Occupy Needs YOU!

If you live near an Occupy camp, or feel any kind of horror at the fact that the brutal arm of injustice is currently destroying books… Occupy Needs You!

To turn up.

Bring books, sleeping bags, tarps, food… Anything you can spare. Everything you can carry.

Bring them to the rally points and bring a message with you.

Occupy now needs to keep a watch on the police, to be aware of raids. People in the camps need to be able to grab what’s most precious to them and move at a moment’s notice. We can not allow this to happen again.

Occupy needs to sue the police in a class action suit against the loss of the property they are now destroying. Expense is the only language they understand. Make this as expensive as all hell.

And, most important of all, Occupy needs to get right back into the park, stronger than ever before. Show them that they can make things unpleasant, but they can not kill the spirit of justice. You can each contribute to something big, and something big needs to happen in America.

You can’t make them pay. Yet. You can make things awkward. You can make them inconvenient. You can make them expensive. You can make oppression more effort than listening.

This is a war on people who don’t want to spend anything on you. Make that impossible. It’s the only way to make them hear what you’re trying to tell them.

Planned Obsolescence is Crippling Me

Every girl loves shoes, right?

We’re stereotypically obsessed by them. All girls allegedly want to be Imelda Marcoss when we grow up.

Not me.

I’m apparently one of those rare women who want shoes that work and last. Looking pretty is icing on the cake. I’m going to spend all day in these suckers and I do not want pinched toes or sharp decorative bits or heels that make my trick ankles go off - resulting in a foot turned suddenly and painfully to the side.

The sole of one’s foot should be parallel with the ground, not perpendicular. Especially when one is in motion.

You have no idea how hard it is to find a ladies’ shoe that fits the following criteria: hard-wearing, flat-heeled, having a decent tread, long-lasting and comfortable.

I swear there’s someone in the ladies’ shoe industry who’s completely misogynistic and has decreed by law that all ladies’ shoes should hurt women in some way.

I thought I had found an ideal sandal in Colorado. It looked okay, it had a decent tread on the sole. It was not balanced on a tiny little spike of a heel and it had lovely cork padding to comfort my aching feet as I ran around doing things.

It had a plastic sole, but I thought I could deal with that.

I obviously thought wrong.

Fast forward two and a half years, and my weight and compounded abuses have compressed the cork quite a bit. Once summer rolls around, I wear these shoes goddamn everywhere. I run in them. I shop in them. I walk around and do all the ordinary things in them. I have them to the point where they almost put themselves on.

And that’s the point where a hidden design flaw started to injure me.

See, plastic soles don’t naturally mesh with anything. you have to have surface area so whatever you’re gluing them to stays glued. Which usually means the “inside” surface of your plastic sole has a big, rigid + across the heel.

Fine when it’s new.

When the shoe gets old, the distance between the centre of that “plus” and the customer’s heel gets shorter. It starts to directly effect the foot.

In my case, I now have bone bruises on my heels because of something that’s designed to fail.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The sandal still looks great. You can’t see anything wrong with it. The plastic sole still looks just as good now as the day I bought it with the shoe. However, the nice padding between that plastic sole and my good self has worn down in the center, where my heel strikes.

That center is exactly where the “plus” is.

Guess what’s been impacting my heel every time I take a step?

So every time I walk, I injure myself. It’s at the point where it hurts like walking on nails whenever I have to get up.

Anyone who’s never had a bone bruise may be laughing at me now. But let me tell you, they’re as painful as all shit. And they keep being painful. Trust me, you don’t know what you’ve got until it hurts like a stabbing when you sit and rest, and it hurts like a stabbing when you put your weight on it.

And you have to rest the injured area for months. No chance of that, I’m a mum. Mums don’t get to rest.

So now I have another category in my ever-lengthening list of things to avoid when I’m shopping for shoes.

No fucking plastic soles!

They are evil.

Could someone tell my why shoe shopping is supposed to be fun, please?

Why I’m concerned about OWS

Hubby says the protests are only about the American economy. He says I shouldn’t fret so hard about the economy or the protestors or the whole movement.

I know I worry about things too much. I overthink and over stress. And I see patterns in time.

I see rich people gaining power through their wealth and making laws that solely benefit themselves. I see isolated wealthy in ivory towers not understanding why the “peasant class” are so upset. I see revolution tearing the old system down and starting anew… And allowing a different set of wealthy start the whole cycle again.

I also see Australia, my home, being used again and again as a dumping ground for other nations’ “waste”.

The British dumped convicts here. And any surplus Irish from the Potato Famine (amongst many other problems). The World Wars allowed Europe to dump boatloads of refugees here. America quasi-routinely attempts to dump their dangerous products/expired medicine on us because it hasn’t been banned here yet.

I also know that where the greatest world power leads, Australia tends to follow like a puppy. We, as a nation, have been trailing after America since about WWII, following as many of its own policies as the Australian public would let us get away with in a kind of sycophantic need to be just like the big boys.

I worry because I know some of the major corporations are trying to get a toe-hold over here. There’s already been some upset because we can’t be bought on the issue of fracking to get gas from the ground. Our water is too deep, too precious, and too vital to waste for corporate gain.

Turn a mountain into a hole for coal? Go for it, but keep your fracking hands off our fracking ground water.

I worry because I know that those corporations will try to take advantage of the lag between American action and Australian action in order to dig their avaricious claws into our country, our government, and our way of life.

They’ll either be dumped or foisted off on us. And Australia is almost stupid enough to go for it. Almost.

But we have been standing up a bit more often, for which I am proud. And grateful. We can say ‘no’ to the money-grubbing evil of big corporations.

I’m just worried about whether or not we will.

Tax Receipt Not Going Far Enough

I’ve been seeing a lot of retweets endorsing the idea of a “tax receipt”, a document telling you, the taxpayer, where your tax dollars are going.

I say it’s a good first step.

A better move would be a Tax Vote. You fill out the form declaring whatever and indicate exactly where you want your dollars to go. And list them in order of importance.

THAT would be a government of true democracy.

Just think about it. Left-wing “hippie whackoes” [as folks like Rush love to call us] can vote for education funding, medicine, green energy, etc; while the right-wing “conservative nut jobs” [As us liberals love to call them] can vote for war, refunds for the rich, etc.

And both sides can pretend that all the advantages are coming from their side, whilst all the detriments are coming from the opposite factor.

And if a corporation wants to have a say? Well, they’d better pay their taxes, hadn’t they?

Illustrating things

You can try this at home.

You need: 2 100-piece packets of paperclips [est cost $1.10 ea]
                1 lot of free time 

One packet represents percentages of the population [PKT 1] and the other represents percentages of wealth [PKT 2].

Find a way to distinguish PKT 1 from PKT 2. You can do this by obtaining different colours/sizes of paperclips or spritzing them with paint. Anything you like. I just kept it straight in my head.

Pick one paperclip from PKT 1 and string 45 paperclips from PKT 2 on it. This is the one percent. Representatives of the one percent include big banks, big corporations, Old Money [Rothschild, Hilton, etc] and the extremely rare individual who was actually able to climb the social ladder all the way to the top.

Now get nine more paperclips from PKT 1 and share out another 45 paperclips from PKT 2 between them. This averages out at 5% of the wealth each. This is the wealthy elite. The people who are very much comfortably well off. Representatives of the 9% include Trust Fund Babies, more corporations and banks, some Old Money, celebrities, senators, and more of the folks who made it on their own merits.

Now get together 53 paperclips. This is the 53% of Americans who pay their taxes. Many of these folks are holding down 3-4 jobs just to break even. Most believe the system they’re supporting will come through for the honest, hard-working etc. and their ship will come in any old day now. These are the “average Joe” to the “wage slave” to the “corporate drone”, depending on where you stand. In essence, these are Everyman.

Now take the remaining 37 paperclips and join them together. These are the people who don’t have enough money to pay taxes. LOTS of these folks are holding down 4-8 jobs, many part-time, just to keep their heads above water. These are the people on welfare, on social security, the pensioners, and the homeless. They are the poor, the weak, the tired and hungry, the huddled masses yearning to be free.

Hey, I think I remember that from somewhere… never mind.

Now take the leftover ten paperclips from PKT 2 and distribute them fairly across the 53% and the poor and desperate 37%.

…uhm…

Yeah, I had that problem, too.

There’s lots of folks from the 37% representing the 99%. They’re the stereotypical “unwashed hippies” the right wing loves to spout about. There’s a goodly portion of the 53% in those protests, too. They’re the ones who’ve realised that the system is rigged to benefit a few, and not the many. Lots have realised that a great proportion of the few who benefit are not, strictly speaking, actual people.

Lots of the 9%, especially celebrities who love a cause, support the 99% because they can actually see how the system is unfair and so forth.

But the 1% who own the media keep telling the 53% to blame the 37% for not getting jobs that aren’t there or they literally can’t do [Try telling a quadra paraplegic to flip burgers sometime. I’m sure it’s hilarious.] or who won’t hire them anyway because they’re too old, too broken, too female, too black, too mentally disabled, or already too busy to do. All the while convincing the 53% to support tax cuts or other laws that allow the 1% to grab even more of the dwindling, metaphorical pie.

Why keep blaming the people who can’t afford to solve the problem when it’s obvious who actually is the problem?

We Need to Take Action NOW

Experts warn we have five years before climate change is irreversible.

It took us ten years to make certain Y2K didn’t happen. We’re already five years behind and you can bet corporate greed is not on our side. Spread the message. We need to fix the environment YESTERDAY.

Why Iceland isn't in our news much. READ THIS - a country has a REVOLUTION, rewrites its constitution using REGULAR citizens & gets rid of its Central Bank & the whole corrupt Fractional Reserve Banking system AND ITS NOT ON WIN TV, 7, 10, ABC, SBS, NBC, FOX, NOTHING! WHY IS THAT I WONDER!?!?

Everyone needs to see this. Occupy your own freedom.

(via )

Welcome back, frugal freedom fighters. This post is showing you the basic preparations for a planter box, or set thereof.

The tools for today are some cheap plastic gutter mesh [the stuff you put in gutters to keep the leaves out] a pair of decent scissors [if you bought wire mesh, use side-cutters!] and the paperclip staples I showed you how to make last time.

Step 1: Measure the mesh to fit, but make sure it fits up the sides of the box a little way.
Step 2: Cut along the joins. You will notice that the mesh does not want to stay where it’s put and tends to spring back on you.
Step 3: Press mesh into shape and weigh it down.
Step 4: Say hello to my little friend. The long side allows you to position the other side for maximum mesh manipulation :D
Step 5: Position staple.
Step 6: Press into the foam. This will kill your fingertips after a while. Not literally, though.
Step 7: Repeat steps 5 and 6 everywhere you reckon you need to keep the mesh in check.
Step 8: Now do the other side.

Put a layer of rocks in the bottom, just enough to mostly cover it.

And now, a teaser. What am I planning to do with that old rag?

Stay tuned, freedom fighters!