Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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"Follow the wisdom provided by nature. Everything in moderation - sunlight, water, nutrients. Too much of a good thing will topple your structure. You can't harvest what you don't sow. So plant your desires, gently nurture them, and they will be rewarded with abundance."
~ Vivian Elisabeth Glyck, 1997
"If you want to be happy for three days, get married;
If you want to be happy forever, make a garden."
~Chinese Proverb
“May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
"Garden Gates", photo credit: the painted garden blog
News
US President Barack Obama is set to announce a $3bn (£1.9bn) plan to boost food security and farm productivity in Africa, US officials say
They say the initiative is aimed at alleviating shortages as world food supplies are being stretched by rising demand in Asia's emerging markets.
Food security is expected to be on the agenda of this weekend's G-8 meeting.
The summit near Washington is being dominated by Europe's debt crisis and a possible Greek exit from the eurozone.
President Obama is expected to announce investments in African agriculture by private US companies, for a total of more than $3bn.
Let's hear it for veggie taco's! ...
WaPo: Chicago braces for NATO ... and Occupy
While the delegates and military attaches hunker down for talks in the cavernous McCormick Place convention center — in virtual lock-down for the duration of the two-day event Sunday and Monday — Occupiers will be outside the protective barriers engaging in actions that could block traffic and bring clashes with police. {snip}
Large swathes of downtown will be closed to parking and traffic throughout the summit, and a no-fly-zone will be enforced in the airspace overhead. High-profile delegates will be whisked through the streets in motorcades and dine on Great Lakes whitefish and Colorado lamb Sunday at a dinner hosted by Emanuel at the Field Museum. (A plan to serve a French dessert called “The Bomb” was apparently nixed.)
Meanwhile, protesters will be taking public transit and eating rice and beans or veggie tacos.
... vs... UK:
The Guardian UK: The Nato summit template for policing the 'other Chicago'
Beginning last fall, Emanuel cracked down on the Occupy movement in Chicago by arresting 300 people participating in successive attempts to establish an Occupy camp, as was happening across the nation. The message was sent that protesters would be aggressively handled.
But that was only a short-term goal for the Emanuel administration. The investment in new riot gear, including hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on masks for police helmets, is not just for the two-day affair of the Nato summit. Rather, their long-term use has to do with the "other Chicago".
The other Chicago will not be on display during the Nato summit. Though only a few city blocks from where the summit will be held, the other Chicago is a million miles from the gala and parties that will accompany the global 1%'s Chicago enclave. This other Chicago is racked by poverty, unemployment, and home foreclosures – and is hemmed in by a notoriously violent police force.
of course!...
Message in the music: Here for NATO, new voices plan 3 concerts
This weekend, some of the best new voices in protest music will be gathered in Chicago, occupying several events (official and otherwise) to sing their dissent in the shadow of the ballyhooed NATO summit. Speaking through hard rock, klezmer, Afrobeat, banda, Norteno, marching bands, jazz, country and, yes, traditional folk, these protest singers seek to both venerate and explode the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan, lone-wolf-with-an-acoustic-guitar template of musical protest.
“No successful protest movement in our nation’s history has existed without a great soundtrack,” says Tom Morello, 47, guitarist from alt-rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, now solo as a socially conscious folk singer under the name The Nightwatchman. “The music behind the Civil Rights era, the anti-Vietnam protests — some of those artists were also chart-toppers. These are different times. Occupy has a great soundtrack, but it’s being played around the campfire and on the city hall steps right now. When I played Zuccotti Park last fall, I was just one of six artists that day. I played [other Occupy events] in Vancouver, in Bristol, in London. The nights were filled with song.”
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Ehrenreich: How Corporations and Local Governments Rob the Poor Blind
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators.
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Plaintiff in NDAA case: U.S. has ‘gone insane’ in its war on terror
Journalist Tangerine Bolen, who along with other activists and writers filed suit over an indefinite detention law, said Thursday that the citizens United States had become indifferent about their rights.
"If I Had A Heart" lyrics link
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Blog Posts of Interest
This is a new section in the What's Happenin' diaries that will be updated throughout the day to promote selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
in case you missed it last night ...
Freaky Friday :: Occupy This Album 05.19.12 by joanneleon on dailykos
It's Saturday. Busy lives. I know. But if you read nothing else today in blogland, please click through and go read this...
Chris Hedges: A Victory for All of Us, May 18 2012
We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.