Fascinating and in-depth article on Isis, focusing especially on the religious aspects:
Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work could do so.
Wall Street Journal article on the 'Uberization of Money' - the rise of P2P lending
Fascinating BBC article on ISIS analyzing a months worth of their propoganda
Sam Harris (neuroscientist) on Joe Rogan podcast talking about the danger of AI (starts AI discussion at 2:14)
Craig Murray (former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan) on the flimsiness of UK 'legal advice' wrt Drone strike assassinations - on his website.
Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers working in collaboration in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. FLOK's Commons Transition Plan for the Ecuadorian Government can be read here. The descriptions of Netarchical Capitalism (facebook), Distributed Capitalism (Bitcoin), Local Resilience (Transition Town) and Global Commons are worth a read.
Jaron Lanier being interviewed on release of Who Owns the Future and a longer piece, a seminar from Stanford on the same - real focus on technology & work
Brilliant and harrowing Guardian article citing first hand accounts about living in Mosul under Isis for the past year.
Fake Name & personal detail generator
"during the Cuban missile crisis for example, you look at the declassified record, they [USA] treated Britain with total contempt.......One high official, probably Dean Acheson and he's not identified, described Britain as in his words "Our lieutenant, the fashionable word is partner". Well the British would like to hear the fashionable word, but the masters use the actual word. " - BBC transcript Chomsky Interview
Assange's take on Google (from his meeting with Jared Cohen & Eric Schmidt)
A site which tracks the blackmarket economy by country
Brilliant Guardian Comment Thread about UK & Scottish politics, instigated by 'Ed Miliband gives Scottish Labour full backing to make own decisions'
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
Article on Lizard Squad and their Xmas 2015 Ddos attacks
Why Sony Keep Getting Hacked
Counterpunch article on Ukraine, Syria and gas pipelines
Long Putin interview on RT from June 2013
Borges' Birthday
Blog post on Earth Sharing and the destruction of the Middle Class. Contains a great Buckminster Fuller quote about the pointlessness of making everyone work.
One of several great comments by danielearwicke on a really interesting guardian article '
The robots are coming. Will they bring wealth or a divided society?'
Orwell review of Hayek's The Road To Serfdom. "Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics."
Details on the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain "
303 Squadron claimed the highest number of kills (126) of all Allied squadrons engaged in the Battle of Britain"
Guardian article on Bitcoin - many interesting comments
Excellent short article on Iceland and the crash - or at least I thought it was until I read this Icelandic retort to it about the more bleak reality of the situation (note the comments)
A plan: Interesting pdf pamphlet on Delegative Democracy by Brian Ford (2002)
Essay in new scientist claiming that historical cycles of social unrest are predictable and that "technology has brought about the emergence of a complex, networked society, one that, he argues, existing democratic institutions are too simplistic to govern."..."what's needed are fluid institutions that allow citizens to collaborate in a direct democracy to solve problems using next-generation social media. It works in a small country like Switzerland, and the time is ripe for it to be exported to larger states. "The technology that allows this is growing," he says."
Brilliant blog essay on how metadata is all the 'security service' need
the coming second revolution in egypt and comments - illuminating comments. guardian280613
Corruption in the Met & the Stephen Lawrence case - Independent article from March 2012
NSA Whistleblower: NSA Spying On – and Blackmailing – Top Government Officials and Military Officers - excellent article (mentions what happened to Petraeus)
'The Pace of Modern Life' - quotes from 1871+ on how advances in technology make us hurry through life without living it properly.
List of Labour and Coaltion 'acheivements'
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracking the covert Drone war
Thomas Midgley Jr. the Patron Saint of Unintended Consequences (added lead to petrol and was instrumental in creating CFCs) he 'had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history'
News article: Beijing sets up advisory body with multinationals
Review of interesting book on why the US entered WWII
Carl Bernstein piece on Murdoch's attempt to get General Petraeus to run as Republican Presidential candidate
Good essay on Syria from the London Review of Books (230513)
Interesting Blog about economics and the financial crisis, it collates a lot of articles & comments from the Guardian website "I have an appropriate metaphor for capitalist crises: they represent cases where the invisible hand of Adam Smith shows humanity the middle finger"
Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
Essay on moving towards a zero growth economy (both why & how)
Interesting essay on how and why socializing Capital could be the answer to the current crisis
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (pdf)
Which Path To Persia? - American thinktank's report on the 'options' for 'dealing' with Iran (from June 2009)
The Syrian opposition - excellent piece in the Guardian tracing the money and characters quoted as the SNC
Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony (video 52mins)
Article in the NYT on the scramble for the Artic (19IX12)
Brilliant interview with Anne Lebowitz (allegedly on OWS)
'The printing press taught people how to read, the internet taught people how to write'
Very long and interesting episode of the Julian Assange show on RT about the internet
Essay on how the spanish economy ended up where it is...
Jimmy Wales has a go at the British Gov over internet freedom
Joseph Stiglitz on Romney & Tax Avoidance
Zizeck on Pussy Riot
Deborah Orr even more on the money than usual: why we can't keep swinging from tory to labour...
Interesting Guardian article about Qatar
City Of London Corporation - A lesson in lobbying
Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham - google preview
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius - Brilliant Orwell essay on politics and Englishness... ‘An economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit — does not work...’
Bertrand Russel essay In Praise of Idleness
Inside The Whale - Orwell Essay on Henry Miller and the literary culture of the 20's and 30's
An interview with economist Dambisa Moyo on the imminent wars for resources and the expansion of china
Quality article on the strife in Syria and reminder of why external forces getting involved is not a good idea (gaurdian 230612)
Google and the increasing number of censorship requests it receives, increasingly from western 'democracies' (guardian 180612)
Terrifying and brilliant lecture on Peak Oil and its effects, by Richard Heinberg
Jesse Schell Ted Talk (?) On when 'games invade real life'
Allan Moore piece in The Occupied Times
The Hero: Tim Berners-Lee
Sweden gives digital piracy advocate religion status
George Carlin, 'The American Dream...'
Amazon, Google & Facebook consider an 'internet blackout' to protest against SOPA legislation allegedly.
Peter Joseph (Zeitgeist) on the Joe Rogan podcast (070112)
American Psychosis - brilliant essay (by Chris Hedges), which although has no new info ties a lot of stuff together really well and warns of the potential of the US becoming a full blown fascist state.
Joe Rogan 'What is reality?' vid
Lazyboy performing Underwear Goes Inside The Pants
Monbiot on corporate welfare (Guardian 22IX11)
New IAEA report on Iran a result of new head of IAEA, not new data (22IX11):
The Arab Spring as continuation of the 1968 uprisings, Immanuel Wallerstein article on Al Jazeera
Seeing this graph of the impact of Occupy Wall Street on discussion in the media, made me go track down this: Culturomics - Kalev Leetrau, the guy who 'predicted' the arab spring using media data analysis tools
Iceland, the crash and the peaceful revolution "To write the new constitution, the people of Iceland elected twenty-five citizens from among 522 adults not belonging to any political party but recommended by at least thirty citizens. This document was not the work of a handful of politicians, but was written on the internet."
"Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big." Leopold Kohr and the problems of big organization (Guardian 25IX11)
Minority Rules - why 10% is all you need
List of US military interventions from 1890 to 2011
Animation of a David Harvey lecture on looking beyond capitalism
Antanas Mockus, the inspirational ex-mayor of Bogota
lack of education, not gangs pivitol to London Riots (Guardian 25X11)
Polly Toynbee on the occupations (Guardian 18X11)
The Occupy London press release
Beware of Images website
Archive of Allan Moore interviews
Assange's Speech at the anti war demo Trafalgar square 9X11
Naomi Klein's call to arms - speech for occupy wall street, published in the Guardian 08X11
Drones & behaviour analysis - From the Guardian 27IX11, the MoD on how they see the expansion of the use of drones to eventually replace manned fighter aircraft, to this article from last week about the Southhampton Uni course on designing UAVs (drones, with the classic last line 'One day, he hopes, he will be able to instruct his laser-printed drone to take off and then watch it touch down in his back garden "like an owl from Hogwarts".')...
Then there's this article in the financial section about up and coming digital entrepreneurs in cambridge - look at Featurespace - algorithms for predicting behaviour from online activity data ('inuitive behaviour analysis')
The Wall Street occupation & Anonymous tweeting the name and details of the NYPD officer who maced the kettled protestors (Guardian 27IX11)
Comment piece on the economic crisis being a 'crisis of bigness' - the ideas of Leo Kohr
From Pankaj Mishra's article in the guardian (03IX11) about the 9/11 decade:
The Great War, wrote Kraus, "was a disastrous failure of the imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences of words and acts". It was "made possible above all by the corruption of language in politics and by some of the major newspapers"
From Gary Younge's piece in the guardian today (05IX11) about 9/11:
In 2004 a Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove) chided a New York Times journalist for working in the "reality-based community", meaning people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do".
European economics to be managed by undemocratic institutions (Guardian 22VIII11)
What Happened to Obama? - interesting piece from the NYT
Ray Dalio founded the biggest hedgefund in the world, he is personally 'worth' $6 billion. He's also clearly a bit of a 'character', with a real sense of his own significance - here is his essay on the world economic crisis published in 2008:
Ray Dalio's essay on the world economic crisis
Lloyd Blankfein Wikipedia entry
NYT editorial piece on the riots
Naomi Kline on the riots
American news feature on wealth disparity (Land of the free home of the poor)
Piece from research on the links between Cuts & Riots (Guardian 17VIII11)
Russel Brand on the riots
Amy Goodman on US Debt ceiling deal & the Military-Industrial Complex (Guardian 04VIII11)
Adam Curtis on Bin Laden & the construction of stories
John Walker Lindh - piece by his father (Observer 10VII11)
Egypt IMF loan to 'relaunch' economy (Guardian 06VI11)
Baby Farm, Nigeria (Guardian 03VI11)
The 'Value' of the natural environment in the UK (Guardian 02VI11)
Afghan Police Chief assassinated
Vince Cable on the untold story of the economy (Guardian 20V11)
Alphonse Mucha website
British Politics, Racism & Immigration (Guardian 11.V.11)
Afghanistan (Guardian 11.V.11)
Clegg backs decision to reject Libyan refugees (Guardian 11.V.11)
Mental illness top reason for claiming incapacity benefit (BBC News 09.V.11)
Twitter and Super Injunctions (Guardian 09.V.11)
Iraqi jail break (BBC News 09.V.11)
Horrific african refugee tragedy (Guardian 09.V.11)
Tunisia revolution keeps revolving (Guardian 09.V.11)
Gary Younge on Libya (Guardian 09.V.11)
Libyan rape story (Guardian 09.V.11)
EU Arab spring immigration article (Guardian 09.V.11)
Maurice Glasman on his Blue Labour idea
Street Art Daily
Eradicating the verb 'to be'
RAND corporation, links to books on their site
RAND corporation, their history according to themselves
Saul Alinsky - Rules for Radicals
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri - Empire (pdf)
Aldous Huxley Interview (youtube)
John Pilger in Conversation with Assange (youtube)
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"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller (Architect & Geometrist)
"I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."
— Richard Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller Interview (youtube)
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People who say the small things cannot make a difference obviously never spent the night in a room with a mosquito" Gandhi
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From Matt Taibbi reported via Alternet:
You have people in this country who—we have two-and-a-half million people in jail this country, you know, more than a million who are in jail for nonviolent crimes. And yet, we couldn’t find a single person on Wall Street to do even a day in jail for losing 40 percent of the world’s wealth in a criminal fraud scheme? And that tells you that we have—this goes beyond the cliché that rich people have better lawyers and they have an advantage. This is a step beyond that. This is a situation where the system is completely corrupted, and it’s true regulatory capture. The SEC and the Justice Department are essentially subsidiaries of Wall Street.
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From Adam Curtis on Afghanistan - specifically part 4 and relates to Amin who conducted the 1973 revolution in Afganistan and went on to become its Foreign minister
The key figure at Madison was an historian called William Appleman Williams. He was determined to create a new framework for radical politics so it could escape from the trap of the Cold War - the conflict of two giant monoliths. He did this by reaching back to a forgotten radical tradition in America, Progressivism.
Progressivism had been born in the 1890s in Wisconsin as the battle between the independent farmer on the land and what were called "The Interests". They were the bankers and the big industrial corporations on the East coast who sucked the life-blood of the farmers and crushed their individual freedom.
The hero of the Progressive movement was the senator for Wisconsin, Robert La Follette. He spent his lifetime struggling against the politicians in Washington who had been bought and corrupted by the bankers and the giant railroad companies. Villains like JP Morgan and Rockefeller whom La Follette believed were destroying the true revolutionary tradition of America.
FROM TOWARDS THE END OF PART 6........................
Then in December 1979 just what the Neoconservatives had been predicting seemed to come true. The Soviet army came through the Salang Tunnel and occupied Afghanistan. The next year Reagan swept to power and 50 members of the Committee on the Present Danger were appointed to the Reagan administration.
And at the same time John Lennon was assassinated in New York. To the Neoconservatives it symbolised the end of a terrible corrupt era in America. It was the death of the hated counterculture.
Norman Podhoretz's daughter had married another Neoconservative called Elliot Abrams. After Lennon's death Abrams gave his opinion - using words that could have been lifted from his father-in-law's rant about liberal hypocrisy and blacks 15 years before:
"I'm sorry. Why is John Lennon's death getting more attention than Elvis Presley's? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor. And therefore, he's being made into a great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of it."
Elliot Abrams went off to help support the Contras in Nicaragua for President Reagan, while many of the other Neoconservatives set out to persuade the president to send sophisticated weapons to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan
Then they found the most surprising ally.
Ahmad Zahir's sister Zahira had fled to the US. She set up a hair salon in Washington DC. It was in the Watergate building. This led her to get lots of high-profile clients, and then one day in the early 80s President Reagan asked her to cut his hair.
FROM PART 7.........................................
At the end of 1994 she and her interior minister, General Babar, unleashed the Taliban, backed by vast amounts of Pakistani arms and money. Within months the "students" had taken Kandahar and were advancing on Herat.
And as the Taliban took control of the cities they began their experiment. All they cared about was morality so the only organisation they created was called - "The Organisation for the Commanding of Good and the Hunting Down of Evil". Otherwise they had no interest in any social or political institutions. They just got rid of them all.
FROM PART 9..........................................
Then there was the extraordinary Colonel Edward Lansdale. He was an advertising executive who invented what he called "psywar" when he almost singlehandedly stopped a communist takeover of the Philippines in the 1950s.
To do this Lansdale employed anthropologists to research into the fears and beliefs of the Huk rebels. He then used the information ruthlessly to create more fear. He described how he used the terror of vampires.
"One Psywar operation played upon the popular fear of asuang, or vampire. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol.
They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.
When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next"
Lansdale said these techniques were incredibly effective.
But it was in Vietnam that anthropology, along with many other academic disciplines, truly became the handmaiden of power.
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Bill Moyers: America Can't Deal With Reality (from alternet.org)
Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to pursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of us still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential to that end?
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger." You can read the entire article online.
I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."
These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary "sport" for soldiers under stress, saying on air: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?" As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune's Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic."
....
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I have been the object of malevolent assaults from the "9/11 truthers" for not reporting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this conspiracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, "the truthers" threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right's sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the "truthers" cherry-picked a few supposed "anomalies" to build an "inside-job" story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.
...
The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do.The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses": Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.
