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A few days ago flags put around the tiny Moran plaza at the MBTA stop for Memorial day weekend were found smoldering in a trash can.

At least three television news trucks and crews spent several hours parked on the street Friday afternoon and evening, filming the scene of the misdemeanor. Much outrage was voiced into the television microphones.

Where are the television crews to cover the lack of affordable housing? The homeless and hungry in Boston and everywhere? The lack of living wages? Heck, the library being closed so much. The things that actually affect people.

It's an interesting point – I wish I recalled who made it – that you can know exactly what the anti-democratic, ultimate-power-to-a-wealthy-elite cadre are up to simply by what the right-wing noise machine accuses its enemies of doing.

Walking by a particularly thin telephone pole a few days ago, I had profound thoughts on profound thoughts that were going to be entitled "A Radical Analysis of a Telephone Pole" but I wasn't up to it either humorously or seriously, let alone the ever-necessary combination.

But the gist of it is that there's no essential dissonance in being a conservative radical or a conservative revolutionary.

I'm jealous of dogs. They can turn a full-body stretch into lying down. That must be so nice. We humans can stretch and sort of collapse onto a bed or couch, but there's a moment of relaxation lost.

From a slow-paced instant message conversation today, May First, 2007:

Brian: Happy Loyalty Day
me: International Workers Day, you mean?
Brian: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070430-3.html
me: SOB
I can't even go look
Brian: oh, look
me: and hmm, that could stand for my emotion, or the president
Sent at 2:21 PM on Tuesday
me: I'm speechless. Really. There's a fine line between satire and fascism, apparently.
Brian: Does this remind you of V for Vendatta as much as it reminds me?
Sent at 2:25 PM on Tuesday
me: yeah, more than a little bit

Just watched Deadly Silence-[Possibly] Innocent Man On Death Row.

Testimony of one eyewitness. Probably a case study in how a man with limited life opportunities far more likely to do something as incredibly stupid and potentially harmful as getting involved in armed robbery. Obviously not a sociopath like the Virginia Tech shooter or so many in our war-crazed regime in Washington D.C.

http://www.maydaymovement.blogspot.com/

It's not just workers. It's not just socialists. It's not just immigrants. It's not just... my, it's beginning to look a lot like humanity.

Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America (2nd edition) by Ward Churchill, introductions by Ed Mead and Derrick Jensen afterword by Mike Ryan.
AK Press pb ISBN: 9781904859185

Just what we don't need. I hope the book would do better, but I'm disgusted by Derrick Jensen's conflating of nonviolence with inaction– a willful misrepresentation no serious activist (whatever their views on the use of violence) would ever make, unless trying to start a fight!

How can my cursed government do this sort of thing and I not even know about it until now?

Free speech, political speech must be absolutely protected. This treatment cannot be accepted.

Supporting political groups or charities likewise cannot be inflated into bogus terrorism charges in a free or fair society.

Meanwhile, the U.S. releases known terrorist Luis Posada, credibly accused of blowing up a Cuban airliner in Venezuela more than 30 years ago, and unrepentant in word and deed since.

(Actually, this was one of my better experiences.)

It seems the MBTA is trying to save money on the Framingham-Worcester line by making people walk a part of the way... the train parks all the way under the bus terminal, a football field length at least from the train station.