This year we've decided to stay home for Thanksgiving.  Our nearest family is 350 miles away but every year but one (and now this one) we've managed to be together for this holiday.  We'll be seeing them all in three weeks or so for the Christmas holidays, but I'm missing them acutely today. 

Dear Authorities:

I would like very much not to have a revolution. I know that you don't want one either. I prefer my change peaceful and democratic. You, I suspect, prefer any changes to be strictly top-down, decided upon by the existing power structure. But neither of us want lawless, spasmodic change. So please take my advice: leave the protestors the hell alone.

Acts of violence by men against women do not begin with the act of violence itself. But whether it be upbringing or societal factors, there is always one factor that remains the same in every act of male violence against woman – the presence of a man willing to commit said act of violence.

My wife is staying with her mother, and I had thought about visiting Occupy DC this weekend, but I decided to work instead. On weekends the office is quiet enough that I can fully concentrate on my cad draughting chores. A fellow called Weasel used to deejay for WHFS, 102.3 FM in Bethesda, when it was a progressive rock station in the 1970s and 80s, and is now doing a Saturday show for WTMD, a public alt rock station broadcast from Towson University. So I grooved and got quite a bit done. 

Over lunch I checked out Occupy Baltimore's website. They were planning to support a SleepOut in front of City Hall, and planned a solidarity march to welcome fifty Occupy the Highway (OtH) marchers, shown in the video above, who had been interviewed en route by WBAL, as shown in this video. 

 For a couple of months now, we on the left have been marking the heady, exhilarating, organic spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and getting it that something unstoppable seems to be happening.  Think of it: The dedication, the precision, the impossible successes coming from a movement organized by ordinary hoi polloi.  No backing by agenda-driven billionaires, no pseudo-intellectual input from think-tanks, no take-over by shady cabals.  It's the stuff of miracles.  

Yesterday,  I received an email from Adam Falk, president of Williams College, a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. Mr. Falk had written to inform me--and every other alumnus on the mailing list--about an incident of racist hate speech on campus. Someone had scrawled, "All N****** Must Die," on a dormitory wall.

Every hour of every day, children in our keep are being harmed.  Throughout the history of the world, adults have used their size and their physical and psychological power as weapons against our most precious assets--our children.

Hurting them is not accidental, it's the goal, but all it takes to muddy the waters is the argument about degree.  Is spanking abuse?  Is yelling?  Is fondling?  If there are no cuts and bruises how bad is it, really?

In the past few weeks the stories have been coming at us, fast and furious.

Occupy Baltimore Livestream picked up by 1100 Global Revolution viewers as OB general assembly discusses the group's responses to Parks and Recreation's deferment of issuing a permit.

The Portland Press Herald reports on the bombing of Occupy Maine:

"We are more motivated to keep doing what we're doing," said Stephanie Wilburn, of Portland, who was sitting near where the chemical mixture in a Gatorade bottle was tossed at 4 a.m. Sunday. "They have heard us and we're making a difference."