Berberis trifoliolata, Mahonia trifoliolata

Agarita, agarito, chaparral berry, wild currant, currant-of-Texas

Occupy protesters engage in other ways

On Monday, an hour after Occupy D.C. organized a noisy rally on Jones’s behalf in front of Freddie Mac’s offices on Seventh Street NW, a spokesman for the government-backed mortgage giant said the company was working toward a “positive resolution” that would allow her to keep her home. Brad German, a spokesman for Freddie Mac, said that the company decided to work with Jones because of the merits of her case and that the rally had little effect on the decision.

from bmaz at Emptywheel

here

Just a snippet from the middle of bmaz's post. Whole thing worth reading. Oh, bmaz is a trial lawyer, and no fan of Obama.

snip~
There were two openings on the most critical Circuit court in the country when Barack Obama took office, and he did not bother to even make a single nomination for nearly two years and, instead, waited until his huge senate majority was effectively down the crapper with the 2010 Congressional election disaster. Since that time, another seat has gone vacant on the DC Circuit, and Obama barely lifted a finger to support his sole nominee, Caitlin Halligan, whose nomination went down in flames in December.~

Today on FOX [ick]. "Coulter Rips Jeb Bush, Suggests He Has Eyes on GOP Nomination." Except the last Jebbie story was three days ago, and after that it died. So why revive it?

Sure, it's all just different branches of the Stasi, but bad optics:

Millions of dollars in White House money has helped pay for New York Police Department program that put entire American Muslim neighbourhoods [and what other neighborhoods?] under surveillance.

The money is part of a little-known grant [slush fund] intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135m to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area programme, known as HIDTA.

Those of us who are still scammable. But I figured he was punting 'til 2013. Nope: Let the Canadians do it:

The White House on Monday welcomed a Canadian company's plan to build an oil pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas after President Barack Obama blocked the larger Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

The new proposal by Calgary-based TransCanada does not require presidential approval because it does not cross a U.S. border.

No, it's not the complete pipeline.

I love this idea:

Todd Bol wanted to honor his mother, a former teacher and book lover who died a decade ago. So two years ago, Bol built a miniature model of a library, filled it with books for anyone to take, and placed it outside his home in Hudson, Wis.

He says people loved it. "People just kept coming up to it, looking at it, patting it, saying 'oh, it's cute,' " Bol recalls.

From that idea, hundreds of similar Little Free Libraries are popping up on lawns across the country. They're tiny — no bigger than a dollhouse. Some look like miniature homes or barns. Others just look like a box on a post.

Security giant G4S is the second-largest private employer on earth.

Mystery plant

Yes, another mystery plant, and it might be a tough one. This fern-like plant with little purple flowers was growing wild here (Zone 10, Southern California), so I brought one home and planted it in a shady spot in the backyard. That was two years ago. Now the offspring are turning up in potted plants all over the yard. I don't know how they got there, but they did it on their own. Spores maybe?

Izvestia:

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.

...in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit ... held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.

Yes, this is something completely different, but I wanted to get away, just for a little while, from "who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out", and consider a subject that's beautiful and long-lasting and useful and tasty; and something that's maybe in the political economy of all our futures, if we're lucky: Edible forests (also called food forests).

The Beacon Food Forest project will be breaking ground in Seattle this summer. Here's one example of a food forest, maybe something like what they hope to achieve:

@jaspergregory The common problem w DoT and NYCGA disruptors - anarchist horizontalism as implemented in Occupy = no boundaries.

2012-02-19 via

web

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@affinistim

Tim Affinis

And - From the Alliance of Community Trainers
Open Letter to the Occupy Movement: Why We Need Agreements

Excerpts:

Awesome.

Pravda. Here's the key paragraph:

The associate attorney general in charge of negotiations, Thomas J. Perrelli, also oversaw talks that led to the recent $26 billion foreclosure abuse settlement with major banks. Perrelli, a law school acquaintance of President Obama, is leaving the department March 9 after three years as its No. 3 official.

Alrighty then.

Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Misdirect Is Widespread in Occupy

There have been a handful of other reports around the country of infiltration. In Oakland, CopWatch filmed an Oakland police officer infiltrating. A nd, in another video CopWatch includes audio tape of an Oakland police chief, Howard Jordan, talking about how police departments all over the country infiltrate, not just to monitor protesters but to manipulate and direct them.

Tim Hetherington, a British photographer based in New York who was a director and producer of the film “Restrepo,” was killed in the besieged Libyan city of Misurata on Wednesday [4-20-11] ...

7-18-10 RE-POST:

Troops ream Afghan elders,
“Stop Taliban-money kills!"
OUR soldiers kill, why?

We never find out from this movie. We never hear any of them ask, either.

Fly-on-the-wall, or rather, on-the-craggy-rock-surface reality.

Mathbabe goes to town meeting on the CFPB

That's too bad.

Shepard Fairey pleads guilty to destroying evidence of copyright violation for image in famous "Hope" poster.

LA Times:

Reporting from Washington — As U.S. and Israeli officials talk publicly about the prospect of a military strike against Iran's nuclear program, one fact is often overlooked: U.S. intelligence agencies don't believe Iran is actively trying to build an atomic bomb.

A highly classified U.S. intelligence assessment circulated to policymakers early last year largely affirms that view, originally made in 2007. Both reports, known as national intelligence estimates, conclude that Tehran halted efforts to develop and build a nuclear warhead in 2003. ....

But Israel appears to have a lower threshold for action than Washington. It regards Iran as a threat to its existence and says it will not allow Iran to become capable of building and delivering a nuclear weapon. Some Israeli officials have raised the prospect of a military strike to stop Iran before it's too late. ...

And then the very last line:

Some [which?] developments have bolstered [sez who?] the view that Iran is secretly pursuing a weapon.

No doubt, no doubt. It is true that although the propaganda campaign for war with Iran comes from the same playbook as the propaganda campaign for war with Iraq, that Obama isn't beating the drum for war as crudely as Bush did.

Or bomb government forces. Do both if possible. This seems to be the US new foreign policy - but only for selected countries. Most of the world's countries in or on the brink of civil war we couldn't care less about; we seem to make an exception for Middle Eastern countries, Syria being only the latest.

I don't know or care what the issues are in Syria and this is what I do with articles about it TL;DR. Apparently, the younger Assad has pissed off the US and we're going to take him out, like we did with Kaddafy in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt. Our state department is ticked that Russia and China don't want to go along with our plan to further destabilize and lay waste to yet another small country in the Middle East.

Let's try an analogy -