Adbusters Admits OWS Flopped; Now Promoting 'Flash Encampments'
The Occupy Wall Street movement was first proposed by the leftwing Canadian magazine, Adbusters. However, now even they are forced to admit the obvious about the failure of their creation which you can read in their sad OWS obituary:
Burned out, out of money, out of ideas… seduced by salaries, comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash and minor celebrity status, some of the most prominent early heroes of our leaderless uprising are losing the edge that catalyzed last year’s one thousand encampments. Bit by bit, Occupy’s first generation is succumbing to an insidious institutionalization and ossification that could be fatal to our young spiritual insurrection unless we leap over it right now. Putting our movement back on track will take nothing short of a revolution within Occupy.
Your humble correspondent begs your pardon for this comparison but does the preceding Adbusters quote not sound eerily similar to this declaration by Bela Lugosi as Dr. Eric Vornoff in that epic film, Bride of the Monster?
Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, Living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
And what is the Adbusters version of "a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world?" An equally unrealistic solution as called "flash encampments" as Adbusters explains:
The next big bang to capture the world’s imagination could come not from a thousand encampments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams… a global cascade of flash encampments may well be what this hot Summer will look like.
And here is their "glowing example" of a flash encampment:
...The new tone was set on Earth Day, April 22, in a suburb bordering Berkeley, California when a dozen occupiers quietly marched a small crowd to a tract of endangered urban agricultural land, cut through the locked fence and set up tents, kitchens and a people’s assembly. Acting autonomously under the banner of Occupy, without waiting for approval from any preexisting General Assembly, Occupy The Farm was notable for its sophisticated preplanning and careful execution — they even brought chickens — that offered a positive vision for the future and engendered broad community support. While encampments across the world were unable to re-establish themselves on May Day, this small cadre of farm occupiers boldly maintained their inspiring occupation for nearly four weeks.
What Adbusters doesn't tell you was this "flash encampment" turned out to be yet another dopey counterproductive idea as reported by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson:
The group cut through a secured gate to enter the property in mid-April and has been squatting on the land since. Protesters have planted vegetables on 2 acres of land being readied for a corn crop used in biofuel research.
Unfortunately, their claim to the land and the reasons they've cited for their actions are as empty as the section of field they have commandeered.
...George Chuck, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher whose work is literally grounded on those same 2 acres, sees it much differently.
...For the past decade, he's worked on mapping corn genes to identify which ones produce energy. His work adding corn genes to switchgrass has more than doubled the yield of biofuels produced by the hybrid crop. His findings were published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
...That research, which has the potential to increase alternative fuel sources sounds more important than the desires of two dozen or so people growing 2 acres worth of anything.
"What's worse is that when I tried talking to (some of) these guys, they just started spouting slogans someone else told them," Chuck said.
And as far as the group's efforts to grow crops on land Chuck said is not yet ready for planting, "They have no idea what they're doing," he said.
Since protesters arrived, they've managed to destroy a fruit tree that was the subject of a research project, created a waste pile, built a rickety chicken coop and left the gate open allowing wild turkeys to escape or be killed by predators that entered the unlocked facility, he added.
It sounds like Dr. Vornoff's race of atomic supermen will have more of a chance of conquering the world than these silly Adbusters-hyped flash encampments have of achieving anything productive.
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Comments
Hey, I never said thanks to
Submitted by ant on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 7:53pm.
Hey, I never said thanks to the Canadian libtards for giving our own, incomparably stupid libtards their bright ideas the first time around...so...thanks.....dicks!
I love that as the occupying farm libturds were trying to comprehend the bio-fuel research all they could do was resort to repeating idiotic lefty slogans.....and, yet, these same fools accuse us conservatives of being "anti-science".
OH NOES!
Submitted by jazbo on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 9:31am.
The occutards are destroying green jobs and causing animals to die.
Not to worry, Sfartz will be here shortly,
Submitted by UpNorth on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 8:26pm.
to explain to all us TEA partiers and conservatives where we've gone off the cliff. Followed by his buddy, mlytle0 and opportunitycost. All the while denying that they are, in fact, Occutards.
Meanwhile, their rationalization, "Burned out, out of money, out of ideas…" is how the Occutards started out, they didn't suddenly arrive at this point, they've been there the whole time.
Between the two, I think I'd
Submitted by LinTaylor on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 8:34pm.
Between the two, I think I'd rather have the atomic supermen. They could be made to be less destructive and better behaved than these psychotic "burn the world down and start over" lunatics.
Honestly, anyone who starts spouting that "In a cosmic sense, nobody owns anything, maaaaan" stuff makes me have to fight down the urge to punch them right in their smug faces and then tell them they're welcome to claim ownership of the broken nose, because they certainly earned it.
In this specific case, what on Earth did those Berkley mouthbreathers think they were accomplishing by squatting on private land? Were they protesting biofuel research? Or were they just being attention whores the way most Occupiers are?
Is "biofuel research" another
Submitted by robert108 on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 8:47pm.
Is "biofuel research" another way of saying "unproductive farming"? Hard to decide which of those two is more useless.
If I may share my $0.02...
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 8:35am.
Research on 2 acres of otherwise "unusuable" land, as long as the tax payer is not being bilked, should be ok. Caveat: as long as the govt. didn't confiscate the property under the guise of imminent domain...or some other Agenda 21 - U.N. racket.Subsidizing entire crops grown on privately owned property, while propping up an entire idustry (ethanol quickly comes to mind) that would/could not likely make it on it's own without subsidies, is detrimental to global food prices and destroys the very products it was supposedly designed to enhance, is entirely another - and is very wrong.
Summary:
Privately funded R&D = good thing.
Tax payer funded subsidies (read: control) = bad thing.
Flash mobs and YouTube
Submitted by CO2Maker on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 9:30pm.
Yep, that'll do it. On to the Bastille!
Destitution, subsistence, and economic systems
Submitted by CO2Maker on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 9:34pm.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of subsistence than any other economic or political system. Some capitalists get rich, and a few of them get really really rich. But more and more people continue to rise above subsistence from the waves of capitalism that wash over all the shores of the globe. And here in the U.S., poor people stand in line for benefits, talking on their cell phones, wearing nice sneakers, owning a car and television, and being a lot better off than Nigerians or Chadians who live without DDT to kill the malaria-bearing mosquitoes, which occurs because capitalist guilt in the West does penance for creating chemical pesticides that save lives and make companies profit.
white guilt runs America
Submitted by hoosherdaddy137 on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 6:33am.
white guilt runs America right now. EVERYTHING we do day to day politically is driven by white guilt.
Grim little chuckle
Submitted by mustango on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 9:54pm.
I have to admit to getting a grim little chuckle out of the notion that it's just barely conceivably possible that research that might have been the key to breaking our dependence on oil, could have been ruined by squatters just having a little petty protest of nothing specific.
Brainless
Submitted by Jerry Mack on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 10:49pm.
Burned out, out of money, out of ideas… seduced by salaries, comfy offices, book deals, old lefty cash and minor celebrity status, some of the most prominent early heroes of our leaderless uprising are losing the edge that catalyzed last year’s one thousand encampments
So the intelligent ones used the brainless too make money. Will not hear or see this article on Msnbc.
OWS -- self-righteous and senseless
Submitted by lgeubank on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 11:00pm.
Theodore Dalrymple said something about the "European project" that applies to OWS:
"Whatever the European project may be, those who don’t embrace it wholeheartedly—with a fervor that can only be described as mystical, considering that no one can explain or define it in simple terms— are depicted not as skeptics, but as enemies."
That's like every leftist enthusiasm -- holy, unquestionable, yet at the same time idiotic and incomprehensible. The OWS hippies know they're "holier than thou," but exactly in what way, or for what cause, they are holier, nobody can be sure. They're fervent, pious, obnoxious and mentally disturbed, like a lot of smelly, annoying Don Quixote's.
Scum collects and clogs things, but it is just scum
Submitted by Don L on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 4:11am.
Some are born with the urge to control all others
Some are born with the urge to be controlled
Some are born to resist control in order to do wrong
Some are born to resist control in order to do good and be free
The parlance sounds familiar.
Submitted by forest on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 5:52am.
The parlance sounds familiar. Does the author also write speeches for TOTUS?
When even Bill Maher is making fun of you.....
Submitted by motherbelt on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 7:00am.
That's gotta hurt.
OWS is not a leaderless movement
Submitted by BMF on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 7:45am.
When the OWS 1960's-wannabe's emerged from the basements of their parents' homes, they declared that they were a leaderless grassroots movement that would bring down Wall Street, banks, CEOs, corportations, and the rich. In other words, they would destroy the job producing sectors of the economy.
I said then that the movement would soon fail. Why? Because it is anything but a leaderless movement. They could only be sustained by outside left wing organizations such as unions and (rich) people. They had to form a "peoples' government" within the camps, they required organization, and they were totally dependent upon self-styled leaders who were in turn getting their insturctions from outside the camps. Worse, OWS didn't have any core principles--only slogans of which most made no sense whatsoever. I still have no idea what "Eat the Rich" means.
The tea party, however, is a true leaderless grassroots movement. It has about five core principles: low taxes, smaller government, more power to the states, balanced budget, and return to our Constitutional roots.
There is no need for marches, riots, bull horns, outside money, or ... drum roll please ... leaders. While some groups such as Tea Party Patriots have organized, they only represent a tiny fraction of the people who consider themselves part of the tea party movement. And neither they nor any other formal tea party organization controls or speaks for the vast number of people who consider themselves a tea party supporter across the country.
There is no one that can be identified as the leader of the tea party. There are influential people who support its principles and who can provided inspiration (e.g., Sarah Palin and others); but they are 100% powerless to tell tea partiers what to do.
How many tea party people are there? No one knows because there is no membership list. The only requirement to be a tea party member is to believe in the five core principles and then act on those principles accordingly when and where appropriate--usually by supporting a candidate that shares those principles.
If you really want to know what leaderless movements are, why they are so effective, and why they are so difficult to counter; I suggest reading "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. It's a quick read.
After reading it, you will understand why the tea party is still around getting their candidates elected and why OWS was doomed to fail from the start. You'll also understand that despite their claims to the contrary, the Democrats fear the tea party as do the Establishment Republicans.
The nice part about the tea party is that while most are probably Republicans, they will support anyone, including Democrats, Independents, and Liberterians who support the core principles or the candidate that best supports them given a limited choice.
If Obama was trying to balance the budgets, was scaling back government, was transferring power back to the states, was committed to keeping taxes low, and adhering to the limited powers granted to the federal government within the Constitution; you was see strong tea party support for him.
The tea party will some times support a candidate that loses; but our record is pretty darn good for a movment based solely on principles.
A movement like OWS that is without principles, that cannot coherently describe its purpose beyond meaningless slogans, and whose tactics are limited to violence, lawlessness, distruption of honest businesses, vandalism, and thuggery will not long endure.
Be carefull what you wish for, Adbusters.
Submitted by CobraMan on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 12:44pm.
Be careful for what you wish for, Adbusters, for one dropped match will "flash" those "encampments" into ash. All that plastic from the "shelters," all that paper from the protest signs, all that waste they dump on the ground, that's a fire just waiting to happen.
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