Update! New blog!

I've been spending most of the last year doing things other than writing. Having spent quite some time posting here rather lengthy piece sometimes several times a week, I suppose I needed a break. Well, the holiday is over and I'm back to writing again, only this time I'm doing it at another site. Most pieces will be in the same format as the others but I'm hoping to do some collaboration and also to do more straight research format pieces that break out of the blog style.

There are two new pieces posted up already from me and this time I've got some help from a comrade, so the burden shouldn't be as great. There might be other contributors, so check there for other voices from the insurrectionary milieu. Thanks to everyone who visited this site and read my work. I enjoyed the feedback and discussion. You can still reach me at the same email address. So, please head on over to the new site and start reading!

Check it out here:
Fires Never Extinguished

Tasers and Torture: Technology and the Expansion of Police Power

Hardly a newscycle goes by these days without two seemingly contradictory things happening: a police officer praises the “less lethal” TASER as his savior in a tight spot; and, someone gets killed or seriously injured by a TASER. It isn't unusual for this second case to occur in circumstances that shed considerable doubt on the first case, whether because of the nature of the victim (young, old, incapacitated, restrained, etc) or because of the victim was either justified in their actions or attempting to comply with police orders. What's behind this phenomenon?

Police cite the TASER as a critical weapon filling a gap in their arsenal between the billy club and the handgun. Rather than engage a suspect in close combat, cops say, the TASER allows them the flexibility to take someone down at a short distance without risking serious injury to either the officer or the arrestee. This is supposed to be more humane than merely beating or shooting someone, especially if there is some doubt as to the criminality of the victim's actions, such as when police merely desire compliance (although police rarely concede such doubts publicly). Likewise, this is alleged to be safer for the officer, who the media and police agencies almost universally portray as constant targets of violence.

But what's the truth of it? We can start by debunking two notions that underlie the case used to justify TASERs. First of all, when we get right down to it, policing isn't a very dangerous job. When ranked by the rate of on the job deaths and injury, cops don't even rank in the top ten, showing up far below truck driver, roofer and farm worker, among others [1]. Jobs we all do every day without the benefit of TASER protection (from our boss, for instance). Indeed, a recent study cited in the New York Times showed that cops are much more likely to die by their own hand than by a so-called “criminal” [2].

Secondly, the truth is that police don't use less force when they have TASERs. If TASERs were serving as a substitute for other forms of violence, or as a deterrent, we would expect the number of uses of force to drop. According to a well-documented study by Amnesty International, however, when police forces get TASERs, their propensity towards violence actually increases [3]. TASERs actually increase police violence. Indeed, Amnesty International specifically pointed out that precisely because of the short distance attack that TASERs make possible, police increasingly use them to compel obedience rather than for actual law enforcement.

Why is this? It's because the police are a tool of class oppression. They are like soldiers, only deployed here at home, enforcing the will of a small elite that is rich and powerful. As the army does in Iraq, so do the police here at home. They are defenders of the status quo, which happens to be one in which folks like us don't have much power while the elite they are defending have a lot of it. For instance, when the bank comes to enforce your foreclosure or eviction, who shows up? The police, of course, toting their TASERs and guns. But when's the last time you saw the cops TASER a yuppie in the rich part of town? That'll be the day!

So, since the police are really a domestic army, not public servants, why would we expect that giving them more weapons (i.e., TASERs) would reduce the level of violence? That's counter-intuitive. For instance, if we gave the army a new weapon, would we expect them to be less violent because of it? Clearly not. The TASER, then, is a way for the police to increase their ability to efficiently project their power or, more accurately, the power of the elite in general (the ones who make the laws and pay for the politicians, for example), onto folks like us – people who want to create our own lives and not bow down before people who don't have our best interests at heart. This explains the vigorous defense of TASERs by police agencies despite the fact that they are used too often and remain quite deadly in many circumstances [4]. They're not concerned with reducing violence. They're concerned with projecting their power.

Thus, it's obvious that all the rhetoric about TASERs doesn't match up with reality and in fact obscures a very fundamental truth: the rich and powerful want to control us so that they can get richer and more powerful. TASERs make it easier for them to do so, especially because police can hide their violence behind the cover of TASERs bogus claim of being less-violent (a claim they continue to make even as the deaths mount). But, once we see through that lie we are ourselves armed to make our arguments against the deployment of TASERs. If we want to be free, we must limit and ultimately challenge the ability of the police to project power onto us. And that means opposing TASERs and the class society they defend.


CITED:

[1] “America's most dangerous jobs”, CNN Money. com, 9 August 2007

[2] “Suicide Bigger Threat for Police Than Criminals”, New York Times, 8 April 2008

[3] “USA: Excessive and lethal force? Amnesty International's concerns about deaths and ill-treatment involving police use of tasers”, 30 November 2004, accessed at http://www. amnesty. org/en/library/info/AMR51/139/2004

[4] “Police defend use of Tasers”, Knoxville News Sentinel, 4 December 2007

###

I contributed this article to the July issue of Modesto Anarcho.

Damn Near Seven Years of Failure: The Phoenix Anti-War Movement and the Ritual Cult of Defeat

In the process of getting ready to write something new about the anti-war movement here in Phoenix, I re-read my past writings on the topic. Looking them over, I realized, why bother? Nothing has changed. Ritual and ineffectiveness still dominate the movement, as do activists who need the war to justify their management of others (to get votes, to build organizations or just to massage their own egos). A fear of shaking things up and a conservative attitude towards tactics prevails.

Failure, rather than success, has become the benchmark for the movement. To continue losing, to continue to stand impotent before the forces of the elite war machine, has in fact become a sort of measure of success in its own right. We're still here, and we're still against the war, seems to be the message, ignoring the fact that as long as that's true, the war must also still churn mercilessly on, devouring both American and Iraqi alike (although one in substantially greater proportion than the other). After all, you can't be against a war once it's over.

Heavy on symbol and low on substance, the movement in Phoenix has become a candle-holding caricature of itself, at war with imagination and as a result completely unable to conceive of any action other than to repeat its own failed mistakes of the past. Nearly seven bloody years of war have passed and still the local liberal anti-war movement has yet to claim anything remotely approaching a victory, having instead allowed itself to be diverted into dead ends like electoralism, petitioning and moral witness.

Literally, the movement here has engaged in the exact same protest almost since the day American bombs started pummeling Iraq: show up at Senator McCain's office, hold some signs and deliver a petition. The movement's success is judged in terms of honking horns rather than concrete results. Initially, there were street protests and some enthusiastic energy, but those days are long gone. The vampires of the liberal left have sucked all the blood from the movement, leaving behind a lifeless, mindless corpse incapable of creative action.

And why not? This was a predictable result of allowing these liberal ghouls to get their cold hands on the movement in the first place. Squash and marginalize the militants, that was their first goal, then manage the rest. And so the fire of the anti-globalization movement went away and the candles of the anti-war movement came out. It was predicted at the time, by anarchists and other radicals in town, who argued against liberal leadership of the movement. And so it has now come to pass and what we're left with is an anti-war leadership morally and organizationally invested in the continuation of the war. To varying degrees they have been duped or acted as enthusiastic movement-slayers but either way, they offer no solutions to our predicament. And how could they? They caused it.

And yet support for the war dwindles along with the attendance, even here in conservative Arizona. This sheer fact alone, that the population is much more anti-war now than ever before while at the same time the numbers showing up at anti-war rallies has generally and noticeably moved in the opposite direction, should give everyone pause. Unsurprisingly, the increasingly marginal rallies and boring tactics have not worked, nor have they inspired new blood to join the movement with fresh ideas. If the goal is to stop the various imperialist wars waged on the world by the United States, then the Phoenix anti-war movement has been a colossal failure. This fact must be faced up to.

My advice now is the same it has been for the last seven years. Either way, at some point we need to start evaluating whether we want an anti-war movement to end the war or just to sooth our consciences. One is based on solidarity with other people and the other is an exercise in First World privilege at best or default imperialism at worst. One empowers people and the other empowers politicians and the other slimy managers of social change. One shakes the halls of power and imposes change on the criminal ruling class, emboldening ourselves in the process, while the other slinks in on all fours and begs for a hearing, further empowering the parasitic liberal activists and their political allies.

So, if you want a good look at the anti-war movement today, have a look at my piece from last year, entitled "So Many Candles, So Little Fire: The Sad State of the Phoenix Anti-War Movement". Truthfully, you could go back and read any of the many articles I wrote or the fliers I handed out on the topic over the past many years and get the same points, because nothing has changed since then either. If anything, the anti-war movement has become even more entrenched in bad habits and bad thinking, its leaders even more managerial and its ideas even more bankrupt.

Further, its analysis has regressed, no longer recognizing the central interests of Capital behind the elite's desperate aggressions abroad. This failure has allowed capitalist politicos like those in the Democratic Party to infuse themselves and exploit and neutralize the movement. Lifestylist, thinly veiled calls for what amounts to a liberal interventionist green empire free of fossil fuels have replaced demands for the dismantlement of the empire.

The gains of the anti-globalization movement, which inspired so many of us not leastwise because it had settled so many of the issues that now bog down the anti-war movement, have faded into the past, both in terms of tactics and analysis. Unlike the anti-globalization movement, the anti-war movement lacks contact with other domestic movements, and as a result it has withered on the vine intellectually, cannibalizing itself and squandering its potential. The truth is, the anti-war movement has become a reactionary force, recuperating past militant movements, neutralizing them and purging them from the collective memory.

Indeed, the obsession of the liberal anti-war movement elite with the coming attack on Iran betrays it's own impotence, as they religiously consult the bones over breaking news of impending attacks, belying their own failure to create a movement capable of stopping them before they begin. The anti-war elites fret over the machinations of their political adversaries and openly plot to replace them. Indeed, if the anti-war movement managers are not able to stop the attack on Iran, it will be hard to come to any other conclusion than to declare the national anti-war movement dead on arrival.

Where are the blockades and destruction of war-related property? Phoenix has plenty of war profiteers. Where is the call for shutting down the whole of elite society until troops are withdrawn (not redeployed) and guarantees for Iran's people are issued? Indeed, where is the generally white and affluent anti-war left when other movements here in town ask for solidarity? Where is the anti-war left when migrants and immigrants take the streets in defense of basic human freedoms? Where was the anti-war left in Jena, Louisiana, not to mention in downtown Phoenix on Mayday 2006?

Further the movement is still mired in infantile anti-Bush and anti-Republican thinking, forgetting the right's many willing accomplices on the left. There are clear reasons why the liberal left prefers to frame things this way, but we have to ask ourselves if it really represents reality and if it's a strategy for stopping America's ongoing war against the world. Indeed, the tendency of the anti-war left to ignore the situation in Afghanistan almost entirely, marking time instead by the invasion of Iraq, betrays the pro-imperialist logic of this mindset by setting Iraq into a special category - a war somehow gone wrong or for the wrong reasons - rather than a continuation of imperial global strategy.

But in the end, if we can't evaluate the anti-war movement on it's ability to hamper or end the war, just what measure should we use? Useless votes? Lip service from politicians? The elevation of local anti-war leaders to elected office, like Kyrsten Sinema, who managed to ride the early anti-war wave for her own personal political gain? Politicos like this can't help us make the kind of radical changes that are necessary to stop the Iraq and other wars. The activists, politicians and other professional managers of social change (after all, whither the anti-war activist without the war?) have had their time. Militance and direct action are the watchwords of the day now.

There is no argument they can make against us. They can't say now is not the time, because it's been damn near seven years and there have been more than a million deaths in that time. They can't say wait for the next election, because we've given them three national shots at the ballot box ('02, '04, '06), including going on two years with liberal control of Congress. They can't say we must persuade more people because more than half the American population want out NOW, not later. It's time for the movement to wake up and realize that when the activists urge passivity, it's not because it's a successful tactic, but because it does not disturb their own positions in the movement. And, in the end, what's the difference between that and supporting the slaughter themselves?

If we have one advantage here in Phoenix, it is the total lack of an organized communist left. Many, many hours of very hard work, often including direct action at their meetings and rallies, consciously directed by anarchists militants, has kept the Valley free of authoritarians of the leftist variety, and we are all better for it. In other cities, authoritarian communists and socialists destroy movements in ways similar to liberals, with common front tactics and marginalization of militant, critical voices and often direct collaboration with the police. Often, however, their organizing is more insidious because their language is seductive to folks looking for something more radical than what the liberals have to offer. Local anti-war militants should take advantage of this fact and act to make irrelevant, through our own creative action, the liberal anti-war leaders in town.

The time is now for militant action. Pick a target and shut it down. Build solidarity and fight for and with others. Link the war to other local struggles and leave room in your organizing to support them unselfishly. Militants must challenge the dominant cadre in the movement and seek to broaden the space for resistance. Politicians and activists must be driven from the movement (they had their chance) and our actions must develop strict criteria for evaluating our success. Let's take the power into our own hands. The time is now.

Wi-Fi's Golden Promise and the Jackboot of the State

The Chicago Times reported last week that the city has linked up all the high school surveillance cameras into a network that feeds into the city's 911 headquarters, forming a network of 4500 cameras. Already, the city's transit cameras and some private business cameras have been similarly routed to police headquarters.

Here's the thing about this article: the real news isn't the cameras being linked up. That's scary enough if you care about freedom and privacy, but it's not the real interesting bit about this. The part to pay attention to is not the cameras streaming to the 911 center, but that they can now stream to cops in their patrol cars.

In an emergency, arriving officers also will be able to view real-time images from the cameras on screens in their squad cars.

'The key is getting the information to the police officer in that car," said Mayor Richard Daley.'

How is this accomplished? The article doesn't say, but if it's like other cities, I'll bet it's with Wi-fi.

The spread of wi-fi across city landscapes has vastly increased the ability of the police to project force in their war against the poor (which is what policing is). It allows them to deploy units strategically and with increasingly pinpoint precision, which of course also increases the ability of the ruling class to impose their version of order (exploitation, prison, povery, etc) on the rest of us. Meanwhile, we are fed the lie that wi-fi is a great boon to humanity. At worst, the detractors will say it is neutral. But is something that increases the power of the ruling class to stomp our faces into a bloody pulp "neutral"? I don't think so.

Of course, knowing this perhaps now you'll look at Tempe's much-hyped neighborhood wi-fi plan a little differently now. Tempe, as you all know, is at the forefront of municipal wi-fi. At the time it was, as such things always are, boosted as a convenience for the neighborhood and the downtown business set, while in fact it was a foundation for the coming police state. But you already knew this if you read my blog, because I warned about this in 2005. Of course, folks thought I was a crazy Luddite then...

Still, poor marketing may have bought us a little time here in Tempeasy: the roll-out of Tempe's wireless police state hasn't gone as smoothly as planned. Last month the Republic reported that both Tempe and neighboring Chandler's wi-fi projects have foundered thanks to poor marketing. At it's peak, Tempe's plan only pulled in 800 subscribers and currently it's being offered free to those who can manage to pick up a signal. If the company currently running the project pulls out, Tempe may takeover the network.

Now that things aren't turning out quite as planned, city bureaucrats are reassessing the progressive spin they put on municipal wi-fi. As reported in Computer World last month:

Dave Heck, the [Tempe's] CIO, remembers how municipal Wi-Fi advocates talked about wireless networks as shining beacons that would bring Internet connectivity to the masses. But that kind of optimism is nearly gone in Tempe, and the city's network is dead in the water.

On Dec. 28, Kite Networks Inc., a division of Gobility Inc. that had been operating the network in Tempe, cut off connections and pulled the plug on its customer service phone line and Web site. Heck said subscribers have been hounding city officials to restore the Wi-Fi service. But the city's leverage over Gobility is limited, he added.

"Obviously, the city never thought this would happen, or we would have never gotten into it," Heck said. "People are pointing fingers, with some citizens thinking [the city] had more involvement than we did. Nobody could have foreseen this."

With the failure of the business end comes doubt about the government projects as well. Last year, as an in kind substitution for rents Gobility offered the city free access for fire and police, but the project's rocky future may put the elite's short-term plan for increased policing power in jeopardy, although, knowing it's potential utility in the war against the poor and working class, they continue to defend the system.

In Philadelphia, which is experiencing a similar situation as Tempe, the project is defended in both policing terms and for the so-called progressive benefits it will bring to poor people (aside from the heavier foot of the police state, I assume). Craig Settles, the author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless, who has written about Philadelphia's wireless experience put it this way:

Mr. Settles insists wireless can help the Nutter administration attain its goals.

"It puts more police on the street," Mr. Settles stresses, "when they don't have to go back to the station to access data and write their reports. They can do mug shot six packs. They can obtain witness identification in the streets.

"When paramedics respond in Houston and Corpus Christi, they can bring up patient data and send data and photographs ahead to the emergency room. There is more effective medicine going on in the ambulance that way. They can coordinate their efforts so the emergency room can be a better responder and treatment can move more quickly.

Settles sounds a bit desperate as he pleads with us:

"You have to use the technology," Mr. Settles emphasizes. "The wireless technology gives you the ability to work ex-offenders through some sort of computer training program."

Mr. Settles is an unabashed cheerleader for Wireless Philadelphia and its mission to bridge the digital divide with low-cost computers and training for low-income households in Philadelphia.

"Some sort of computer training program?" Like prison, perhaps? What a joke.

Sure, we're told, this will help poor people, too, even as it polices them. Indeed, the real purpose of municipal wireless becomes apparent when we consider a recent article in Information Week. Aside from subsidizing gentrification and business, we're reminded by Firetide's company spokesman (the company responsible for the wi-fi project in Los Gatos, California) that, "It's free to residents wherever they can get a signal." But what else is free?

Late last month, Firetide reported that its wireless mesh system tied a video surveillance network of cameras to the West Palm Beach Police Department in Florida. Deployed in the toughest neighborhood in the 100,000-resident city, the network is aimed at helping deter gang activity, drug dealing, and prostitution. Mesh nodes are connected to Wi-Fi-enabled laptops in police cruisers.

West Palm Beach's police communications manager Michael Cambisios said the Firetide network enabled the police force to "reach into areas not accessible by fiber or cable, extending resources without increasing manpower."

There: you couldn't have it put more clearly. Wireless is what the army calls a "force multiplier" and it's bad news for the poor and working class who, we know, never get anything for free from the elite (except a prison cell or a military uniform, perhaps). When the elite begins holding out freebies to us, we had best think twice about the deal we're getting. Municipal wi-fi is a net loser for us, and we need to recognize it as such. When the uprising comes, don't forget to take out the wi-fi. It benefits them far more than it helps us.

Montel Williams, Heath Ledger and 1.2 million dead Iraqis walk into a bar...

Montel Williams was interviewed on Fox about Heath Ledger's death and he threw a fit because the media was fawning over Heath while ignoring the deaths in Iraq. But which deaths did he mean?

Montel Williams: "How many people have died in Iraq since January one? "

Fox Host: "It's about 20"

Montel Williams: "No its not about, it is 28"

But, in fact, if Montel, a former Naval Intelligence officer, had bothered to check he'd know that actually according to "Combined figures obtained from the defence, interior and health ministries 541 people were killed in Iraq last month". Montel gets it wrong because he's only counting Americans. To him Iraqis don't count. Imagine that! Americans killed in Iraq count more than Iraqis killed in Iraq, many of whom have been killed by Americans in Iraq! Bizarre!

But why is this? Montel has swallowed this "support the troops" crap which divorces the actions and mission of the soldiers from our support for them. Our support stops being conditional and becomes the patriotic price of admission to the public debate on the war. It depoliticizes the debate and makes it harder for us to understand what's really going on in Iraq. Thus, it matters not that US war dead have been killed trying to impose on Iraq the imperialist vision of a small global elite based mostly in Washington, New York and London. But isn't that a big difference? For instance, if you're killed breaking into someone's house, are you a victim to be honored? Likewise, if you kill someone randomly in a mall, that's murder, but if you kill them as they force their way into your bedroom with a gun, that's self-defense.

Indeed, echoing Montel's misguided sentiments, a recent article posted on Reddit.com cleverly retitled an AP piece "Five Heath Ledgers Die In Iraq" in an apparent attempt to draw attention to US war deaths, which are indeed continuing to mount every day. Like Montel, it seems safe to presume that the author of said alternate title thought the dead soldiers to be more worthy of mention than dead Heath Ledger. But, really, when you think about it, perhaps Heath Ledger might actually be more worthy of our praise than those five more or less willing tools of foreign occupation. After all, rather than joining the Aussie military and heading out to do his patriotic duty in Iraq, Heath Ledger was out protesting the war in Iraq in 2002, well before the invasion.

In an interview just before the war, Heath Ledger slammed the war and his own country's then-Prime Minister, John Howard:

"I think John 'Coward' should just grow up," he said while watching the war on Iraq unfold on television.

"He's so subservient to this guy (US President George Bush) and they're sending 250,000 troops over there, why should we send our 2000, it makes no difference.

"We've got nothing to do with it, we've got to grow up and be independent.

"All of a sudden we're an aggressor, we're part of this, we're supporting this aggression, and it's ridiculous, we shouldn't be."

Ledger said it was strange to be publicising a movie in the midst of war breaking out.

"It's surreal for me to be sitting here, talking to you and giving an interview while they're dropping 3000 bombs on Bagdad," he said.

"It's really hard to sit here and be happy about a movie opening, 'cause it just makes you realise the insignificance of this, it means nothing in comparison.

"The one thing I do have is the opportunity to be heard and it's something that the average person can't stand up and say 'Hey, we shouldn't be doing this.'

"It's just my opinion, but I think it's the right one. I don't think war is the answer to anything.

"It's a very, very sad day."

But the US media will hear nothing of that sort of criticism, even as the war drags on and Americans increasingly turn against it. Discussion on the war is carefully managed, sometimes leading to quite ridiculous results.

Two weeks ago the New York Times ran an article on the rising trend of US soldiers returning home and committing murders. Screwed up from combat and forgetting that US law only condones the killing of civilians when it's done under the US flag overseas, sometimes US troops return home and start killing random civilians and less-random loved ones. The Times put the total at 121 US soldiers/murderers.

And you never heard such a sympathetic treatment of a cold-blooded killer in your life! Throughout the piece, the victims of the various murder sprees are stripped of both identity and humanity, referred to as "gang member[s]" or left entirely unidentified. In fact, in one case a soldier's participation in the murder of an Iraqi civilian is then used as an excuse for his later murder of two American civilians after returning home. All three victims being poor and likely people of color (if we are to take the Times' application of the code word "gang member" for what it likely really means), they are unworthy of equal status with their murderer in the eyes of both the reporter or the newspaper. And even when the victim is treated sympathetically (when it's a relative, for instance), we are reminded constantly of the poor, broken-minded status of the pathetic killer.

Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans, many of whom struggle in quieter ways, with crumbling marriages, mounting debt, deepening alcohol dependence or more-minor tangles with the law.

But these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.

Try finding that kind of sympathetic reporting about an Iraqi insurgent killing a US soldier in the Times. Or of a "gang member" killing another American. Never, of course, will you see it. This despite the fact that it should hardly surprise anyone when soldiers who kill abroad tend to become violent at home. Perhaps the arbitrary geographical lines we use to separate murderer from war hero are a bit harder to navigate on the ground than newspaper publishers in New York would like to believe. Things are always clearer from the head-spinning heights of the ivory tower.

But, of course, now we know that over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion of Iraq (and that doesn't count the half million kids alone killed by US sanctions in the 90's and another 100,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War!). Think about that: before the invasion Iraq had somewhere around 27 million people, so if that proportion of deaths were to happen here, it would mean nearly 15 million dead Americans. Do you think Montel or the Times would ignore that? You know Montel falls asleep every night counting every one of those dead troops and probably the folks killed on 9/11, too.

In fact, contrary to Montel's nationalistic whining about alleged American ignorance of US deaths in Iraq, a poll taken last year asked Americans to estimate the number of US dead, which they did quite accurately, missing the actual figure at the time by only about a hundred (the total was then 3100). That's pretty close given the rate of casualties. But, when it came to Iraqi dead in the war, they consistently underestimated it by many factors compared to even the US government's low ball figures!

Notice how, even though Montel's position is easily refuted -- just watch any local news for the regular roll call of local fallen so-called "heroes" (apparently all it take to be a hero is to be killed in an imperialist war) -- his statements are encouraged, because they reinforce the jingoistic atmosphere and rally people behind the flag by focusing on our so-called collective losses (even though the gains from the Iraq war will not be shared collectively, either with regular Americans or with the Iraqis). This even though they are couched as criticism of the media, which they are generally loath to consider. That's because it's actually criticism that subverts criticism. It's disinformation that aids the imperialists' war in Iraq.

But this is not an indictment of Fox News, per se. What it really reflects is the shared common ground between conservatism and liberalism. Constantly portrayed to the American public as antagonistic philosophies, they are in fact the twin bastards of capitalism and empire, and as a result neither is equipped with the analytical tools necessary to come to grips with the heart of the issue: imperialism. Unable to name the source of the problem, those who adhere to these two bankrupt philosophies can only pour out more sappy, empty justifications for war and its willing executioners in the field.

Talking heads argue aggressively about victory and whether it's possible while the true question -- what victory really means (US hegemony) and whether that is indeed desirable -- is left completely off the table. It cannot be articulated within the current context. Meanwhile, millions continue to die and the American people, trapped between these two bloodthirsty kissing cousins, remain unable to see a way past the war and, therefore, unable to come to terms with their own complicity and the true aims of the elite when it comes to Iraq. Without breaking from this nationalistic worldview and the cross-class alliance it creates, the reality that for there to be a just outcome to the war in Iraq, the US elite and its war machine must be defeated there, will continue to elude the American people and the great tragedy in Iraq will continue to unfold, until the oil runs out.

And then woe be unto any remaining nations still sitting on our oil.


Watch the video for yourself. Pathetic nationalism in full display:

Progress in Iraq: Mobile Death Labs Come to Iraq

So, weapons designer Anh Duong has developed a mobile lab (it's inflatable!) chock full of high tech identification gear, such as a retina scanning devices, computers and a satellite uplink to Washington, DC. She hopes to make more efficient the decision-making process that soldiers go through every day: "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?" Those are her words.

While the deployment of mobile high tech death labs in Iraq (set for 2008), something we've actually seen recently in China as well, is truly a sad development for humanity, I think the interesting part about this article is the way this new technology is being praised by the elite media for the way it brings more specific death to Iraq. And in a very real sense, it's being pushed as a progressive development in war-fighting.

As Robert Parry reports for Consortium News (drawing on a previous Washington Post article on the subject):

Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.

"I don't want My Lai in Iraq," Duong said. "The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror – just like in Vietnam – is to know who the bad guys are. How do we make sure we don't kill innocents?"

Duong, a 47 year-old refugee from Vietnam, seems to have drawn all the wrong lessons from America's imperialist wars. Driven by some twisted sense of gratitude to the country that laid indiscriminate waste to hers, she claims the experience growing up in Saigon under the shadow of Viet Cong rockets drove her on a quest to develop means of killing that avoided the massacre of innocents she had seen in her youth.

Explains, Duong in the Washington Post piece:

"My life is payback: I'm indebted to the soldiers and to Americans," she said. "I was enraged when I found out how Hollywood portrayed my American heroes and my American friends as women- and children-killers. How dare they?" As a teenager, Duong went to see "The Deer Hunter." She walked out in the middle.

Duong is still angry, though no longer helpless. "I'm here because in Vietnam, we ran out of bullets. I don't want to ever be in that position again," she said. "By building bombs, the other guys realize they shouldn't mess with us. If you have a gun, I have a bazooka. If you have a grenade, guess what? I have a bomb."

Despite her explanation, becoming a bomb maker for the US government still seems like an odd conclusion to come to in those circumstances, but what strikes me perhaps even more is her complete lack of a critique of bureaucracy and data entry -- especially for a public servant! If she had ever worked punching numbers into computers for the US Post Office like I have, she might be a little less enthusiastic about the efficiency of her new mobile techno-death-marvel. Some tired teenage soldier, hopped up on amphetamines and barely able to read, accidentally enters a 5 instead of a 6 and all of a sudden you're lying in a pool of your own brains and blood. Progress indeed!

Of course, efficiency in killing isn't the only benefit the mass application of repressive technology in Iraq will bring to the Iraqi people. Mass incarceration, too, will soon come to Iraq (again), and US occupation forces are now planning to more than triple the number of Iraqis in detention facilities, in large part made possible thanks by the new technology.

In effect, the Bush administration is transforming Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, which already include use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.

The new techniques represent a modernization of tactics used in other counterinsurgencies, such as in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s.

In Vietnam, U.S. forces planted sensors along infiltration routes for targeting bombing runs against North Vietnamese troops. In Guatemala, security forces were equipped with early laptop computers for use in identifying suspected subversives who would be dragged off buses and summarily executed.

Now, modern technologies are updating these strategies for the 21st century’s “war on terror.”

The U.S. news media mostly has reacted to these developments with gee-whiz enthusiasm, like the Post story about Duong, which breezily depicts her complicated life as a devoted mom whose personal history as a Vietnamese refugee led her to a career developing sophisticated weapons for the U.S. government.

Truly frightening, but, nevertheless, we should pay attention because Iraq's present foreshadows our future if we don't do something about it now. These technologies will come home, if they haven't already. First in disaster areas and riots. Or perhaps first in malls and on street corners. Or maybe first at sporting events and in police cars.

And the story of the mobile death lab also presents a lesson we had best not ignore about the way technology is so often presented as progressive when in fact it merely further tightens the death grip of the elite class on society. We see this at home with the broad application of Tasers and surveillance cameras. Crime fighting will be more efficient and less bloody, we are told, but we never ask just who is being policed and why? Or how they might be different from those doing the policing.

After all, who are the bad guys Duong wants to kill anyway? Without getting into their specific politics, when you get right down to it aren't they really just folks standing in the way of the American elite's imperial project in Iraq? They're folks with the nerve to think that they, not some distant imperialist in a beltway think tank, might more deserving of making decisions about what goes on in their country. The good guys, on the other hand -- according to Duong's imperialist formulation -- are the ones who stand passively by or even support the destruction and dismantlement of their country for the benefit of a small elite in the US. Truly a reversal of logic.

Now, perhaps we do understand Duong's perspective. She was against those in Vietnam who resisted imperial domination and she's against them now in Iraq. In a bizarre case of Stockholm Syndrome, Duong has embraced the country that wanted so much to keep Vietnam within the imperial domain that it was willing to mercilessly kill 2 million of her countrymen and women, often in brutal massacres like My Lai, creating the chaotic conditions that set her and her family fleeing into the arms of the US military in 1975. Of course, it's worth remembering, since Duong is so focused on carrying out specific killings as a path towards so-called success in Iraq, that the US used quite discriminate murder in Vietnam as well, such as that organized through the infamous Phoenix Program of assassination, which murdered more than 80,000 Vietnamese quite specifically.

And yet, to her, in true imperialist fashion, it's the resisters that must be eradicated, not the oppressor. When resistance to foreign domination is eradicated in Iraq, apparently, freedom will finally ring for Iraqis. It's the imperial project of the far off overlord, the goals of which we dare not name in polite company, that is the all beautiful good, and the resistance of the dominated, who's goals we also obscure lest we sympathize, that is the ultimate evil.

Bullshit.

Despite all her hand wringing about finding a better way to sort out the bad guys from the good guys, hasn't Duong really just come full circle? Remember the old Vietnam era soldiers refrain, as reported to the Winter Soldiers investigation in 1971:

The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, VC had weapons and civilians didn't and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient.

Vietnam. Washington. Iraq. Washington.
Some things never change.

Is the Internet killing the planet?

Over at BLDGBLOG earlier this week there was an interesting article on the environmental impact of servers. It's something most folks don't think about (and neither do IT people, apparently, since a huge majority of them expressed stunning ignorance of their industry's contribution to climate collapse).


The writer at BLDGBLOG cites a recent piece from the New Scientist that revealed, among other interesting facts, these tidbits:

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.

This massive increase in storage capacity, demanded as it is by capitalism, the state -- and the technology itself -- is having disastrous effects on the planet, as we found out today (again!) with the release of yet more dismayingly catastrophic news about the environment. While we certainly can't lay the all the blame for the rapidly increasing onset of global warming at the feet of the tech industry, I still find it curious that we have had exponential growth in computer power (and the resulting computerization of everyday life) at the same time we have seen a major escalation in the pace of ecological collapse.

Ironically, thanks to technology we are able to record the facts of our own planetary demise with unprecedented accuracy at the very same time that the technological system is driving us off a cliff. As one NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, said, "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines." Zwally worked in coal mines as a kid, so maybe he's someone we should listen to. "The Arctic is screaming," said another scientist.

And the pace of neither seems about to slow any time soon. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for job growth in the computer industry certainly foretell a continuation of this trend with job growth in the industry centering in data handling specialties:

The report, released Dec. 4, said network systems and data communications professionals will make up the single fastest-growing occupation between 2006 and 2016. That category will grow by an estimated 53.4 percent, followed closely by computer software applications engineers, whose ranks are expected to rise 44.6 percent in that time span.

Strong growth also is projected in computer systems analysis, 29 percent; computer software engineering, 28 percent; database administration, 27 percent; and network and computer systems administrators, 27 percent.

The news is not as good for computer programmers and computer operators, who were among the occupations with the largest projected declines - 4.1 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively.

Environmental scientists increasingly point out that we are in a ecological feedback loop.

Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral.

White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting.

Likewise, we are in a feedback loop with regard to information technology. As storage capacity increases, it creates more demand for data, which in turn requires more storage. Indeed, where would such ambitious projects like IBM's S3 surveillance system, soon to be deployed in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics (and in Manhattan), be without the massive storage permitted by modern computer systems and servers.

The S3 system, developed by IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, combines existing network and video surveillance infrastructure with state-of-the-art Information Technology, according to IDG News Service.

"Physical security and IT security are stating to come together," said Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side."

When the S3 system is deployed in the Beijing Olympic Games, it will scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The S3 uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected.

It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a restricted area.

Perhaps now we can see a big reason why the US is projected to require a dozen new power plants just to keep up with the growth of the server industry into 2011. The exponential growth in data handling and storage is also an exponential growth in the power of the elite class. No longer content with police records and prisons to track its mortal enemy the poor, excluded and working classes, the elite have embarked on a massive expansion of their power under the guise of supposedly neutral technology. Lacking an analysis of the class power of technology and blinded by elite arguments about "connectivity" and "family and friends" calling plans, nearly everyone has missed this massive accumulation of power in the hands of a very small elite. And all made possible by computer technology.

But it's not just security applications, of course, that are sucking up energy and pumping CO2 into the air. Indeed, we have the capitalists who perhaps are most enthusiastic about the coming Age of Omniscient Capitalism. The tech vanguard of Google and Facebook have both made headlines recently for their perhaps overzealous (for now) attempts to accumulate and harness the vast amounts of data that circulate on the internet about each of us. Not aberrations, as some liberals and libertarians might claim, these stockpiles of information are the direct result of the technology itself.

Indeed, one shocking innovation the personal computer has brought to us all is a massive increase in our ability to suck up not just data but actual resources. The globalization and consumerism we all now take for granted (whether we like it or not) is a direct result of computerization. Likewise, the growth of the Internet has opened opportunities for virtual accumulation that has increased the cost to the real world, not least in terms of ecological destruction.

Over at Rough Type there was an interesting analysis of the energy consumption of avatars in popular social networking world of Second Life. Crunching some numbers reveals that an avatar -- a virtual, often quite wishful thinking version of a real participant -- consumes more energy as an actual person in most Third World countries. In fact, one avatar uses as much power as a real Brazilian.

The vast amount of data and the demands to transmit that data (and the energy necessary to do it) that are required as part and parcel of the Internet and operations like Second Life seem to offer proof that we can take the effects of the technology on our environment as a direct result of the technology itself, not an exception to the rule. In that case, isn't it fair to ask the question: is the Internet killing the planet?

According to BLDGBLOG, the answer would seem to be maybe, but it doesn't have to be that way. S/he situates the locus of the archival instinct in ourselves, not in the technology, although s/he questions its utility in the long run. Thus, s/he thinks we could perhaps just record less data and thus avoid our dismal fate. However, in the process, s/he asks some great questions.

However, couldn't we also just store less information, save two or three – or four – hundred fewer emails, stop being mouse potatoes and go outside for a walk, leaving our servers turned off in the darkness?

Sure – or we could build our server farms in Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power is easy enough to find.

In any case, I can't help but wonder if the ecological effects of this archival instinct to preserve the past at any cost – whether we store something inside air conditioned warehouses full of books that no one wants, or in the well-lit galleries of potentially unnecessary new museums, or even out on server farms somewhere in the rainy hills of Oregon – are really worth it.

And I can't help but suggest that they're not – even if that means I'll no longer have a place to save BLDGBLOG.

But we are making the earth unearthly, through the knock-on effects of global climate change, in order that we might hold onto the human past for another generation – reading old books, preserving films, saving emails.

So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects?

Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...?

Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?

Interesting, but there is a cost inherent in the technological mode of data storage that is not similarly built into other methods, not least of which, from the perspective of the elite class, is the ability to access it on a whim -- to cross reference it and to track and modify it according to new information. Similarly, whatever the cost to the environment of making the books and warehouse in the first place, a warehouse full of books does not need to be replaced every few years to keep up with the pace of data storage and transmission.

As we continue to speed towards the Age of Omniscient Capitalism, propelled as it is by two main forces, the elite's desire for control and the technology's capacity for storage and transmission, we will increasingly find ourselves facing the answer to this question. Can we divorce our increasingly critical ecological situation, not to mention the ever more tenuous state of what the liberals and libertarians wistfully lament as our "lost civil liberties," from the technology that delivered it to us?


***UPDATE***

Speaking of massive stockpiles of data, consider this Wired article on DARPA's plan to record, store and analyze everything we do, from emails to what you read to where you go to grab breakfast.

"The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable."

Of course, while they'll certainly assure us that it's for our own good, you have to wonder: could that amount of data be used for anything OTHER than nefarious ends?

Read it:
A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams

Some people fight back. Remembering Indian resistance in the Southwest.

Drug running by intelligence services resurfaces again.

Plenty of evidence has linked the CIA and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies to drugs trafficking over the years. Most people in the US don't remember Burmese warlord Khun Sa. Sa was the CIA's longtime heroin pusher in Southeast Asia. He was the guy who used to run heroin during the Vietnam War in conjunction with the CIA's infamous Air America Airlines. In that particular situation, the heroin was shipped to Vietnam where it was sold to GI's. That money was used to fund illegal operations in the country like the Phoenix Program, which claimed thousands of lives through assassination and other nasty methods.

More recently, famed and now dead by suicide reporter Gary Webb wrote extensively on the CIA-crack-Contra connection in the 80's. Webb's exhaustive reporting revealed how the government was bringing in crack cocaine, targeted at Black communities. That money was then turned around and used to fund the Contras illegal terrorist war against the people of Nicaragua. At that time, the assistant director of the CIA was Robert Gates and he was the one tasked with investigated -- and exonerating -- the agency of all charges surrounding drug smuggling, which he did faithfully. Gates is now the Secretary of Defense.

Now, drug money is perfect money for running covert operations because it's hard to track. One thing we know about the current wars is that the CIA and other government agencies have long-standing ties to jihadist and Al-Qaeda organizations and individuals. This extends back to the US creation of the Islamic jihadist movement to counter Soviet forces in Afghanistan right through to the false flag attacks of September 11th. We also know that increasingly the intelligence services have been supporting these groups again. Sy Hersch has written about it recently for New Yorker, among other publications.

And we likewise know that since the US invasion of Afghanistan the poppy crop, which was all but eliminated under the Taliban, has resurged, thus opening up again this tried and true revenue stream for covert operations. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that, as ABC news reported, former northern Takhar province chief of the border police, Haji Zahir Qadir (the man that President Hamid Karzai had planned to name as head of the entire country's border police) was recently caught with more than 100 kilos of heroin in his car.

Is history repeating? Or did it never end?

Mysterious Jet Crash Is Rare Portal Into the “Dark Alliances” of the Drug War
Paper Trail for Cocaine-Filled Plane that Crashed in Yucatán Suggests Link to U.S. Law Enforcement Corruption in Colombia

CIA "rendition" flights as cover for drug smuggling: Did the Inspector General discover the Agency's dirtiest secret?

Technological end run leads to re-runs.

I generally support striking workers, and I'm quite sympathetic to the position of the writers on this one, especially since this appears yet again to be a case of the elite using technology to upend workers power on the job not least by attempting to cut workers out of the profit they are due by redefining the means of distribution. In essence, these new technologies have been applied as a means to do an end run around writers' traditional relationships to production.

And not for the first time. Part of the reason that writers are out this time is precisely because they feel like the transition to cable and VHS both undermined their power to challenge the boss about the distribution of the profits from their labor. In essence when the bosses brought in those new technologies, they transferred power from writers' hands into their own, and billions of dollars along with it. Writers vow not to be fooled again.

Typical of a ruling class that likes to obscure the political-economic content behind a news story, the media has treated the transition to new technologies not as an attack on workers power, but as a natural phenomenon, generally referred to in the passive voice. For instance, when they remind us that "technology revolutionizes the way entertainment is delivered." Or when, as the International Herald Tribune reports it:

The strike would pit union writers, whose position has been eroded by reality television and galloping technological change, against studios and networks that are backed by big corporate owners like General Electric and News Corp., but are also unsure of the future.

As if technology is a force that drives itself, independent of the will of the elites that fund it, develop it, distribute it and apply it. Can we really say that the "big corporate owners like General Electric" would have invested billions in new technology if it would have empowered their workers interests over theirs? Even in the IHT article, while some class analysis seeps in, the fundamental myth of neutral or naturally progressing technology is maintained. But without understanding the class nature of technology, we cannot understand the writers' strike.

Nevertheless, I do have to express some solidarity with the caller to NPR the other day who asked if the writers will start writing better quality shows when they return. That would be nice. It does feel weird supporting a striking worker who writes for Touched By An Angel. It's kind of how I feel when I hear that defense industry workers have walked out. If they're just going to go back to doing what they were doing before the strike then I have to wonder which side I'm really on this time. After all, if TV stayed in reruns, maybe less people would watch it.

Although, of course, while technology is a ruling class weapon, we are sometimes able to use it to some small benefit towards our own ends. This exception doesn't invalidate the rule, however. On that note, enjoy this short bit produced on the picket line by striking Daily Show writers.

A brief description of my recent trip to Mexico

Having visited Mexico a few times in the last year and having met up with the Other Campaign twice in Magdalena (most recently in early October), I have become more and more interested in the Zapatistas and revolutionary struggle in Mexico. I certainly have followed and supported them over the many years since their 1994 uprising brought them to my attention, but revolutionary organizing in Mexico only truly captured my political attention recently, in particular with the release of the Sexta document and the exciting Other Campaign. Whereas before my support was largely symbolic, in the last year, thanks to organizing with local Indigenous collectives and the immigrant/migrant movement, I have been engaged to participate directly in solidarity, which has been truly exciting.

I think a primary limitation on my participation early on came from not knowing Spanish. Now, however, I can speak it pretty well, and that has facilitated exploring my interest in revolutionary politics on the other side of the border. As I become increasingly convinced that the opportunity for revolutionary change in the US in quickly diminishing -- probably forever -- it has been truly inspiring to see up close what revolutionary struggle really looks like.

The first visit I took to Magdalena was inspiring. It was during the Sonora leg of the Zapatistas listening tour. It was open to anyone and the camp was quite packed. Quite a lot of Northern gringos milled about and watched, as did I, while Subcommandante Marcos and other Indigenous and civic leaders took notes on the particulars of social struggle in the state. The stories I heard from local elders and organizers were both heart-breaking and inspiring and seeing leaders from the various movements actively taking notes and listening to the complaints and ideas of the base was interesting indeed. As an anarchist, of course, I am generally skeptical of leadership, but the process I saw taking place went some distance to re-assure me that I wasn't seeing leadership as we have rightfully grown to distrust it here in the US.


For the second trip down to Magdalena this October, I took a more active role, doing support and fund-raising through a collective in which I participate and sending money down to Mexico via a collective of Indigenous youth (Yaqui and O'odham) with whom we were working. Then, tagging along with them, I headed down for the regional Indigenous encuentro as an observer and a supporter.

The meeting was smaller this time, with only a handful of whites observing. The first day opened with a speech by Marcos and others, and that was followed by a series of report-backs on local conditions and struggles from the various groups attending. The news was largely sad, spanning the range from displacement to murder and attacks by paramilitaries and police, although the collective that I have worked with was able to report to the gathering that they had successfully shut down a toxic waste plant that had been spewing filth into the air and cancer into the bodies of folks on the reservation for decades. It was one of the few bright spots, but I was proud to have been a small part of that victory, so it was good to hear the applause erupt from the assembly upon hearing the news. While people spoke, supporters actively took notes on large sheets of paper. Though the news was sad, the strength of everyone there, sharing their experiences together with the aim of building a revolutionary movement in Mexico was palpable. Sad stories, perhaps, but not told by defeated people.

The next day was made up of more report-backs and finally a vote and discussion on the proposed document as it had been hashed out. As an anarchist I have of course always firmly believed that people have it in themselves to run their own affairs in a democratic fashion. The concept of "Democracy" in the US has always been an extremely limited and elitist one, so it was particularly inspiring to see Indigenous peasants and farmers -- folks that arrogant Americans would never consider capable of practicing such a high form of self-organization -- engaging in democratic practice far and beyond that which exists here in the North without the "benefit" of college educations or high school diplomas.

Indeed, in all likelihood the pathetic sort of democracy we have here in the US depends precisely on the limiting of the imagination and authoritarianism accomplished by the school system to function -- not because such institutions make true democracy possible, but precisely because it limits it and excludes participants, forcing actors in the system to make pragmatic demands and to accept the authority of politicians and the recuperation of social struggle through institutions of the state and capital and its various non-profit accomplices.

We returned to the US and sailed through the border without incident. As it doesn't exist for capital, so it likewise doesn't exist for me. Not so for our Mexican comrades organizing so urgently even now for liberty and equality, ironically, precisely so that fewer of their fellow Mexicans will have to flee north into the exploitation and precarity of life in the US.

If technology is so great, then where are all the E.T.'s?

This may not seem like the kind of question you would expect discussed here at Phoenix Insurgent, but bear with me for a moment. Why is it that despite the self-confident promises of the techno-philiac transhumanists, the constant reassuring of better things to come from our technology-loving elite and their scientist cadres, not to mention the treated-as-inevitable prognostications of the wizened researchers and science fiction writers alike -- why is it that despite all this so-called common sense about the benevolent and promising nature of technology we don't see any evidence of other high technology or space-faring civilizations anywhere in the universe?

This might be a just a thought experiment, but it sure does make you wonder doesn't it? I mean, the universe has had somewhere on the order of nearly 14 billion years to produce all the millions of space shuttling races that we see portrayed in our science fiction classics. Certainly the universe, given the myth of technology, must at least be populated with hundreds of iPod wearing slime, gas, carbon or silicon-cased creatures by now. Yet where are they? In all the years we've been listening to the skies, we haven't detected so much as a stray podcast from them.

Isn't this a bit surprising? After all, doesn't the ideology of technology as we are force fed it from day one in this society instill in us a religious-like faith in progress as manifested through our many microchips and machines? Like Jesus returning to pluck us from our Earthly hell and deliver us to paradise, we all take for granted that humanity will someday get its planetary shit together and, thanks to its technology, head off-world towards the heavens and paradise, where we'll all somehow finally manage to build an egalitarian world of mono-color jumpsuits and prime directives (and all without ever having to overthrow the bloody capitalists and politicians that have kept us from doing so up to that point - if that doesn't reveal this faith in technology as a tool of the elite than I don't know what does!). Yet despite scientists' allegedly strictly adhered to method of evidence-based research, we are left to assume that the very same science and technology which, so far, has yet to solve even the most basic problems of distribution of wealth and power, and both of which in fact adhere themselves quite willingly to existing power structures like the military and the university-corporate system, will somehow develop a heretofore undiscovered mechanism for solving all our problems in an egalitarian way - all while ceasing to cause new problems and eschewing the accountability of all except their capitalist and government masters. In other words, we're supposed to ignore all the evidence to the contrary and trust the scientists that it'll all come out all right in the end, even though there is no process for ensuring it will do so. In fact quite the opposite.

So, if it's so true (and ignoring Dennis Kucinich's midnight close encounters), how do we explain the strange absence of our celestial brothers? Said another way, where is ET?

Well, let's set aside for a moment whether there could even be something called an egalitarian technological society and consider instead what other forces might conspire to keep the universe barren of galactic civilizations and what that might mean for us. Indeed, some may be familiar with the Drake Equation, which Dr. Frank Drake developed in 1960 in an attempt to figure out just what was the likelihood of the universe spawning intelligent life that could reach out to the stars. It attempted to get a handle on a variety of variables, some quite mundane like how many stars will have planets that could support life and how many civilizations will develop the technology to communicate with us (so we can become aware of them). Interesting stuff, for sure. Alluded to, but not spoken outright, however, is perhaps the most important part of the equation: how many technological civilizations actually survive technological civilization itself? The equation doesn't get too specific on that point, opting to couch things in general terms: "L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space." In other words, how long a civilization can avoid destroying itself (or, less likely, I suppose, dodge comet impacts). That such formulations are left to euphemism and the abstract says a lot about the miasma of self-denial afflicting scientists living in the midst of the Cold War and under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of, well, scientists (who created the bombs to begin with, of course). Such investigations are at their heart, speculation, for sure. However, as the equation suggests, there are some knowables, and they may more broad-ranging in scope than mere atomic destruction or a meteor impact.

For instance, recent news suggests that it's not just the bullet of nuclear holocaust that we must dodge if we are to make it to the stars. Technological existence has slower but no less lethal weapons in its arsenal, too. Consider the UN's recent report on climate change, which frames itself as a last warning to humanity else we face the catastrophic collision of total ecological collapse and the steadily building crisis of over-population. As reported in the International Herald Tribune recently,

The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are "among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century," he said.

What if all civilizations faced similar inevitable crises, not despite but precisely because of their technological nature. Consider that experts have increasingly been forecasting disastrous wars over shrinking access to resources in our near future (perhaps, some contend, we are already witnessing such conflicts in Darfur and the Middle East). Indeed, a recent military think tank report suggests an increasingly willingness of reactionary elements to take these threats seriously and are already preparing for the war of the technological world against the planet of slums. Seen Children of Men? That's one vision of what we could be facing.



Then, of course, we have peak oil, which is also in the news today, as several oil-producing regimes (perhaps not to be trusted) have declared that they cannot guarantee increased production as global supplies shrink and demand rises. Likewise, China announced this week that it will reach peak oil production by 2015. Throw in increasingly virulent diseases or mutated old ones, and you have a good idea of the kind of dangers that technological society creates for itself, ironically limiting its own ability to make good on its promises and deliver us safely into the celestial bosom.

Quite impressive, really, when you consider that of 100,000 years of human history, industrialism has only really been at it in a serious way for a hundred or so. And there remain large sections of the planet's population and land that are not yet incorporated into the industrial system of production! Just wait until the entire planet is under industrial domination - if we ever get there. What would that success mean for our survivability?

All this talk is a round-about way of pointing you to Dr. Michael Byron's quite interesting recent article entitled Peak Oil and the Fermi Paradox. In it, Byron explores these very factors as they relate to the Drake equation and the likelihood of there existing any ETs out there at all. He asks,

If other civilizations exist, then it would seem reasonable that at least some would be more advanced than ours, and would presumably be able to travel to nearby star systems. After a few millions of years they ought to have colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Radio astronomers have been searching ever since Frank Drake undertook the first scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations with Project Ozma back in 1960. Yet there is no sign of extraterrestrial civilization anywhere in our galaxy. The silence across the galaxy has been deafening. So where are they?!

To which he responds that perhaps the conditions necessary for a civilization to reach interstellar heights are rare indeed - and self-limiting. Maybe developing a galactic civilization is more of a window of opportunity, not a guarantee that comes merely from avoiding immediate self-destruction. Perhaps, he wonders, in our case we had our chance to escape our Earthly bondage and have now let it slip by, distracted as we were by the Cold War and other misadventures.

The bottom line is clear: our civilization could have expanded off planet and established itself among the moons, asteroids, and in the case of Mars, even planets of our solar system. Except that we didn’t. Instead we had the Cold War, we had the Vietnam War, while Soviet Russia had its Afghan War, etc. In just the past half decade, a fraction of the monies that will ultimately be squandered on the futile Iraq war (trillions of dollars) could have, if directed by a pragmatic visionary such as Robert Zubrin, bootstrapped our species out into the solar system.

Without our realizing it, the window of opportunity for humans to expand into our solar system is rapidly closing. With all of the multiple crises which are bearing down upon our civilization—peak oil, climate change, capture of our government and our economy by rapacious, undemocratic corporate elites, etc., I do not believe that we will (pun intended) rise to the occasion.

Across our galaxy this story has likely played out multiple times during the last two billion years or so in which intelligent life might plausibly have evolved. The core problem is that the window of opportunity for solar system expansion is so very brief, that of the small number of planetary civilizations which have probably emerged in our galaxy thus far in its history, none have succeeded in taking advantage of it before the window slammed shut forever.

Interesting indeed.

Of course, I would hasten to add that in all likelihood, even a society that would successfully navigate through this window of opportunity to the stars would suffer the great tragedy of creating a civilization overwhelmed by high technology to such an extent that, if it did support human life, it would be highly unlikely to support freedom in any form that we would find recognizable. After all, as I pointed out above, the assumption that a high tech society that made it to space would be a free one is just that - an assumption. And one that flies in the face of the available evidence at that. Further, who's to say that we wouldn't just do to the universe what we have done to the Earth. As Byron puts it:

At a deeper level I have come to the conclusion that perhaps even the vast resources of our solar system are themselves ultimately limited. If a solar system wide civilization were to emerge, it would likely grow to a population of hundreds of billions. If such a civilization were to merely be an expanded version of our present day civilization, it seems likely that we would just end up consuming or destroying utterly irreplaceable resources on not just a planetary scale, but rather upon a solar system wide scale. This is not good as these resources could be put to effective use by a more culturally evolved civilization—unless they had already been senselessly trashed by cultural primitives such as ourselves.

In that case, then, perhaps it's better that we missed the window.

News of the week

The fires in California put lives at risk as immigrant workers stay away from shelters out of fear of deportation.

Evacuations raise deportation fears
Flames were only one worry for some illegal immigrants in the fire zone. Equally scary were the crowded roads and evacuation centers, heavy with law enforcement officers, including U.S. Border Patrol agents. Some wondered if they would be deported if they went to shelters.

"We decided that we wouldn't go because they ask for your name and everything," said day laborer Jose Salgado, waiting for work off the 5 Freeway near Rancho Santa Fe.

His friends working in the nearby tomato fields had different concerns, he said: "They didn't know if they would have a job when they got back."

Disasters can magnify the marginalized status of people here illegally. Seeking help can mean taking risks, and decisions can be informed as much by rumor and miscommunication as by facts and actual events.

As if that wasn't the point to begin with. Liberals and even some on the right will fret over how we can 'fix' our 'broken schools' when in fact the schools are performing quite as planned. The bad news is that kids that dropout are for the most part setting themselves on a path towards lower wages and higher incarceration rates, but the positive side is that these kids are engaging in a massive decentralized resistance movement against the incarceration system of compulsory schooling. Lacking an alternative movement of students taking their education in their own hands after dropping out, however, the future looks bleak for them.

1 in 10 schools are 'dropout factories'
The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones — the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.

We're running out of last chances. Although the ecological collapse brought on by capitalism (generally euphemistically referred to in Newspeak as 'climate change' so as to protect the guilty) is now officially on the public agenda here in the US, the form the discussion takes is twisted by capitalist power and the modern economy's demand for unending consumption. While the US (very) slowly greens its policies, it merely exports pollution and direct responsibility for the catastrophe to places like China and India.

UN issues 'final wake-up call' on population and environment
The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview.

Technological capitalism must know everything about everyone. As we move steadily towards the age of omniscient capitalism, we can point the finger of blame solidly at technology itself, which contains within it the logic of authority, tracking and enumeration. The authoritarian future that awaits us isn't a result of technology gone wrong -- it is technology's logical conclusion. Technology is an ideology of the ruling class. The more we begin to understand it that way, the better we will understand the way power in the future will be wielded by the ruling class against us.

Technology, the Stealthy Tattletale
A technological revolution is making it possible not just to track down escaping bank robbers but to find missing things and people far more quickly and precisely than ever. The change is powered less by new technologies than the artful combination of existing ones, mainly the Internet, cellphones and G.P.S. satellites. In some cases, the new devices linked to these systems can even detect a theft before it happens.

“This stuff is coming down the pike very soon,” said Jim Van Cleave, vice president of Spectrum Management, which has developed tracking systems for commercial and covert uses since 1980. “The number of potential applications is mind-boggling.”

The enclosure of public space continues as the age of omniscient capitalism draws ever nearer, sold under the twin banners of security and better service. Of course, the truth is the elite just want to know what we are doing all the time so they can farm us for profit and keep us from knocking them off their golden perches of privilege.

Camera feeds to police sought
High-tech surveillance cameras capable of providing real-time feeds to police could be coming to parks, playgrounds and business districts in Baltimore County.

The county would join Baltimore City in using cameras to deter crime - an approach that has drawn the ire of some privacy and civil liberties groups.

One Baltimore County Council member wants officers in patrol cars to be able to download digital images from Webcam systems at shopping centers and public places, and county police say they are interested in the idea.

As loath as anyone is to say it out loud, our capacity to bring force to bear against the police in certain situations is vital to maintaining our ability to organize to achieve our own ends as a class. As the elite's foot soldiers, the police, get more power - whether defensive or offensive - our power and autonomy diminishes. This makes the power of the elite more secure and therefore further enhances our levels of exploitation. These technologies must be opposed for that reason.

Super-strong body armour in sight
A new type of carbon fibre, developed at the University of Cambridge, could be woven into super-strong body armour for the military and law enforcement. The researchers say their material is already several times stronger, tougher and stiffer than fibres currently used to make protective armour.

Not that anyone likes being depressed, but it certainly wouldn't be completely out of line to say that if you're not at least a little depressed - or pessimistic - given the current global direction, then you're not paying attention. Happiness will be mandatory in the future, despite what other emotions the really existing political situation may evoke in you. But will the state have to mandate it? After all, who doesn't want to feel optimistic? As the article points out, optimistic people do better, so won't there be ample pressure from individuals themselves to prime their optimism centers? On the other hand, maybe what the revolutionary movement needs is to look a little more on the bright side of life.

Brain regions responsible for optimism located
"Understanding healthy optimism is important because optimism is related to mental and physical health and to success. We can have people who are not necessarily depressed but have different levels of optimism," said another of the researchers, Tali Sharot of University College London who was at NYU when the study was conducted.

Phelps said the research team is not saying these are necessarily the only brain regions involved in optimism. The researchers said they examined how the brain generates what some scientists call the human "optimism bias." "Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.

I thought work was always a treadmill. But seriously, I was at a library booksale the other day and there was a book that caught my eye entitiled, "Work: opposing viewpoints". I got a little excited for a second but it was a college textbook, so there was nothing criticial about it at all. Nowhere in it did it question work itself or any of the fundamentals that modern society takes for granted. Likewise, you can see here that this research comes so close to the truth but rather than advocating for the abolition of work, it injects more science into the mix. Thanks, doc, but I'll pass on that medicine.

Product combines workstation, treadmill
Levine said his research has shown that a sedentary lifestyle is unnatural. The key to fighting obesity and many other health problems is to keep people from spending their days desk-bound.

"Over the last 150 years, we've become chair-imprisoned. We are behind a screen all day at work. We are in a car or bus getting to and from work. And in the evening, we are in a chair watching television or surfing the Internet," Levine said. "We've gone from being on our legs all day to being on our bottoms all day."

Back from hiatus

I took a bit of an unannounced hiatus for a few weeks to work on some other projects and to support and then participate in the Continental Indigenous Encuentro organized by the EZLN (among other groups) that took place in Magdalena, Mexico a few weeks ago. I'm back now and a little more free in terms of time, so regular updates will proceed as normal from here on out. I may be forced to do some smaller posts from time to time, perhaps with an increased quantity, though, since I'm working on another writing project, but we'll take it as it comes. Thanks for sticking out during my little break.

If you would like to hear Marcos' speeches from the meeting in Magdalena, translated in real time into English, click on this link here.

Police news roundup

This is a special edition of the news roundup dedicated to police. As the city gets set to have another public beatification ceremony for another dead cop, let's take a second to remember what cops really do in a day's work. And this is just what they've been up to recently!

Officials fire Alton police chief accused of sex assault

Alton's chief of police has been fired weeks after the South Texas lawman was accused of sexually assaulting two male employees.

Jose Luis Vela was suspended after his August 29 arrest on two charges of sexual assault. Since then, three current and former police department employees have accused Vela of sexual harassment.

Vela was officially fired yesterday for poor record keeping and possible theft of confiscated items. City Manager Jorge Arcaute said allegations surfaced accusing Vela of stealing alcohol confiscated by his department.

E. Bruns. cop claims DWI bias

He has made more than 100 drunken-driving arrests a year and has won convictions in 99 percent of his cases.

But Patrolman Joseph Marcantonio, 17-year veteran of the East Brunswick Police Department, alleges in a lawsuit that drunken off-duty police officers skated from DWI arrests in East Brunswick, and his complaints to supervisors brought retaliation against him.

Marcantonio, in a complaint filed in Superior Court, New Brunswick, in July also claims that East Brunswick police officers engaged in racial profiling, failed to deal appropriately with DWI arrestees — some of whom later died. And the department destroyed video evidence, misused breath-testing devices and misspent funds used to combat drunken driving, he alleges.

Officer referred to murder-suicide during fight with wife, police say

An area police officer was arrested Thursday night at his Bethlehem home after his wife told police he was acting erratically and made reference to a murder-suicide this week involving another police officer and his wife.

John Fiore, 44, of 1041 N. New St. was charged with making terroristic threats and harassment. He was arraigned before District Judge James Stocklas of Bethlehem and released on $10,000 unsecured bail. According to court documents, Fiore is being treated at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Muhlenberg.

Police said Fiore was acting ''erratic and explosive'' and made statements about having nothing to lose after mentioning the murder-suicide, according to court documents.

Cop who shot, killed a man had been involved in 2 previous shootings

But King's parents, Gary and Catherine King, decried what they believed was excessive force. Their son had just left a liquor store with a bag of chips and soda, they said.

"My son didn't deserve to be brutally murdered this way," Gary King, 52, said. "Gary is a good boy, and he didn't hurt anybody and he was well-loved."

Catherine King, 50, acknowledged that her son could have been armed. "If he had a gun, I don't know," she said. "It's possible, and that wouldn't necessarily be the kind of thing he would share with his mom and dad."

Still, she said she didn't believe the sergeant had to shoot to kill.

Their son wasn't involved in any homicide, she said, adding her son probably fit the description of "thousands of 20-year-olds - or thereabouts - men who are light-skinned and have braids around here."

Friends of the slain man set up a makeshift memorial Friday in the median of Martin Luther King Jr. Way that featured pictures of King and messages that read, "RIP G-Money" and "The police did this."

Santa Cruz councilman accuses Santa Cruz police of racial profiling

City Councilman Tony Madrigal, upset with a city plan to step up law enforcement on Halloween, accused police of "racial profiling," which city police immediately responded to as "wildly irresponsible."

Madrigal's allegations came Tuesday as the council was considering a plan to increase public safety on a night that draws up to 30,000 people, many outlandishly dressed, to Pacific Avenue.

Madrigal told the council he visited downtown during last year's Halloween celebration and witnessed officers "patting down" a group of young Latinos. But police didn't question a group of young white people nearby, he said.

"I asked [the Latinos], and they said they weren't doing anything," Madrigal said. "There was racial profiling going on. Those issues concern me."

Castroville Residents, Police Square Off Over Racial Profiling

A public forum was held in Castroville Monday night after civic leaders said racial profiling by the Monterey County Sheriff's Department was putting residents on edge.

Nearly 150 residents, elected officials and civic leaders, were on hand to hear what the League of United Latin American Citizens said is the improper targeting of Hispanic men.

Victor Mejia said he was disappointed in what he always thought was a sheriff's department going after the bad guys. But instead, Mejia said he discovered that he should fear authorities more.

Mejia, the executive director of the nonprofit agency said he was unfairly targeted in December due to his ethnicity and was consequently arrested by a sheriff's deputy.

Mejia's complaint was one of a number of recent alleged incidents that brought community members to the Castroville Community Center.

Martha Padilla Chavarria, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said the evidence is overwhelming -- especially after she said her son, a Fresno State student, was pulled over and questioned as to his gang affiliation.

Among the long list of racial profiling examples community members cited were: intimidation; mocking residents; and excessive force.

Police complaints abound at initial open forum

Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick got an earful of complaints from citizens at her first ever open forum Wednesday night.

Not sure how many people to expect, Kirkpatrick was met by a mostly crowded room, with many in attendance voicing their concerns about racial profiling, bullying, police brutality and a handful of other related issues.

Spokane’s top cop set up the meeting after receiving a petition of more than 100 signatures calling for the Spokane Police Department to be held accountable for their actions.

“I think you’ve seen already in my one year being here,” Kirkpatrick said, “that we have been pretty upfront.”

However, there were a number of people in the audience who didn’t feel that her sentiment properly addressed the extent of the problem. They feel that there should be more oversight on the Police Chief’s part.

Police brutality victim says he was targeted because he's black

A Twin Cities man who won more than $700,000 in a police brutality case says he is still haunted by that day two years ago when he was arrested by Golden Valley police. He believes the arrest was motivated in part by race.

Two Golden Valley officers pepper sprayed and arrested Al Hixon in April 2005 as he was filling his car at a gas station. They believed he was involved in a robbery at a nearby US Bank.

Hixon says police knew the suspect was white, but assumed he was involved because he's black.

He says he hopes winning the trial last week sends a message.

"Justice is a very big word in reference to the situation," Hixon said. "Going to trial so the nation and the world could hear the story meant a lot to me."

Hixon says he suffers from depression, stress and physical injuries because of the incident, but says the trial was even tougher for him than the arrest itself.

"To sit on the stand to testify, and to sit and listen to people lie about you is the most difficult thing I've ever gone through," Hixon said.

Group Alleges Racial Harassment by Police

About 100 Flora residents gathered outside City Hall Tuesday protesting what they call unfair treatment at the hands of the city's police officers.

"Concerned Citizens of Flora" called for the resignations of former Police Chief Ernie Scarber, Sgt. Mike Alderman, and Mayor Scott Greaves.

The group of African-American residents says police target them for tickets, set up roadblocks in their neighborhood and place them under curfew.

"It's a whole lot of things that are going on in this town that's being swept up. It's time for them to come out. What are some of those things? Those things are we have a chief of police here. He's still chief. He's still getting the same pay. That was told to us by a alderman. He still getting the same pay and everything. Nothing has changed," said group spokesperson Rosetta Harris.

Hispanic Heritage Month event banned by UW police

A national fraternity says a decision by University of Wisconsin Police to cancel an event that was to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month is "very close to racial profiling, if not racial profiling."

The Madison branch of Lambda Theta Phi, a Latino fraternity, had arranged for the celebration to be held Saturday in Memorial Union's Tripp Commons, but was told last week that the event would be canceled due to concerns the University Police had about security.

Agustin Garcia, national chairman of the Lamda Theta Phi Foundation, said in a telephone interview from Florida this morning that the police would not give the fraternity specific reasons why they thought the event was unsafe.

"They kept coming back to the music and the nature of the event," said Garcia. "They said the event was unsafe but we don't have a reputation for problems, so that's where we got concerned with racial profiling."

According to Garcia, the fraternity felt there was no reason behind the decision to cancel an event planned only to be a dance with "a melody of Latin music."

Garcia said when the fraternity learned of the cancelation Sept. 11 they did everything to try and prevent it, even offering to pay for additional security.

Wife says man killed by Sunnyvale police was unarmed

The wife of a man killed Wednesday by Sunnyvale police said that her husband was unarmed and was shot in his car while leaving for work.

Erika Cañas, 22, said she was standing in the front yard of her apartment complex with her 18-month-old twin sons when police confronted her husband, Jose Cañas, 32.

"They shot my husband in the head," Erika Cañas said.

The Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety is investigating the death and has placed two officers on paid administrative leave, keeping with departmental policy on officer-involved shootings, Capt. Doug Moretto said. Police, with a warrant, were seeking to arrest Cañas and two others for investigation of an Aug. 17 killing in the neighborhood.

About the claim that Cañas was unarmed, Moretto would only say that an unspecified weapon was involved.

The other two men, whom police would not name Thursday, were arrested without incident.

At 11:35 a.m. Wednesday, Jose Cañas was pulling out of his parking place on the street when a car rammed his, his wife said. She said an officer drew a gun and shouted "Stop." She said her husband turned to look at the officer and was shot twice.

"I said, 'Don't shoot him, leave him alone,' " she said.

Then, she said, another officer threatened to shoot her, as she was standing in front of her apartment at 1144 Ayala Dr., and also threatened to handcuff her if she didn't go inside.

"I said no, you guys are shooting my husband."

A neighbor then took her keys and her crying sons, Jesus Angel and Jose Emmanuel, inside, she said.

Parents of man fatally shot by Hayward police sue city

The parents of a 20-year-old man killed by Hayward police while he fought with his brother have filed two $10 million lawsuits against the city alleging the man had surrendered before he was fatally shot.

Naser Solis of Hayward was unarmed and pinned to the ground by Officer Jason Corsolini moments before Corsolini shot him, according to separate lawsuits filed by Saleh Ali and Maria Joya last week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

"Witnesses also confirm that although there was a struggle between Mr. Solis and the officer, Mr. Solis gave up and surrendered, and that's very clear," said Ben Nisenbaum, a lawyer for Joya. "For whatever reason, the officer didn't take it that way."

City Settles On Police Brutality Suit

One of Chattanooga's most high profile brutality cases does not go to trial...but reaches a settlement. And taxpayers will be footing the bill. But the two men who sued the department got nowhere close to what they were seeking.

Jason McCollum and Matthew Jones combined will receive 114 thousand dollars, well short of the 20 million they were seeking together. Both men agreed to not release the terms, but because this is public money we were able to find out the details.

This is what each young man looked like after their arrests in September three years ago.
The city agreed to pay McCollum 42 thousand dollars and Jones, the more seriously injured man, 72 thousand dollars. The two young men raced out of north Georgia. Both had been drinking. And when they stopped at Kanku's convenience store, the video surveillance shows officers hitting Jones.

Instead of going to trial, the city agreed to pay both men damages. McCollum told me it was not about the money, but the principle. His attorney spoke for him. Robin Flores said, "He felt wronged and rightly so. If it was up to him and he had the inclination to do it, he may have gone to trial just for the principle of it."

The lawsuit also used testimony from former officer Ray Brantis, who got the maximum 28 day suspension. Brantis testified that before this happened, then deputy chiefs Freeman Cooper and Skip Vaughn both told officers they were authorized to use whatever means at your disposal to clean up this city.

Force was excessive, ex-police chief testifies in brutality case

Former Minneapolis Police Chief Tony Bouza was unequivocal on Monday in U.S. District Court. "The force used in this case was excessive, unnecessary and constituted police brutality," he said.

Bouza testified as an expert witness on behalf of Al Hixon, who is suing the city of Golden Valley and two of its police officers over an incident on April 2, 2005.

Hixon is seeking damages in excess of $75,000, alleging that his civil rights were violated by excessive force, battery and assault.

Everyone agrees that Hixon was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had just taken his Jaguar out of winter storage and pulled into a Sinclair gas station near his home to fill it up and get some fresh oil.

Unbeknownst to him, a U.S. Bank branch inside a nearby Byerly's grocery store had been robbed. Officers swarmed the gas station on the heels of possible suspects. They saw Hixon allegedly trying to run and captured him.

The next thing Hixon knew, he was on the ground, handcuffed and had been sprayed in the eyes and nose with a chemical irritant. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is a changed man as a result of the ordeal, he said in testimony Friday.

The bloody circus never ends: the media post-humously knights another dead cop.

Another Phoenix cop has been killed while executing a racial profiling stop (jaywalking!?). The media has been so busy focusing on the fact that his killer was undocumented that it has completely missed the racist motivation behind the initial police contact. As police in Arizona have increasingly become enforcers of immigration laws, they have surged to the front lines of the battle over the border, which of course leads inevitably to racial profiling.

But, as anarchists, it's times like these that offer us the opportunity to examine the relationship between the ruling class and the police. Just why is it that the elite, who care nothing about the deaths of thousands of other workers in more dangerous professions, cry such crocodile tears over the death of a police officer? Typically they pay no notice at all to the deaths of common workers - who they generally despise. Our friends and family die every day for the convenience (!) and profit of a tiny elite and yet where is the public outcry at our graves? For instance, construction workers die much more frequently on the job than cops do, and yet they are not treated as heroes when they are killed on the job. This despite the importance of the housing industry to Phoenix's economy. Indeed, my own line of work - and most of ours - is more dangerous than policing but still the rich do not look upon my comrades as saints to be venerated whenever our blood stains the city's streets. Of course, there's a reason for that.

In 2005 a police officer named David Uribe was killed when he made a traffic stop. While the whole of elite society automatically offered him up for sainthood (without ever looking into his record on the job to see if he deserved it), I took the opportunity to consider the reason why. What is it about policing that the elite value so much and what are the myths that reinforce our perceptions of law enforcement? What are the origins of the policing in the US and what can that tell us about the relationship between the police and their homies in the elite class, who weep so disingenuously at their gravesides whenever we are lucky enough to be rid of one?

But in the outrage spewing forth from the vultures now feeding on Officer Nick Erfle's still warm body, and as they demand increased immigration powers for the ever-expanding police force, we don't hear an immigration problem. We hear a police problem. We hear the echoes of the slave patrols and the Fugitive Slave Act of old. Everything old is new again. And couldn't those patty rollers claim they were protecting the community as well?

Now recognizing our history in the present, we're not fooled anymore by their grand pronouncements or false emotions. When they say this is a loss for the whole community, we can now reply with a question of our own: "Which community are you talking about?" In their broad statements we see not a description of reality, but rather a sermon from their civic religion of the state, capitalism and white supremacy. Likewise, their oh-so-sincere genuflecting before the monument of the dead cop, transforming him into a fallen, righteous defender of all things civilized now appears a mere empty, self-serving public ritual to us. When they say that the police put themselves on the line for us every day, we can now ask, "Put themselves on the line for who?" And therein lies the crux of the matter.

So, while the media opportunistically gushes over the fresh corpse of Officer Nick Erfle, I'll delve into the archives and consider the deeper implications of the institution of policing and the role of police in society. Below is the original article, as relevant now as ever.

Officer Down: The media and cop-killings

Phoenix Insurgent
Summer 2005

The recent shooting death of Officer David Uribe, shot in the head and neck while making a traffic stop, offers several opportunities for radical analysis. Typical of its easy-going treatment of local police departments, the media fell lock step behind the idea of the police officer as defender of public order and all things good. In fact, where any dissented from the gushing media monotone, they demanded an even more gratuitous lavishing of praise on Uribe and police in general.

Such was the case with John McDonald’s melodramatic column in the Arizona Republic. In his sensationally titled article, “The day a cop died, this city lost its soul,” McDonald expressed his exasperation at the TV when “two anchors and a weatherman laughed and giggled about the delightful mild temperatures just minutes after detailing the brutal execution of a local veteran cop.” One wonders if McDonald even watches local television news, which in fact was dominated by endless coverage of the murder, manhunt and reaction for several days as local talking heads beatified Uribe with all due haste.

A LOSS FOR THE WHOLE COMMUNITY?

The media uniformly treated the Uribe killing as a loss for whole community. Even the killing of an unarmed man by Phoenix PD the very next day could not damper the media’s enthusiasm for the story. Remarking on the second shooting, Patty Kirkpatrick, a Channel 3 anchor, expressed relief that the conflict had ended in the death of the suspect, rather than a cop. In her mind it was preferable that an unarmed man die than a cop get hurt trying to carry out murder.

On May 12th, Benson’s cartoon in the Republic featured a simple sketch of a police badge bearing Uribe’s number. Written across a black band of mourning were the words, “thank you.” But for what? "When we lose someone like that, we lose part of ourselves," answers the Phoenix Fire Department's chaplain, Rev. Father Carl G. Carlozzi in the Arizona Republic. In a letter to the editor, Patricia Fay of Phoenix explained it this way, “They are my protectors. Someone killed one of my protectors.”

THE MEDIA COVERAGE

But there is a real tension between the public image of policing, defended so single-mindedly by the media, and the reality. Introducing channel 12’s coverage of the Uribe funeral the following Tuesday, Lin Sue Cooney described the event as “a whole community” saying thank you. Effusive in their coverage of a car-wash fundraiser for the Uribe’s family, local media outlets actively campaigned for valley residents to participate. Can the same police force that regularly kills unarmed people of color be the protectors of the community? Can the same police force that uses Tasers to kill, just as the Phoenix Police did on May 4th, 2005, killing a 24 year-old man, be protectors? Are the same police forces that disproportionately target, arrest and incarcerate the poor, and especially people of color, really defenders of the “community?”

But, everyone knows that police don’t protect everyone equally and that they specifically target some segments of the community over others. For years the Scottsdale PD enforced what they called a “no-n****r zone,” pulling over and harassing black people driving through the city. Incarceration rates for poor people versus rich people are so obvious that they hardly require mentioning. But many whites still continue to deny the just as obvious disparities in white and non-white incarceration rates. To believe that these disparities exist apart or in exception to the overall system of policing makes no sense. They exist because this is the way the system was meant to function.

THE ROLE OF THE POLICE

The police system is designed primarily to defend the rich and toward that end to police poor people and poor people of color in particular. Made up of reporters primarily drawn from middle and upper classes, and owned by very rich people, the media serves that goal as propagandist for the police and defender of its own class interest, and they reflect the racism that all white people learn in their upbringing.

Let’s look at the numbers. According the Princeton Review, the average television reporter, after five years on the job, earned $65,000 dollars a year. In the top 25 television markets the median salary as reported by the Missouri School of Journalism stood at $78,000 in 2000. According to the US Census, that rate stood at nearly twice the same figure for male workers in general, a rate which, it should be pointed out, itself remains higher than the median for non-whites and women. That disparity appears even sharper when we consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics count, which put the average annual wage in the U.S. as $36,764 for 2002. Even print reporters, generally paid less than their television comrades, fair better than average Americans. Clearly there is a class divide between many of us consuming the news and the people reporting, not to mention the editors and owners, and the media coverage shows it.

For example, the bulk of the media ignored a story that ran in the Arizona Republic the 11th, the very day Uribe was killed. Jahna Berry reported that a federal jury had awarded Gerardo Ramirez-Diaz $1 million dollars after a Phoenix police officer shot him in the gut without just cause. And just four days before the shooting of Uribe, in a rare display of public criticism, the Arizona Republic came out against the reinstatement of Chandler police officer Dan Lovelace. Lovelace was fired for using excessive force after he shot and killed unarmed Dawn Rae Nelson in her car, from behind, with her 14 month-old son sitting in the seat behind her. That murder occurred on October 11th, 2001, making the Republic’s opposition to Lovelace’s reinstatement a little late in coming, to say the least, though it does show just how extreme a case it takes for the local media to take a critical position towards local police.

A DANGEROUS JOB?

Much of the coverage of Uribe’s killing focused on the supposed danger cops face in the carrying out of their duties. Multiple newscasters and residents interviewed regarded the police as “putting themselves on the line” for other people, risking their lives regularly or standing as soldiers on the front lines of American society. But reflecting a rate that has remained pretty consistent, police officers don’t even rank in the top ten most dangerous jobs as most recently listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, just a little over a week before Uribe’s killing, a farm worker was killed in Arizona when a bale of hay fell on him. Another worker, a roofer, was killed when he fell and drowned in a pool. The first didn’t even merit mentioning his name in the brief Arizona Republic article that ran. Both farm worker and roofer do rank within the top ten most dangerous occupations. Interestingly, Latinos represent a large proportion of workers in these fields. Another recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found a rate of five fatalities per 100,000 Hispanic workers in 2002 that was 25 percent higher than for all workers. This wouldn’t happen if white workers would stand up with Latino workers against these kinds of abuses. But apparently local media finds the deaths of workers, especially workers of color, as too commonplace to merit coverage, even though that contradicts their attitude towards the job of police officer, who they misreport as in constant jeopardy.

So, in order to understand why the media, the rich and so many white people have fallen all over themselves to praise Uribe and to condemn his murder – while rarely admitting police excesses - we have to delve a little into the history of American police forces. The alleged danger of the job doesn’t stand up as a sufficient explanation. Policing in America has two main origins, both of which serve to accomplish the same mission: to protect the wealth of the rich and powerful.

THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN POLICING

The first origin lies in the violent class struggles of the 19th century. During those times, workers were forced into the emerging factory system that the capitalist class was creating in the cities of the Northeast. In these factories workers had little power and were subjected to long hours and brutal conditions. When armed class struggle broke out, the capitalists, outnumbered and not generally wishing to risk their own necks in the fighting, created police forces to wage war on the working class in defense of their factories and wealth. The first real police force in the US was founded in 1845 in New York City, center of the country’s emerging industrial economy. As industrialism and modern capitalism spread, other cities followed New York’s example.

Private property lies at the heart of capitalist exploitation. The authority of the boss derives precisely because s/he owns the means of production – the workplace, the computers, the machines and thus the profits. Because workers’ interests depend on a redistribution of wealth and equality in the workplace, this brings us in inevitable conflict with the boss and his lackeys, the police. It’s the same thing with the landlord. The landlord’s ability to evict or demand rent couldn’t exist without the system of private property and the police to back it up with violence.

The second main origin of American policing centers on the slave patrol system of the South. Charged with protecting white plantation owners, the slave patrols, or “patty rollers” as they were often called, brutally oppressed blacks, both slave and free. It is from the slave patrollers that American policing gets many of its traditions and powers. Patty rollers worked specific “beats” and could demand identification from any black person they encountered. The slave patrols incarcerated and returned, frequently with violence, any black person who could not prove their free status or provide written permission for their travel. Even in the North the police were charged with capturing and returning escaped slaves.

The influence of this racist tradition reverberates today in a variety of ways. An Arizona Daily Star review of Department of Public Safety records revealed that during traffic stops police searched Latinos more than twice as frequently as whites. And police searched blacks almost three times as frequently as whites – despite the fact that searches of whites turned up contraband much more regularly. Beyond racial profiling, which brings them into police contact more frequently in the first place, non-whites also face racist judges, unequal access to competent defense and sentencing guidelines that send them to prison at rates many times that of whites and for longer duration.

In fact, the history of Arizona police forces combines both origins. Back in the day, as now, Arizona was a mining state and Latinos composed a large percentage of the miners. In response to militant organizing by mine workers, the state created the Arizona Rangers. Ostensibly formed to combat cattle rustling, in actuality the government used the force primarily against miners and people of color. This tradition continues to contemporary times, and many of us remember the UMW strike of 1983 when then-Governor Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, called out police and national guardsmen against workers in defense of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation. Police guarded scabs brought in by the company, effectively breaking the strike.

It is critical for working class white people to understand the true origins and purposes of American policing and to be critical of both the aims and causes of media defense of police and police departments. In the end, supporting police power means supporting the rich people that exploit the entire working class, white or not. The American system has given white workers privileges that non-white workers don’t get, and many of them directly involve reduced exposure to police violence and policing in general. American history has shown, though, that when even white workers organize against the bosses and politicians, the police are brought in against us as well. It’s time for white workers to stand in support of communities of color when they organize against the police of all kinds, including La Migra. We need to recognize that the police are a racist institution that cannot be justified if what we want is a world of equality and justice, and media defense of policing amounts to defense of racism and the rich.

The RAF and Stasi: false flags over Germany

In a week where bin Laden has yet again shown up, conveniently-timed, curiously-bearded and denouncing capitalism, today's Wall Street Journal article on the Red Army Faction in Germany couldn't be better timed to shed some light on the murky world where terrorism and intelligence services come together. Spurred by the mysterious murder of Deutsche Bank Chairman Alfred Herrhausen, the article delves into the interesting relationship between the East German intelligence agency, the Stasi, and the communist terrorist organization, famous for a long string of bombings, murders and kidnappings.

It's perhaps no surprise that there would be connections between these two organizations, but what probably is most interesting is the allegation that not only did the Stasi manipulate and cooperate with the RAF, but they also studied their methodologies so that they could engage in terrorism in West Germany under the cover of it being organized by the RAF. Thus, when the RAF proved too uncontrollable for their purposes, Stasi still had a cover for their actions in the West.

Based on these documents, German investigators increasingly believe that the Stasi played a more active role than previously believed in Red Army Faction terrorism. After years of not being able to draw parallels between the Stasi unit in Wartin and the Red Army Faction killings, police are now focusing closely on such a link. Joachim Lampe, who assisted the successful prosecution of the first wave of Red Army Faction terrorists up until 1982 and was then assigned to prosecute Stasi-related crimes in West Germany, says it's time to compare the activities of Wartin with the activities of the Red Army Faction to see where they overlap. "It is an important line of investigation," he said.

A year after the Red Army Faction's first generation collapsed in 1972, an internal Wartin report said cooperation with terrorists is possible if the individuals could be trusted to maintain secrecy and obey orders. Initial contacts, however, may not have taken place until later in the decade. Disillusionment gripped many of the terrorists living on the lam, according to court records citing witness statements by accused terrorists. Beginning about 1980, the Stasi granted refuge to 10 members of the Red Army Faction in East Germany and gave them assumed identities.

The Stasi sympathized with the anti-capitalist ideals of the Red Army Faction, but Stasi leaders were concerned about placing their trust in a group of uncontrollable leftist militants, a review of Stasi records shows. Stasi officials did not want to tarnish East Germany's international reputation, so they toyed with different concepts for cooperation with terrorist groups, according to a prosecutor who has investigated Stasi involvement with terrorism.

One suggestion, contained in a document prepared for new officers assigned to the unit, was to emulate Romanian intelligence, which successfully worked with the terrorist "Carlos" to bomb the Radio Free Europe office in Munich, Germany, in 1981. To assist in such operations, the Wartin unit developed highly specialized explosives, poisons and miniature firearms.

About 1980 the Stasi also proposed a second strategy: instead of using a terrorist group directly -- such cooperation always contained risk of discovery -- they could simply execute attacks so similar to those of known terrorists that police would never look for a second set of suspects, according to Wartin records. The Wartin leadership called this strategy the "perpetrator principle," according to Stasi records. The unit's progress in implementing the steps to imitate terrorist attacks is described in a series of progress reports by Wartin officials between 1980 and 1987.

In September 1981, Red Army Faction terrorists attempted to kill U.S. Gen. James Kroesen in Heidelberg, Germany, shooting a bazooka at his car. About the same time, members of the same Red Army Faction team visited East Germany, where they were asked by the Stasi to shoot a bazooka at a car containing a dog. The dog died, according to court records.

In Wartin, officials wrote up a detailed description of the Red Army Faction members' re-enactment of the Kroesen attack. "It is important to collect all accessible information about the terrorist scene in imperialist countries, to study and analyze their equipment, methods and tactics, so we can do it ourselves," a senior Wartin official wrote in February 1982, according to the report.

Curious indeed, but not surprising to students of the machinations of the various intelligence services. The flipside to the Stasi's intervention with the RAF is the Italian right wing and NATO's false flag terrorism during the Strategy of Tension. As "anti-terrorism" increasingly becomes the dominant theory (i.e., justification) of the elite political class, we can expect to see intelligence services operating with more and more of a free hand. Their interventions will become more numerous and more bold and their power will almost certainly grow to previously unseen levels.

Intelligence services offer the elite, under a paradigm of anti-terrorism and the cover of secrecy, both the means to achieve their goals and to create the excuses for their interventions at the same time. Capable of playing all sides in the global struggle for power, wealth and, importantly, control over domestic populations, intelligence services have and will continue to be a vital - and often unseen - tool of the elite. Where no threat exists, the intelligence services can create it. Where it exists, it can be manipulated. When it is manipulated, it can be exploited to create terrorist attacks or to sweep participants up in anti-terror operations, all of which justify the overall myth of terrorism.

Will the 21st Century be the century of the intelligence service?

The subtly sanitized language of warfare

A lesson in the way bias for the invader's point of view can subtly be transmitted through the language and perspective of a piece of journalism. Consider this excerpt courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor: 'Sheikh's death threatens US success in Anbar Province'

Sheikh Abu Risha's death, which was the result of a roadside bomb explosion near his home in the provincial capital Ramadi, comes at a crucial time. The Sunni tribal forces he led were moving closer to creating a formidable block with sufficient weight to provide representation for the embittered community in the government and counter those Sunnis who still believe in using violence to achieve their aims.

"This is a tragic loss," said Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, in a statement released in Washington by his spokesman. "It's a terrible loss for Anbar Province and all of Iraq. ... He was an organizing force who did help organize alliances and did help keep the various tribes together."

His death came 10 days after meeting President Bush during his visit to Anbar.

Notice how the sheikh's opposition (the shadowy Al Qaeda, which we are to assume killed him) gets tagged in the piece as violent, and justifiably so. Al Qaeda, to the extent it exists as an actor separate from US policy in Iraq, is a despicably reactionary organization. In this particular article, as evidence, we are reminded that they "still believe in using violence to achieve their aims".

But in comparison to whom? The US army? Leaving this question unanswered, readers can only assume that Al Qaeda's violent strategy differs significantly from the kisses and flowers strategy adopted by the likes of the Sheik and the US Army. Note also that this disconnect occurs despite mentioning the Sheik's pistol packing, highway robbing background later in the article. In this sense, US violence - and state violence in general (despite the dubious legitimacy of the Iraqi state) - is normalized and stripped of violent content. Meanwhile, a US ally's own violent banditry is minimized.

In fact, consider how the sheik's political objectives - partially achieved, we are assured by a compliant media - are referred to in a contrived passive voice. "The tribal rejection of Al Qaeda that started in Anbar Province and helped produce such significant change," the author informs us through the words of General Pataeus, commander of all US invaders in Iraq, "helped produce such significant change there has now spread to a number of other locations as well."

It "helped produce," we are advised by a dutifully stenographic media class, leaving the reader to conclude that the sheik and US forces had somehow managed to confront Al Qaeda non-violently. A ridiculous claim, of course - even in the most radical of the liberals withdrawal schemes a US force remains in country to attack Al Qaeda in Iraq. Clearly the US isn't planning to blast rock music at them until they give up.

Nevertheless, the agent of pro-American violence is obscured through the use of the passive voice. Plus, the Sheik's own declared aim of joining the ridiculously bloody American puppet government in Iraq is not similarly denounced as violent, although an association with Al Qaeda certainly would be. Nor does the reporter seem to consider violent the sheik's alliance with the mass-murderous US Army. Likewise, note that both General Patraeus and George Bush, collectively responsible for the deaths of around a million Iraqis, are not labeled as violent. No problem, the media's reporting insures that violence committed by America and its allies is not the same as violence committed by its opponents.

Meanwhile, in the broader media the elite's goals in Iraq have been similarly stripped of political content. They are spoken of merely in terms of "success" or "national interests". This is significant, because when the media use this kind of language, they reveal their alliance with the ruling class. When they talk about 'success in Iraq' and other related euphemisms for the application of state violence, we ought to remember that what they really mean is the successful conquering of that country for the benefit of the American elite. Putting Iraq under the thumb of US imperialism is considered "success" in Iraq.

Thus, pushing for success in Iraq, or denouncing the Administration for failing to achieve it as many liberals have done is an exercise in legitimizing the sanitized policy goals of the elite. It represents nothing more than one wing of the elite offering a better strategy for dominating Iraq. But neither wing of the elite class is interested in the interests of anyone not of their own class. Therefore, a genuinely radical position in Iraq must at least endorse one of these options. Either, the total destruction of the US military machine in Iraq or the immediate and full withdrawal of all American troops, followed by a complete dismantlement of the military machine at home. Redeployment must not be an option.

News of Interest 9/13/07

(1) "The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history."
-Buenaventura Durruti

Global Warming Impact Like 'Nuclear War'
Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife.

(2) They call it a singularity because it's the point from which humanity can never return.

Techies ponder computers smarter than us

At the center of a black hole there lies a point called a singularity where the laws of physics no longer make sense. In a similar way, according to futurists gathered Saturday for a weekend conference, information technology is hurtling toward a point where machines will become smarter than their makers. If that happens, it will alter what it means to be human in ways almost impossible to conceive, they say.

"The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity" brought together hundreds of Silicon Valley techies and scientists to imagine a future of self-programming computers and brain implants that would allow humans to think at speeds nearing today's microprocessors.

Artificial intelligence researchers at the summit warned that now is the time to develop ethical guidelines for ensuring these advances help rather than harm.

"We and our world won't be us anymore," Rodney Brooks, a robotics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the audience. When it comes to computers, he said, "who is us and who is them is going to become a different sort of question."

Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Palo Alto-based Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which organized the summit, researches on the development of so-called "friendly artificial intelligence." His greatest fear, he said, is that a brilliant inventor creates a self-improving but amoral artificial intelligence that turns hostile.

(3) The extinction crisis continues to spread...

Threatened species Red List shows escalating 'global extinction crisis'
Corals and seaweed have joined the ranks of threatened species, and more apes and reptiles are now facing extinction according to the World Conservation Union, which warns of a "global extinction crisis".

The conservation group's annual Red List of threatened species, published today, found that the extinction crisis had escalated in the last year with 16,306 species now at the highest levels of extinction threat, equivalent to almost 40% of all species in the survey.

A quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and one in eight birds on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.

(4) The elite continue their death-spiral with Iran. With the economy tanking, the dollar sinking and the population finally turning against their desperate adventures, what choice do the elite have but to expand their wars?

U.S. Officials Begin Crafting Iran Bombing Plan

Political and military officers, as well as weapons of mass destruction specialists at the State Department, are now advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the diplomatic approach favored by Burns has failed and the administration must actively prepare for military intervention of some kind.

Among those advising Rice along these lines are John Rood, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation; and a number of Mideast experts, including Ambassador James Jeffrey, deputy White House national security adviser under Stephen Hadley and formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs.

Consequently, according to a well-placed Bush administration source, "everyone in town" is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months, after the presidential primaries have probably been decided, but well before the November 2008 elections.

The discussions are now focused on two basic options: less invasive scenarios under which the U.S. might blockade Iranian imports of gasoline or exports of oil, actions generally thought to exact too high a cost on the Iranian people but not enough on the regime in Tehran; and full-scale aerial bombardment.

(5) The capitalists and their apologists may try turn global warming lemons into lemonade, but they'll never share that lemonade with us anyhow.

Warming May Trigger Agricultural Collapse
ndia could lose up to 40 percent of its agricultural output because of global warming even as it becomes the world's most populous country, warns a new study.

Global farm productivity faces "serious damage" this century, and poor countries will bear the worst of it, unless emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change are held in check, says veteran climate economist William Cline.

He further contradicts analysts who have said that global warming could boost yields.

"My work shows that while productivity may increase in a minority of mostly northern countries, the global impact of climate change on agriculture will be negative by the second half of this century," said Cline, who has studied the economic aspects of climate change since the early 1990s.

"There might be some initial overall benefit to warming for a decade or two but, because future warming depends on greenhouse gas emissions today, if we delay action it would put global agriculture on an inexorable trajectory to serious damage," he added.

(6) The guy this article is about made a presentation earlier in the year at a black hat hacker conference in which he declared that the private security firm that has been releasing al-Qaeda videos (they claim they intercept them) has been doctoring them. An article ran about it in CNET but, even though he saw the article and affirmed everything in it, he issued a retraction of that statement later, perhaps after being pressured (one assumes). Now he says it is AQ that is changing them. Six of one, half dozen the other...

Researcher: Bin Laden's beard is real, video is not

More important though are the edits. At roughly a minute and a half into the video there is a splice; bin Laden shifts from looking at the camera to looking down in less than 1/25th of a second. At 13:13 there is a second, less obvious splice. In all, Krawetz says there are at least six splices in the video. Of these, there are only two live bin Laden segments, the rest of the video composed of still images. The first live section opens the video and ends at 1:56. The second section begins at 12:29 and continues until 14:01. The two live sections appear to be from different recordings "because the desk is closer to the camera in the second section."

Then there are the audio edits. Krawetz says "the new audio has no accompanying 'live' video and consists of multiple audio recordings." References to current events are made only during the still frame sections and after splices within the audio track." And there are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video," Krawetz says.

(7) Lest we get too depressed, a newly assertive Russia has deployed a new, gigantic conventional bomb.

Russia tests superstrength bomb, military says
The report said the new bomb was much stronger than the U.S.-built Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb -- MOAB, also known under its name "Mother of All Bombs." "So, Russian designers called the new weapon 'Father of All Bombs'," it said.

Showing the orange-painted U.S. prototype, the report said the Russian bomb was four times more powerful -- 44 metric tons of TNT equivalent -- and the temperature at the epicenter of its blast was two times higher.

In 1999 Russian generals threatened to use vacuum bombs to wipe out rebels from the mountains during the "anti-terrorist operation" in its restive Chechnya province.

New York-based Human Rights Watch then appealed to Putin to refrain from using fuel-air explosives. It remains unclear if weapons of this type were used during the Chechen war.

U.S. forces have used a "thermobaric" bomb, which works on similar principles, in their campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

"It (the bomb) will allow us to safeguard our state's security and fight international terrorism in any circumstances and in any part of the world," Rukshin said.

The Elite's Religion of Terrorism, an Agnostic Perspective

9/11 is the myth that the elite of all political parties have selfishly used to coerce and convince us into supporting wars of aggression, handing over our already too limited freedoms and looking the other way while a massive security state is built and then unleashed on the world and us. They've reinforced it at every cynical turn. Whether you believe the government's story of the events of that day or not, 9/11 has become a lie. One in a very long list that politicians and the media have told us.

Contrary to the language generally used to describe the deaths that day, the people who were killed at work in the twin towers or going to work on those planes were not making a 'sacrifice'. Though their deaths were tragic, for sure. But, for the most part, they had no agency in their own deaths. They didn't wake up knowing there would be a terrorist attack and they did not decide to go to work anyhow. And they certainly didn't punch their time card that day so they could be used as a political excuse to justify the invasion of multiple countries, the massacring of more than a million innocent people and the extension of US imperial power all over the world. They were victims, not martyrs. But their deaths ought not to be revenged on faraway countries and peoples. In a truly just world, their graves, rightfully dug, ought to crowd out the fountains and security signs of the carefully manicured lawns of America's politicians, bureaucrats and capitalists. After all, it was the policies and actions of this elite class that offered then and continues now to offer us up as cannon fodder for their adventures abroad. Whoever was behind 9/11, it was still the American elite that made us all targets.

And make no mistake about it, all the crocodile tears and fire and brimstone emanating from the eyes and mouths of elites at ceremonies and vigils across the country today are meant not to pay tribute but rather to camouflage their callously calculating political manipulations and exploitations. They don't care about us. They never cared about us. In a real way, the 9/11 dead are the only workers killed on the job in this country that the elite pay any attention to. Think about that. Theirs are the only worker-corpses that will merit the tears of the elite - and only because their deaths can be massaged to the benefit of the rich and powerful. Since September 11th, thousands more workers have died on the job because of unsafe working conditions, stress, traveling to or from work (including crossing the deserts of the Southwest in search of jobs). Do the elite venerate these dead? No, because their deaths do not serve their political purposes.

I recommend that everyone take a long hard look at what happened on 9/11 and the context in which it occurred. Despite the grand and self-assured pronouncements of the elite that run this country (and haven't they always lied to you before with equal confidence?), the government's story of what happened that day is far from complete, correct or even plausible. It has very little to say about the historical or political background of terrorism and even less about the American role in creating, nurturing, exploiting and unleashing it. And why would it be otherwise? The 9/11 Commission was an exercise in political ass-covering and profiteering. Because of that, reflexive flag-waving and candle-holding are naive exercises that reinforce the 9/11 myth and, worse, signal to the elites your willingness to be manipulated still more for their narrow and selfish interests. And that can only mean more deaths.

This is particularly dangerous as the powers that be, having lunched on Iraq and Afghanistan, now cast their hungry eyes towards places like Iran and Syria. Those regimes are not governments to be defended - like ours they are deeply flawed and not representative of the interests of their people to very large degrees. As are all governments. Nevertheless, any US military action there will kill thousands who don't deserve it and won't be taken with either their or your interests at heart. Knowing how they have used this myth to manipulate you or your friends or your family into two wars already, can we expect that they won't try it again? Accepting the myth of 9/11 leaves you open to further influence by their machinations.

Remember how little you trusted government, politicians and businessmen before 9/11 came along? The fundamental facts that made you feel that way then haven't changed now. The rich still own almost all of the wealth. Politicians are still corrupt. Wars still kill way more innocents than they do combatants. Your job still sucks. You still have to pay rent and taxes - probably more now. Your credit cards are still maxxed out. The collections agents still call you. You still have bad, expensive health care - or none at all. If we're going to remember anything on this day, let's remember that.

If you must pay tribute this day, do it by learning how terrorism really operates in the world. Take a couple hours and read something by Nafeez Ahmed or watch one of these videos on terrorist operations in Europe. If terrorism is the defining issue of our time, we would all do well to get a clear understanding of what it really is and how it really functions. Terrorism in the First World is very much a tool of the elite. They use it to instill fear so they can control us. And they are not above organizing it themselves if it doesn't appear on its own. The elites worship terrorism and we would do well to remain at least agnostic in the face of their religion.

Ties With Terror: The Continuity of Western-Al-Qaeda Relations in the Post-Cold War Period by Nafeez Ahmed

Operation Gladio: False Flag Terrorism in Europe

Technology in the active voice.

I recently became aware of a very good anarchist journal out of Britain called Voices of Resistance from Occupied London. In it they cover a wide range of topics and their first issue has a lot of interesting stuff in it. In this issue, there's a great interview with the always interesting Mike Davis about surveillance and security in the modern city. To the question, "Why aren't cameras being vandalised in London?" he responds:

That would be one of my questions too. I think that we need to propagandise and fight for the idea of a universal insurrection against surveillance state, against the erosion of civil liberties. We need to encourage people and find every way possible in which to resist, subvert and destroy the apparatus of surveillance and control. Of course, millions of teenagers do that anyway. Kevin Lynch wrote a book on vandalism; he was very interested in vandalism as an urban process, in spontaneous vandalism of all sorts. He studied it in the seventies, partially to understand how architects could combat it and partially because he was interested in its logic. He thought that anything that involved people and the built environment, including destroying it, was a good thing. If you wanted to generate a theory of participatory architecture or urbanism, vandalism seemed to be the most common and popular form of participating in the built environment by revolting against its dehumanisation, in working class council estates in American inner cities and so on.

I think we need a strategy to support each other; we should vandalise and subvert the surveillance state and the middle class that supports it. Tearing down the armed response signs from peoples' lawns freaks them out... Not that the armed response is real or reliable, but people get immense reassurance from having the sign there. If you remove it they think that all forces might mobilise against them and that they might get killed the next day. I started off vandalising lawn jockeys - these are a phenomenon of American segregation and racism. They are black jockey figures put in the lawn like the pink flamingos they put there. They are popular amongst people who are nostalgic of the old racial order, when all blacks were servants or slaves. When I went back to L.A. in the late eighties I discovered that there were quite a few of these around houses in Beverly Hills. It is something to which all the creative energy of youth needs to be applied: to find ways in which to fight back and subvert the surveillance society.

Surveillance is on the way to ubiquity as the system - and as Davis smartly points out, it's citizens - strive for the total abolition of all unregulated space. All space must be watched, goes the new ethic. Further, spaces that are not watched are considered dangerous and threatening, and not only by the State. Just look at an ad for cell phone GPS! We are all encouraged and encourage each other to voluntarily participate in these systems of surveillance, forgetting the power they have to control and regulate our behavior. Properly viewed, these technologies are not conveniences, they are interventions by the rich and powerful into our lives.

Take the case of John Halpin, now threatened with termination from his job because his employers offered him a work cell phone with the hidden objective of tracking his movements. Having used the GPS system inside to establish John's tendency to skip out of work early, an administrative trial judge recommended firing the 21-year veteran.

But here's the problem. Halpin wanted the phone. Not every worker who was offered one took them - although the secret purpose of the new phones was not revealed to anyone. So, why did he take the phone?

Some workers refused the free-phone offer, saying they preferred to use their own cells.

Richard said the unsuspecting Halpin "admitted he took the phone because he liked the walkie-talkie and other functions it has."

She dismissed concerns about whether the city had to warn Halpin in advance of the cellphone's tracking abilities.

"The department [of Education] is not expected to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct," Richard decided.

"The undisputed intent of issuing the cellphone with GPS was for the department to be able to determine the whereabouts of its supervisors in the field."

In this case, Halpin had the choice whether to participate and he opted to take the phone without considering its potential for subverting his attempt to reclaim from his bosses some time from work. That's probably because, as hinted at above, he never considered that the tech would be used that way.

And why would he, after all? This society has adopted a technology that has huge implications for how we organize our lives - and how the boss and other authorities will try to organize them for us - without considering the implications. There never was a discussion about these technologies and whether we would use them. Again, we can ask why, and the answer is that we have been sold a political line that technology is neutral when in fact it is a weapon in the hand of a ruling class that seeks to control, manage and remake us so that they can maintain and expand their wealth. Because we believe the lie, we don't question when technology changes our lives. And, cleverly obscuring their power behind technology, the elite escape any blame for the dislocations technology causes to our lives. Technology's affect on our lives is discussed only in the passive voice: it's "change". What a tremendous coup for the elite!

But such technologies are not always imposed voluntarily, of course. If we don't voluntarily take them, the ruling class has no objection to forcing them on us. Take the case of Falluja which, in order that the imperialists could impose their will on the rebellious city (what is generally euphemistically referred to in the media as "succeeding in Iraq"), has been turned into the poster-child for biometric security.

The Marines have walled off Fallujah, and closed the city’s roads to traffic. The only way in is to have a badge. And the only way to get a badge is to have Marines snap your picture, scan your irises, and take all ten of your fingerprints. Only then can you get into the city.

The idea: deny insurgents “freedom of movement,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Smitherman, who heads the biometric badging program for Multi-National Forces-West, here in Al-Anbar province. “Like Mao said, insurgents are like fish swimming in the sea of the people.” These are the high-tech nets, “to keep ‘em from swimming freely.”

There are still plenty of holes in the nets. The biometric systems don’t all talk to one another. Nor do they interface, really, with the other fingerprint- and iris-tracking systems used in other parts of Iraq. Getting the machines to work far, far out in the field can give a Marine migraines. (And, for today, let's not even get into the privacy and human-rights implications.) But, in combination with other measures, the badges do seem to be having an effect. After years of bombs and machine gun fire, the city of Fallujah has suddenly gone quiet.

Let's read that last part again so we don't miss it: "After years of bombs and machine gun fire, the city of Fallujah has suddenly gone quiet." This is the true objective of the ruling class with regards to the rest of the planet's people. Pacification. And their project now more than ever depends on the application and spread of technology, sold to us as neutral or even progressive, but with the sinister intent of controlling us and rendering us unable to resist them or to organize our own lives as we see fit.

And of course they sell it as a boon to human society. That's how they sell wars, strike breaking, police and prisons, too. Increasingly, technology is the ideology of the ruling class. And, as anarchists do with wars, strike breaking, police and prisons, we would be well-served to approach technology, too, with a deeply critical eye.

A laugh riot at APEC

Comedians from the Australian TV show "Chasers War On Everything" were arrested yesterday for accomplishing what so far the actual protesters of the APEC summit have been unable to do: puncture the high security surrounding the event. Riding in an official-looking caravan, flagged as Canadian (because "they thought Canada would be a country that might not be too closely scrutinised and might realistically have only three cars in a motorcade.") and surrounded by fake security, the entourage managed to get past a couple levels of the police and to within a dozen meters of the hotel housing Bush and other leaders. The two stars of the show, one of whom was dressed as Osama bin Laden (who himself made a dubious appearance in the media), and several members of the crew were arrested for the stunt.

The show has made a point of targeting the summit in several hilarious skits that focus on the police state that has descended on Sydney along with the various Pacific leaders. I have posted below one of those segments along with some news coverage of their most recent APEC hi-jinks.

As for the rest of the protest, while police have been eager to deploy their new goodies (a water cannon, for instance) and to kick some ass, the mood has been tame. The Sydney Morning Herald, however, reports that the brothels have been doing a booming business.

"It's been going gangbusters," Adult Business Association NSW spokesman Chris Seage said yesterday.

"Businesses that were banking on a 200 per cent increase in business have done better than that with it up by 300 per cent.

"There have been secret service agents, trade envoys, but no Putins yet."

Several specials were trotted out for the event, including the "the Condi Combo, the UN Duo and the Presidential Platter."

Enjoy the videos:

Taxi drivers strike against techno-tracking!

Congratulations to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) today for going out on strike against the installation of GPS in their vehicles, despite opposition from the city and even rival taxi organizations, some of whom have been actively intervening against the NYTWA with leafletting and other tactics, including deploying "dozens of volunteers to taxi stands at the city's airports and the main rail terminal asking drivers not to join the stoppage.". Workers cite several reasons for their strike today, which is taking place in the middle of fashion week and the US Open:

The Taxi Workers Alliance opposes the installation of high-tech touch-screen video systems that will allow passengers to watch television, make credit-card payments and — using a global-positioning device that tracks the cab — follow their ride on an electronic map.

Some drivers have said that the global-positioning devices and the automated trip recording system are an invasion of privacy, and that the use of credit cards would diminish drivers’ incomes, given the card transaction fees.

They also say they will take in less money because the system requires drivers to log on before each fare, and they object to the television noise and the heat from the monitors.

"If they're going to tell us that our voices should be silent, well then, we're going to make our engines silent," said NYTWA President, Bhairavi Desai, a history and women's studies graduate from Rutgers University who has worked hard to unite Pakistani and Indian drivers, culminating until now most notably in the one day strike of 1998.

Her declaration reminds me of a similar action by Somali taxi drivers here in Phoenix a few years ago, where drivers blocked the street in front of city hall and abandoned their cabs, keys locked safely inside. I'll never forget how great it felt to be there. What a wonderful sight to behold. Desai has declared the work stoppage "a resounding success". In an insightful comparison, she has called the GPS system "electronic anklets," a clear reference to the tracking systems increasingly used on felons and other criminals.

But, in the age of the unending War on Terror, there was a racial and religious element to the city's plan to track drivers, who are predominantly foreign and very often Muslim. Citing one flier being distributed, the Times reported:

“This is where deep racial, ethnic and religious prejudices and biases come into play,” it read. “DNA samples are obtained, scrutinised and archived. Personal and family histories are scoured for evidence of ethnic and religious fervor. Clearly, surveillance technology can be a death sentence once you are in its crosshairs.” Syed Hossain, a Bangladeshi driver, said the main problem was that cabbies feared losing money. “Number one problem is, many drivers do not report their earnings to the Internal Revenue Service,” he said. “Number two is that [the authorities] are going to be behind you all the time.”

And, of course, the drivers will have to pay for the privilege. The NYTWA estimates that the new technology will cost its members, predominantly contract drivers and thus the most precarious of the taxi fleet, an additional $1000 dollars a year and could cause them to lose fares.


He said that drivers were worried that satellite tracking technology would lead to automatic tickets if they were speeding and fines if they exceeded the 12-hour maximum shift.

The city and officials from the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers (NYSFTD), both of which oppose the strike, cite convenience and even higher tips as reasons that drivers ought to accept this technological assault on their autonomy and power. Speaking for the NYSFTD, it's president, Fernando Mateo, denounced what he called the "radicals" of the NYTWA and took the side of the city and garage owners (the latter hopes to charge higher fees to contractor drivers and reign in its workforce).

But Mr. Mateo said that credit card capability would enable yellow-cab drivers “to keep cash customers but add on the corporate business that they lost” to livery cars that handle corporate accounts. He added that the larger credit-card fares and bigger tips “will more than compensate for the cost of the card transaction fee.”

To which, one striking driver who already has the system installed replied, "If the credit card system does not work, then we don't get paid. I have lost whole fares." At the same time, Mateo revealed his own difficult position by hoping that the city didn't call on these higher end drivers to compete with his scabs.

The city has placed police at taxi stops so as to protect workers advocating against the strike (i.e., to support the strike breakers), as well as beefing up public transportation. It will be a tough fight, as the subway strike showed a couple years ago. One article summed it up this way:

Professor Hodges said he believed that a large number of drivers would join the walkout. “I think what you’re going to see tomorrow is that the owner-drivers will turn out to work: the Lomto people and the people who own their own medallions,” he said, referring to the League of Mutual Taxi Owners, an association of individual owner-drivers. He spoke admiringly of Bhairavi Desai, the longtime activist who runs the Taxi Workers Alliance, saying: “I think she’s going to be able to put a substantial dent in turnout. She has real credibility.”

Professor Hodges, saying that he believed many drivers had a legitimate grievance, added: “This is a conditions issue: Under what conditions do I want to work? Do I want to have the thing behind me which is tracking me and which can cause me a lot of grief if it breaks down?”

But Professor Hodges also said that public attitudes toward cabdrivers may have hardened since the years of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s administration, when City Hall took a particularly tough stance toward drivers. Most of the drivers are immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East; South Asians make up the most sizable area of origin.

“One thing I’m worried about is how sympathetic New Yorkers will be,” Professor Hodges said. “There is a more conservative population within Manhattan now. Class boundaries have widened. And New York is not quite the union town it was in the past.”

Certainly, the workers are facing an uphill battle, not least of which with their fellow workers, who are fractured along ethnic and other lines. As the professor points out, the industry in New York has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Precarity has been imposed on drivers, with the explosion of contract driving and the concomitant reduction in wages and benefits. The contract drivers increasingly suffer the bosses' externalization of the costs of driving like gas, insurance, leases and various garage fees.

From a technology perspective, this battle has several facets to it. Strategically, defending the workers' freedom from being tracked is vital both now and for the future. Right now, refusing the new technology maintains the worker's autonomy on the job. But, when the next strike comes, it also makes it harder for the boss to defend against a strike. You can be certain that, just like the automated checkout lanes that grocery bosses have embraced so enthusiastically following the strikes in California a few years back, the new GPS systems will certainly be used against striking workers to more efficiently utilize scab labor to undermine any future labor actions. That alone makes this fight vitally important. On a side note, refusing the GPS technology (and the credit card) also protects to some extent the privacy of riders, which is vital to a free society.

Beyond that, the credit card technology is without doubt an attack on the worker's control of her wage. While the billionaire mayor of New York may assure workers that their tips will go up with the new tech, what we can surely expect is that their fares will be more regulated. And that will limit the power of workers to determine their own pay when it comes time to reckon with the garage bosses. There's nothing wrong with a little dishonesty when it comes time to pay the boss his pound of flesh. As with the computerized cashout systems that more and more servers have to contend with in restaurants these days, this new system will limit a driver's ability to pocket cash and hand out freebies. And as the flier above pointed out, it will also increase the power of the government to regulate and tax drivers' incomes. You can see why the boss and the government want it so much.

Also, as several workers have pointed out in articles, the technology is unreliable. Unfortunately, this is a bad argument to make, because it only propels the capitalists' engineers to make the technology more efficient. And, as mentioned above, the credit card tech undermines the freedom of riders as well.

In support of the taxi drivers strike, I have linked below three previous articles I wrote on GPS and workers struggles, the last of which references another workers struggle in New York that recently resisted the imposition of the boss' will as imposed through technology. I sympathize greatly with the taxi drivers' struggle, being in essentially the same industry myself. The fight against technology is the class war!

(1) GPS and the attack on worker autonomy and unregulated space


(2) The anatomy of a typical article on GPS

(3) One union wakes up to the threat of technology at work

George Carlin takes on public education

If you like the hilarious clip below, consider reading John Taylor Gatto's awesome, "An Underground History of Public Education". The whole thing is online for free and I highly recommend it. Also, if you have an mp3 player, a great radio show called Unwelcome Guests has been airing readings of chapters from the book, so you can effectively 'read' it as an audio book if you want.

In modern society, the fundamental institutions of our society must at once seem both absolutely necessary and also shrouded in mystery. For instance, we must all believe that without cops we'd all be killing each other and ripping each other off, but how many of us know the history of policing and why we really have cops? Where did cops come from? How long have cops been around as an institution? How can you be sure we need them if you don't know the answers to these questions? Just admitting that we haven't always had them suggests they might not be necessary. This, in fact, turns out to be the case.

So, it's the same thing with public education. Where did public education come from, and why do we have it? Do you know? Did they teach you that in school? Nope, not once in the twelve years they held you hostage did they share with you the history of your prison. Hell, they don't even teach that to teachers. Nevertheless, you're supposed take on faith that it's totally natural and necessary for parents to give their kids up seven hours a day to state bureaucrats - at the same time you're not supposed to know why that is. And you're supposed to take for granted that you're supposed to sit your ass in a hard wood chair 35 hours a week at the same time you're not supposed to know just why the hell they're keeping you there. Or why you still can't get a job that pays more than ten bucks an hour after you finish.

If you're in school now, try asking your teacher where public education came from. Odds are they won't be able to tell you. That's because you are meant to ignore every instinct you have against it and trust in authorities who will never justify themselves to you. And that's what school is for.

News of Interest 9/4/07

Yet again, we have the ugly face of imperialism hidden behind a facade of human rights. The heat ray will be more humane, we are told. A more humane way for the elite to impose their will on the world? I'm not buying it and every day the new weapon is kept out of the hands of soldiers, the better. Note that some officers have "asked for the system as part of a broader weapons package on wheels, one that could shoot bullets as well as the non-lethal beam."

Pentagon Nixes Ray Gun Weapon in Iraq
In October 2004, the commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force "enthusiastically" endorsed Natonski's request. Lt. Gen. James Amos said it was "critical" for Marines in Iraq to have the system.

Senior officers in Iraq have continued to make the case. One December 2006 request noted that as U.S. forces are drawn down, the non-lethal weapon "will provide excellent means for economy of force."

The main reason the tool has been missing in action is public perception. With memories of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal still fresh, the Pentagon is reluctant to give troops a space-age device that could be misconstrued as a torture machine.

More "non-lethal" tech deployed, this time against kids in the seat of the empire.

Now police are told they can use Taser guns on children
Police have been given the go-ahead to use Taser stun guns against children. The relaxing of restrictions on the use of the weapons comes despite warnings that they could trigger a heart attack in youngsters. Until now, Tasers - which emit a 50,000-volt electric shock - have been used only by specialist officers as a "non lethal" alternative to firearms.

When First World fuel tanks compete with Third World stomaches, we know who's going to lose.

The looming food crisis
But the surge in demand for agrofuels such as ethanol is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The UN World Food Programme, which feeds about 90m people mostly with US maize, reckons that 850m people around the world are already undernourished. There will soon be more because the price of food aid has increased 20% in just a year. Meanwhile, Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, the price of the staple tortilla quadrupled in Mexico in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.

In the US, where nearly 40 million people are below the official poverty line, the Department of Agriculture recently predicted a 10% rise in the price of chicken. The prices of bread, beef, eggs and milk rose 7.5 % in July, the highest monthly rise in 25 years.

"The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue," says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, and author of the book Who Will Feed China?

It is not going to get any better, says Brown. The UN's World Food Organisation predicts that demand for biofuels will grow by 170% in the next three years. A separate report from the OECD, the club of the world's 30 richest countries, suggested food-price rises of between 20% and 50% over the next decade, and the head of Nestlé, the world's largest food processor, said prices would remain high as far as anyone could see ahead.

A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," says the US Department of Agriculture.

In seven of the past eight years the world has actually grown less grain than it consumed, says Brown. World stocks of grain - that is, the food held in reserve for times of emergency - are now sufficient for just over 50 days. According to experts, we are in "the post- food-surplus era".

Note that the threat is not just limited to the frozen northern reaches...

Global Warming Might Spur Earthquakes and Volcanoes
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says.

The impact of human-induced global warming on Earth's ice and oceans is already noticeable: Greenland's glaciers are melting at an increasing rate, and sea level rose by a little more than half a foot (0.17 meters) globally in the 20th century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

With these trends in ice cover and sea level only expected to continue and likely worsen if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, they could alter the stresses and forces fighting for balance in the ground under our feet—changes that are well-documented in studies of past climate change, but which are just beginning to be studied as possible consequences of the current state of global warming.

As the US steadily marches towards war - potentially nuclear war - with Iran, it's worth considering the fates of others that have fallen under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

Inside the nuclear underworld: Deformity and fear
Decades of Soviet nuclear testing unleashed a plague of birth defects. When the Soviet Union tested its nuclear devices, it chose eastern Kazakhstan, one of its remotest, most desolate areas. But no one bothered to evacuate the people living there.

The testing began in 1949 at a site known as Polygon and continued until 1989. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, there were 456 tests, including 116 nuclear bombs tested above ground. The Polygon site officially closed on August 29, 1991 -- 16 years ago this week.

Here's something to keep you up at night: What if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile triggered an automatic nuclear holocaust in retaliation?

The Return of the Doomsday Machine?
And even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create—the physics and mechanics of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard—but never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.

An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.

The 'bin Laden trades' has Wall Street scratching their heads

I've been following this for about five days on some option traders discussion forums and I thought some of you all might be interested in it. I admit that I've been sitting on this in part because of the wild speculation surrounding it and in part because I wanted to see if some clear explanation would emerge. None has been forthcoming - and believe me, I've been looking - so I opted to post about it here when the story broke out of the margins and started showing up on more mainstream market websites. It's a bit technical, but if I can figure it out, so can you.

Essentially, what it boils down to is that there are some very strange trades being placed on several international markets right now, including the American S&P. It's all pretty complicated, but essentially someone or some institution (no one knows who it is) has placed big bets, through options purchases over the last couple months, that the markets are going to collapse to half their value by September 21st (when the options come due). That alone is very unusual, but even more strange is their size. Together, they amount to multi-billion dollar bets that will pay off big if the market collapses. Traders are calling them "bin Laden trades."

Of course only a few events can really cause that - use your imagination. But it doesn't mean that there's going to be a terrorist attack (although it could - after all, you remember the very strange puts placed on United and American airlines right before 9/11, don't you?). There are some market explanations, but all the maneuvers that the traders seem to come up with to explain it are quite contrived - especially when one considers the amount of money involved. Generally, all the analysts that I have seen try to explain it immediately follow up their proposed solutions to the mystery with a bit of a shrug. It could be it, but it would still be really weird, is what they are saying, essentially.

On the other hand, there are some unusual market forces at work now, like the credit crunch and the sinking dollar, so someone could be betting, for instance, that when the Fed meets on the 18th of September, it won't lower interest rates like traders want (because if it does the dollar will sink), and that could trigger a sell-off. China threatened a couple weeks ago to dump its dollars if the US doesn't back off on on demands that China revalue the Yuan. Or it could be a play for some short money in a tight credit market, but considering the money involved, it would have to be a big player, which would still be a very bad economic sign. After all, if a big company needs to go to the market to raise money this way, not to mention anonymously, they're obviously in trouble. Nevermind what happens if they can't pay it back when the options come due on the 21st.

Either way, the US economy is not looking good. Major economic movers and shakers have said recently that the risk of recession this year is the highest in years, which would jibe with the fact that some of the economic benefits of the last few years are finally starting to trickle their way down to the bottom (i.e., the poverty rate dropped for the first time since the recovery began in 2001). Generally, this is about the time when the elites decide to engineer a recession in order to keep those of us at the bottom from getting too comfortable. Still, with the credit crunch tightening and spreading every day, and with foreclosures mounting amongst the working and middle class, what would the repercussions be of an increase in the interest rate? Thursday Freddie Mac reported a 45 per cent drop in second-quarter profits, further spooking Wall Street. And with the shadowy "Plunge Protection Team" already working overtime along with the Fed to keep the market afloat, what is left to do if things get bad? The problem is, Wall Street needs interest rates to drop so as to aleviate the credit crunch, but a drop in interest rates will put downward pressure on the dollar... what to do?

Further, there is a school of analysis that says that American adventures abroad in the last few years are all about the collapsing dollar and a desperate attempt to maintain US hegemony. In other words, the elites are scared and that's why they're acting so aggressively to shore up the dollar and to encircle Russia and China. Keeping oil off the market keeps the price high, and that buoys the value of the dollar, the international currency of oil exchanges.

This might explain the steady move towards an attack on Iran, which one think tank recently reported could involve the use of nuclear weapons and would be 'designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state."' Either way, from the perspective of the elite, the oil must be kept out of the hands of China and Russia, both of whom are steadily building their individual and collective power. Together, they are the main powers in the emerging Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which seeks to balance American-Anglo power around the world, but in particular in Central Asia. The organization, which Iran hopes to join, just held its biggest joint military maneuvers in August.

This desperation, resulting from a faction of the elites' recognition of the dubious future of American power both at home and abroad, would explain why this year the Congress has passed so many domestic measures giving the President extreme powers of martial law, including detention camps, increased surveillance powers, the power to deploy troops domestically and to declare states of emergency under which basic rights we take for granted are stripped away. Among the threats that can legally trigger these powers is economic chaos. This makes a fair amount of sense to me because, after all, there is absolutely no chance that Al Qaeda is going to run riot through American streets.

But there is some reason to consider the possibility that some cadre in the government or private organizations, probably the various intelligence agencies, is planning a false flag terror attack on the US. A false flag attack is when the government or a pro-government group stages an attack and blames it on someone else. Intelligence agencies, including the CIA and other US organizations, do this kind of thing all the time abroad. The Church Commission, the Congressional committee that investigated the COINTELPRO attacks on activists and militants in the US during the 60's and 70's, concluded that the National Security Council was only aware of or approved of at most 14 percent of the covert operations that the American intelligence agencies engaged in. With the black budget reaching into the tens of billions, we certainly can’t imagine that we know everything the government – or various factions within it – have their hands in.

Further, various intelligence agency heads have been hyping the threat of an attack this summer, particularly September, pointing out the rising and ominous level of 'chatter'. Likewise, some in the neo-con camp have been actively calling for a terrorist attack to restore American unity and to propel us further into war.

I don't have any hard answers, and I wouldn't want to make a prediction, but it's something to think about. Who knows? You could go in circles forever trying to figure this out.

So, if you're interested in this kind of thing, here's a link to a trader discussion thread that can lead you to all the possible information - which is really quite fascinating. Below that is a video link for a short explanation from a news segment on a trader show called "The Street." Check it out. The third link is to a more radical take on what might cause this, and it's what got a lot of people's attention in the first place. The next link is to an explanation that errs on the moderate side, although you'll see that even that author is skeptical about his answers. Finally, the last link is to a guy who's trying to dispel the fears, although, again, you'll see that he has some doubts himself about his benign explanations.

Anyhow, September 21st is just around the corner. Here's the links. Check it out for yourself. I really recommend reading as much of the traders thread as possible, daunting as that might be. Whatever it is, you may be watching market history in the making.

(1) URGENT!!! LOOK AT AUG SPY CALL ACTION FROM $65 - $90 (discussion thread at tickerforum)
(2) 'bin Laden trades (video)
(3) "**$4.5 BILLION 'Bin Laden Trade' STOCK MARKET TO CRASH
(4) This $900 Million Bet Has Global Traders Talking…
(5) Dispelling the 'Bin Laden' Options Trades

Protest the Murderous Mesa PD Tomorrow!

Mesa: Remember Mario Madrigal Jr., Executed by Mesa Police Officers! Demand Justice this Saturday!



Four years have passed since one of the most notorious police killings in the valley’s history, Mario Madrigal Jr. was coldly executed by three Mesa cops in August of 2003 at his own home, in front of his family. He was fifteen, unarmed, and passive in the police presence, but these Mesa cops still saw it fit to shoot the teenager eleven times.

"He was already on the floor [when an officer] emptied his gun," said Marta Madrigal, his mother. "We called the police for help, and they shot him."

The Madrigals had called the Mesa cops for help with Mario Jr. because he was having emotional problems. They expected the officers to help him get to a crisis center and had no idea the officers would kill him. The officers (Orlando Dean, Mark Beckett, and Richard Henry) claimed Mario lunged at them with a knife, and that’s why they shot him eleven times. The Madrigals couldn’t believe that their son, who was not threatening or attacking any of the officers, was tasered and then shot to death for no reason.

"We want justice for Mario," said Marta Madrigal. "Justice means I want those killers behind bars". "They killed him in front of my eyes," said Mario Madrigal Sr. "If I didn't move my [son Bryant], they'd have killed him, too."

Church groups, community organizations from across the valley, as well as families and individuals who have been brutalized or had a relative or friend killed by police, came to the defense of the Madrigals after a vicious media assault on the family led by law enforcement. Over the years the Madrigal family and community organizations such as Phoenix Copwatch, Women in Black against Violence, and the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition have held demonstrations, candle light vigils, and know your rights forums in response to the police violence in Mesa, specifically in regards to the murder of Mario Madrigal Jr. The struggle for justice continues.

In the spirit of justice and freedom for all, and to remember Mario Madrigal Jr., a demonstration has been called to mark the fourth anniversary of his death. The killer cops, not yet held accountable for their aggression, still roam the streets of Mesa after four years have passed, protected by police unions, the Mesa police department, and their own shameful lies about his execution.

Join us to say: “NO MORE!” The Madrigal family, and their allies, will be holding a demonstration Saturday, August 25 at the main Mesa Police station in downtown Mesa to call for justice, and demand the officers be held accountable for their crimes. Come out to stand up against police violence

WHEN: Saturday, August 25 at 4 PM

WHERE: Mesa police department station at 130 North Robson in downtown Mesa. Located between University Dr. and Main St., and just east of Country Club.

People United Against Police Abuse
August 2007


FIGHT POLICE BRUTALITY!
CONFRONT THE MURDEROUS MESA PD!
NO STATE PROTECTION FOR KILLER COPS!
DEMAND JUSTICE FOR THE MADRIGAL FAMILY!

School's in forever: tracking schoolkids through their uniforms

Reading the news that one of the largest manufacturers of school uniforms in Britain is considering sewing GPS tracking devices into the clothes schoolkids are compelled to wear, just so parents can follow their kids to and from school, I can't help but notice a few things.

Of course, this isn't the first time that GPS has been sold to scared parents as a panacea to their poorly-justified fears. In this newest case, fearful parents can log into a secure website and watch their precious little ones skip about from home to school. But in Japan, for instance, GPS tagged school jackets with "panic buttons" that summon security services have been around for a couple years. In ads for car and cell phone services, GPS is routinely sold to us as protecting us from the alleged dangers of unregulated space - the places where the State and Capital have yet to institute their dream of total surveillance. Going off the map is dangerous, we are told, a sin against the new religion of techno-surveillance. After all, the system wants to track you and everything you produce - including your kids.

Still, I am struck by the way the polling numbers reveal how disproportionately terrified parents are of their children getting kidnapped, even though the odds of that actually happening are quite negligible. Polling cited in most the articles I read about the GPS-tegged uniforms "found 44 per cent of the adults were worried about the safety of their children and 59 per cent would be interested in uniforms with satellite tracking systems." And all this in Britain, the most spied-on country in the world! Clearly technology hasn't alleviated parents' anxieties. Of course, technology's promise is always for tomorrow.

This terrified attitude, propelled as it is by the police and the media's obsession with hyping kidnappings and other crimes against children - especially when they happen to white middle and upper class families - certainly reminds me of the goal of the secret NATO Gladio program in Europe, which I have been researching the last year or so. While it's highly unlikely that government or paramilitary organizations are at all involved in what the media reports as a rash of child abductions, the similarities in the result cannot be overlooked, and the benefits that accrue to the security services and the elite by the continuation of such crimes are obvious.

Considering one terrible episode from the past, under NATO's Gladio program government secret services employed criminal gangs and right-wing organizations to commit random public murders in Belgian supermarkets under the theory that a terrified population would demand for the State to be empowered to protect them by expanding police powers. Of course, this was also the objective behind the security services' interventions into the European armed ultra-left, such as the Red Brigades, as well as their employment of false flag terrorism in Italy (which included the bombing of trains and other public places).

Of course, the system also generates its own independent thugs, criminals and pranksters, which it is quite happy to publicize. But playing both sides, as we see with the arrest today of former Red Brigades member, Marina Petrella, also suits the State quite well. Stoking fear sends people running to the State for help, and that's certainly what we have seen result from the current climate of fear, regardless of its source.

Returning to GPS, I notice that in addition to being boosted as "a safety net for parents" supporters of the technology also point out that "there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels." In other words, the technology can be utilized to attack the autonomy of children at school, who often use ditching and other schemes to get out of the prison that is modern, industrialized schooling and carve out space for their own lives and interests against the wishes of the school autocrats, bureaucrats and babysitters.

It's never explained this way in the mainstream despite the painful obviousness of the point, but forcing kids into public school is a way to dumb them down, to bore them, to regulate them and to make them compliant, unthinking drones. And, of course, getting kids used to being tracked young makes sense if you're an elite class that wants to track everyone. After all, indoctrinating children into the various systems of control is what schooling has always been about.

This is a tragedy for anyone, but while we tend to think of the less-academically inclined children when we think of "dumb" stoners, dropouts and ditchers, it's important to realize that plenty of so-called "smart" kids are forced into this system, too, and they are just as beaten down by it. Their options are limited, too, since the system is just as interested in controlling their choices as it is the kids it puts on the track to a trade or prison. So, using technology to herd kids of all skill levels, aptitudes and interests into the one-track, cookie-cutter school system hurts all the kids who resist and could do better - or who might become independent thinkers - outside the fences. And it turns out that that's a lot of them.

Finally, I can't help but notice the discrepancy between the desire of parents, capitalists and bureaucrats to tag the kids and the willingness of the kids themselves to be tagged. As the Telegraph reports:

[C]hildren rejected the idea of any tracking technology.

The firm interviewed 450 children aged nine to 16 and found that just a third of those under 12 were keen on the move.

It was even more unpopular among older schoolchildren.

No surprise there. Sadly, as was the case with some other former prisoners, namely the 210 paroled burglars that Connecticut plans to track via GPS (remember when it was just going to be murderers and child molesters the government wanted to track?), the system is not terribly interested in what the kids think of the plan to track them, nor is there a formalized mechanism for them to express their opposition. In fact, techno-boosters cite the statistics as proof for their business model. Trutex marketing director, Clare Rix, expressed her disdain for the opinions of students this way: "As a direct result of this survey, we are now seriously considering incorporating a device into future ranges."

But the data does show that the kids, aside from exhibiting a natural tendency towards anti-authoritarianism, surely also understand the importance of maintaining their autonomy from a system that most recognize as operating, to put it most generously, without their best interests at heart. But there's hope. In a sense this lack of a formalized structure for taking students opinions into account is a good thing, because it will leave students to come up with their own forms of creative resistance, probably centering around sabotage and refusal. Any struggle against these technologies of control that results will necessarily have to be centered on modes of organization that the youth themselves will control. Nevertheless, the extension of this technology to students would be another defeat for autonomy.

Still, one article I read, surprisingly coming from an English-language publication in Dubai, expresses the best analysis I have yet seen on the GPS controversy (and perhaps we should be thankful that for now it indeed remains controversial). Citing the alienating effects of technology, the need for youth to have freedom - even freedom to rebel - as well as casting a doubtful eye on the ability of technology to fix the problems it has created, the piece expresses a sound critique of the fate to befall students and the rest of society should they fail to resist.

The internet, and global communications nowadays, has made it easier than ever for parents to be extra-anxious about the safety of their kids. News reports of kidnappings and the continuous coverage of the recent abduction of Madeline McCann has left many parents eagerly embracing the idea of tagging their kids with technology. However, many children, especially those in their teens, are less than enthusiastic about the idea, fearing it would mean that their parents could spy on them.

One 13-year old Dubai school-goer told 7DAYS, “I reckon my parents would have some peace of mind with this device, but I wouldn't really like it 'cause I'd feel like I'd be under surveillance. I don't need a baby-sitter, so why would I need this.”

Rajeshree Singhania, a child psychologist at the Singhania Children's Clinic at Healthcare City is in two minds about tagging a child's movements by satellite. She says that parents today have a heightened sense of anxiety when it comes to their kids, but she doesn't know if tracking them is the answer for all kids.

“I understand the worry parents have about their kids. Perhaps this idea would be suitable for younger children, but for teens it is simply an invasion of privacy. I know that my kids would rebel if I asked them to wear a tracking device,” says Singhania. “I can see certain situations where it might be suitable, like for a single parent. If a single parent had to work, they might be more relaxed if they could check and see if their child got home safely from school etc.”

Growing up, all children are prone to slight rebellion and adventure, which doesn't involve their parents’ permission. If this freedom to be 'free' is taken away from them, because they have to wear a tracking device, how will it affect their personality and development?

“Knowing that you are being constantly observed and that your every movement can be checked on is bound to affect a child's personal development, because their ability to take risks is going to reduce. A child will develop anxiety to the world they live in and see it as a big-bad-world and this is not healthy,” says Singhania.

Perhaps rather than equipping children with state-of-the-art technology, we should be encouraging the idea of community, says Singhania. “In this high-tech world we tend to forget about the human factor. What we need these days is more community-type living, where people look out for other people. Here, community is nearly non-existent. How many people say 'hello' to each other? How many of your neighbours do you know?” she adds.

It concludes on a stark note indeed, issuing a clear warning: "How long before satellite tracking comes here then - it’s time to be afraid Dubai kids..."

News of Interest 8/21/07

The increasing high-tech-ization of warfare not only increases the power of the American elite to project its will on the rest of the world, but it also reduces the exposure of Firth Worlders to the resistance of those being imposed upon.

Robot Air Attack Squadron Bound for Iraq
The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.

The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.

That moment, one the Air Force will likely low-key, is expected "soon," says the regional U.S. air commander. How soon? "We're still working that," Lt. Gen. Gary North said in an interview.

The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior Air Force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next spring. They look forward to it.

"With more Reapers, I could send manned airplanes home," North said.

Some walls hold people in. Some walls keep people out. Both kill.

East German Shoot-to-Kill Order Is Found
Seventeen years after German reunification, archivists have found the first written proof that East German border guards had been ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to escape to West Germany, including women and children.

The seven-page order, dated Oct. 1, 1973, was discovered last week in the regional archive office in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. Though unsigned, it shows that the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, had told guards that they must “stop or liquidate” anyone trying to cross the border.

“Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used,” the document said.

No everyone feels the pinch as the economy tanks.

Wealthy still not asking the price
The stock market is swinging like a pendulum and the credit market is getting tighter than a drum but there are no signs the rich are buckling their Pradas to hold onto their bucks.

"Luxury goods still have quite a lot of momentum," said Kamalesh Rao, director of industry research at SpendingPulse, the retail data service of MasterCard Advisors.

Rao said luxury goods sales rose 10.7 percent in July from a year ago and added, "I'd be surprised if that changed radically in August."

One reason there are so many AQ sympathizers in Bosnia is because the US intelligence apparatus facilitated their movement to the region and access to weaponry and training.

Al-Qaeda helpers present in Bosnia, US diplomat warns
Al-Qaeda uses Bosnia as a transit point, receiving help from Islamic veterans of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, US diplomat Raffi Gregorian said in an interview with a Sarajevo daily published Saturday.

"Certain intelligence agencies consider Bosnia-Hercegovina as one of the Al-Qaeda's transit points," Gregorian told the Dnevni Avaz newspaper.

"There are sympathisers in the country who are ready to help Al-Qaeda with hiding agents, providing financial support or providing false documents," he added.

The numbers parallel racial privilege as you would expect them to.

Poll: White youths happier than others
From their relationships to their jobs to their money — even from they time they first roll out of bed — young white Americans are happier with life than their minority counterparts.

According to an extensive survey of 1,280 people ages 13-24 by The Associated Press and MTV, 72 percent of whites say they are happy with life in general, compared with 51 percent of Hispanics and 56 percent of blacks.

"It doesn't surprise me," said Martin Carpenter, 21, a black New Jersey resident. "There's a lot of issues out there for African-American young adults. You can still go to certain places and feel uncomfortable, like you don't belong there."

Martin's feeling about racism, real or perceived, was echoed in the survey: 28 percent of minorities believe race will hurt them in the quest for a better life. Among whites, 20 percent feel their race will help in getting ahead.

Destiny Brown, 17, a black Virginia high school student, said she has friends who were already passed over for work simply because their names sounded different: "I know sometimes your name — people will give you a hard time when you try to get a job."

The difference in levels of happiness is not always stark, but it's consistent. Among whites, 67 percent usually wake up happy in the morning; for minorities, the figure is 61 percent.

Neither communism nor capitalism has abolished slavery in China, it seems.

Chinese still see themselves as slaves
But a list of new slang expressions compiled by its Ministry of Education suggests the country's economic reforms have simply multiplied the ways its people can fall into serfdom.

Among the most popular phrases used by the country's growing middle class are an expanding variety of equivalents to the English "wage slave".

The most common is "house slave", meaning someone who struggles to pay off the mortgage. But there are also "car slaves" who, unlike lucky government cadres, have to pay all their own petrol, servicing, and road toll fees.

More specialised versions are "grave slaves" who have bought expensive funeral plots in advance, and "feast slaves" whose jobs mean their lives are an endless round of banquets, weddings, funerals, and other social events requiring the cash gifts, or "red envelopes" expected on such occasions.

A choice: high technology or freedom.

A case in point: China, where the government is going to blanket the city of Shenzhen (with more than 12 million residents) with a network of linked up surveillance cameras and force almost every resident to carry a computer-chipped id card that carries their work, health, residency status and criminal record, as well as a whole host of other information that might still be considered nominally "private" here in the US. Further, they have issued all the cops GPS systems so that the authorities can better use them to keep everyone in check, whether they are a criminal or a political activist.

The technology will allow for a more specific and accurate application of force by the ruling class through their armed protectors, the police, thus increasing the ability of the Chinese elite to force their will onto that of the people, many of whom have moved to the cities from rural areas and have engaged in increasingly violent and class conscious protests and insurrections against their communist and capitalist bosses (there were nearly a hundred thousand riots and other uprisings last year in China).

The interesting thing is, as even the developers of this tech (American companies, of course) admit, they're not giving the Chinese government anything special. That means that the tyrannical capabilities of the technologies are built into them - you can't separate them. Said another way, there's nothing neutral about this technology. It's a tool of the ruling class and, as they do now, they will use it to exploit and dominate us for their own selfish profit.

And this is why we have a choice: high technology or freedom. Sadly, unless we do something about it soon, we'll have no choice at all. After all, the authorities plan on using the same technology here, and they've already deployed aspects of it in many cities.

(By the way - thanks to both Andrew and my comrade Collin for each independently pointing me towards to the article below.)

Consider the future:

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.

Continued at the New York Times...

News of Interest 8/14/07

More evidence that the solution to the ongoing collapse of the environment has to be a massive step back from industrialism - in this case from the production of carbon dioxide. Acting after the fact is not good enough.

Trees Won't Fix Global Warming
The plan to use trees as a way to suck up and store the extra carbon dioxide emitted into Earth's atmosphere to combat global warming isn't such a hot idea, new research indicates.

Scientists at Duke University bathed plots of North Carolina pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew more tissue, only the trees that received the most water and nutrients stored enough carbon dioxide to offset the effects of global warming.

The Department of Energy-funded project, called the Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) experiment, compared four pine forest plots that received daily doses of carbon dioxide 1.5 times current levels of the greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere to four matched plots that didn't receive any extra gas.

When can we call this genocide? The death toll now likely surpasses the Rwandan catastrophe.

Over 1 million Iraqi deaths since 2003
Nearly one million and a thousand Iraqi civilians have lost their lives since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The figure is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on the only scientifically valid study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the US-led invasion of March 2003, according to JustForeignPolicy.org.

The security state uses terrorism as an excuse to extend its system of control and surveillance into even the smallest American cities. More evidence of the increasingly desperate and paranoid state of the ruling class. What do they know that we don't know about what the future holds?

US doles out millions for street cameras
The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.

Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation.

The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants.

NYPD has been told to reward "aggressive" cops with overtime money.

$ICCING THE COPS
The NYPD's new patrol chief has ordered that special overtime money earmarked for cops in violence-prone precincts be given to "aggressive" officers rather than "do-nothings," The Post has learned.

Another source said Giannelli wants the OT to go to "intelligently aggressive" cops, such as ones who manage to avert civilian complaints by adequately explaining to people why they are being stopped and frisked.

In response to the new policy, some precincts already have compiled lists of their top-performing officers - when it comes to arrests - and forwarded the lists to the borough commanders.

Sources also said bosses have been told not to worry in the future about their officers' names appearing on lists of cops who have received large amounts of overtime.

Of course, for it to stop the next terrorist attack, MI5 and MI6 would have to stop planning them first, right? Still, more encouraging developments from the tech sector. When you click on the link, make sure to watch the video. Notice all the 'oohs' and 'aahs' from a scientific sector that has lost - if it ever had it - it's ability to think critically about the applications of its research. Remember, scientists worked for the Hitler and for Stalin. Don't count on something in the scientific process or scientists themselves to stop this march towards a surveillance society. In fact, these are the folks who are going to bring it to you, questioning only the date of their next grant disbursement along the way.

Britain's Police Drone: Could It Stop Next Terror Plot?
As if there weren't enough cameras trained on Britain's population, police in Merseyside County are field-testing a flying drone equipped with closed-circuit TV cameras. The 3-ft.-wide, German-built MD4-200 chopper has four whisper-quiet rotors and can fly autonomously at up to 15 mph using GPS way points. It can also be piloted from nearly 550 yards away with a handheld controller.

The drone sends footage to the pilot, via a pair of video eyeglasses, and to a police support vehicle or a control room. Since its battery allows for just 20 minutes of flight, the MD4-200 will be deployed for specific missions, as opposed to ongoing patrols. As part of a task force charged with fighting "antisocial behavior," its potential duties range from mundane (monitoring traffic jams) to ominous (recording evidence to be used in court).

A brutal history acknowleged - if only briefly

There was a fuck up at the China Daily online and they accidentally included the following sentence in an article about how Beijing is getting ready for the Olympics (leaving out the more than one million poor people that have been displaced unceremoniously to make way for tourists, stadiums and trains, of course):

The offending sentence:

"Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations."

Read more about it here and see a cached version of the page - ironically saved via Google, which has itself cooperated with the Chinese government in censoring news in China..

Read more about how the Olympics affects poor people here:
Rights group: Olympics displace 2 million people over last 20 years, 1.25 million in Beijing

And here:
How the Olympics Destroy Cities

The end of the era of hubris and the rising sense of panic.

The US is making preparations for war with Iran right now. Cheney is pushing hard for airstrikes and with Congress leaving town for its summer recess the likelihood of an attack is significantly raised. Cheney appears to want some kind of a provocation, either in terms of clear evidence of Iran caught in the act of arming or supporting Shiites in Iraq or a large attack on the US or US interests that can be tied back to them. Administration heavies and their allies in the military leadership have been highlighting Iranian involvement in Iran recently and Bush has been pushing outright lies about Iran's nuclear intentions specifically to prepare us for war. Amongst the administrations allies in the media and think tanks the determination to push for war with Iran has grown quite strong.

Right now US forces have peaked in Iraq and are higher than they have ever been, including during the invasion. Also, many Neo-Con thinkers have been actively either calling for a new terrorist attack at home or hoping one happens. Some have warned that there is a high probability of an attack being engineered by American forces to be blamed on Iranians or perhaps Al Qaeda (interestingly, in Iran we are again allying with the terrorist group just like we did in the Balkans in the mid and late 90's). Matching the enthusiastic calls from their allies in the American elite, Al Qaeda has likewise stepped up its threats this month against US targets in the 'homeland'.

Further, with the looming collapse of the dollar and China's recent - though not yet serious - threat to dump $900 billion in dollars on the market, thus eliminating the status of the dollar as the world's reserve (oil) currency, we are reminded of one of the main motivations for America's recent wars: maintaining the dollar's special global status. Iran has threatened to switch it's oil sales from dollars to Euros. Meanwhile, the Shanghia Cooperation Organization - made up of China, Russia and other Central Asian states - is conducting its largest military maneuvers ever this month. The focus? Anti-terrorism, of course. Iran hopes to join this emerging strategic counter-weight to the US-Anglo empire.

Another interesting note, when you look at a map of recent US interventions, instead of Al Qaeda influence, consider comparing it to the sphere of influence of the SCO and its member states. Al Qaeda is a convenient tool, as it has been in the past, to justify and wage attacks on these countries' steadily increasing power. With the increasing co-ordination with Al Qaeda, it's quite convenient indeed, then, that CIA headman, General Michael V. Hayden, has past experience aiding Al Qaeda operatives in Bosnia.

Many Neo-Cons are becoming convinced of the need for action on Iran, revealing the true nature of their political position. Many on the left and even the right have misconstrued the actions of the elite as stemming from supreme confidence - even hubris. The truth is, the elite knows the end of the American era looms near unless some drastic action is taken, and therefore they are quite desperate indeed. America's actions on the global stage are a reflection of a state of panic amongst the ruling class.

That's a recipe for disaster.

Strange bedfellow or bugs in a rug?

The Wall Street Journal - sometimes lampooned as the War Street Journal for it's never-ending love affair with war of all kinds - has run a curious article on non-violence and social change. Anyone who reads this blog or my other writings knows that I adhere to the notion that we should use whatever means work to achieve our goals. It's my opinion that non-violence doesn't really exist in reality. There are only degrees and relationships to violence.

But, if what's it's boosters call 'non-violence' will work, then by all means let's use it. However, here in the First World non-violence, riddled with inconsistencies and tainted by the high-browed moralism of a wealthy elite, is most often used not as a means of effecting change but rather as a club for dictating social outcomes by limiting the forms that social struggle will take to the symbolic and ineffective.

Further, the ideological construction of non-violent thinking itself limits analysis in critical ways. Take for instance the Bush Administration's allocation of funds to Freedom House for non-violent change in Iran. Just how can an organization that advocates so-called non-violence accept money from the homicidal Bush White House and still maintain a shred of self-respect? Setting aside the violent methods with which the State and Capital employs to collect such funds (because, after all, the charities of the rich, fat on surplus value, are not morally pure either), the American government today is actively engaged in the battle to overthrow the Iranian regime through all available means, including alliances with Al-Qaeda and other violent organizations. For an ideology that pretends to put so much stock in the aligning of ends and means, you have to wonder what kind of ideological gymnastics allow them to jump through those kinds of hoops for the benefit of Washington thugs and criminals.

Of course, once we abandon the useless ideology of non-violence, such contradictions fade away. It becomes clear that, if the paragon of violence that is the State sees no inconsistency in utilizing both allegedly non-violent and violent organizations to achieve its murderous ends, then perhaps there really is no antagonism at all between them. What we are left with is the stark fact that there are ends and there are means and while we may want to achieve our ends in the way most consistent with our values, we still want to achieve them. Considering which tools are appropriate to the task at hand is a much more useful ethic to apply, it turns out.

Nevertheless, you have to give the WSJ credit for consistency. Rather than lecture those low on the economic ladder to constrain our tactics to those that the hypocritical global elite approve of as morally pure (that's a job for the Left, primarily), the paper has admitted that non-violence doesn't always work. That's an understatement, for sure, and obviously disprovable by the sheer fact that the state and other organizations routinely use violence of various kinds to achieve their ends - including overturning various regimes. However, in the end, the paper is unable to draw a connection between it's advocacy of war for social change in Iraq (after all, isn't that what all war is?) and it's position on non-violence in popular movements.

Nevertheless, they get close, and we can connect the dots for them.

Read the article at the link below:

They shall overcome—but perhaps not always

But at its purest, the doctrine of non-violence insists that the method is nearly as important as the message. It also claims that there is no regime or foe, however brutal, that cannot be weakened by non-violent means. Is that claim justified?

No tyrant lasts for ever, and the statement that any brute can be defied can't be disproved. But the experience of ex-Soviet republics suggests that mass protest by a courageous crowd won't always work. In two republics—Belarus and Azerbaijan—rallies have been dispersed and opposition neutralised. Brave souls like Alyaksandr Kazulin, a critic of the regime in Belarus, and Eynulla Fatullaev, an Azeri editor, languish in jail on phoney charges. And in both places, numbers, money and geopolitics have made a difference. The Azeri elite is riding high on surging oil prices; that makes it easier to buy off groups or individuals. In Belarus, there were protests over election fraud in March 2006 which resembled the mass protests that had prevailed in Ukraine 14 months earlier. But in Belarus (despite the solidarity offered by colour-revolution veterans from Georgia and Ukraine), the rallies attracted little over 10,000 at most. Those in Kiev had involved hundreds of thousands.

More of the same in '08

Just another warmonger... he claims he would withdraw from Iraq (yeah, right), but only so he could intensify the imperialist war in Afghanistan and free up troops for more invasions, like in Pakistan. Whatever he does, it's clear that he doesn't intend to diverge from the bogus and manipulative anti-terrorist narrative that the Bush Administration and the rest of the elite have set up and pray to every day since 9/11. Look at Obama appeal to that 9/11 jingoism like an old pro: "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans." More of the same. No one for president in '08, please.

Obama might send troops into Pakistan

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists even without local permission if warranted — an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

...

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting them "on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said he would send at least two more brigades to Afghanistan and increase nonmilitary aid to the country by $1 billion.

He also said he would create a three-year, $5 billion program to share intelligence with allies worldwide to take out terrorist networks from Indonesia to Africa.

Slippery slope confirmed, but no one cares.

Redflex, the spy camera company that installed speed cameras on the 101 Freeway that goes through Scottsdale (and whose national HQ is at 15020 N 74th St in Scottsdale) may begin switching some of its cameras over from red light versions to surveillance cameras as one California town hopes to start using them for policing and prosecution beyond red light running. Here's your ammunition for you slippery slope argument. Still, fighting against them in the realm of public opinion is an uphill fight as recent poll numbers suggest.

Check out these two stories:

Surveillance Cameras Win Broad Support

There's some interesting polling here, but it boils down to the fact that most everyone seems to be down with the cameras, which pretty much means the only possible check on them - the actions and opinions of regular folks - is not doing the trick because the elites are winning the idealogical battle. That basically means that the government wants them, the business class wants them, and the people want them. Guess what? We're going to get a lot of them under those conditions.

Nonetheless, majority support for surveillance cameras crosses political, ideological and population groups, albeit with differences in degree.

Seniors are most apt to support the increased use of these cameras, with under-30s, least so; Republicans more than Democrats; women more than men; higher educated people more than the less educated; and whites more than African-Americans.

California City to Transform Red Light Cameras Into Spy Cameras

Looks like the slippery slope argument is true.

Privacy advocates have long viewed red light cameras with the suspicion that the devices were the first step down a path of increased surveillance. Those fears may come true as the city of Oakland, California has revealed that it is working with the state legislature to secure a change in the law that will allow red light cameras to become full-scale surveillance cameras. In a memo from the Oakland Police Department dated June 26, Police Chief Wayne G. Tucker recommended that the city's lobbyist be ordered to advocate a new law in Sacramento.

"The legislation would also allow the use of those (red light camera) images for evidentiary purposes other than the enforcement of red light violations, such as reckless driving, assaults, public nuisance activity, drug dealing, etc."

The Angry Brigade: A Documentary

The Angry Brigade was an armed clandestine anarchist organization that was highly influenced by the Situationists in Paris. Rooted in the squatter movement in Britain in the early 70's, the Angry Brigade engaged in largely symbolic bombings throughout the country, targeting government officials, offices and private symbols of capitalist exploitation.

There are a few books on the group. One I picked up in San Francisco at the anarchist bookfair in March, The Angry Brigade: The Cause and the Case. A history of Britain's first urban guerilla group, was released by Christie Books and contains a pretty good amount of information, including newspaper clippings and analysis from a libertarian perspective.

My interest in them has gone back some years, so I was happy to get a tip from a friend of mine today about a British documentary focusing on the group that was posted on the internet last year. Just having watched it and found it quite interesting, I now provide it here for your enjoyment.

News of Interest 7/18/07

Report: Deportation Devastating Families
Families split up and returned to the South in the name of defending white supremacy. Where have I heard this before in American history?

An estimated 1.6 million children and spouses have been separated from family members forced to leave the country under toughened 1996 immigration laws, a human rights group said Wednesday.

The separations have taken a toll on families who have sold homes, lost jobs, lost businesses or been thrown into financial turmoil, Human Rights Watch said in a new report.

Will security firms detect police spyware?
Does your spyware detection software protect your from government snooping?

A CNET News.com survey of 13 leading antispyware vendors found that not one company acknowledged cooperating unofficially with government agencies. Some, however, indicated that they would not alert customers to the presence of fedware if they were ordered by a court to remain quiet.

Mega-rich paying top price for luxury submarines
Q. How do you sink a billionaire's submarine?
A. Overthrow capitalism.

The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world's richest people. Journeying to see what's on the bottom aboard a personal submersible is a wretched excess guaranteed to trump the average mogul's stable of vintage Bugattis or a $38 million round-trip ticket to the international space station aboard a Russian rocket.

Luxury-sub makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.

"Everyone down there is a wealthy eccentric," says Jean-Claude Carme, vice president of marketing for U.S. Submarines, a Portland company that custom builds submarines. "They're all intensely secretive."

Who owns the estimated 100 luxury subs carousing the Seven Seas mostly remains a mystery.

Poll: Rooting for Bonds Divided by Race
I'd like to see the numbers for Lance Armstrong...

When it comes to rooting for Barry Bonds to become the home run champion, one factor stands out: race. An AP-Ipsos poll released Monday showed 55 percent of minority baseball fans want Bonds to set the record, while only 34 percent of non-Hispanic white baseball fans hope he passes Hank Aaron's record.

Dust, waste and dirty water: the deadly price of China's miracle
There is a word for this: externalization. The Chinese people pay the environmental and health costs for the profits and cheap products demanded by American consumers and capitalists alike. Those who claim that national wealth leads necessarily to environmental protections ought first to consider China, and then the fact that the state of the Chinese environment is also a function of American's desire to externalize the costs of their consumerism and production.

The OECD study, prepared at China's request, spells out the scale of the ecological crisis now engulfing the country, poisoning its people and holding it back economically.

It says up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water every day, and 190 million are suffering from water related illnesses each year. If air pollution is not controlled, it says, there will be 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas and 20 million cases of respiratory illness a year within 15 years.

China's water quality gives the researchers greatest concern. One third of the length of all China's rivers is now "highly polluted" as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year.

Although China is the world's fourth largest economy, and is closing rapidly on the US, Japan and Germany, its environmental standards are often closer to those in some of the poorest countries, says the report. More than 17,000 towns have no sewage works and the human waste from nearly 1 billion people is barely collected or treated. "A majority of the water flowing through China's urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing," says the report.

Unruly students' Facebook search
The social network functions increasingly as a social surveillance apparatus.

Students at Oxford University are being warned that university authorities are using the Facebook website to gain evidence about unruly post-exam pranks.

The student union has urged students to tighten their security settings on the social networking website, to stop dons viewing their details.

Fight for control of Iraq's reserves
The class struggle continues four years into the war despite the presence of both Islamic jihadists and American liberators.

Hassan Jumaa Awad al Assadi, the head of the Iraqi oil workers' union, was in London last week campaigning against a new law which, he says, will give the oil giants unprecedented rights to his country's vast reserves.

"We will lose control over Iraqi oil. The social progress in Iraq will be curtailed substantially, because the oil companies want huge profits; they are not concerned about the environment, wages, or living conditions," he warned. "We will wait to see the reaction of the Iraqi people."

Baghdad has reacted angrily to the union's campaign, issuing arrest warrants for al Assadi and his fellow leaders, and refusing to recognise the 26,000-strong confederation of workers.

Police to use helmet cams to record public order incidents
Does it come with a delete button?

The mini digital cameras, strapped to the helmet headbands of patrolling police officers, are to be used to film rowdy late-night scenes, underage drinkers, controversial stop and search confrontations and domestic violence incidents.

The cameras can store up to 400 hours of footage with soundtrack on their hard drive, with a battery life of eight to 12 hours. The footage can be played back on a four-inch (10cm) screen attached to the officer's belt. Future versions may use a memory card or even live streaming technology to transmit the pictures to a nearby vehicle or communications centre.

Are these the last days of the Oil Age?
Even if it could do so, the deadline for replacing oil with alternative energy is getting tight. The defenders of the "green energy" wing of capitalism must answer the obvious question: is there even enough time for that?

Peter Warburton’s excellent weekly risk analysis has pointed out that 27 of the 51 oil-producing nations listed in BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy reported output declines in 2006. One projection of world crude oil production actually forecasts a 10 per cent reduction in total world output between 2005 and 2015. That would be a revolution.

The oil peak debate can be left to the oil analysts. It is a complex issue, and there are some grounds for questioning the most pessimistic forecasts, including the likely development of the Canadian tar sands, and the success of American enhanced oil recovery techniques. Past forecasts of oil depletion have often proved wrong, and the present forecasts are uncertain. Nuclear power could increase energy supply, but a big nuclear programme has been left far too late in most countries.

The five-year view taken by the IEA is itself a central forecast. Some analysts think that the peak oil moment has already been reached; some still think that it will not come until 2020 – which is itself only 12 years away. Market trends and the statistics both support the IEA’s view that consumption is accelerating and supplies falling faster than expected. Of course, if the “crunch” point is only five years’ away for oil, and closer for natural gas, it has, for practical purposes, already arrived.

Since you been gone

"To see how the world would look if humans were gone, I began going to abandoned places, places that people had left for different reasons," says Alan Weisman, journalist, in a recent interview in Scientific American. After covering the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, Weisman became intrigued with the idea of just what would happen to the planet if humanity just up and disappeared. How long would it take for Nature to recover from humankind's many thousand-year attack, especially the last hundred years? And what would that look like? He attempts to answer these questions in his new book, The World without Us.

Visiting no-man's lands like the Korean DMZ, Chernobyl and ancient preserves provided some answers, as did voyages into the murky depths beneath New York City. Says Weisman:

I also went to the Korean DMZ, the demilitarized zone. Here you have this little stretch of land—it’s about 150 miles long and 2.5 miles wide—that has two of the world’s biggest armies facing off against each other. And in between the armies is an inadvertent wildlife preserve. You see species that might be extinct if it weren’t for this one little piece of land. Sometimes you’ll hear the soldiers screaming at one another through loudspeakers or flashing their propaganda back and forth, and in the middle of all this tension you’ll see the flocks of cranes that winter there.

Lacking the everyday maintenance that keeps them going, our cities would crumble and soon become overgrown with plants. Writing in the Daily Mail, Michael Hanlon summarizes Mother Nature's counterattack:

The big cities would crumble with remarkable ease. London or New York, like all large towns near the sea, would start to rot from their foundations up, as underground tunnels and conduits that carried trains and cables, roadways and sewage, started to fill up with water within days. The pumps that keep them dry would have simply ceased to operate.

Indeed, the recent floods in northern England showed just how much damage can be caused when human defences fail. Without people to patch them up, and the rumble of traffic continually to keep them at bay, weeds would win their long battle with the asphalt.

Within a few weeks, grass shoots would begin to shatter every road surface in the world. Within 15 years, the M1 would look like one of those roads built in Africa in the 1960s and never since maintained.

Within a decade, the combined onslaught of weeds, waterlogging from blocked drains and the freeze-thaw action of water seeping into cracks would combine to turn the foundations of the urban world to rubble.

Many buildings would start to fall apart within 20 years. Walls would groan and creak, roof tiles lift, joints between walls and roofs separate. Without central heating, with gutters permanently clogged and no maintenance, most of Britain's homes would be in ruins by 2040.

America's cities, with their generally harsher climates, would fall apart even sooner.

Some of the first buildings that would decay are, paradoxically, some of the newest. The shoddily built box-homes that have sprung up across Britain in the post-war era, the badly-made tower blocks and the cheap conversions, would collapse like houses of cards.

Large, well-designed modern buildings with steel-framed constructions might survive for centuries, however, as would some of the thick-walled buildings of the Georgian era and before.

Of course, some constructions would last a very long time. Massively over-engineered, the Forth Rail Bridge could stand for hundreds of years. And one structure which, interestingly, would survive far longer than you might think would be the Channel Tunnel.

Dr Weisman points out that it wouldn't flood because it is built deep under the seabed, in a single geological layer. That is why it might prove to be a vital conduit for the recolonisation of Britain by dozens of animal species long banished by man.

Meanwhile, as the buildings crumbled and decayed, what about the other works of man?

Our world is still very much the Iron Age, but iron - and its modern incarnation, steel - is the most transient of materials: strong but powerless against corrosion.

"Don't be fooled," says David Olsen, an American materials scientist, "by massive steel buildings, steamrollers, tanks, railway tracks... sculptures made of bronze (an extraordinarily resilient alloy) will outlast the lot".

Again, we are faced with the paradox that some of the oldest artefacts on Earth might outlast the newest. Within a century or two, nearly all automobiles would have rusted away. Within a millennium - without maintenance and painting - the steel fabric of our civilisation would have crumbled.

But bronze sculptures from the ancient world - as well as more modern bronze artworks - might last millions of years.

Indeed, by AD10,000,000, the world would still be littered with hundreds of semi-oxidised bronze artefacts - sculptures and statues, reliefs and delicate instruments. Add to that billions of copper-alloy coins, which might survive just as long. Humans might vanish at the height of the steel age, but it is to the Bronze Age that the Earth would return.

We live in the steel age, but we might also be said to live in the plastic age. Depressingly, it may be the plastic bag that proves to be one of mankind's most persistent legacies.

The billions of bags blowing across the Earth like tumbleweed would continue to blow. Come back in ten thousand years, and most of them will still be there.

Some scary stuff, for sure, but also sort of encouraging as well. Considering the tremendous impact humanity has had on the Earth is the point of Weisman's book.

And he offers a solution, of sorts. Environmental collapse looms ever nearer, at least from a human perspective, but is there anything short of self-extinction that we could do to stave off the worst of the effects of our own industrial lifestyle? Weisman suggests:

What if we tried one child per family for everyone? I don't want to deprive people of siblings, but I don't want to deprive people of species that are wonderful and part of our life. We can't live without them. If we could bring our numbers down, that would buy us some time to clean up our act.

Sticking to one kid per family, by the end of the century we could reduce the planet's population down to around one and a half billion people - about what it was in 1900. Perhaps that might buy us enough time if we also take the vital step of beginning a project of rapid de-industrialization that is the only solution that could both save humanity and the planet while at the same time preserving human freedom.

Can you hear me now?

Cell phones are sold as a convenience or even as a necessity for safety, but we ought not to forget the power they have for tracking and regulating our lives in ways that were never possible before. You are now reachable at all times and in all places, as your boss probably knows. Some bosses are now using cell phones to track their employees at work and, in fact, you're now traceable all day long. Increasingly, the police are subpoenaing cell phone records in criminal cases - there goes your alibi! Consider the case of John Wesley Womack, arrested the other day for theft:

A prosecutor says 34-year-old John Wesley Womack's downfall came when he stole an upscale maroon purse from his last robbery at a Papa John's pizzeria. Womack didn't know the purse contained a cell phone that was equipped with Global Positioning Satellite technology.

Police used the phone to pinpoint the location of Womack's residence.

We are supposed to be relieved to know that the reign of terror of the "Papa John's bandit" has come to an end thanks to his unwitting participation in the system via a stolen cell phone. And didn't that woman get her cell phone back, thus reinserting her safely back in the soft bosom of the surveillance society?

Meanwhile, in part thanks for grants from Homeland Security, 911 centers across the country are developing the capability to track down calls coming from cell phones.

Jeff Walker, director of Homeland Security, emergency management and 911 services in Licking County, said the county has spent almost $50,000 for emergency system upgrades that included a separate screen for a map to show where the caller is and a router that has a database of local towers.

By the end of the year, the center will be adding two additional emergency lines, bringing the total to eight, McNamara said. If all six lines are busy, they roll over to Heath police to be answered.

Further, cell phone records can be called up, ironically, even in the case of the many accidents caused by failed attempts to drive and talk cell phones at the same time, as this recent Indystar article demonstrates:

An accident eyewitness told The Noblesville Ledger that she approached the truck and found Cooper pinned against the dashboard of the Insight Communications van, clutching a cell phone.

"We'll pull his (Cooper's) cell-phone records to see if he was on the phone before the crash," Noblesville Police Lt. Bruce Barnes said Friday, adding that due to the condition of the van it's unlikely Cooper was conscious after the impact with the Republic Services of Indiana truck.

Sandy Colony, spokeswoman for Insight Communications, said the company has received no confirmation from police that Cooper, a technician for the company since December in the Anderson/Noblesville district, was talking on a cell phone at the time of the crash.

Cell phones have effectively reduced the space in which we have to operate free from surveillance and, as a result, have increased the control that authorities of various kinds have over our lives.

As with most tech, the relatively small benefits that cell phones actually do provide (most of which could be provided in other, less-intrusive ways) are hyped while the giant downsides for our freedom, autonomy and possibly our health are rarely discussed. In a truly Orwellian move, cell phone companies frequently sell themselves as enhancers of personal freedom, despite the reality.

When it comes to selling the supposed benefits of tech, up is down and down is up. For instance, as we saw above, cell phones are widely known to contribute to many quite injurious car accidents every year. Nevertheless, as we see in this quite typical editorial from Anderson, South Carolina's Independent Mail, the technology is sold not as the threat to health that it actually is, but rather as a saver of lives, and our fear is primed with an exceptional situation in order to justify a bigger intrusion on our freedom.

To date, the sheriff’s office has given out about 30 phones. And while that may not seem a large number, according to Marlene McClain, director of the department’s victims’ services since 2005, at least two people were able to use the phones to call for help.

That’s two lives that might have been lost.

These days, we expect that everyone has a cell phone. According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in 10 years, the number of cell phones in active use in the United States has grown from 34 million to more than 203 million. Worldwide, there are more than 2 billion people who carry cell phones. But twice that number, more than 4.5 billion people, don’t have a cell phone or access to one in case of any emergency.

By definition, an emergency is an “urgent situation.” That could also be a good description of what a victim of domestic violence or an older person who is ill and alone might experience on a regular basis.

If you have old cell phones and chargers just gathering dust and taking up space in the kitchen junk drawer, pull them out, dust them off and take them to either the city police department or the county sheriff’s office.

In essence, we are being asked to conclude that it's actually dangerous for those 4.5 billion people that lack cell phones to remain outside the system of total safety that is modern life with a cell phone? After all, what if there is an emergency? Their independent life is dangerous, it is alleged, so we are urged to bring them into the system as soon as possible through acts of goodwill and charity. We are urged, in essence, to forget the ironic telecommunications worker cell phone accident we read about earlier and support the further expansion of this dangerous technology so that, ironically, people don't get hurt in unforeseen emergencies - like car accidents, presumably. The only danger the system and its apologists want us to recognize is the danger of being outside the system. The dangers the system causes are to remain invisible and largely uncommented on, safely hidden in plain sight thanks to their ubiquity.

Further, because the development and application of these technologies is overwhelmingly in the hands of those at the upper end of the hierarchy, their supposed benefits, such as saving time and effort, rarely pan out for those of us down here. Despite the clear hand of the elites in controlling these technologies, most radicals continue to maintain that technological developments are merely neutral "advances" or "discoveries" rather than recognizing them for what they really are: interventions by the ruling class into the lives and organization of the working class, not for our benefit or safety, but for theirs.


We live in an age now where technologies that are in fact very new in our lives have actually begun to be viewed and presented as essential to basic human existence - despite the fact that most of us have quite clear memories of a time when most of them were either non-existent or nowhere near as prevalent. This is a hell of a revisionist bit of doublethink, when you really think about it, and tremendous victory for the ruling class. They have not only erased our memory of our independence, but they have successfully made us view that independence as dangerous and scary. Thus, a cell phone is sold as a tool for finding your way around the city, replacing the basic human necessity of knowing your way around your environment and at the same time transforming an exceptional situation (being lost) into the rule. Being lost is scary. Thanks to tech, we can avoid that rare yet terrifying situation forever.

So, it was with some satisfaction that I greeted the news that John Patterson, an ex-employee of Australian telecommunication giant, Telstra, had gassed up a British APC that he had been restoring and then attacked seven cell phone towers, downing six of them before stalling out and being arrested. Patterson claimed that radiation from the cell phone towers owned by his former employer had caused him health problems, against whom he had filed a claim.

On a related note, as you drive north out of Phoenix on the I-17, somewhere around Black Canyon City, there's a church on a hill that has rented out land for a cell phone tower. You can see it from the highway. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, apparently, the church has affixed to the tower a gigantic cross. New god meets old god.

Below is a link to an article about it and a clip from Australian news:
Vengeful worker's heavy-armour rampage silences mobile phones

News of Interest 7/13/07

Human greed takes lion's share of solar energy
More cold water to splash on those who hope we can use so-called "green energy" to maintain our imperialist First World lifestyle.

HUMANS are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the sun's energy captured by plants - the most of any species. The human dominance of this natural resource is affecting other species, reducing the amount of energy available to them by almost 10 per cent, scientists report. Researchers said the findings showed humans were using "a remarkable share" of the earth's plant productivity "to meet the needs and wants of one species". They also warned that the increased use of biofuels - such as ethanol and canola - should be viewed cautiously, given the potential for further pressure on ecosystems.

Teacher pleads for CCTV in classrooms
The pressure to make the surveillance society ubiquitous comes from all sides. With a dialectic like this, does freedom need enemies?

A TEACHER who was unfairly dismissed wants to see CCTV in classrooms - to protect teachers...

...Now the father-of-two says he would like to see cameras installed in all classrooms to protect the rights of teachers wrongly accused of misconduct.

He said: "If CCTV was installed in classrooms it would solve a lot of problems."

He knows his plea will raise concerns over costs and loss of

civil liberties. But he said: "Coventry City Council has spent well over £100,000 on my case. And what about my civil liberties? My career and my health have been taken away from me.

"Bankers and shop assistants work with CCTV around them all the time without any problems, so why shouldn't teachers?"

Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers
More evidence that the white middle and working classes are not foreseeing the many-sided assault on their privileged position in relation to immigrant labor. When the immigrants are gone, the capitalists will just use machines to undermine the power of what remains of the working class. The only solution is unity against the machines and the bosses.

Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.

The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa...

...But it wasn't just technological challenges that held back previous attempts at building a mechanical harvester –- politics got involved, too. Cesar Chavez, the legendary leader of the United Farm Workers, began a campaign against mechanization back in 1978.

Chavez was outraged that the federal government was funding research and development on agricultural machines, but not spending any money to aid the farm workers who would be displaced. In the '80s, that simmering anger merged with a growing realization that the technology was nowhere near ready, and government funding dried up.

Scientists find drug to banish bad memories
Did I ask for that raise last week or not? Did I get my ass kicked by the police? Have I been exposed to harmful chemicals in my neighborhood? Has Oceania ALWAYS been at war with East Asia? What's that weird taste in the tap water? Oh well, I don't remember...

Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear.

The research has, however, sparked concern among parliamentary advisers who insist that new regulations are now needed to control the use of the drugs to prevent them becoming used by healthy people as a "quick fix".
advertisement

But the US scientists behind the research insist that amnesia drugs could be invaluable in treating patients with psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress...

...Scientists at New York University have published another new study where they claim to have erased a single memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of the animals' memories still intact.

Will the real Al Qaeda please step forward?

Strange brewings and strange bedfellows in Iraq and Iran these days. If it was ever clear what the hell Al Qaeda really is and whether they actually have an independent existence apart from the CIA,MI6 and the ISI, it sure gets murkier every day with regard to Iran.

From ABC News (Australia): Al Qaeda threatens to 'annihilate' Iran

The self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq has given Iran a two-month ultimatum to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs or face all-out war, according to an audio tape posted on the Internet.

"We give... the leaders of Iran a period of two months to stop all forms of support to the rejectionists of Iraq, and stop direct and indirect interference in the affairs of the Islamic state," a voice attributed to the group's leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, said.

The term 'rejectionists' is used by Sunni militant groups to refer to Shiites, who dominate the Iraqi Government and are in a majority in both Iraq and neighbouring Iran.

"Otherwise, expect a fierce war that will annihilate you, which we have been preparing for over the past four years and just waiting to issue the orders to wage the campaign," the voice said.

Aside from this timeline syncing up quite nicely with reported US and Israeli plans to attack Iran before the end of the summer, what makes this even more interesting is that the CIA is now supporting, amongst others, a Sunni radical group against Iran called Jundallah ('God's Brigade'). This group is based in the border area of Baluchistan, Iran and southwestern Pakistan. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

The group, known as Jundallah... is made up of members of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Baluchi tribe which inhabits Pakistan's gas-rich province of Baluchestan, as well as neighboring regions in Iran and Afghanistan. In their exclusive report, which aired on Tuesday evening and was posted online on Wednesday morning, ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Christopher Isham said that while the US provides no direct funding, the group has been "secretly encouraged and advised" by the American government since 2005.

Jundallah had at least one particularly important member: Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's nephew, Abu Musab. Readers may remember that KSM, whose parents also hail from Baluchistan, was not long ago trotted out by American intelligence after having confessed in custody to a long laundry list of terrorist plots, including the murder of Daniel Pearl, the planning of the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the latter of which he is alleged to have carried out with his other nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.

ABC News (US) reports that the Americans claim they are not providing direct funding to Jundallah (although they admit its leadership has met regularly with US officials), but that they find the alliance convenient for various reasons:

A senior U.S. government official said groups such as Jundullah have been helpful in tracking al Qaeda figures and that it was appropriate for the U.S. to deal with such groups in that context.

Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

In the world of international intelligence, it's often difficult to know where co-operation or infiltration leaves off and manipulation or a front group begins. Consider that NBC News reported in March that KSM was betrayed by a CIA asset that had infiltrated his group. So, when the media report, as the Times of India did, that British police have been infiltrated by radical Muslims, we have to ask ourselves which way that relationship really goes: who is really infiltrating who?

Answering it would seem to be a simple matter if we didn't already know the history of MI6 and MI5 manipulations and participation in terrorist plots in Britain, such as the Omagh bombing that killed 29 people, and the regularity with which British police reveal their infiltration or surveillance of local bomb plots, such as the liquid bombers of last year or the fertilizer bombers of 2004. In that last case, police admitted that the provider of the fertilizer was known to them and in the Guardian praised the convenient timing of the bust and the "close working relationships between the Metropolitan police's anti-terrorist branch, MI5 and local police forces. Sources said MI6, which operates abroad, was also involved."

While there are certainly both real (independent) and manipulated terror attacks - and not every bust is a secret plot of the police services - the Daily Mail's report that the second carbomb in London's recent set of 'failed' attacks was placed at an official evacuation point further raises questions about just what and how the alleged bombers knew and the true relationship between the two sides of the supposed war on terror.

And, knowing that the elite have placed their bets on terrorism as the defining excuse for their exploitation and violence at home and abroad, we can be forgiven for being both skeptical and concerned when the MI5 chief admits to knowlege of 30 ongoing plots and surveillance of 1600 suspects in Britain not long before America's own head of Homeland Security claims his 'gut feeling' is that we are headed into a summer of terrorism here in the US.

And, as if perfectly timed, Al Qaeda has issued new threats against Britain and American intelligence sources report AQ has sent or is in the process of sending new cells to threaten the US, just like it is against Iran. So, it's no surprise when we hear from Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the Royal Military College in Kingston's war studies program, say in the Toronto Star that

It may well be that the key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago, he says.

"If nothing happens, it will be harder still to say this is necessary."

No conspiracy, that comment. Merely a reflection of reality. When the ruling class needs terrorism, you can bet, one way or another, it will get it. If Al Qaeda or an affiliate doesn't deliver it independently, the security services have the resources and connections to make it happen. And, most of all, they have a self-interest in doing it.

News of Interest 7/11/07

Data on Americans mined for terror risk
The elite use tech to increase their ability to wage war at home on potential threats. Note the liberal critique which only seeks to make the system more efficient, not to question its overall objective. Would such a system have caught John Brown before Harpers' Ferry? This is the question radicals must answer.

"'Each of these initiatives is extremely valuable for investigators, allowing them to analyze and process lawfully acquired information more effectively in order to detect potential criminal activity and focus resources appropriately,' Boyd said in a statement.

All but one of the databases — the one to track terrorists — have been up and running for several years, the report showed.

The lone exception is the System to Assess Risk, or STAR, program to rate the threat posed by people already identified as suspected terrorists or named on terror watch lists. The system, still under construction, is designed to help counterterror investigators save time by narrowing the field of people who pose the greatest potential threat and will not label anyone a terrorist, Boyd said."

Officials worry of summer terror attack
One set of officials warns of an impending attack while another says that it might be the only thing that could save the War on Terror from sinking poll numbers. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail warns that AQ militants may have infiltrated British police forces. Or is it the other way around? Is there any way to tell for sure? Given the repeated links between UK intelligence and supposed terror groups, there is certainly grounds for skepticism if AQ is held up as the supposed perpetrator of the any future terrorist attack. Either way, if both the ruling class and the loyal opposition in Al Qaeda want a terrorist attack, you can almost bet one will happen, one way or another.

U.S. counterterror officials are warning of an increased risk of an attack this summer, given al-Qaida's apparent interest in summertime strikes and increased al-Qaida training in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a "gut feeling" about a new period of increased risk. He based his assessment on earlier patterns of terrorists in Europe and intelligence he would not disclose.

Finding secrets of bats' flight could change military aircraft
Holy bat-bomber! One group of conscience-less scientists is busily at work augmenting the capability of the ruling class to project military power abroad in its unending quest for total domination of the planet's resources and humans.

"The Air Force has taken notice of Brown's work. It will invest $6 million in the project over the next 5 years, in the hope of using the research to design future military aircraft.

Research so far has found that bats can carry up to 50 percent of their weight and execute airborne maneuvers that would make a bird or plane fall out of the sky. Moreover, scientists believe the hundreds of tiny sensors covering bat wings could be the key to their most impressive airborne maneuvers, a discovery that engineers could replicate with networks of sensors and computers on military aircraft.

If researchers can unlock the secrets of bat flight, it could have wide-reaching implications, according to Air Force and Brown officials. They say the project has the potential to revolutionize aircraft design and could lead to the creation of smaller, more efficient military air vehicles that can maneuver in tight spaces as well as gather intelligence and airlift supplies through forbidding terrain.

'The Air Force envisions a future in which they have lots of autonomous air vehicles that can take on different kinds of missions and that don't have pilots," said Sharon Swartz , an evolutionary biologist at Brown who is helping run the project. "We know a lot about the aerodynamics of large things moving very fast. There is almost nothing known yet about the basic physics of bat flight.'"

Teacher pleads for CCTV in classrooms
A teacher in Britain contributes to the dialectic of surveillance technology by advocating it as a protective measure in the workplace. With friends like these...

Now the father-of-two says he would like to see cameras installed in all classrooms to protect the rights of teachers wrongly accused of misconduct.

He said: "If CCTV was installed in classrooms it would solve a lot of problems."

He knows his plea will raise concerns over costs and loss of

civil liberties. But he said: "Coventry City Council has spent well over £100,000 on my case. And what about my civil liberties? My career and my health have been taken away from me.

"Bankers and shop assistants work with CCTV around them all the time without any problems, so why shouldn't teachers?"

85 rounds, one body
Philadelphia cops shoot at a man 85 times, leaving more than 20 wounds and endangering bystanders.

Investigators found 85 shell casings on the street and 34 additional pieces of "projectile-related evidence," said Capt. Daniel Castro, of the crime-scene unit.

Some neighbors were upset by the police actions, complaining that excessive force had been used and that no effort had been made to negotiate with an obviously deranged man.

"This is an abuse of power," said neighbor Maurice Calhoun. "The cops could have killed a bystander."

Although police said the street was empty when the confrontation began shortly after 6 p.m., neighbors disputed their account. They said it was crowded with people, including children playing in the street.

Police contend the shootings were justified because Miller refused to drop his gun when repeatedly ordered to do so, and pointed it at a cop. He never fired the weapon.

I'm back (hiatus over)

After a short summer break, I have returned to regularly updating the site. Thanks to everyone who kept emailing while I was away from the website - I have tried to reply to everyone. If I missed you, hit me again, I may have overlooked it. Look for some new content in the near future, along with the usual regular news links. I may try a few different styles of posts, we'll see. As usual all feedback and conversation (and debate) is welcomed either in the comments or via email.

In the meantime, check out these two recent comments to posts I made last month:

Brad Spangler comments on
Anti-war right fights to succeed where the anti-war left has failed

Anonymous comments on
Peter Gelderloos: Arms and the Movement

Keep the comments coming and don't forget to check the comments sidebar, which I will again start updating regularly beginning after work today if all goes well. I'm coding it myself, so it's not instantaneous, but I hope it will help facilitate debate and discussion. Give me a little time after your comment and I'll post it up there.

Also, I wanted to say I appreciate all the interest in this site coming from radical market anarchists. Although I am an anarchist-communist myself, I hope that we can find some common ground for struggle and discussion. I would be particularly interested in hearing a market anarchist analysis of the class war applications of technology, especially as they flow from the bosses/managers/bureaucrats down to the rest of us.

News of Interest 6/19/07

I've been busy with various other projects, so I apologize for the lag in posting this last week.

No regrets from an ex-Algerian rebel immortalized in film
"'This was not just a tactic. It was part of a whole strategy that included mass participation. It was specifically targeted at occupiers, not just anybody,' he said, his small, almost boyish body devoured by a large armchair. 'We killed women, yes, and took fetuses out of their wombs. But ours was for liberation. This was our only means against a cruel enemy.' He also noted, much like a rebel character in the film predicted, that the National Liberation Front botched its rule of Algeria after it took power. The government triggered a post-1992 round of violence when it canceled elections that an Islamic party was favored to win."
Greece: 4 Banks Damaged in Attack
"About 20 masked youths wielding sledgehammers and iron bars damaged four banks and a government car during business hours in central Athens Tuesday, police said. One man suffered light injuries from broken glass. No arrests were made. The youths attacked branches of Citibank and three Greek banks, smashing storefront windows. Police said the attackers scattered leaflets demanding the release of Greek anarchists, charged or convicted for various crimes, from prison."
Playing the blame game on vandalism
"Also early Weds., June 6, five chain businesses -- Talbots, the Gap, Coach, Apple and Starbucks -- and one independent optometrist's office were smashed along Walnut Street, Shadyside's trendy retail corridor. Managers at the chain establishments declined to speak with City Paper. Zone 4 Commander Kathy Degler did not return several calls seeking comment. What, if any, relation the incidents at independent and corporate establishments have to one another is unclear. All bore anti-capitalist messages and coincided with the G-8 summit -- an annual gathering of the world's leading industrial nations, and a perennial cause for anti-corporate activism and protest. None of the incidents included robbery. Eyewitness accounts and surveillance video indicate that all the attacks were carried out by people in dark hoodies and bandanas. But the choice of targets is confounding. The Quiet Storm and the Co-Op, as independent entities, seem to be odd choices for such political vandalism. References to the G8 summit -- often protested for insufficient action against poverty, AIDS, climate change and other ills -- and the timing of the incidents indicates that the vandalism did have a political motive, as does the anti-capitalist sentiment scrawled on the Co-op."
Text messengers to fight crime in Boston
"Boston's police, facing an upsurge in murder and other violent crimes, have set up a system to allow witnesses to tip them off to crime by sending anonymous text messages. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said the 'Text a Tip Program,' announced on Friday, appeared to be the first in the nation to combine cell phone text messaging with an anonymous police tip line. He said he hoped it would crack a street culture where gangs often punish people who 'snitch,' making it hard for police to solve crimes at a time when the murder rate is rising."
Supermarkets offering personal scanners
"The scanners are "purely about convenience for customers" and do not replace store employees, who can be deployed elsewhere in the store, Pawelski said. ...William Stewart of Sykesville avoided lines while shopping with his father at the Eldersburg Martin's store. Stewart said he prefers the system over the traditional checkout, except for its occasional problems accepting coupons. 'I do miss the interaction with the cashiers because my dad and I are people persons. But you do beat the line and, once you get used to it, it pretty much works for itself,' Stewart said."
Web cam to eye test-takers
"This fall, Troy University in Alabama will begin rolling out the new camera technology for many of its approximately 11,000 online students, about a third of whom are at U.S. military installations around the world. The device, made by Cambridge, Mass.-based Software Secure, is similar in many respects to other test-taking software. It locks down a computer while the test is being taken, preventing students from searching files or the Internet. The latest version also includes fingerprint authentication, to help ensure the person taking the test isn't a ringer. But the new development is a small Web cam and microphone that is set up where a student takes the exam. The camera points into a reflective ball, which allows it to capture a full 360-degree image. (The first prototype was made with a Christmas ornament.)"
Ex-cop sells pot tips on DVD
"Barry Cooper sells a DVD on how to stash pot in your car without getting caught. This fall he will release a second one on how to keep police from raiding your home for marijuana. Now for the kicker: Cooper is a former narcotics officer once considered among the top cops in Texas, where more marijuana is seized each year than in any other state. The formerly straight-laced lawman has become a shaggy-haired militant for the legalization of weed."

Teachable moments in class war history: Paris Hilton in and out of jail

Despite complaining about the media obsession with covering her case, hypocrite Hilton gave an interview to Barbara Walters from jail. It seems she called home from jail just as her mom happened to be chatting it up with the world famous journalist, an old family friend (such is the elite life, I suppose). Mom quickly arranged an impromptu interview.


Perhaps taking a card from the President's playbook, she urged "the public and the media [to] focus on more important things, like the men and women serving our country in Iraq". Showing yet again how out of touch she is with reality, Paris attempted in her own fumbling way to divert our attention with an appeal to patriotism just when public opinion has significantly turned against the war. Nice try, Paris, but we don't believe you. Backasswards and self-serving though her appeal may have been, the gross inequalities revealed by her treatment seem to resist even the most tried and true ruling class diversionary techniques. That signifies a rupture in the typical functioning of the elite propaganda system and therefore represents an opportunity for anarchists. Indeed, in this case, aided by the paparazzi and celebrity press - the red-headed stepchild of the mainstream media - regular folks forced the re-incarceration of a wealthy heiress, and that is to be celebrated.

But all is not well with Paris. It turns out that she has been refusing food and water because she's afraid that a guard will take a picture of her on the toilet with a cell phone camera and post it on the internet (a fate actually visited on many poor women in Sheriff Joe's jails a few years ago, a point that provides more than a little irony given Arpaio's offer to house Paris in his internationally condemned Tent City). Nevertheless, she reassures us, she's a changed woman now: "I used to act dumb. That act is no longer cute. Now, I would like to make a difference...God has given me this new chance."

Whatever. I won't hold my breath waiting. I'm still hoping she gets shivved in there. Barring that, I'd be satisfied with putting her in the general population so she can at least see what it's like for regular folks in jail. In all likelihood, they'd be the only regular people she's ever met that weren't expecting a tip. Still, despite her claims to the contrary, even in jail personal growth eludes Paris, who can't help but wallow in her totally unexceptional punishment, crying "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" when the judge's decision to send her back to jail was announced. Proving that her willful naiveté runs in the family, Paris's mommy fell to her knees in shock! The shock was probably only compounded by the sudden forced cancellation of Paris' "freedom party" at her mansion.

Speaking of privilege (and how can't you when talking about Paris Hilton), it's worth knowing that Paris' billionaire grand daddy gave the maximum allowable contribution to the very Sheriff who let her out of jail early. This sheriff has a history of soft treatment of celebrities that run afoul of the law. Money talks, Paris walks. But not this time, perhaps.

Now, if only folks can take their justifiable outrage and turn it towards a broader critique of the prison system. So far, the story is so outrageous that it's hard to ignore the class implications of just who goes to jail and who doesn't in this country. Nevertheless, most the analysis I have seen merely reinforces the hard-line "do the crime, do the time" argument.

Still, some inmates have had some practical advice for her. One inmate in Joe's jails, doing four months for her own DUI advised, "This is not where you want to be. They try and break you down but you gotta be strong." Another prisoner offered this: "If you're gonna drive, don't go over 70 so that they catch you if you're on probation." Another said, "Be cool to everybody, don't run your mouth a lot."

But the problem with Paris getting out wasn't so much that she got out early. Lots of people get out early in California's jails since they're so over-crowded (200,000 early releases since 2002). Being rich certainly didn't hurt her, at first, and Paris clearly expected special treatment (and is still receiving it since she's being housed in a special section reserved for cops, the rich and celebrities - a teachable moment of its own). Nevertheless, the point that should be made is that more people ought to be getting out of California's prisons, and that far too many people are going there in the first place. It's precisely Paris' specialness - rich, white - that threatens to bust through the typical bullshit that passes for debate on prisons and jails in the US. With more than 2 million in prisons and another five million behind bars in jails (that's 1 in 32 people!), America's prisons are filled to bursting with the victims of a brutal class war that not only generally passes folks like Paris by, but directly benefits them.

Given that it treads so dangerously close to issues of class and privilege that they would much rather ignore, the media and elites are working hard to recuperate this issue. Indeed, in true fascist form Sheriff Joe worked that angle hard in a recent article, pushing class antagonisms not to open opportunities for liberatory dialog, but rather to reinforce the overall class system of policing and imprisonment. "Now she's going home with some Mickey Mouse bracelet. That never would have happened here... I am totally against bracelets. I think it's a cop-out. I'd love to stay in her mansion," he said, upon hearing of her initial release. "I've got 10,000 people in the tents," he bragged.

Always room for one more, right Joe?

Likewise, J.R. Dieckmann of the Conservative Voice has decried Paris' early release as well, priming us with a class appeal against a "a spoiled rich, no talent, celebrity who believes her money places her above the law" but offering up this explanation for her exit:

California has a “three strike rule” for felons. Two slaps on the wrist, then you go down for the count. But because of County jail overcrowding by criminal illegal aliens [my emphasis], most offenders serve only 10% of their sentence, the rest is commuted to probation or electronic monitoring. Misdemeanor offenders sentenced to 10 days are usually out in one. No one serves their court ordered sentence in Los Angeles and criminals know it. Brief jail time for a crime is merely a break from the stress of life on the streets.

Likewise, some on both the left and right are already decrying the Paris fiasco as a distraction from real issues. Rick Orlov, columnist for the LA Daily News admonishes us for falling for what he considers a ruling class ploy aimed at diverting us from more important business.

Every politician in the state - except, maybe, Sheriff Lee Baca - should be thanking Paris Hilton.

It is fairly amazing how a 115-pound celebrity suddenly became the 800-pound gorilla of public policy. She has become the queen of distraction politics with an early jail release that has become the focus of a wrathful public spotlight.

Forget the threat by the feds to pull funding from Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital.

Never mind the LAPD turmoil over the May Day melee at MacArthur Park.

Ignore the lack of success in finding Osama bin Laden or passing an immigration reform bill.

Sure, these are all very important issues, but the Paris spectacle shouldn't be reduced to just mere celebrity-obsession or ruling class plot. Nor should we be so sure about who it will benefit.

Paris, unwittingly for sure, has opened a window through which many Americans can vent their hatred of the rich and celebrity, of special treatment and the increasing bifurcation of this society into two distinct classes, even if they are each further divided within themselves (with richistan at the top and race and gender divisions at the bottom). In this sense, the Paris obsession is in fact quite different from the usual celebrity fare.

Though accused of celebrity worship and slagged off by the mainstream media, the celebrity press and paparazzi echoed the class resentment of its readers. CBS News blogger Brian Montopoli reflected the general disgusted tone of the more responsible corporate mainstream newsmedia, which itself was practically overwhelmed by the demands of its customers for class war Paris Hilton coverage.

[T]he nature of the Hilton coverage has been downright embarrassing. Instead of looking at the reality of the situation – and segueing into a discussion of the loopholes, double standards and arbitrariness one often finds in the legal system – most media outlets are pandering to news consumers' class resentment.

As if the growing class resentment wasn't newsworthy?! What Montopoli is missing is that most Americans aren't surprised by the "loopholes, double standards and arbitrariness" of the legal system. They're tired of it.

Reflecting this, celebrity sites like TMZ.com featured regular and humiliating video of her and features on Rev. Al Sharpton's sermon's on inequality in the justice system as well as other pieces on unequal treatment in jails. And gossip sites like Perezhilton.com posted sarcastic articles highlighting her sister's tear-filled shopping trips to "[drown] her sorrows away by hitting up some boutiques in Malibu" while her sister sat in jail.

Bypassing the main media apparatus, the message boards, too, were full of quite vigorous denunciations of not just Paris but the system she represents. On a Sioux City Journal message board, Greg Thatcher wrote, "She is no better than the rest of us and if she thinks that she is maybe this will help her to see that she can't just do whatever she wants and get away with it! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and when they get away with things like this it makes you realize how off balance things really are." Another poster on the same board, momof2, wrote

She thought that money would be able to get her out of serving the term!! I am glad that she is back in jail serving her sentence. They have medical facilities in jail for a reason, if she would have been in her home, she would have have her own soft bed, beauty supplies, maids, and tons of other stuff. She deserves everything the judge has given to her. Hollywood stars have gotten out of hand!

On a Yahoo message board, Em answered the question of Paris' release from jail with

I knew she would never serve much time in jail. I think it is a joke- how can anyone call house arrest (especially for her in her mansion) a punishment? I wish I could buy my way out of anything with my millions... :)

Even when they used the logic of "do the crime, do the time," in this context folks - unlike Joe Arpaio - were hoping to hold the system accountable to its own professed logic in order to force not consistent treatment (because that would have led to her release like so many others) but rather exceptional treatment upon someone viewed as a class enemy.

Right now, America is united against wealth and inherited privilege. In a real sense, the Paris brouhaha reflects what Rightwingworld.com columnist Dennis Lennox calls "anti-rich sentiments". Public outrage has forced the administrators of so-called justice in this country to put one of its own back in jail despite the standard calculations that would have let her and many others out. This runs against not just the traditions of privilege but also the general standard of treatment. And that's why it's a victory for all those of us outraged and opposed to wealth, power and privilege.

This is a moment that anarchists would be remiss to let pass us by.

Eying up the future: iris scans spread to Iraq and New Jersey schools

A recent Washington Post/MSNBC article about US forces joining up with Sunni insurgents to attack Al-Qaeda contained this interesting little nugget towards the end:

Kuehl said later that he would probably supply weapons to the militiamen, but in limited amounts. The fighters have given the Americans identification, including fingerprints, addresses and retinal scans, so the soldiers believe they could track down anyone who betrayed them. "What I don't want them to do is wither on the vine," Kuehl said.

Alliances with the occupier - even alliances of convenience - aren't what they used to be in Iraq.


News of US forces using retinal scans and other forms of biometric tracking and identification aren't new. After the US forces destroyed that city, officials began requiring returning residents of Fallujah to obtain biometric ID cards and to submit to retinal scans before re-entering the city. But the security procedure has spread. Iraqi troops, forced to abandon their reliable AK-47's for American-made and much more complicated M4's, will have to submit to retinal scans as a condition of receiving the new weapons. This information, of course, can be used to track the weapon, with the intent of keeping it out of the hands of insurgents (Iraqi police and soldiers routinely either sell their weapons or work both sides of the fight). Likewise, officials hope that the massive databases they are compiling can be used to screen out potential sympathizers with the insurgency.

The scanning device of preference seems to be the PIER™ 2.3 – Portable Iris Enrollment and Recognition Device, produced by Securimetrics Incorporated. According to the spec sheet, the scanner

"is a rugged hand-held device that allows the operator to enroll and identify individuals using the highly unique patterns and textures of the human iris. The PIER™ can store a database of up to 200,000 individuals (both left and right eye) and quickly return the identity of the subject. Tethered to a PC, the device can match an unknown individual against a database of millions with extremely high accuracy."

The company's website claims that PIER has been approved and deployed by a variety of government agencies, including The Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization (OLETC), seeing action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia ("the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) registered the irises of 1.8 million Afghans in 2002").

With the increasing overlap of domestic policing and foreign war-fighting (Blackwater deployed in New Orleans, NY and LAPD training Iraqi police), we can almost expect such technology deployed here at home, almost certainly against marginalized or vulnerable populations.

And so, knowing that, it should come as no surprise that the technology has already spread into public schools, thanks to government subsidies (in this case a $369,000 grant from the Department of Justice). According to an ABC News article,

Parents who want to pick up their kids at school in one New Jersey district now can submit to iris scans, as the technology that helps keep our nation's airports and hotels safe begins to make its way further into American lives.

The Freehold Borough School District launched this high-tech, high-wattage security system on Monday with funding from the Department of Justice as part of a study on the system's effectiveness.

As many as four adults can be designated to pick up each child in the district, but in order to be authorized to come into school, they will be asked to register with the district's iris recognition security and visitor management system. At this point, the New Jersey program is not mandatory.

When picking up a child, the adult provides a driver's license and then submits to an eye scan. If the iris image camera recognizes his or her eyes, the door clicks open. If someone tries to slip in behind an authorized person, the system triggers a siren and red flashing lights in the front office. The entire process takes just seconds.

The superintendent of the district clearly supports the program (on a side note, check out the way that the technology breaks down normal human relationships, such as holding a door for someone or the traditional method of protecting kids from stranger dangers in which their teacher knows their parents):

Phil Meara, Freehold's superintendent, said that although it was expensive, the program would help schools across the country move into a new frontier in child protection.

"This is all part of a larger emphasis, here in New Jersey, on school safety," he said. "We chose this school because we were looking for a typical slightly urban school to launch the system."

Meara applied for a $369,000 grant on behalf of the school district and had the eye scanners installed in two grammar schools and one middle school. So far, 300 of the nearly 1,500 individuals available to pick up a student from school have registered for the eye scan system.

"The price tag was high really due to the research and program development," Meara said. "We're all aware that at that price, this system couldn't be duplicated at other schools. But most of the money paid for the development. So my prediction is that in the future, the price of this system will be much lower."

Meara said they were trying to deny entry to anyone who wasn't permitted in the building and ensure that when an adult came to take a child out of school, he or she was who they said they were. Meara was also involved with a pilot program that took place in 2003, in Plumstead Township in New Egypt, N.J.

The superintendent found that teachers and parents often held the door open for others as they entered the school, which allowed strangers to slip right in behind.

This new eye scan system, however, catches strangers. Once the iris scanner permits an individual to enter the school, it monitors how many people pass through the door.

"Biometrics is the wave of the future," Meara said. "Everything I've heard is that there will be a tremendous emphasis on making schools as safe as possible. If our school process [shows] that this system works, yes, it might just take off."

And that's not the only school. In Britain the technology has been trotted out to track kids in the lunch line and checking out library books. With the current state of fear permeating American families and schools (remember the Al-Qaeda school bus scare?), and the concomitant desire to make schools as "safe as possible", there is little doubt that, as Meara suggests, the technology "might just take off."

Anti-war right fights to succeed where the anti-war left has failed

I remember some conversations around 2002 and 2003 about how much many of us anarchists in Phoenix hated the way the liberal left was so anti-libertarian when it came to anti-war organizing. Already sick of the antics of the anti-war left, some of us put forward the idea of an anarchist/libertarian alliance against the war and the curtailing of civil liberties.

However, trapped in their silly left-right crap and aided in large part by the liberal actions of the supposedly radical Bring the Ruckus collective here in town, the liberals who had come to dominate the movement didn't see any value in reaching out to the libertarians. At a demonstration, I once even saw liberal organizers demand that the cops disarm some libertarians who came packing to an anti-FBI PATRIOT Act protest. Those folks never came back, of course. Aside from the hypocrisy of a bunch of supposed pacifists asking the heavily armed and violent cops to disarm someone exercising their constitutional rights, it sure looked like a bad move strategically at the time to a lot of us, as we were short of allies to begin with. But now, with the total failure of the left to stop the war, it looks like some on the left are finally beginning to look right instead of left for allies in the fight against the war.

There are some problems, specifically the electoralism of some politicians (Ron Paul) and elements of the libertarian 9/11 Truth movement. And, we have yet to see the development of a direct action ethic amongst the libertarian right when it comes to the war. Of course, the left suffers perhaps even more from this affliction, having just elected an anti-war congress that they can't seem to get to vote anti-war and having repeated the same boring and ineffective protest tactics (if you can call speechifying about Israel a tactic) for five years now. Also, the libertarian right is quite explicitly capitalist, but it is an anti-corporate, anti-elitist sort, so I think there is room there for anti-capitalist anarchists - at least as much as there is on the left, where we are surrounded by our traditional enemies, the big-state communists of all stripes.

The libertarian right also suffers from an overly optimistic assessment of American history. To keep them honest, one frequently has to follow up their romantic rants about the good old days with the caveat "for white men". Nevertheless, the left has never been a terribly comfortable place for anarchists either, to put it mildly. Not fitting on either side too well, who other than anarchists are positioned to address both sides of this movement? As we see the merging of these two movements (or perhaps the abandonment of the leftist side of it for the right), it offers a prime opportunity for us as a movement. Plus, it offers the possibility of encircling the moderate, pragmatist (and electoral) left, which is really the main impediment to truly challenging the war in a broad way.

So, in that spirit, check this article out. It's written from the perspective of a Green, but I think it is still useful to anarchists opposing the war:

Antiwar Libertarians Put Lefties to Shame

News of Interest 6/4/07

Somebody's Watching You
"Cop Watch LA is no longer relying on mere coincidence to capture images of police misbehavior. Dressed in black and red Cop Watch T shirts, the young members are motivated and vigilant — telling their own stories of victimization at the hands of police. When many young adults are often sleeping in during the weekends, they are often getting up before 7 a.m. to patrol downtown LA in an effort, Austin says, to keep police from harassing the homeless population."
Activists Don't Always Want Celebrity Help For Their Causes
"Simon Teune, an academic who studies protest movements at the Berlin Studies Center, says a survey of several campaigns shows that 'the original objectives of civic movements get watered down whenever celebrities come on board.' The faces tend to package their social criticism in a generalized way and to drop the radical edge. 'They say they are against poverty. So what? Do you know anyone who is in favor of poverty?' he said. The celebrities focus on phenomena that can readily be portrayed as scandalous, but do not point any finger at the political and social causes of the crises, he said. 'That is why a majority of the critics of the G8 are not too rapt about all the celebrities jumping in to lend their support,' Teune explained."
These days a good butler is hard to find
"his crisis might bring scoffs of mock sympathy from commoners. But it is causing anxiety from estates in the Hamptons to the ocean-side mansions of Malibu. There's a butler shortage. 'If we doubled the number of butlers, they wouldn't be without work,' said Charles MacPherson, vice chairman of the International Guild of Professional Butlers and president of a top household consulting company who also is an instructor at International Butler Academy in the Netherlands."
Median pay for Arizona CEOs in '06: $1.09 million
"Many Arizona chief executive officers collected an armload of goodies last year, and several took home grand prizes. Amid a benign economy and strong stock market, companies reported median CEO and chairman compensation of $1.09 million, according to an analysis of pay packages at 57 public firms by The Arizona Republic. That was down slightly from $1.11 million in 2005 but well ahead of median totals of $679,000 in 2004 and $629,000 in 2003. "
Vt. secession movement gains traction
"Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, a small cadre of writers and academics hopes to put the question before citizens in March. Eventually, they want to persuade state lawmakers to declare independence, returning Vermont to the status it held from 1777 to 1791."
Japanese policeman stabs self to avoid work
"The plight of overworked Japanese employees was highlighted over the weekend when it emerged that a policeman had stabbed himself in the stomach and tried to make it look like an assault so that he could take time off work."
Are crimes in virtual reality subject to real laws?
"Earlier this year, one animated character in Second Life, a popular online fantasy world, allegedly raped another character. Some Internet bloggers dismissed the simulated attack as nothing more than digital fiction. But police in Belgium, according to newspapers there, opened an investigation into whether a crime had been committed. No one has yet been charged. Then last month, authorities in Germany announced that they were looking into a separate incident involving virtual abuse in Second Life after receiving pictures of an animated child character engaging in simulated sex with an animated adult figure. Though both characters were created by adults, the activity could run afoul of German laws against child pornography, prosecutors said. "

Plastic oceans, plastic people

I was forwarded this article by a friend of mine. Despite being published in a sad yuppie men's magazine ('Stay Young, Retire Rich' blares this month's cover), the piece is actually very good and I recommend it highly.

Pretty much every piece of plastic ever made is still around, you know, and less than five percent of all plastic made is ever recycled, so the rest has to go somewhere. Ever wonder where?

Short answers: (1) into the ocean; (2) into YOU!

The plastics industry wants you to think of convenience or even beauty when you think plastic, but the truth is a lot more sinister, and all over the world huge sections of the ocean have become giant, swirling dumps for plastic, sometimes measuring the size of the state of Texas. Meanwhile, back on dry land, plastics break down into tiny particles and make their way into our bodies.

According to the article, written by Susan Casey:

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Read more here:
Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?