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."