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.