The ultimate gangnam style

Seagull steals camera

Lеbаnоn, A Letter to North American Аnаrchists from Radical Веirut

From A-Infos:

It's also unfortunate that many of our comrades in the West have digested the patronizing tone of their imperial governments, and use it unconsciously with their comrades from the third world. Too many times, we found our comrades dictating with whom we should ally ourselves with, or how should we deal with our own causes like political Islаm, the Sуrian revolution, anti-government tactics, and radical environmental and feminist organizations.
We appreciate the feedback and the exchange, and we think it's desired and needed, but we feel that there are a lot of subtle expectations that we should become another version of you. And we don't want to. Being on the other end of the equation, the one that has been getting drone missiles, uranium depleted shells, and imperialism for decades, we can honestly tell you that whatever you tried, it didn't work well for us, and it seems it didn't work for you as well.

On the disingenuous simplifications of right-wing libertarians

What is "freedom"? What is "property"? What are "rights"? They define these terms to eliminate all but one possible conclusion, which makes it impossible for them to reason outside their narrow right-wing economic framework.

Let's start with property: by applying a single term to a variety of economic relationships, they conflate our natural and innate understanding of possession with the feudal concept of land titles. To claim that owning the shirt on your back is equivalent to a claim on the goods and services produced by those laboring on a plot of ground on which you never step foot is lunacy. The landed classical liberal philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries recognized this definition as being particularly advantageous to them. Conceptually differentiating personal possessions from land and other capital which serves the needs of society only when operated in a cooperative fashion by multiple workers, is obvious to all but the most gluttonous materialist.

And rights? Does that include the right to deny others access to the means of obtaining food and shelter on the basis of your use of it as an investment? And how could it include the right to life while not recognizing the right to the basic necessities of survival? By defining rights selectively and conflating radically different uses of property, they establish an implicit set of rules that appears to create a moral justification for the hoarding of productive capital and resources on the part of a few while denying it to everyone else in society. And how about once one also then combines this particular type of property "right" with a labor market? Then they are in effect arguing for the right to exploit others, because those who lack productive property of their own must sell their labor to those who have it simply to survive, and receive as compensation less than the market value of the goods they produce.

And freedom for whom? In such a society where everything is owned, those with the most capital also have the most freedom. If you have nothing, then you have the freedom to starve, which is not any kind of freedom at all. And a society in which the vast majority of its members have no choice but to submit to the will of those who control access to the means of production is by every definition tyranny.

Adwaita, c. 1750 – 23 March 2006

Weighing 250 kg (590 lb), Adwaita was a bachelor with no records of his progeny. He lived on a diet of wheat bran, carrots, lettuce, soaked gram, bread, grass and salt. His shell cracked and a wound developed a few months before his death from liver failure in March 2006.

The age of Adwaita at his death is estimated to have been around 255 years. If confirmed, this would have made Adwaita the oldest known tortoise of modern times, living longer than Harriet by 80 years, and Tu'i Malila by 67 years.

Another response to a capitalist advocate calling himself an anarchist

I don't understand the association of anarchy with anti-capitalism. With no state, there would only be capitalism. Capitalism is simply trade of goods and services amongst voluntary parties.

You seem to be under the impression that markets and Capitalism are the same thing.

Let's start with your definition of Capitalism, which you claim is "simply trade of goods and services amongst voluntary parties.".

First, trading of goods occurs in all markets (which have existed for thousands of years). This is not unique to Capitalism.

Does Capitalism involve markets? Yes! So why then do we also use the word "Capitalism"? Wouldn't that be redundant?

Capitalism is a term first used by Proudhon to refer to a unique system of exploitation that arose during the industrial revolution, and that has subsequently become the dominant mode of production.

What makes Capitalism unique are two things:

1. The use of land and human labor as commodities, and the subsequent trade of them on markets.
2. Its recognition of private property (as distinct from personal property) entitling the owner of productive capital to the proceeds of the labor of others paid to operate it.

Second, while markets can be voluntary, the unique combination of private property with commodified labor (which is the heart of Capitalism), gives rise to a system of social relations in which a minority class owns most productive property, leaving the great majority no choice but to sell their own labor for access to that property in order to earn enough money to survive. Moreover, the existence of a surplus "workforce" of unskilled labor gives complete control to the employer to set the rate of compensation. The employer uses the profit he extracted from the workers (by paying them less than the value of the goods and services they produced) to accumulate even more productive property and continue the cycle.

Thus, because the alternative would be starvation, workers are not making a voluntary decision when they sell their labor.

Third, in order to create the concept of private property, pervasive and violent force is necessary to deny access to those who lack a title to it. How else could a majority of the world's population continue to exist with wage-slavery as their only option for survival?

So amusingly enough, what differentiates Capitalism from any other economic system involving markets is precisely the fact that it imposes involuntary decisions upon people, and in so doing requires, for all practical definitions, the existence of a coercive state.

The Cardiacs are Amazing

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

From The Atlantic:

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

LES MONDES ENGLOUTIS

Criminal Fortification of a Residence or Building

Somehow Illinois lawmakers have become prematurely apprised of my plans.

720 ILCS 5/19-5 (from Ch. 38, par. 19-5)

Sec. 19-5. Criminal fortification of a residence or building.
(a) A person commits the offense of criminal fortification of a residence or building when, with the intent to prevent the lawful entry of a law enforcement officer or another, he maintains a residence or building in a fortified condition, knowing that such residence or building is used for the manufacture, storage, delivery, or trafficking of cannabis or controlled substances as defined in the Cannabis Control Act or Illinois Controlled Substances Act.

(b) "Fortified condition" means preventing or impeding entry through the use of steel doors, wooden planking, crossbars, alarm systems, dogs, or other similar means.

(c) Sentence. Criminal fortification of a residence or building is a Class 3 felony.

(Source: P.A. 86-760.)

Yiddish-Anarchist song: Down with the police!

אין אַלע גאַסן, וווּ מען גייט, הערט מען זאַבאַסטאָווקעס. ייִנגלעך, מיידלעך, קינד־און־קייט, שמועסן פֿון נאַבאָווקעס. גענוג שוין, ברידער, האָרעווען, גענוג שוין באָרגן־לײַען, מאַכט אַ זאַבאַסטאָווקע, לאָמיר, ברידער, זיך באַפֿרײַען! ברידער און שוועסטער, לאָמיר זיך געבן די הענט, לאָמיר מיקאָלײַקעלען צעברעכן די ווענט! היי, היי, דאָלוי פּאָליציי, דאָלוי סאַמאָדערזשאַוויע וו׳ראָסיי! ברידער און שוועסטער, לאָמיר גיין צוזאַמען. לאָמיר מיקאָלײַקעלען באַגראָבן מיט דער מאַמען! היי, היי, דאָלוי פּאָליציי, דאָלוי סאַמאָדערזשאַוויע וו׳ראָסיי! נעכטן האָט ער געפֿירט אַ וועגעלע מיסט, הײַנט איז ער געוואָרן אַ קאַפּיטאַליסט. היי, היי, דאָלוי פּאָליציי, דאָלוי סאַמאָדערזשאַוויע וו׳ראָסיי!

Everywhere you go, the streets are full of strikes Boys and girls, family and friends are talking better wages Enough of breaking back, brothers, and still having to borrow Call a strike! Brothers, let's free ourselves Brothers and sisters, let's muster our strength, and crush the rule of little Nicky. Hey, hey, down with the police! Down with autocracy in Russia! Brothers and sisters, let's do it together. let's bury little Nickolai along with his mother Hey, hey, down with the police! Down with autocracy in Russia Only yesterday he was wushing a garbage cart and now he's become a capitalist.

NSA Whistleblower: Everyone in US under virtual surveillance, all info stored

From Davidope

“Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

— Howard Zinn

If you're unemployed, it's not because there isn't any work

Life without Capitalism? How is that possible?

"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society."

– John (Fire) Lame Deer
Sioux Lakota (1903-1976)

Sun City Girls: The Halcyon Days of Symmetry

GANGNAM STYLE

Apparently this video is a significant cultural commentary focusing on the materialism and hypocrisy of those living in the Gangnam district in South Korea.

The Media's Portrayal of White Tеrrоrists

The Top Ten differences between White Tеrrоrists and Others:

1. White tеrrоrists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other tеrrоrists are called, like, “tеrrоrists.”
2. White tеrrоrists are “troubled loners.” Other tеrrоrists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white tеrrоrists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of tеrrоrists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white tеrrоrist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other tеrrоrists are almost never interviewed.
5. White tеrrоrists are part of a “fringe.” Other tеrrоrists are apparently mainstream.
6. White tеrrоrists are random events, like tornadoes. Other tеrrоrists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White tеrrоrists are never called “white.” But other tеrrоrists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white tеrrоrists are typical of white people. But other tеrrоrists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White tеrrоrists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other tеrrоrists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white tеrrоrists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other tеrrоrists.

From The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America's Middle Class:

The system's incoherence and contempt for its dependents fluoresce brilliantly in the wake of an historic event like the Great Recession. When floodwaters cover our homes, we expect that FEMA workers with emergency checks and blankets will find us.
There is no moral or substantive difference between a hundred-year flood and the near-destruction of the global financial system by speculators immune from consequence. But if you and your spouse both lose your jobs and assets because of an unprecedented economic cataclysm having nothing to do with you, you quickly discover that your society expects you and your children to live malnourished on the streets indefinitely.

Resisting the Surveillance State and its network effects

Panel discussion with Jacob Appelbaum, Dmitry Kleiner:

They produce a continual stream of fantastic points about threats to online privacy posed by prevailing attitudes, the role of private profit in communication systems, and pervasive state surveillance.

The video is worth watching if for nothing else to witness Appelbaum's awesome smack-down of one audience member on the topic of market choice in social networks.

(Appelbaum is a Tor developer who has experienced repeated harassment and monitoring by US federal agents.)

A Revelation Indeed

Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

From Discover Magazine:

But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat. When the egg hatches, the confused larva does not develop into an adult in the human’s intestines. Instead, it acts as it would inside a pig. It burrows into the person’s bloodstream and gets swept through the body. Often those parasites end up in the brain, where they form cysts.

The tapeworm larvae often get stuck in ventricles, or fluid-filled cavities, in the brain, sprouting grapelike extensions. In this way the worm actively cloaks itself from immune cells. Protected and well fed, its cysts can thrive there for years.

On the value of teamwork

COMPUTER JESUS REFRIGERATOR

Why Facebook Is Never Safe

From Wikileaks and TOR developer Jacob Appelbaum, on Facebook among other things:

Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate.

What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: "Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself!"

Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

Acoustic Levitation Chamber 1987

The Goose and the Commons

A 17th century English protest rhyme against enclosure:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

The just-world hypothesis

The just-world hypothesis refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.

In more depth.

Why the U.S. used to have and should reinstate an effective maximum wage

Professor of Economics Michael Hudson explains how anti-labor economic policies have damaged the U.S. economy, how views on capital gains, interest, and rent have shifted in the capitalists' favor, and how lower taxes on the rich (down to 35% from 90% on the highest marginal tax bracket) have supported rampant speculation and the growth of the financial sector rather than actually aiding directly-productive investment.

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

- Albert Einstein, 1949

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week's vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, "I'm not interested in that—I'm an individualist!" And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was "paternalism," and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And they really thought that it was "individualism" for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been "Paternalism"!

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

Soviet Image Editing from 1987

"I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans."

It is quite possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. Intellectually, you are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate volunteer action overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968. "Mission-vacations" among poor Mexicans were "the thing" to do for well-off U.S. students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to much worse poverty at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual insight into the difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the spirit of Peace Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.

Ivan Illich tells off a group of CIASP volunteers at their annual convention

Charity vs Solidarity

On charity, mutual aid, and class struggle:

A definition of solidarity I’ve heard is that it’s about providing concrete support to an oppressed group so that they can more easily use their own power to change the conditions of their lives. As I understand it, solidarity is about working with people who are struggling for their own liberation in a way that means my future gets bound up with theirs.

On the other hand, charity is about me feeling good, assuaging guilt, feeling like I’m doing something about injustice but without actually threatening the status quo. Charity doesn’t really cost me anything, especially my self-image as being someone who’s down with the struggle and on the side of the oppressed. With charity I don’t have to acknowledge my privilege in a situation, and in the case of work in New Orleans, I don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that my family and I have materially benefited, historically and presently, from the racism that bludgeoned the south long before the hurricane. With charity, I don’t have to connect the dots between sudden catastrophes like Katrina, and the perhaps slower but very similar economic devastation happening in poor communities and communities of color, every day, right here, in my city. And most importantly, with charity, I don’t have risk that what I’m doing might truly transform society in such a way that white folks like me may not end up on top anymore, because charity actually reinforces existing relationships of power.

On Neoliberal Globalization

The poor complain; they always do,
But that's just idle chatter.
Our system brings rewards to all,
At least to all who matter.

- Canadian economist Gerald Helleiner

Animal Bedding Mixture

The internet is a wonderful thing:

An animal bedding mixture is disclosed herein. The animal bedding mixture includes a bedding material and a bedding material additive. Bedding material is preferably straw, sawdust, sand or recycled manure solids. The bedding material additive is preferably 60-99% by weight absorbent clay powder, 0.1 to 35% by weight chlorite salt, and 0.01-35% by weight sodium bisulfate or sodium percarbonate. The bedding material additive of the present disclosure is inert when dry and neither germicidal or acidic. However, when the additive is exposed to moisture, such as animal urine, the sodium bisulfate will acidify the liquid, causing the formation of hypochlorous acid and chlorine dioxide. Hypochlorous acid and chlorine dioxide are very powerful, broad spectrum germicides that have proven efficacy against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and other micro-organisms commonly found in animal bedding.

An exchange with an anarcho-capitalist

Says an enlightened commentator:

Private property is dependent on the existence of the State.
Without a state, who is to say that fancy car of yours isn't MY fancy car? [sic; cars are actually personal property]
Why do you think the state even exists in the first place? Without capital, there is no reason for the state to exist.

Says the anarcho-capitalist

The lock on it, the car alarm that will go off and the bullet in my chamber all disagree with who's what is really who's.

Says me:
The anarcho-capitalist's point doesn't actually rebut the original argument. What if the other guy is holding the gun instead? Is he suggesting that possession of property simply boils down to whoever can marshal the most force in defending or taking it? If that's the case, all we have then is rule by warlords and a tyranny of the strong over the weak.

At some point people would need to agree to collectively defend and protect the notion of private (non-personal) property, which seems philosophically contradictory, to say nothing of the impracticality of a landlord asking his tenants to defend his exclusive ownership of their building (possibly with their own lives) while still paying rent and yet without granting them any actual ownership stake in exchange. I'd almost say that sounds like feudalism.

Ultimately, it comes down to the difference between personal and private property, where the latter is property used solely by people who don't own it (e.g., a factory or office), and the fruits from such use flow back to the owners. It's one thing to actually live in the building you own. It's another to extract money from people who need to use it (e.g., to live there) simply because you already possessed the wealth to buy it in the first place; i.e., to use capital as a wealth-yielding instrument in and of itself, requiring no actual labor on your part and no direct (personal) involvement with said asset. The former case constitutes personal property while the latter constitutes private property.

As one of the 95% who do not own for a living, which would risk your life for — your home, or your corporate employer's office park? This reasoning can show how the essence of capitalism is impossible without the centralized threat of violence, whether on the part of the state or private-sector enforcers.

Skinned and Gutted Dogfish + Aluminum Foil + Lemon Juice + Salt

Electrochemical reanimation!

Louis CK is brilliant

Gulf of Mexico: Oil Ocean Zone

Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?

Outsourcing unit to be set up in Indian jail

An example of the great divergence between the theory and actual practice of neoliberalism; long live the free market:

(From BBC News).

No charge for a security viewer window!

High pressure concrete-filled blast doors:

The door is constructed with an envelope of 3/16 inch steel plate - but after you hang it in place, you fill it with concrete - no forms necessary - the skins are in place. This construction method keeps the door relatively light for installation - and once it is filled with cured concrete, it has a lot of dense mass between you and whatever fallout is outside your shelter. It also helps to prevent anyone from using a cutting torch to gain access through the door because concrete doesn't "burn."

The Free Market Solution

A city in California is now charging people $300 per call for 911 access.:

Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.

But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Or, there's the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead, they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.

"A $300 fee and you don't even want to be thinking about that when somebody is in need of assistance," said Tracy resident Greg Bidlack.

Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they'll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.

This is of course the inevitable free-market Libertarian answer to the question: “Why should I let those politicians spend my hard-earned tax money on services that overwhelmingly benefit poor people?”

It's the "pay only for what you use" model. Well, congratulations, free-marketeers, now you can rest easy knowing that the homeless will now be truly dying on the streets instead of wasting your hard-earned income.

Political Myths We Live By

Here's an excellent itemization of the tacit assumptions that many people hold about our political situation, from Z Magazine:

It includes such very important points as

8. Public opinion is made by the public. (The Public Opinion Fallacy)

It isn't. It is made for the public by a process of selective filtering and re-framing on the part of the owners, managers and employed commentators of the corporate media. Corporate think tanks and PR machines also play important public opinion-forming roles, often behind the scenes. The important ideological and manipulative work of all these ‘pundits' is to keep public discourse within the tight parameters and limited concepts of allowed official discourse. The purpose is to manufacture consent for the decisions and policies of the ruling elites. There is no conspiracy involved here, it is a ‘natural' part of the system and works largely by cultural osmosis and conformity.

and

10. Economically, this is a Free Market Society. (The Free Market Fallacy)

There is no free market and never has been, even under the rule of the deregulating, neo-liberal state. A completely free market system would self-destruct in no time. Because it can, by definition, only care for its individual vested interests and not for the good of the whole system, capitalism needs constant saving from itself by the state. The capitalist state has always been there to massively support, gently oversee, subsidize and bail out the capitalist economy in countless ways, not only in times of crisis. Corporate and middle class welfare is actually its main game. The state helps capital privatise the profits and socialise the costs. It provides the physical infrastructure, educational development of the ‘human capital' and picks up the immense social, health and environmental costs of the latter's wrecking balls. All this happens whether the state is neo-liberal or social democratic (Keynesian) in nature.

Dennis Kucinich Answers Questions

Queenie's in trouble!

"We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts."

A very clear discussion of the current heath care plans

Healthcare Napkins:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

Brazil TV host turned politician 'ordered killings to boost ratings'

This is could almost be the plot of a David Cronenberg film.

From The Guardian:

A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings.

Wallace Souza, a former police officer who used his lunchtime television slot to rail against the violence sweeping the jungle city of Manaus, is suspected of commissioning at least five murders to prove his claim that the region is awash with violent crime.

"Manaus can no longer live with this wave of crime," Souza, 50, frequently told the audience of his daily show Canal Livre. "Nowadays everyone is killing."

In a 2008 speech at Manaus's local parliament, Souza boasted that Canal Livre enjoyed complete editorial freedom and was conducted with "journalistic responsibility".

But prosecutors in the remote Amazon city say the politician's actions went far beyond the call of journalistic duty, accusing Souza of links to drug trafficking, death squads and organised crime, and possessing illegal arms.

"Our investigations indicate that they went as far as creating facts," Thomaz Augusto Correa, the local police intelligence chief, told a Brazilian news channel. "Crimes were committed in order to create news for the group and for the programme."

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

See this excellent summary of different demographics' daily activities, presented in the style of those Histograph of History maps:

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Who is that Pokemon?

FLAMING TETHERBALL

Back to the Future, part TWO

REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!

Quote of the day

One of the most famous of the Civil War balloons was made by the Confederacy of donated undergarments of the ladies of the South, all silk and the only source of silk the South had at the time. It was hoped that it would counter the shocking success of Union balloons which were providing airborne intelligence of opposing troop movements that was proving devastating. The southern patchwork balloon only flew once before it was captured by the Union, a disappointment and an afront for which General Longstreet claimed he never found it in his heart to forgive the Union.

(Lifting gases)

The End of Work

From Anxiety Culture:

Every technological advance implemented in industry effectively increases wealth - otherwise it wouldn’t be utilised. Wealth is piling up all around us. The technological revolution which brought this wealth should be seen as a social phenomenon – it was not created by any one individual or group; neither is it a creature solely of the marketplace – it rightly ‘belongs’ to everyone.

In a world of decreasing demand for human labour, the economic rewards derived from technology will need to be distributed to people in ways that have nothing to do with the amount of work, if any, they perform.

Big Brother: what's on your PC?

The U.S. and European governments are working behind closed doors to establish an international copyright treaty (ACTA, leaked here) that would create a global police force, answerable to no one, with the authority to seize and inspect any device, without recourse or the possibility of appeal.

What's more, this copyright treaty has now been classified in the "interest of national security".

What you are witnessing is a conspiracy perpetrated by global capitalists to cement their control, under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Treaties between nations are effectively law, and when they can be negotiated in secret without any public debate, then democracy is completely subverted. The government has no mandate from the people to carry out laws drafted in this manner, and when they do, they are acting on behalf of the corporate oligarchy.

On the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the holders of capital

Rich People Don’t Create Wealth. They Manipulate It.:

The point is that both intellectuals and labourers are definitely more valuable than wealthy executives who only know how to increase their personal fortunes (which we perceive as “making the company successful”). We all know that the real success of a company is a consequence of innovators, good labour, and good marketing. In most cases the extremely wealthy don’t directly involve themselves with those tasks, but rather leave them up to hired experts.

Rich people skim wealth off the surface and manipulate their wealth, thus creating the illusion that they’re performing an important service. In truth a computer could do most of what they do; hire specialists to manage their companies and hire workers to perform labour. The wealthy just have what, superficially, appear to be complicated jobs because they’re always leveraging their existing capital to make more money. That’s not really a useful job - that’s just the manifestation of their own self interest, and a consequence of our willingness to allow this parasitic elite class to exist.

United States Economic Collapse Facing Its Weimar Moment

From The Market Oracle:

As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.

But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.

It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.

Rushkoff on the Economy

This is a wonderfully discerning article by the famed media-counterculture master. Read it all.

LET IT DIE:

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

Move to Detroit

For Sale: The $100 House:

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

...

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

The real Dow Jones

When adjusted for inflation, the March 2009 Dow low is fractionally lower than the real Dow high in 1966.

"Going Galt"

And now, an anti- Ayn Rand rant: Where in the World is John Galt?:

...
Rand's world is a vast fictional explication of the concept of 'social darwinism'; through absolute selfish competition, those who are fittest rise to the top and collect the bulk of the wealth, and everyone else gets whatever level of power and wealth they are comptent to handle. This is not only a social reality but a moral imperative; anyone who tries to interfere with the function of the free market is a sinful parasite, and anyone preaching the virtues of altruism and the 'duty' of people to help the less fortunate is just trying to get theirs by subterfuge instead of honest hard work.

Or, you know, by skimming the cream off the hard work of others, because that's what capitalism is in reality. No mention is made of how Galt's Gulch feeds itself, of how a bunch of investor/inventors engaged in a kind of extreme tax evasion managed to convince people to come work in their factories (or even build them). Presumably Galt and his cronies did it all themselves. The idea is more or less the same as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, except that everyone's working for wages and gets to buy each other's products, and magically nobody falls to the bottom of the economic heap because they're all magic super-capitalists (or if they do, they're happy about it because they're fulfilling their maximum potential in life while getting the moral satisfaction of sticking it to those parasites outside); and if there's a fire or they get sick they'll most certainly have insurance, and if the commies come along to rob them of their capital they'll all just pick up their guns and fight back. In fact, the concept of 'going Galt' is lifted from Anarchism hook line and sinker; but where Anarchism is about people working together to free themselves from tyranny, going Galt is about declaring yourself to be intrinsically better than the masses of poor and the working class by virtue of your ability to stack up worthless pieces of paper via usury.

Erosion: Just Say No

Catastrophic landslides at a Malaysian tin mine:

I must introduce you to Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays.

The short of it: in a fully automated society, it is simply infeasible to have 100% (or even 50%, with most jobs moving into the service sector) employment.

Thus he proposes a $25,000/yr/person stipend funded from a combination of sources, including high marginal rates on new tax brackets for multi-million-dollar corporate salaries, various sales taxes, and the full reallocation of social spending in almost all other areas.

The result would be a complete elimination of poverty, the stigma of welfare, wage slavery, and the social security solvency problem, leading to a "supercharging" of capitalism via massive increases in consumption and ultimately "true economic freedom".

I find this proposal very appealing, yet lacking in other core respects; e.g., those countries and entities with the greatest access to natural resources will continue to be the root sources of growth and power, and as money is simply a tool for distributing wealth, it inevitably adapts to reflect the availability of wealth. Maybe he's also assuming energy from pervasive nuclear fusion? Moreover, extreme consumption and growth also translate into extreme environmental devastation. Increased economic activity invariably decreases our quality of life, at the very least in so far as our natural environment is concerned.

I was waiting for him to mention gift economies, but he seems to love the profit system too much to accept its fundamental infeasibility in the long term.

A beginner's guide to being homeless

http://www.qassia.com/beginners-guide-to-being-homeless

In a nutshell:

0. Hit the Streets Prepared


1. Don't Let Them Know


2. Essential Belongings


3. Reverse Your Diurnal Cycle


4. Reconnaissance is Key


5. Work on the Exit Strategy

See also Survival Without Rent.

Scratch that--here's the real America

Corningware sells Pyrex division to a Chinese company. People get hurt.

If you buy Pyrex in the United States, you're buying untempered soda lime glass. If you buy it in Europe, you get fully tempered borosilicate.

Another miracle of globalization.

Peter DeFazio on the proposal to steal $700 B from the people of the united states

The mainstream media cannot allow contradictions in its propaganda messages

In its interview of Iranian president Ahmadinejad, 60 Minutes was so displeased by his appeal for peace and democracy that they deemed it unfit to broadcast.

To say that their editing was disingenuous would be an understatement. In light of the imminent nuclear threat that we're apparently supposed to believe Iran poses, 60 Minutes' barefaced manipulation of a foreign leader's statements is a serious offense.


The significance of all this: if you watch corporate television, your beliefs and opinions on matters of the world are pre-shaped and prefabricated with the aim of benefiting a small number of wealthy individuals at the expense of the health, safety, and livelihoods of almost everybody else.

Helium vs Sodium Hexafluoride

You absolutely must watch this:

The Chinese government operates its prisons as live organ banks

Collected in this Wikipedia entry:

(Call to Dr. Lu, Nanning City Minzu Hospital, Guangxi:)

M: Then they use organs from Falun Gong practitioners?
Hosp: Correct...
M: ...what you used before (organs from Falun Gong practitioners), was it from detention centre(s) or prison(s)?
Hosp: From prisons.
M: ...and it was from healthy Falun Gong practitioners...?
Hosp: Correct. We would choose the good ones because we assure the quality in our operation.
M: That means you choose the organs yourself.
Hosp: Correct...
M: Usually, how old is the organ supplier?
Hosp: Usually in their thirties.
M: ... Then you will go to the prison to select yourself?
Hosp: Correct. We must select it.
M: What if the chosen one doesn't want to have blood drawn?
Hosp: He will for sure let us do it.
M: How?
Hosp: They will for sure find a way. What do you worry about? These kinds of things should not be of any concern to you. They have their procedures.

And from an organ transplant web site:

A: Before the living kidney transplantation, we will ensure the donor's renal function...So it is more safe than in other countries, where the organ is not from a living donor.
Q: Are the organs for the pancreas transplant(ed) from brain death (sic) (dead) patients?
A: Our organs do not come from brain death victims because the state of the organ may not be good.

In Pakistan they make automatic weapons with their bare hands

ICE sadistically forced the imprisonment of hundreds of immigrants to deprive their families of support

The Translator's Perspective: an Inside Account of the Biggest ICE Raid in History:

This was the immediate collateral damage. Postville, Iowa (pop. 2,273), where nearly half of the people worked at Agriprocessors, had lost one third of its population by Tuesday morning. Businesses were empty, amid looming concerns that if the plant closed it would become a ghost town. Besides those arrested, many had fled the town in fear. Several families had taken refuge at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, terrified, sleeping on pews and refusing to leave for days. Volunteers from the community served food and organized activities for the children.

At the local high school, only three of the 15 Latino students came back on Tuesday, while at the elementary and middle school, 120 of the 363 children were absent. In the following days the principal went around town on the school bus and gathered 70 students after convincing the parents to let them come back to school; 50 remained unaccounted for. Some American parents complained that their children were traumatized by the sudden disappearance of so many of their school friends. The principal reported the same reaction in the classrooms, saying that for the children it was as if ten of their classmates had suddenly died. Counselors were brought in. American children were having nightmares that their parents too were being taken away. The superintendant said the school district's future was unclear: "This literally blew our town away."

The Itch

From the New Yorker:

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

A Younger Bill O'Reilly

The web is rotting your brain

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The U.S. has completely withdrawn from the human rights council in Geneva

http://www.humanrights-geneva.info/US-quits-Human-Rights-Council,3184

Copyright Infringement is not Theft

Copyright infringement is not theft. Not legally, not historically, and not philosophically. Challenge this mistaken notion wherever you hear it and throw it back into the faces of those who would see your freedom subordinated to some Imaginary Property.

The Gospel of Consumption

From Orion Magazine:

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

It's like dunking a heated soda can into ice water

Defaced money

Theremin Cat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ONJfp95yoE

Just like the old saying goes...

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he doesn't need to work in your factories eight hours a day for the rest of his life.

The draconian terms of Apple's iPhone developer program

APIs and Functionality:

3.3.1      Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.

3.3.2      An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

3.3.3      Without Apple's prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store.

3.3.4      An Application may write data on a device only to the Application's designated container area, except as otherwise specified by Apple.

User Interface and Data:

3.3.5      Applications must comply with the Human Interface Guidelines and other Documentation provided by Apple.

3.3.6      Any form of user or device data collection, or image, picture or voice capture or recording performed by the Application (collectively "Recordings"), and any form of user data, content or information uploading, syncing, or transmission performed by the Application (collectively "Transmissions") must comply with all applicable privacy laws and regulations as well as any Apple program requirements related to such aspects, including but not limited to any notice or consent requirements. In particular, a reasonably conspicuous visual indicator must be displayed to the user as part of the Application to indicate that a Recording is taking place.

Location Services:

3.3.7       For Applications that use location-based APIs:

-  You and the Application must comply with all applicable privacy and data collection laws and regulations with respect to any collection, transmission, maintenance, processing, use, etc. of the user's location data by the Application.

-  Applications may not be designed or marketed for the purpose of harassing, abusing, stalking, threatening or otherwise violating the legal rights (such as the rights of privacy and publicity) of others.

-  Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.

-  Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose.

3.3.8      Applications that offer location-based services or functionality must notify and obtain consent from an individual when his or her location data is being collected, transmitted or otherwise used by the Application.

3.3.9      Applications must not disable, override or otherwise interfere with any Apple-implemented system alerts, warnings, display panels, consent panels and the like intended to notify the user that the user's location data is being collected, transmitted, maintained, processed or used, or intended to obtain consent for such use. If consent is withheld, Applications may not collect, transmit, maintain, process or utilize the user's location data.

Content and Materials:

3.3.10      Any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application must be wholly-owned by You or licensed to You on a fully paid-up basis and in a manner that will not require the payment of any fees, royalties and/or sums by Apple to You or any third party. In addition, if Your Application will be distributed outside of the United States, any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application (a) must not fall within the repertoire of any mechanical or performing/communication rights collecting or licensing organization now or in the future and (b) if licensed, must be exclusively licensed to You for Your Application by each applicable copyright owner.

3.3.11      If Your Application includes or will include any other content, You must either own all such content or have permission from the content owner to use it in Your Application.

3.3.12      Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.

3.3.13      Applications must not contain any malware, malicious or harmful code, program, or other internal component (e.g. computer viruses, trojan horses, "backdoors") which could damage, destroy, or adversely affect other software, firmware, hardware, data, systems, services, or networks.

3.3.14      If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms.  You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations.

Cellular Network:

3.3.15      If an Application requires or will have access to the cellular network, then additionally such Application:
-  Must comply with Apple's best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network;
-  Must not in Apple's reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth;
-  May not have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality.

This is insane

Humanity is literally filling the Pacific ocean with plastic:

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Repress U

The police state is infiltrating our universities. Stand up for yourselves and give it a good boot to the head.