Consider This....
Consider This....
The Insecurity Industry
Edward Snowden: The greatest danger to national security has become the companies that claim to protect it ... In short, the phone in your hand exists in a state of perpetual insecurity, open to infection by anyone willing to put money in the hand of this new Insecurity Industry. ... An Industry like this, whose sole purpose is the production of vulnerability, should be dismantled. ... Where there is no liability, there is no accountability ... State-sponsored hacking has become such a regular competition that it should have its own Olympic category ... In technology as in public health, to protect anyone, we must protect everyone. ... The first step in this direction—at least the first digital step—must be to ban the commercial trade in intrusion software....
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Jul 28, 2021, 2:34pm
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The Olympics Is a Racket
An interview with Jules Boykoff: The world’s top athletes coming together in a spirit of friendly competition is a beautiful vision. But the Olympics have become a machine for the ruthless extraction of profit at the expense of working-class people. ... The IOC, political power players, and megacorporations use the occasion as a pretext to funnel massive amounts of money to local and international elites while stiffing athletes and harming working-class people in every Olympic city. ... The games are an extreme intensifier of inequality: some people’s homes are razed to make space for temporary structures, while others rake in millions and live permanently at five-star hotels...
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Jul 19, 2021, 1:10pm
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The Fight for Recognition: The Tularosa Basin Downwinders and the Injustices of Trinity
Tina Cordova: On July 16, 1945, when the US government detonated the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in South Central New Mexico, officials had little to no concern for the people who lived in the adjacent area. ... Most of them were people of color, Native Americans and also Hispanos ... These people were warned neither before nor after the so-called “test” as to the dangers they were facing as a result of the bomb ... As documented in written and oral histories recorded by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC), ash fell from the sky for days after the bomb was detonated and settled on everything—the people, the land, and the animals ... The bomb detonated at Trinity produced massive fallout that blanketed the earth and became part of the water and food supply...
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Jul 16, 2021, 12:16pm
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Why We Should Change How We Talk About Nonhuman Animals
Debra Merskin, Carrie P. Freeman and Alicia Graef: Happy has to be one of the most ironic names for an Asian elephant whose living conditions have prompted groundbreaking legal action on her behalf. ... Her lawyers at the Nonhuman Rights Project argue that Happy possesses such complex cognitive, emotional and social abilities and deserves fundamental rights to “bodily liberty” and “bodily integrity” ... If successful, her liberation would be a landmark step toward breaking down the legal wall that separates humans from nonhuman animals. ... Nonhuman animals value their own lives, have their own interests and experience a range of emotions similar to our own ... We share this planet with a mind-blowing array of incredible, awe-inspiring, sentient nonhuman animals whose lives matter to them and who each deserve the dignity and respect of us...
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Jul 10, 2021, 2:31pm
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The Original Inconvenient Truth
Jeff Schechtman: Interview with Josiah Thompson,author of Last Second in Dallas ... a “clearing” of all the bad information, and a reaffirmation of the simplicity of what we actually know (about JFK murder) ... We now can say that what happened was that Kennedy was hit above the right temple by a shot fired from about 8 to 10 feet west of the corner of the stockade fence, that that shot killed him without any question. ... three-quarters of a second later, Kennedy is hit a second time in the head by a shot that clearly came from the depository window ... One guy didn’t do it ... What this also means is that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill the president...
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Jun 17, 2021, 2:20pm
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Fermi’s Other Paradox
Caitlin Johnstone: In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi. .... One of them was not human. ... On this particular occasion they discussed the recent spate of reports about flying saucers, and whether or not an alien civilization could hypothetically have discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light ... They listened with rapt attention as Fermi’s luminous mind rapidly dissected the sheer mathematical improbability of humanity being the only intelligent life in this galaxy...
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Jun 9, 2021, 11:32am
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A People’s Guide to the War Industry -5: Portfolio of Conflicts
Christian Sorensen: When war is profit, death ensures a healthy bottom line... A variety of conflicts, disparate and some seemingly futile, is precisely the aim. Conflict itself — producing untold mountains of profit for war corporations and Wall Street — is the goal. ... Capital is also putting money toward cultivating and promoting politicians who advocate for wars and broad military deployments; media and think tanks to propagandize and generate militant narratives ... and marketing, pushing, and operating goods and services that harm populations and destabilize countries around the world, generating more profitable conflict ... The war industry pursues a portfolio of conflicts as any organized, dominant industry views the global marketplace...
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Jun 2, 2021, 11:57am
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A People’s Guide to the War Industry -4: The New BOSS
Christian Sorensen: Corporations have taken over many military tasks or “base operations support services" ... A given corporation now in charge of what was once a governmental job needs to get a layer of profit out of the task. To obtain that profit the corporation ends up over-charging, cutting jobs,polluting, and/or harming unions. ... Business sectors of war are military functions that corporations now run. ... War is when the ruling class of one country sends the working class of that country off to fight the working class of another country. ... Wall Street, U.S. war corporations, and their pliant politicians are responsible for the post-9/11 fatalities...
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May 31, 2021, 11:45am
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A People’s Guide to the War Industry -3: Bribery & Propaganda
Christian Sorensen: When war is your business, peace is your enemy ... One lobbyist: ... “Unlimited expense accounts, nights out on the town, expensive bottles of wine, elaborate meals with sitting senators ... It was an endless cycle of money trading hands for votes. ... Profit drives corporate media. ... Corporate media air info-tainment, designed not to inform or foster critical thinking about the world. Informing the public is not a priority. Maintaining the existing economic order is...
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May 28, 2021, 4:47pm
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A People’s Guide to the War Industry -2: Profits & Deception
Christian Sorensen: maps out the global system of weapons mongering. Second in a series of five articles on the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex. ... The ruling class profits by underpaying the workers. ... This difference between what a worker is paid in wages and the value a worker creates is how the corporation profits. ... Group think, hierarchy, compartmentation, economic incentive, and chain of command enforce the status quo. Violence and social isolation deter the few who push back against the machinery of war. ... The claim that the “defense” industry brings jobs is a stale public relations ploy. It hides the truth: Spending on healthcare, education, or clean energy creates more jobs than spending on the military...
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May 26, 2021, 10:21am
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Are We Getting the National Security We Are Paying For?
Michael Carrigan - Peter Bergel: At this time of year, when we send our hard-earned dollars to pay for the programs we value, it is worth examining our priorities. ... Our country continues to expend nearly half its discretionary budget on its military might. That leaves only half for everything else. ... Not only is our military powerless to protect us from these national security threats, but in many cases it makes the threats more severe. ... the US military – the world’s largest institutional emitter of CO2 – continued to be one of the largest drivers of climate change. ... Our most urgent crises — such as the pandemic, climate change and racism — not only lack military solutions, but instead require solutions based on international cooperation and collaboration...
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May 18, 2021, 2:14pm
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Mother’s Day Has Deeply Radical Roots
Liza Featherstone: Yes, you should absolutely call your mom today. But you should also know that Mother’s Day isn’t just a holiday for greeting card and chocolate companies to make a buck, but of radical antiwar and feminist organizers. ... Mother’s Day began in 1858 when Ann Jarvis, an Appalachian housewife and mother to at least eleven children, organized “Mother’s Work Days” to improve sanitation, in a time when polluted water and disease-bearing pests were major causes of death in poor communities like hers. Jarvis was also a peace activist ... In 1872, after the brutal Franco-Prussian war, Julia Ward Howe, a peace activist who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” established a day for mothers and antiwar protest..
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May 9, 2021, 2:59pm
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Personal Digital Resistance
Thomas Neuburger: There are dozens of ways to gum up the works of the machine, throw chaff at the enemy's radar and poison their big-data wells — actions that won't take months that most don't have. ... Here's just one. The target is Google and its predatory and monopolistic advertising practices. The side benefit of this act of resistance is, it pollutes Google's profile of who you are, what you like, and what you want...
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Apr 29, 2021, 12:13pm
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Police violence is directed against working people and youth of all racial and ethnic backgrounds
Niles Niemuth: Data collected by the Washington Post records 6,214 police killings in the period between January 2, 2015 and April 14, 2021. The victims are overwhelmingly male (95 percent) and predominately white (46 percent). Blacks make up the second largest group (24 percent), followed by Hispanics (17 percent), Asians (1.6 percent), Native Americans (1.4 percent) and all others (0.7 percent). ... Overwhelmingly, it is workers and young people—of every skin color, gender, sexuality and national origin—who are the victims of the police. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of the social and economic conditions in the United States. ... The police, as Frederick Engels noted, are “special bodies of armed men” created to defend the capitalist system and the inequality it creates...
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Apr 20, 2021, 3:00pm
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What to do instead of calling the police
Anna North: These alternatives can help keep communities safe for everyone.... a lot of resources already exist for people who want to learn about alternatives to bringing law enforcement officers — and potentially police brutality — into crisis situations. ... Know your neighbors and your community: having a basic familiarity with the people who live nearby can help prevent problems down the road. ... Learn about local mental health and medical resources: ... police are not trained to address mental health or substance use issues ... a growing number of cities have crisis response teams composed of social workers, counselors, and others trained to help people ... Take a community approach to stopping violence and protecting people...
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Apr 14, 2021, 2:48pm
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