Last night NBC Universal created a television set version of Zuccotti Park for an upcoming episode of Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Word got out and the set was soon occupied by actual OWS protesters. Such a crazy story.

Drew Hornbein, 24, from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said he found it “bizarre” to walk through an imitation occupation a few weeks after the actual one was swept away by sanitation workers spearheaded by police officers wearing helmets and carrying plastic shields.

And he wondered whether the people producing the show failed to realize that a fake tent city presented a target that many former Zuccotti inhabitants would find too tempting to pass up.

“It’s absurd,” Mr. Hornbein said. “Did they think we were gone?”

Link

Today marks the two month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests in NYC. I’ll be joining the rally at Foley Square, 5pm to celebrate. Here are a couple links I recommend to get a sense of what’s been happening:

• Occupy in October, a documentary radio piece from KCRW’s Unfictional covering the period leading up to the rally in Times Square
• Beyond Liberty Plaza, a summary of articles by Khujeci Tomai (whose blog has been a great resource) describing more recent events and an appeal for growing beyond the occupation of a single park

We need to be reflective, celebratory, practical, forward-looking, and inspiring — all at once. So let us start on a macro and micro, holistic and granular level. Find a project, an affinity group, an alternative art space, a progressive organizing space, a classroom, an immigrant rights group, a trade union; anything, everything, somewhere in your neighborhood, in your city. Start building something specific, tangible– linked to the larger Occupy project of economic justice and resisting corporate control over democracy. All in preparation for spring, when people will start coming out in large numbers again. Don’t be afraid to go against some of the fetish of horizontalism; the movement needs some leaders as well. Time to move to the second phase.

Do not ask about Sky Watch. Nick Turse on Alternet:

“We’re just gonna take your name down. That you’re a reporter and that you’re asking questions about our Sky Watch. Don’t worry. No summons,” Torres said.

See also: Wall Street Firms Spy on Protestors in Tax-Funded Center

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning—they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

And also this part:

The banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.

Your average chimpanzee couldn’t fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?

I’ve finally set up a GitHub repository! It also includes some documentation on how to configure OpenWRT to behave like a captive portal. I’m trying to think of a better fake-TLD than “.offline”. Dot-occupy? I’m open to suggestions.

Update: I’ve renamed the project to occupy.here! More soon…