If want to know if there's a response today near you, here you go!

Hey, my Buffalo peeps, after dinner tonight, time to make a stand

Those of you in Pittsburgh, at this moment, time to get a move on...

If you're anywhere Reno, NV later today, it's time to make some plans...

If you're anywhere near Emporia, KS right now, you've got someplace to be...

About the number of "hits" assigned to this website… Which would you rather have?

Quality or quantity?

In general, the two can tend to be mutually exclusive. It all depends on what you want, attracting a lot of people, or attracting potentially compatible members who fit in with the established belief systems of this forum.

Now consider that roughly half of the electorate will vote for Democrats and the other half will vote for Republicans. Since politics in this country is so polarized at the moment, there aren't a lot of topics sharing common ground with both. However, even within the two sides, there's even more polarization. But in spite of this, there are beliefs that all of us on the left, from the center to the far fringe, share.

That's what's you're looking for, what connects all of us, what makes us more inclusive than exclusive. Despite the urge for engage in political distillation and conduct purity tests, your goal would be to seek common ground, even with other people ON THE LEFT who do not share all of your own views.

Open and shared beliefs and willingness to seek common ground, that is what makes a community. Not to mention a little emotional detachment from time to time, because it's not always about you. You don't have to assume that you're being judged all of the time. It's better to wait until you're called out BY NAME.

If you want to maintain relevance, then you want to establish a place where people are able to relate and feel welcome. You want to share a common goal, which would mean that some of your own personal pet projects may have to take the back burner for the common good. Not entirely and permanently, but until the most opportune time. Those whom you have helped should remember what you did for them and will more than likely help you in return. If your character judgement is sound and your cause is just and does the most common good, then they will be on your side when it's your time to advance your own causes.

It's always best to start with the basics, the general things that connect to most, if not all of us lefties. It's best to recognize when false "allies" show up to disrupt and derail unity for their own nefarious purposes. It means that you have to trust FIRST sometimes, until you know for a fact that you don't have a reason TO trust. Sometimes it means that you have throw in a little quid pro quo, even for causes not completely your own, but in doing so, does not harm the overall unity of the group.

Sometimes you have to let go.

Again, quality is not always mutually exclusive from quantity… But usually, the BEST QUALITY increases quantity by attracting the best in all people. Appeal to the best in all people and the numbers will eventually grow.

APD officer fired after shooting death of suspect...

On April 21 cops in Albuquerque shot and killed 19-year-old Mary Hawkes, who was suspected of auto theft. It was the third fatal shooting by officers from the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) in a month and the first since the Department of Justice (DOJ) had announced the results of its review of civil rights violations and abuses by the APD. The assistant attorney general who made that announcement insisted that even though the DOJ found a likely pattern and practice of civil rights abuses, it wasn't singling out any individual officer or questioning the character of the department's members.

"We recognize that many of you are dedicated public servants who wear your badge with distinction," said Jocelyn Samuels, the assistant attorney general. "We do not intend our findings today to mean that you must needlessly risk your lives or safety. You must come home safely to your family and loved ones."

The feds may have declined to target any specific officer that may be contributing to the pattern and practice of abuse but at least in the case of the shooting of Mary Hawkes the APD showed it might be interested in actually disciplining officers contributing to the department's problems. Officers of the APD are equipped with body cameras. Footage from such cameras has helped bring attention to questionable police shootings like that of a knife- or brake pad-wielding man in December or that of a homeless camper in March that sparked protests across New Mexico.

The officer who shot and killed Hawkes did not have his lapel camera turned on. He insists he turned it on prior to the encounter but it was off and the manufacturer said they couldn't determine if the officer was being truthful. Now the officer, Jeremy Dear, has been fired.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/03/albuquerque-pd-fires-cop-for-not-turning

#CrimingWhileWhite

With the exception of just two, all of this happened within the last four months. (Graphic)

As Americans, we're our own worst enemy

And the tools that we use to cripple ourselves are forged in greed, apathy and white supremacy.

We've become a dysfunctional society, not really a society at all, but rather a huge collection of isolated individuals, fighting for self-serving interests and utterly disconnected from each other and the world around ourselves.

America is suffering from pandemic pathological dissociation. The results are clear: Massive wealth inequality, social and racial oppression of minorities, of women and of the poor. Destruction of the evironment. Fear and hatred of outsiders. And the most self-destructive tendencies imaginable.

We are well on a path to self-collapse and we only have ourselves to blame. To change direction represents the idea that what we've done to ourselves is wrong. And that very idea of possibly being wrong creates a massive case of cognitive dissonance. "How could we have been so wrong? After all, we're Americans, we live in the greatest country on Earth."

But by not listening to voices who tell you what's wrong with the system we've set up in this country, we suffer from blindness to those who exploit us to their own unfair advantages.

So this self-failure is planned and codified. It's not by accident at all. The mindset is trained into our national psyche, in order to fashion our own identity.

All you have to do is just look at the media as a whole, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and gauge that against the dichotomy of the real world surrounding us to understand how this delusion is accepted as reality: Where whiteness, malesness and straightness becomes the norm by which everything else is judged. How a nation of immigrants seeks to devalue the humanity of immigrants and fashions boundaries based on imaginary lines. Where anything, no matter how trivial, can be blown out of proportion in order to create an existential threat, all while ignoring things that are real, like global climate change and inequality. How we can become disconnected from our very environment through the commodification of the land, the sea, the air and everything within it.

These are all signs and symptoms of the problems before us, and as a whole, we are blind to them because we've accepted them as natural states of being.

The system works against us all because we've accepted the belief the we are nothing more than either our own individually assigned, but systemically induced failures, or that oppressed groups are to blame for their own oppression and disenfranchisement. If you don't belong to an oppressed group, thank your lucky stars. If you do, why can't you just stop complaining about it?

You simply reduce the available resources (money) to a pittance, induce competition between those who have little access to those resources and just sit back to watch the sparks fly.

If the level of misery is reduced by compensation through cooperation, simply do what you can to divide and conquer some more.

Induce hatred and fear against "The Black President," against "thugs," "illegals," "Muslims," and "feminists."

The targets are all equally available and valid.

Just never look behind the curtain to see who's sitting on a pile of riches and bones. We're supposed to believe that's where we belong as well and it's too much trouble to think about how utterly wrong it is to allow that sort of exploitation in this day and age and on this path of self-destruction.

After all, it's the way it's always been, right?