Media pundits have often tried to point out the similarities between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, in a futile attempt to get the two groups to merge. Unfortunately, the differences were too great, and we have yet to see the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protesting against the same thing side-by-side at the same protest.

That is, until now.

The unthinkable finally happened last night in San Francisco: the Tea Party shared a protest with the Occupiers, both groups angry with the same person.

And who was this unifier, the only man who can bridge the divide and bring together all sides of the political spectrum? Why, President Obama, of course.

He ping-ponged across San Francisco on Thursday, February 16, hosting a series of high-end fundraisers that netted him somewhere near $4 million, by some estimates. I tailed him all day, and will present photos from each of his stops. But we’ll start with what was in fact the final event, on Nob Hill at the Masonic Auditorium, because that’s where all the protesters congregated. Photos from the day’s earlier events are found in the second half of the report, below.

Protest Outside the Obama Fundraiser, Masonic Auditorium, San Francisco

Here it is: proof! All three kinds of protesters, together at last. On the left (appropriately), an Occupier angry at Obama for not being sufficiently left-wing, and promising not to vote for Obama unless he stops enforcing federal drug laws. And on the right, a Tea Partier who thinks Obama is too left-wing. And in the middle, a rare find at such events, an Obama supporter who thinks he’s “just right.”

Now everybody link arms and sing along with me: “Kumbaya, my Lord, Kumbaya….”

Sadly, however, it was not to be. For although the Tea Party and the Occupiers were both at the same event protesting against Obama, this was no lovefest. Mutual distrust and disdain still divided the two camps, who also for the most part kept to opposite ends of the police-designated protest zone. Here we can see the Occupy end of the zone, with a wall of police keeping them away from the long line of Obama donors filing into the Masonic Auditorium across the street.

Everybody lived up to expectations. The Occupiers were, well, Occupiers, as you can see from this sign.

And the local Tea Party was also out in force for the first time in at least a year.

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}
I had arrived at the protest after dark, having spent the earlier part of the day following Obama around to other fundraisers. But fellow citizen photojournalist “Larry in SF” was there when the protest first started in the afternoon, and snapped several photos that captured the extent and enthusiasm of the Tea Party crowd. (Unofficial estimates from various people I talked to: About 200 Tea Partiers, and 150 Occupiers.)

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}
Many of the Tea Partiers wore giant foam “Nobama” fingers, which they waved in unison for a particularly photogenic effect.

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}
Local Tea Party doyenne Sally Zelikovsky led the finger-wagging cheers. The idea came from this article in the SFWeekly, which said that after Jan Brewer wagged her finger in Obama’s face last month, “Obama Coming to San Francisco, Where Nobody Will Wag Their Fingers in His Face.”

(Hungry for more? “Larry in SF” has plenty more photos from the daytime protest posted on his blog.)

The Occupiers had their own chants as well. This video from later in the evening records two of them. The first one:

“The system has got to die, hella hella Occupy!”

The second Occupy chant reveals that there was no love lost between the two protest groups:

“Hey Tea Party, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side.”

The Occupiers this time around seemed unified around a single theme, one of the few policy areas where Obama hasn’t even tried to mollify his base: legalizing marijuana. Most of the Occupy protesters had pot-themed signs. As for the Occupier in the middle with the “Teach” sign: That’s what I’m worried about!

And they weren’t just carrying signs. Seemingly half the Occupiers were openly smoking marijuana at the protest, like this guy who kept bogarting his joint. But since they most likely all had their fraudulently obtained “medical marijuana” cards, the cops just let them get away with it.

One of the people on the Tea Party side emailed me after the protest with this first-hand account:

“Many of us actually got sick from the dope smoke…yeah, wimpy TPers…but I’m serious, they were blowing it over at us on purpose. At one point I mentioned to the young smokers, “Hey, I thought you guys were all about clean air? Your killing my carbon footprint.” BTW, w/ all of the medical cannabis signs, I didn’t see too many people who looked sickly. Mostly young and healthy OWS types.

Let’s take a look at two protesters who fulfilled everyone’s assumptions:

The typical Occupier.

The typical Tea Partier.

Now let’s look at two signs that fulfilled everyone’s assumptions:

Typical Occupy sign with way too many words. (“California could generate thousands of jobs and trillions of dollars through a multitude of green industrie!!!“)

^{(Photo courtesy of Larry in SF.)}
Typical Tea Party sign with way too many words.(“Take your Marxism and shove it!!!“)

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I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

- Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
- Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
- Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
- Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
- In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

The Solution Remains the Same

As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive “climate change scare” that was the exact opposite of the one we’re enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.

The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:

The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.

In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.

I realized: The solution (commit civilizational suicide) always remains the same; all that differs are the wildly divergent purported “crises” proffered up to justify the imposition of the solution.

Seen from this angle, the entire Climate Change field should be more properly reframed thus:

In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological “crisis” so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesn’t materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.

I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me. The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality. The goal remains constant; the supposed imminent catastrophes justifying it come and go as needed.

Below, I’ll present scanned pages from the book so you can see for yourself.

The scenario we’re in reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode called “The Midnight Sun”: At first we see the characters sweltering in increasingly unbearable heat as the Earth, knocked out of its orbit, slowly plummets into the sun. Just as they are all about to burn to death, in typical Twilight Zone fashion, the lead character wakes up — she had in fact merely been having a fever dream about the world getting hotter; in reality, the Earth had been knocked away from the sun, and they’re all going to freeze to death. Ha ha — gotcha! Just as in the narratives spun by the climate change catastrophists, the Earth is doomed either way, even though the disaster scenario flips from one extreme to its exact opposite. Hot, cold, whatever; one way or the other, Mother Nature will wreak revenge on us for our hubris!

Ice Ages Are Making a Comeback

Turns out my choice of reading material (discovered recently at a rummage sale for 25¢, in case you’re curious) was fortuitous, as climate change — and ice ages — are suddenly back in the headlines this past week. And the news is not good for the crisis-mongers.

First we learned that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is actually helping us stave off the next inevitable ice age by a few years. Yes, you read that right: the “runaway global warming” scenario is now off the table; a new ice age is coming for sure, and whatever human warming effects there may be will only make our descent into the deep freeze a little more comfy.

Then, in a different breakthrough, leading scientists announced the discovery of a heretofore undetected type of molecule in the atmosphere which spurs cloud formation and negates global warming effects. Thanks to something called “Criegee biradicals,” the more we pollute, the more clouds form, and the cooler the planet becomes. Thus, the cumulative effect on the climate due to mankind’s activity: zilch. So for the second time in a week, the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming theory was fatally undermined.

But wait! We’re not done. Next up: A study out of Harvard proving that warming and cooling cycles are caused by orbital wobble and precession of the poles; and that the only reason the next ice age hasn’t arrived quite on schedule yet is due to our beneficial increase in carbon dioxide. Yes, that’s right: more data showing that another ice age is inevitable sooner or later.

A third nail in AGW’s coffin in less than a week? Why wasn’t this front page news?

But brace yourself — because those nails in the coffin were just the opening act. The next bit of news was the real blockbuster, a stake through AGW’s heart:

Now we learn that the world has not warmed at all for the last 15 years, and that the entire recent “global warming” hubbub was totally imaginary. Furthermore, the recent cooling is so significant that we may be headed for — you guessed it — a “mini ice age.”

Still not enough for you? The coup de grace came from our own USDA, which released a new “Plant Hardiness Zone Map” indicating that the mild global warming spike of a few years ago was actually good for plant growth and biodiversity. In other words: Even if we do experience warming, it makes the world a nicer place.

And that was just one week’s news. I wonder what next week will bring?

Now, you’d think that this devastating barrage of body blows would basically bring an end to the whole Global Warming “controversy.”

But no. Because, you see, true believers are nearly impervious to facts. In the midst of all this, the AGW activists and bullies continued their relentless quest to reshape the world’s economic landscape, as if they still had the upper hand. They even launched a witch hunt against “denier” weathermen, threatening to get any TV meteorologists fired unless they present global warming propaganda during their forecasts. Meanwhile, Al Gore continued on his decade-long tirade, declaring that “civilization is at risk” if the presidential candidates don’t cave into his demands immediately. And if you check the Web sites of any number of climate change nonprofits and organizations, they’re all still in hysterical crisis mode about the coming calamity. To them, you see, news stories like the ones we saw this week may come and go, but Global Warming is forever!

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Earlier this week President Obama articulated how he understands the concept of employment, explaining that, in his view of the universe, bureaucratic regulations are a good way to create jobs:

Obama Says ‘EPA regulations create jobs’
“When we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs building and installing all sorts of pollution-control technology.”

Yes, seriously, he said that. The President of the United States said it.

Obama’s fundamental misapprehension of employment economics reminds me of an intriguing paradox I observed first-hand just a few months ago when I visited a relative who lived in a suburban tract:

Twice a week, my relative hired a “gardener” to clean up the front yard. I put “gardener” in quotes because this young hardworking immigrant didn’t actually know anything about plants or gardens; basically his only task was to get rid of the leaves that fell from the trees in front of the house. He achieved this very quickly and efficiently by using a gas-powered leaf-blower. Perhaps when he was first hired his technique was to blow all the leaves into a big pile which he would then load into his truck for removal. A few may have gone into the neighbors’ yards, but hey, they were out of my relative’s yard, so problem solved. I imagine that over time, as he got hired by more and more people in the tract due to his low rates, he worked quicker and quicker and sloppier and sloppier, until the day I observed him, when he no longer even made a pretense of gathering the leaves into a pile; instead, he just blew them all into the neighbors’ yards, and then hopped into his truck and drove off to his next client. At three or four yards per hour, he was (metaphorically at least) raking it in.

But here’s where the paradox begins. The neighbors would come back from their jobs at the end of the day, and see all the leaves on their lawns, and they’d call up their own gardeners who would proceed to do the exact same thing in reverse — blow all the same leaves back into my relative’s and adjacent neighbors’ yards. This cycle would go on across the entire tract, because the same leaf-shedding trees had been planted along every street: everyone would hire gardeners to blow the leaves back and forth from yard to yard. At the end of each week, exactly nothing had been achieved: all the leaves were back where they started. And then the cycle would begin again.

A normal person would look at this situation and say, “What a monumental waste of effort. So much human labor for no purpose whatsoever; after all those man-hours, nothing has changed. All the leaves are back in their original positions.”

Obama would look at this same situation and say, “How can you claim that nothing was achieved? Forty-seven gardeners are now fully employed!”

But I look at it and see what the radical theorists see: It’s not true at all that nothing has changed. Maybe the leaves are all in their original positions, but a great deal of money has been transferred from the middle-class homeowners to the immigrant gardeners.

If you think that “economic redistribution” from the middle-class to the “working poor” is desirable, then you see the Leaf-Blower Paradox not as a paradox at all but as a neat mechanism for extracting money from the more-well-off and giving it to the less-well-off.

But then the question arises: Why bother with the leaves at all? A simpler way to achieve the same thing would be for the “gardeners” to just drive very slowly through the neighborhood and each homeowner would toss $20 bills in the backs of their pickups trucks. The end result would be exactly the same.

Yet even this ludicrous scenario is not satisfactory for the true radicals. Why even bother with the pickup trucks? The Obamas of this world can (and do) produce the same result by instituting a tax — let’s call it the “Unemployed Gardener Tax” — and utilize the government as a middleman to transfer money from the employed to the unemployed. The gardeners can just sit at home watching TV all day, while the IRS collects extra taxes from the middle-class workers and doles it out as benefits to the would-be gardeners.

In fact, we can just drop the “Unemployed Gardener” part and just call it “Taxes” and — voilà! — we have Obama’s understanding of economics. In his view, the role of government is to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor. And don’t imagine that this is just for the purpose of helping the poor; rather, the main purpose is to punish the wealthy, for the crime of, well, being wealthy.

Some mainstream economists have in the past argued in favor of the Leaf-Blower Paradox as a valid way to stimulate the economy. FDR and his advisors famously created millions of low-level government-financed manual labor jobs in the mid-1930s as a way to “put America back to work” during the Depression; while these “Civilian Conservation Corps” and similar jobs weren’t quite as useless as blowing leaves in circles, they were a sort of inefficient busywork whose main goal was not to get anything essential done but rather to get food in the belly of millions of unemployed Americans, and to get the money flowing in the economy again.

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That is, unless we jettison this freak show of Republican so-called candidates.

Newt Gingrich? Newt Gingrich????? The guy peaked nearly 20 years ago. Compromised, corrupt, amoral. He has about as much chance of winning the general election as do Calvin Coolidge’s decomposing remains.

Ron F-ing PAUL?????????????? The most charitable thing I can say about him is: Joke candidate. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If he gets the Republican nomination, I would actually stay home on election day, as would most voters forced to choose between a communist and a madman.

Michele Bachmann’s vaccine conspiracies have doomed her as a viable mainstream nominee, unfortunately, even though she is the most likeable of all the candidates and I would have gladly voted for her, “crazy eyes” notwithstanding.

Rick Perry has already made far too many unforced errors, and his extreme social conservative activism has turned off many Constitutionally-minded voters like myself who worry that if he wins he’ll use his power not to shrink government but to meddle in Americans’ private lives. No thank you.

Herman Cain: Toast.

Rick Santorum: If we were all in hell, I’d put my money on the snowball.

Huntsman, Johnson and the rest: Who?

Which leaves us only with Mitt Romney. He’s the sole Republican in the current field who even has a ghost of a chance at beating Obama, but as many have noted, he’s an old-school-checked-pant-double-talking-insider-flip-flopping pseudo-Republican who looks, talks and acts like a phony. I’d still vote for him over Obama, but only out of desperation; I’d rather have a president with magic underwear than an emperor with no clothes. But the growing tide of anti-Mormon bigotry in this country means that I fear few would join me in this protest vote.

And that, to my (and everyone else’s) great chagrin, is it. The pitiable pantheon of declared Republican candidates ends there. I keep reaching around in the bottom of the bag, asking “Any more in there? That can’t be all of you.” But my hand comes back empty. And my heart sinks.

Unless something changes drastically, Obama will beat any of these people handily. Which means, as my title reminded everyone, that he’ll be president for the term between 2012 and 2016 — which actually lasts until January 20, 2017. Think about that: 2017. It’s still 2011, people, and if things keep going as they are, Obama will be in charge until 2017.

2017.

Motivated now?

A complaint yesterday from HotAir commenter “magicbeans” succinctly summarized the national mood:

“I hate this field. What we should have had was Christie, Palin, Ryan, Rubio, West and Jindal. That could have been amazing. Instead we got the second stringers….”

Oh, how true that is. Any one of those candidates would have a good chance at beating Obama, and would be guaranteed to stir up the excitement lacking from the current field.

But we have one big problem: All the exciting potential candidates have already declared that they’re not running. In yesterday’s essay which inspired the comment above, William Kristol subtly suggests, without naming names, that perhaps one or more non-candidates should change their minds and re-enter the race.

But the time for subtlety is over. Let me be blunt:

ALLEN WEST, SAVE US FROM THIS CLOWDER OF CLOWNS.

And Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal, please join Allen’s posse.

I know what all six of you are thinking: “We publicly declared that we aren’t running. We can’t break our promise now!”

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Politicians change their minds all the time. In fact, the act of repeatedly “breaking promises” is the very thing that distinguishes politicians from normal people. Sure, a few voters may hold it against you for a week or two, but once you electrify the country and surge into the lead, the grudge will subside. And sure, the Democrats will try to use this broken promise against you in the general campaign, but trust me, that’ll be the least of their attacks.

But if you want something more official, here is an Absolution Coupon especially for you six:

I might seem lighthearted about all this, but I am actually deadly serious. A lame-duck Obama will have four years of not worrying about re-election to complete his conscious destruction of American capitalism and constitutionalism. It’s too hideous to even contemplate. And, aside from a long-shot chance by the slightly-better-than-a-crash-test-dummy Romney, none of the current candidates has any chance whatsoever to defeat Obama.

I know the public is waiting for an end to the unfunny charade known as the 2012 Republican Party nomination, so the real battle — between, for example, West, Palin and Rubio — can begin.

Let’s make it happen. You and I. Stop sitting on our hands waiting for a miracle.

Choose your favorite(s) from the six (temporarily) non-candidates above, and join the popular uprising to get some or all of them to change their minds.

First step: Vote in this two-part poll, so we can get some hard percentages to use as bargaining chips:

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Next: On the next page are a few resources to get you involved in the various groundswell campaigns to draft potential nominees. Send emails to your preferred candidates containing the Absolution Coupon above (download the jpeg here) and a link to this post — contact info given on the next page:

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The privileged Occupy kiddies of U.C. Berkeley were back in action again yesterday, play-acting at revolution to entertain their professors.

The purported thesis of this particular Occupation is “more money for secondary education,” but that’s just a veneer (a very very thin veneer, as the above photo shows) for a more radical agenda.

The Occupiers very self-consciously posed under various campus landmarks to echo the protests of their 1960s predecessors.

They took a supervised field trip off-campus and marched around town under a Che banner. Just like Grandma and Grandpa did! So cute.

In case there was any doubt that the Berkeley version of this whole “Occupation” thing is just an opportunity for this generation of kids to re-enact Berkeley’s 1960s “Free Speech Movement” halcyon days, some of the march leaders carried a sign reading “FREE SPEECH – Then and Now.” The other sign in the photo, with the mystifying message “Oops didn’t see the broken ribs – I was in Tokyo,” is more typical of contemporary thought disorders, whereby kids are taught that repeating some anecdote about themselves earns them respect and lends gravitas to their opinions. This being Berkeley, of course, she also blends it with subtle bragging about her exotic travels.

Only in Berkeley is Angela Davis is still considered a cutting-edge philosopher worth quoting.

One of the marchers was even carrying — no, could it be…?

Yes, as I feared: Looking at the sign right-side up, I see that it is a 1968 Eldridge Cleaver for President poster.

It is 2011, people. What relevance could a 43-year-old Black Panther Party campaign poster possibly have?

(In case you’re curious: The poster design really is from 1968. Here’s a clear picture of what the original looked like.)

Speaking of 1960s presidential campaigns…Back then, the students were protesting against President Johnson (for sending troops to Vietnam); but these days, the protesters emulate Johnson’s infamous “this little girl will get killed by an atomic bomb if you don’t vote for me” ad, now updated to “this little girl will get decapitated by a guillotine unless you give us more money.”

And yes, even some of those crusty old original 1960s protesters themselves were on hand. Why re-live your youth vicariously when you can do it for real yourself?

Some of those 1960s kids have now become professors (see lower left of the photo), and they joined in the march too. I can only laugh about the calls to get rid of Proposition 13 (California’s landmark voter rebellion scaling back astronomical property tax rates).

One of the original sparks that ignited Berkeley’s radical transformation in the 1960s was an (ultimately successful) drive to get rid of the University’s “loyalty oath,” in which professors had to declare loyalty to the United States and non-membership in any communist group. Now that the oath is gone, this is the result: U.C. Berkeley now has its own on-campus Communist Party (named in Spanish here, for extra PC points).

Anyway, back to the present. We marched through the streets of town, reveling in the piquant joy of blocking traffic. (BTW, I agree with the sign “Police brutality, pathetic fallacy,” though perhaps not in the way its owner intended.)

As we passed City Hall, workers came outside and gave black power salutes, and leaned out windows giving the “thumbs up” sign. It kind of makes it hard to feel revolutionary when the establishment is on your side. Sigh.

More fists in the air as we passed the small and rather uneventful municipal Occupy camp of the city of Berkeley (as opposed to the much larger U.C. Berkeley campus Occupation).

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A clique of privileged U.C. Berkeley students, upset that they’re the top 1% of elite students in the state and thus disqualified from participating in the Occupy movement, could no longer contain their frustration on Wednesday and threw an Occutantrum, attempting to “occupy” a few square yards of the 1,200-acre campus. The police dutifully played their roles in the street theater performance, showing up in riot gear and looking scary so the privileged students could shout at them and feel properly revolutionary, as instructed by their professors. Following the script, the police repeatedly removed the handful of occupation tents so that the students could feel sufficiently wronged by authority figures and thereby earn their “Berkeley protest stripes,” which have been a requirement for graduation since 1964.

The group tantrum also gave the students a chance to test their fluency in Occupese, a new language which they have all been studying since the semester began on September 17.

The students, comprising the top 1% of high school graduates in the state (the top 12.5% are guaranteed admittance to the University of California’s 11 campuses statewide; of those, U.C. Berkeley is the most sought-after and thus the most selective) twice tried to set up tents in front of Sproul Hall on Wednesday, and twice the U.C. police moved in to dismantle them, as they had announced they would do:

Dozens of police in riot gear descended on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on Wednesday in two violent confrontations with student protesters that prevented them from building an Occupy encampment on the campus.

Campus police arrested seven protesters during an afternoon altercation at the plaza after protesters set up three tents, which police promptly tore down.

By evening, protesters had once again erected tents – this time there were seven. Students joined arms and chanted “hold the line” and “the whole world is watching” while police approached with batons and bean-bag guns. After a brief scuffle, police broke through their line and pulled down the tents. Then officers formed a perimeter on the steps of Sproul Hall.

Our first video shows the U.C. cops dismantling the tents as the students jeer in feigned outrage:

Our second video shows the climactic highlight of the “violence” as cops jab their nightsticks into the encroaching “human chain” of protesters trying to stop the dismantlement of the tents, in direct violation of the cops’ commands to keep back and not interfere:

Since the whole purpose of a protest is to elicit a vigorous response from the police, so the agitators can then scream “Police brutality!”, the whole affair worked out splendidly for both sides; the cops got the tents removed, and the privileged students got some bruises they can show off as proof of their radical bona fides.

I swung by campus a short time afterward, missing the big confrontation, but just in time to witness their very first “General Assembly,” where the fledgling Occupiers could test out their fluency in “Occupese,” the newly emerged language of the Occupy movement that is part vocalization, part sign language, and part bodily gestures and other idioms. It was a satisfying moment for many of them, as until today they had only studied the language online and never had an opportunity to use it in a real-life setting.

Fresh tents had already been re-erected a third time, just one hour after the cops had torn down and removed two previous generations of tents.

Among the tents, two students majoring in Gender Ambivalence demonstrated the prototypical Berkeley experience: publicly combining love and politics, in this case hugging while simultaneously reading revolutionary political tracts.

Another student leader, majoring in “How to Try Dressing Up Like Lenin But Only Succeed in Looking Like an Asshole,” gave an interview to a local radical radio station.

Fashion alert! A new trend was spotted at Occupy UC: Combining the “Black Bloc” anarchist look with the “V for Vendetta” Anonymous look. It’s simple: Just spray-paint your Guy Fawkes mask black, to go with your all-black clothing and ski mask, and unused gas mask. If “Wannanymous” (wannabe Anonymous) is a poser in a Guy Fawkes mask, then let’s dub this new fashion statement “Wannanarchist.”

HA ha! Some loser was still using an original un-spray-painted Guy Fawkes mask, oblivious to the fact that he was now tragically unhip. In the foreground, some suburbanite girls had gone shopping at Safeway with Daddy’s debit card, buying supplies for the brave Occupiers planning to spend the night in the tents, away from the comforts of the futon in their nearby apartments.

Up-twinkles, down-twinkles, clarification, block! You know the drill.

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Urban Infidel, the independent New York blogger who made a splash with her earlier Occupy Wall Street coverage, re-visited Zuccotti Park yesterday and with practically no effort captured on video the kind of conversations going on down there that the mainstream media just won’t show you.

The topic? As usual, Jews and Israel. And it wasn’t pretty:

Partial transcription (starting at 0:48):

Jewish man wearing a yarmulke: I work 65 hours a week.
Protester: You probably live in the Hamptons ‘n’ some shit.
Jewish man: I live in the Hamptons? I live in Brooklyn…I work 62 hours a week. Do you work 62 hours?
Protester: You know what’s funny? Your people own schools and fuckin’ government buildings, but your wives are on welfare. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand that. I met a public assistance officer. And they were Jewish, but their husbands own fuckin’ everything.
Jewish man: I work 62 hours a week. How many hours a week do you work?
Protester: I don’t work. How about them apples?
Jewish man: So why don’t you get a job?
Protester: I don’t need a fuckin’ job.
Jewish man: Why not?
Protester: You don’t need paper! We can grow our own fuckin’ food. We can shoot our own fuckin’ animals. We can do all that shit. We can build our own fuckin’ houses.
Jewish man: How do you get the materials?
Protester: We can just take it from the Earth! You come from the Earth. This comes from the Earth. Everything comes from the Earth, you dumb motherfucker! Like seriously. Technology comes from the Earth, protons, neutrons, electrons.
Jewish man: Is this a real conversation? Is this a real conversation?
Other OWS protester: He’s making points. But he’s making points.
Jewish man: What are the points?
Protester: I don’t need a point. It comes from here (indicating the ground). It came from here for free! Why we gotta pay for it? It’s here for free! Why we gotta pay for it? It’s bullshit. This is bullshit.

More disturbing to me than the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is the complete ignorance of how economics works.

In addition to the “Jews own everything” meme, Urban Infidel also uncovered the “Israel is evil” meme, with one protester praising Palestinian suicide bombers as having the kind of dedication and “righteousness” that the Israelis lack:

Partial transcription (starting at 0:27):

Anti-Israel protester: War — that’s the only thing you understand. Them people in Palestine, you killing ‘em so bad that they gotta strap themselves up with bombs, and go take buses into Israel and blow themselves up and die. Ain’t a Israeli person going into Palestine, strapping themselves up with a bomb, and killed one Palestinian person. They gonna shoot them with guns, they gonna shoot them with [fire]. They ain’t got no heart, because they don’t have no righteousness. There’s no love for that. You got to really be about what you’re saying to sacrifice your life. C’mon, don’t tell me that they’re about that. C’mon, man, don’t talk to me about that, Israel. When you said that, I got to stop you, because what you’re saying is the lies. Actual lie. They’re not about peace. Israel is doing the same thing to the Palestinians that the Germans did to the Jews. Bottom line. They’re doing the same thing to the Palestinians that the Germans did to them.
Anti-Israel protester #2 (pointing to pro-Israel protester): You don’t want to hear the truth. You don’t like the truth! Ha ha!
Anti-Israel protester: You think we about lies? You think I came out here on my day off to just hear some lies? I came out here to bear witness to the truth. You can’t be talking lies in front of the people. C’mon, man. Talking about ‘Israel is about peace.’ It ain’t about peace. They’re about destroying people. If they had ovens, they’d put the Palestinians in ovens. And you know it.
Anti-Israel protester #2: That’s why the Jews come into existence.
Pro-Israel protester: Ain’t nothing about peace when you come to Israel. Israel is totally about war and destruction. And you know it. …
Arabic-speaking man: Can she ask you a question? She’s a journalist from the Middle East, and we cover these stories here.
Middle-Eastern journalist woman: [Asks question in Arabic.]
Arabic-speaking man: [Translating her question] Has there [been] anyone that has responded to what you’re calling for?
Anti-Israel protester: Everybody agrees with what I said. Every word I said, everybody agrees with it.

…and then his interview with the Middle Eastern journalists continues. As Urban Infidel recounts,

All the spewing about Israel caught the attention of an Arab media camera crew, don’t know which one. They, along with their translator took great interest in interviewing this angry man. So one could reasonably assume that this will be broadcast all over the Islamic world.

Don’t miss the full report at Urban Infidel’s blog:

Occupy Wall Street: Zucotti Square Day 41 & Counting – The Crazy Has Set In

This is the side of Occupy Wall Street that they don’t want you to see.

UPDATE:

And thanks to Israellycool for drawing our attention to this jaw-dropping bonus video from OccupyDC with an unapologetically anti-Semitic DC Occupier:

UPDATE II:

And Ringo down in Los Angeles snapped photos of some disturbing signs at a recent Occupy LA march:

This picture looks innocent enough — until you zoom in on the ties of Lieberman and Obama:

Star of David.

Star of David.

Oh, those sneaky Jews!

And a little girl was holding up a classic “American flag with Stars of David” sign, a design I’ve seen several times at earlier anti-Israel rallies. The not-so-subtle message is “The Jews control America.”

See these photos (and so much more) in context in Ringo’s truly eye-popping report:

The Occupation of Los Angeles – Part 6

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has received so much media coverage in recent weeks that it’s nearly impossible to keep abreast of all the developments. So many endorsements and criticisms coming from all directions enter the news cycle in such rapid succession that even the most dedicated news junkies may have missed out on many of the pronouncements. Supporters and detractors of OWS both might find it useful to have a handy all-inclusive list of who has endorsed or embraced the protest.

To satisfy that demand, we hereby present a list of groups, organizations, individuals and entities that have expressed their support for, sponsorship of, or sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Note: All entries on this list are real and verified. Below each entry you will find a series of source links documenting the support for OWS. We have striven in almost all cases to reference either first-hand statements by the groups or individuals themselves, hosted on their own Web sites; or videos of the people in question voicing their support for OWS at various Occupations; or news reports from reliable mainstream networks; or articles by publications or organizations sympathetic to the Occupy movement; or indisputable evidence, whatever the source. As a result, it cannot be claimed that these statements of support were made up or distorted by detractors of the Occupy movement.

As each new controversial endorsement has appeared over the last month, OWS supporters have dismissed them one by one as “isolated examples” that don’t reflect any overall trend toward extremism. But when viewed in aggregate like this, it becomes much more difficult to dismiss any individual endorsement as an aberration; instead, an undeniable pattern emerges.

This list is obviously incomplete; we hope to update it over the upcoming days and weeks.

If you think we’ve left out any well-known endorsers for which there is solid evidence, then please post suggestions and evidentiary links in the comments section; but please try to supply links that will stand up to any potential claims of misrepresentation.

If you disagree with the inclusion of any of the entries on this list, please post your reasoning and any contravening source links in the comments section, and we will take the evidence into account when updating the list.

Members of the media, bloggers, activists, OWS supporters and detractors as well are all free to repost this list, in whole or in part, without any restrictions. Do note, however, that it may be updated over time, so make sure to get the latest version.

And without further ado, here is…

The 99%: Official list of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters, sponsors and sympathizers

	Communist Party USA Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller
	American Nazi Party Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News
	Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News
	Barack Obama Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York
	The government of North Korea Sources: Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India
	Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly
	Revolutionary Communist Party Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance
	David Duke Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com
	Joe Biden Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones
	Hugo Chavez Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com
	Revolutionary Guards of Iran Sources: Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI
	Black Panthers (original) Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune
	Socialist Party USA Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller
	US Border Guard Sources: White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog
	Industrial Workers of the World Sources: IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances
	CAIR Sources: in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York
	Nancy Pelosi Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard
	Communist Party of China Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph
	Hezbollah Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia
	9/11Truth.org Sources: 911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)
	International Bolshevik Tendency Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine
	Anonymous Sources: Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement
	White Revolution Source: whiterevolution.com
	International Socialist Organization Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance
	PressTV (Iranian government outlet) Sources: PressTV, wikipedia
	Marxist Student Union Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com
	Freedom Road Socialist Organization Sources: FightBack News, fightbacknews.org
	ANSWER Sources: ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua
	Party for Socialism and Liberation Sources: Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)

UPDATE: Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have made suggestions for additional entries on this list. I now have a large pile of potential new OWS supporters to investigate, and will work on updating this list over the upcoming weeks. When I’ve made it more thorough, I will re-launch an updated list that will be much more “official” in its comprehensiveness, sometime later this month. Keep an eye out for it!

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Much ado has been made about recent media reports describing Occupy Oakland as a cross between Lord of the Flies and Animal House. The leftist magazine Mother Jones was furious about the negative coverage, deeming it “The Right-Wing Media Assault on Occupy Oakland,” and attempting to debunk the bad press. But Big Journalism lashed back with an article entitled MotherJones: Truth To Unflattering Reports On OWS.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out the scene for myself to settle the matter.

Occupy Oakland is a tent encampment in the park facing Oakland’s City Hall. Wooden pathways wend between dozens of tents inhabited by over a hundred activists.

Saturday, October 22 was a special day for the Occupiers: A rally and march were planned at noon. A talented local artist recorded the scene as hundreds of day-protesters arrived to hear the speakers in the amphitheater adjacent to the camp.

Adding to the excitement: Today was “Bring Down Capatalism Day,” so we were all eagerly anticipating the destruction of “capatalism” by nightfall. The only remaining question was: How would we bring it down? With “Group Cacases”?

This protester had the answer: Behead all the evil capitalists.

Many in the crowd, such as QPOC (Queer People of Color, for all you ignorant facsists) called for the death of capitalism in a more generic sense.

Some of the speakers addressing the rally wanted to go “the full Lenin.”

But some of the protesters reminded us: If we aren’t all in tune with Allah, nothing will change. As the uprisings in North Africa have reminded us: the only path to true revolution is through Islam. Maybe this will be the American “Arab Spring” in more ways than one!

One thing quickly became apparent to me: Occupy Oakland at first tried to create a completely anarchistic rule-free social utopia — but as the days and weeks pass, the Occupiers are inescapably re-creating society from scratch, and before long will have all the same rules and customs and problems that they tried to abandon. (All of this is entirely predictable, I might add.)

During the boring speeches, I strolled around the encampment and discovered that many of the reports about Occupy Oakland are, unfortunately, true. Let’s look at them one by one:

DRUG USE and COMMERCE

Everywhere I went, I encountered people taking drugs — mostly marijuana. Many of them were understandably camera-shy. But this guy stood right on the main walkway and puffed away on a drug pipe.

The ground around and inside the camp was also littered with other evidence of drug use, such as this crack cocaine baggie that had been dropped or discarded.

This guy was sitting outside his tent, riffling through and counting huge wads of greenbacks. I can’t say for sure that he was a drug dealer, but I found it mighty suspicious that he would have such a massive amount of cash amidst such squalor.

DISGUSTINGNESS

The City of Oakland issued an eviction notice the day before the rally, citing sanitation issues, garbage, rats and other hygiene problems at the encampment. The protesters announced that they simply wouldn’t budge, and the city temporarily caved in, so for now the standoff continues, though the eviction notices are still taped up around the plaza. But as far as I could tell — yes, the city has a very good point. The place was pretty disgusting.

Paradise for rats.

Even more disturbingly, all over the camp were signs that said “Not a toilet,” because some occupiers basically relieve themselves wherever and whenever they feel the urge. Disgusted campers started putting up signs so that their particular tents wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any effluvia.

One tree had basically become an outside communal toilet, so the more environmental-minded Occupiers put up signs trying to discourage doing one’s business au naturel.

INTIMIDATING “INTERNAL SECURITY” TEAMS

Occupy Oakland has agreed by consensus to not cooperate with the Oakland Police Department under any circumstances. But as the law-breaking and nuisance behavior within the encampment started to grow, the evolving mini-society found it necessary to appoint its own ersatz police force. Basically, the scariest looking guys, and/or those guys with with strongest authoritarian urge, have assumed the role of internal policemen. As many reporters have discovered, these guys really really do not appreciate having their picture taken, so I could only get a few surreptitious shots. In this scene, someone had found a large Bowie knife in the camp and turned it into these two Occupolice, who set about scanning the crowd for the potential owner, ready to wreak justice on anyone who broke the “no weapons” law consensus agreement. They communicate with walkie-talkies.

There also seemed to be a possibly separate “rally security force” consisting of guys wearing Black Panther buttons on their berets.

People have often cited Lord of the Flies in reference to Occupy Oakland, and I tend to agree — but in a good way. In the original novel about boys stranded on a desert island, it’s not just that they descend into barbarism, but more interestingly they start to re-create society from first principles, instituting hierarchies and rules and customs where none had existed before. And it’s quite obvious that, left on their own for a sufficient amount of time, the book’s characters would naturally have developed a new society not much different from the one they left behind.

I see the same thing happening at Occupy Oakland: They reject the existence of the current police force, only to find it necessary to found a new substitute police force of their own, which were it to mature would eventually become an institution probably not much different from the original Oakland Police Force they so reviled. Here, for example, is the first incarnation of a “police station” in the emerging Occupy culture.

Around and around the cycle goes.

Remember Lovelle Mixon, the serial rapist, child molester and murderer who single-handedly committed one of the worst mass killings of police officers in American history? Yeah, that guy. Well, the anti-police sentiment at Occupy Oakland is so intense that they regard Lovelle Mixon as a hero!! Whatever other crimes he may have committed, if he offed some pigs, then all is forgiven. Fuck the Po-lice! Power to the people!

I guess there are so many crime victims at the camp that the Occupiers have found it necessary to establish a donation fund to help them — presumably to replace stolen items. Come back in ten years’ time, and this will be called “the insurance industry.”

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