Moe Lane

Or, more accurately, this “Let’s crack the Occupy movement’s bones for the marrow!” comic that DC Comics is doing:

(H/T Hot Air)

[pause] (more…)

Apparently last night/early this morning the Chicago cops sent out a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, to disperse the rioters… excuse me, the ‘peaceful protesters*’.  If you’ve never seen one of these before, well, that probably means that you’re more used to activism on the Tea Party model.  Oddly enough, the police rarely if ever need to use crowd-suppression devices on crowds that end their protests by cleaning up all their loose trash and depositing it in the nearest public waste receptacle.

Think about that, ye Occupiers.  Also: the hygienic and social advantages of soap and deodorant.

Moe Lane (more…)

Walter Russell Mead, writing the epitaph of the Occupiers:

To some degree, [the Occupy movement] was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

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And it is subtly, entertainingly vicious, too.  I don’t quite feel comfortable excerpting any single one of them, so let me give you some of the suggested course titles:

• The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. This one is particularly subversive, since it’s aimed at the universities themselves (Glenn is a law professor at the University of Tennessee).
• Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. This one would get the most broad-spectrum screaming.
• The Fragility of Public Health.  Now this one was just mean.  Depressingly accurate, but mean.

So – ahem – read the whole thing.  You might as well, because there’s not a chance in Perdition that anything like these classes will be taught in our current academic atmosphere.  At least, not in Establishment academia…

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines)

Moe Lane

…to be allowed to auto-Darwinate?  You make the call:

Saturday marks the two-month anniversary for the Occupy Fairbanks movement. Instead of the police crackdowns seen elsewhere around the country, the Interior Alaska protesters are contending with punishing cold and local grumbling about the legality of warm-up tents.

Brent Baccala, a 41-year-old self-described preacher and software designer from Maryland, continued his vigil at Veterans Memorial Park sporting a donated Northern Outfitters blue suit and matching boots Friday. He slept in the nearby tent as overnight temperature dropped to minus 36, Thursday, three degrees cooler than the record low for that date, set in 1969.

(Via @SonnyBunch) Minus 36.  As I understand it, winter in Fairbanks, Alaska lasts seven months.  I gather that the local Occupiers are somehow impressed with a mental group hallucination that thinks that screaming about imaginary corporate conspiracies is a viable way to spend one’s life, but I’m more curious about whether this qualifies for what the local equivalent is to a 72-hour psychological observation. (more…)

Yeah, I know: “Occupy WHO?” Still, there are people out there who take the dirty hippie wannabees seriously, so every so often there needs to be a refresher post. In this case, the aforementioned dirty hippie wannabees managed to illegally* burn an American flag and got arrested for it. With the Occupiers screaming epithets about fascists all the while.

Mind you, the geniuses were apparently doing the burning in the middle of their own squatters’ encampment. Which suggests that ‘fascist’ is semantically equivalent to ‘not willing to let dirty hippie wannabes auto-darwinate** themselves and their ilk;’ and before you renounce the ‘fascist’ label hereby, consider that permitting these idiots to immolate themselves would result in a very nasty cleanup job for some poor sanitation workers. To say nothing of the paperwork.

(Via Power Line, via Instapundit)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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Background (H/T: Instapundit) next Monday there is supposed to be an organized shutdown of the West Coast’s port facilities by the Occupy movement – if you’re wondering why the heck they’re going after port facilities, it’s because the Occupy movement has a lot of anti-globalization sorts in it these days, and those people hate free trade with a passion that normal people reserve for rapists – and supposedly said shutdown would be supported by the private sector unions that would be immediately affected by it.  Most important one? The International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU).  The Occupiers are expecting the ILWU’s support in their shutdown.

Witness the solidarity! (more…)

Yesterday a Bostonian court decided that the Occupiers’ occupation was not in fact protected by the First Amendment; today Boston mayor Thomas Menino lowered the boom.  The Occupiers have until midnight to disperse their illegal encampment, or the city of Boston will do the dispersal for them.  It’s yet to be determined whether they’re going to go quietly; although that may be more to do with the Occupiers’ inability to actually do anything useful with their time than anything else.

Which is probably why Democrats across the land have decided to gut the Occupy movement.  You simply can’t get these people to accomplish anything.  They apparently can’t even elect progressive candidates to Congress; at least, they’re showing no signs of moving in that direction (unlike, say, the Tea Party).

Oh, this is entertaining: remember that video showing the Occupy Colorado Springs people being made to look even more like fools by Gov. Hickenlooper (D, darn it)?  Well, it turned out that the guy who shot the original footage that Verum Serum grabbed-and-edited is an Occupier, and he was not happy that we were all laughing at the superior intellect.  So, he went for a copyright take-down*.

Unfortunately for Mr. Occupier, one of the first things that the VRWC learned when we started up with this activism thing was this: Get a camera.  Get lots of cameras.  Film everything.  And lo! – somebody else was filming this event.

I believe that the technical term here is ‘pwn3d.’

Moe Lane

*Suuuuure.  Now they care about private property.  Doesn’t information want to be free, Michael Clifton?

Shame?  Me?  It is to laugh.

…and take notes.  As Jonah Goldberg notes, this is what democracy looks like:

For those without video: Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado (Democrat, alas) shut up local Occupiers by letting them whine for enough time to annoy the crowd… then put the question of whether the Occupiers should be allowed to continue to a vote.  The crowd, of course, then promptly voted for the Occupiers to shut up, with shouts of “We are the 99%!” made to speed them on their way.

It’s a shame that a Democrat came up with this technique first, but I certainly hope that nobody reading this is so foolish as to disdain a clever technical coup simply because somebody from the Other Side came up with it.

What a shame.

This New York magazine article on the Occupy movement is interesting, and that’s not a euphemism: author John Heilemann is not only aware that the supposedly leaderless movement has plenty of self-appointed (and I’d add, ‘imposed’) leaders to it, but he’s even willing to admit to it in writing.  Heilemann also has some pretty good insights on the Occupy movement, and the Democratic establishment, and how the two are, ah, ‘interacting.’ All in all, it’s about as fair-minded an article as you could hope to get from somebody who is sympathetic to a movement that thinks that the act of defecating on police cars is a valuable addition to public discourse.

And yet: the following bit of advice on what the Occupiers’ long-term goals should be is, well, poor. (more…)

If this story is true:

…as reported on the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Richmond Tea Party delivered an invoice for charges incurred in our previous three Tax Day rallies at Kanawha Plaza because Mayor Jones chose to allow Occupy Richmond protesters to convene in the same park for two weeks.

[snip]

On November 14th, representatives of our Tea Party attended the City Council meeting to speak to the Mayor and Council during the citizen forum. Mayor Jones, apparently too busy to listen to his constituents, got up and left before we spoke. He had no problem inviting members of the Occupy group to his office for a closed door meeting days later, at the same time refusing to meet with us.

His administration, however, found the time to send us an audit letter…

(Via PJ Tatler) (more…)