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