Darn, this is gettin’ retro. And not in a good way.

Just like on N30, a serious mass protest against the rule of big money was the target of an attempted hijacking.

Yep, another “black bloc” of masked vandals claiming to be anarchists busted stuff up.

As if that was any more a “political” act than the busting up of stuff last June in Vancouver.

Meanwhile, many thousands more people participated in real May Day protests.

They made statements, made banners, spoke, sang, rapped, networked, and forged connections.

Their goal was not to feel powerful, nor to get their testosterone rocks off, nor to “live without dead time.”

It was, and is, to change the direction of the world.

Socially, politically, and especially economically.

That’s a mighty tall order.

But that’s what Occupy ____ is about.

No single demands.

No simple solutions.

No instant utopias.

No small dreams.

Nothing less than the end of greed, cronyism, and megabuck-influence-peddling; and the revival of democracy.

one of rob vasquez's many out-of-print 45s, via aarongilbreath.wordpress. com

(No snickering jokes from this corner about a certain three-digit number.)

• A pair of my ol’ punk era acquaintances have nice write ups. You may have already seen the Seattle Times profile of former Showbox impresario and current ACT Theatre honcho (and all around nice guy) Carlo Scandiuzzi. You may not have seen Aaron Gilbreath’s loving tribute to one of the scene’s greatest unsung guitarists, Rob Vasquez.
• And here’s one of Seattle’s smartest writers, Neal Stephenson, on the need for science fiction to relate to readers’ present-day real lives. (Update: Link now fixed.)
• For such a small, efficiently laid out building, could the legendary 5 Point bar/cafe really have a heretofore undiscovered secret room?
• There are several other lying memoirists out there. What makes Greg (Three Cups of Tea) Mortenson different? He used his allegedly partly-made-up book to raise $62 million for his own charity, money he’s accused of mismanaging and misspending.
• Starbucks is removing crushed-bug-based red dye from its strawberry-flavored cold drinks. (But that contributed half the nutritional value!)
• John Urquhart, who’s running for King County Sheriff, used to be the department’s PR guy. As such, he issued several interesting press releases.
• The city’s apparently afraid of another Occupy situation. It won’t let Real Change put up tents in Westlake Park to protest insufficient help for the homeless. Not even unoccupied “prop” tents.
• Greenpeace has a point about Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple opening server farms fed by coal and nuclear power. This “clean tech” takes an awful lot of electricity.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

It’s been almost a month now since the feds issued their scathing report indicting Seattle Police for regularly using excessive and unnecessary force.

What’s happened since?

There have been the usual acts of explaining away, of claiming the SPD merely had an image problem, of claiming further studies were needed and what the heck was the methodology the feds had used anyway.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild (that modern anomaly: a right-wing labor union) proclaimed that any departmental changes would have to come at the union bargaining table.

(Earlier last year, guild members were on the record claiming the city had a “socialist agenda,” had gone too far in protecting racial minorities, and was too critical of police who should be left to make their own decisions. The Guild’s newsletter often referred to the citizens the police should be protecting, and the city brass above the department, as “the enemy.” And the Guild started raising money to oust Mayor Mike McGinn, claiming he’d gone too far in “trying to fundamentally transform the deep-rooted culture of our beloved police department.”)

City Councilmember Tim Burgess (an SPD vet) issued a statement this week, saying the department needed “deep, fundamental reform,” beyond anything proposed thus far by McGinn. Many of Burgess’s specifics, however, were less about cop-on-civilian violence, and more about allocating manpower by neighborhoods and “beats.”

Similarly, the police themselves announced Thursday they were scrapping parts of their 2007 “Neighborhood Policing Plan.” The result, department leaders claim, will be more accountability among officers assigned in tight coherent units, rather than rotating between beats and supervisors.

All this is not exactly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Some of it might actually help result in a more responsible, more accountable department, in the field and at the top.

But it probably won’t be enough.

As long as many officers (as seen in Guild statements) believe themselves to be not a civilian service agency but a military occupation force, battling those heathen liberals n’ minorities for the glory of Limbaugh-land, not much will really change.