OH CHEER UP

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http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/exoplanets/resources.php
“The area around our own solar system showing the location of known extrasolar planetary systems (purple circles). The red sphere represents Earth’s radio signature, or the distance our radio/television broadcasts have so far traveled outward.”

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AS AN ASIDE:
ANYBODY NOTICE THE MARKETS
WERE CLOSED FOR GOOD FRIDAY?
IT’S NOT A FEDERAL HOLIDAY

MAYBE OUT OF RESPECT FOR
HOW MUCH JESUS HATED BANKERS
(OR THEY ARE TOO SUPERSTITIOUS NOT TO)

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WHICH ALMOST REMINDS US OF WHEN YIPPIES WENT TO NEGOTIATE
OVER HOW HIGH THEY WOULD BE ALLOWED TO LEVITATE THE PENTAGON
SUPPOSEDLY ABBIE GOT THEM TO AGREE TO 3 ft (TALKED DOWN FROM 22)
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-12202003-145735/unrestricted/France_Jr_thesis.pdf
“During a meeting between Washington and military representatives with the Mobe, a lengthy, surreal discussion developed over the height the Pentagon could be levitated. The military claimed that Abbie’s original plan to levitate the building twenty-two feet would be too high for structural reasons. According to a friend of Abbie’s, Sal Gianetta, who was in attendance at the meeting, “Ab came down from twenty-two feet to three feet, the military agreed to three feet and they sealed it with a handshake.” (qtd. in Sloman 98)

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IT’S NICE TO FEEL IN CHARGE, SURE

THOUGH WE STOP HERE TO MAKE
A FORMAL SPECTRE LABS REQUEST
FOR SUPERSTITIOUS PRIMATE RESEARCH

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AND NOW (SHUT OFF YOUR CELL PHONES, PLEASE)

GREAT DANCERS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  (pt 1)

EMMA GOLDMAN
http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2007/06/dancing-with-emma-goldman.html
from History is Made At Night : Dancing with EG

“The anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is perhaps best known today for one quote attributed to her: ‘If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution’. It seems that she never actually said these words, but in her autobiography Living My Life her joy in dancing is obvious.

At one point she recalls her first ball in St. Petersburg, aged 15: “At the German Club everything was bright and gay… I was asked for every dance, and I danced in frantic excitement and abandon. It was getting late and many people were already leaving when Kadison invited me for another dance. Helena insisted that I was too exhausted, but I would not have it so. “I will dance!” I declared; “I will dance myself to death!” My flesh felt hot, my heart beat violently as my cavalier swung me round the ball-room, holding me tightly. To dance to death – what more glorious end! It was towards five in the morning when we arrived home”.

After moving to the United States, she was involved in supporting a strike by Jewish women cloakmakers in New York’s East Side in the 1890s, including dances for the strikers: ‘At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for, a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world – prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal’.

MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN IN AMERICA
http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/goldman_e.html
Goldman, Emma (1869-1940)

Once called “one of the most dangerous women in America,” by the F. B. I.’s J. Edgar Hoover, Emma Goldman was an energetic political organizer, a fiery radical, and a passionate free spirit. She was also one of the first outspoken allies of gay and lesbian people anywhere in the world. Firmly believing that “the most vital right is the right to love and be loved,” Goldman braved not only the disapproval of the mainstream, but also opposition within the radical left to defend the rights of homosexuals.

Born in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania on June 27, 1869, Goldman grew up learning the politics of liberation under the shadow of discrimination and pogroms. In 1884 she emigrated to the United States to join her sister in Rochester, New York. Working under sweatshop conditions as a sewing machine operator in a corset factory, Goldman continued her education about oppression and the struggle for human rights.

She was politically galvanized when a violent political demonstration in 1886 led to the execution of four anarchists in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. She moved to New York City and became an active anarchist. Over the next years Goldman became an effective speaker and organizer for anarchist causes. She was attracted to anarchism as a philosophy not only because it sought economic and political justice, but also because anarchists advocated free speech, atheism, and sexual freedom.

Goldman had already left one unhappy marriage, and she valued the freedom to love without bondage as much as she valued the right of workers to adequate pay. She spoke out boldly in favor of contraception and against marriage, which she deemed a form of female slavery. Goldman’s political speeches, writings, and other activities earned her admiration from many working people and fear and hostility from those in power. She was arrested and jailed in 1893, 1901, 1916, 1918, 1919, and 1921 for her radical activities.

In an era when gay writer Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years (1895-1897) for “gross indecency,” Goldman spoke out publicly in defense of gay and lesbian people, defending their right to choose who and how they would love. For this outspokenness she faced criticism from her colleagues on the left who feared that embracing the cause of homosexuality would damage their other political work. Goldman was as unaffected by these fears as she was by the condemnation of those on the right, and she continued to support homosexuals throughout her life. In attacking the stigmatization and persecution of homosexuals, she drew upon the works of Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and other sexologists.

Goldman herself embraced free love as a lifestyle and had many passionate affairs, notably with Alexander Berkman, her co-editor of the anarchist journal Mother Earth, and Ben Reitman, a Chicago radical. While she did not write or speak about her own relations with women, it is likely that she did have some. Margaret Anderson, lesbian editor of The Little Review, was a member of Goldman’s circle, as were other lesbians and gay men. One of her admirers, Almeda Sperry, implied a sexual relationship, but it was never acknowledged by Goldman.

In words that still ring true almost a century later, Goldman wrote in a 1923 essay: “Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification. And since man in many cases cannot offer her this, she turns to her sisters.” However, she also criticized some lesbians, whose “antagonism to the male,” she wrote, “is almost a disease.”

Goldman was arrested in 1917 for speaking out against military conscription for World War I, and in 1919, she was deported to Russia. Although she left Russia disillusioned by the failures of the Communist revolution there, she continued to work for progressive social and political causes until her death on May 14, 1940. She was buried near Haymarket Square in Chicago, where her political inspiration had been ignited.

‘MY DISILLUSIONMENT IN RUSSIA’ – BY E.G.
http://ditext.com/goldman/russia/russia.html
‘MY FURTHER DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RUSSIA’ – BY E.G.
http://www.panarchy.org/goldman/russia.1924.html

ENEMY OF STATES
http://www.tankriot.com/2009/074/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/g#a840
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/Goldmanarchive.html

CLOSET TRANSVESTITE DEPORTS FREEDOM ADVOCATE
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/deportation.html
War Resistance, Anti-Militarism, and Deportation, 1917-1919

Though she was not a pacifist, Emma Goldman insisted on the anarchist principle that the state has no right to make war. She believed that most modern wars were fought on behalf of capitalists at the expense of the working class, and that the draft was a form of illegitimate coercion.

As the United States appeared to be drifting toward war in late 1916, Goldman threw her energy into opposing the government’s military preparations, using her magazine, Mother Earth, as a forum. Goldman was not alone in this cause: the antiwar effort was the product of a broad coalition of liberals, socialists, anarchists, and progressive unionists. Ultimately, however, the federal government crushed this movement and repressed its elements in an almost hysterical patriotic prowar and antiradical crusade orchestrated by President Woodrow Wilson. Mother Earth was banned, along with other periodicals opposing the war. Hundreds of foreign-born radicals were deported.

Although Goldman knew federal government officials had been looking for grounds to deport her for years, she pressed on with her antiwar activities. Within weeks of America’s entry into World War I, she helped launch the No- Conscription League to encourage conscientious objectors and spoke repeatedly against the draft, attracting eight thousand people to one meeting. Predictably, the government responded, arresting Emma Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman on June 15, 1917. Charged with conspiring against the draft, they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison with the possibility of deportation at the end of their term.

After an unsuccessful appeal to the Supreme Court, Goldman began serving her term at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. On September 27, 1919, Emma was released, only to be re-arrested shortly afterward by the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Hoover advanced his career by implementing to the fullest extent possible the government’s plan to deport all foreign-born radicals. Writing the briefs and presenting the case against Goldman himself, Hoover persuaded the courts to deny Goldman’s citizenship claims and to deport her.

On December 21, 1919, Goldman, Berkman, and over two hundred other foreign- born radicals were herded aboard the Buford and, accompanied by a fearsome block of nearly one hundred guards, set sail for the Soviet Union.

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HAPPY RABBIT FESTIVAL
OR WHATEVER IT IS

(JESUS IS TIRED OF CARRYING YOU, BTW)

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