] CCS International, a surveillance products company in New
] Rochelle, NY, estimates that ordinary Americans are
] buying surveillance devices, many of dubious legality, at
] a clip of $6 million a day. We have met the enemy of our
] privacy, and it is us.

a great article that talks about how loss of privacy is not inevitable.

Surveillance Nation Part Two

] America's dream of waging wider war in the region is all
] too familiar to James Akins, former political officer at
] the US Embassy in Baghdad and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
] 'If the ultimate goal [of the US] is to be world
] dominatrix, then she will need the oil of Arabia, from
] Kirkuk to Muscat,' he states. 'The ideological, imperial
] aim and that of commanding the oil markets for the rest
] of the oil era, entwine into the same game plan. If we do
] this, and move into Saudi Arabia, we are masters of the
] universe - the American Imperium.'

masters of the universe

] Richard Wilson, Harvard University, January 1, 2003
]
] On Dec. 19 GNN ran an article about a relatively unknown
] former Iraqi atomic weapons scientist named Imad Khadduri
] ("In Search of Saddam's Bomb," A. Lappé). Khadduri, who
] currently lives in Canada, claims Saddam's push for the
] bomb began in earnest after the Israeli raid on Osirak, a
] French-made nuclear reactor the Israelis claimed Iraq
] could use to build a nuclear weapon. Here Harvard
] professor Richard Wilson, who visited the reactor after
] the attack, confirms much of Khadduri's acount of that
] incident and the effects it had on Saddam's atomic
] strategy. "Preemption," Wilson argues, is a dangerous
] game:

The Lessons of Osirak

Not only is the American voting code secretly held by private companies (naturally for copyright reasons; the Dollar trumps Democracy every time), but private companies manufacture the voting machines. And those companies are owned, predominantly, by Republican interests. Including Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who won by a landslide on machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a company he owned a considerable interest in. And he wasn't the only one.

Open Source Code Meets Democracy - in Australia anyway

Interesting little piece on wealth distribution:

Specifically, the number of people with some value of wealth w is proportional to 1/wE. Pareto claimed that E is generally has a value of between 2 and 3. The bigger this value, the greater the extent to which extreme wealth is suppressed - and the more socialist the economy.

Burda's group define liberal economies as those in which E is less than 2, and social economies as those in which E is greater than 2.

.....

It looks to me like a larger E means much more difference between high and low incomes (Third world model) and a smaller E introduces a larger middle class. So a larger E does not limit high wealth, it simply limits the number who have a high wealth, while increasing the number with very little and squeezing the middle class, which is the 'regressive', not-socialist situation.
I beg for validation, even by way of refutation.

Wealth spawns corruption

We're in deep shit people. Time to get off the couch and get involved...

Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wifes Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There?

A CHRISTMAS TRUCE

On Christmas Day, 1914, in the first year of World War I, German,
British and French soldiers disobeyed their superiors and fraternized
with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops
held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with signs, "Merry
Christmas." "You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed
across no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas
carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations,
played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men
they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to
warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and
to aim high.

A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was
disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with
each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this
spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial.
By March, 1915 the fraternization movement had been eradicated and
the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of the
armistice in 1918, fifteen million people would be slaughtered.
...

an XMAS tale from WW1

It's about information, and libraries and archiving.
Concerning archiving Mr. Sterling says:
"We're already leaving some impressive gifts for the remote future of this planet. Nuclear wastes, for instance. We're going to be neatly archiving this repulsive trash in concrete and salt mines and fused glass canisters, for tens of thousands of years. Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of selfless, dedicated archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-century pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully. Gosh, thanks, ancestors. Thanks, twentieth century! Thanks for thinking of us! "

The Twentieth Century: Our Curses Work

``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge''

MP3 audio of a great talk by Howard Zinn. Required listening for anyone with an interest in dissent or non-standard history.

Howard Zinn - Reed College Talk - People's History of the United States

Today's mounting social and ecological crises demand responses that are broad, deep, and strategic. Given the widespread destruction wrought by globalisation, it seems clear that the most powerful solutions will involve a fundamental change in direction - towards localizing rather than globalising economic activity. In fact, 'going local' may be the single most effective thing we can do.
Localisation is essentially a process of de-centralisation - shifting economic activity into the hands of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations. Localisation doesn't mean that every community would be entirely self-reliant; it simply means striking a balance between trade and local production by diversifying economic activity and shortening the distance between producers and consumers wherever possible.

Where should the first steps towards localisation take place? Since food is something everyone, everywhere, needs every day, a shift from global food to local food would have the greatest impact of all.

Bringing the Food Economy Home