G8 Asem Protests

In Germany,

the police will point their guns at protesters who throw paint:

http://www1.ndr.de/nachrichten/asem/asembilder2_org-asemindex2.html

Time to hiss the blag flag...

...and begin slitting throats. (That is a quote, look it up).

"The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords."

http://news.com.com/FBI+turns+to+broad+new+wiretap+method/2100-7348_3-6154457.html?tag=alert

Doomsday Clock: Fear Uncertainty Doubt

So the guys moved the "Doomsday Clock" forward so that it is now five minutes to midnight.

http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction--the figurative midnight--and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm.

Apparently, these chappies want us to pull our act together and just stop all this nonsense and start behaving like a rational nuclear physicist. We should do that because otherwise, the planet (and you and I) will die, so they say.

I don't want to live in a world where the force of fear is used as a motivator for change. I think these guys are using the wrong instruments. I think that fatalism is a hindrance to enacting on real change, the changes which people make in their outlook on life.

Bliar is going down in flames of righteous indignation

Never forget: power corrupts. Politicians are corrupt, or being corrupted.

When it was sent to MI6 headquarters last week, Mr Scarlett, refused. Officials made it clear there were "differences" between the intelligence agencies and the government over the language used by Lord Goldsmith. A source said that Lord Goldsmith's claims to parliament in December "contained quite a degree of conjecture".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1991281,00.html

Surge, Splurge, Urge

Why does no- one talk about the oil?

The surge plan is a painfully twisted military option, but what is twisting it is not well understood. Stability in Iraq could be achieved relatively easily, even now, in conjunction with a precipitous redeployment of Anglo-American military forces. The strange attractor—strange mostly because the media never mention it—is Iraq’s ”first postwar draft hydrocarbon law,” which would ”set up a committee consisting of highly qualified experts to speed up the process of issuing tenders and signing contracts with international oil companies to develop Iraq’s untapped oilfields.” This law, which is tantamount to privatization with an Anglo-American franchise in perpetuity, is the bottom line for the U.S., as evidenced by the fact that this is the one, absolute, bottom-line point of agreement between the Bush administration and the so-called Iraq Study Group. The rhetorical scuffle between these two entities is not the what, but the how.

http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2007/01/petraeus-is-baghdad-burning.html

Fight them in the streets

I have a zero tolerance policy towards fascists, I applaud my comrades in the Czech Republic.

Police terminate demonstration of right extremists
Zlin, South Moravia, Jan 13 (CTK) - Police terminated a march of some 200 right-wing extremists in Otrokovice over brawls with anarchists at 16:00 today, two hours before its planned end.

The demonstration, organised by the National Corporativism association in protest against the left, was announced to the municipal authorities in Otrokovice, south Moravia, beforehand.

Five radicals were detained during the brawls when both camps were throwing bottles and explosive charges to one another. One radical was treated with minor injuries in his face.

http://www.praguemonitor.com/ctk/?story_id=w49869i20070115;story=Police-terminate-demonstration-of-right-extremists

K-Pax, Anarchism as a dominant Sci-Fi meme.

Last night I watched with the movie K-PAX with Kevin Spacey (fantastic)
and Jeff Bridges (idiot). It's a pseudo sci/fi flick with Spacey playing
a psychiatric patient who believes himself to be from the planet K-PAX -
this delusion being caused by a typically American "Trigger" moment of
violent rape and murder at some point in his past.

The interesting thing about this generally good-but-mediocre movie is
the essentially anarchist principle which is explained to be at the
heart of K-PAX society. There are no governments, no laws, no police
"These things are a non-sequitor" explains Spacey, they are unnecessary.
This theme is also at the heart of Iain M. Banks' book "The Algebraist",
the most "alien" of the extra terrestrials being the multitudinous
inhabitants of the universe's gas giants. These beings also live
essentially anarchist lives, using mutual aid, free association and a
kudos-based equivalent for money as their basis for societal wealth
production.

Now there is nothing wrong in portraying alien societies to be
anarchist, indeed the trick of projecting the best and worst of human
characteristics in a grotesquely accentuated way onto an alien alter-ego
is at the heart of off-world science fiction. In many ways we can see
that the continued use of anarchism as the projected future-vision
Utopia is a ray of light, as long as the meme of anarchism as Utopia is
being propagated there will remain a realistic chance of anarchism
becoming the dominant cultural and socio-economical ideal.

I would like to recommend to these authors and plot writers that they
take the bull by the horns and start to use the term "anarchism" to
describe a positive Utopia, its time to promote anarchism, its time to
gain some traction.

Fascism Anyone?

Does anyone recognize these symptoms?

Fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.
5. Rampant sexism.
6. A controlled mass media.
7. Obsession with national security.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.
9. Power of corporations protected.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.
14. Fraudulent elections.

By Laurence W. Britt
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4113.htm

Customize Google

This is a great way to anonymize Google's tracking cookies.

http://www.customizegoogle.com

The Labor Movement: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.

You may have seen bumper stickers on vehicles as you drive down the highway that read, "The Labor Movement: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend."

What exactly does that mean? Well, in a nutshell, it means that many workplace benefits that we all take for granted were issues that were fought for and won by organized labor.

Consistently over the years, it has been labor unions that have waged the battle (and it has always been a battle) for improvements for workers--whether in a collective bargaining agreement or through legislation. These include: the non-working weekend; child labor laws; the 40-hour work week; overtime premium pay; contractualized tuition reimbursement; employer-paid health insurance and disability insurance; paid vacation leave; leaves of absence; guaranteed pensions and retirement; health and safety legislation; child care and elder care provisions; paid holidays; due process through a grievance and arbitration procedure; a wage scale with escalator clauses; job security; workplace non-discrimination; and other major intangibles like dignity and respect in the workplace.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/1/28/161243/795

Track Me Not

This is an interesting Firefox extension: "Track me Not".

It steganographies your really search queries by hiding them in a
stream of "random" search queries. Basically, it spams various search
engines continuously, so an attacker would have a more difficult time
discovering wht you are really interested in.

I kind of feel that a more random timing in the submit frequency would
help things, it can't be too difficult to discard all queries which
match a temporal pattern: say at a frequency of 120 seconds with a
standard deviation of a few points.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/faq.html