be in DC and Knoxville.

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2012-01-18T17:53:00.000-05:00

2012-01-18T17:25:00.001-05:00

2012-01-18T16:51:00.000-05:00

2012-01-18T16:34:00.000-05:00

2012-01-18T15:41:00.003-05:00

For 30 years, Jim worked as a manager at a warehouse owned by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the very first in the US, founded in 1790. After Nasdaq acquired it in 2008, they laid off 200 of its 400 employees, including Jim. Now he sings Creedence Clearwater and Beatles songs for tips at a commuter train station. Since he doesn't remember all the lyrics, he has to look at sheets of paper as he sings. After a song today, he announced, "This is good for pocket money, folks, but it doesn't pay the bills! If anyone has a real job to offer, please let me know!"

The man in red, John, works at a shoeshine stand. He stopped by to sing along, then dropped a buck into Jim's guitar case.

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2012-01-18T15:25:00.000-05:00

Collateral Savages

2012-01-16T17:39:00.009-05:00

As published on OpEd News, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch and Intrepid Report, 1/17/12:

It is a recurring theme: civilization committing barbaric acts to feed its refined gluttony. As we found out about American Marines urinating on dead Afghans, there was also a story about Brazilian loggers tying an eight-year-old girl to a tree and burning her to death. She belonged to the Awá, an Amazon tribe of around 300 members, with only 60 still clinging to their hunter-gatherer way of life. To maintain our so-called civilized standards of living, collateral damages are inevitable, and “savages” must be sacrificed.

If they get in the way of civilization’s quest for petroleum, lumber, tin, zinc, copper, whatever, they must be killed wholesale, or one by one, as was accomplished by Chris Kyle, currently touring bookstores to promote his American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. Kyle killed 255 “savages,” his term, and can stand before God with a clear conscience, he told Bill O’Reily, because he was saving American lives. FOX being FOX, the question of why Kyle was in Iraq in the first place was not probed.

With his tunnel vision specialty, teamwork ethics and preoccupation with numbers, Kyle is the quintessential tool in civilization’s machinery. Tasked with long-distance, targeted killing, he performed outstandingly, and is proud of his feats, all carefully quantified. His 160 Pentagon-confirmed kills wipe out the previous American record of 109, held by Delbert F. Waldron, not to mention the relatively puny 93 of Carlos Hathcock. Kyle’s longest shot was 2,100 yards. Though impressively long, yes, very long, it’s dwarfed by the 2,700 yards recorded by one Horse Craig Harrison, a Brit.

Empire is civilization’s greatest efflorescence and final aim. With empire comes the tallest, biggest and longest of everything. Citizens of empire, down to the lowest cog, bathe themselves daily with numbers as a kind of self-congratulation. Counting themselves hoarse to prove that they are in fact content, they measure their achievement and happiness with Dow and Nasdaq indexes, inches on flat-screen TVs, cars sold, runs and touchdowns scored by sport heroes, and savages killed by even more heroes. A large number denoting anything, even debt, cheers up denizens of an empire since it is proof of their gigantism. Empires compete to see who can piss the longest and furthest, over the most continents.

What a contrast this is to a primitive nomad, who sees properties as a burden, and thus does not care to count hardly anything. The most extreme example of this is another Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose language includes no cardinal numbers at all. They simply can’t count, and have no interest in doing so. American scholar Daniel Everett spent an hour each night for eight months trying to teach them numbers in Portuguese, with zero success, “It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board.”

Though living on a finite planet, the subjects of empire are indoctrinated into the religion of infinite growth, with anything short of that seen as a major disaster. With their gross appetites, they cannot conceive of a no-growth existence, though that was the economy of man for thousands of years. During the age of fossil fuels, now winding down, this infinite growth formula can appear sane and sustainable, but as oil and gas go scarce, its murderous and suicidal nature will become ever starker, like an innocent girl being burnt at the stake.

Most of the planet must slave and starve, so the anointed few can consume, yet even these lucky buyers must themselves slave, commute long hours and pop uppers or downers nonstop to afford that Ipod, Ipad and Xbox. Speaking of which, here’s a still relevant insight from Ben Franklin:

“Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.”—from his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America

With social networking, who needs face-to-face conversations? Slaves to bogus needs and virtual thrills, we have become estranged from the real, with our savage instincts, suppressed, flaring up as conceits or pathologies. Often they explode overseas, as the T-shirt says: TRAVEL TO EXOTIC LANDS, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE THEN KILL THEM.

In an advanced civilization, a nomadic existence, with its hunting pack, can only be approximated in a war, but instead of hunting animals for subsistence, our boys are gunning down people who are merely trying to prevent us from exploiting and humiliating them. With such a dubious reason to kill or be killed, it’s not surprising that many of these soldiers come back home only to kill themselves.

As I write this, the US is encircling, harassing and sabotaging Iran, yet few Americans seem alarmed that for the sake of oil, again, and increasingly elusive economic growth, their leaders may kill millions and wreck this earth even further, but as their empire convulses and collapses, most Americans will find themselves reduced to the level of those they’ve been annihilating. They will discover that they, too, are just collateral savages.

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2012-01-12T00:35:00.000-05:00

2012-01-12T00:00:00.006-05:00

Half an hour before this photo, I followed a black, middle-aged man into The Dollar Store because he was talking to himself, "You eat garbage, listen to garbage and read nothing, no wonder why you're garbage! Don't tell me you're loaded. I know pimps who are loaded! Prostitutes who are loaded. Loaded ain't nothing! Your mind isn't worth two cents. My dad got a PhD when he was 26, and my mom, she got a Master's. In fact, she got two! One in science, and one in philosophy. A son has got to be equal to or better than the father, that's how you move forward, but you don't even know your sons. In fact, you don't even know your father! My father, he played with Cab Calloway. He even met that, uh, that banana lady. What's her name? I can't think of her name at the moment, the banana lady. Oh, yes, Josephine Baker! My father met Josephine Baker when she was 78-years-old. He said she had a body of a 23-year-old. Imagine that! Yes, give me a good woman any day, because I know how to be a man. A real man."

Josephine Baker died at 68, by the way.

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2012-01-11T21:02:00.001-05:00

2012-01-11T20:08:00.002-05:00

[Dirty Frank's]

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2012-01-10T15:14:00.001-05:00

[2,3,4,5]

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2012-01-10T13:16:00.003-05:00

Monday, 1/9/12--"Two for a dollar, two for a dollar. Who's next? How are you today? Very good to see you. Two for a dollar, two for a dollar. Who's next? Welcome back, it's happy Monday. It's time to go to work! It's a beautiful day today, but don't get used to it. It's going to get colder tomorrow! Two for a dollar, two for a dollar. It's very nice to see you. Welcome back!"

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2012-01-10T12:47:00.000-05:00

2012-01-10T11:47:00.004-05:00

Harvey, 18, is a college freshman studying political science. When he stated he was considering law school, I warned, "Be careful. Do you know that only half of law school graduates could find jobs in their field?" Harvey is reading Naomi Klein for class, and he has discovered Chris Hedges and Common Dreams on his own. I told him about Howard Zinn. At 18-years-old, I was much more politically naive than Harvey is, for sure. Harvey is from Robbinsville, a wealthy suburb of Trenton. Many people there work in pharmaceuticals.

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2012-01-10T11:17:00.003-05:00

Lamont. In left background is Vito, a second generation Italian-American. He was unemployed for two years before he found work at Papa John's, but it is only part time. He now works 3 to 4 hours a night, 3 nights a week.

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2012-01-10T02:30:00.000-05:00

2012-01-10T01:38:00.007-05:00

Inside Columbus International Pizza. The two men and one woman behind the counter were Mexican, but the owner had to be Italian because I saw a photo of Padre Pio on the wall. All the customers but me were black. Ten minutes after this photo, several black teenaged girls ran in and sat down at a couple of booths, to be followed by a Korean shopkeeper about 30 seconds later. They had apparently shoplifted from her store because she started to tussle with them as they ran out. Yelling, "Call 911! Call 911!" she managed to yank a small plastic bag from one girl, then ran after the rest down the street.

A customer came in and asked, "Yo, what happened?"

The lady behind the counter answered, "No big deal. Nobody shot nobody."

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2012-01-10T01:19:00.000-05:00

2012-01-10T00:51:00.000-05:00

2012-01-10T00:37:00.000-05:00

2012-01-09T23:57:00.000-05:00

2012-01-08T22:38:00.000-05:00

2012-01-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

2012-01-08T14:12:00.001-05:00

2012-01-08T13:49:00.000-05:00

2012-01-08T10:52:00.001-05:00

[Same woman from 10/21/09 and 9/9/10.]

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2012-01-08T10:12:00.000-05:00

2012-01-08T09:40:00.001-05:00

2012-01-08T09:06:00.000-05:00

Kensington, famous for the Kenzo Mouthwash and Rocky Balboa.

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2012-01-08T00:16:00.002-05:00

[Kensington]

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