In the star studded nightfall memoirs of me look intently
Your heart was out there blowing in the breeze of
The Spring, how have you become forlorn to picture
The Summer heated the earth frenzied and droughty?
Together with viewing shady trees on gray mountains
Open your insight and see the dejection of my mind
The rock-strewn yard covered with the tiptoeing rosemary

That stands before your eyes, with aroma returns our sanities
Must I feel the gravity, illustrious arroyo of love that you nurture
At heart for years, as I took it to mean your moments of denial
You lived at; still you urge to soar high in the blue like a seagull

In the star studded twilight memoirs of me say obviously
Sweetly sad sounds the flute Sonata played a wonderful
Way to falling in love stroked you deeply from far and away
Over the moon else lit up in me no ebb but the flow of lust
On highways of my core a red carpet reception for you solely
Ignoring all social medians and preferences we know risks
Us becoming the outcasts, still we’ll float on romanticism

The young guys were half a block ahead of us. Nothing was happening except that they were walking. A police car pulled up behind them, slowed to their pace, aimed a spotlight at them.

They were African-American (did you guess?), numbering maybe half a dozen. They weren’t intimidated. Some of them stopped, stood staring at the police car, talking to it; this had obviously happened before. The spotlight continued to shine in their faces. Other young men crossed the street in front of the car and joined the crowd. The game went on for a while: the slow saunter, the cops driving along next to them, the light in their faces.

Chicago, Chicago! My kind of town, but not this. How weird to see the moment unfold as I was walking along Pratt Avenue, through my own ’hood. The energy I felt was immensely unpleasant — racial profiling, pointless discord. Young black men in Chicago have to know their legal rights; that’s simply the way it works. These guys obviously did.

Suddenly the light snapped off. The police car accelerated, drove away. That was it. No further confrontation. The young men kept walking. I was an observer in an occupied zone.

Citing a wide range of ailments from leukemia to blindness to birth defects, 79 American veterans of 2011’s earthquake/tsunami relief Operation Tomadachi (“Friendship”) have filed a new $1 billion class action lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power.

The suit includes an infant born with a genetic condition to a sailor who served on the USS Ronald Reagan as radiation poured over it during the Fukushima melt-downs, and an American teenager living near the stricken site. It has also been left open for “up to 70,000 U.S. citizens [who were] potentially affected by the radiation and will be able to join the class action suit.”

Now docked in San Diego, the USS Reagan’s on-going safety has become a political hot potato. The $6 billion carrier is at the core of the U.S. Naval presence in the Pacific. Critics say it’s too radioactive to operate or to scrap, and that it should be sunk, as were a number of U.S. ships contaminated by atmospheric Bomb tests in the South Pacific.

This Tuesday, February 11th, is The Day We Fight Back (against mass surveillance) -- and we need your help to make it as impactful as it can be.

This will be BIG. This will be the biggest day of action against dragnet NSA surveillance in history. This will be The Day We Fight Back.

Do you remember two years ago when the Internet went dark to fight toxic legislation in Congress that would have crippled freedom on the Internet—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—and we won?

Click here to learn more and to sign up to take part.

We understand the United States to be a democracy, founded upon a Constitution that affords us critical rights, and governed by the rule of law.

Yet for years, the NSA has exploited secret legal interpretations to undermine our privacy rights -- thus chilling speech and activism, and thereby threatening to subvert the very underpinnings of our democracy itself.

This Tuesday, February 11th, thousands of websites and organizations are joining together to demand an end to mass spying.

On February 5, NBC published new documents leaked by Edward Snowden that reveal direct cyber attacks on the infrastructure of the hacktivist group Anonymous. The heavily redacted documents also gave insight to research already underway by the Free Press into a campaign of disinformation and harassment of the same group by private intelligence companies that received start up capital from the CIA. Both campaigns seemed to indiscriminately target members of the group engaged in lawful dissent and social welfare activities.