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By Alden Reiss, Managing Photo Editor
Published November 26, 2012
When I was 10, my dad would chauffeur me to school once a week. I would sit on his lap as we drove the 10 city blocks to my middle school.
For more photographs of the project, please visit Alden Reiss Photography.
Unlike most people who were driven to school, my journey took place on the sidewalk instead of the street — in my dad's motorized wheelchair, since he was unable to walk at the time.
I first realized there was something wrong the summer before 5th grade during Parents' Day at my Jewish summer camp in New Hampshire. My dad, who had always been tan, physically strong and full of energy, showed up with a cane, looking pale and exhausted. When I asked for a ride on his shoulders, he wasn't strong enough to carry me.
When I returned from camp a month later, my parents broke the news to my sister and me. My dad had multiple sclerosis, a disease that would affect his brain and spinal cord, making him tired and unable to walk. I was assured that he would not die from it and, more importantly, that we would be OK. My four-year-old cousin, overhearing the diagnosis, came in afterward and asked why my dad was "a mess," having not clearly heard the MS.
As a tough tomboy at the time, I kept my emotions inside, ignoring any opportunity my mom gave to me to talk about my feelings. Due to the stress that came with his diagnosis, my dad had developed depression and anxiety. I remember opening a package from Amazon that had arrived at my front door and seeing a book on dealing with depression. I sealed the package back up and put my emotions away with it, deciding to not confront the situation or talk to my family about it.
As I got older and closer with my family, I became more comfortable talking about my feelings and discomfort with the disease.
My dad's MS has its ups and downs, as the disease typically does — it depends on the day. Sometimes he can walk decently without any apparatuses.
Sometimes he uses a cane. Sometimes he uses a vehicle. And sometimes he can't even leave our apartment because of the fatigue. Though my sister and I were never explicitly asked to step up and help my dad, we would do little things. Beginning at the age of 10, every time we approached a set of stairs, I ran up to my dad, holding his side that wasn't being supported by the banister. And whenever we would travel through airports, go to restaurants, or really anywhere that wasn't on a couch, I felt protective of my dad.
The scariest moments have been when he repeats himself. For example, he'll forget a story I have told him or is so tired that he doesn't have enough energy to recall certain thoughts or ideas in conversation. When I was younger, I would get angry during these moments, but as I got older I realized that my anger only made the situation scarier for both of us. There is absolutely nothing good about feeling like you have lost your marbles, especially when you don't have control of your brain and its contents. At 51, he is fairly young, but sometimes he has to deal with physical and mental problems that should only be issues for someone who is 20 years older than he is.
My dad had one of his best years when I was a freshman in college. He was able to walk and do a fair amount of exercise on his recumbent bike in Central Park. During my second semester, we both trained to do the 42-mile New York City Bike Race to raise money for a charity called First Descents. Not only did we finish the race, but we also did it in great time.
Since then, he has physically and cognitively gone downhill. At the moment, he uses a cane outside of the house, and if he is traveling more than a few blocks, he has to use the vehicle. He cannot exercise, and by 3 p.m. he feels so tired that we know to not expect much of him cognitively.
One night, I apologized to my mom. I said I was sorry that she had a husband who was in so much pain, and who was unable to walk and sometimes unable to think straight. I just wanted him to be OK, I told her. My mom said, "He isn't going to be OK. He isn't going to get better anymore. But there is nothing to be sorry for. I am still the luckiest woman alive to be married to him and to have our family."
This past summer, I decided to learn more about the disease. I knew that there was a wide range of manifestations the disease could take on, and I wanted to see them firsthand. After being awarded a grant from the Stamps School of Art & Design, I worked with the Multiple Sclerosis Research Center of New York photographing the struggles of several MS patients. Dr. Saud A. Sadiq, director of MSRCNY and my father's doctor, graciously introduced me to nine of his patients, and I had the opportunity to document many of the physical and emotional pains that MS patients face on a daily basis, both in the doctor's office and in their own homes.
It was really nice getting to know my dad's doctor. Rather than looking at his patients as markings on a chart, Sadiq gets a sense of each patient as a whole person, chatting with them about their significant others, family, friends and hobbies. For Sadiq, understanding a person's lifestyle is key to understanding how to treat their MS. Because of these almost-therapeutic office visits, his patients have come to love him. Not just like him — they love him. I know this because each one of them told me. I had never heard anyone talk about their doctor the way these patients spoke about Sadiq.
Through this project, I found out that every person, and the manifestation of their version of the disease, was completely different. The medication, treatment, symptoms and stage of MS vary so much that it seemed to me each patient I photographed had a different disease.
But I found that those who had family or friends helping them dealt with the disease much better. There was one man who had lost so much body function that he couldn't control his motorized wheelchair with his hands; he had to control it with his head movements instead. When I walked into the room, he was lying down and receiving his treatment. But as we spoke about the progression of his disease, he was incredibly positive and kind. He had two people with him at his appointment.
This made me wonder: Which came first, the good attitude or the support? Did those who had friends and family supporting them have people helping them because of their good attitude? Or did they have a good attitude because people loved them enough to help?
Either way, seeing some of the MS patients who dealt with their disease on their own made me really sad. It made me remember how important it is to be there for my dad. Whether he needs help or doesn't, it can't hurt to let him know that I'm here if he wants it.
There is nothing fun about struggle or sickness. Even though my dad has an incredibly debilitating disease with no hope of recovery at the moment, our family survives because of our love for each other — and a good sense of humor. When my dad repeats himself for the third time in one meal, we laugh about it, make jokes and give him big hugs. When we are at social events and his fatigue is causing him to talk so much that it's annoying others, we give him a special look. He responds with a zip of his lips and a smile. Our communication and loving attitude toward the disease make it all work.
Alden Reiss is an Art & Design junior and a managing photo editor for The Michigan Daily.


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We continue... 31st October - 3rd November at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire.
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Filed under: war-machine | Tags: 1%, anarchy, media, news, occupy portland, port blockade, stolen camera
"Given the good deal of media-led misinformation//opposition to the west coast #d12 port shutdown, the presence of habitually unsympathetic local news crews at the blockaded terminals in Portland seemed to assure that our actions would be misrepresented beyond recognition. So when the opportunity arose to relieve KATU of a 25,000$ news camera, we did just that. Given KATU's inclination to distort current events through the filthy lense of power, we figured they were no worse off filming their story from the muddy bottom of the Willamette. #splash."
-some folks.
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: capitalism, occupy, occupy everything, OWS, port blockade, the economy, west coast
Filed under: Milwaukee area | Tags: autonomist, CCC, cream city collectives, elio petri, film screening, heaven, italia, italy, refusal of work, workers, working class goes to heaven
"Steeped in the volatile political conflicts taking place in Italy at the time, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the rejection of the compromises of the Italian communist Party (PCI), the refusal of work, factory and university occupations, Elio Petri's film The Working Class Goes to Heaven explores the struggles in the factory in all their contradictions; between consumerism and work, alienation, libidinal desire, self-destruction and, potentially, collective action. The Working Class Goes to Heaven demonstrates an impressive and inspiring illustration of the exploitation of capital society and the alienation of workers under this system. It showed us how the ruling class manipulates the ideology into people's mind by alienating them through work, and how the workers are exploited with and without being conscious of that. Furthermore, it also gives us a sketch of the futility of reformism and the issues which will be confronted in the process of revolution."
December 18th 7pm at the CCC (732 E Clarke St.)
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, blockade, capitalism, economy, general strike, oakland, oakland commune, the bay area, value circulation
From Bay of Rage:
By any reasonable measure, the November 2 general strike was a grand success. The day was certainly the most significant moment of the season of Occupy, and signaled the possibility of a new direction for the occupations, away from vague, self-reflexive democratism and toward open confrontation with the state and capital. At a local level, as a response to the first raid on the encampment, the strike showed Occupy Oakland capable of expanding while defending itself, organizing its own maintenance while at the same time directly attacking its enemy. This is what it means to refer to the encampment and its participants as the Oakland Commune, even if a true commune is only possible on the other side of insurrection.
Looking over the day's events it is clear that without the shutdown of the port this would not have been a general strike at all but rather a particularly powerful day of action. The tens of thousands of people who marched into the port surpassed all estimates. Neighbors, co-workers, relatives – one saw all kinds of people there who had never expressed any interest in such events, whose political activity had been limited to some angry mumbling at the television set and a yearly or biyearly trip to the voting booth. It was as if the entire population of the Bay Area had been transferred to some weird industrial purgatory, there to wander and wonder and encounter itself and its powers.
Now we have the chance to blockade the ports once again, on December 12, in conjunction with occupiers up and down the west coast. Already Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver and even Anchorage have agreed to blockade their respective ports. These are exciting events, for sure. Now that many of the major encampments in the US have been cleared, we need an event like this to keep the sequence going through the winter months and provide a reference point for future manifestations. For reasons that will be explained shortly, we believe that actions like this – direct actions that focus on the circulation of capital, rather than its production – will play a major role in the inevitable uprisings and insurrections of the coming years, at least in the postindustrial countries. The confluence of this tactic with the ongoing attempts to directly expropriate abandoned buildings could transform the Occupy movement into something truly threatening to the present order. But in our view, many comrades continue thinking about these actions as essentially continuous with the class struggle of the twentieth century and the industrial age, never adequately remarking on how little the postindustrial Oakland General Strike of 2011 resembles the Oakland General Strike of 1946.
The placeless place of circulation
The shipping industry (and shipping in general) has long been one of the most important sectors for capital, and one of the privileged sites of class struggle. Capitalism essentially develops and spreads within the matrix of the great mercantile, colonialist and imperial experiments of post-medieval Europe, all of which are predicated upon sailors, ships and trade routes. But by the time that capitalism comes into view as a new social system in the 19th century the most important engine of accumulation is no longer trade itself, but the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production process. Superprofits achieved through mechanized production are funneled back into the development and purchase of new production machinery, not to mention the vast, infernal infrastructural projects this industrial system requires: mines and railways, highways and electricity plants, vast urban pours of wood, stone, concrete and metal as the metropolitan centers spread and absorb people expelled from the countryside. But by the 1970s, just as various futurologists and social forecasters were predicting a completely automated society of superabundance, the technologically-driven accumulation cycle was coming to an end. Labor-saving technology is double-edged for capital. Even though it temporarily allows for the extraction of enormous profits, the fact that capital treats laboring bodies as the foundation of its own wealth means that over the long term the expulsion of more and more people from the workplace eventually comes to undermine capital's own conditions of survival. Of course, one of the starkest horrors of capitalism is that capital's conditions of survival are also our own, no matter our hatred. Directly or indirectly, each of us is dependent on the wage and the market for our survival.
From the 1970s on, one of capital's responses to the reproduction crisis has been to shift its focus from the sites of production to the (non)sites of circulation. Once the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production of goods no longer generated substantial profits, firms focused on speeding up and more cheaply circulating both commodity capital (in the case of the shipping, wholesaling and retailing industries) and money capital (in the case of banking). Such restructuring is a big part of what is often termed "neoliberalism" or "globalization," modes of accumulation in which the shipping industry and globally-distributed supply chains assume a new primacy. The invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s – a technical intervention which multiplies the volume of capital in circulation several times over.
This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces –the ports, for instance– did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.
Like the financial system which is its warped mirror, the present system for circulating commodities is incredibly brittle. Complex, computerized supply-chains based on just-in-time production models have reduced the need for warehouses and depots. This often means that workplaces and retailers have less than a day's reserves on hand, and rely on the constant arrival of new shipments. A few tactical interventions – at major ports, for instance – could bring an entire economy to its knees. This is obviously a problem for us as much as it is a problem for capital: the brittleness of the economy means that while it is easy for us to blockade the instruments of our own oppression, nowhere do we have access to the things that could replace it. There are few workplaces that we can take over and use to begin producing the things we need. We could take over the port and continue to import the things we need, but it's nearly impossible to imagine doing so without maintaining the violence of the economy at present.
Power to the vagabonds and therefore to no class
This brings us to a very important aspect of the present moment, already touched on above. The subject of the "strike" is no longer the working class as such, though workers are always involved. The strike no longer appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from a workplace by those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression (or even sabotage or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it, and perhaps to wage-labor entirely. We need to jettison our ideas about the "proper" subjects of the strike or class struggle. Though it is always preferable and sometimes necessary to gain workers' support in order to shut down a particular workplace, it is not absolutely necessary, and we must admit that ideas about who has the right to strike or blockade a particular workplace are simply extensions of the law of property. If the historical general strikes involved the coordinated striking of large workplaces, around which "the masses," including students, women who did unwaged housework, the unemployed and lumpenproletarians of the informal sector eventually gathered to form a generalized offensive against capital, here the causality is precisely reversed. It has gone curiously unremarked that the encampments of the Occupy movement, while claiming themselves the essential manifestations of some vast hypermajority – the 99% – are formed in large part from the ranks of the homeless and the jobless, even if a more demographically diverse group fills them out during rallies and marches. That a group like this – with few ties to organized labor – could call for and successfully organize a General Strike should tell us something about how different the world of 2011 is from that of 1946.
We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other. But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness. In Rome, proletarius was the name for someone who owned no property save his own offspring and himself, and frequently sold both into slavery as a result. Proletarians are those who are "without reserves" and therefore dependent upon the wage and capital. They have "nothing to sell except their own skins." The important point to make here is that not all proletarians are working-class, since not all proletarians work for a wage. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, such "wageless life" becomes more and more the norm. Of course, exploitation requires dispossession. These two terms name inextricable aspects of the conditions of life under the domination of capital, and even the proletarians who don't work depend upon those who do, in direct and indirect ways.
The point, for us, is that certain struggles tend to emphasize one or the other of these aspects. Struggles that emphasize the fact of exploitation – its unfairness, its brutality – and seek to ameliorate the terms and character of labor in capitalism, take the working-class as their subject. On the other hand, struggles that emphasize dispossession and the very fact of class, seeking to abolish the difference between those who are "without reserves" and everyone else, take as their subject the proletariat as such. Because of the restructuring of the economy and weakness of labor, present-day struggles have no choice but to become proletarian struggles, however much they dress themselves up in the language and weaponry of a defeated working class. This is why the Occupy movement, even as much as it mumbles vaguely about the weakest of redistributionary measures – taxing the banks, for instance – refuses to issue any demands. There are no demands to make. Worker's struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts. They struggle to preserve the right to be exploited, the right to a wage, rather than for any expansion of pay and benefits. The power of the Occupy movement so far – despite the weakness of its discourse – is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.
Twilight of the unions
This brings us finally to the question of the unions, the ILWU in particular, its locals, and the rank-and-file port workers. Port workers in the US have an enormously radical history, participating in or instigating some of the most significant episodes in US labor history, from the Seattle General strike of 1919, to the battles on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934 and the sympathy strikes that spread up and down the coast. The ferocious actions by port workers in Longview, Washington – attempting to fight off the incursion of non-ILWU grain exporter EGT – recall this history in vivid detail. Wildcatting, blockading trains and emptying them of their cargo, fighting off the cops brought in to restore the orderly loading and unloading of cargo – the port workers in Longview remind us of the best of the labor movement, its unmediated conflict with capital. We expect to see more actions like this in this new era of austerity, unemployment and riot. Still, our excitement at the courage of Longview workers should not blind us to the place of this struggle in the current crisis of capitalism. We do not think that these actions point to some revitalization of radical unionism, but rather indicate a real crisis in the established forms of class struggle. They point to a moment in which even the most meager demands become impossible to win. These conditions of impossibility will have a radicalizing effect, but not in the way that many expect it to. They will bring us allies in the workers at Longview and elsewhere but not in the way many expect.
Though they employ the tactics of the historical workers' movement at its most radical, the content of the Longview struggle is quite different: they are not fighting for any expansions of pay or benefits, or attempting to unionize new workplaces, but merely to preserve their union's jurisdictional rights. It is a defensive struggle, in the same way that the Madison, Wisconsin capitol occupation was a defensive struggle – a fight undertaken to preserve the dubious legally-enshrined rights to collectively bargain. These are fights for the survival of unions as such, in an era in which unions have no real wind in their sails, at their best seeking to keep a floor below falling wages, at their worst collaborating with the bosses to quietly sell out workers. This is not to malign the actions of the workers themselves or their participation in such struggles – one can no more choose to participate in a fight for one's survival than one can choose to breathe, and sometimes such actions can become explosive trigger points that ignite a generalized antagonism. But we should be honest about the limits of these fights, and seek to push beyond them where possible. Too often, it seems as if we rely on a sentimental workerism, acting as if our alliance with port workers will restore to us some lost authenticity.
Let's remember that, in the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers' movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all. Alliances are important. We should be out there talking to truck drivers and crane operators and explaining the blockade, but that does not mean blindly following the recommendations of ILWU Local 10. For instance, we have been told time and again that, in order to blockade the port, we need to go to each and every berth, spreading out thousands of people into several groups over a distance of a few miles. This is because, under the system that ILWU has worked out with the employers' association, only a picket line at the gates to the port itself will allow the local arbitrator to rule conditions at the port unsafe, and therefore provide the workers with legal protection against unpermitted work action. In such a situation we are not really blockading the port. We are participating in a two-act play, a piece of legal theater, performed for the benefit of the arbitrator.
If this arbitration game is the only way we can avoid violent conflict with the port workers, then perhaps this is the way things have to be for the time being. But we find it more than depressing how little reflection there has been about this strategy, how little criticism of it, and how many people seem to reflexively accept the necessity of going through these motions. There are two reasons why this charade is problematic. For one, we must remember that the insertion of state-sanctioned forms of mediation and arbitration into the class struggle, the domestication of the class struggle by a vast legal apparatus, is the chief mechanism by which unions have been made into the helpmeet of capital, their monopoly over labor power an ideal partner for capital's monopoly over the means of production. Under such a system, trade unions not only make sure that the system produces a working-class with sufficient purchasing power (something that is less and less possible these days, except by way of credit) but also ensure that class antagonism finds only state-approved outlets, passing through the bureaucratic filter of the union and its legal apparatus, which says when, how, and why workers can act in their own benefit. This is what "arbitration" means.
Secondly, examined from a tactical position, putting us blockaders in small, stationary groups spread out over miles of roads leaves us in a very poor position to resist a police assault. As many have noted, it would be much easier to blockade the port by closing off the two main entrances to the port area– at Third and Adeline and Maritime and West Grand. Thousands of people at each of these intersections could completely shut down all traffic into the port, and these groups could be much more easily reinforced and provided with provisions (it's easier to get food, water, and reinforcements to these locations.) There is now substantial interest in extending the blockade past one shift, changing it from a temporary nuisance to something that might seriously affect the reproduction of capital in the Bay Area given the abovementioned reliance on just-in-time production. But doing so will likely bring a police attack. Therefore, in order to blockade the port with legal-theatrical means we sacrifice our ability – quite within reach – to blockade it materially. We allow ourselves to be deflected to a tactically-weak position on the plane of the symbolic.
The coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions – occupations, blockades, sabotage – that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught. Let's recognize this antagonism for what it is, and not dress it up in the costumes and ideologies of a bygone world.
-Society of Enemies
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: 99%, anarchy, black, black bloc, general strike, oakland, occupy everything, occupy wallstreet, vandalism, violence
From Bay of Rage:
In addition to the marches called for by the General Assembly of the Oakland Commune, several marches were organized outside the formal processes at Oscar Grant Plaza. The organization of this, and other "unofficial" actions throughout the day is a point to be celebrated: the GA has consistently emphasized autonomous action and the strike has to be seen as a success in opening space for such autonomous activity. Most significant of these was the march that departed from the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph at 2 p.m. This march had been anonymously called as an anti-capitalist march. Both the poster promoting the march and the banner at its front boldly proclaimed "if we cannot live, we will not work; general strike!" An accompanying banner declared "this is class war." This messaging of the march matched its stated intention and its subsequent action: to shut down those businesses and banks that remained open despite the strike (a promise it would make good on).
The small concrete triangle at the intersection of Broadway and Telegraph has great significance in the recent and long-past history of the struggle against class society in Oakland. In 1946, this intersection was the stage for the opening act of what would be the last General Strike in the United States before Wednesday. More recently, anarchists and anti-state communists in the Bay Area have used the intersection as a staging point for a series of three anti-capitalist processions in downtown Oakland. Named anticuts, these marches were a conscious attempt by anti-capitalists to carve out (anti)political space in Oakland from which to begin a non-statist / non-reformist response to the financial crisis, in the absence of any foreseeable social movement in the States. Each one beginning at Broadway and Telegraph, these three marches took to the streets of Oakland and took as their objects certain focal points of hate in downtown: particularly the jail and certain highly visible banking institution, but also the police whenever they came into conflict with demonstrators. To the extent that the intention of this sequence was to claim space for and build the offensive capacity of anti-capitalists in the Bay Area, the anti-captitalist march during the general strike proved this initial sequence to be a success. Noise demonstrations have returned to the jail several times through the course of the occupation, each communicating louder and more fiercely to the prisoners than the march before. However, it was specifically the downtown banks that attracted the ire of this particular march. The anti-capitalist march on November 2nd must then be understood within a continuum through time; it must be seen as the emboldened and enraged continuation of a communizing thread which aims to collectively claim and determine space within the city of Oakland.
Any reading of recent anti-capitalist street endeavors in the Bay Area also offers another discreet lesson to the students of social struggle: come materially prepared for the conflict you wish to see. Following this analysis, one could read this march as highly conflictual based solely on the obvious material preparations that went into it. From the outside, one could see that the march was equipped with two rather large reinforced banners at the lead, scores of black flags on hefty sticks, dozens of motorcycle helmets, and the now familiar book shields. Add to this the anonymity afforded by hundreds wearing masks and matching colors, and there is no question that these demonstrators came to set it off that afternoon. The black-clad combatants at the front of this march would retroactively be referred to with much notoriety as the black bloc, though this is perhaps a backwards reading of the events of the day. Rather than a coherent subject group or organization that set out to offer a singular political position, this tactical formation should instead be thought of as a void, a subjective black-hole where those who shared a similar disposition could be drawn to one another for protection and amplification. The so-called black bloc forcefully asserted a desirable situation for those who wanted to accomplish outlaw tasks despite repressive state apparatuses. Many will question the metaphysical implications or the contemporary efficacy of this particular form of making destroy. Yet regardless, it is important to emphasize that in the context of efforts to openly attack capitalist institutions in the face of intense surveillance, concealing your identity and rolling with friends will continue to be the best tactic. Additionally, this effort further expands the intention of anti-capitalist space in the bay area, offering a way for social rebels to find one another and act in concert.
Toward this end, the anti-capitalist march was quite successful in heightening the conflict in the streets of Oakland during the general strike. To the pleasure of a great majority of the several hundred demonstrators, an active minority within the march set about attacking a series of targets: Chase Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Whole Foods, the UC Office of the President. Each was beset by a stormcloud of hammers, paint bombs, rocks, black flags and fire-extinguishers loaded with paint. The choice of these targets seems intuitive to anyone attuned to the political climate of Oakland. The banks attacked are responsible for tens of thousands of foreclosures in Oakland alone, as well as the imprisonment of Oaklanders through the funding of private prisons and immigrant detention. Whole Foods, in addition to its daily capitalist machinations, had purportedly threatened its workers with repercussions if they'd chosen to strike. UCOP, besides being the headquarters for the disgusting cabal that rules the UC system, was rumored to be the day's base of operations for OPD and its cronies. Despite any number of reasons to destroy these places, the remarkable point of these attacks was that no justification was necessary. As each pane of glass fell to the floor and each ATM was put out of service, cheers would consistently erupt. Foregoing demands of their enemies, demonstrators made demands of one another, shouting wreck the property of the one percent! and occupy / shut it down / Oakland doesn't fuck around! In 1999, at the height of neoliberal prosperity, participants in the black bloc at the Seattle WTO summit issued a communique detailing the crimes of their targets. A dozen years and a worldwide crisis later, such an indictment would seem silly. Everyone hates these places..
This isn't to say that there wasn't conflict over these smashings. A small, yet dedicated group of morons set about trying hopelessly to defend the property of their masters. In the name of non-violence, these thuggish pacifists assaulted demonstrators and sought to re-establish peace on the streets. Thankfully, these people were as outnumbered and ill-coordinated as they are irrelevant. Chair fights and brawls ensued, but each skirmish concluded with the hooded ones and their comrades on top. The anti-capitalist march and the formations that comprised it, should also be looked to as a practical means of neutralizing and marginalizing such peace police as well as the plain-clothed officers who fight at their side.
Property destruction is not a new element for the Oakland Commune. In the weeks prior to the anti-capitalist march, the property of various police entities were attacked by communards several times.:an anonymous communique claimed an attack on an unmarked police cruiser parked near the plaza; the riot following the eviction of Oscar Grant Plaza took a few more cop cars as its victim; a march against police brutality, days later, smashed the windows at OPD's recruiting station next to City Hall. The destruction of the anti-capitalist march is set apart from these incidents for a handful of noteworthy reasons. Firstly, this demonstration marked the first large and coordinated act of collective destruction by the nascent Occupy movement. For a movement that fetishizes re-written narratives of non-violence in the Arab Spring, this event served as an act of forced memory. Clandestine attacks, however lovely, have a tendency to be overlooked, whereas hundreds of masked individuals comprising a march that makes destroy cannot so easily be ignored. Secondly, this symphony of wreckage marked a turning point in the naughty behavior of the occupations. Rather than reacting to police provocations (and in doing so feeding certain narratives about what justifies destruction) the demonstrators of the anti-capitalist march determined to take the initiative and the offensive in smashing their enemies without waiting to be gassed and beaten first. In doing so, they concretely refused the pacifist ideology of victimization that characterizes the dominant discourse of policing and violence. Lastly, in specifically targeting the dreaded banks and corporations, so hated by the occupation movement, these attacks served to equip he movement with the teeth it had previously been missing. Not only do these people hate the banks, they'll actually make concrete attacks against the institutions they hate.
For enemies of capital, the shattering of bank windows and the sabotage of ATM machinery is beautiful in and of itself. It is intuitive that wrecking the property of financial institutions and forcing their closure is desirable. Some will argue that plate glass can be replaced and that any business closed by these actions would likely re-open the next day. This line of criticism isn't wrong on the face of it, but it often misses a certain set of implications at the center of chaotic episodes such as this. For those seeking to destroy class society, chaos itself must be seen as a primary strategy at our disposal. Theorists of social control often cite the broken window theory: a way to describe the phenomena where the introduction of disorder to an otherwise perfectly ordered environment begets and creates space for further disorder. At the heart of this theory of governance is the understanding that biopolitical government must treat any interruption of order as a threat to order as a totality. Put another way, this violence against the facades of these capitalist institutions is damaging to said institutions in a manner far more grave than the cost of a few windows or the lost labor time. Rather, this activity sends signals of disorder pulsing through the imperial system. In the way that a broken window indicates the instability of an environment, the concerted efforts to smash the windows of various banks signals a coming wave of violence against the existent social order and its fiscal management. In the same way, attacks on police apparatuses signal the coming of far greater confrontations with the institution of policing. In a system as future-oriented and perception-driven as capitalism, this type of perceived disorder is catastrophic to investor confidence and to the key functions of the market. One need only look to the Eurozone to see the way in which anti-austerity revolt is intrinsically tied to the collapse of any illusion of security or confidence in the capitalist mode of production. Last year, blackclad haters in London smashed windows and attacked banks during a UK Uncut day of action. Months later, dispossessed people all over the England set about burning police cars, attacking police stations, looting stores and generally expropriating a future they were totally excluded from. Though the professional activists of UK Uncut were quick to distance themselves from the rioting in London, nobody was fooled. The actions of vandals during the UK Uncut events demonstrated that the crisis had arrived; that disorder was about to unfold. The left bewailed the nihilistic elements who had 'infiltrated' 'their protest', either anarchists intent on destruction or hooligans out to get theirs. When in subsequent months, massive segments of London's underbelly rose up against their daily misery, they confirmed the fears of the bourgeoisie; the war was at their front door. In Greece and now in Italy, the violence of insurrectionaries in the streets corresponds to the chaos tearing through the countries' economies. In each of these events, the reality that there is no future comes tearing into the present. To quote comrades in Mexico, chaos has returned, for those who thought she had died!
One can already see this instability rending its way through Oakland. The business leaders of the city are all too aware of the implications of this sort of anti-capitalist activity in the East Bay. In the days following the strike, bureaucrats from Oakland's Chamber of Commerce went to City Hall to wring their hands about the previous day's destruction. According to them, three businesses had already withdrawn from contractual discussions about opening their doors in downtown Oakland. Another downtown business association, comprised primarily of banking institutions and corporate investors, bewailed the existence of the Commune. They asserted that the activities of the occupation and the strike were causing a great deal of damage to Oakland's business community and that many "local businesses" wouldn't survive another month of its existence. Clearly it is wrong to locate a month of anti-capitalist activity as the cause of financial crisis in the town, but there is a truth buried beneath their denial. These events in Oakland cannot be conceived of outside the context of the crisis as it unfolds. By the same logic, the activities of Oakland communards cannot be separated from the social conflict which propels them and of which they are but a small part. Almost two years ago, social rebels in the Bay Area locked themselves into university buildings and ran blindly onto freeway overpasses declaring OCCUPY EVERYTHING and WE ARE THE CRISIS. The former slogan has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Perhaps the latter is coming to fruition as well.
Predictably, dogmatic pacifists responded to the vandalism and fighting by screaming PEACEFUL PROTEST and NON-VIOLENCE. The majority of demonstrators responded by taking up the chant, WE ARE NOT PEACFUL. Since the strike, this particular conflict has played out in innumerable discussions. In each case, the meaning and efficacy of 'violence' is drawn out and debated ad nauseum. In the skirmishes between occupiers and university police that played out the following week on University of California campuses, this discourse surrounding violence escalated to pure absurdity. After UC police beat protesters on the UC Berkeley campus, police and university officials declared that such beatings were in fact not violent, while those students who linked arms in the face of police assault had themselves committed a violent act. Within the logic of power, force dealt out by police batons is not violent, while solidarity and care in the face of such force is violent. In the clearest way possible, this tragicomedy demonstrates precisely why it serves us to avoid discussions of non/violence. Violence will always be defined by Power. Those who resist will be labeled violent, regardless of their conduct. Likewise, brutality at the hands of those servants of Power will always be invisible.
There is an intelligence in this declaration against peace, but it cannot be reduced to this or that position on violence. Any attempt to define violence will always fall back upon abstraction. Any attempt to deploy such a definition is always already useless. Rather than being for or against violence, it behooves us to instead position ourselves against peace. In defining peace, let's avoid abstraction. We can name every miserable element of the daily function of capital as peace. Peace is our terrible jobs, our lack of a job, our workplace injuries, the time stolen from us and the labor we'll never get back. Peace is being thrown out of our homes and freezing on the streets. Peace is when police officers kill us in cold blood on train platforms and in our neighborhoods. Peace is racism, transphobia, misogyny and anti-queer attacks. Peace is immigrant detention and prison slavery. When the apologists for class society declare their intentions to be peaceful, we understand as their desire for the perpetuation of the day to day atrocities of life under capital. To raise one's fingers in a peace sign in the face of our armed enemies can only be seen as the greatest act of sycophancy. The tragically common chanting of PEACFUL PROTEST should really be read as NOTHING, NOTHING, MORE OF THE SAME! It should be abundantly clear, then, that we are quite done with peace. Reading peace as a euphemism for the horrors of the present, we must take as our task the immediate suspension of social peace.
The dominant discourse of peaceful protest bears a more troubling implication. Many who advocate for peaceful protest, actually do so quite cynically. It isn't out of a desire for an absence of violence (as evidenced by their violent efforts to police others and enforce their peace). Rather, these peace-warriors operate on an assumption that so long as they are sufficiently meek, their cause will be just. Following from this, so long as they are passive, the inevitable violence enacted upon them by the police will appear illegitimateThis attempt at self-victimization, beyond being a foolish tactic, is a specific measure to invalidate resistance and to justify the operations of the police state. Any criticism of peace discourse must also be centered around an understanding that this language originates from, is advocated by, affirms the position of, and is in itself the State.
Rejecting the logic of social peace, we instead assert a different rationale: social war. Social war is our way of articulating the conflict of class war, but beyond the limitations of class. Rather than a working class seeking to affirm ourselves in our endless conflict with capital, we desire instead to abolish the class relation and all other relations that reproduce this social order. Social war is the discrete and ongoing struggle that runs through and negotiates our lived experience. As agents of chaos, we seek to expose this struggle; to make it overt. The issue is not violence or non-violence. What's at issue in these forays against capital is rather the social peace and its negation. To quote a comrade here in Oakland: windows are shattered when we do nothing, so of course windows will be shattered when we do something; blood is shed when we do nothing, so of course blood will be shed when we do something. Social war is this process of doing something. It is our concerted effort to rupture the ever-present deadliness of the social peace. It is a series of somethings which interrupt this nothing.
In the course of the anti-capitalist march, like countless before it, many attempted to take up an all too familiar chant. WE ARE THE 99%! However this consensus was quickly disrupted. Anti-capitalist demonstrators quickly took up a different chant: WE ARE THE PROLETARIAT! From an anti-capitalist perspective, this is as important an intervention as a hammer through any financial or police apparatus. Firstly, the prevailing conception of the 99% must be recognized primarily as a means to control the activity of rebellious elements within a mass. Originally a reference to crazy distributions of wealth in the United States, the 99% has come to be an empty and abstract signifier for any dominant group. A relevant example of the application of this normalizing concept is the recent letter from the Oakland Police stating that they too are part of the 99%, and struggle daily against the criminal 1% comprised of thieves, rapists, and murderers. Another odious deployment of the concept is the way that lovers-of-bank-windows declare that anarchists are in fact the 1%, opposed to the peaceful 99% of protesters. Even more absurd is an assertion by police-apologists that, in fact, 99% police officers are good people and that only 1% of them are sadistic sociopaths. Each of these examples points to the fact that wherever it is cited, the meme of the 99% is always synonymous with one undifferentiated mass or another. Cops and mayors are part of the 99%, anarchists and hooligans clearly are not. Acting as a normalizing theoretical concept, it always functions to otherize a deviant element and to inflict disciplinary measures on that element. Insofar as it is a reference to a mass – an abstract, peaceful, law-abiding mass – the 99% can only mean society itself.
We cannot, however, read this use of the concept of the 99% as a misappropriation of an otherwise correct term. From the beginning, the concept is totally useless to us. There is no such thing as the 99% and it can never serve to describe our experience of capitalism. The use of such a framework requires a flattening out of a whole range of power relationships that constitute the real structures of our lives. In my daily life, I have never met a member of this mythical 1%, nor do I analyze this 1% as some elusive enemy in my hand-to-hand conflict with capital. I have never been directly oppressed by a member of this 1%, but I have been oppressed and exploited at the hands of police officers, queerbashers, sexual assaulters, landlords and bosses. Each of these enemies can surely claim a place within this 99%, yet that does not in any way mitigate our structural enmity. The strength of certain anarchist critiques of capital is to be found in their location of diffuse and complex power relations as being the material sinews of this society. The world is not miserable simply because 1% of the population owns this or that amount of property. Misery is our condition specifically because the beloved 99% acts to reproduce this arrangement in and through their daily activity.
Fleeing from this miserable discourse, we assert that if the 99% percent is real, we are not of it. Rather we are the proletariat. Often misconstrued as being synonymous with the working class, there is in fact a discrete distinction in our efforts to define ourselves as such. Rather than referring to a positive conception of wage-laborers, our use of proletarian is meant to negatively describe those who have nothing to sell but their bodies and their labor. Having nothing, being the dispossessed, the proletariat is the diffuse and yet overwhelming body of people for whom there is no future within capitalism. Those who comprised this proletarian wrecking machine perform any number of functions in society – sex workers, baristas, medical study lab rat, petty thieves, servers, parents, the unemployed, graphic designers, students – and yet we are united specifically in our dispossession from our ability to reproduce ourselves in any dignified manner within the current social order. In a post-industrial economy, an attention to our economic position must be central to our efforts to destroy that economy. Where in the past the proletariat was primarily comprised of industrial labor, it was conceivable that workplace takeovers and seizure of the means of production made a certain amount of sense. For those of us with absolutely no relationship to the means of production, an entirely different set of strategies must be cultivated. Being a genuine outside to the vital reproduction of capital, our methodology must valorize the position of the Outside and must pioneer ways in which this outside may abolish the conditions of its exclusion.
For those trapped within the field of circulation, this will mean an interruption of that circulation and an expropriation of the products to which our labor adds value. For those engaged in informal and criminal practices, it will mean developing new methods of collective crime in order to loot back a future that isn't ours. For those excluded from economic structures, it will mean efforts to blockade and sabotage and destroy those structures, rather than any attempt to self-manage the architecture of our exclusion. For those who need homes, it will mean occupation. For those who hunger, it will mean looting. For those who cannot pay, it will mean auto-reduction. This is why we steal things, this is why we smash what can't be stolen, this is why we fight in the streets, this is why we make barricades and block the flows of society. As proletarians – as those who have nothing but one another – we must immediately set about creating the tactics to destroy the machinery that reproduces capitalism and at the same time forge means of struggle that will sustain us for conflicts to come.
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anti-capitalism, bay area, general assemblies, general strike, oakland commune, occupy, occupy everything, oscar grant plaza
From BayofRage:
In the early hours of Monday morning (11/14) the police conducted the second eviction of the Oakland Commune. Far less spectacular than the first, a few hundred campers and supporters picketed and protested inside police perimeters and under the ruthless lights of helicopters for hours. Numbers dwindled down to dozens by 9 a.m. The following day, as planned, a large rally was held at the downtown Oakland Public Library followed by a march back to Oscar Grant Plaza (OGP). Upon arriving at OGP no tents were raised, the kitchen was not re-established, and there was no library, no free store or medic tent. By the mayor's orders, the plaza was to be open to the public for 24 hours a day, but no camping would be tolerated and the plaza would be under police supervision for 3 full days thereafter. Next to the mud puddle that used to be our strong, police-free common space, we held our regular Monday night General Assembly under the eye of more than one hundred police, paddy wagons on hand. Despite how uninspired and crushed one could feel at this time, it was hard to forget, after all we've been through, that this is still Oakland.
On Tuesday, a contingent of Oaklanders marched from OGP to UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to join the students' second attempt at an encampment on the evening of their campus-wide strike (called for the evening of their first attempted encampment of the plaza). As the march approached the University, rich with the history of 2009′s student occupations, they chanted "Here comes Oakland!". Occupy Cal's General Assembly was attended by thousands, and they set up camp and partied late into the night. Police presence was minimal compared to the first day of Occupy Cal. This day's activities overshadowed and largely disregarded the death of Christopher Travis, a UC Berkeley student who was shot and killed by the UCPD that same day (allegedly for having a gun on campus, though details are unclear).
Wednesday's GA drew out a rough blue print for actions to come. A proposal to establish a new camp at 19th and Telegraph[link], blocks away from OGP, passed among a crowd of at least 250. This was a particularly bold proposal because every detail of the event was disclosed publicly. It was a testament to the collective confidence and loss of fear that informs the people of OO.
At around 10:30pm it was brought to the attention of the new encampment that the sound truck (used during many marches and throughout the day of the General Strike) had been stopped by the police. This was clearly unwarranted harassment, but the pigs used the excuse of a local anti-sideshow law to impound the vehicle. Campers ran with excitement to 17th and MLK to try and stop them. After the drivers had left the truck, a cop got inside to drive it away, but people had it surrounded. It was only minutes after comrades responded that the police responded too – about 30 riot cops, running towards the comrades with their batons drawn. One of them, in an unmarked crown vic, drove into two people, leaving them without injury but in a fit of rage.
Some thoughts:
Occupy Oakland has received the warmest statements and actions of solidarity and inspiration from comrades in Chapel Hill, Seattle, Egypt, Mexico, St. Louis and many more. It is clear that Oakland has found a place in the hearts of rebels far and wide. But this is not enough. We must challenge ourselves to create our own media and to secure consistent communications among the rebels who carry each other. Meet these ends creatively and not under the illusion that we can subvert the mass media any more than we can subvert the banking industry, the misery of service work, or the police. May these lines of communication open as the veins and vessels in our own bodies did during the inception of Oscar Grant Plaza. Let's assess our thought processes and the practical application of our most complex theories and simplest desires. If your heart beats to see the world in communization, negated or in total ruins, you know that you will not find your revolution here. Your absent future, on the other hand, may be further realized at this time.
Like the impressive actions of those in black bloc during the Nov 2nd General Strike, or the spontaneous eruptions of spray painting, minor looting and window smashing of that evening, it is important that our demonstrations necessitate creative use of our bodies and minds. Saturday night, 500 or more people participated in tearing down the fence surrounding the lot on 19th and Telegraph. The collective realization that this barrier between Oaklanders and a vacant space could be destroyed spread like wild fire in a matter of seconds. Where we are economically and emotionally alienated from each other, we are also alienated from our own bodies, our desires, our individual and collective potentials. Many in Oakland have resolved to stop asking for their most basic needs to be met. Many more linger in the absence of artillery – friends.
If this movement really is doomed, we must push it to its limits, suspend ourselves in time and space for just now, and redecorate the insulting facade of this world with indications of its destruction. If not for today, than for the security of the network of rebels we must depend on tomorrow. #Occupy is the perfect example.
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Year of car 1969Norwood carMonth and week of vehicle assembly 12BEngine 396Transmission M20Driveshaft length (measured center of u joint to center of u joint)49.56 in.Driveshaft casting number ?Type of attachment to pinion yoke. strap and bolts method.Code stamped on front of passenger side axle tube. BS Paint stripes none leftPosition of the u-joint flanges= "clocked" about 30 degrees off from each otherI have an extra driveshaft from a friends 69 396. He parted it out back around 1990 and gave me some parts. It is the same as my original. No stripes visible on either. MAy show up evidence if I clean them (sand) Will get to other 2 cars as time permits.


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Commercial, Personal/Corporate, Products, Public Service, Regulatory, Training
By James T. McKenna | April 1, 2007
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TIMES ARE GOOD IN THE HELICOPTER INDUSTRY. IN some ways, they're too good. Take Schweizer Aircraft, for example.
The Horseheads, N.Y.-based manufacturer's core businesses — commercial and military helicopters, fixed-wing surveillance aircraft, unmanned helicopters, and aerospace subcontracting — are all booming.
The same is true for the "new" lines of work added in the last two years by parent Sikorsky Aircraft, which bought family-owned Schweizer in 2004. Sikorsky is tapping Schweizer for rapid prototyping, with its X-2 technology demonstrator as a lead program, and completion of H-60 Hawk variants that aren't in a standard U.S. Army or Navy configuration. A 100,000-sq-ft (30,490-sq-m) facility dedicated to prototyping and H-60 work is slated to open in June, and the companies already are looking to build a second to handle the expected volume of work.
The problem is that Schweizer doesn't have the capacity to handle all that work. It's added about 125 workers in the last two years, and plans to hire up to 100 more this year. Late last year, it struck an agreement with China's Aviation Industry Corp. 2 for its Jiangxi Changhe Aircraft Co. unit to supply airframe components and assemblies for the 300CBi helicopter as a means of increasing its production capacity.
"We simply don't have enough resources in Elmira to produce all the product that we need," said Schweizer President Paul Schweizer, son of one of the company founders, Bill Schweizer. "We see China production being a way to supplement that."
But Schweizer's order backlog exceeds 14 months. At Heli-Expo 2007 last month, the company was booking orders into 2009 and says it sees no sign of demand slackening. In fact, it sees it increasing.
"The reality is for our products, that doesn't work," Schweizer said. If a customer has a need for a helicopter, "he can't wait a year or a year and a half for us to deliver a product for him. We're forcing people to buy our competitor's products because of the backlog."
The problem is bigger than losing sales now. The company's stated goal is to be "the predominant worldwide training helicopter," for both piston and turbine, for commercial and military operators, its president said. Schweizer also is looking for its sales to triple in five years. It can't do either unless it can deliver more helicopters and do so on time.
Schweizer is like most other major Western helicopter manufacturers, and many of their suppliers. Eurocopter's new chief, Lutz Bertling, has said repeatedly that his company's challenge is to "deliver, deliver, deliver" on its record civilian and military backlogs and to streamline its production and supply operations. Bell Helicopter's new president and CEO, Richard Millman, hired in January to fix production and quality problems that have fouled its U.S. military programs, said at Heli-Expo that Bell "has islands of excellence. We need to combine them into a continent." Sikorsky Aircraft spent much of 2006 struggling to overcome production and quality problems stemming from its efforts to boost production capacity by farming out work; those problems pushed the U.S. Navy to threaten cancellation of a major contract unless Sikorsky fixed them.
Individually, these companies face demand that, in some cases, is unprecedented. At the same time, customers want "greater value," which translates to lower prices for or greater performance from those products, or both. It is difficult, if not impossible, to add workers or plants fast enough to increase production and maintain quality. The only feasible option for satisfying that set of customer demands is to extract more production capacity from the existing facilities and workforce. In today's management mindset, that means implementing "lean manufacturing" practices.
Schweizer's experiences in implementing such practices shed light on the challenges of going "lean," particularly for smaller manufacturing operations.
These practices entail analyzing the flow of work involved in accomplishing specific tasks, then identifying and eliminating inefficiencies. The goal is to reorganize the workflow to condense and match steps in more efficient combinations, standardize the work done in those steps, and reduce the time required to complete them. Done right, lean practices should enable a manufacturer to increase output and quality without significantly adding workers or facilities.
Lean manufacturing demands that everyone on the payroll thinks differently about what their job is and how it should be done. That can be a challenge in any operation, since people naturally are averse to change. But it would seem a particular challenge at a company like Schweizer, where the average worker has been on the job for well above 20 years. But Schweizer has embraced change since its inception. The three founding Schweizer brothers started out in the 1930s building gliders, and moved on to powered gliders and drones during World War II, subcontracting, agricultural aircraft, fixed-wing reconnaissance birds, and then helicopters. "One of the striking things here is they continue to reinvent themselves," said Randy Simpson, the former Sikorsky executive who serves as Schweizer's general manager.
Schweizer began embracing lean practices before Sikorsky bought it in 2004, launching its Partners in Excellence program in league with the leadership of the United Auto Workers' Local 1752, which represents Schweizer workers. A key provision of that program was that any efficiencies gained through improving the company's production processes wouldn't cost workers their jobs. The Partners in Excellence efforts continue in conjunction with the Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE) initiatives Sikorsky brought.
The biggest challenge for workers is getting used to new ways of doing things, said Jim Dersham, Schweizer plant chairman for the UAW. "We always did the tribal knowledge stuff" — each worker had his or her own "black book" for doing jobs. "Now things are getting done by the people who are writing the specs."
It is critical to involve everyone, not just production workers. "Unless you involve the whole enterprise, the customer doesn't feel the impact," Simpson said.
That's particularly true for middle managers, who often feel most threatened by "efficiency" initiatives and typically are best positioned to foil them. Schweizer created a lean council and mandated that middle managers be members of it.
That council oversees more than a dozen efforts to lean out processes. It had the blade shop revamped, for instance, and the number of stations to build its piston-engine 300Cs and CBis pared from seven to four. Schweizer aims to cut the days to make a piston aircraft by 40 percent.
Two initiatives highlight the potential of lean. Schweizer found that it took about four months to deliver an aircraft after a customer made the final deposit. One reason was the time required to design and produce the aircraft's instrument panel. Unless Schweizer is working on a fleet order, each aircraft's instrument panel is unique to the buyer. "We needed to just abbreviate the entire process and, at the same time, to reduce the costs," said Barbara Tweedt, a veteran Schweizer's marketer who helped lead the instrument-panel effort. (Lean also calls for bringing in employees from outside an operation to help assess how to improve it.) "We figured out a way that we could do this, but it meant 'cultural change.' We're not going to do this the same old way that we've been doing it."
The instrument-panel group eliminated warehousing of panel faces and scrapped the old start-and-stop workflow, replacing it with one designed to move a panel through continuously to completion and inspection. It also consolidated inspection points.
The changes pared the time it took to produce a panel from more than 100 days (sometimes far more) to about a month, Tweedt said.
Another example is the machining and welding stations for the build-up of the steel-tube frames of Schweizer's helicopters. When the lean efforts got under way, the stations were manned by two of Schweizer's more senior workers, Mike Nagle and Ed Warner. Warner alone had 34 years with the company.
"When we had the first meeting that Mike and I get into, I seen the dollar signs," said Warner. He said he realized that with lean they could probably cut in half the time required to produce a frame and improve the quality of it.
The pair came up with a system of color-coding steel-tube sections for the Model 300 frames by the part of the frame they made up. Nagle, who machines the tubing, designed a cart that groups the sections by color. "It pretty well checks itself." He also rearranged the flow of tube section processes.
"Each tube has a home in this cart, and this cart is calibrated and accepted and periodically inspected," said Simpson. "Now Mike just builds one shipset and sticks it in the cart."
After a cart is inspected, Warner welds the tube set into a frame. In addition to working on the color-coding system, he designed new fixtures to speed the assembly of frame sections. In some cases, those fixtures helped cut assembly time for some Model 300 sections in half. "We used to do one frame in 8 hr. Now it's four."
He added that quality has improved because the machined tubes from Nagle's station more consistently match specifications. "Quality's great, because I don't have to do much grinding at all."
There are still production challenges. In early 2006, company officials said they planned to deliver 78 helicopters. At Heli-Expo, they reported delivering 61. They hope to deliver 80 this year.
"The bottom line on our helicopter production is that we simply are not building helicopters fast enough," Schweizer said. "We're not meeting the demands of our customers. That really tears the heart out of a guy like me, because I've been through the tough times when you couldn't give an aircraft away. Now we simply can't make them fast enough."


text:
I know, it's a guitar forum, but some guitarists use them. So that's my guitar content.
Anyhow, I've been wondering. I've owned many harps here and there and they don't sound like this. That haunting sound.
Is this a special type of harp, or is it in a lower key? Check these two out.


text:
One of my favorite grapes. Still Piedmont, still dry...
More posts
- Tom/Cristina brought for dinner after we picked up Olivia from camp.
- Approx $15, bought by Foley. Smooth and easy. Good price
- Refined but still powerful. Dry but not annoyingly dry. SO good on its own and with food! Drank at Gran Gusto Restaurant
- Light slightly peppery. From Leah cox. The region is Asti which is in alba.


text:
NHS news 26/11/1026th November 2010
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Article Information
Title: NHS news 26/11/10
Author: Martine Hamilton
Article Id: 17033
Date Added: 26th Nov 2010


text:
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Admission Trading / Clearing
On behalf of the authorities, we ensure the further development and certification of trader examinations for the public institutions Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse (FWB®, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange) and Eurex Germany.
In order to be admitted as a trader, Qualified Back Office Staff (QBS) or Qualified Back Office Employee by a stock exchange member, certain admission requirements must be fulfilled regarding to the regulations of the relevant exchange or clearing house.
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text:
DR. DRE lyrics : "Kush (ft. Snoop Dogg & Akon)"
[Intro: Sly]
Roll up, wait a minute
Let me put some kush up in it
[Verse 1: Dr. Dre]
Now this that puff, puff, pass shit, Cheech and Chong glass shit
Blunts to the head, kush pillows no mattress
Speed boat traffic, bitches automatic
Cross that line, fuck around and get yo ass kicked
We roll shit that burn slow as fucking molasses
Probably won't pass it, smoke it 'til the last hit
Down to the ashes, Mary J. a bad bitch
Andre 3001, another classic
Go ahead, ask him bitches, 'bout how I be smokin' out
Party all night, yeah its goin' down
Order rounds, we smokin' quarter pound of that good stuff
Oh yeah, we smokin' all night
Yeah, puff puff pass that shit right here
Nigga, better than my last batch, caramel complexion and her ass black
(Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale)
[Hook: Akon]
I know you tryna get high, type of shit that have ya leaning sideways
Take a whiff of this suicide, holla at me cause I got it all day
No need to fly to Jamaica, quarter ganja, we can get the same thing
You want that bom bom biggy, holla at my niggie, right here in LA
(Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale)
Hold up, wait a minute
Let me put some kush up in it
[Verse 2: Snoop Dogg]
Still I am, tighter than the pants on Will.I.Am
Backthrow, back still, I have a pound in my backpack
Next to where the swishas at, smoking presidential
Got some bubba, I give me that, need it for my cataracts
Four hoes and I'm the pimp, in my Cadillac
You can tell them Cali back, matter fact, they a know
This ain't Dro, get a whiff of that
No, it ain't no seeds in my sack, you ain't never gotta ask, dog
What he smokin' on? Shit, kush till my mind gone
What you think I'm on? Eyes low, I'm blown
High as a motherfucker, there ain't no question 'bout it
Niggas say smoke me out, yeah I really doubt it
I'm Bob Marley reincarnated, so faded
So if you want it, you know yo nigga homie
You can put it in a zag or a blunt and get blunted
(Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale)
[Outro: Sly]
Need that kush, we blow on the best smoke
Inhale slow, no choke, make yo ass choke
Hold up wait a minute, you can go put it back
Cuz what you got in yo sack boy, it ain't that
Submit Corrections
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text:
Since introducing a texting service in late March of 2012, the suicide prevention and crisis intervention hotline CONTACT We Care has received more than 2000 texts from people in distress, the majority coming from teenagers, the nonprofit reported today.
Texters reach the hotline by texting "CWC" to 839863 Monday, Wednesday or Friday 4:00-10:00 p.m. All texts are anonymous and confidential.
This significant use of the texting service followed CONTACT's promotion of the option in several Union County schools as part of its roll out of the program, as well as through general publicity, according to Joanne Oppelt, the agency's executive director. In 2013 CONTACT plans to add up to four additional schools in an effort to make more teenagers aware of the service.
There are other frightening numbers driving that expansion. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth aged 15-24, the fourth leading cause of death for youth aged 10-14 and the second leading cause of death among college students, Oppelt said.
Each year approximately 5,000 young people aged 10-24 commit suicide, according to national statistics. In addition, the National Institute of Mental Health believes as many as 25 suicides are attempted for each one that is completed. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19.3 percent of high school students have seriously considered suicide and 14.5 percent have made plans to kill themselves.
Causes for teen suicide include: stress over school; feelings of being misunderstood by parents or teachers; struggles with friendships or romantic relationships; social isolation; low self-esteem; developmental issues; recent loss; bullying; eating disorders; and mental disorders.
"Add to that list the tragedy of Newton, Connecticut, and the rising level of violence young people are being exposed to," Oppelt said. "Being a teenager in the 21st century can bring untold pressures, angst and disappointment. Yet this age also gives us technology we've never had before and that technology gives these young people in crisis one more important avenue for getting help, and one they are comfortable with."
More than 60 percent of teenagers prefer texting to other forms of communication, according to the Pew Internet Research Center. Seventy-five percent of teenagers text and the average American teen sends more than 60 texts each day, with older teenage girls averaging 100, Pew revealed.
After introducing texting in late March CONTACT worked with Cranford, Roselle Park and Scotch Plains high schools to promote the service and raise awareness of options for teenagers in distress within those schools. Promotion included posters, take-home cards, presentations and morning broadcasts and emails to parents.
Materials featured messages such as "RU hrtn?," "UR not alone" and "I was too scared to tell my friends. My parents would never understand. It seemed too horrible for words. Then I texted about it I got answers."
In 2013 CONTACT hopes to begin similar promotional campaigns in Westfield, Union County College, Summit and Elizabeth, according to Oppelt.
CONTACT We Care is staffed by more than 100 listeners and text consultants who are trained to be empathetic and help callers and texters come to their own conclusions that they have options and that, if they are feeling suicidal, taking their life is not the answer. CONTACT handles more than 12,000 calls and texts each year.
CONTACT We Care serves Central and Northern New Jersey and a primary responder to calls to the national suicide prevention line (1-800-273-TALK or 1-800-SUICIDE) that originate in New Jersey. Callers also reach CONTACT by dialing 908-232-2880 or texting "CWC" to 839863.
About CONTACT We Care
CONTACT We Care is Central and Northern New Jersey's crisis listening line, receiving more than 12,000 calls per year. CONTACT brings comfort and hope to people in emotional distress through active, empathetic and nonjudgmental listening. All calls are free, anonymous and confidential. If you are in crisis and need someone to listen, call our hotline at 908-232-2880. We are affiliated with CONTACT USA, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the American Association of Suicidology. For general information about CONTACT We Care or to become a volunteer, call us at 908-301-1899 or visit our website at www.contactwecare.org.
Story and excerpts from clark.patch.com


text:
Radioactivity and toxic chemicals spilled into soil and groundwater at Prairie Island
Xcel Energy's Prairie Island nuclear power plant has made what appears to be two admissions of separate toxic chemical and radiological spills in less than a week. Residents, and the tribal day care center, of the Prairie Island Indian Community are located within hundreds of yards of the nuclear power plant. Read more...
The Saint Paul, Minnesota Pioneer Press ran a front page article about the recent spills at Prairie Island nuclear power plant, quoting Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps responding to Xcel Energy's and the NRC's downplaying of the risks of the tritium spills:
"But Kevin Kamps, a radioactive-waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Maryland-based watchdog group that focuses on the nuclear power industry, said it was irresponsible to claim that there was no danger.
'We do take exception to that flippant disregard they have. Tritium is a clinically proven cause of cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations,' Kamps said. 'It's long known that any exposure carries a health risk.'
...But just because the level is below the EPA's limit does not mean there's no risk, Kamps said.
'It's long known that any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how small, still carries a risk of cancer," he said. "And those risks accumulate over a lifetime."
The articles reports that Xcel Energy did not notify the Prairie Island Indian Community, located 600 yards from the nuclear power plant, about last November's spill until last week, and waited till Monday to notify them about last Friday's spill, as it had occurred "after business hours" just before a weekend.


text:
You must login before you can run this tool.
[Illinois]: BUTDjointDistribution
this tool simulates bottom-up/top-down processing in the visual system using the joint distribution
Version 1.3b - published on 06 Aug 2014
doi:10.4231/D3ZC7RV50 cite this
This tool is closed source.
Published on
This tool is used to infer the posterior probabilities of unknown variables given known values for other variables. This involves normalizing the joint probabilities of the unknown variables so that they sum to 1. We can infer the posterior probability of any of the possible values of the Combination given known values for all other variables by normalizing the joint probabilities for all values of Combination and the known variables. This distribution specifies the probabilistic relationships among the variables in a model but for large models with many variables, computation of the joint distribution is infeasible. The dependence of the location and feature also has important implications for probabilistic inference using the model. The enhancement of area V4 neuron responses due to increased attention to a different location, can both be simulated by the image-generation model of bottom-up/top-down interactions in the visual system. This image-generation model can be used to simulate effects in which the response of an area V4 neuron is selective for something over another. The "attentional effect" is interpreted as an increase in the posterior probability brought by an increase in the expectation of the location. Simulations involve larger set of images and combinations than are considered in the models, however the basic modeling approach is the same. The difference between the tools of BUTDjointDistribution and BUTDprobInference are the methods in which the posterior probabilities are computed. For BUTDjointDistribution, it is through the joint distribution.
Sponsored by
NanoBio Node, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana
Anastasio, Thomas J. Tutorial on Neural Systems Modeling. Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 2010. Print.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:


text:
Instruction Request Form
This form is intended for use by University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan campus program and adjunct faculty. Faculty may use this form to reserve a classroom session for students or for personal research instruction. Please complete as much information as possible.
Please allow the Librarian to adequately prepare for this instruction by requesting it at least one week in advance of the date you would like your session.
- If you would like laptops for your students to use after the instruction, please indicate below.


text:
Celtics & Nets working on superstar trade deal
The Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets are working on a potential blockbuster trade involving All-Stars Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, according to ESPN.
Garnett has reportedly agreed to waive his no-trade clause, paving the way for the two teams to reach an agreement involving eight players and three draft picks.
The proposed deal would see the Nets land Garnett, Pierce and guard Jason Terry. In exchange the Nets would send three first-round picks from the 2014, 2016 and 2018 draft, along with Kris Humphries' expiring contract, Gerald Wallace, Kris Joseph, MarShon Brooks and a sign-and-traded Keith Bogans.
The two sides have reportedly reached an agreement in principle, but no trade can be signed off before July 10 - the date when an NBA moratorium on signings and trades ends.
According to ESPN's source, Garnett's waiver was the final stumbling block cleared, after Boston's concerns over collecting Wallace's three-year $30m contract were alleviated when the Nets agreed to take Terry.
Nets general manager Billy King refused to comment on the trade reports, but the proposed deal would signal a clear commitment from the Nets to contend in the Eastern Conference next season.
Adding the veteran trio to Deron Williams, Joe Johnson and Brook Lopez would give them a strong starting five.
First-year head coach Jason Kidd would be expected to improve on last season's showing if the trade is cleared - the Nets were knocked out in the first round of the playoffs by the Chicago Bulls this term.
The Celtics, having dumped Doc Rivers' three-year $21m contract, are clearly positioning themselves for a season of transition.
By loading up on draft picks and creating cap space, they are looking to the future.News Now - Sport News


text:
|Safe Haskell
Examples of networks
Creating a simple network
example function is the typical example.
It is using the monad
BNMonad. The goal of this monad is to offer
a way of describing the network which is natural.
There are only three functions to understand inside the monad:
variableto create a discrete variable of type
DV. Creating a discrete variable is using a
Enumtype like for instance
probato define the probability P(A) of a variable A
cptto define the conditional probability table P(A | BC)
It is important to understand how the values are organized. If you define P( wet | sprinkler road) then you have to give the values in the order:
wet=False, sprinkler=False, road=False wet=False, sprinkler=False, road=True wet=False, sprinkler=True, road=False wet=False, sprinkler=True, road=True
Finally, don't forget to return the discrete variables at the end of your network construction because those variables are used for making inferences.
example :: ([
CPT) example =
runBN$ do winter <-
variable"winter" (t :: Bool) sprinkler <-
variable"sprinkler" (t :: Bool) wet <-
variable"wet grass" (t :: Bool) rain <-
variable"rain" (t :: Bool) road <-
variable"slippery road" (t :: Bool) --
probawinter ~~ [0.4,0.6]
cptsprinkler [winter] ~~ [0.25,0.8,0.75,0.2]
cptrain [winter] ~~ [0.9,0.2,0.1,0.8]
cptwet [sprinkler,rain] ~~ [1,0.2,0.1,0.05,0,0.8,0.9,0.95]
cptroad [rain] ~~ [1,0.3,0,0.7] return [winter,sprinkler,rain,wet,road]
By default, all variables are typed (
TDV Bool).
TDV means Typed Discrete Variable.
In case you are mixing several types, you'll need to remove the type
to build the
cpt since the list can't be heterogeneous. Just use
dv for this. It will convert the variable into the
DV of untyped discrete variable.
Creating truth tables
In practise, it is easy to compute the posterior of a variable because it is always possible to find a cluster containing the variable in the junction tree. But, it is more difficult to compute the posterior of a logical assertion or just a conjunction of assertions.
If a query is likely to be done often, then it may be a good idea to add a new node to the Bayesian network to represent this query. So, some functions to create truth tables are provided.
exampleLogical :: ([
CPT) exampleLogical =
runBN$ do a <-
variable"a" (t :: Bool) b <-
variable"b" (t :: Bool) notV <-
variable"notV" (t :: Bool) andV <-
variable"andV" (t :: Bool) orV <-
variable"orV" (t :: Bool) let ta = a
.==.True tb = b
logicalnotV ((
.!.) ta)
logicalandV (ta
logicalorV (ta
.|.tb) return $ [a,b,notV,andV,orV]
In the previous example, we force a type on the discrete variables
DV to avoid futur errors
in the instantiations. It is done through the
tdv function.
But, it is also possible to use the untyped variables and write:
logicalandV ((a
The goal of a Bayesian network is to factorize a big probability table because otherwise the algorithms
can't process it. So, of course it is not a good idea to represent a complex logical assertion with a huge
probability table. So, the
logical keyword should only be used to build small tables.
If you need to encode a complex logical assertion, use
logical several times to build a network representing
the assertion instead of building just one node to represent it.
Noisy OR
The Noisy OR is a combination of logical tables (OR) and conditional probability tables which is often used during modeling to avoid generating big conditional probability tables.
It is easy to use:
no <-
noisyOR [(a,0.1),(b,0.2),(c,0.3)]
Each probability is the probability that a given variable has no effect (so is inhibited in the OR).
Importing a network from a Hugin file
exampleImport function can be used to import a file in Hugin format.
Only a subset of the format is supported.
The function will return a mapping from node names to Discrete Variables
The node name is used and not the node's label.
The function is also returning a simple bayesian network
SBN using
as factors.
The implementation is using
getDataFileName to find the path of the
test pattern installed by cabal.
exampleImport :: IO (Map.Map String
CPT) exampleImport = do path <-
getDataFileName"cancer.net" r <-
importBayesianGraphpath return (
runBN$ fromJust r)
- example :: ([TDV Bool], SBN CPT)
- exampleJunction :: UndirectedSG () Vertex
- exampleWithFactorChange :: ([TDV Bool], SBN CPT)
- exampleSoftEvidence :: ((TDV Bool, TDV Bool), SBN CPT)
- exampleImport :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- exampleDiabete :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- exampleAsia :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- examplePoker :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- exampleFarm :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- examplePerso :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
- exampleLogical :: ([TDV Bool], SBN CPT)
- testJunction :: DirectedSG () Vertex
- anyExample :: FilePath -> IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT)
example :: ([TDV Bool], SBN CPT) Source
Standard example found in many books about Bayesian Networks.
exampleWithFactorChange :: ([TDV Bool], SBN CPT) Source
Standard example but with a wrong factor that is changed in the tests using factor replacement functions
exampleImport :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT) Source
Example showing how to import a graph described into a Hugin file.
exampleDiabete :: IO (Map String DV, SBN CPT) Source
Diabete example (not provided with this package)
testJunction :: DirectedSG () Vertex Source