>> ^ToastyBuffoon:

Unnecessary dramatic music aside, THIS is and should be the #1 focus with OWS. This country is being purposely torn apart through much of the media, leading the true victims into bickering and fighting with each other over your supposed "political beliefs" as the wealthy just sit back and laugh all the way to these corrupt banks. It sickens me to see what our government has become.


I disagree, perhaps your thinking is along the lines of "If we can accomplish one thing, this should be it." I think its a completely noble and ethical goal, and will make things better, but this measure alone is not enough.

I think many of the people on the streets are there for a lot more than this, money out of politics is a given, but what about electoral reform, national financial reform, and a general sense of discussion and debate about direction and goals of the nation, aka the common good.

A lot of people laugh when you use Star Trek as an example, but at this point in civilization's history, considering population and ecological stresses, I like to imagine that the enterprise would intervene, break the prime directive and give us a good talking to.

At this point in time, its way past due that we move the discussion about common good, and expand the range of our empathic sensibilities to a global level. Now, if I can claim that I've made a point with this rant, it would be that when the people take to the streets in a beautiful unfolding of common, peaceful democratic expression, the last thing we should do is narrow that movement to a sliver of its potential, put blinders on, and ask for less than we are capable of. Less than we now realize what we deserve.

When people realize that political organization is fun, empowering, and deeply meaningful, they will realize just how politically dormant our democratic discussions have been. There is plenty more to say, lets not arrest the discussion prematurely. (no pun intended)

ECOnomy ≠ ECOlogy

just another person clinging on to hope that the current system won't fail, because he's doing quite well out of it thank you very much. It already failed good sir, that's why the protesters are in the streets, and they aren't stopping any time soon.

For anyone repeating the 'protesters have no demands' rhetoric, perhaps try reading? These were posted 10 days ago.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.



Once you've read them, and realize that there are actually demands, and that they have been posted for quite a while now, understand that the movement, by necessity has to be leaderless, so coming up with demands needs to be done in an organic fashion taking into account a variety of viewpoints - this takes TIME. On that note, expect the demands to change and improve with time, those demands are just a snapshot. The whole point of the protests is that things have just gotten rediculous, there are so many issues the Government is not dealing with, so what would be the point of protesting against just one issue?

Protests can involve more than one issue? How unthinkable!!!

@enoch & @IAmTheBlurr: Spiral dynamics is not for everyone... and there is very little empiricism to back it up because the bases upon which the different levels are concerned have not been qualitatively elucidated sufficiently enough to study them, to say nothing of the scientific method, itself, as being contingent upon certain assumptions within a given level of consciousness and not others.

However, if you were to adopt the philosopher, Hans Vaihinger's postulate of "As If," you may find a utility of the theoretical orientation which extends beyond its empirical accuracy. That is to say, "So what if it's bullshit, so long as it's useful?" This goes for many of the theories that are widely used in the social sciences, including Abe Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" among others.

That said, we should note that none of this "spiral dynamics" theory is very original. The concept of the "evolution of consciousness" is itself the basis of much of early Vedas in Hinduism which are nearly 5 thousand of years old.. However, the theory has become more codified in the 20th century by mystics and scholars such as Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Clare Graves, Edward Haskell, Arthur Young, Erich Jantsch, Jean Gebser, and, most recently, by Ken Wilber.

Of these, I'd have to say the following books are worth reading:

Aurobindo's The Life Divine & Synthesis of Yoga
de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man
Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin
Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

(partly because I haven't read the others' works)

After viewing nearly all the BBC natural series there are, the thing that confuses me the most are the justifications of anti-ecology types of people, i.e. those people who think we must destroy/alter nature to the degree we do today in order to live...

>> ^legacy0100:

>> ^zor:
This video is from Waimea, Hawaii. At first I thought it was kind of strange that they knew to take advantage of this difference in fresh and ocean water levels. I found the area on the map and it looks like this river "delta" fills up with water because a dam of sand is formed from the big waves against a steep landscape. It is really an awesome situation!

Is he speaking Portuguese @4:45? Could be a bunch of Brazilians f cking with Hawaiian ecology lol

I dunno what language it is, but he's a shouty bastard. I wish the uploader had normalised the level of the speech and the music.

>> ^zor:

This video is from Waimea, Hawaii. At first I thought it was kind of strange that they knew to take advantage of this difference in fresh and ocean water levels. I found the area on the map and it looks like this river "delta" fills up with water because a dam of sand is formed from the big waves against a steep landscape. It is really an awesome situation!


Is he speaking Portuguese @4:45? Could be a bunch of Brazilians f*cking with Hawaiian ecology lol

What the heck is going on. Did they actually turn a whole river?

That's awesome, and alarming at the same time. This has the potential to create some radical ecologic issues.

Over 800 instances of human waste are reported in San Francisco each month. This does not aid tourism in the city. Thankfully, Oakland-based ecological engineering company Hyphae Design Laboratory has come to flush the problem away, reports the San Francisco Huffington Post. They'll soon set up eco-friendly “pooplets” to tackle the staggering insufficient public toilets the homeless can use. Source for this article: San Francisco pooplets address lack of toilets for homeless

Sharks are apex predators. Last time I checked, geese were not.>> ^legacy0100:

Mind you that I have never tried shark fin soup, but I must point out that Ramsey again puts himself in the shoes of an extremist. I've seen the documentaries of Ramsay and he is not this intense egomaniac he presents himself in front of Cameras. So I'm not sure how much he believes in the things he's preaches in this video.
But my main concern of this video is this ridiculous Hypocracy that's going on in this video. He has yet again taken this role as a very ethnocentric typical westerner judging and criticizing cultures that are different from his own for the sake of entertaining television. In the video he is arguing that harvesting fins from sharks are bad because:
1. Sharks are endangered species
2. The rest of the shark meat is being wasted.
3. The fins doesn't taste that good.
4. Sharks are killed inhumanely.

Then I've compared it with a delicacy from western tradition: Foie gra. http://www.aprl.org/sdcitybeat.php
1. Foie Gras Geese are Specially bred species that will not survive out in the wild. They are specialized to live ina mechanized farm to yield maximum production.
2. Goose meat is generally gamier and intensely flavored, and considered a 'delicacy'. Translation= People would rather eat chicken.
3. A lot of Easteners do not like the taste of Foie Gras, as they consider it to be too rich and fatty.
4. Geese are force-fed against their will, and killed as any farm animal would.
The only difference between these two delicacies is that western chefs are 'taught' to be comfortable with process of making Foie Gras. They are 'taught' to think it's okay to force-feed the Goose, that they're physiologically different from us, and that shoving metal tubes down their throat doesn't hurt them as much as we imagine it to be, so it's okay to do it.
So as long as we are used to the idea, it's perfectly normal. After all, western chefs make good money off of serving Foie Gras. But Shark fins? No western customer has ever came in demanding those. So it's pretty useless in his/her eyes.
The only argument the western Foie Gras' got going for is that the Goose species isn't endangered, since it's bred in a mass farm, in a cramped space, being force-fed periodically.
Yea, I find this video very hypocritical. Oh and then there's the problem of Eurpoean fisheries over farming the fish and devastating local ecology. Oh and then there's western demand for large fish, which has created this monster of a shrimp farming economy in Southeast Asia that's basically creating the most disgusting thing you can put in your mouth, yet westerners still buy them up.
Yea. So... Why is Ramsay, someone who's openly endorsing these products by constantly releasing recipes using Foie Gras and other unethical shit, hosting this video?

>> ^legacy0100:

Mind you that I have never tried shark fin soup, but I must point out that Ramsey again puts himself in the shoes of an extremist. I've seen the documentaries of Ramsay and he is not this intense egomaniac he presents himself in front of Cameras. So I'm not sure how much he believes in the things he's preaches in this video.
But my main concern of this video is this ridiculous Hypocracy that's going on in this video. He has yet again taken this role as a very ethnocentric typical westerner judging and criticizing cultures that are different from his own for the sake of entertaining television. In the video he is arguing that harvesting fins from sharks are bad because:
1. Sharks are endangered species
2. The rest of the shark meat is being wasted.
3. The fins doesn't taste that good.
4. Sharks are killed inhumanely.

Then I've compared it with a delicacy from western tradition: Foie gra. http://www.foodreference.com/html/artgoose.html
1. Foie Gras Geese are Specially bred species that will not survive out in the wild. They are specialized to live ina mechanized farm to yield maximum production.
2. Goose meat is generally gamier and intensely flavored, and considered a 'delicacy'. Translation= People would rather eat chicken.
3. A lot of Easteners do not like the taste of Foie Gras, as they consider it to be too rich and fatty.
4. Geese are force-fed against their will, and killed as any farm animal would.
The only difference between these two delicacies is that western chefs are 'taught' to be comfortable with process of making Foie Gras. They are 'taught' to think it's okay to force-feed the Goose, that they're physiologically different from us, and that shoving metal tubes down their throat doesn't hurt them as much as we imagine it to be, so it's okay to do it.
So as long as we are used to the idea, it's perfectly normal. After all, western chefs make good money off of serving Foie Gras. But Shark fins? No western customer has ever came in demanding those. So it's pretty useless in his/her eyes.
The only argument the western Foie Gras' got going for is that the Goose species isn't endangered, since it's bred in a mass farm, in a cramped space, being force-fed periodically.
Yea, I find this video very hypocritical. Oh and then there's the problem of Eurpoean fisheries over farming the fish and devastating local ecology. Oh and then there's western demand for large fish, which has created this monster of a shrimp farming economy in Southeast Asia that's basically creating the most disgusting thing you can put in your mouth, yet westerners still buy them up.
Yea. So... Why is Ramsay, someone who's openly endorsing these products by constantly releasing recipes using Foie Gras and other unethical shit, hosting this video?


So your argument is that it's ok for one ethnic group to wastefully kill an endangered species for an over-priced, tasteless status symbol because another ethnic group force feeds birds to make an over-priced status symbol?

Ah, the old "two wrongs make a right" argument! Ramsay's an ass. He's an ass that can cook, but he's still an ass. He can barely interact with other humans let alone animals (if my boss swore at me or called me "big boy", I'd quit so fast he wouldn't know what hit him. And I'd probably hit him). But that doesn't mean he's wrong about this or right about foie gras.

Mind you that I have never tried shark fin soup, but I must point out that Ramsey again puts himself in the shoes of an extremist. I've seen the documentaries of Ramsay and he is not this intense egomaniac he presents himself in front of Cameras. So I'm not sure how much he believes in the things he's preaches in this video.

But my main concern of this video is this ridiculous Hypocracy that's going on in this video. He has yet again taken this role as a very ethnocentric typical westerner judging and criticizing cultures that are different from his own for the sake of entertaining television. In the video he is arguing that harvesting fins from sharks are bad because:

1. Sharks are endangered species
2. The rest of the shark meat is being wasted.
3. The fins doesn't taste that good.
4. Sharks are killed inhumanely.


Then I've compared it with a delicacy from western tradition: Foie gra. http://www.aprl.org/sdcitybeat.php

1. Foie Gras Geese are Specially bred species that will not survive out in the wild. They are specialized to live ina mechanized farm to yield maximum production.
2. Goose meat is generally gamier and intensely flavored, and considered a 'delicacy'. Translation= People would rather eat chicken.
3. A lot of Easteners do not like the taste of Foie Gras, as they consider it to be too rich and fatty.
4. Geese are force-fed against their will, and killed as any farm animal would.

The only difference between these two delicacies is that western chefs are 'taught' to be comfortable with process of making Foie Gras. They are 'taught' to think it's okay to force-feed the Goose, that they're physiologically different from us, and that shoving metal tubes down their throat doesn't hurt them as much as we imagine it to be, so it's okay to do it.

So as long as we are used to the idea, it's perfectly normal. After all, western chefs make good money off of serving Foie Gras. But Shark fins? No western customer has ever came in demanding those. So it's pretty useless in his/her eyes.

The only argument the western Foie Gras' got going for is that the Goose species isn't endangered, since it's bred in a mass farm, in a cramped space, being force-fed periodically.

Yea, I find this video very hypocritical. Oh and then there's the problem of Eurpoean fisheries over farming the fish and devastating local ecology. Oh and then there's western demand for large prawns, which has created this monster of a shrimp farming economy in Southeast Asia that's basically creating the most disgusting thing you can put in your mouth, yet westerners still buy them up.

Yea. So... Why is Ramsay, someone who's openly endorsing these products by constantly releasing recipes using Foie Gras and other unethical shit, hosting this video?

World ecology of America? Douche.

Good work pissing on the AMA and APA, btw.

Nice. I hear that herders mix Goats with their sheep flock to prevent sheeps from devastating the ranch ecology by eating only one kind of grass. If the sheeps are with a goat, they start eating various kinds of vegetation, which prevents the farm from becoming a barren land. No training required, it's just the way they naturally behave.