United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

In the 1980s, before performing "The River," Bruce Springsteen often recounted an episode from his youth that evoked his conflicted relationship growing up in New Jersey with his conservative, working-class father and what happened in 1968 after he received his draft notice for the Vietnam war.  --  One of these recountings was transcribed by Cathal Garvey, an Irish fan, in 2009.  --  A number of silent emendations to his version have been effected in the text below, which based on a recording of a performance on Sept. 30, 1985, at a concert at the Coliseum in Los Angeles.[1]  --  It appears as a track on the album "Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/ 1975-1985."  --  The lyrics to "The River" follow.[2]  --  NOTE:  According to Wikipedia's article on the song, Springsteen's preambles to "The River" "would sometimes conclude positively and sometimes not." ...

In July 2011, Richard Wilkinson (coauthor -- with Kate Pickett -- of The Spirit Level (2009), on how societies with more equal distribution of incomes have better health, fewer social problems such as violence, drug abuse, teenage births, mental illness, obesity, and others, and are more cohesive than ones in which the gap between the rich and poor is greater) reviewed the data the book is based on in a 16-minute TED talk.  --  COMMENT:  In the London Review of Books, Wilkinson admitted that "we do not have evidence on the fraction of one percent who are very rich," but that "people at all other levels of the social hierarchy do better in more equal societies."  --  A key question is whether the richest 1% we are all now talking about are truly misguided in their resistance to greater equality and also suffer from inequality ("Midases of the world!  you have nothing to lose but your gold!"), or whether they are really benefiting from it at what Wilkinson and Pickett call "the spirit level" ("I prefer to keep all my residences even though I've lost count of them, thank you very much").  --  See here for more discussion of Wilkinson's argument....

John Updike died in 2009, so he won't be weighing whether or not to join Occupy Writers, the list of more than 1,000 well-known writers who support Occupy Wall Street.  --  But a 1992 essay written when the author of Rabbit, Run was sixty shows he would have sympathized with the movement.  --  Updike's prescient essay was the keynote speech at a humanities festival in Chicago in the year Barack Obama begin teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.  --  Entitled "Freedom and Equality: Two American Bluebirds," it appears in his 1999 collection More Matter: Essays and Criticism (1999).  --  In it, Updike concluded that equality is more important than freedom because it is freedom's foundation.  --  "An unequal society," Updike wrote, "is an angry and fearful society, and a fearful society is not a free society."  --  "[A]n American degree of personal freedom can flourish only when the economic thrust is not forcing people apart."  --  The concluding paragraphs of Updike's essay evoked the 1%-99% theme, and are reproduced below.[1] ...

A fast-paced montage of some of the signs being displayed at Occupy Wall Street in New York City, set to "Power," a 2010 song by Kanye West assisted by Dwele.[1] ...

On Aug. 29, 2011, Emmanuel Kelly caused a sensation on the Australian TV reality music competition "The X Factor" when he gave a compelling performance of John Lennon's "Imagine."[1]  --  One of the judges, the Irish singer Ronan Keating, said: "I don't think I've ever, ever been moved as much as I was by that performance."  --  One of the YouTube postings of the video has already had more than 2 million hits....