DC Occupation Marks the 11th Year of Afghan War, Austerity Budgets and Builds on Arab Spring, European Summer, Madison and Occupation of Wall Street

The People’s Uprisings seen around the world and in the United States come to Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza beginning on Thursday, October 6 when thousands will converge to begin a prolonged people's occupation of Freedom Plaza. The October2011 Movement involves thousands of people and 150 organizations who have already signed. The DC occupation comes at a pivotal time: the beginning of the 11th year of war in Afghanistan and a new federal fiscal year that promises austerity of everything except weapons and war.

The Freedom Plaza occupation occurs as activists in New York are occupying Wall Street and follows major protests across the Midwest against austerity budgets, the environmental protest of the Tar Sands Pipeline where more than 1,200 were arrested and protests throughout the United States on a wide range of issues.

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda
by Peter L. Bergen
Free Press, New York, 2011

Writing history is a matter of placing points in time as bookends or markers for significant events that have occurred around the world. Generally this is done by the winners of the particular struggles that create the events of history in order to highlight their own prowess and beneficence as compared to the other parties backwardness and ignorance.

Peter Bergen, representing the U.S. as putative winner of the war on terror, bookends the "war on terror" with the dates spanning Sept 11, 2001 to the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. The latter date is not written in stone yet, as Bergen's last statement is "In 2011, the Longest War, finally, began to wind down." I will return to that final statement later, partly because of the convenient name change from the "war on terror" and partly because of the "winding down" aspect.

Hotel room at a Singapore resort: $253.
Discounted tickets to watch wild dolphins suffer in captivity: Priceless.
Mastercard is offering discounted tickets to the infamous Resorts World Sentosa, a resort in Singapore that recently kidnapped 27 wild dolphins for an exhibit. Two of those dolphins have already died, and the 25 other dolphins are being held in brutal conditions until construction of the exhibit is complete. The surviving dolphins' risks of illness and death increase with each day of captivity.

100,000 Change.org members have already called on Resorts World Sentosa to release its captive dolphins. If Mastercard cancels its ticket discount promotion, it will put big financial pressure on the resort to finally set the dolphins free.

Please sign dolphin activist Barbara Napoles's petition on Change.org calling for Mastercard to stop offering discounted tickets to Resorts World Sentosa.

Statistics for captive dolphins are bleak. While dolphins in the wild usually live for 45 years, more than half of all captured dolphins die within their first two years of captivity.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Leonard Peltier has been moved from Oklahoma City to the U.S. Penitentiary at Coleman, Florida.

The United States Penitentiary I in Coleman is a high security facility located in central Florida approximately 50 miles northwest of Orlando, 60 miles northeast of Tampa, and 35 miles south of Ocala.

LEONARD PELTIER #89637-132
USP COLEMAN I
U.S. PENITENTIARY
P.O. BOX 1033
COLEMAN, FL 33521

This is nearly 2,000 miles from Leonard's Nation, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, in North Dakota! Tell the Federal Bureau of Prisons that the only acceptable transfer is one to a medium security facility in close proximity to (within a 500-mile radius of) his family and Nation. Ideally, Leonard should be moved to the medium security facility at Oxford, WI.

Dr. Thomas Kane, Acting Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)
320 1st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20534
Phone: (202) 307-3250 (Director); (202) 307-3198 (Switchboard)
Fax: (202) 514-6620

Launched into cyberspace by the

The woo-woo nuttiness of it all defies the imagination, beginning with the idea of a course in “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Nuclear ethics? Does that mean no nuclear weapons should ever be used to promote sexual harassment?

Well actually, turns out the point of the mandatory course recently canceled by the Air Force after officers of numerous faiths complained to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation about it and TruthOut published an exposé in July — was to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a Bible-verse-studded indoctrination in faux-Just War Theory, cynically known in the ranks as the “Jesus Loves Nukes” training.

“Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.”