The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda has nothing on its website about using nonviolence, supporting nonviolence, or opposing violence.

The G8 and NATO Protest also has nothing like that, but does have this:

"As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space btween divergent tactics."

A month ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because both groups were refusing to state that they opposed violence.

Occupy the RNC has now put this on its website:

"We are not organizing actions, especially violent ones. That would just be stupid. We exist to provide information and facilitate logistics for people resisting the RNC."

Not how I would have put it. Nor would I have added:

"Don't fuck with us. We'll sue you."

But foreswearing violence and calling it stupid is enough for me. I wish Occupy DNC could bring itself to do as much. Better yet, just add "We oppose violence and will not use it."

That would be ideal, smart, strategic, and beneficial to the movement.

In the latest nail in the coffin of American liberty the people’s court of “last resort,” the U.S. Supreme Court, has confirmed that law abiding American Citizens (that means YOU, YOUR WIFE, and YOUR CHILDREN) traveling along any highway, breaking no law can now be arrested, handcuffed, hauled off to jail, mug shot, striped naked, and have your private parts gawked at or fondled by chuckling prison guards for the “crime” of -get this -a seven year old traffic ticket, that it turns out had been paid in full.

And this kind of treatment goes for old granny’s too -just keep your eyes wide open at the airports.

Now fellow Americans, if the thought of your wife or kids or grandma being treated like this does not get your blood pressure rising, then I can’t imagine what would.

And this president, who got himself elected on the promise of “Change” recently proved himself as phony as the last one by re-signing The Patriot Act into law -even though all President’s swear to “uphold and defend” the constitution. This doesn’t sound like change to me. But it’s all the proof anybody should need that they’re ALL a bunch of two faced liars.

In recent years, many government officials seem to have developed a “reverse Midas touch”. You know: everything they touch seems to turn brown and stinky.

I’d like to think that elected people at all levels would respond by working “full time”, learning how to respond constructively to charges like the one my Mother levels against them: “they don’t care about the country, only their party’s and their own personal interests”. SHE IS DISGUSTED!

Instead, in Ohio (but more generally as well), Republicans have resorted to cheating legally. It’s called gerrymandering, and it means “the winning party gets to redraw election districts so it can keep winning, without caring about the country, just their party’s and their own interest”, much as Mom had charged!

No surprise! That’s what parties do. But, if we persuade them how mad my Mom and so many others really are: they might do differently. Two ways to persuade them to try:

• negotiate some variant of philosopher John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”, according to which neither party would know which group of redistricted districts they would end up with;

What would you do if someone had a button that could destroy the earth and they were walking across the room to push it? Would you stand in the way? Would you talk them out of it? Would you sit by and watch, maybe make a sarcastic remark or two? What if the button might destroy the earth or might just destroy part of it? What if it might leave most of the earth intact but kill millions of people, but what if you had no way of being sure how far the destruction would spread?

Here is an animation made by the Union of Concerned Scientists on the damage a strike on Iran would likely cause, including the death of three million people.

Here is a New York Times article on what would likely happen next, including a war at least regional in scope and involving the United States.

Oil and gas corporations, their trade associations, mass media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and numerous pundits continue to report there is a new day unfolding in the energy future of the U.S. Indeed, they sometimes say it is a revolution in the making. It's now feasible to mine hitherto unreachable or unprofitable sources of "unconventional" oil and gas. As a result, massive, environmentally-devastating mining of tar sands in Canada expands, with a proposed and controversial pipeline to carry the partly processed oil from Alberto to Texas. Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the arctic, multiple off-shore locations drill ever-more deeply into the ocean floor and beneath it. As far as mining for shale gas and oil goes, the situation is described with words such as gushers, or bonanzas, or energy independence.