Passive Observers

Article: Western intervention in Syria will do more harm than good

2012-02-23T17:57:00.000Z

Original Article written by Kevin Ovenden for The Guardian - Friday 17, January 2012

Syrian army defectors join anti-regime protesters in Homs province, January 2012. Photograph: AP

After decades of selling arms to dictators in the Middle East, the west's talk of humanitarian intervention rings hollow

Calls for aggressive intervention in Syria are growing as the country slides further into sectarian civil war. The shrillest are from the Republican right, joined this week by Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. The same people are campaigning for confrontation with Iran, threatening a major war. Elliot Abrams, a neoconservative architect of the Iraq disaster, spells out the connection: Syria, he says, provides a "proxy opportunity" to heat up the cold war with Tehran.

Regime change and ensuring that the Arab spring yields only the wizened fruit of governments as accommodating as Saudi Arabia cannot be sold on their own terms. Instead they are wrapped in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, tapping the sentiments of those genuinely moved by the suffering in Syria.

We've been here before. The war in Libya was purportedly to save lives. In fact, the killing intensified on all sides, including from Nato bombs. Estimates of the number dead reach 30,000. The outcome is not democracy and human rights. Amnesty International is the latest NGO to report the torturing to death of prisoners under the new regime and rival militias. The town of Tawergha, home to 30,000 largely black Africans, has been virtually wiped off the map. But the cameras have moved on, just as they did more than a decade ago following Nato's bombardment of Serbia and Kosovo. That, too, was supposed to save lives: the death toll spiralled; after the victory came ethnic cleansing in reverse.

That "ethical" war, which lacked the fig leaf of a UN security council resolution, presaged more to come. It lowered the threshold for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by way of ongoing war in Afghanistan. Negotiation and a political settlement with the Taliban in 2001 were impossible, we were told. They were uniquely diabolical, closed to reason and killed their own people. Now, after tens of thousands dead, there are talks – in Qatar, where the Taliban have an office not far from the US's Centcom headquarters.

The Russian and Chinese veto of a regime change resolution over Syria at the security council has left western leaders exploring other options to the Libya model. But all of them rule out any political settlement between the government and armed opposition in Syria and are designed to ratchet up the conflict and tension in the wider region.

The "humanitarian corridors" proposed by French foreign minister Alain Juppé would mean troops on the ground. The kleptocratic Gulf Co-operation Council's proposal says everything about how hollow is the professed concern for the Syrian people and progress in the Arab region. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are posing as friends of a democratic Syria while shooting down their own pro-democracy protesters.

The Gulf states are already reported to be funding sections of the Syrian opposition and are trying to cohere it under a leadership that will be congruent with their western allies. With Saudi largesse comes sectarian poison designed to pit Sunni Muslims against Shia, and especially against Iran, which is singled out along with China in the Pentagon's latest doctrine as an obstacle to "securing US global leadership in the 21st century".

As for covert operations, they are already under way – against nuclear scientists in Iran, bringing us closer to war.

We strongly oppose, rather than defend Assad's actions. But the solution is not more intervention in the Middle East. British arms sales to Bahrain continued during the suppression of the democracy movement. The US is selling $60bn of warplanes to Saudi Arabia. The Stop the War Coalition has argued consistently to reverse this cynical and corrupt policy. Doing so would truly contribute to progress in the Middle East. In Tahrir Square western allies cleaved to Mubarak until the 11th hour and protesters still face US-supplied weapons.

People across the Arab region are struggling to throw off decades of foreign interference and domestic dictatorship. We should do what we can to stop our country subsuming them again in a great game which is heading towards further war.

Article: Silencing the Critics

2012-02-21T05:22:00.006Z

Original Article written by Paul Craig Roberts for PaulCraigRoberts.org - Monday 20, February 2012

In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI — the lead orchestrator of fake “terrorist plots” — called an investigation of “activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”
Subpoenas were issued to compel antiwar protestors to testify before grand juries as prosecutors set about building their case that opposing Washington’s wars of aggression constitutes giving aid and comfort to terrorists. The purpose of the raids and grand jury subpoenas was to chill the anti-war movement into inaction.

Last week in one fell swoop the last two remaining critics of Washington/Tel Aviv imperialism were removed from the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano’s popular program, Freedom Watch, was cancelled by Fox TV, and Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC. Both pundits had wide followings and were appreciated for speaking frankly.

Many suspect that the Israel Lobby used its clout with TV advertisers to silence critics of the Israeli government’s efforts to lead Washington to war with Iran. Regardless, the point before us is that the voice of the mainstream media is now uniform. Americans hear one voice, one message, and the message is propaganda.

Dissent is tolerated only on such issues as to whether employer-paid health benefits should pay for contraceptive devices. Constitutional rights have been replaced with rights
to free condoms.

The Western media demonizes those at whom Washington points a finger. The lies pour forth to justify Washington’s naked aggression: the Taliban are conflated with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi is a terrorist and, even worse, fortified his troops with Viagra in order to commit mass rape against Libyan women.

President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. According to news reports, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta told members of the House of Representatives on February 16 that “Tehran has not made a decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.”(Source) However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.

At the moment the american Ministry of Truth is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria. Recently, there were some explosions in far away Thailand, and the explosions were blamed on Iran. Last October the FBI announced that the bureau had uncovered an Iranian plot to pay a used car salesman to hire a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US. The White House idiot professed to believe the unbelievable plot and declared that he had “strong evidence,” but no evidence was ever released. The purpose for announcing the non-existent plot was to justify Obama’s sanctions, which amount to an embargo — an act of war — against Iran for developing nuclear energy.

As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. IAEA inspectors are permanently in Iran and report no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.

In other words, according to the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US National Intelligence Estimate, and the current Secretary of Defense, there is no evidence that Iran has nukes or is making nukes. Yet, Obama has placed illegal sanctions on Iran and continues to threaten Iran with military attack on the basis of an accusation that is contradicted by all known evidence.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen because there is no Helen Thomas, who also was eliminated by the Israel Lobby, to question, as a member of the White House press, President Obama why he placed war-like sanctions on Iran when his own CIA and his own Secretary of Defense, along with the IAEA, report that there is no basis for the sanctions.

The idea that the US is a democracy when it most definitely does not have a free watchdog press is laughable. But the media is not laughing. It is lying. Just like the government, every time the US mainstream media opens its mouth or writes one word, it is lying. Indeed, its corporate masters pay its employees to tell lies. That is their job. Tell the truth, and you are history like Buchanan and Napolitano and Helen Thomas.

What the Ministry of Truth calls “peaceful protesters brutalized by Assad’s military” are in fact rebels armed and financed by Washington. Washington has fomented a civil war. Washington claims its intention is to rescue the oppressed and abused Syrian people from Assad, just as Washington rescued the oppressed and abused Libyan people from Gaddafi. Today “liberated” Libya is a shell of its former self terrorized by clashing militias. Thanks to Obama, another country has been destroyed.

Reports of atrocities committed against Syrian civilians by the military could be true, but the reports come from the rebels who desire Western intervention to put them into power. Moreover, how would these civilian casualties differ from the ones inflicted on Bahraini civilians by the US supported Bahraini government, the military of which was fortified by Saudi Arabian troops? There is no outcry in the western press about Washington’s blind eye to civilian atrocities committed by its puppet states.

How do the Syrian atrocities, if they are real, differ from Washington’s atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo prison, and secret CIA prison sites? Why is the american Ministry of Truth silent about these massive, unprecedented, violations of human rights?

Remember also the reports of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo that Washington and Germany used to justify NATO and US bombing of Serbian civilians, including the Chinese consulate, dismissed as another collateral damage. Now 13 years later, a prominent German TV program has revealed that the photographs that ignited the atrocity campaign were grossly misrepresented and were not photographs of atrocities committed by Serbs, but of Albanian separatists killed in a firefight between armed Albanians and Serbians. Serbian casualties were not shown. (Source)

The problem that truth faces is that the Western media continually lies. On the rare instances when the lies are corrected, it is always long after the event and, therefore, the crimes enabled by the media have been accomplished.

Washington set its puppet Arab League upon Syria in order to establish Syria’s isolation among its own kind, the better to attack Syria. Assad forestalled Washington’s set-up of Syria for destruction by calling a nationwide referendum on February 26 to establish a new constitution that would extend the prospect of rule beyond the Ba’athists (Assad’s party).

One might think that, if Washington and its Ministry of Truth really wanted democracy in Syria, Washington would get behind this gesture of good will by the ruling party and endorse the referendum. But Washington does not want a democratic Syrian government. Washington wants a puppet state. Washington’s response is that the dastardly Assad has outwitted Washington by taking steps toward Syrian democracy before Washington can obliterate Syria and install a puppet.

Here is Obama’s response to Assad’s move toward democracy: “It’s actually quite laughable — it makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Obama, the neoconservatives, and Tel Aviv are really pissed. If Washington and Tel Aviv can figure out how to get around Russia and China and overthrow Assad, Washington and Tel Aviv will put Assad on trial as a war criminal for proposing a democratic referendum.

Assad was an eye doctor in England until his father died, and he was called back to head the troubled government. Washington and Tel Aviv have demonized Assad for refusing to be their puppet. Another sore point is the Russian naval base at Tartus. Washington is desperate to evict the Russians from their only Mediterranean base in order to make the Mediterranean an american lake. Washington, inculcated with neocon visions of world empire, wants its own mare nostrum.

If the Soviet Union were still extant, Washington’s designs on Tartus would be suicidal. However, Russia is politically and militarily weaker than the Soviet Union. Washington has infiltrated Russia with NGOs that work against Russia’s interests and will disrupt the upcoming elections. Moreover, Washington-funded “color revolutions” have turned former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into Washington’s puppet states. Shorn of communist ideology, Washington does not expect Russia to push the nuclear button. Thus, Russia is there for the taking.

China is a more difficult problem. Washington’s plan is to cut China off from independent sources of energy. China’s oil investment in eastern Libya is the reason Gaddafi was overthrown, and oil is one of the main reasons that Washington has targeted Iran. China has large oil investments in Iran and gets 20% of its oil from Iran. Closing down Iran, or converting it into Washington’s puppet state, closes down 20% of the Chinese economy.

Russia and China are slow learners. However, when Washington and its NATO puppets abused the “no-fly” UN resolution concerning Libya and violated the UN resolution by turning it into armed military aggression against Libya’s armed forces, which had every right to put down a CIA sponsored rebellion, Russia and China finally got the message that Washington could not be trusted.

This time Russia and China did not fall into Washington’s trap. They vetoed the UN Security Council’s set-up of Syria for military attack. Now Washington and Tel Aviv (it is not always clear which is the puppet and which is the puppet master) have to decide whether to proceed in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition.

The risks for Washington have multiplied. If Washington proceeds, the information that is conveyed to Russia and China is that they are next in line after Iran. Therefore, Russia and China, both being well-armed with nuclear weapons, are likely to put their foot down more firmly at the line drawn over Iran. If the crazed warmongers in Washington and Tel Aviv, with veins running strong with hubris and arrogance, again override Russian and Chinese opposition, the risk of a dangerous confrontation rises.

Why isn’t the american media raising questions about these risks? Is it worth blowing up the world in order to stop Iran from having a nuclear energy program or even a nuclear weapon? Does Washington think China is unaware that Washington is taking aim at its energy supply? Does Washington think Russia is unaware that it is being encircled by hostile military bases?

Whose interests are being served by Washington’s endless and multi-trillion dollar wars? Certainly not the interests of the 50 million americans with no access to health care, nor by the 1,500,000 american children who are homeless, living in cars, rundown motel rooms, tent cities, and the storm sewers under Las Vegas, while huge amounts of public funds are used to bail out banks and squandered in wars of hegemony.

(Watch Poor Americans, BBC)

The US has no independent print and TV media. It has presstitutes who are paid for the lies that they tell. The US government in its pursuit of its immoral aims has attained the status of the most corrupt government in human history. Yet Obama speaks as if Washington is the font of human morality.

The US government does not represent americans. It represents a few special interests and a foreign power. US citizens simply don’t count, and certainly Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalians, Yemenis, and Pakistanis don’t count. Washington regards truth, justice, and mercy as laughable values. Money, power, hegemony are all that count for Washington, the city upon the hill, the light unto nations, the example for the world.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts’ new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Speech: How Online Communities are changing the world

2012-02-20T23:29:00.006Z

Kaustubh Katdare is the founder of CrazyEngineers.com

Crazy Engineers is one of the world's biggest and most popular websites for engineers and students around the world with a passion to innovate and build.

A Leading Blogger from Nagpur, He was selected for "Once in a Lifetime 2.0″ Project. At TEDxNagpur - He speaks on How Online Communities are changing the world !

Video: Everything is a Remix

2012-02-18T18:46:00.003Z

Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.

Article: The world war on democracy

2012-02-18T06:07:00.008Z

Original Article written by John Pilger for Johnpilger.com - Thursday 19, January 2012

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, "I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lizette, "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, an

d Regis, died within a week of each other. "They died of sadness," she said. "They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness."

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a $14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine - was not on the agenda of a group of British "defence" correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. "There is nothing in our files," said a ministry official, "about inhabitants or an evacuation."

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America's and Britain's war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders' abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the "bunker-busting" bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its "rendition" victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette's paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, "it never happened even while it was happening". Last July, American historian William Blum published his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy". Since the Second World War, the US has:

- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.

- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The "enemy" changes in name - from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism - western terrorism - are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy ("Operation Cyclone") is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed "our man" by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as "the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century", the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. "For almost the first time in two centuries", wrote Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life". No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that "disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things...
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust...

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama's drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in "Bugsplat". Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: "momentous, spine-tingling": the Guardian. "The American future," wrote Simon Schama, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ..." The San Francisco Chronicle's columnist saw a spiritual "lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet". Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America's corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America's largest creditor and new "enemy" in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama's permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama's most "historic" achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year's Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only "associate" with those "belligerent" to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to "secure territory and populations" overseas but to fight in the "homeland" and provide "support to the civil authorities". In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a "market" extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will "feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy". This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron's "big society", the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax "legally" avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, "can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism". Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. "Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed," said Lisette. "And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others." Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, "What can I do?"

I last saw Lisette's tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

Video: Mr. Freeman - Don't hate each other

2012-02-17T16:03:00.000Z

Mr. Freeman explains how we tend to hate each other and shows our uniqueness in a different way.
(Make sure subtitles are on - or click cc)

Article: The US schools with their own police

2012-02-16T03:41:00.013Z

Original Article written by Chris McGreal for The Guardian - Monday 9, January 2012

A policeman on the beat in a school in southern Texas.
Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Alamy

More and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."

The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the
playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."

The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a "school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

The Texas state legislature last year changed the law to stop the issuing of tickets to 10- and 11-year-olds over classroom behaviour. (In the state, the age of criminal responsibility is 10.) But a broader bill to end the practice entirely – championed by a state senator, John Whitmire, who called the system "ridiculous" – failed to pass and cannot be considered again for another two years.

Even the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline in schools: "That is something that clearly has to stop."

As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young.

The emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.

"It's very much tied in with some of the hyperbole around the rise in juvenile crime rate that took place back in the early 90s," said Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin legal rights group, and principal author of a 200-page study of the consequences of policing in Texas schools. "They ushered in tough, punitive policies. It was all part of the tough-on-crime movement."

Part of that included the passing of laws that made the US the only developed country to lock up children as young as 13 for life without the possibility of parole, often as accomplices to murders committed by an adult.

As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas, its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the past two decades.

"Zero tolerance started out as a term that was used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used widely when you're referring to some very punitive school discipline measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other," said Fowler.

In the midst of that drive came the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, in which two students in Colorado shot dead 12 other pupils and a teacher before killing themselves. Parents clamoured for someone to protect their children and police in schools seemed to many to be the answer.

But most schools do not face any serious threat of violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful childhood behaviour.

"What we see often is a real overreaction to behaviour that others would generally think of as just childish misbehaviour rather than law breaking," said Fowler. Tickets are most frequently issued by school police for "disruption of class", which can mean causing problems during lessons but is also defined as disruptive behaviour within 500ft (150 metres) of school property such as shouting, which is classified as "making an unreasonable noise".

Among the more extreme cases documented by Appleseed is of a teacher who had a pupil arrested after the child responded to a question as to where a word could be found in a text by saying: "In your culo (arse)", making the other children laugh. Another pupil was arrested for throwing paper aeroplanes.

Students are also regularly fined for "disorderly behaviour", which includes playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly the weapons used were fists.

The very young are not spared. According to Appleseed, Texas records show more than 1,000 tickets were issued to primary schoolchildren over the past six years (although these have no legal force at that age). Appleseed said that "several districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years".

Fines run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn 17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student's problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.

"Once you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid."

In Austin, about 3% of the school district's 80,000 pupils were given criminal citations in the 2007/8 school year, the last date for which figures are available. But the chances of a teenager receiving a ticket in any given year are much higher than that because citations are generally issued to high-school pupils, not those in kindergarten or primary school.

The result, says the Appleseed report, is that "school-to-prison pipeline" in which a high proportion of children who receive tickets and end up in front of a court are arrested time and again because they are then marked out as troublemakers or find their future blighted by a criminal record.

From her perch on the bench in an Austin courtroom, Judge Jeanne Meurer has spent close on 30 years dealing with children hauled up for infractions, some serious, others minor. Some of the difficulties faced by teachers can be seen as Meurer decides whether a parade of children should be released to await trial or held in custody. Meurer switches between motherly and intimidating depending on what she makes of the child before her.

"Some of them are rough kids," she said. "I've been on the bench 30 years and you used to never have a child cuss you out like you do now. I appreciate the frustrations that adults have in dealing with children who seem to have no manners or respect. But these are our future. Shouldn't we find a tool to change that dynamic versus just arresting them in school and coming down with the hard criminal justice hammer?"

Many of those who appear in front of Meurer have learning problems. Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of police in schools. Simpkins describes the case of a boy with attention deficit disorder who as a 12-year-old tipped a desk over in class in a rage. He was charged with threatening behaviour and sent to a juvenile prison where he was required to earn his release by meeting certain educational and behavioural standards.

"But he can't," she said. "Because of that he is turning 18 within the juvenile justice system for something that happened when he was 12. It's a real trap. A lot of these kids do have disabilities and that's how they end up there and can't get out. Instead of dealing with it within school system like we used to, we have these school police, they come in and it escalates from there."

Sometimes that escalation involves force. "We had one young man with an IQ well below 70 who was pepper-sprayed in the hallway because he didn't understand what the police were saying," said Simpkins. "After they pepper-sprayed him he started swinging his arms around in pain and he hit one of the police officers – it's on video, his eyes were shut – and they charged him with assault of a public servant. He was 16. He was charged with two counts of assault of a public servant and he is still awaiting trial. He could end up in prison."

Austin's school police department is well armed with officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for sniffing out drugs and explosives.

According to the department's records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy students.

In recent months the questionable use of force has included the tasering of a 16-year-old boy at a high school in Seguin, Texas, after "he refused to cooperate" when asked why he wasn't wearing his school identification tag. He then used "abusive language". The police said that when an officer tried to arrest the boy, he attempted to bite the policeman. The youth was charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass even though the school acknowledges he is a student and was legitimately on the grounds.

Such cases are not limited to Texas. In one notorious instance in California, a school security officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.

Sometimes the force is deadly. Last week, Texas police were accused of overreacting in shooting dead a 15-year-old student, Jaime Gonzalez, at a school in Brownsville after he pointed an air gun, which resembled a real pistol, at them outside the principal's office. The boy's father, also called Jaime, said the police were too quick to shoot to kill when they could have wounded him or used another means to arrest him. "If they would have tased him all this wouldn't have happened," he told the Brownsville Herald. "Like people say there's been stand-offs with people that have hostages for hours … But here, they didn't even give I don't think five minutes. No negotiating." The police say Gonzalez defied orders to put the gun down.

Meurer says she is not against police in schools but questions whether officers should regard patrolling the playground the same way they go about addressing crime on the streets.

"When you start going overboard and using laws to control non-illegal behaviour – I mean if any adult did it it's not going to be a violation – that's where we start seeing a problem," she says. "You've gradually seen this morphing from schools taking care of their own environments to the police and security personnel, and all of a sudden it just became more and more that we were relying on law enforcement to control everyday behaviour."

Chief Brian Allen, head of the school police department for the Aldine district and president of the Texas school police chiefs' association, is having none of it.

"There's quite a substantial number of students that break the law. In Texas and in the US, if you're issued a ticket, it's not automatically that you're found guilty. You have an opportunity to go before the judge and plead your case. If you're a teacher and a kid that's twice as big as you comes up and hits you right in the face, what are you going to do? Are you going to use your skills that they taught you or are you going to call a police officer?"

But Allen concedes that the vast majority of incidents in which the police become involved are for offences that regarded as little more than misbehaviour elsewhere.

"Just like anything else, sometimes mistakes are made." he said. "Each circumstance is different and there's no set guideline. There's also something called officer discretion. If you take five auto mechanics and ask them to diagnose the problem of a vehicle, you'll come up with five different solutions. If you ask five different doctors to diagnose a patient, a lot of times you'll have five different diagnoses. Conversely, if you ask five different police officers if they would write a ticket or not for the same offence, you possibly have five different answers."

Jennifer Rambo (left) and her daughter Sarah Bustamentes, who was charged with 'disrupting class'.

Photograph: Chris McGreal

Parents who have been sucked into the system, such as Jennifer Rambo, the mother of Sarah Bustamantes, wonder what happened to teachers taking responsibility for school discipline.

"I was very upset at the teacher because the teacher could have just stopped it. She could have said: OK class, that's enough. She could have asked Sarah for her perfume and told her that's inappropriate, don't do that in class. But she did none of that. She called the police," she says.

Politicians and civil liberties groups have raised the same question, asking if schools are not using the police to shift responsibility, and accountability, for discipline.

"Teachers rely on the police to enforce discipline," says Simpkins. "Part of it is that they're not accountable. They're not going to get into trouble for it. The parent can't come in and yell at them. They say: it's not us, it's the police."

That view is not shared by an Austin teacher who declined to be named because he said he did not want to stigmatise the children in his class.

"There's this illusion that it's just a few kids acting up; kids being kids. This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don't control their children. Their fathers aren't around. They're in gangs. They come in to the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They're doing badly, they don't want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They can be very threatening," he says. "The police get called because that way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids."

The Texas State Teachers Association, the state's main teachers union, did not take a position on ticketing at the recent debate in the legislature over Whitmire's proposal to scrap it. But the association's Clay Robison says that most teachers welcome the presence of police in schools.

"Obviously it looks as if some police officers are overreacting at some schools. I'm a parent and I wouldn't want my 17-year-old son hauled in to court if he and another student got in to an argument in a cafeteria. Police officers need to exercise a little bit of common sense but the police are what they are. They enforce the law," he says. "At the same time, years ago, at a school in one of the better neighbourhoods of Austin, a teacher was shot to death in his classroom. It's still a very rare occurrence but it does happen. Anything that increases the security of the teacher is good so they don't have to worry about personal safety and they can concentrate on teaching the kids. We get complaints from some teachers that the police aren't aggressive enough at moving against some of the older juveniles, those that they feel actually do pose a danger to the teachers or the other students."

Because of Sarah Bustamentes's mental disorders, a disability rights group took up her case and after months of legal battles prosecutors dropped the charges. Ask her how she feels about police in schools after her experience and she's equivocal.

"We need police in school. In my school it can get physical and it can turn out very bad," she says. "But they should stop issuing tickets. Only for physical stuff or bullying. Not what you do in class."

Article: Greece lies bankrupt, humiliated and ablaze: is cradle of democracy finished?

2012-02-14T14:32:00.000Z

Original Article written by Helena Smith for The Guardian - Monday 13, February 2012

Police clash with protesters during an anti-austerity strike in Athens. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Greece got rid of its military dictators in July 1974. But almost four decades later, as the debt-stricken country endures a crisis that some might say is almost as bad as the long dark night of their rule, it is still impossible to protest in the cradle of democracy.

When tens of thousands of Greeks tried to demonstrate peacefully in front of the large sandstone parliament building on Sunday night, they were met almost immediately with volleys of teargas. The toxic fumes were the authorities' answer not only to the popular opposition unleashed by the prospect of yet more austerity but the fear that underpins it. For angst, like uncertainty, is now haunting Greece.

What followed was textbook chaos: a familiar mix of young punks with no relation to ordinary protesters going on the rampage, setting fire to banks, stores and cafes. Scenes of bedlam and mayhem that ensured the event taking place inside the Athens parliament – a ballot on deeply unpopular measures in return for the rescue funds that will keep bankruptcy at bay – was thoroughly drowned out.

Buildings burned into the early hours. By the time Athenians awoke, the historic heart of their ancient city resembled a war zone. Shops along busy boulevards lay looted, their shutters shattered and smashed. Mangled bus stops lay strewn among the detritus. The charred remains of two of the capital's oldest cinemas smouldered, and, with the stench of teargas still hanging in the air, newspapers proclaimed the vote had been passed.

"All this," said Angela Economou, a student taking in a blackened edifice that had once been a bank, "when all we had wanted to do was exercise our democratic right.

"It is not the politicians who are suffering, it's the people. And these are measures that don't only kill your creative flame, they make you despair."

As Europe's great debt drama intensifies, it is clear that in the country where it began nothing is going to plan. Teetering on the edge of economic collapse, Greece is also on the brink of becoming ungovernable; its politicians panic-stricken and discredited; its institutions barely functioning; its people ground down by waves of budget cuts.

Three years into the crisis and the crushing austerity demanded by the EU, ECB and IMF, the country's troika of creditors, is clearly having a devastating effect.

Unemployment, once among the lowest in the EU, is nudging 21%, an all-time high, industry has all but collapsed, and nationwide hundreds of small businesses, once the lifeblood of the Greek economy, are closing by the day. The desperate and poor can no longer be hidden. Begging has proliferated. So, too, have the homeless, mostly men who can no longer afford a roof over their heads who crouch in doorways or lie strewn across pavements, buried under blankets, hands outstretched.

As recession stretches into a fifth straight year, the spectre of yet more wage, pension and job cuts – the price of €130bn in further aid from foreign lenders – has not just startled Greeks but united them in rage.

Tellingly, more members of the well-dressed, well-shod middle class rushed to participate in Sunday's protests than ever before. Thronging the area around Syntagma square, surgical masks often hanging about their necks, their presence was the strongest sign yet that the savage measures exacted in exchange for aid have begun to affect people who not that long ago might have considered themselves "well-established".

"I can still remember as a boy how it was during the great famine and great freeze of the winter of 1941," said Panaghiotis Yerogaloyiannis, a former mariner now surviving on a pension of €500 a month.

"We have a different sort of war now, one that's economic, that's not fought on the field. But it's still the same enemy, the Germans. And today you are not even allowed to protest. I carry this around," he said producing a wooden baton from a plastic bag, "to protect myself from the police and thugs who hijack our demonstrations."

More and more Greeks believe they are "at war". For the political class, joined in an uneasy power-sharing alliance under Lucas Papademos, the technocrat prime minister, it is a war that "must be won."

War is unfair, officials say. There's collateral damage, innocents get hurt, some even die. "There was never not going to be victims," said one economist employed by the government. "It is the price that has to be paid getting from point A to point B. We had a system based on debt and it was totally unsustainable. It had to change."

Fear is the strongest force keeping the alternative – default, bankruptcy and eurozone expulsion – at bay. Five weeks separate Athens from hypothetically having to renege on its massive debts – by 20 March it has to have €14.5bn to meet loan repayments.

Once the latest rescue programme gets under way, starting with a private bond swap deal that will automatically reduce Greece's €350bn debt pile by €100bn, Papademos says the economy will be given the "breather" that will allow it to regain stability and slowly recover. Bankruptcy, said the leader, invoking apocalyptic scenes ahead of Sunday's vote, would be the death of Greece, a proud nation that within living memory had survived Nazi occupation, civil war and a military coup.

Even those who rue the day they gave up the drachma for the euro – and they are a growing contingent – would be hard pressed to disagree.

But that is the good scenario. For many, Greece has already lost its war.

Corrupt, bloated and inefficient, its public administration has come to a standstill; tax officers no longer able to receive bribes or kickbacks have simply stopped working which is partly why the economy has deteriorated rather than improved since Athens received its first, €110 bn bailout in May 2010. And with liquidity drying up payments are drying up too – companies providing the state with medicines and other supplies have not been paid for months.

Greece appears, increasingly, to be caught between two evils: avoiding official acceptance of bankruptcy and enacting reforms that, having already killed the market, now stand to exacerbate the very thing that will hurtle the country into greater poverty: recession. Growth and development, the two things that could provide a ray of hope, do not have pride of place in the fiscal remedies currently being advocated by Berlin, the main provider of rescue funds to date.

Far from deferring the day of reckoning, many believe that acceptance of the draconian conditions attached to the latest loan deal will only bring it closer to the precipice.

"Yesterday's vote in the parliament may have saved the country temporarily from default," said Vassilis Korkidis who heads the National Confederation of Greek Commerce. "But the Greek economy is going bankrupt and the country's political system is failing."

Paul Krugman, the Nobel economics laureate, expressed a similar view, if more forcefully, last week. "The Greek situation is essentially impossible. They will default on their debt. In fact they already have. The question is whether they will also leave the euro."

If the country is to be saved at all many believe it will have to be "rebooted" by starting all over again, from the beginning, when democracy was first reintroduced with the collapse of military rule.

"I would love it if a panel of outside judges came in and tested everyone I have to work with," said one civil servant complaining about the lack of meritocracy in his field. "I am sick of working with people who got where they are through rousfeti [political patronage in return for votes], who are totally incompetent and, yet, expect to be paid."

Resistance to reform – at the heart of Athens' failure to enact long overdue change and worsening relations with the EU – is likely to mount as opposition to the cuts also grows. A general election in April has added to worries that Greece is also braced for political tumult with powerful leftwing groups who are fierce opponents of cost-cutting reforms coming to the fore. Forced to leave their hotel in Athens by the backdoor because of daily protests, Troika officials openly say social unrest is their biggest concern.

As politicians on Sunday engaged in fierce debate over the controversial rescue package, with leftwing leaders furiously decrying the deal as "a blow to democracy," the finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, admitted that, like many Greeks, he felt "as a refugee" in his own country.

Nothing was the same. Nothing would be the same. It was all about to change. And he prayed it would be in the right way.

Article: The dark side of the personalised internet

2012-02-14T12:25:00.000Z

Original Article written by Andrew Keen for New Scientist - Monday 13, February 2012

JOSEPH TUROW'S invaluable The Daily You is a warning about the impact of the "Web 3.0" revolution - though he doesn't use the term - on individual freedom and privacy.

Coined by Reid Hoffman, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, the term Web 3.0 defines our digitally networked age of "real identities generating massive amounts of data". It is via this avalanche of personal data, available through networks like Facebook, Foursquare, Google and The Huffington Post that, Turow warns, "the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your world".

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, wryly notes. In the first flush of the digital revolution, optimists like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Nicholas Negroponte and Harvard University's Yochai Benkler were promising a web of "The Daily Me" in which the consumer would be empowered to "define themselves" through the democratic openness of the internet. But the bright promise of The Daily Me has been eclipsed by the dark reality of The Daily You - an online world in which we are being persistently "peeked" at and "poked" by data mining and analytics companies like Rapleaf, Next Jump, Acxiom, Daily Me and Medicx Media.

The root of the problem, Turow explains, is the disappearance of boundaries between advertising and content that shaped 20th-century media. Because it is hard to generate significant revenue through selling online banner advertising, web publishers now cosy up to advertisers by offering them access to the personal data we reveal every time we go online.

"It's a new world and we are only at the beginning," Turow writes of this creepy set-up in which the consumer, rather than being king, has become the serf of an increasingly seductive and coercive advertising industry. And it is only going to get creepier, he warns,
as television and the internet merge, and services like Google TV transform the 20th-century viewer into 21st-century data points that are bundled up and sold on to advertisers.

So what is to be done? Here, Turow is at his least convincing. "The train has already left the station," he writes, ominously, before falling back on anodyne solutions like to "teach our children well - early and often" and encouraging the US Congress to pass "Do Not Track" legislation, which limits gathering consumer data online.

No, what really needs to be done is for all of us to buy Turow's book. In guiding us through the ways in which, whether we know it or not, we are generating massive amounts of personal data online, The Daily You is required reading in today's Web 3.0 age.

Book Information
The Daily You: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth
by Joseph Turow
Published by: Yale University Press
£20/$28

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Also, here are links to helpful Google Chrome extensions:
- Keep my Opt-outs: Avoid getting your information gathered for personalized advertising
- Ad Block: Block ads all over the web (including Youtube, Google ads, Facebook, etc)

Article: The Real Problem With Google’s New Privacy Policy

2012-02-13T15:54:00.000Z

Original Article written by Thomas Gideon and James Losey for Slate - Friday 10, February 2012

The tech giant owes users better tools to manage their information.

When Google announced impending changes to its privacy policy, users and the media alike were focused on one thing: the inability to opt-out, short of deleting your account. Though Congress keeps pushing Google for more clarification, many users have grumpily acknowledged the Gmail notifications and moved to new privacy concerns like an iPhone app that copied and uploaded users' contacts.

However, the popular conversation must continue because this is about more than opt-in or opt-out. It’s about control. The search giant plans to replace dozens of separate privacy policies with a unified policy. Google calls this a step toward simplicity—a single policy instead of 60. But while the new policy does not expand the personal information it collects, it introduces new ways for Google to combine and share data across its own services.

This transition to a unified service sets the course for future growth built on each user having a single profile across their online experience. But while Google is changing, the tools are not keeping up.

Google’s public-policy director Pablo Chavez responded to criticism emphasizing that Google will not collect any new data, and users can still employ the same privacy tools currently available to them. In a letter to Congress, Google stressed that it is maintaining its privacy approach and will “continue to focus on providing transparency, control, and security to our users.” Additionally, users can access many services without a Google account, and they can always execute the ultimate opt-out: deleting their data and choosing other online services.

While Google’s dashboard offers a number of tools, and one privacy policy can be simpler than several dozen, users are fundamentally losing the ability to manage and maintain different identities within the massive Google World.

Social-media researcher danah boyd (as she prefers to style her name) previously confronted this challenge in the fall of 2010 following a change in Facebook’s privacy policies. In “Why Privacy Is Not Dead,” published in MIT’s Technology Review, boyd writes: “Privacy is not simply about controlling access. It's about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and shared accordingly.” How most online companies share information with customers and services is not transparent for users.

Google explained to Congress why it believes users will benefit from sharing data between Google services, including editing Google Docs within Gmail, or integrating Google Maps within Google+. Already, if you log in to one Google service, your Google ID follows you to the next site. The company argues that sharing personal data between services yields benefits in the form of tailored services, like recommended videos based on past search results.

But how and why a person uses different services does not always demand, or benefit from, sharing information. A user may primarily use Google’s search engine for work or technology issues and YouTube for music and cute cat videos. Some people simply prefer to have a different persona on YouTube than on Google search, much like how we may reveal different aspects about ourselves at a library than at our favorite watering hole. Forcibly consolidating these identities undermines the users’ freedom to reveal different facets of their identity to Google in different contexts.

In an effort to clarify misconceptions about the new policy changes, Google policy manager Betsy Masiello reminds readers many Google services such as Search or Maps are available to use without logging in. With a single sign-on, however, this is an unrealistic proposition—just as user accounts are carried from one service to the next, logging out takes you out of the entire Google platform. Google’s customers are practically entrenched in some services, such as Gmail or Chat. Forcibly bridging services without the choice of a partial opt-out is an attempt by Google to leverage user dependency on some services to increase the usage of others—most notably Google+. Instead, Google could offer the tools to manage how their identity is shared, or separated, between various services.

Google could also offer a service for customers to audit their online identity. On a smaller scale, Google+ users already enjoy a feature to “View profile as ...” to examine how their online identity looks to others—a subtle, easy-to-miss text box with a faint gray label on your Google+ home page that lets you review your posts as if you were a peer, so you can see how, say, your parent sees your information. This is a similar feature to one on Facebook, where a user can assume another user's perspective to check for leaks in their sharing rules and permissions. Why not go further and provide a tool for users to see what Google knows about them and add or delete assumed topics of interest on different services accordingly? True, users can tweak their ad profile or search history, but as Google transforms into an integrated world, more comprehensive user controls are needed. In fact, the ad-profile option and the Google+ “view as” feature reinforces that while Google's policies are evolving, privacy tools are painfully service-specific.

Google’s revised and consolidated policies, and the data collection and sharing changes at their core, could be viewed as a competitive response to Facebook initiatives that integrate your Facebook identity into thousands of different websites. Together, Google’s and Facebook’s actions exemplify the current state of the online public sphere—a space governed by terms of service, but without meaningful protections for its participants to control and manage their online identity across different services.

If we gain access to the public sphere using the currency of personal information, then users must also have greater control on how that information is given, stored, shared, and deleted.

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

Article: Currency Warfare - What are the Real Targets of the E.U. Oil Embargo against Iran?

2012-02-06T04:56:00.003Z

Original Article written by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya for Global Research - Tuesday 31, January 2012

Against whom is the European Union’s so-called “oil embargo on Iran” really aimed at?

This is an important geo-strategic question. Aside from rejecting the new E.U. measures against Iran as counter-productive, Tehran has warned the member states of the European Union that the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will hurt them and their economies far more than Iran.

Tehran has thus warned the leaders of the E.U. countries that the new sanctions are foolish and against their national and bloc interests. But is this correct? At the end of the day, who will benefit from the chain of events that are being set into motion?
Oil Embargos against Iran are Not New

In 1951, the Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh with the support of the Iranian Parliament nationalized the Iranian oil industry. As a result of Dr. Mossadegh’s nationalization program, the British militarily blockaded the territorial waters and national ports of Iran with the British Royal Navy and prevented Iran from exporting its oil. They also militarily prevented Iranian trade. London also froze Iranian assets and started a campaign to isolate Iran with sanctions. The government of Dr. Mossadegh was democratic and could not be vilified easily domestically by the British, so they began to portray Mossadegh as a pawn of the Soviet Union who would turn Iran into a communist country together with his Marxist political allies.

The illegal British naval embargo was followed by regime change in Tehran via a 1953 Anglo-American engineered coup d’état. The 1953 coup transformed the Shah of Iran from a constitutional figure head to an absolute monarch and dictator, like the monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. Iran was transformed overnight from a democratic constitutional monarchy into a dictatorship.

Today, a militarily imposed oil embargo against Iran is not possible like it was in the early 1950s. Instead London and Washington use the language of righteousness and hide behind false pretexts about Iranian nuclear weapons. Like in the 1950s, the oil embargo against Iran is tied to regime change. Yet, there are also broader objectives that go beyond
the boundaries of Iran tied to Washington’s project to impose an oil embargo against the Iranians.

The European Union and Iranian Oil Sales

Iran’s largest customer for oil is the People’s Republic of China. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), which was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo as the strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Iran exports 543,000 oil barrels per day to China. Iran’s other large customers are India, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. India imports 341,000 barrels per day from Iran, Turkey imports 370,000 barrels per day from Iran, Japan imports 251,000 barrels per day from Iran, and South Korea imports 239,000 barrels per day from Iran.

According to the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum the European Union only accounts for 18% of Iranian oil exports, which means less than one-fifth of Iranian oil sales. Only “collectively” is the European Union the second largest customer of Iran. All the E.U. countries together import 510,000 barrels per day from Iran. This collective rank that all Iranian oil importing E.U. countries have together is being highlighted by those that want to emphasize the effectiveness of the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

Iran can replace oil sales to the European Union via new buyers or by increasing sales to existing customers like China and India. An Iranian agreement to work with China for stockpiling Chinese strategic reserves would fill a large portion of the vacuum left by the European Union. Thus, the oil embargo against Iran will have minimal direct effects on Iran. Rather, it is most likely that any of the effects that the Iranian economy feels will be tied to the global ramifications of the oil embargo against Iran.

Iran and Global Currency Warfare

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both the U.S. dollar and the euro together constitute 84.4% of the world’s currency exchange reserves (end of 2011 date). The U.S. dollar alone, was the largest share of the world’s currency exchange reserves in 2011, namely 61.7%.
Energy sales are an important part of this equation, because the American dollar is tied to the oil trade.

Thus, oil trade, through what is called the petro-dollar, is helping sustain the American dollar’s international standing. Countries around the world have been virtually forced to use the U.S. dollar to maintain their energy and trade needs and transactions.

To highlight the importance of the international oil trade to the U.S., all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – have their national currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar and thereby sustain the petro-dollar by trading oil in American dollars. Moreover, the currencies of Lebanon, Jordan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Belize, and several tropical islands in the Caribbean Sea are also all pegged to the U.S. dollar. Aside from the overseas territories of the United States, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Panama also all officially use the U.S. dollar as their national currencies.

The euro on the other hand is both a rival of the U.S. dollar as well as an allied currency. Both currencies work in tandem against other currencies in many cases and seem to be controlled by increasingly merging centres of financial power.

Aside from the seventeen European Union members using the euro as their currency, the Principality of Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have issuing rights and both Montenegro and the Albanian-majority Serbian province of Kosovo also use the euro as their national currencies. Outside of the euro area (Eurozone), the currencies of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania in Europe; the currencies of Cape Verde, Comoros, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, and the two CFA zones in Africa; and the currencies of several Western European overseas dependencies, such as Greenland, are all pegged to the euro.

Several monetary zones are directly tied to the euro. In Oceania, the Comptoirs Français du Pacifique (CFP) franc, simply called the Pacific franc (franc pacifique), used in a monetary union of the French dependencies of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and the Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands is pegged to the euro. As mentioned earlier, both the CFA zones in Africa are also pegged to the euro. Thus, both the Financial Community of Africa (Communauté financière d’Afrique, CFA) franc or West African CFA franc in West Africa – used by Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – and the Financial Cooperation in Central Africa (Coopération financière en Afrique central, CFA) franc or Central African CFA franc – used by Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon – have their fates tied to the monetary value of the euro.

Iran is not looking for military confrontation in the rising hostilities with the United States and European Union. Despite the warped narrative being presented, Tehran has said that it will only close the Strait of Hormuz as a last resort. The Iranians have also said that they will not let U.S. or hostile ships go through Iranian territorial water, which is their legal right, and that hostile ships could navigate through Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz instead. As a side note, among other things, the problem for the U.S. and Iran’s other adversaries is that the waters on the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz are too shallow.

Instead of military confrontation, Tehran is fighting back economically in several ways. The first step, which started before 2012, was Iranian international oil sales and trade were diversified in regards to their currency transactions. This is part of a calculated move by Iran to move away from using the American dollar just like Saddam Hussein of Iraq did in 2000 as a means to fight back against the sanctions imposed on Iraq. In this context, Iran has created an international energy exchange or bourse competing with the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), which both operate using the American dollar for transactions. This energy exchange, called the Kish Oil Bourse, was officially opened in August 2011 on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. Its first transactions were made using the euro and the Emirati dirhem.

In context of euro and U.S. dollar rivalries, the Iranians originally wanted to turn to the euro and a petro-euro system with the hope that the competition between the American dollar and the euro would make the European Union an ally of Iran and de-link the E.U. from the United States. As political tensions have mounted with the E.U., the petro-euro has become less attractive for Tehran. Iran has realized that the European Union is submissive to U.S. interests under corrupt leaders. Thus, to a lesser extent, Iran has also tried to move away from the euro.

Moreover, Iran has broadened its move away from the use of the U.S. dollar and the euro as policy in bilateral trade relations. Iran and India are talking about gold payments for Iranian oil. Iranian and Russian trade is conducted in Iranian rials and Russian roubles, while Iranian trade with China and other Asian countries is conducted using the Chinese renminbi, Iranian rial, Japanese yen, and other non-dollar and non-euro currencies.

While the euro could have been a big winner from a petro-euro system, the actions of the European Union have worked against this. The E.U. oil embargo against Iran is merely hammering the nails in the coffin. Globally, the emerging matrix of Eurasian and international trade and transaction outside of the umbrellas of the American dollar and the euro is weakening both currencies. The Iranian Parliament is now passing legislation to cut oil exports to the members of the European Union that will be part of the sanctions regime until they rescind the Iranian oil sanctions. The Iranian move will be a blow to the euro, especially since the European Union will not have time to prepare for the Iranian energy cuts.

There are several possibilities that could emerge. One of them is that this could be part of what Washington wants and it could be playing into its hands against the European Union. Another is that the U.S. and specific E.U. members are working together against strategic economic rivals and other markets.

Who Benefits? The Economic Targets are beyond Iran…

The end of Iranian oil exports to the European Union and the decline of the euro will directly benefit the United States and the U.S. dollar. What the European Union is doing is merely weakening itself and giving the U.S. dollar the upper hand in its currency rivalry against the euro. Moreover, should the euro collapse, the American dollar will quickly fill much of the void. Despite the fact that Russia will benefit from higher oil prices and greater leverage over E.U. energy security as a supplier, the Kremlin has also warned the European Union that it is working against its own interests and subordinating itself to Washington.

Many important questions are at play about the economic consequences of increased oil prices.

Will the European Union be able to weather the economic storm or a currency collapse?

What the E.U. oil embargo against Iran will do is destabilize the euro and snowball globally hurting non-E.U. economies. In this regard, Tehran has warned that the U.S. aims to hurt rival economies through the adoption of E.U. oil sanctions against Iran. Within this line of thinking, this is the reason why the U.S. is trying to force China, India, South Korea, and Japan in Asia to reduce or cut Iranian oil imports.

Within the European Union, it will be the most fragile and struggling economies, such as Greece and Spain, which will be hurt by the E.U. oil embargo against Iran.

The oil refineries in the European Union countries that import Iranian oil will have to find new sellers as sources and will also be forced to adjust their operations. Piero De Simone, one of the leaders of Italy’s Unione Petrolifera, has warned that approximately seventy oil refineries in the E.U. could be shutdown and that Asian countries could start selling refined Iranian oil to the European Union at the expense of the local refineries and the local petroleum industries.

Despite the political claims supporting an oil embargo against Iran, neither will Saudi Arabia be able to fill the void of Iranian oil exports to the European Union or other markets. A shortfall in oil supplies and the production changes could have spiralling effects in the European Union and on the costs of industrial production, transportation, and market prices. The prediction is that the E.U. will effectively be deepening the crisis in the euro area or Eurozone.

Moreover, the rise in everyday prices, ranging from food to transportation, will not be limited to the European Union, but will have global ramifications. As prices rise on a global scale, the economies in Latin American, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific countries will face new hardship, which the financial sector in the U.S. and several of its partners – including members of the European Union – could capitalize on by taking over certain sectors and markets. The IMF and World Bank, as the Bretton Woods proxies of Wall Street, could get into the mix and impose more privatization programs benefiting the financial sectors of the U.S. and its main partners. Furthermore, how Iran decides to sell the 18% of oil it will stop selling to E.U. members will also be a mediating factor.

The Ghosts of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo: Libya and the International Energy Agency

While countries in Africa or the Pacific have no strategic oil reserves and will be at the mercy of global price increases, the U.S. and the European Union have worked and tried to strategically insulate themselves from such scenarios. This is where the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) comes into the picture. Libyan oil reserves are also a factor to the hostilities and petro-politics involving Iran.

The IEA was created after the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. As mentioned earlier it is a “strategic wing of the Western Bloc’s Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” The OECD is a club of countries that includes the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and New Zealand. It is essentially based on the contours of the Western Bloc, which is comprised of America’s allies and satellites. Aside from Israel, Chile, Estonia, Iceland, Slovenia, and Mexico all the members of the OECD are members of the IEA.

Since its creation in 1974, one of the responsibilities of the IEA has been to stock strategic oil reserves for the OECD countries. During the NATO war against Libya the IEA actually opened its strategic oil reserves to compensate for the void left by a lack of Libyan oil exports. The only other two times this happened were in 1991, when Washington led a military coalition in its first war against Iraq, and in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the United States.

The war in Libya had many purposes:

(1) preventing African unity;
(2) driving China out of Africa;
(3) strategically controlling important energy reserves; and
(4) guarding oil supplies in the scenario of any American-led conflicts against Syria and Iran.

What the NATO war in Libya has done is secure oil output from Libya, because there was a chance that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Colonial Muammar Qaddafi could have suspended oil sales to the European Union in support of Syria or Iran in possible conflicts with the U.S., NATO, and Israel. It is also interesting to note that one of the Libyan figures that helped enable the war against Libya in the United Nations was Sliman Bouchuiguir, the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR) and the current Libyan ambassador to Switzerland, who worked on formulating a strategy against allowing oil from being used as a strategic weapon to insure that the 1973 oil crisis never repeat itself for the U.S. and its allies.

Aside from Iran, the Syrians have also been a source of oil imports for the European Union. Like Iran, the E.U. has also cut their bloc off from Syrian oil via a sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government. With Iranian and Syrian oil cut off from the E.U., the strategic value of Libyan oil rises. In this regard, the reports about the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Libyan oil fields can also be analyzed as being coordinated or tied to the growing U.S. and E.U. hostilities with Syria and Iran. Rerouting Libyan oil shipments to the E.U. that were intended for China can also be part of such a strategy.

The Psychological War

In reality, the sanctions regime engineered by the U.S. government against Iran has gone as far as it can go. All the speeches about Iranian isolation are bravado and far from the reality of current international relations and trade. Brazil, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and various countries in the post-Soviet space, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have all refused to join the sanctions against the Iranian economy.

The E.U. oil embargo, coupled with the broader sanctions against Iran, has broad psychological implications. Iran and its ally Syria both face a multi-dimensional war that has economic, covert, diplomatic, media, and psychological scopes.

The psychological war, which involves the mainstream media as a tool of foreign policy and war, constitutes an efficient propaganda instrument for the U.S. due to its lower costs. Yet, the psychological war can be fought on both sides.

Much of the power of the U.S. is psychological and tied to fear. Like the geography of the Persian Gulf, time is on Iran’s side and working against the United States.

If Iran continues on its present course and is undeterred by sanctions, this will help break a critical psychological threshold, which around the world tends to discourage countries from confronting and opposing the United States.

Should many countries continue to refuse to bow down to the Obama Administration pertaining to the impostion of sanctions against Iran, this will also be a blow to the prestige and power of the U.S., which would also have economic and financial implications.

Moreover, at the end of the day, the E.U. oil embargo will hurt the E.U. instead of Iran. In the long-term it could also hurt the United States.

Structurally, the effects of the E.U. oil embargo will further entrench the E.U. in the orbit of Washington, but these effects will catalyze growing social opposition to Washington, which will eventually manifest in the political and economic arenas.

Speech: Dan Gilbert - We can synthesize our own hapiness

2012-02-06T03:36:00.014Z

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

P.S. After watching the talk (interesting experiment described at 11:00) , I recommend you should listen to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sl0kkJ_lik

/peps

Speech: Clay Shirky - Why SOPA is a bad idea

2012-01-31T16:30:00.000Z

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Video: ACTA - The new threat to the internet

2012-01-30T17:09:00.002Z

LEARN ABOUT ACTA. It affects you more than you might think.

SIGN THE PETITION HERE.

Some more links:
- Forbes: If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA
- ZDNet: ACTA FAQ, How ACTA will affect you
- Natural News: ACTA is worse than SOPA: What you need to know

Speech: Julian Baggini - Is there a real you?

2012-01-27T18:28:00.000Z

One of the best known philosophers in the UK, Julian will ask the question 'Is There A Real You? He will draw on the research supporting his latest book 'The Ego Trick' and challenge our audience to reflect on their understanding of the 'Self'.

Article: The Real Reason We Don’t Need SOPA or PIPA - We Already Have Broken Copyright Law, DMCA

2012-01-24T21:16:00.000Z

Original Article written by Eric Limer for Geek-o-System - Wednesday 18, January 2012

Now don’t get me wrong, there are awful, awful aspects to both SOPA and PIPA. The prospect of DNS blocking is egregious censorship. The prospect of cutting off funds and ad revenue to “infringers” without due process is egregious. Even without those provisions, though, we still don’t need or want SOPA or PIPA. Why? Because we already have dangerously broken copyright law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It’s almost funny, in a I-want-to-cry sort of way. SOPA and PIPA seem to be constructed on the premise that the DMCA had the right approach, but just isn’t strong enough. The fact of the matter is that DMCA has the wrong approach and is too powerful. There’s evidence to back this up.

The main DMCA principle that SOPA and PIPA are building on is the takedown request. Under DMCA, anybody – anybody – can file a takedown request claiming that something on the Internet falls under their copyright and needs to be removed from wherever it is, typically YouTube. That’s all fine and dandy — good even — the problem is that there are norepercussions for filing a bogus takedown request, something that happens all the time.

Under DMCA, the content just comes down. Under SOPA and PIPA, the government could call on ISPs to block entire sites via DNS, not just specific content. Granted, those DNS blocking provisions have largely been “dropped,” but SOPA was “shelved until consensus,” so take that with a grain of salt. Even without DNS blocking provisions, SOPA and PIPA still lend an extra power to the standard DMCA takedown; they can force advertisers to sever ties with accused infringers, all in an insanely shoot-first-ask-questions-never sort of way.

Let’s take a look at some of the DMCA craziness that’s already happened, shall we?

Nyan Cat got ripped off YouTube, probably by some random prankster who thought it’d be funny to file a request. The creator stated he didn’t file the request. The video was reinstated, but no one ever found out what happened.
Jimmy Iovine — of a Universal subsidiary — used a bogus DMCA takedown request to remove a music video by an artist named Skepta from YouTube. Iovine didn’t own the video or the song. No, instead he wanted to get it out of public view so he could liscense the tune for Eminem before the public started to associate it with its original artist. Nothing bad ever happened to him because of it.
Random DMCA takedown requests took out Justin Bieber’s YouTube channel along with Lady Gaga’s. It’s still unclear who filed it.
Viacom had the trailer for The Last of Us removed from YouTube because it aired on Spike, despite the fact that it was clearly owned by developer Naughty Dog. This may have been an automated accident, but an accident nonetheless. And under SOPA and PIPA, automation isn’t likely to stop.
Warner Bros. admitted to taking down files to which they had no claim after hosting service HotFile tried to play nice and gave Warner access to hosted files. Warner also took down legal download speed enchancing programs because they might be used to download pirated content. Warner is currently being sued by HotFile.
Universal filled a takedown request to remove the MegaUpload song from YouTube despite having no right. Probably because they didn’t like that some of their artists agreed to support what Universal considers a rogue site. MegaUpload is currently suing Universal over the matter.
Universal later filted a takedown request against an episode of Tech News Daily that merely mentioned the MegaUpload song and played a short clip, the use of which is clearly covered under Fair Use.
There are probably many more examples that never hit the news or occurred on sites with less public presence than YouTube.

The main takeaway to be had here is that in all these cases, a DMCA takedown request resulted in the wrongful removal of content from the Internet. In almost all cases, it was put back after things were “straightened out.” No harm, no foul, right? Wrong. When you’re just talking the brief removal of content, admittedly the damage is generally minimal. Under SOPA and PIPA, sites would face the temporary removal of content plus the possible blocking of their entire siteand denial of funds when advertisers are forced to cut them off. Even if the situation is cleared up and the content is reinstated, the downtime could be enough to bankrupt a startup. A copyright holder on the other hand, especially a large one, has virtually nothing to lose if their content is hosted illegally for a limited period of time because piracy is not theft. DMCA is already aimed at the little guy, SOPA and PIPA just give the gun a bigger caliber.

Wouldn’t you think that maybe we should correct existing copyright law — copyright law with many documented instances of abuse — before introducing new copyright law? Especially new copyright law built on the premise that its predecessors were heading down the right path? SOPA and PIPA — in any form — are awful because they are an iteration on an already flawed method. When you take a wrong turn at a fork in the road — DMCA — you don’t get anywhere by going further down that path. The only way to make progress is by going back and correcting your original error. No further copyright law is going to be remotely helpful or beneficial to the people it claims to protect unless it goes back and fixes the mistakes made back when DMCA passed. Obviously, we shouldn’t be making any more mistakes, but we really should be fixing the ones we’ve already made.

Stop SOPA and PIPA now, while we still can.

Speech: Alain de Botton - Atheism 2.0

2012-01-23T13:45:00.001Z

What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a "religion for atheists" -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.

Video: How are SOPA and PIPA attacking the Internet

2012-01-20T03:32:00.003Z

Speech: Alain de Botton - A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

2012-01-18T15:12:00.000Z

Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.

Speech: Bunker Roy - Learning from a barefoot movement

2012-01-17T14:26:00.000Z

In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

Article: Fresh Practices - A Few Things To Start TODAY

2012-01-13T21:41:00.002Z

Original Article written by Russ Baker for WhoWhatWhy - Sunday 1, January 2012

People are always saying to me,okay, now that you’ve told us what the problems are, what can be done about them?

A good practice is to start by working on yourself. From individual choices and thinking, on matters large and minuscule, emerges the state of mind that leads invariably to broad benefits for us all. Here are a few simple things to try in the new year, if you’re not already doing them:

-Notice what you notice: Make a conscious, deliberate mental note of things you noticed. This is a great technique for writers and reporters, but generally useful for creating more awareness of your life, your world, and the things in it. From awareness springs action. Solutions are to be found everywhere.

-Notice how you feel: What makes you feel good—and why? What makes you feel bad—and why? Most of us are not especially introspective, because self-examination can be painful. But it isn’t so difficult if you start with small exercises. These lead gradually to revelation.

-Identify especially two categories: (a) The bad things that make you feel good, and (b) The good things that make you feel bad.

First, A: We fill our lives with bad things that make us feel good for a moment, but in the
end make us feel bad. The examples are easy to come by: diet, behavior toward others, leisure time choices, etc. Simply doing the opposite, which at first is not as pleasurable, can often add more meaning and long-term pleasure to living.

Then, B: By engaging with some things that make us feel bad or uncomfortable, we figure out how to feel good about them. One example of this is paying attention to the world around us—learning about the problems of the world and what causes them. Initially, this can be depressing, but those who engage regularly and willingly with the complexity of the human condition usually end up feeling engaged, and often find themselves coming up with or being part of the solution.

-Notice what you do: Do you keep getting yourself in trouble? Start consciously noticing what you did that caused that. If you are always in a panic looking for things you lost, start very deliberately pausing and making a mental note when you put them down, or put them away—it will be much easier to find them later. Do you make people angry with you? Identify a few solutions—from small changes in how you speak with people, to being more selective about whom you spend your time with.

-Do something selfless: start by doing the tiniest things. Help others in a way they can’t see you’re helping; pick up some garbage someone else has tossed out onto the street; anticipate a problem about to happen to someone else and quietly prevent it. Do something someone else should have done, without seeking credit.

-Practice being protean—that is, embracing change as normal and good. Learn something new every day; be open to a new fact or a new way of thinking about something.

-Do something fun or playful or inventive every day that those who know you would say is out of character. Surprise others, and surprise yourself.

-Join with other people in a good cause: Whatever it is, it will enrich everyone around you—as well as yourself. It’s a win-win. Good causes are habit forming, but many of us need to start small, and learn to be good at charity.

-Lastly, if you’re inclined, join with us at WhoWhatWhy in our “knowledge revolution.” In whatever way works for you, become part of what we do—visit us often, spread the message, share your skills, resources, or good fortune. Together, we’ll figure this thing out.

Happy 2012 from Russ and the whole WhoWhatWhy Team

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Happy New Year from the Passive Observers team too :)

This article speaks through me!

/od

Documentary: What the Bleep Do We Know!? (2004)

2012-01-12T13:50:00.002Z

This a GREAT thought provoking and mind opener documentary. It's quite hard to describe it, but in short, it brings together science and spirituality in a mind blowing way.

I think EVERYONE should watch this, and then watch it again to really understand it!

It's a great start understanding ourselves through science and spirituality and realizing we can change ourselves if we want to and we can create our own realities.

Note: even though most of the content is amazing, I don't think it is produced in the best way possible, since it involves a (boring) story and some special effects which I find a bit too much some times.
Also bare in mind that this is NOT a purely scientific film, and there's stuff in there that's either not really proven or sometimes plain bullshit (some examples here). Please try to see through them and get the most out of this film, instead of bitching about it not being scientific. Just follow it through and keep watching, ti won't fail to amaze you!

/od

Article: The Problem With Patents (Infographic)

2012-01-07T19:26:00.001Z

Original Article written by Jason for Forbes - Wednesday 04, January 2012

There’s no question that software and technology represent some of the fastest growing industries today. The internet has fundamentally changed the way we interact, do business, and spend money. That said, I always try and keep abreast of what’s happening in these sectors, and to be aware of how the online and tech industry makes its money.

I recently listened to an episode of This American Life called “When Patents Attack!”. Something that surprised me while listening was that while I think of patents as being mostly for gadgets and the kinds of products you see on infomercials, patents have become a huge factor in the software and online industries, to the tune of billions of dollars.

This infographic discusses some of the facts behind the patent industry and how it’s changed as software, technology, and the internet have developed at an incredible pace. I find the information to say a lot about the state of development and innovation; both how important it can be to everyday life, and the problems it can face on a larger scale.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

Research (Videos): Obama Signs NDAA Bill - What is the NDAA Bill?

2012-01-07T14:39:00.002Z

The NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) was signed by president Barack Obama on New Year's eve (2012) and I believe is of significant importance.
It has been commonly called the "indefinite detention" bill, because it gives the US Armed forces the right to indefinitely detain (even) US citizens suspected and accused of terrorism, without ANY trial whatsoever.

This post contains three chosen videos (as promised), that clearly explain the NDAA.

To READ about the NDAA click here.

Read about the NDAA here.

. . .

Speech: Justin Hall-Tipping - The Future of Energy

2012-01-06T14:58:00.000Z

Justin Hall-Tipping (CEO of "Nanoholdings") explains how nanotechnology is set to change the future of energy and replace fossil and nuclear fuels.

"The powerplant of tomorrow, is no powerplant."

Research (Articles): Obama Signs NDAA Bill - What is the NDAA Bill?

2012-01-05T19:45:00.002Z

The NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) was signed by president Barack Obama on New Year's eve (2012) and I believe is of significant importance.

It has been commonly called the "indefinite detention" bill, because it gives the US Armed forces the right to indefinitely detain (even) US citizens suspected and accused of terrorism, without ANY trial whatsoever.

Yes, it's scary and yes it reminds us of those authoritarian regimes the USA has been criticizing (but secretly supporting) all those years.

This is why I think its necessary to understand how the Act works and what it means for US citizens and for the rest of us. (Ναι, κι εμάς λέω)

This post contains two chosen cross-posts from the Guardian and Salon.com, which I think give a thorough explanation of the act.

I have included a few links to other informative articles and have posted some helpful videos too. I hope it helps. /od

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Article 1 (The Guardian)

The NDAA's historic assault on American liberty
By signing into law the NDAA, the president has awarded the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country … and citizens partied in unwitting bliss into the New Year.

Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely (see the text of the statement here).

Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would
not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.

The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not "support our troops" by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The "American way of life" is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.

The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.

On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.

There are also those who continue the longstanding effort to excuse Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by blaming either others or the times. One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.

The Obama administration and Democratic members are in full spin mode – using language designed to obscure the authority given to the military. The exemption for American citizens from the mandatorydetention requirement (section 1032) is the screening language for the next section, 1031, which offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial.

Obama could have refused to sign the bill and the Congress would have rushed to fund the troops. Instead, as confirmed by Senator Levin, the White House conducted a misinformation campaign to secure this power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama maintains, a reluctant president with dictatorial powers.

Most Democratic members joined their Republican colleagues in voting for this un-American measure. Some Montana citizens are moving to force the removal of these members who, they insist, betrayed their oaths of office and their constituents. Most citizens, however, are continuing to treat the matter as a distraction from the holiday cheer.

For civil libertarians, the NDAA is our Mayan moment: 2012 is when the nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between rounds of drinks.

• This article was originally published on Jonathan Turley's blog and is crossposted [on the Guardian] by kind permission of the author [to the Guardian]

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Article 2 (Salon)

Three myths about the detention bill
(updated below)

Condemnation of President Obama is intense, and growing, as a result of his announced intent to sign into law the indefinite detention billembedded in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). These denunciations come not only from the nation’s leading civil liberties andhuman rights groups, but also from the pro-Obama New York Times Editorial Page, which today has a scathing Editorial describing Obama’s stance as “a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency” and lamenting that “the bill has so many other objectionable aspects that we can’t go into them all,” as well as from vocal Obama supporters such as Andrew Sullivan, who wrote yesterday that this episode is “another sign that his campaign pledge to be vigilant about civil liberties in the war on terror was a lie.” In damage control mode, White-House-allied groups are now trying to ride to the rescue with attacks on the ACLU and dismissive belittling of the bill’s dangers.

For that reason, it is very worthwhile to briefly examine — and debunk — the three principal myths being spread by supporters of this bill, and to do so very simply: by citing the relevant provisions of the bill, as well as the relevant passages of the original 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), so that everyone can judge for themselves what this bill actually includes (this is all above and beyond the evidence I assembled in writing about this bill yesterday):

Myth # 1: This bill does not codify indefinite detention
Section 1021 of the NDAA governs, as its title says, “Authority of the Armed Forces to Detain Covered Persons Pursuant to the AUMF.” The first provision — section (a) — explicitly “affirms that the authority of the President” under the AUMF ”includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons.” The next section, (b), defines “covered persons” — i.e., those who can be detained by the U.S. military — as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” With regard to those “covered individuals,” this is the power vested in the President by the next section, (c):

It simply cannot be any clearer within the confines of the English language that this bill codifies the power of indefinite detention. It expressly empowers the President — with regard to anyone accused of the acts in section (b) – to detain them “without trial until the end of the hostilities.” That is the very definition of “indefinite detention,” and the statute could not be clearer that it vests this power. Anyone claiming this bill does not codify indefinite detention should be forced to explain how they can claim that in light of this crystal clear provision.

It is true, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, that both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that the 2001 AUMF implicitly (i.e., silently) already vests the power of indefinite detention in the President, and post-9/11 deferential courts have largely accepted that view (just as the Bush DOJ argued that the 2001 AUMF implicitly (i.e., silently) allowed them to eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law). That’s why the NDAA can state that nothing is intended to expand the 2001 AUMF while achieving exactly that: because the Executive and judicial interpretation being given to the 20o1 AUMF is already so much broader than its language provides.

But this is the first time this power of indefinite detention is being expressly codified by statute (there’s not a word about detention powers in the 2001 AUMF). Indeed, as the ACLU and HRW both pointed out, it’s the first time such powers are being codified in a statute since the McCarthy era Internal Security Act of 1950, about which I wrote yesterday.

Myth #2: The bill does not expand the scope of the War on Terror as defined by the 2001 AUMF
This myth is very easily dispensed with. The scope of the war as defined by the original 2001 AUMF was, at least relative to this new bill, quite specific and narrow. Here’s the full extent of the power the original AUMF granted:

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Under the clear language of the 2001 AUMF, the President’s authorization to use force was explicitly confined to those who (a) helped perpetrate the 9/11 attack or (b) harbored the perpetrators. That’s it. Now look at how much broader the NDAA is with regard to who can be targeted:

Section (1) is basically a re-statement of the 2001 AUMF. But Section (2) is a brand new addition. It allows the President to target not only those who helped perpetrate the 9/11 attacks or those who harbored them, but also: anyone who “substantially supports” such groups and/or “associated forces.” Those are extremely vague terms subject to wild and obvious levels of abuse (see what Law Professor Jonathan Hafetz told me in an interview last week about the dangers of those terms). This is a substantial statutory escalation of the War on Terror and the President’s powers under it, and it occurs more than ten years after 9/11, with Osama bin Laden dead, and with the U.S. Government boasting that virtually all Al Qaeda leaders have been eliminated and the original organization (the one accused of perpetrating 9/11 attack) rendered inoperable.

It is true that both the Bush and Obama administration have long been arguing that the original AUMF should be broadly “interpreted” so as to authorize force against this much larger scope of individuals, despite the complete absence of such language in that original AUMF. That’s how the Obama administration justifies its ongoing bombing of Yemen and Somalia and its killing of people based on the claim that they support groups that did not even exist at the time of 9/11 – i.e., they argue: these new post-9/11 groups we’re targeting are “associated forces” of Al Qaeda and the individuals we’re killing “substantially support” those groups. But this is the first time that Congress has codified that wildly expanded definition of the Enemy in the War on Terror. And all anyone has to do to see that is compare the old AUMF with the new one in the NDAA.

Myth #3: U.S. citizens are exempted from this new bill
This is simply false, at least when expressed so definitively and without caveats. The bill is purposely muddled on this issue which is what is enabling the falsehood.

There are two separate indefinite military detention provisions in this bill. The first, Section 1021, authorizes indefinite detention for the broad definition of “covered persons” discussed above in the prior point. And that section does provide that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” So that section contains a disclaimer regarding an intention to expand detention powers for U.S. citizens, but does so only for the powers vested by that specific section. More important, the exclusion appears to extend only to U.S. citizens “captured or arrested in the United States” — meaning that the powers of indefinite detention vested by that section apply to U.S. citizens captured anywhere abroad (there is some grammatical vagueness on this point, but at the very least, there is a viable argument that the detention power in this section applies to U.S. citizens captured abroad).

But the next section, Section 1022, is a different story. That section specifically deals with a smaller category of people than the broad group covered by 1021: namely, anyone whom the President determines is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force” and “participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.” For those persons, section (a) not only authorizes, but requires (absent a Presidential waiver), that they be held “in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.” The section title is “Military Custody for Foreign Al Qaeda Terrorists,” but the definition of who it covers does not exclude U.S. citizens or include any requirement of foreignness.

That section — 1022 — does not contain the broad disclaimer regarding U.S. citizens that 1021 contains. Instead, it simply says that the requirement of military detention does not apply to U.S. citizens, but it does not exclude U.S. citizens from the authority, the option, to hold them in military custody. Here is what it says:

The only provision from which U.S. citizens are exempted here is the“requirement” of military detention. For foreign nationals accused of being members of Al Qaeda, military detention is mandatory; for U.S. citizens, it is optional. This section does not exempt U.S citizens from the presidential power of military detention: only from therequirement of military detention.

The most important point on this issue is the same as underscored in the prior two points: the “compromise” reached by Congress includes language preserving the status quo. That’s because the Obama administration already argues that the original 2001 AUMF authorizes them to act against U.S. citizens (obviously, if they believe they have the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination, then they believe they have the power to detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants). The proof that this bill does not expressly exempt U.S. citizens or those captured on U.S. soil is that amendments offered by Sen. Feinstein providing expressly for those exemptions were rejected. The “compromise” was to preserve the status quo by including the provision that the bill is not intended to alter it with regard to American citizens, but that’s because proponents of broad detention powers are confident that the status quo already permits such detention.

In sum, there is simply no question that this bill codifies indefinite detention without trial (Myth 1). There is no question that it significantly expands the statutory definitions of the War on Terror and those who can be targeted as part of it (Myth 2). The issue of application to U.S. citizens (Myth 3) is purposely muddled — that’s why Feinstein’s amendments were rejected — and there is consequently no doubt this bill can and will be used by the U.S. Government (under this President or a future one) to bolster its argument that it is empowered to indefinitely detain even U.S. citizens without a trial (NYT Editorial: “The legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial”; Sen. Bernie Sanders: “This bill also contains misguided provisions that in the name of fighting terrorism essentially authorize the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges”).

Even if it were true that this bill changes nothing when compared to how the Executive Branch has been interpreting and exercising the powers of the old AUMF, there are serious dangers and harms from having Congress — with bipartisan sponsors, a Democratic Senate and a GOP House — put its institutional, statutory weight behind powers previously claimed and seized by the President alone. That codification entrenches these powers. As the New York Times Editorial today put it: the bill contains “terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law.”

What’s particularly ironic (and revealing) about all of this is that former White House counsel Greg Craig assured The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer back in February, 2009 that it’s “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” Four months later, President Obama proposed exactly such a law — one that The New York Times described as “a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free” — and now he will sign such a scheme into law.

UPDATE: There’s an interview with me in Harper’s today regarding American justice and With Liberty and Justice for Some.

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

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MORE ARTICLES:

Article: Why don’t the US and Iran choose dialogue first?

2012-01-04T06:18:00.003Z

Original Article written by Linda Heard for Arab News - Wednesday 4, January 2012

If you believe that current hostilities between Washington and Tehran are all about Iran’s uranium enrichment program opening the door to a potential Iranian-made nuclear bomb engraved “Tel Aviv,” you’ve yet to peel the layers of this increasingly poisonous onion. Once you do, you’ll understand that fundamentally the feud is over which side gets to dominate the oil-rich Gulf region.

Before taking office, President Barack Obama was keen to initiate face-to-face talks with the Iranian leadership which he later failed to pursue despite having received a rather rambling conciliatory letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At stake is a major regional conflict, if not World War III, so one must wonder why the US president who was once keen to reach out to the Muslim world has swapped diplomacy for bellicosity.

There may have been a time when Obama fantasized riding into Tehran on a white horse, olive branch in hand, to end decades of enmity but he would have swiftly bolted that stable on being schooled that America’s strategic interests leave little room for warmth and fuzziness.

America’s appreciates allies as long as they submit to US diktats which the Iranian ayatollahs conceivably would never do as much of their standing at home and elsewhere rests on an ultra-conservative anti-Western ideology. For example, the Americans had no problem with their man Saddam Hussein until he became a liability and were happy to pander to the Shah until he got ideas above his station when he was unceremoniously dumped.

In one way, the US and Iran represent both sides of the same coin. It’s in the interests of both countries to keep up the enmity. In the absence of Saddam Hussein, Washington needs a regional bogeyman as a pretext to retain its mushrooming military bases and sell weapons to the tune of billions to Iran’s worried neighbors. And Tehran needs the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan” as a locomotive to distract public sentiment from anti-government discontent and to reinforce its ideological tentacles with
anti-US/Israel proxy states and actors.

Likewise, Israel gains from having a belligerent state on its doorstep. As long as Israeli leaders can cite a major ‘existential threat” its exceptionalism and noncompliance with international laws and treaties can be excused. In reality, as various prominent Israeli intelligence figures have confirmed, Iran does not present a threat to Israel’s existence even it succeeds in producing nuclear weapons.

Let’s suppose that Iran has nuclear missiles and decides to launch preemptive strikes. Almost as soon as they got off the ground, the US and Israel would react in kind enveloping Iran in a series of mushroom clouds. Moreover, any nuclear attack on Israel would equally impact Arab Israelis and Palestinians as well as Iran’s Syrian and Lebanese allies. The ayatollahs have shown no suicidal tendencies, however, an Iranian bomb would be a deterrent to would-be foreign occupiers which is primarily why such capability will not be tolerated by the US halls of power.

Iran was one of nine countries on George W. Bush’s invasion wish list as long ago as 2001 and featured in his three-state “Axis of Evil.” A recent column by former US Army intelligence officer Ray McGovern and former Deputy National Intelligence Office Elizabeth Murray reminds us of a 2008 disclosure by the award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh who discovered that Bush administration officials brainstormed on how to provoke war with Iran.

There were a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war,” said Hersh. “The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build in our shipyard four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats? Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Strait of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That the kind of — that the level of stuff we’re talking about — Provocation.”

This is, of course, reminiscent of a Bush administration plot to paint a reconnaissance aircraft with UN colors before being sent into Iraqi airspace with fighter cover in hopes it would be shot down, as revealed in a leaked British memo.

McGovern and Murray also highlight an excerpt from Bush’s autobiography “Decision Points” in which he complains about news that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 because without a casus belli his hands were tied on the military side. In the event of regime change in Iran resulting in a more Western-friendly government, the US and Israel would be on the lookout for another regional foe.

You might imagine that were President Bush in the White House today, he’d be rubbing his hands with glee watching 10 days of Iranian naval exercises/war games in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Aden and listening to Iran’s warning that it would seal the Strait to shipping in the event of US sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry. Clearly, Iran has succumbed to the bait. After years of open threats from Washington and Tel Aviv during which it was on the defensive, it has morphed into a belligerent. But I believe even gung-ho Bush would be hesitant now.

Since 2008, the deckchairs have been rearranged. In the first place, debt-laden America simply cannot afford another major war and especially one that would be almost impossible to sell to the country’s cash-strapped population.

Secondly, the so-called Arab Spring appears to have nurtured the rise of Islamist parties most of which are anti-Israel and well-disposed toward Iran as “the enemy of my enemy.” The US can no longer rely on friendly rulers to forcibly quell the Arab Street’s fury at yet another Muslim country being aggressed — and America’s relations with fellow NATO member Turkey and nuclear Pakistan have visibly cooled.

Most of all, a growing number of military and intelligence experts are warning that strikes on Iranian military sites could have catastrophic unintended consequences. And lastly, over the last years, Tehran has beefed up its conventional weapons capability with missiles capable of reaching European cities.

We’ve reached the point where anything can happen. As tensions rise, so does the potential for a lit match to be inadvertently thrown by either side igniting a massive conflagration that would hike up oil prices at a time when global economies are fighting recession, making the Great Depression seem insignificant by comparison. The possibility of fully-fledged war will be further increased should one of the Republican frontrunners (with the exception of Ron Paul) send President Obama packing as most prostrate themselves before Israel and are champing at the bit to lay into its arch enemy.

Obama held out the promise of being a hero before being indoctrinated by the political establishment. If only he had the gumption to get on that white horse armed solely with dialogue he would finally deserve his Nobel Peace Prize — and rank among George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy as one of America’s presidential greats. But given his clay-footed record to date, I won’t hold my breath.

Article: LEAKED - US to start 'trade wars' with nations opposed to Monsanto, GMO crops

2012-01-04T04:41:00.006Z

Original Article written by Anthony Gucciardi for Truth Theory - Tuesday 3, January 2012

The United States is threatening nations who oppose Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) crops with military-style trade wars, according to information obtained and released by the organization WikiLeaks. Nations like France, which have moved to ban one of Monsanto’s GM corn varieties, were requested to be ‘penalized’ by the United States for opposing Monsanto and genetically modified foods. The information reveals just how deep Monsanto’s roots have penetrated key positions within the United States government, with the cables reporting that many U.S. diplomats work directly for Monsanto.

The WikiLeaks cable reveals that in late 2007, the United States ambassador to France and business partner to George W. Bush, Craig Stapleton, requested that the European Union along with particular nations that did not support GMO crops be penalized. Stapleton, who co-owned the Dallas/Fort Worth-based Texas Rangers baseball team with Bush in the 1990s, stated:

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices.”

The Leaked Political Agenda Behind Monsanto’s GMO Crops

The ambassador plainly calls for ‘target retaliation’ against nations who are against using Monsanto’s genetically modified corn, admittedly linked to organ damage and environmental
devastation. Amazingly, this is not an isolated case. In similar newly released cables, United States diplomats are found to have pushed GMO crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative. Furthermore, the U.S. specifically targeted advisers to the pope, due to the fact that many Catholic bishops and figureheads have openly denounced GMO crops. In fact, the Vatican has openly declared Monsanto’s GMO crops as a ‘new form of slavery’.

“A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath – to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach,” says the cable.

Perhaps the most shocking piece of information exposed by the cables is the fact that these U.S. diplomats are actually working directly for biotech corporations like Monsanto. The cables also highlight the relationship between the U.S. and Spain in their conquest to persuade other nations to allow for the expansion of GMO crops. Not only did the Spanish government secretly correspond with the U.S. government on the subject, but the U.S. government actually knew beforehand how Spain would vote before the Spanish biotech commission reported their decision regarding GMO crops. The cable states:

“In response to recent urgent requests by [Spanish rural affairs ministry] state secretary Josep Puxeu and Monsanto, post requests renewed US government support of Spain’s science-based agricultural biotechnology position through high-level US government intervention.”

Monsanto has undoubtedly infiltrated the United States government in order to push their health-endangering agenda, and this has been known long before the release of these WikiLeaks cables. The U.S. is the only place where Monsanto’s synthetic hormone Posilac is still used in roughly 1/3 of all cows, with 27 nations banning the substance over legitimate health concerns. Despite Monsanto’s best attempts at incognito political corruption, nothing can stop the grassroots anti-Monsanto movement that is taking over cities and nations alike.

Speech: Rebecca MacKinnon - Let's take back the Internet!

2011-12-19T16:22:00.000Z

In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control?

She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.

Video: George Carlin On Drugs And Marijuana

2011-12-18T15:31:00.002Z

Article: Max's privacy war brings Facebook to heel

2011-12-16T16:48:00.000Z

Original Article written by AP for The Age - Thursday 27, October 2011

Austrian student Max Schrems sits with 1222 pages worth of his personal data

that Facebook provided to him. Photo: AP

Max Schrems wasn't sure what he would get when he asked Facebook to send him a record of his personal data from three years of using the site.

What the 24-year-old Austrian law student didn't expect, though, was 1222 pages of data on a CD. It included chats he had deleted more than a year ago, "pokes" dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, let alone attended, and hundreds of other details.
Advertisement: Story continues below

Time for an "aha" moment.

In response, Schrems has launched an online campaign aimed at forcing the social media behemoth that has 800 million users to abide by European data privacy laws - something the Palo Alto, California-based company insists it already does.

Yet, since Schrems launched his Europe vs. Facebook website in August, Facebook has increasingly been making overtures not only to Schrems, but to other Europeans concerned about data privacy, including Germany's data security watchdogs.

"Have we done enough in the past to deal with you? No," Facebook's director of European public policy, Richard Allan, testified before a German parliamentary committee on new media. "Will we do more now? Yes."

The lawmakers were holding a hearing on privacy rights.

Europeans - Germans in particular - have long been more concerned about data privacy than their US peers. Still, the European campaign comes amid increased agitation in the US over what many view as invasive internet marketing practices that allow consumers to be observed, analysed and harvested for profit, with no regard for their right to privacy.

Last month, several US privacy interest groups asked the US Federal Trade Commission in Washington to look into recent changes made by Facebook that give the company greater ability to disclose users' personal information to businesses than it used to have.

The German lawmakers brought up a raft of complaints, from allegations that Facebook's "Like" button allows the company to track non-members' internet activity, to concerns over the company's use of facial recognition software on personal photos.

One of Schrems's main complaints with Facebook, he says, is that the company retains information far longer than allowed under European law, which in most cases is limited to a few months.

"I wondered, what are they doing with my data?" Schrems said, sitting with his laptop in a Viennese coffee house. "I thought through everything that one can do with that amount of information; all the marketing that is possible."

Under European law, consumers have the right to request a record of the personal information held by a company. The law further stipulates that to retain data beyond the limit of several months, a company must have a reason to do so.

In Australia it is not clear whether Facebook users can get as much of their data from the company as Schrems received. However, Facebook has several pages on its site explaining how people can pull down their profile data and other posts they've made to the site since being a member.

That issue has been the basis for several of the 22 formal complaints that Schrems and his group have lodged with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner - responsible for Facebook's Ireland-based European subsidiary, which serves all users outside of the US and Canada.

Schrems also disputes that Facebook has given him all of the information it holds about him, arguing that he has only received information from 23 out of a possible 57 data categories.

Facebook insists it has given Schrems and others in his group all of the information that is legally required. Still, Facebook insists it is allowed to hold back data that includes "a range of other things that are not personal information, including Facebook's proprietary fraud protection measures, and 'any other analytical procedure that Facebook runs,'" a Facebook spokesman said.

"This is clearly not personal data, and Irish data protection law rightly places some valuable and reasonable limits on the data that has to be provided," said the spokesman, who did not give a name in keeping with company policy.

Ciara O'Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the Irish commissioner, said a formal investigation has been launched into Schrems's complaints. In addition, a routine audit of Facebook's Irish operation will be conducted sooner than planned, to give authorities a complete picture in weighing the requests.

"We look at the law, and whether something is in breach of that law or not, whether we need to bring an organisation into compliance or not," O'Sullivan said in a telephone interview.

Allan repeatedly stressed that Facebook's view is that the way its service operates is completely compatible with European data protection law.

If an organisation is found not to be in compliance, they receive a warning and are asked to mend their ways. If they fail to do so, they could face a fine of about euro 100,000 ($133,500) - a drop in the bucket for a company valued by Goldman Sachs at $US50 billion ($48 billion).

Schrems, who has spent hours poring over his data and the European laws, points out that although the laws on data privacy are tough, there is little incentive for companies to follow them.

"I am not interested in money. What interests me is that the company follows the law," Schrems said. He argued that the only way that can happen is if Facebook users take matters into their own hands.

"It only takes a click to do something about it," he said.

Speech: John Pilger - Obama and Empire (2009)

2011-12-13T11:48:00.000Z

A truly inspirational speech by author, journalist, film maker John Pilger, at Socialism 2009.

Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Womens Building in San Francisco 07-04-09.

Article: WikiLeaks Posts Spy Firm Videos Offering Tools For Hacking iTunes, Gmail, Skype

2011-12-09T13:58:00.001Z

Original Article written by Andy Greenberg for Forbes - Thursday 08, December 2011

It’s no longer a secret that firms like Gamma International, maker of Finfisher spyware, sell tools for hacking computers and secretly surveilling Internet and cell phone users. But nothing captures the creep factor of that business quite like the firm’s own low-budget, computer-animated marketing videos.

On Wednesday, WikiLeaks released a series of video files obtained from UK-based Gamma that show how its products can be used to monitor Wifi networks from a hotel lobby, hack cell phones and PCs with fake software updates, or infect computers from a USB key to intercept Skype conversations, log encryption passwords and read private files. The videos were posted as part of the secret-spilling group’s ongoing project in cooperation with Privacy International and Bugged Planet known as the Spy Files, which aims to collect and publish marketing documents and other revealing materials from technology firms that sell surveillance equipment.

While most of the capabilities shown in the videos have been previously revealed in a special report by the Wall Street Journal that published dozens of surveillance firms’ sales documents, the Journal had posted only screenshots and short segments of the videos, perhaps fearing that Gamma International would take legal action against the newspaper for copyright violations. WikiLeaks seems to have no such concerns.

After the downfall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the BBC obtained evidence that Gamma had offered its technology to the country’s regime for surveilling Egyptians’ use of tools like Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Gmail and Skype.

Click on the screenshots below to see the full videos on WikiLeaks’ site. (Though I should warn that each is temporarily obscured by an obtrusive fundraising pop-up window.)

And check out the complete collection of Gamma’s videos here, along with the reust of the Spy Files here.

An Internet service provider tool offers a fake iTunes update to a machine that infects it with spyware.

A desktop tool allows the customer to sit in a hotel lobby spy on fellow users of its Wifi network.

The company's spyware intercepts a user's Skype conversation and data he transfers from a folder encrypted with the common encryption software TrueCrypt.

Gamma's fake BlackBerry update infects the user's phone and offers access to its data.

Finfisher claims its training course can show staff how to break into webmail services including Gmail.

Interview with Julian Assange, by John Pilger (2010)

2011-12-09T08:50:00.005Z

Article: Tahrir Square And The Occupy Movement

2011-12-08T12:19:00.001Z

Original Article written by David Wearing for The Occupied Times - Friday 18, November 2011

In the rising wave of international protests happening under the Occupy banner, Cairo’s Tahrir Square has gained iconic status, frequently invoked by activists from New York and Oakland to Barcelona and London. The substantial differences between what is happening now in Zuccotti Park, or outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and events in Egypt at the start of this year, are obvious enough. Concerns about the abuse of civil liberties and the undemocratic distribution of power in Western societies are certainly real, but thankfully we do not live in anything like the sort of authoritarian police state that was presided over by Hosni Mubarak (and which in many ways persists today under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces). In one sense, it is those very differences that form part of what makes Tahrir Square so important to activists in the West. If Egyptians can begin to achieve positive social change in spite of the huge obstacles they face, then what excuse do we have for not mounting successful challenges to our own structures of power? Tahrir Square undoubtedly stands as an inspiration, but the connection goes deeper than that.

Throughout his reign, Mubarak enjoyed long-standing and substantial military and diplomatic support from the United States and Britain. Barack Obama’s response, when asked if he viewed Mubarak as authoritarian, given the thousands of political prisoners held by the Egyptian regime, was to say “no, I prefer not to use labels for folks”. While gangs of pro-regime thugs were being unleashed on protestors in Cairo, Tony Blair saw fit to describe Mubarak as “immensely courageous and a force for good“.

During the revolution itself, the position articulated by the British government until very close to the point where Mubarak fell was that the dictator should “listen” to the protesters and make “reforms”. The call from Tahrir Square, by contrast, and as William Hague and David Cameron well knew, was not “the people demand that the dictator listen to our legitimate aspirations and enact reforms”. The call, now famous throughout the world, was
a simple one: “ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam”, “the people demand the fall of the regime”. Only when it became clear that Mubarak’s position had become untenable irrespective of their wishes did Britain and the US belatedly decided to support his departure, notwithstanding a brief dalliance with the idea of replacing him with the regime’s torturer-in-chief, Omar Suleiman.

A recent poll showed 51% of Britons agreeing with the statement that OccupyLSX and Occupy Wall Street “are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people”. That system – perhaps more accurately understood as putting profit and power before people – is an international one, with its 1% ruling class including a diverse range of figures from David Cameron and Tony Blair, Fred Goodwin and Bob Diamond, to regimes like the notoriously tyrannical Saudi monarchy, with whom the British state and associated corporations enjoy one of the world’s most lucrative arms contracts.

The connection between the British and American governments and the tyrants of the Middle East has endured since the early twentieth century, as Washington and London have sought to exert proxy control over the huge material and strategic prize that the region’s energy reserves represent. The regional order in the Middle East is a key component of the US-led, UK-supported, neoliberal capitalist system, and notwithstanding its lack of oil wealth, Egypt’s historic role as the indispensible nation of the Arab world make it a lynchpin of that system, and vital to Western interests (or rather, the interests of the West’s 1%). Mubarak’s fall was bitterly lamented by his fellow one-percenters in the House of Saud, whose subsequent involvement in the violent crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain gives you a sense of the nature of our government’s alliances in the Middle East.

In addition to his role as regional strongman, Mubarak also moved to integrate Egypt into the global economy along 1%-approved lines, tasking his son Gamal with effecting neoliberal reforms that saw the living standards of ordinary Egyptians plunge, yet still earned the regime regular praise from the IMF. Meanwhile Tunisia, another IMF poster child, was undergoing a similar experience, as growth under crony-capitalism was embezzled by the Ben Ali clique while people like the young street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi fought a losing battle to keep their heads above water. The financial crash that plunged the world into recession in 2008 inflamed the existing grievances of the Arab 99%, with Bouazizi’s self-immolation triggering the uprisings that toppled Ben Ali, and then Mubarak in quick succession. As Juan Cole, Professor of History and Middle East expert at the University of Michigan, points out:

“It’s easy now to overlook what clearly ties the beginning of the Arab Spring to the European Summer and the present American Fall: the point of the Tunisian revolution was not just to gain political rights, but to sweep away that 1%, popularly imagined as a sort of dam against economic opportunity.”

All over the world, the economic crisis became a crisis of political legitimacy for governments who had adhered to the now discredited neoliberal orthodoxy. And as the system is international in scope, so the protests became consciously internationalist in character. It should therefore come as no surprise that activists from Tahrir Square recently sent a message to Occupy Wall Street which said that “we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle”.

In Britain, critics of the Occupy movement have cited the numerous causes espoused by the protesters as a sign of their incoherence of purpose. In reality, the protesters understand that a complex but nevertheless identifiable system – which puts profit and power before people – is responsible for a wide range and variety of malign outcomes, from global warming to wars of choice to welfare cuts and unemployment. To the extent that politicians and pundits are capable of discerning the mere existence of this system, they have seen it as no more than the natural way of things, the best of all possible worlds, to which there is no alternative. That position, however, is no longer tenable at a time when neoliberalism is undergoing a profound crisis, with increasingly devastating consequences for millions around the world. The protesters understand that neoliberal capitalism is not ordained by God, but sustained by human beings through a series of choices. They have therefore taken up the duty abrogated by the political class to subject those choices, and that system, to proper critical scrutiny and challenge, within the particular context of their own local circumstances. That is the connection between Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, the City of London, and scores of other locations worldwide.

By David Wearing

David Wearing is a PhD researcher, studying Britain’s response to the Arab uprisings, at the School of Public Policy, University College London. He is a co-editor of New Left Project

Documentary: Century of Self - by Adam Curtis (2002)

2011-12-07T18:10:00.021Z

Century of Self , Episode 1:
Happiness Machines

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

Click on the playlist icon (bottom right) to navigate through the parts!
If you can't navigate through the different parts, I have them linked here:
PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 1.4 - PART 1.5 - PART 1.6

Century of Self , Episode 2:
The Engineering of Consent

The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

Click on the playlist icon (bottom right) to navigate through the parts!
If you can't navigate through the different parts, I have them linked here:
PART 2.1 - PART 2.2 - PART 2.3 - PART 2.4 - PART 2.5 - PART 2.6

Century of Self , Episode 3:

There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads:
He Must Be Destroyed

In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.

Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics.

This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.

But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

Click on the playlist icon (bottom right) to navigate through the parts!
If you can't navigate through the different parts, I have them linked here:
PART 3.1 - PART 3.2 - PART 3.3 - PART 3.4 - PART 3.5 - PART 3.6

Century of Self , Episode 4:

Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self.

Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.

Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.

The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

Click on the playlist icon (bottom right) to navigate through the parts!
If you can't navigate through the different parts, I have them linked here:
PART 4.1 - PART 4.2 - PART 4.3 - PART 4.4 - PART 4.5 - PART 4.61 - PART 4.62

Alternatively watch the FULL LENGTH Documentary - 3:54:56. Knowledge marathon! :)

Speech: Dan Ariely - Are we in control of our own decisions?

2011-12-07T10:19:00.000Z

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Interview: Michael Gundlach (AdBlock For Chrome/Safari Developer)

2011-12-06T04:49:00.001Z

Original Article written by Jeff Weisbein for BestTechie - Feburary 16, February 2011

I was fortunate enough to have a Q&A session with AdBlock For Chrome and AdBlock For Safari developer, Michael Gundlach. If you’re not familiar with AdBlock For Chrome or Safari, it’s an extension that blocks online advertisements from loading within the browser. There are over 2 million people who use AdBlock every day.

Let’s see what he has to say.

1. What was the inspiration to create AdBlock For Chrome?
Firefox’s Adblock Plus addon — I love it and have used it for years. I had halfway switched to Chrome from Firefox in 2009 because Chrome is so much faster, but couldn’t use it for long because of all the ads. So the first day that extension support shipped in Chrome, I went excitedly to download an ABP port and found to my dismay that it didn’t exist — and that the author had no plans to port it to Chrome. There were a few other ad blocking Chrome extensions in their infancy that weren’t terribly good, so I decided to build AdBlock For Chrome to fill the void.

I was also inspired by earlier frustrations with ABP’s somewhat difficult UI — I’m a power user but when I tried to change my filter settings to opt in to Google AdWords text ads, I managed to break ABP. So I wanted to make sure to make AdBlock For Chrome usable by anybody and their grandma. So I focused on making it work out-of-the-box, and making opting in to text ads a one-checkbox-click experience, and making an intuitive filter creation wizard. I try hard to balance making a powerful ad blocker with keeping the UI simple — a lot like Chrome.

2. Do you personally hate advertisements (online or offline)?
I like ads that help me solve the task at hand, so I like Google’s relevant text ads in response to commercial search queries. And when ads have enough intrinsic entertainment value that they’re virally being watched on demand online, I think the advertiser has done its job well.

But mostly, yes, “hate” might be the right word to describe how I feel about many ads. I hate the message of consumerism behind them: “Don’t value your life, your health, your
family and friends; value what you own. Actually, don’t value what you own; value this thing that you don’t own yet.” I hate ads that sell with sex: they manipulate men, and demean women, and tempt recovering porn addicts (I’ve received a few thank-you emails specifically thanking me for blocking ads for that reason.)

Separate from the content within ads, their format can drive me crazy too. I can’t believe that anyone enjoys ads that get in your way and demand your attention, like a video pre-roll ad, or a full-screen ad in front of a news article, or video ads that cover the bottom quarter of the video until you close them.

Offline, my wife is kind enough to sort the mail so that I can pretend we don’t receive any junk mail :)

3. Why should someone use AdBlock For Chrome over another ad blocking extension?
It’s so simple to use. Casual users can click Install and it Just Works — they’re automatically subscribed to filter lists appropriate for their locale, and the UI is probably translated into their language (there are 23 translations). Advanced users can still get to powerful features, through an intuitive UI that allows but doesn’t presuppose knowledge of how to write an ad filter.

It’s the most thorough. It prevents more ad resources from being downloaded than any other ad blocker I’m aware of. Because Chrome doesn’t offer full support for blocking ads, most ad blockers have had to resort to hiding most ads after downloading them. I go through some crazy hoops behind the scenes to pull off true resource blocking despite the lack of a proper API in Chrome.

It gets updated really frequently — to the point where Google is rate limiting my updates, because the Extension Gallery doesn’t want to shell out bandwidth for multiple updates a week to 2 million users. As soon as a new feature is written and tested, I ship it, so that users get the improved experience as soon as possible.

It isn’t going to disappear out from under you or stop working. It’s the most popular extension in Chrome, and the Chrome team makes changes to Chromium based on feedback from AdBlock users (e.g. the new Hide Button feature in Chrome 9, and the resource blocking API that they’re working on to simplify AdBlock). I wrote AdBlock For Safari at the request of the Safari team, who included APIs in Safari specifically to support my extension.

And I think I love my users more than anybody else does :) I learned years ago that I’d prefer to write software that improved people’s lives over software that I was paid a lot to make, so the huge response to AdBlock For Chrome has been a dream come true. Basically all my free time in 2010 went to working on the extension, and I don’t regret it.

4. You recently quit your job to focus on AdBlock development. AdBlock currently has over 2 million users (and growing), if you look at the numbers it would appear you could make a decent amount of money through donations. However, now that you must rely on people to make an optional donation to earn a living, does that worry you?

My wife and I had saved up from “real” work enough that I can try this out for a while and see what happens. I was kind of surprised that fewer than 1 in a thousand users donates, but I hoped that with the launch of the Chrome Web Store AdBlock For Chrome would have more exposure and it might turn into a viable source of income.

Worst case I can go back to working for someone else, but I really, really hope I can keep working for my users instead :) Like I said above, I get so much more out of someone saying “thanks, your software made my life better” than I do out of getting a paycheck, so as long as I can scrape by I will keep working on this extension full time.

I’ve been thanked by a pastor for providing something he can suggest to his flock to make the Internet safer for their kids to surf. I’ve been thanked by a blind man whose screen reader no longer has to read him the advertisements. I’ve been thanked by a recovering porn addict who uses AdBlock to hide links to questionable web sites. I’ve been thanked by students with ADHD who can surf the web without being pulled in ten directions at once. Emails like these are so, so much more motivation than a paycheck is.

5. Have you ever received any angry emails from a company or website which relies on advertisements to make money? If so, any stories you would like to share?

After I unveiled AdBlock For Safari at WWDC 2010, a guy came up and said that he worked for [a popular news website], and that his company absolutely hates my extension. I asked him what he personally thought of it, and he said “Oh, I use it and love it, it’s awesome, of course!” and shook my hand.

In a similar vein, I recently got an email from a developer at [a popular social networking site], and in speaking with him I asked him how he found my address. He said that he was installing AdBlock For Chrome, and that he loved it, and that “all the devs here use it” — at a company that makes its money selling your information to advertisers.

I think these nicely illustrate the tension between users and publishers: many publishers want to shove ads down our throats, but everybody knows that most ads as they exist today on the Internet don’t serve users’ interests.

6. Can you provide information about any future developments or plans for AdBlock?
I’m waiting with bated breath for the improved resource blocking API in Chrome, so that I can simplify the code and stop doing all the backflips that work around the missing support. That API will also mean I can block ads in videos across the web, instead of only on YouTube where I use a site-specific hack.

I’d like to offer one-click opt-in to different classes of ads (e.g. AdSense, or all text ads) like I do with AdWords today. I’ve also been talking to the ABP team about convincing advertisers to support a protocol for “unobtrusive” ads, so that users could opt-in to a wide range of ads that promised to behave nicely.

I’d like to spread the word more. 2 million users is still fewer than 1 in 60 Chrome users, and I suspect that many more people would love to use it if they only knew it existed. I’m relying on word of mouth, so tell your friends, and if you know Oprah, convince her to tweet about it.

7. Do you personally enable any ads on websites you visit regularly to show your support?
I actually visit very few websites regularly, ironically. I love Slashdot, but I went cold turkey a few years ago because it was sucking up time that I could spend doing something productive, or being with my family. I suppose I see ads on websites more frequently than most AdBlock users, because I’m so often testing, disabling, re-enabling, changing filter list subscriptions, etc. I tend to buy merch to support websites that I love — the XKCD book, Topatoco T shirts, the Machine Of Death book from qwantz. Hm, apparently I like webcomics.

Once AdBlock has opt-in support for AdSense, I’ll probably just opt myself in to AdSense text ads across the board, to support publishers who don’t try to shove ads down my throat.

8. You have a version of AdBlock for both Chrome and Safari, which browser do you prefer and why?
I am impressed with Safari for building and open-sourcing WebKit, the excellent rendering engine that Chrome adopted. But I like Chrome’s speed, and that it has a security sandbox, and how little screen real estate it uses; and its extension system is so good that other browsers are imitating it.

From a development perspective, packaging a Chrome extension can be done in a script, while packaging a Safari extension requires running Safari and clicking menu items with a mouse. And Chrome extensions auto-update themselves, while Safari users must opt *in* to auto-update — so I suspect that most of my Safari users are not getting bugfixes.

Finally, from a philosophical perspective, Chrome is entirely open source, unlike Safari, and I like the future that Chrome OS is betting on more than the future that the iPad is betting on.

9. Any chance you could stop AdBlock from working at all on BestTechie? Just kidding. But seriously…
AdBlock needs support for opting in to AdSense ads on publisher sites. If you guys show AdSense text ads, well, patches welcome! :)

10. In your opinion, which site has the worst advertisements?
There are a few websites that I always visit as smoketests before shipping an update, because if AdBlock can block their ads then it must be working rather well. But really, pick any website that interrupts you with large, animated ads pushing a product that you don’t need, and I’d consider that website plenty offensive.

11. Have you ever seen an ad which you have (or wanted) to click?
Plenty! Like I said, I like search result ads for products I was looking for; but in the past I’ve also been caught off guard by ads that were interposed to look like required steps of a form, ads that I thought were notifications from Windows, and ads that masqueraded as hyperlinks in news articles. Thank goodness for AdBlock :)

Documentary: The New rulers of the world (by John Pilger)

2011-12-02T13:54:00.008Z

Indonesia is just another gem in the crown of asian capitalism, the prosperity of which is heavily dependent on oppressive regimes, sustainable poverty and the continuous influx of western capital. Our Gap boxers and nike shoes shall remind us all that the words development, democracy and fair trade have long now found their place in an orwellian dictionary. Also check out the documentary the Shock Doctrine (posted below).

Documentary: The Shock Doctrine

2011-12-01T19:31:00.003Z

A documentary adaptation Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. An investigation of disaster capitalism, based on Naomi Klein’s proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001.

The films traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Follow to part 2 here!

Article: OCCUPY - Then what?

2011-12-01T19:11:00.000Z

Original Article written by EricAllenBell for Daily KOS - Wednesday 9, November 2011

In February of 2011 I wrote a very short article for MichelMoore.com called “Egypt is Just the Beginning” (http://www.michaelmoore.com/...). In it I said “LET'S GET TO WORK on removing the Plutocracy in this country. Let's take the power back from Wall Street, from the Military Industrial Complex. Let's be next to peacefully shift power from the privileged few to the restless many - the people who do all the work and deserve to have a government that reflects OUR interests instead of the piggish appetites of the power elite. Egypt is just the beginning.”

We just took a quantum leap forward by getting people organized and out on the streets. This is history in the making. This is an interruption from the regularly scheduled programming. But this is also disorienting and alarming so many people, who didn't see it coming, don't know what to make of it or don't know what it means. It's to be expected that the masses would have an initial knee-jerk reaction to the Occupation of Wall Street - or no reaction at all because they’re busy watching “Dancing With the Stars” and can’t kick the habit of feeding off the entertainment machine that has become America.

And many of us who are involved in this Occupation don't want to see it squandered, hijacked, sold out, fizzled out or forgotten. We know what we want. We know when we want it. And we realize that by a “reasonable” person’s standards, what we want is unreasonable. I write this article with the belief that we can be unreasonable together. History’s greatest achievements were fashioned and shaped by unreasonable people, with unreasonable ideas and unreasonable expectations. We just happen to have been born into a time when we are being invited to join their ranks. And in that spirit, I’d like to share a few ideas with you about how we can work together to revolutionize the world and leave it better than we found it…

When it comes to Occupy Wall Street, time is a critical factor. The longer we keep the pressure on, look for new and creative ways to keep getting the message out - and don't back down, eventually larger and larger segments of the population will begin to rethink some of their tightly-held beliefs about money, government, education, the media, and most importantly the environment. This will not happen overnight. In fact, many cold winter nights will be spent by those who have the courage, the time and the ability to sleep in tents, through a dark New York Winter, and maintain an occupation - to stay the course and not fade away.

Most people, once they make up their mind about something, once they reach a conclusion, they don't want to have to rethink it. It’s uncomfortable. And if there is one thing we Americans love more than Jesus, it’s our comfort. The great thinker, J. Krishnamurti once said that the nature of intelligence was inquiry. He went on to say that once inquiry ceases, once one becomes satisfied with their conclusions, intelligence ceases.

America is a lazy town. We must be patient but diligent. The longer we can keep the pressure on, the more dialogue occurs, the more we exchange ideas, the better chance we have of working together to solve problems that, only recently, the majority refused to believe even existed. We're not there yet. As a great Carpenter once said, “We’ve only just begun”.

The vast majority of America still does not know why we Occupy. They know nothing about the Federal Reserve System and the secrecy surrounding it. They don't know what the word "Plutocracy" means and many of them don't want to know. We've got a long road ahead of us and it is uncharted territory. If something as bold as this were uncomplicated, we'd have done it a long time ago.

So where do we go from here? We've occupied parks and cities and held a General Strike, won over some of the media, got some celebrity endorsements and even our own President mentioned it on the Jay Leno show, using the word “folks” in almost every sentence. After several journalists have been arrested, or hit with a baton or maced, much of the mainstream media is on our side. Imagine that. But most of those journalists do take orders from those who own media, which brings us back to that word that most people are too busy to look up: "Plutocracy". If only there was a dictionary online…
http://dictionary.reference.com/...

So what do we do now?

Step 1 - Keep the pressure on: OCCUPY TOGETHER. This means that those who can take to the streets - don't back down. If you are sitting on your couch watching the evening news and complaining because you saw someone with a pierced nose at an Occupation rally say something you don’t like, and you think that sends the wrong message, get our ass off the couch and find the nearest Occupy rally. If you can afford it, maybe bring some food with you or bottled water. And make sure you speak to the media while you're there. Let your voice be heard. It’s one thing to sit on the sidelines and yell “boo” and it’s quite another thing to suit up and get in the game. The People, united, embody the true meaning of the phrase “Too Big to Fail”. Occupy Together.

Step 2 - Take your own personal power back: OCCUPY WITHIN. This means that you have the courage to question your own conclusions. Many of us would like to believe that we already did that and have everything all figured out. But here I must agree with J. Krishnamurti, in that this is where intelligence hits a brick wall. You might think you “get it” and others “just don’t get it”. For example, someone just told me the other day that the solution was simple: Just get money out of politics. And they went on to say that how we do this is to make sure we have a Democrat as President so he can appoint more Liberal judges to the Supreme Court and overturn corporate person-hood. While this sounds like a simple enough idea, intoxicatingly simple, it only treats the symptom. It fails to even acknowledge the underlying problem. So what is the underlying problem? I would say it goes very, very deep. In short, up until now, human beings have had a tendency to solve our problems in a way that creates more problems. Our educational system has more to do with indoctrination, in other words teaching us what to think instead of teaching us how to think. It is very humbling and yet very courageous to even consider, that the way you have been thinking up until now is actually part of the problem . Is it possible that it's not all "them" or those people over there who have screwed everything up? Could it be that in fact we are the 100 Percent? To "Occupy Within" means to take personal responsibility, to take personal inventory, to reconsider everything we've been taught was real, to rethink our beliefs - especially our favorite beliefs that make us feel comfortable. It really is true that inward revolution creates outward revolution. And you don’t have to wait until payday to start, to wait until you feel inspired or are having a good hair day. Start to take back your personal power NOW. Have the courage to see where you have given it away. You gave it away - and you can take it back. When a person is undergoing an inward revolution, their thoughts, words and actions will be, by their very nature, revolutionary. Occupy Within.

Step 3 - Empower the Collective Consciousness: EDUCATE. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, use social media, use the phone, use the lunch table at work, use whatever means are at your disposal to educate. Most people still think we have a two-party system. They don't know what "Corporatism" means and they sort of don't want to know. Although it is widely agreed upon by now that our government is corrupt, most people still believe that the government is going to solve our problems. And if we rebuild it, it might play a very important role in solving our problems - one day. But today the government belongs to the ruling power elite. They paid for it after all. This is another painful truth. Naturally, the Republicans want to blame the Democrats and the Democrats want to blame the Republicans. The religious establishment want to blame the Devil, and the Devil did not return my calls in time for the printing of this article, but his office did release a brief statement saying that he did not exist. Meanwhile, the Plutocrats and the Oligarchs are laughing at how we took the bait, how we walked right into their "Divide and Conquer" trap. Good Cop (D) versus Bad Cop (R). LOL - Yes, they are laughing all the way to the bank, which you bailed out by the way, and they own. If you really want to avoid seeing some really painful data, whatever you do, don't click this link here. I mean it, do not click this link: http://motherjones.com/...

Okay, don't shoot the messenger. I told you not to click it. The fact is, we cannot transmit something we do not have. Each of us must educate ourselves before we can begin to educate others. This is a harder nut to crack in many ways than understanding the Viet Nam war and trying to explain that to your neighbor - and it was designed to be that way. How do you tell Frank at the gas station about Fractional Reserve Banking? (No offense, Frank. I'm still trying to figure it out). We know lobbyists have bought most of our politicians and we can talk about that. We can Educate. And this brings me to the next step...

Step 4 - Share information: DIALOGUE. Twitter alone will give you tons of information in just a matter of seconds. Twitter is easier to use than most TV remote controls. You just enter a hashtag (that is this symbol here "#") for what you want to follow. For instance, if I enter #OccupyWallStreet I will see an activity stream, much like Facebook, where people share links. These are often links that show, for example which candidate was backed by Wall Street in the last Presidential election (ouch, I know) and what they got in return (remember, facing the truth takes humility and guts, and I hope you didn’t click that link back there at Step 3, that I told you not to click). Some of these Twitter links will take you to widely respected sources of information on how the rich are doing better than ever, how poverty is spiking like crazy, how foreclosures are up, how the middle class is shrinking, which corporations are paying no taxes at all - while receiving huge tax "refunds" at the same time. You will even find links that demonstrate how Wall Street is doing better under this President than under the past several Presidents that went before him. Or, you could decide to recoil, to cower in the comfort of your own cozy partisan belief system and avoid going down the rabbit hole altogther. While others are doing the work, you could sit back in your comfortable chair, turn on the Corporate News Network, watch their spin on the Occupation and become a critic, telling anyone who will listen to you how those people out there are doing it all wrong. What they ought to do is... Well, you get the idea. If revolution were easy, everyone would be doing it. And that is why we must stay in Dialogue.

Step 5 - Leave a better world for future generations: CHANGE: And here is where we reach what Al Gore called "An Inconvenient Truth". The unfortunate fact here, the one that scares the majority into paralysis, is the fact that the way in which we are currently living is simply unsustainable. This is now truer than ever - at the most basic level - and that is our fragile environment. If the Universe had social workers, one of them would come and take Planet Earth away from us for abusing her so badly. It’s a strange thing, I just said its "our environment" as if it belongs to us when really we belong to it. For now we are its caretakers, but we won’t be for long, if we continue as we have been. If we do not take the power back from the psychotic, greedy, fraction of one percent, who have convinced themselves they can do no wrong, who have for thousands of years enslaved people, caused wars, caused famines, mismanaged resources, brainwashed the masses and are hellbent on destroying the Earth, then we will, by our own inaction, laziness and cowardice, leave apocalyptic conditions for our grandchildren and their children until there are no more children born into this world. One day the intelligence of this planet might just heal itself, by removing this parasitic life form that is smart enough to build a nuclear bomb and just stupid enough to use it. We just absolutely must Change.

So, after going through steps 1 through 4 thoroughly and with a vengeance - as if our lives depended on it (and they do) it is my view that this will make the execution of Step 5 rather self-evident. And here's where it gets interesting... Left-brain people tend to think that in order to accomplish anything you need a plan with clear measurable objectives and a realistic blueprint for getting there. And the left-brain folks are half right. Right-brain people tend to follow their intuition. They are out protesting in the streets not because of any one particular issue but because they feel captured by an underlying sentiment. To the Right-brained individual, "the process is the product". Be true to the process and this will be reflected in the quality of the finished masterpiece. And the Right-brained folks are half right too. But in order to sustain a radical revolution, both inward and outward, it will require both hemispheres of the brain, both sides of the aisle, the mind and the heart, the artists and the accountants, the “us” and the “them”, confronting our worst fears and allowing ourselves together to believe again, in our greatest hopes.

OCCUPY TOGETHER - OCCUPY WITHIN

Peace,
Eric Allen Bell
http://www.EricAllenBell.org

Speech: Dan Pink - The surprising science of Motivation

2011-11-30T15:15:00.000Z

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

Speech: Jane McGonigal - Gaming can make a better world

2011-11-29T15:51:00.001Z

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Documentary: Run from the cure

2011-11-22T12:14:00.005Z

The following presentation of RUN FROM THE CURE: The Rick Simpson Story was made possible by Rick Simpson and video producer Christian Laurette.
Made for free to teach YOU how to heal yourself of disease and illness using cannabinoids.

Article: Why Inspiration Matters

2011-11-14T20:42:00.000Z

Original Article written by Scott Barry Kaufman for Harvard Business Review - Tuesday 8, November 2011

"When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey." — Rudyard Kipling

In a culture obsessed with measuring talent and ability, we often overlook the important role of inspiration. Inspiration awakens us to new possibilities by allowing us to transcend our ordinary experiences and limitations. Inspiration propels a person from apathy to possibility, and transforms the way we perceive our own capabilities. Inspiration may sometimes be overlooked because of its elusive nature. Its history of being treated as supernatural or divine hasn't helped the situation. But as recent research shows, inspiration can be activated, captured, and manipulated, and it has a major effect on important life outcomes.

Inspiration has three main qualities. Pyschologists Todd M. Thrash and Andrew J. Elliot have noted these core aspects of inspiration: evocation, transcendence, and approach motivation. First, inspiration is evoked spontaneously without intention. Inspiration is also transcendent of our more animalistic and self-serving concerns and limitations. Such transcendence often involves a moment of clarity and awareness of new possibilities. As Thrash and Elliot note, "The heights of human motivation spring from the beauty and goodness that precede us and awaken us to better possibilities." This moment of clarity is often vivid, and can take the form of a grand vision, or a "seeing" of something one has not seen before (but that was probably always there). Finally, inspiration involves approach motivation, in which the individual strives to transmit, express, or actualize a new idea or vision. According to Thrash and Elliot, inspiration involves both being inspired by something and acting on that inspiration.

Inspired people share certain characteristics. Thrash and Elliot developed the "Inspiration Scale," which measures the frequency with which a person experiences inspiration in their daily lives. They found that inspired people were more open to new experiences, and reported more absorption in their tasks. "Openness to Experience" often came before inspiration, suggesting that those who are more open to inspiration are more likely to experience it. Additionally, inspired individuals weren't more conscientious, supporting the view that inspiration is something that happens to you and is not willed. Inspired individuals also reported having a stronger drive to master their work, but were less competitive, which makes sense if you think of competition as a non-transcendent desire to outperform competitors. Inspired people were more intrinsically motivated and less extrinsically motivated, variables that also strongly impact work performance. Inspiration was least related to variables that involve agency or the enhancement of resources, again demonstrating the transcendent nature of inspiration. Therefore, what makes an object inspiring is its perceived subjective intrinsic value, and not how much it's objectively worth or how attainable it is. Inspired people also reported higher levels of important psychological resources, including belief in their own abilities, self-esteem, and optimism. Mastery of work, absorption, creativity, perceived competence, self-esteem, and optimism were all consequences of inspiration, suggesting that inspiration facilitates these important psychological resources. Interestingly, work mastery also came before inspiration, suggesting that inspiration is not purely passive, but does favor the prepared mind.

Inspiration is not the same as positive affect. Compared to the normal experiences of everyday life, inspiration involves elevated levels of positive affect and task involvement, and lower levels of negative affect. Inspiration is not the same state as positive affect, however. Compared to being in an enthusiastic and excited state, people who enter an inspired state (by thinking of a prior moment they were inspired) reported greater levels of spirituality and meaning, and lower levels of volitional control, controllability, and self-responsibility for their inspiration. Whereas positive affect is activated when someone is making progress toward their immediate, conscious goals, inspiration is more related to an awakening to something new, better, or more important: transcendence of one's previous concerns.

Inspiration is the springboard for creativity. Inspired people view themselves as more creative and show actual increases in self-ratings of creativity over time. Patent-holding inventors report being inspired more frequently and intensely than non-patent holders, and the higher the frequency of inspiration, the higher the number of patents held. Being in a state of inspiration also predicts thecreativity of writing samples across scientific writing, poetry, and fiction (as judged by a panel of fellow students) independent of SAT verbal scores, Openness to Experience, positive affect, specific behaviors (e.g., deleting prior sentences), and aspects of the product quality (e.g., technical merit). Inspired writers are more efficient and productive, and spend less time pausing and more time writing. The link between inspiration and creativity is consistent with the transcendent aspect of inspiration, since creativity involves seeing possibility beyond existing constraints. Importantly, inspiration and effort predict different aspects of an activity. Individuals who exerted more effortwriting spent more of their time pausing, deleted more words, wrote more sentences per paragraph, and had better technical merit and use of rhyming in poems, but their work was not considered more creative.

Inspiration facilitates progress toward goals. In a recent study conducted by Marina Milyavskaya and her colleagues, college students were asked to report three goals they intended to accomplish throughout the course of the semester. They then reported on their progress three times a month. Those who scored higher on the Inspiration Scale displayed increased goal progress, and their progress was a result of setting more inspired goals. Therefore, people who were generally more inspired in their daily lives also tended to set inspired goals, which were then more likely to be successfully attained. Importantly, the relationship between inspiration and goal progress was reciprocal: goal progress also predicted future goal inspiration. As the researchers note, "this suggests that goal progress and goal inspiration build on each other to form a cycle of greater goal inspiration and greater goal pursuit." Finally, inspired individuals reported experiencing more purpose in life and more gratitude.

Inspiration increases well-being. In another study, those who were exposed to Michael Jordan's greatness experienced higher levels of positive affect, and this increase in positive affect was completely explained by their score on the Inspiration Scale. This inspiration was not transitory though, predicting positive well-being (e.g., positive affect, life satisfaction) three months later! Inspiration was more strongly related to future than to present satisfaction. The extent to which inspiration lasted was explained by self-reported levels of purpose and gratitude in life.
These findings show that inspiration matters a lot., which may cause someone to feel pressure to become inspired and helpless to do so considering the evocative and spontaneous nature of inspiration. The writer Elizabeth Gilbert rightly expresses this concern in her inspiring TED talk. I agree with Gilbert that one should not put pressure on oneself to become inspired. These key scientific findings suggest that inspiration is not willed--it happens. Knowing this should free you from the pressure to make inspiration happen.

This does not mean that inspiration is completely outside your control. Contrary to the view of inspiration as purely mythical or divine, I think inspiration is best thought of as a surprising interaction between your current knowledge and the information you receive from the world. There are things you can do to increase the likelihood of inspiration occurring. Research shows quite clearly that preparation ("work mastery") is a key ingredient. While inspiration is not the same as effort, effort is an essential condition for inspiration, preparing the mind for an inspirational experience. Openness to Experience and positive affect are also important, as having an open mind and approach-oriented attitude will make it more likely that you will be aware of the inspiration once it arrives. Small accomplishments are also important, as they can boost inspiration, setting off a productive and creative cycle.

Speech: Martin Hanczyc - The line between life and not-life

2011-11-13T00:21:00.001Z

In his lab, Martin Hanczyc makes "protocells," experimental blobs of chemicals that behave like living cells. His work demonstrates how life might have first occurred on Earth ... and perhaps elsewhere too

Article: Psychedelics Open the Mind

2011-10-31T21:27:00.001Z

Katharine MacLean and her colleagues at John Hopkins Medical School administered a high-dose of psilocybin (the active ingredient of 'magic mushrooms') to 52 people, aged 46 on average, who were not well acquainted with hallucinogens but were curious about their effects. The participants completed two to five 8-hour sessions separated by at least three weeks. During the sessions, they either took psilocybin or a non-hallucinogenic drug, lied down on a couch, put on an eye mask, and listened to music on headphones. They were instructed to focus on their inner experience. To minimize psychological damage, all participants received extensive initial screening (to make sure they didn't have any prior mental disorders) and received extensive support and guidance before, during, and after the sessions. All participants were followed up more than a year after the last session involving psilocybin.

Participants showed a significant increase in Openness to Experience after taking the psilocybin, but showed no differences in Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, or Conscentiousness. The dimensions of Openness that increased were openness to fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, and ideas. Openness to Values didn't budge as much as the others.

30 participants had a "complete mystical experience", which consisted of scoring above 60% on the dimensions of unity, transcendence of time and space, ineffability and paradoxicality, sacredness, noetic quality, and positive mood (I'm not sure I even know what all that means, but I'm sure I would if I took such a high dosage of psilocybin!). For these participants, Openness to Experience remained significantly higher than their baseline score more than 1 year after the sessions were over. The 22 patients who did not have a
complete mystical experience showed no change over the long haul. Interestingly, mystical experiences were not related to initial levels of Openness.

These results are rather striking, as the changes found in personality are larger than what is typically observed in healthy adults over decades. In fact, Openness usually decreases as one ages instead of showing such a dramatic increase. This is the first experiment to demonstrate such large changes in personality in healthy adults. Psilocybin had more of an effect than solitary meditation over 3 months and the use of antidepressant medications.

The point of this post is not to promote the use of hallucinogens. The use of psychadelic drugs can be very dangerous, and can lead to extreme anxiety and panic. All of the participants in this study received support. Nonetheless, the study is important in terms of our understanding of personality and the potential for change. Openness to Experience is an important dimension of our personalities, and is strongly associated with the experience of flow, absorption, and artistic creativity, as well as a breakdown of mental boundaries. Understanding the biological and psychological mechanisms by which psilocybin is exerting its effects is important, as we may be able to simulate the effects using other methods of relaxation and transcendence.While psilocybin may be dangerous to use, its potential effects can have far reaching consequences. Recent reviews suggest that hallucinogens could have positive effects on clinical disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders. Qualitative research has documented sudden and dramatic positive changes in attitudes, values, and behaviors following spontaneous mystical or spiritual experiences. Such experiences have also facilitated recovery from addiction and has been shown to help coping with cancer.

It will be important to replicate this finding with other groups of participants. The present study included unpaid community volunteers who were curious about the effects of psilocybin. Nearly all of the participants regularly engaged in spiritual activities such as religiousservices, prayer, and meditation. It will be interesting to see if mystical experiences and changes in personality occur so dramatically among those who are more skeptical of psilocybin's effects.

At any rate, this study is important, as it suggests that even though personality is heritable and tends to remain relatively stable across the lifespan, there is still great potential for opening up one's mind.

© 2011 by Scott Barry Kaufman
Follow him on G+ or Twitter.

Speech: Iain McGilchrist - Things Are Not What They Seem

2011-10-30T18:03:00.000Z

Dr Iain McGilchrist*, author of "The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World", puts our society on the couch. He suggests that the bipartite structure of the brain helps us to understand why the world so often seems paradoxical, and why we so often end up achieving the opposite of what we intend.

Recorded at Schumacher College.
Schumacher College is part of The Dartington Hall Trust, a registered charity, which focuses on the arts, social justice and sustainability.
For more information about Schumacher College and Dartington visit:
http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/ and
http://www.dartington.org/

Speech: Iain McGilchrist - The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

2011-10-27T01:44:00.000+01:00

Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how the 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.

Also, check out the RSA Animate, taken from the lecture:

Documentary: The great global warming swindle

2011-10-25T09:27:00.004+01:00

"The Great Global Warming Swindle is a documentary film by British television producer Martin Durkin, which argues against the scientific opinion that human activity is the main cause of global warming. The film showcases scientists, economists, politicians, writers, and others who are sceptical of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Publicity for the programme states that global warming is 'a lie' and 'the biggest scam of modern times.'"

http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.co.uk/

Also check out this article which criticizes Al Gore's documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, a very well known film about global warming, which claims that it is mainly due to human causes.

Article: Most people don't want to hear the Truth

2011-10-21T13:51:00.000+01:00

Original Article written by Doreen Hannes for News with Views - 13, February 2008

Now, more than in the past 100 years or so of our nation's history (USA), we have a great number of people who sense that something 'just ain't right'. So what is one to do? First of all, you begin a quest for the truth about any particular topic. Pick one. Currently, you can choose from the NAU, Real ID, NAIS, the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that aren't in Iraq, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the water boarding issue in Gitmo, the legality of the "income tax," the effects of the 'free trade' agreements on our nation, the "Clean Water Restoration Act," the "Military Commissions Act", Agenda 21, the "CFR" or heck, for some real light study, how about the institution of central banking and fractional reserve banking systems? There are a lot more, but this should at least give the idea that we have a problem. A very, very, big problem. It's like that infamous elephant in the living room that no one wants to talk about and most don't want to see.

Yet those giant piles of elephant excrement keep getting on everyone's shoes, so many have no choice but to begin to contemplate that where there is crap, there is a crapper. And before one can get the elephant out of the room, you have to admit that there is one. Some people will sit with brown stuff running down their faces and look at you with a blank stare saying, "What elephant?" They don't even notice the manure. Those folks are the furniture….You can't help them, so don't waste your time trying. Some people will marvel at the manure that keeps spontaneously generating out of thin air and blame it on the opposing political party; you may or may not be able to help these people. They are certainly worth a try. What you really want is the person that is wondering what kind of beast keeps splattering them and why isn't anyone on NBC-BS talking about it? These are people that are ready for some truth. Now you've got something to work with.

When you find someone who wants to know what the heck is going on, you just received a parallel promotion. Now you have the duty of teaching this person what you know, but don't look for a paycheck, this job has more eternal rewards. Since not many of us were raised up in households that knew the effects of birth certificates, Social Security numbers, and positive versus non-positive law (if lots of us were raised with that knowledge we wouldn't be in the mess we're in) we all had to start learning at some point. So you have to find out what the capacity for understanding of this person is. Even though it's way too late to be polite, you have to keep some empathy about you or you'll just scare the person into hopelessness, paranoia, or worse yet, apathy, and that isn't helpful to you, them or our nation.

If someone asks you "How can Congress pass a law that violates the Constitution?," don't hit them with a dissertation on the power structure of the NWO complete with breakdowns of the effects of our membership in the UN, the truth about the "Civil War," the history of the Federal Reserve and the Shadow government all at once. Just answer their question and it will lead to another question. Think of it like food. They need to eat little bites at a time. They may be hungry for the whole meal because they are one of the rare people who truly want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but they still need to chew only what they can swallow. It is an elephant after all.

Then there are those folks who notice the elephant feces, and ask about it, and when you begin to show them the elephant, they disdainfully say, "How preposterous! That cannot possibly be!! I know that is indeed elephant manure, but still….I'll acknowledge the tail and leave the rest to my imagination, thank you. Dismissed." These people are even more disappointing than the last type. They see some of it, but want to keep their hands over their eyes and admit into existence the little bit of what they can see through their fingers. If they keep being forced to admit that the tail is connected to a rump, and the rump is connected to rear legs, and the legs -well you get the picture, and they may, but it requires a lot of patience.

Finally there are people who don't want to look at the elephant even though it's standing on their foot. We all have plenty of these people in our lives. When told about something like the NAIS with all of its effects on choice for consumers, loss of rural jobs and businesses, privacy issues, consolidation of agriculture and effects on property rights, they say things like "I want to be sure my burger is free from terrorism." These people will trade your real liberty for their false sense of security in a heartbeat. They think they get the truth from the evening news, believe that you can't understand issues without a doctorate, and that the government gives us rights. They are absolutely sure there are no absolutes. They sit there obstinately no matter how persuasively you plead with them to move. They are the furniture. They stay where they have been put and will not be swayed.

Sometimes the furniture is part of your immediate family. You give them articles, places on the internet to visit, links to government documents on the topic, and endless reams of documentation and mainstream news articles, and they toss back a flippant accusation that "You're just a conspiracy theorist. None of this is that bad." Usually you'll ask, "Did you read what I gave you?," and they'll say something like "I scanned some of it, but didn't really have time to spend on it. My kid had a soccer game and then our favorite show was on, so we got pizza on the credit card and just enjoyed the entertainment." They just told you they don't know, don't care, and asked that you please stop confusing them with the facts…When you find that you are engaged in conversation with a coffee table, stop. Save your breath for those with questions. No impassioned plea ever moved a couch. Don't talk to the furniture.

© 2008 Doreen Hannes - All Rights Reserved

Article: Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: “We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare”

2011-10-21T12:17:00.001+01:00

Original Article written by Sarah Shin for Verso - Monday 10, October 2011

On October 9, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Here is the original text of his speech — not a transcript, as originally described in error.

Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.

So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee
without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.

They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.

They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

We were called losers—but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists—but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect private property—but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day—just think of thousands of homes foreclosed...

We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system.

They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down...

So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?

In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters—even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world—see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.” And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—'war on terror,' "democracy and freedom,' 'human rights,' etc—are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

Visit Critical Legal Thinking to read a transcript of the speech as delivered. You can watch a video of the speech on YouTube.

Article: Laziness - Fact or Fiction?

2011-10-19T11:57:00.000+01:00

Original Article written by Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. for Psychology Today - Sunday 22, June 2008

Addressing this topic generally, the immortal Dagwood Bumstead once claimed: “You can’t teach people to be lazy—either they have it, or they don’t.” So what is laziness anyway? Is it about being slow to do something?... Or about doing something slowly?... Or about not doing it at all?... Or, finally, is it about not sufficiently wanting to do something? And if this last alternative is true, when we label someone lazy are we really talking about that person’s being indolent, sluggish, or slothful? Or is there something else going on that hasn’t yet been appreciated?

What I'm going to be discussing here is my own, somewhat unorthodox view on laziness. For I believe (apologies to Dagwood, who would otherwise seem to be one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject) that the whole idea of anyone's being inherently lazy--or having a "lazy personality"--is basically a myth.

My experience, both as an individual and therapist, has led me to conclude that laziness as an explanation of human behavior is practically useless. Referring to--or rather, disparaging, or even dismissing--a person as lazy seems to me a glib and overly simplistic way of accounting for a person's apparent disinterest or inertia. And resorting to this term to categorize a person's inactivity suggests to me a laziness more on the part of the describer than the person described. In short, I view this pejorative designation as employed mostly as a "default" when the person talked about is not particularly well understood.

What I'd like to consider here is a more useful--and psychologically accurate--way of understanding people who don't do what we believe they ought to do. And my thesis is simply that what we commonly think of as laziness is not really about a lack of mobility as such but a lack of motivation.

What Interferes with Motivation
In reflecting on laziness and its various ramifications, I'll explore some of the factors I believe diminish or undermine the motivation required to embark upon--and follow through on--life's various challenges and difficulties. So far at least, here's what I've come up with to help clarify the various reasons all of us, at some time or another, fail to start or complete a task.

• Lacking a sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the conviction that if we put our mind to something, we'll be effective with it. Without adequate self-confidence, however, we may not believe we're capable of doing something successfully, so we end up not attempting it. Without a "can do" attitude, we unfortunately restrict ourselves to doing only what's already within our comfort zone. And, going forward, we are limited precisely because we have such a limiting view of ourselves. Another possibility here is that even after we've successfully undertaken something, because we still harbor doubts about our self-efficacy, we continue to delay, procrastinate, vacillate, etc.

• Lacking sufficient emotional support. It may be that we require some sort of "cheering section" to handle what otherwise might overwhelm us. Without enough encouragement from without, we simply may not be able to motivate ourselves enough from within. As adults, we should be beyond needing "attaboys!" or "attagirls!" to stay resolved to complete a task. But many of us still depend on others for the motivation--or inspiration--to do what, technically, we should be able to do independently (without being "cheered on" by others).

• Needing--but not expecting--that others will give us recognition. When we apply ourselves to something, it's usually done with some expectation of reward--whether material or emotional, internal or external. If, developmentally, we're still at a place where we must anticipate "strokes" from others to feel sufficiently motivated to begin a task, then lacking any hope that we will get such acknowledgment may leave us without the motivation to undertake it. If in the past, our application and diligence hadn't gotten us the positive feedback we craved, then how realistic is it to think we could yet maintain such diligence going forward?

• Lacking self-discipline. It may be true that we can do almost anything we set our mind to. But if our mind is our worst enemy, we simply may not be able to believe this otherwise inspiring (and motivating!) maxim. That is, whatever anxieties we may have about failing, as well as our poor sense of self-efficacy, may either keep us from starting a task or prevent us from completing it. And even if we do end up finishing it--because, say, it's a job requirement and we absolutely must--our pattern of delay will still persist. Unresolved self-doubts (deeply programmed within us) aren't automatically erased by an expedient action and will reaffirm themselves (through some sort of procrastination) the very next time we're obliged to do something.

In my experience, people who lack self-discipline also lack fundamental self-esteem. And here the latter deficiency seems to feed directly into the former. That is, significant defects in our self-image undermine our confidence in our abilities, and this lack of self-confidence negatively affects the development of self-discipline--which of course is necessary to accomplish just those things that would enhance our self-esteem. Psychologically speaking, this has got to be one of the most vicious of vicious cycles.

• Lacking interest in the endeavor itself. If the task or project feels tedious to us (i.e., not appropriately challenging), we're likely to want to avoid it altogether. If it's essential we do it, we probably will--but in one way or another we'll "act out" our displeasure by hesitating, or by doing a halfhearted, mediocre job. When we denigrate someone as lazy, frequently what we're really referring to is a task that the person finds so dull or boring that they just can't get themselves to tackle it. After all, it's only human nature to avoid those things seen as a nuisance or burden.

What induces us generally to evade work is not really laziness but the fact that the work isn't sufficiently compelling to us. Think of it in terms of "working" on a jigsaw puzzle. If absorbing ourself in the puzzle is experienced as fun, we'll readily engage in it. But if, frankly, we're not much attracted to jigsaw puzzles--that is, such pursuits don't represent an interesting challenge for us--we'll consider such "play" to be work and (unless we feel we have to participate) try to get out of it. All of which is to say that what motivates some people won't motivate others; and in neither case does doing, or not doing, something say anything about a person's "laziness." After all, what might be a task for one person might be an absolute delight for another.

• Ambivalence--or lacking faith that the action will be worth the effort. If certain of our priorities or values are in doubt, we may lack the clarity to move forward. Our contradictory motives--to approach or to avoid--may be weighted equally and so cancel each other out, leading to a kind of behavioral torpor. We may not be convinced that the action we're considering--or that's been suggested to us--will be all that useful, or valuable, or satisfying to us. And so we're unable to commit to performing it. Without the belief that a particular act or enterprise will somehow improve the quality of our life, it's hard (if not impossible) to cultivate the initiative necessary for undertaking it.

• Fear of failure. This explanation for not doing something overlaps with the lack of self-efficacy already discussed. But whereas an inadequate sense of self-efficacy reduces our motivation because we don't believe we can complete something successfully, the fear of failure focuses much more on our lacking the emotional resources to cope with the possibly negative outcome of our efforts. There's an old expression, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," that cogently makes the point that if we're ever to succeed we must at least be willing to try. But if our self-esteem is so tenuous, so weak, so vulnerable that the very risk of failing easily trumps any other consideration, we'll be stymied.

Even if the odds of success are actually quite good, we may still not be able to go forward, since we'll nervously anticipate how bad we'd feel should our efforts not be successful. Without the internal resources to "catch" ourself should we fail, and absent the ability to unconditionally validate ourselfindependent of failure, we're unable to start the project in the first place. In short, our negative programming--not our actual ability--renders us unequal to the task.

And, it should be added, absolutely none of this has anything to do with laziness. Moreover, even though what we label procrastination may relate simply to poor time management, the act of procrastinating may also be motivated principally by the fear of failure. And such a delaying tactic (commonly seen as depicting some sort of "laziness") generally goes back to our having learned in childhood that we weren't good enough if our performance was somehow flawed. So naturally we learned that it was better not to take on anything unless we were sure in advance we could do it well. In fact, much of what we describe as perfectionism derives from having grown up in a home where our parents held us to unrealistically high standards that, unless we could meet them, led to our being constantly criticized.

• Fear of refusal or rejection. If we require help to get something accomplished and we're afraid that the person needed to assist us might refuse our request, we might decide--for that reason alone--not to start the project at all. As regards, secondly, our fear of rejection, if we're dependent on others to feel good about ourselves, then we won't be able to undertake anything that could lead another to be frustrated with us, stand in judgment over us, or maybe even reject us altogether.

• Sense of discouragement, hopelessness, futility, etc. All of these feelings, moods or states of mind can drop us into that listless place of apathy where we no longer care about getting anything done. This is a painful, dispirited state in which our very will is paralyzed. And in such a state virtually no task seems worth doing. For it's impossible to imagine that undertaking it would help us feel better about ourself, or about life generally.

And so our lethargic avoidance--which to an outsider might seem indistinguishable from laziness--has in fact nothing to do with laziness and virtually everything to do with depression. DSM-IV (the mental health practitioner's diagnostic bible) actually defines depression as characterized by a "markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities." And so, whether the activity be work- or pleasure-related, the overwhelming impulse is to avoid it. In such a state, merely getting out of bed in the morning can feel like an almost insurmountable task. What we might appreciate here as the enervation of our spirit seems almost synonymous with what the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron (in her article "Looking into Laziness") refers to as the agonizing "loss of heart" experienced in this state.

• An attitude of pessimism, cynicism, hostility or bitterness. One final reason for explaining our lack of motivation to apply ourselves to some task or project has to do with our becoming so jaded that we view our efforts as benefiting only others rather than ourself. Or we've become so skeptical about our future prospects that we no longer believe it makes sense to push ourselves to do anything.

This I'd refer to as rebellion masquerading as "laziness"--a kind of "Hell, no! I don't want to do it, and I'm not going to do it!" Underlying this self-restraining orientation is un-discharged anger (or rage) from past disappointments, which propels us into resistant negativity. Because of the depth of past psychological wounds, we're left disheartened, disillusioned and disenchanted. And perversely, we experience our strength only in reactive, oppositional willfulness. So we refuse to do what otherwise we might achieve without much difficulty. And here--yet again--our resistance to take action, even if it's really in our own behalf, has nothing to do with laziness.

Originally, I'd considered calling this post, "The Many ‘Motives' of Laziness." But in the end, putting the word "motives" in quotes seemed less descriptive than putting those quotes around the word "laziness." Hopefully, as a result of reading this piece, readers will begin to question in their own lives whether they might not want to re-think some of their former assumptions about this so oversimplified concept.

Having given Dagwood Bumstead this post's first words, I thought it fitting to give the last to an even zanier humorist--namely, W. C. Fields--who once declared, "The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves" (!). I must admit that this quote sounds more descriptive of true laziness than anything I've described earlier. But we must still ask ourselves whether Fields' portrayal actually reminds us of anybody we ever knew.

What, ultimately, makes Fields' quip so funny is its very exaggeration. It's doubtful that we can actually recognize ourselves, or anybody else, in this ingenious, intriguing (but not finally revealing) one-liner. To the extent that anyone might have tried to get popcorn to execute the job of turning over pancakes, such a novel approach would suggest more about the person's creativity in the service of making a task less routine and more fun than an expression of some biological propensity toward sloth.

Notes:

Regrettably, this piece has had to ignore entirely the topic of overcoming laziness, for such a focus would have taken me in a completely different direction. Reviewing what on the web relates to this equally important topic, I can direct readers to at least two articles, even though I don't necessarily agree with all the suggestions included in them. They are: "11 Tips for Nuking Laziness Without Becoming a Workaholic," by Scott H. Young , and "10 Ways to Make Laziness Work for You," by Leo Babauta

There's actually a book entitled The Myth of Laziness, which I thought I should probably mention, even though it has almost nothing to do with the thesis of my post. Written by pediatrician Mel Levine, it's about so-called "lazy" children who in fact can't perform up to their innate potential because of what he calls "output failures." These failures are caused by a variety of biological, neurological and psychological deficits. Obviously, my post is not intended to address such performance-degrading deficits--which Levine conceptualizes as involving such internal factors as motor skills, long-term memory, oral language ability, mental energy dysfunction, idea generation, and organization; as well as external factors, relating to family patterns, socioeconomic background, and negative modeling.

Article: Interview with Chronis Missios

2011-10-17T20:05:00.003+01:00

Original Article written for a Greek Magazine and found on this blog - Translation by Niko Paterakis.

Chronis Missios was born in Cavala (Greece) to a pair of tobacco workers. He spent his early years in Potamoudia, a neighbourhood of refugees, workers and illegal communists hunted from Metaksa’s dictatoship [Greek general, serving as Prime Minister/1936-1941]. His family flees to Salonica, where Chronis works as a salesman.

He returns to Salonica after the liberation. He joins the Urban Democratic Army and in 1947 – at the age of seventeen – he is arrested, brutally tortured and sentenced to death. He spends the next 9 months expecting execution every morning. In 1953, he is released, enlists for his compulsory military service and is sent to Makronisos, afterwards Ai-Stratis [significant political exile destinations], until 1962, when the camp is disbanded. Since then, he works as a member of Unified Democratic Left [Greek initials: EDA]. The dictatorship of ’67 finds him a member of the five-strong secretarial office of the Lambrakis administration. He joins other members in forming the illegal party Greek Liberation Front [Greek initials: PAM]. In November 1967 he is arrested and court-martialled to 18 years in prison. Once again, Averoff, Corfu, Koridallos, until the August 1973 general amnesty.

In an interview he gave Car & Driver he stated that: “Life is a gift for all of us. It has an expiration date. And we have the right to enjoy it, share it, create it”.

Below are excerpts of that interview:

‘Some of us romantics believed that we could make something beautiful back then, something special, but as Danton said: “the steps of humanity are the tombstones of the romantics”. We were, I think, the last of the Mohicans, the romantics. We had a myth, we believed in an ideal, we sacrificed our very lives for it. For the betterment of humanity, a more beautiful society, all of that. Well! It turned that the vision of this ideal society we strived for was impossible to materialize because people’s consciousness – that is, their deep internal cultural sensitivity – was not at the same level as the civilization it was trying to create. So, the powers that be climb back on top again and used all pretensions, legally or illegally, to form a new establishment much worse than the previous one. This happened
worldwide; the October Revolution, Vietnam, Cuba, everywhere…’, he emphasizes.

He continues to say that ‘the only visionary rebels who retained their innocence were the ones that died early. From Christ to Che Guevara, to Velouhiotis, to Beloyiannis, and so many others…’.

‘The opportunity was not lost in ’44; it never even existed. Just up the road is a little tavern. Vasilis, the owner – an old man, passed away now – and I were sitting and chatting one day. Me – a guerrilla fighter – and him – in the national guard. He was a gunsman. After a few drinks he started wondering about the insanity we both lived through. I said to him: “It’s a good job you held yur gun tight, ‘cause if we had won the war we would have destroyed Greece”. That’s how it is. The level of political guidance and of the people where such that it could not support this new model; aside from the fact that those where the circumstances, what would have become of Greece? Another Bulgaria, another Albania, something like that…’.

‘After the civil war, the right wing kept all the laws. The 509, the 3rd vote and it pressured the left wing to the point of annihilation. Independent justice, my ass. Let aside my convictions in the court-martials. When they exiled us, though, they sent us past appeal boards – supposedly; we were never taken there. So my papers read: “inducted due to judgement of threat to public order”. These boards where made up of judges, not court-martials. How the fuck do you exile someone without even knowing them? Every year? For ten consecutive years? Without hearing them state their case once?...’

‘When I returned from a trip to the Soviet Union in ’64, after obtaining a passport with great difficulty, Rinio asked me how things are there. I was disappointed with what I had encountered and I said, “Forget about it, but we’re Mediterraneans; we’ll sort communism out”. I didn’t believe it but else could I do? Where else to go? The party and my fight for communism was my whole life. It’s not easy renouncing your whole life. Today, for example, there are a lot of capable comrades in the party. How could they renounce their lives?...’

‘When I got out of prison after the dictatorship fell, I found work in a business. Someone asked for me urgently. I look at him, he looks at me; it was one of my torturers from prison. “What’s up”, I said. “What brings you here?”. He says, “Look, Chronis, I need to ask you for a favour…I’m so embarrassed…well, my son is looking for work, could yu help me out?”. We started chatting. We ended up in ‘Smaro’, a small ouzerie in Kaisariani, had a few drinks and cried on each other. Go figure. When you’re a rebel, and more so a romantic one, in order to survive the meat machine that those in charge put you through, you need to safeguard your culture and dignity like the rarest perfume. Don’t stoop to their level. Only that can save you as a human being. That’s what humanizes your struggle. That is culture. If we came out of the cavernous holes they threw us in with knives and grenades we would have become the same…’

‘In prison, we used to have a little game of talking about what job we would have in the future. “Chronis, what are you gonna do?”, they used to ask. “Lawman”, I said. And they thought that that’s how I was going to get my revenge. But that wasn’t my purpose. I wanted to be able to console the mothers whose children where inside. I imagine what it must have been like for my mom, who came every day to bring me fresh clothes and take the blood-stained ones, so she would know how often they tortured me…’

‘The main issue is to win people over. You can’t save people if they don’t want to be saved. Us communists did that. Save them by force. If the other isn’t bothered, doesn’t feel the need to change, how do you expect to make him do it?…’

‘Andreas [Papandreou – founder of the Greek Socialist Party (Greek initials: PASOK - currently in government); Prime Minister, 1981-89, 1993-96], the superb demagogue he was, adopted all of the slogans of the left wing, devalued them through his selective exercise of power and the movement was left looking for its legacy. As if that weren’t enough, he’s left us his family, too [current Prime Minister George Papandreou is his son]...'

‘Back then, us romantics had an ideal, a vision, a dream; also, an opponent. The system violated our bodies. It put us behind bars, tortured us, and executed us. Today the system violates the mind. It lobotomizes people. It is very hard today to form one’s own consciousness. One lives in a fake world, a fake life. Consumerism, marketing, television. From our generation they took away the quality of life. Today they take away life itself. What does the future hold for youngsters in this country? They hear numbers, memoranda, defaults, etc. Is it democracy for all this tragedy to have occurred after the regime change? Driving the country to the ultimate submissive state, to national servitude, through all these scandals and bribes and not have a single person behind bars? Not a single apology? A single one, for fuck sake! What justice? What democracy? Are the institutions under threat because Pagalos [current government – PASOK – second Vice President] got some yoghurt thrown at his face? If there was a fair democratic system in place, all in power would have to be charged with treason. We are experiencing a tragedy with puppets for actors. As for the past, let it be. The system is so powerful, it can erase history. It’s scary…’

‘While our political system has brought us to this point, as soon there is a deviation, open action against a member of parliament, it becomes immediately a matter of democratic principle. Personally I am against these methods, but if you have an entire nation of people enraged, there’s bound to be some impulsive ones in the bunch. Does that signify a breach of institutions? And what are they? To sell your vote every four years to a candidate or a party hoping to climb up the ladder socially, professionally – find your child a job? Is that Democracy? Isn’t the right to work and live your life in dignity, in safety, to prosper and to secure your childrens’ future a democratic principle, but this 4-year bazaar is? We need to realize that life is a gift for all of us. It has an expiration date. And we have the right to enjoy it, share it, create it. Well! The fact that the system stops us from fulfilling all this and instead pushes us to depression, despair, unemployment, insecurity – I’m sorry; that is NOT democracy…’

‘That is why I think it is important that the people are out on the streets. To have a look around, to cross paths and dreams, to exchange a few words, to get out of the ‘party pen’. The spontaneous is creative. And of course the party leaders are baffled; how can this happen without them, without guidance?...’

‘The system has been so dominant for so long that it has obligated people to constantly reproduce it. And the problem right now is not just the expansion of the institutional boundaries of freedom in our society. The problem is freeing the human being. That is the main challenge because people have been transformed and it is extremely hard to redefine oneself…’

‘When I hear what a rich nation we are because of the recent discoveries of oil in the Aegean and the Ionian Seas I get depressed. We’re going to mess the whole thing up. We’re going to become a colony for oil multinational companies. Can you imagine the platforms and the boats rustling about all over the Aegean?...’

‘Even ecological activists – who come indubitably to perform the important task of forging an ecological awareness and conscience – have not realized that our planet consists of two environments: the natural and the social. The problem is that the social is applying such catastrophic pressure on the natural one that, in order to protect it, we have to reshape the social. That is why ecology is revolutionary. Humanity must realize that the environment is our home…’

‘Marketing has made people insane. It always produces new things that it tries to push to people. Marketing has even vulgarised children. Makes them advertise crisps or whatever while moving and looking like prostitutes. Rubbish. We consume the planet’s resources so greedily and fast that we can barely tell what tomorrow will bring. Natural goods, water, air, sunshine are being destroyed. And these fuckers, the politicians go out on television and shake their finger at us…’

‘We’re living in ugly times. We used to fight, wage battles and conflict. Today they steal the lives of the children, of people. Who’s there to fight? Not even yur boss. Multinational corporation, they say. That’s the system. Fake money, plastic. There’s no reliable value around us to rest upon. Is that society? Is that culture?...’

‘The hippie movement was the last insurgence of mankind. Why was it that important? Because it had understood that universities where turning into technocratic boot camps, set to groom a new generation of high-tech idiots. That’s how questioning the entire system began. Coupled with the Vietnam war, a dynamic evolved that defied everything. To dissolve it, they threw chemical drugs in the mix. Unfortunately, the system prevailed and turned it into fashion. It even turned Guevara’s face into fashion, the hippies weren’t gonna get away with it…’

‘I last went to Cavala a few years back. It hurts a lot. I couldn’t find the road leading to the house I was born in. The city’s been destroyed, populated by monstrous apartment buildings…’

‘So what to do? Rebuild the country. Reclaim the land. Rebuild our agriculture. We live in a paradise land, capable of producing so many of the finest things. We need to return to our villages, to our bond with the earth. To hell with the lenders and our debts. What are they gonna do – send the troops in? We’ll suffer, but we’ll suffer for ourselves and all we create will be ours…’

“Since my generation failed at changing the world, at least I will not let the world change me and that is, in my view, the ultimate political statement’.

Video: Julian Assange speaking at the Antiwar Mass Assembly, London (Oct 8, 2011)

2011-10-11T18:20:00.000+01:00

WikiLeaks's Julian Assange speaks (0:50) at the October 8th Antiwar Mass Assembly in London on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war and the formation of the Stop the War Coalition.

http://fb.com/harryfear

Article: Occupy Wall Street ends capitalism's alibi

2011-10-11T12:41:00.002+01:00

Original Article written by Richard Wolff for the Guardian - Tuesday 4, October 2011

This protest pinpoints how dysfunctional our economic system is:

we must refashion it for human needs, not corporate aims

A man holds up an anti-Wall Street placard on the march to NYPD headquarters. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, "Wow!" And now, ever more people are organising local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.

Let me urge the occupiers to ignore the usual carping that besets powerful social movements in their earliest phases. Yes, you could be better organised, your demands more focused, your priorities clearer. All true, but in this moment, mostly irrelevant. Here is the key: if we want a mass and deep-rooted social movement of the left to re-emerge and transform the United States, we must welcome the many different streams, needs, desires, goals, energies and enthusiasms that inspire and sustain social movements. Now is the time to invite, welcome and gather them, in all their profusion and confusion.

The next step – and we are not there yet – will be to fashion the program and the
organisation to realise it. It's fine to talk about that now, to propose, debate and argue. But it is foolish and self-defeating to compromise achieving inclusive growth – now within our reach – for the sake of program and organisation. The history of the US left is littered with such programs and organisations without a mass movement behind them or at their core.

So permit me, in the spirit of honoring and contributing something to this historic movement, to propose yet another dimension, another item to add to your agenda for social change. To achieve the goals of this renewed movement, we must finally change the organisation of production that sustains and reproduces inequality and injustice. We need to replace the failed structure of our corporate enterprises that now deliver profits to so few, pollute the environment we all depend on, and corrupt our political system.

We need to end stock markets and boards of directors. The capacity to produce the goods and services we need should belong to everyone – just like the air, water, healthcare, education and security on which we likewise depend. We need to bring democracy to our enterprises. The workers within and the communities around enterprises can and should collectively shape how work is organised, what gets produced, and how we make use of the fruits of our collective efforts.

If we believe democracy is the best way to govern our residential communities, then it likewise deserves to govern our workplaces. Democracy at work is a goal that can help build this movement.

We all know that moving in this direction will elicit the screams of "socialism" from the usual predictable corners. The tired rhetoric lives on long after the cold war that orchestrated it fades out of memory. The audience for that rhetoric is fast fading, too. It is long overdue in the US for us to have a genuine conversation and struggle over our current economic system. Capitalism has gotten a free pass for far too long.

We take pride in questioning, challenging, criticising and debating our health, education, military, transportation and other basic social institutions. We argue whether their current structures and functioning serve our needs. We work our way to changing them so they perform better. And so it should be.

Yet, for decades now, we have failed to similarly question, challenge, criticise and debate our economic system: capitalism. Because a taboo protected capitalism, cheerleading and celebrating it became obligatory. Criticism and questions got banished as heresy, disloyalty or worse. Behind the protective taboo, capitalism degenerated into the ineffective, unequal, crisis-ridden social disaster we all now bear.

Capitalism is the problem – and the joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, and austerity it now imposes everywhere are the costs we bear. We have the people, the skills and the tools to produce the goods and services needed for a just society to prosper. We just need to reorganise our producing units differently, to go beyond a capitalist economic system that no longer serves our needs.

Humanity learned to do without kings and emperors and slave masters. We found our way to a democratic alternative, however partial and unfinished the democratic project remains. We can now take the next step to realise that democratic project. We can bring democracy to our enterprises – by transforming them into cooperatives owned, operated and governed by democratic assemblies composed of all who work in them and all the residents of the communities who are interdependent with them.

Let me conclude by offering a slogan: "The US can do better than corporate capitalism." Let that be an idea and a debate that this renewed movement can engage. Doing so would give an immense gift to the US and the world. It would break through the taboo, finally subjecting capitalism to the critiques and debates it has evaded for far too long – and at far too great a cost to all of us.