Members of one of Occupy Wall Street’s offshoots, Occupy Our Homes, were arrested Monday and Tuesday demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Department of Justice in Washington.

Try to contain your surprise, the police officers who brutalized Occupy Wall Street protesters will not face criminal charges. Apparently it is crime to protest but not to beat up protesters despite any reasonable reading of the law leading one to the opposite conclusion.

What does it accomplish to dance in the streets?

Can Anonymous be destroyed with enough arrests and punitive sentences?

Some of you are probably familiar with me as the weekday editor of MyFDL or from my work as the FDL correspondent on stories like the Gulf Port 7 trial. This week, I’m bringing the SXSW Interactive conference to the Lake.

Valentine’s Day: some people love the romance, others decry it as an obligatory expression of love or lament the misery of being single on a day devoted to coupledom. If being single on February 14 seems unbearable, imagine if you were not just alone but locked away from everything — your family, your friends, the outside world.

We have entered an age of protest. Social media tools allow new ways to mobilize activists into public and private spaces and also provide new avenues for amplifying their actions. The Internet, when used properly, can drive activists to an action — or a worldwide coalition of actions — and then make sure thousands more people see and hear about them after. Using simple tools like hashtags, we can monitor the response to actions in real time in a way never possible before.

A year ago, I was arrested and put in jail, shivering, coughing, and frightened, and worried that I would miss a statistics exam. It’s funny to think about, because the past year has rushed by so quickly that I didn’t even realize it had been a full year until I logged onto Facebook and read a fellow occupier’s post.

Looking back, it’s been a wild ride.

On November 16, Richard Estes interviewed me on his KDVS program Speaking In Tongues about Burning Man and the recent suicide of Paul Addis. This is part 2 of the interview, in which we talk more about the effects of police and pranksters on countercultures and activist movements.

The Rolling Jubilee debt elimination project is one of the best ideas to come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet some, most notably Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, have raised concerns that eliminating debt in this fashion might create tax liabilities for the former debtors.

It turns out that the Rolling Jubilee folks have already dealt with this potential issue.