Since September 17th, a group of people have gathered at Zuccotti Park – now called Liberty Square – in New York to #OccupyWallstreet and have their grievances heard.

They are forbidden by police forces to pitch tents, so they sleep in the rain.

They are forbidden by police forces to use megaphones, so they use a people’s mic. One person talks and the crowd repeats, so everyone can hear. On September 30th, the crowd was so big, multiple people’s mics were needed and the chants spread in 4 to 5 separate waves emanating outwards across thousands of people.

In order to function as a whole, inclusive, open democratic processes have emerged on the site that have resulted in Working Groups for everything from political groups to sanitation to food to General Assemblies where the working groups report back.

It is emergence at its finest. General Assemblies are currently being formed across the US from Los Angeles to Chicago and around the world from Greece to Latin America.

Having emerged from the collective, this is the declaration of the New York City General Assembly:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them. They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

• Occupy Wall Street – occupywallst.org
• New York City General Assembly – nycga.cc
• Watch the events live on livestream.com/globalrevolution

I wrote a number of comments in response to Chris Pirillo’s post on Google+ in which he put forth the question “Are humans computers?”. I decided they were worth repeating here – with some adjustments.

A computer is an entity that is subject to physics, that perceives the world through input, behaves according to its historically inherited characteristics and programming and is limited by its physical capacities and characteristics. Even bacteria have computational capabilities if you want to physically “compute” yogurt as an outcome into existence. We even share evolution and natural selection with technology.

All the matter in the Universe is subject to the same laws, be it emergent biological entities or technological ones. You can call one thing a computer and another thing Bob, yet both made of the same fundamental particles. We change and naturally select (evolve) our technology to whatever environments demand, make them behave more like Bob or more like people in military positions or people working in factories, but even now, computers can do some things that Bob obviously can’t. Computers, like us are expressions of complexities emergent from matter.

A laptop gets its energy from a power plant and stores the electrical energy by means of lithium-ion chemical reactions. Humans get their “charge” by ingesting food and store the energy as lipids. It’s basically the same concept and ultimately the Earth’s energy cycle isn’t even a closed system – Our primary source of energy is the Sun. We also use nuclear fusion for power generation and that also finds its origins in stars. Uranium -like all elements heavier than Helium, Hydrogen and Lithium- is created in stars through nucleosynthesis and spread by supernovae.

When you compare computers and humans, and ask if they’re the same, the question itself is a simplification with some ambiguous parameters. It depends on the overarching subject the comparisons takes place in. Are we constructed like computers? No. One is manufactured, the other grows to maturity. Do we both compute? Yes. Are we both as reliable at computing? No. One is digital, the other is analog. We are both constrained by inherent characteristics. Are we both evolved entities? Yes. Are we both as consistent? No. One is cloned and has fewer consistency issues than the other, which is subject to mutations and genetic recombination. But when you view it from a more abstract perspective or from a physics point of view, we may be more complex in some ways, but essentially we operate, consume energy and have a life-cycle just like computers.

It’s like asking “Are cars, horses?” The question has some open parameters but assumes a perspective of utility and one could argue that cars and horses do the same thing and compare their commonalities to conclude that cars consume energy, have a life-cycle and are used just like horses. Cars and horses are made from the same elementary particles and subject to the same laws of physics and both at a certain scale and time fill an ecological niche in the respective environments they evolved in.

I’m not sure if that answers the question of whether humans are computers. I guess the short would be “It depends on your point of view” but there is no doubt that the computational capacity of the Universe manifests itself both in biology and technology.

In two epic, surreal and mind-expanding films, Professor Jim Al-Khalili searches for an answer to these questions as he explores the true size and shape of the universe and delves into the amazing science behind apparent nothingness.

Everything

The first part, Everything, sees Professor Al-Khalili set out to discover what the universe might actually look like. The journey takes him from the distant past to the boundaries of the known universe. Along the way he charts the remarkable stories of the men and women who discovered the truth about the cosmos and investigates how our understanding of space has been shaped by both mathematics and astronomy.

Nothing

The second part, Nothing, explores science at the very limits of human perception, where we now understand the deepest mysteries of the universe lie. Jim sets out to answer one very simple question – what is nothing? His journey ends with perhaps the most profound insight about reality that humanity has ever made. Everything came from nothing. The quantum world of the super-small shaped the vast universe we inhabit today, and Jim can prove it.

Osama Bin Laden, as a Saudi national and a member of a powerful industrialist family insured his network reached deep amongst the Wahhabi ruling family of Saudi Arabia and their connections in Pakistan. They funneled money through shell businesses masked as “charitable organization”, funding and planned the attacks on 9/11.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks were Saudi nationals, some of whom are believed by U.S. authorities to have received assistance from Saudi Arabia-based charities while they were living in the United States.

While not identifying the country or countries identified in the report, Graham said, “I will say that the foreign government went well beyond facilitating charitable giving to terrorists.

“There was also direct governmental involvement with some of the terrorists. And an unanswered question is, Was the same assistance provided to the other 19 terrorists?”
source

By making Pakistan an ally in the war on terror, America built a relationship that now prevents Pakistan from giving nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia. In return the United States funds Pakistan’s military and helps it develop its economy. Israel retains its position as America’s strategic force field over its supply of oil, their “interests in the region” and the economy can recover from its 2001 hiccup. Of course, I could be wrong.