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

The Ground Truth

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends shows a recruiting day at Venice Beach in California, a Marine boot camp in 2002, just months prior to the Iraq Invasion, scenes from combat in Iraq, and interviews with returning soldiers and their families.

At one point in the movie, the film’s producers reproduce footage from behind an airborne camera (in a drone perhaps?) showing the distant ground images of maybe 20 or more Iraqis walking through a street intersection.  You hear a spoken order to destroy these people and then a countdown to the launch of a missile.  You see a big explosion that destroys all of the Iraqis.  Then you hear the voice of a young white male, one of the military personnel involved in the attack.  He says “Dude.”  He says it in a very awestruck way.  It’s like a video game, he knows, but this time it’s real.  Those were actual flesh and blood human beings he just eliminated with the flick of a switch.

http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2873

http://thegroundtruth.org/soldiers.html

The Long History of American Torture

This is disturbing.

There are several methods for achieving water boarding’s perverse effect of drowning in open air: most frequently, by making the victim lie prone and then constricting breathing with a wet cloth, a technique favored by both the French Inquisition and the CIA; or, alternatively, by forcing water directly and deeply into the lungs, as French paratroopers did during the Algerian War.

After French soldiers used the technique on Henri Alleg during the Battle for Algiers in 1957, this journalist wrote a moving description that turned the French people against both torture and the Algerian War. “I tried,” Alleg wrote, “by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me.”

Let us think about the deeper meaning of Alleg’s sparse words--“a terrible agony, that of death itself.” As the water blocks air to the lungs, the human organism’s powerful mammalian diving reflex kicks in, and the brain is wracked by horrifically painful panic signals--death, death, death. After a few endless minutes, the victim vomits out the water, the lungs suck air, and panic subsides. And then it happens again, and again, and again--each time inscribing the searing trauma of near death in human memory.

http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2006/12/us-has-history-of-using-torture-by.html

Netherlands: police state

Freedom of the press? Not in Holland:

Reporters behind bars - not an everyday occurrence in the Netherlands, yet that's exactly where two journalists from De Telegraaf, the country's biggest selling morning newspaper, have been since Monday this week.

The two men are refusing to disclose who was responsible for supplying them with confidential information from the Dutch AIVD national intelligence and security, and the fact that a court has ordered them to be held in custody until they do, has been labelled as unacceptable by the Dutch journalist community as well as one of the country's European Parliament representatives.
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/ned061128mc

Noam Chomsky Speaks

Chomsky puts forth on what is going on in Israel.

In January, Palestinians committed a major crime: they voted the wrong way in a free election.  In accord with their fabled commitment to democracy, revered in just about every article and book that appears, the US and Israel instantly determined to punish the Palestinian population for this atrocious act.  Always thanks to US backing, Israeli illegally withheld funds it owes to the Palestinian authority, stepped up its violence, even went to the extent of cutting off water to the water-starved Gaza strip, an extreme act of savage cruelty.  Meanwhile, again thanks to US backing (and that includes the complicity of the media and intellectual class), Israel continued its programs of takeover of whatever it wants in the West Bank.  That was formalized by Olmert's program of "convergence," lauded here as a noble act of "withdrawal," in reality a brutal program of annexation, dismemberment of what's left of Palestine, and imprisonment (as Israeli took over the Jordan valley).

http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2871

Bush and Blair use fascist rhetoric

Over the years of Blair's leadership, he and his cabal have themselves regularly echoed the rhetoric of fascism, from "New Labour" (as in Neue Ordnung) to "the third way", a phrase much used by fascists in the interwar years. At one time, the Blairites liked to tell us that we lived in a Young Country. Quite apart from the fact that this is simply wrong in terms of history or demography, it recalled Giovinezza, or Youth, the marching song of Mussolini's Blackshirts. We were endlessly told about the People's Government, People's Wimbledon, and even the People's Princess. It is terrifying that anyone should have been quite so tone deaf to memories of a Third Reich with its People's Courts and People's Car (Volkswagen).

Maybe that could be excused as obtuse inadvertence but some things Blair has said cannot be so easily overlooked. One of his most memorable speeches was given to the Labour conference in 1999, when he attacked "the forces of conservatism", a phrase that sent some of his more simple-minded followers into raptures until they realised that those forces included everyone who stood in his way, from honourable Tories to decent radicals and principled socialists.

He used even more frightening words that day. When he said that New Labour was "the political wing of the British people", the implication was that other parties weren't needed at all. Had he really never thought of those leaders of the 1920s and 1930s who claimed that theirs was the one true voice of the people, above the corruption of party politics? In a recent essay in Prospect on politics and language, Richard Jenkyns, the Oxford classicist and literary critic, looked harder at that scary oration, which was, "in its demonising of opponents and its aspiration to make the Labour party the political arm of the British people, perhaps the most fascistic speech ever made by a mainstream British politician".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1448722,00.html

 

 

 

Cryptome.org down?

Tracing route to cryptome.org [161.58.59.189]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 Destination host unreachable.

Trace complete.

A comprehensive analysis of class division

Racism and sexism train us to develop and acquire certain capabilities at the expense of all others. Then these acquired capabilities are taken to be our nature and fix our functions for life, and fix also the quality of our mutual relations. So planting cane or tea is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence. Race, sex, age, nation, each is an indispensable element of the international division of labour.

By Selma James.

Web 'fuelling crisis in politics'

Fantastic! Because more direct participation between the "voters" - that is, you and me  -and the politicians is possible, the powers that be view this as a crisis! Well of course they would. Their thinking exposes the dirty truth behind the sham of "democracy" - it is an institutionalized power hegemony.

Outgoing No 10 policy chief Matthew Taylor says the internet is helping to fuel a democratic "crisis".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk_politics/6155932.stm

The poor will pay for global warming

As if we didn't know already. New Scientist says that the poor will pay for global warming. In capitalism, the rich get to enjoy, the poor get to suffer.

Tackling climate change is about more than science or economic policy - it is a human rights issue.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=mg19225774.600&feedId=climate-change_rss20