'The Traitors (BBC One) is the Highlands Hunger Games. It is terrible - a pandering to our basest, most voyeuristic, atavistic instincts, an exercise in exquisite cruelty lasting 12 weeks. You’re going to love it.
'Like all the best tortures, the set-up is simple. Twenty-two people are taken to an isolated spot - a huge castle in the wilds of Scotland - to complete a series of tasks together that will increase the prize money (up to a possible £120,000), which will be split among the winners. Fine! Dandy, you might even think! Except that three of the contestants are secretly designated - by host Claudia Winkleman - “traitors”. They get to “murder” one person a night to reduce the competition. The group can eliminate one person a day. They must try to identify the traitors and get them out because if a traitor survives to become one of the prizewinners, he or she will walk away with the whole sum. Thus are the seeds of discord sown with a lavish hand.
'Somehow, I’ve made it sound complicated. It really isn’t. Not least because the rules are, in a sense, immaterial - all you really need to know is that the game has been ruthlessly designed to set individual against individual, exploit every inch of humanity’s capacity for suspicion, dissembling, paranoia, guilt, sociopathy and every other unpleasantness you can think of. The knowledge that there are three traitors in their midst is like a poison creeping through the group. But as it works on them, they must come together to do the tasks as a unified whole to maximise their profit. If the makers had had the balls, they would have called it Headfuck.' (Guardian article).
'Ready to see one of the most famous alleged alien abduction incidents questioned? It’s coming, anyway. It’s that of Betty and Barney Hill. They were a husband and wife who, on the night of September 19, 1961, and while driving home from Canada to New Hampshire after completing a fun vacation, had a significant number of hours erased from their minds. It all happened near Indian Head, New Hampshire. It was there they saw a strange light in the sky that appeared to be carefully shadowing them from above. Concern and anxiety set in, which is no surprise. Finally, they made it home. Something very strange and disturbing happened to the Hills, but such was the state of their minds, they weren’t sure what it was. But, they certainly wanted to know. In the days and weeks that followed, the Hills began to experience terrifying, never-jangling nightmares: there were memories of having been taken on-board a UFO, and of having been subjected to intrusive and stressful medical-based experiments. Betty recalled that the aliens inserted a needle into her navel. Sperm was removed from Barney, via what was termed as “a suction device.” The “alien abduction” phenomenon was up and running, and the issue of “missing time” was well and truly born. The fascination that the Hill’s experience generated - partly due to Betty and Barney’s decision to speak openly at UFO events - ultimately led to the publication in 1966 of The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer.” It was written by a respected journalist and author, John Fuller.
'The story of Betty and Barney - and of their pet dog, Delsey, too, who was also in the car at the time of the incident - still provokes interest and intrigue to this very day. It is to alien abductions what Roswell is to tales of crashed UFOs: a key case in the history of Ufology. What if, however, aliens did not abduct Betty and Barney? What if - just like those who were present in Rendlesham Forest in 1980 - the pair were led to believe they had undergone something that had extraterrestrial origins, when things were actually much different? One of those who came to believe that the Hills had been subjected to an MK-ULTRA-type encounter was the late Philip Coppens. He said: “It is clear that the Hills were being monitored by USAF [U.S. Air Force] Intelligence before the encounter took place, through Major James MacDonald, who had befriended them some time earlier. Betty Hill wrote to [UFO researcher/author] Donald Keyhoe who, despite the fact that he received over a hundred letters a day, homed in on this initially unremarkable case. Within twenty-four hours, Keyhoe had arranged for the Hills to be visited by top-level scientists, including C.D. Jackson, who had previously (definitely not coincidentally) worked on psychological warfare techniques for President Eisenhower. Stretching coincidence far beyond breaking point, Jackson already knew Major MacDonald, with whom he next interviewed the Hills.”' (Mysterious Universe article).
'The death of Queen Elizabeth II, where the BBC dropped programming to run endless, wall-to-wall coverage, has underlined the fact to many Britons that the network is far from impartial, but the voice of the state.
'The BBC website draped itself in black, printing stories such as “Death of Queen Elizabeth II: The moment history stops,” while BBC News presenter Clive Myrie explicitly dismissed the cost of living and energy crisis wracking the country as “insignificant” compared to the news.
'But even before the monarch’s death, the BBC’s reputation was in crisis. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of Britons saying they trusted its coverage dropped from 75% to just 55%. Yet it still remains a giant in media; more than three-quarters of the U.K. public rely on the network as a news source.
'However, this investigation will reveal that the BBC has always been consciously used as an arm of the state, with the broadcaster openly collaborating with the U.K. military, the intelligence services and with NATO, all in an effort to shape British and world public opinion.' (MintPress News article).
The Las Vegas shooting conspiracy! Yeah whatever. Don't care. What I find interesting is occasionally I'll come across articles on conspiracy theorists, their warped epistemology, their need to feel unique or in possession of insider knowledge, "I know things you don't know", etc. My only problem with this theory is the sheer number of intelligent, rational, sane, professionals who still believe something is not quite right with the official story on 9-11. I know you can find lists online of 9-11 Truthers with master's degrees, architects and engineers, Ph.D.s, scientists, military, former CIA agents, but what I'm talking about are those that I personally know. These are people I'm friends with, college professors, people with master's degrees, one has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology - who fully believe something is still fucked with 9-11.
My only question is this: How is it, these types (who don't believe any other conspiracy theories like vaccine, flat earth, fake moon landing, New World Order, government gun grab, Sandy Hook or Las Vegas shooter crap) are able to accept 9-11 Truth conspiracy when they're obviously not the type to talk about it openly, don't want to be seen as special, know the definition of epistemology and are quite literally very sane people? How does that happen? Now what?
Several Zogby polls over the years have shown at least 50% of the American population don't believe the official story when there is a virtual corporate media blackout on 9-11 Truth (and most progressive media too like The Nation, PBS and Democracy Now) yet at the same time, in addition, when they do mention 9-11 conspiracy over the corporate airwaves it's been completely ridiculed or explained away for the past 16 years. How is it that many people are still delusional? How are they unable to trust the mainstream view on 9-11? How is it the private perception (just sitting around at a bar, family reunion or casual conversation) and the public perception (NY Times, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, History Channel) are at such odds? Half the people I talk to in private don't believe the official story on 9-11 but it's the complete opposite when you turn on the TV. That, in and of itself, is frightening to me for some reason.
And this Anti-Conspiracy Trust Me The Official Story Is Totally Legit guitar solo has been going on for literally 16 years. On November 10th 2001 George W. Bush gave a speech at the U.N. and said this:
"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."
That was only one month after the attacks. Wrap that around your Adderall XR 20 mg addled brain. Remember, this is way back when everyone was still shitting their pants, we were on the doorstep of Armageddon and nobody was even thinking about conspiracy, very few people were asking questions online, there were no 9-11 conspiracy books, websites or YouTube documentaries. None of my friends were talking about it. It's just creepy to me that he would say that. I'll bet half the assembly, in a deep coma bored out of their minds, cracked open their eyes thinking: "Wait, what? What the fuck did he just say? Conspiracy? Jesus Tits!"
Telling someone to not think about conspiracy one month after 9-11 is like coming home at three in the morning saying, "Honey, before I tell you why I'm late and the horrifying experience I just had I want you to know I wasn't out with any hookers so don't think about hookers. Anyone that might tell you I was with a hooker is feeding you malicious lies to shift the blame. I know this looks weird because I'm still covered in cocaine, I smell like Chanel No. 5, there's a very clear video online of my pants coming straight down at freefall speed, all three of our cars are wrecked even though the criminals hit only two, I have five frames of a surveillance video of whatever it was that hit our fourth car, I didn't do that myself but you can't see anything at all in the video anyway. Don't worry about it. I do have 70 other videos of the same wreck but I can't show you those for your own safety. The police were trying to stop these assholes from wrecking into our cars but all their vehicles were in Wichita or some shit getting worked on. They only had like two cop cars available to protect the entire town so they didn't make it in time. The fucking dispatch was all confused. You know how those 911 calls can be so crazy. Anyway, it wasn't hookers so don't even think about hookers, and cocaine, but we're going to need more cocaine, so I'm going to need more money."
Despite the distractions caused by recent scandals and the ongoing drama of U.S. politics at the moment, net neutrality is still at the center of much debate. Some efforts to remove it have even moved forward in Congress, much to the chagrin of supporters and to the benefit of internet service providers (ISPs). The FCC has recently considered killing net neutrality, bringing the issue to the forefront of interested parties’ radars.
If you’re wondering what net neutrality is, to summarize, it is a series of laws and guidelines that have been adopted by most Western governments to ensure all content and data are treated the same by ISPs and government organizations. It is intended to prevent discrimination of the user or host based on political views or for potential financial gains. Some of the things it prohibits, for example, are:
• An ISP “fast lane” allowing ISPs to charge websites and online services for improved bandwidth or priority over other services.
• A government or ISP ability to throttle (make loading times impossibly slow) political content of one view or another.
• Discrimination against a particular IP address or user to leverage higher rates or prohibit access to certain content.
Net neutrality, for most people, equates to keeping the internet an egalitarian arena where websites can easily and freely rise through the ranks. Proponents argue it keeps internet standards high and fosters free speech for people around the world. Without it, they worry governments and corporations will control the flow of information more strictly to keep people in the dark.
Danny McGregor of the Scottish Green Party provides some personal insight into the timing of a second Scottish Independence Referendum...
'There is a view held by some commentators that it is “only a matter of time” before Scotland obtains independence and so we should wait it out for more favourable conditions to manifest.
'Implicit in this argument is that the devolution process started a one-way train towards independence and there is nothing that can be done to stop it, regardless of political developments in the meantime.
'Resting on the idea of a permanent SNP juggernaut or, more broadly, a pro-independence majority being present at Holyrood, may be comforting for some. However, this is based on the erroneous assumption that the status quo will continue to prevail. Political developments often surprise even the most astute political commentators.
'The only reason people can argue indyref2 is only a matter of time is because the SNP dominance is assumed to be in a fixed position come what may. If we remove this assumption, holding to the “only a matter of time” argument becomes considerably more difficult.
'In just over the last year or so, the list of political events that were near impossible to accurately predict include: the Corbyn victory, the Sanders surge, the SNP landslide at the last UK elections, and the victory for Leave in the EU referendum.
'On the specific question of the SNP, the last Scottish election showed how much voting patterns are consolidating around the constitutional question. Although we shouldn’t read too much into a by-election with a meagre 20 per cent turnout, Tory transfers in the recent North Ayrshire Council by-election helped Labour scrape over the line. Whatever the exact cause, the impact of increased Tory representation reflects a rejuvenated right and, unfortunately, it is not a guarantee that their vote share won’t grow. It wasn’t so long ago that the Tories were thought “dead” in Scotland.
'The debate around tactical voting seems likely to sharpen at the next Scottish election and not in a way that benefits advocates of independence. Aside from anything else, the last result helped to make the Tories seem like a legitimate alternative to a struggling Labour Party - Ruth Davidson’s party is no longer isolated after years in the wilderness.
'Furthermore, the political landscape in the UK could change sufficiently in such a way that could make blocking a second independence referendum more likely. For example, if the Corbyn/PLP dynamic ends badly, the prospect of an increased Tory majority is not so farfetched. In this political climate, it is entirely possible that attitudes in England towards granting a second independence referendum could harden.' (Bella Caledonia article & Scottish Independence podcast).
'As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions - sights, sounds, textures, tastes - are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it - or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion - we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.
'Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.' (The Atlantic article).
Gerald Suster, the esteemed British writer, occultist and historian, died on Saturday the 3rd of February 2001 at the age of 49. As a devoted advocate of Thelemic Magick, Gerald’s fascination for the occult, and in particular the esoteric theories of Aleister Crowley, developed in his very early teens. Later, at the age of 21, his interests in occultism were undoubtedly fuelled by his meeting with Crowley’s former secretary, Dr. Francis Israel Regardie, whom he later wrote about in his biography Crowley’s Apprentice (Weiser, 1990).
It was this biography which first inspired me to contact Gerald in 1992. At the time I was 21 myself and having first been introduced to Aleister Crowley through Gerald’s biography The Legacy Of The Beast (W.H. Allen, 1988), I was curious and keen to find out what this excellent writer had to say. I was not disappointed.
Over the years that followed I enjoyed a healthy correspondence with the man and delighted in the intelligence, wit and charm that was always present within each of his missives. Despite the fact that we both shared a profound interest in Thelemic philosophy, the diversity of subject matter in our correspondence was of great value to me as a growing youth, and ranged in anything from boxing, woman and politics to science, art and occultism.
On one instance I remember being particularly nervous about informing him of a Qabalistic theory I had been working on which I felt expounded further his solution to the riddle and cipher of The Book Of The Law as published in the Thelemic journal Nuit-Isis in 1989. To my utter astonishment, he was delighted with my research and sent a copy of my theories to virtually everyone he thought would find it of interest. Having believed that I had solved the cipher, he then encouraged me to write more and kindly put me in touch with certain individuals whom he felt would aid me in the circulation of my work.
His kindness to me was exquisite and in June 1995 I travelled down to London and met him for the first time in an Islington pub called The Four Sisters.
'The Scots were never big enough to break the Union. That’s always been a job for the English.
'So what do we do now? We’ve just lost a fight, so our instinct is to pretend we can re-organise and regroup immediately, like Rocky Marciano. The hive mind of the Yes movement is already a-buzz across social media with plans and hashtags. We are so busy picking ourselves up off the floor that while we may have grumpily noted that we ceased to be very interesting to the UK media at about a minute past 4 on Friday morning, we probably haven’t quite noticed that the way the story has moved on is entirely in our favour. Quite bewilderingly, our project of Breaking Britain has been taken up with gusto and enthusiasm... by the British State.
'Might it just be that a narrow No vote last Thursday was the best possible result in the long term? Before you reach for a brick and tell me to stop being such a smart-arse, consider this.
'The best imaginable result was a decisive Yes... but that was never on the cards. The bestpossible result was a narrow Yes - and that would have united all the politicos of the rUK against us. While a narrow, not even that narrow a No vote has turned them on each other. Like wolverines in a sack.' (Bella Caledonia article).
With just four more days until the people of Scotland take to the polling stations to make the biggest political decisions that they are ever likely to make, trying to capture the essence of this referendum is a daunting task. This campaign on whether to choose self-determination or stick with the same old horseshit has been a long and arduous one, spanning back at least two years, officially, and has taken many twists and turns along the road as the citizens of this country have wrestled with the issues in their heads, hearts and guts.
From the onset of the referendum, I was intrinsically aware that the British Establishment wouldn’t give up Scotland easily – the rich elites who run CorporationUK™ have way too much at stake. What has taken me by surprise is the extreme lengths to which they have gone to and the underhand methods they have employed as the establishment has come to the realisation that the Union is slipping from their clammy little hands like the spouse of a wife-beater who has finally decided to leave her abuser for good.
This analogy, I think, is a good one. For most of my life I feel I have been part of a nation of losers and underdogs. As a teenager growing up through the miner’s strike of 84/85, the repercussions of Thatcher being able to defeat the miners meant that the backbone of the working classes had finally been broken and that through the years and generations that followed, a complacency was systematically bred into our culture that disconnected and disillusioned the poor with the entire political process. During the introduction of the Poll Tax (which in 1989 was unfairly put on trial in Scotland first), many of those who opposed it and refused to pay took themselves off the electoral register in an effort to get out of the loop and avoid local council retribution.
The British Establishment thought they had us by the balls.
You've got to be kidding, right? Surely such questions as 'Land Reform' are for the developing world, where nasty corporations are cutting down rain-forests and booting off indigenous people to grow beefburgers on, etc. This is indeed true, but the state of land ownership - and the subsidy system it has - in the UK is a scandal of epic proportions. In fact it is the underpinning reason as to why we have to pay a ridiculous amount for a place to live in the UK; a fact that is then sold back to as: 'high house prices are a good thing for the economy'. Sadly most folks are entirely duped by this nonsense.
This excellent and disturbing article shines some much needed light onto the issue:
'Modern British history, excluding world wars and the loss of empire, is a record of two countervailing changes, one partly understood, one not understood at all. The partly understood change is the urbanisation of society to the point where 90 per cent of us in the United Kingdom live in urban areas. Hidden inside that transformation is the shift from a society in which, less than a century and a half ago, all land was owned by 4.5 per cent of the population and the rest owned nothing at all. Now, 70 per cent of the population has a stake in land, and collectively owns most of the 5 per cent of the UK that is urban. But this is a mere three million out of 60 million acres.
'Through this transformation, the heirs to the disenfranchised of the Victorian era have inverted the relationship between the landed and the landless. This has happened even while huge changes have occurred in the 42 million acres of rural countryside. These account for 70 per cent of the home islands and are the agricultural plot. From being virtually the sole payers of such tax as was levied in 1873 (at fourpence in the 240p pound), the owners of Britain's agricultural plot are now the beneficiaries of an annual subsidy that may run as high as £23,000 each, totalling between £3.5bn and £5bn a year. Urban dwellers, on the other hand, pay about £35bn in land-related taxes. Rural landowners receive a handout of roughly £83 per acre, while urban dwellers pay about £18,000 for each acre they hold, an average of £1,800 per dwelling, the average dwelling standing on one-tenth of an acre.' (New Stateman article and Who Owns Britain website).
'One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
'Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
'By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.' (The Intercept article).
Last September The New York Times ran a ridiculous article entitled 'Overpopulation Is Not The Problem' by one Erle C. Ellis. At the foot of this article it states that 'Erle C. Ellis is an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a visiting associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design'.
Despite all these impressive credentials, however, it is clear that Erle C. Ellis is no wizard when it comes to basic arithmetic as he dismisses the notion that humans are behaving like bacteria exploding out of a petri dish, despite the world population having more than doubled in less than half a century. Fortunately, Robert Walker of The Huffington Post responded with a much more sensible and scientifically based article.
But who gives a shit about any of that? Right? Hell, just keep breeding, producing and consuming whilst at the same time hoping that it'll all work out fine and that boffins will figure out a solution whilst the rest of us go back to sleep.
Come on you selfish smug bastards, breed like there's no tomorrow. After all, if we keep acting like this there probably won't be...
'While acknowledging that we live on a finite planet with finite resources, Ellis insists that there "is no such thing as a human carrying capacity." Other species on this planet suffer massive die-offs when their numbers exceed what nature can sustainably provide, but modern humans, according to Ellis, are an exception to that rule. Humans, in his words, do not have to "live within the natural environmental limits of our planet."
'In support of that bold proposition, he notes that at numerous times in the past 200,000 years humans have altered the natural environment so as to increase the carrying capacity for our species. When we hunted large animals to near extinction, we found ways to hunt and consume smaller species. When our hunter-gather lifestyles did not produce enough food, we domesticated animals and began growing crops. When traditional farming was not producing enough, we manufactured fertilizer and began irrigating our crops. And because we expanded our carrying capacity in the past, we can do so again in the future.
'However, as anyone on Wall Street will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results. The fact that a value of a stock has doubled or tripled in the past does not mean that it can go on doubling or tripling on into the future. In nature, as in the financial world, there are limits to exponential growth on a finite planet. Sooner or later, what goes up ultimately comes down. And many times it comes down with a crash or a bang. Bubbles burst.' (Huffington Post article).
'Lurking amidst the mass chaos of information that exists in our reality is a little gem of a concept called the Quantum Zeno Effect. It is partially named after ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea, who dreamed up a number of paradoxes about the fluidity of motion and change. For example, the “Arrow Paradox” explores the idea that if you break down time into “instants” of zero duration, motion cannot be observed. Thus, since time is composed of a set of instants, motion doesn’t truly exist. We might consider Zeno to have been far ahead of his time as he appeared to be thinking about discrete systems and challenging the continuity of space and time a couple thousand years before Alan Turing resurrected the idea in relation to quantum mechanics: “It is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion…”. The term “Quantum Zeno Effect” was first used by physicists George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra in 1977 to describe just such a system - one that does not change state because it is continuously observed.
'The challenge with this theory has been in devising experiments that can verify or falsify it. However, technology has caught up to philosophy and, over the last 25 years, a number of experiments have been performed which seem to validate the effect. In 2001, for example, physicist Mark Raizen and a team at the University of Texas showed that the effect is indeed real and the transition of states in a system can be either slowed down or sped up simply by taking measurements of the system.
'I have enjoyed making a hobby of fully explaining quantum mechanics anomalies with the programmed reality theory. Admittedly, I don’t always fully grasp some of the deep complexities and nuances of the issues that I am tackling, due partly to the fact that I have a full time job that has naught to do with this stuff, and partly to the fact that my math skills are a bit rusty, but thus far, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. The more I dig in to each issue, the more I find things that simply support the idea that we live in a digital (and programmed) reality.' (The Universe Solved article).
'In recent years, Facebook has become an unexpectedly crucial tool for activism. The social media platform allows activists to efficiently connect and communicate with one another in order to arrange meetings, protests and boycotts. Unfortunately, activists who once found that Facebook helped make organizing easier are now encountering obstacles – and the resistance is coming from Facebook itself.
'With little explanation, Facebook has been disabling pages related to activism. In some cases, administrators who set up the pages are no longer able to add updates. In others, the pages are being deleted entirely. Understandably, activists are frustrated when a network of 10,000 like-minded individuals is suddenly erased, leaving no way to reconnect with the group.
'Realistically, that’s the downside of relying on a hundred billion dollar company. Facebook is a pro-business enterprise with countless partnerships that undoubtedly pressure the site to limit the types of socializing progressives may engage in, particularly activities that might harm advertisers’ profits.' (Films For Action article).
'In an effort to buck the expensive rates of unreliable corporate telecom companies, a community in Athens, Greece, has created its own private Internet. Built from a network of wireless rooftop antennas, the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) now has more than 1,000 members. Data moves “through” the AWMN mesh up to 30 times faster than it does on the telecom-provided Internet.
'According to Mother Jones, this off-the-grid community has become so popular in Athens and on nearby islands that it has developed its own Craigslist-esque classifieds service as well as blogs and an internal search engine. "It's like a whole other Web," AWMN user Joseph Bonicioli told the magazine. "It's our network, but it's also a playground."
'The AWMN began in 2002 in response to the poor Internet service provided by traditional telecommunications companies in Athens. However, the past few years have illustrated another use for these citizen-run meshes: preserving the democratic values of the Internet.' (The Daily Dot article).
Re-examing all this ten years on, I find it amusing to recollect the paranoid experiences of my first crazy trip to the United States - a trip that had no purpose whatsoever other than to go to a party in the middle of the Mojave Desert with comedian Doug Stanhope and friends...
The checking in queue at the airport was one of the longest I’d ever seen. Some problem with the luggage belts, they’d said, which was just the excuse two ugly American tourists needed to try and push their way to the front. They were both stereotypes of everything that we Europeans detest about America: the woman - a sick parody of Blanch from The Golden Girls, the gentleman - a miserable looking swine with pot belly, 50s style slicked back hair and a shirt that perfectly matched the pattern on his luggage.
“This queue seems to be getting longer,” remarked the businessman standing in front of me.
“Yeah, and somewhat fatter too,” retorted my dad, looking suspiciously at the two Yanks that were trying to squeeze their way in front of us.
“Excuse me,” remarked the businessman, “but the end of the queue is way back there,” he explained to the Americans.
The two ugly Yanks looked unconvincingly confused as they tried to hide their obvious lack of manners by giving us a poorly rehearsed rendition of “is it?” and “oh really?”
“What the hell is this?” I said out loud. “Exclusive preferential treatment solely for American tourists?”
“We didn’t realise,” explained Blanch.
“Hah!” I replied. “No wonder people wanna blow you up.”
Blanch looked somewhat hurt and confused, whilst Captain Brylcreem had asserted that this was all the excuse he needed to stand his ground and push on in behind us.
What was I doing going on this trip, I thought to myself? Into the lion’s den to go on some crazy wild adventure out into the Mojave Desert with comedian Doug Stanhope and crowd. This was my first ever trip to the States. Was I completely insane?
Eventually my luggage was checked in as I bid farewell to my dad, who was giving me his usual look of deep concern. Too late to back out now, I said to myself, better just ride out this crazy adventure and find out where the hell it all leads.
Finally some reasonable questions on the Boston bombing...
'Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.
'I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given).
'I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”
'I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, "Did you call the Marathon organizers?" When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, "They did?" Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”' (This Can't Be Happening article).
Cyberpunk and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff talks perfect sense, yet again, on the dangers of using Facebook. As he aptly points out: "The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers"...
'I used to be able to justify using Facebook as a cost of doing business. As a writer and sometime activist who needs to promote my books and articles and occasionally rally people to one cause or another, I found Facebook fast and convenient. Though I never really used it to socialize, I figured it was okay to let other people do that, and I benefited from their behavior.
'I can no longer justify this arrangement. Today I am surrendering my Facebook account, because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book Present Shock, I chronicle some of what happens when we can no longer manage our many online presences. I argue - as I always have - for engaging with technology as conscious human beings, and dispensing with technologies that take that agency away.
'Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we're not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and - worse - misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation - I call it “digiphrenia” - would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the "likes" and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable.
'Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences, and activities over time - our "social graphs" - into a commodity for others to exploit.' (Rushkoff article).
'The butler did it! That was the tabloid take on the unprecedented breach of security that shook the Vatican last year, when a trove of secrets plucked from one of the most impenetrable places on earth - the pope's private quarters - was leaked to the media. But why did he do it? And did he act alone?
'Sean Flynn digs around the Vatican's strange, cloistered world and unravels a cloak-and-dagger scandal that's a lot more layered than the Church would have you believe - and that may be just the beginning...
'The whole thing began, as many cryptic scandals do, with an apparently innocuous phone call. In the spring of 2011, a friend that Gianluigi Nuzzi hadn't heard from in quite some time asked to meet for coffee in Milan. Nuzzi's friend didn't work in journalism, which is Nuzzi's business, and he didn't mention that he might have the seeds of a story.
'At the café they exchanged pleasantries, caught up. But then Nuzzi's friend announced his true intention: He had another friend - he wouldn't say who, exactly - who wanted to share some secrets from inside the notoriously leakproof walls of the Vatican. Nuzzi didn't find this particularly surprising. People often want to tell him things: He's on television, the host of an investigative news show called The Untouchables. But he didn't find it particularly interesting, either. Though he'd written a well-received book in 2009 about the Vatican bank's history of shady dealings, Nuzzi had no desire to become a specialist in the inner workings of the world's smallest sovereign nation. And who knew what an anonymous source might be offering.' (GQ article).
'The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
'The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank. The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.
'The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate's eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.' (Wired article).
Comedian Doug Stanhope was recently interviewed by KRUU-FM for a program scheduled for Wednesday. The only problem was, only Stanhope knew he was accidentally impersonating Johnny Rotten...
'I get a call at 7:45 am a few weeks ago, that I only got up for to scream at whoever dare call at that hour. Missing the call, I check the voice message and it says: "Hey John it's Mike Ragogna from KRUU & HuffPost - we have a phone interview scheduled if you can please call the studio line - it'll be real easy, just a few questions about the new release and PiL."
'I had an interview scheduled with this same guy at noon so he'd obviously put the wrong phone number to the wrong guest - and although I don't know shit about music I did catch the John and the PiL together and realized he was calling for John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten.
'So I dialed the number he'd called me from, got voicemail and left a message saying who I was and that he'd called the wrong guest. Ten minutes later I'm woken up again to the phone ringing and now I'm fucking furious: "Hey John it's Mike Ragogna from KRUU & HuffPost - we have a phone interview scheduled if you can please call the studio line..."
'This time I said fuck it, wrote down the studio number, put on the best British accent I could muster (which is absolutely fucking awful) and called in to do the interview as best as I could, being still half asleep and not knowing shit about who I am pretending to be.' (Doug Stanhope blog post).
'In ancient Greece, Democritus put forth the idea that solid objects were comprised of atoms of that element or material, either jammed tightly together, as in the case of a solid object, or separated by a void (space). These atoms were thought to be little indivisible billiard-ball-like objects made of some sort of “stuff.” Thinking this through a bit, it was apparent that if atoms were thought to be spherical and they were crammed together in an optimal fashion, then matter was essentially 74% of the space that it takes up, the rest being air, or empty space. So, for example, a solid bar of gold was really only 74% gold “stuff,” at most.
'That view of matter was resurrected by John Dalton in the early 1800s and revised once J. J. Thompson discovered electrons. At that point, atoms were thought to look like plum pudding, with electrons embedded in the proton pudding. Still, the density of “stuff” didn’t change, at least until the early 1900s when Ernest Rutherford determined that atoms were actually composed of a tiny dense nucleus and a shell of electrons. Further measurements revealed that these subatomic particles (protons, electrons, and later, neutrons) were actually very tiny compared to the overall atom and, in fact, most of the atom was empty space. That model, coupled with a realization that atoms in a solid actually had to have some distance between them, completely changed our view on how dense matter was. It turned out that in our gold bar only 1 part in 10E15 was “stuff.”
'That was, until the mid-60’s, when quark theory was proposed, which said that protons and neutrons were actually comprised of three quarks each. As the theory (aka QCD) is now fairly accepted and some measurement estimates have been made of quark sizes, one can calculate that since quarks are between a thousand and a million times smaller than the subatomic particles that they make up, matter is now 10E9 to 10E18 times more tenuous than previously thought. Hence our gold bar is now only about 1 part in 10E30 (give or take a few orders of magnitude) “stuff” and the rest in empty space. By way of comparison, about 1.3E32 grains of sand would fit inside the earth. So matter is roughly as dense with “stuff” as one grain of sand is to our entire planet.' (The Universe - Solved! weblog).
Sam Harris is one of my all-time heroes; he is a rare beacon of forensic-light when it comes to analysing world religions and demolishing their collective nonsense. In this excellent piece he nails the recent hysteria surrounding the allegedly 'anti-Muslim video', and the US Government's response.
'The latest wave of Muslim hysteria and violence has now spread to over twenty countries. The walls of our embassies and consulates have been breached, their precincts abandoned to triumphant mobs, and many people have been murdered - all in response to an unwatchable Internet video titled “Innocence of Muslims.” Whether over a film, a cartoon, a novel, a beauty pageant, or an inauspiciously named teddy bear, the coming eruption of pious rage is now as predictable as the dawn. This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas. And I fear it will be with us for the rest of our lives.' (Sam Harris article).
'In horror movies, the scariest moments usually come from the monster you can't see. So the same goes for real life, or at least online life. Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control. In the next few months, this process is set to be enshrined internationally, amid plans to put cyberspace under the authority of a largely secretive and obscure UN agency.
'If this succeeds, this will be an important boost to states' plans to censor the web and to use it to monitor citizens. Virtually all governments are at it. Some are much worse than others. The introduction last month of a law in Russia creating a blacklist of websites that contain "extremist" content was merely the latest example of an alarming trend. Authoritarian states have long seen cyberspace as the ultimate threat to their source of power.' (Guardian article).
'Rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk believes he can get the cost of a round trip to Mars down to about half a million dollars.
'The SpaceX CEO says he has finally worked out how to do it, and told the BBC he would reveal further details later this year or early in 2013.
'Musk is one of NASA's new commercial partners, building systems to take cargo and crew to the space station.
'He has developed his own rocket and a capsule for the purpose.
'The Falcon 9 launcher and the Dragon vessel are expected to give the first full demonstration of their capabilities next month on an unmanned sortie to the orbiting outpost.' (BBC News article & audio stream).
'Scientists at the Tevatron particle collider in the US have found the strongest evidence yet for the existence of the Higgs boson. Their results lend credence to the tentative glimpses of the subatomic particle reported at the end of last year by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern in Geneva - suggesting that the particle is indeed real.
'Tevatron scientists, based at Fermilab in Chicago, announced their results on Wednesday at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy. They found evidence for a new fundamental particle that has a mass of around 120 GeV, which fits with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics for the Higgs boson and is similar to experimental evidence announced by LHC scientists in December.
'The Tevatron's results are the swansong for the particle accelerator, which finished colliding particles in September last year. Until the LHC was switched on in 2008, the Tevatron was the most powerful collider in the world and, in its final years of operation, raced to catch a glimpse of the Higgs boson.' (Guardian article).
'Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have put out a new video to address false claims about the "Mayan apocalypse," a non-event that some people believe will bring the world to an end on December 21.
'In the video, which was posted online Wednesday (March 7), Don Yeomans, head of the Near-Earth Objects Program Office at NASA/JPL, explains away many of the most frequently cited doomsday scenarios.
'Addressing the belief that the calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilization comes to a sudden end in December 2012, and that this will coincide with a cataclysmic, world-ending event, Yeomans said: "Their calendar does not end on December 21, 2012; it's just the end of the cycle and the beginning of a new one. It's just like on December 31, our calendar comes to an end, but a new calendar begins on January 1."
'Yeomans also attempted to allay fears regarding potential causes of a Mayan apocalypse, including Nibiru, an imaginary planet that some people think is swinging in from the outer solar system just in time to collide with Earth in December. "This enormous planet is supposed to be coming toward Earth, but if it were, we would have seen it long ago. And if it were invisible somehow, we would have seen the [gravitational] effects of this planet on neighboring planets. Thousands of astronomers who scan the sky on a daily basis have not seen this," he said.
'He added that there is zero possibility of a NASA cover-up. "Can you imagine thousands of astronomers who observe the skies on a daily basis keeping the same secret from the public for several years?"
'As for solar flares, Yeomans explained that these do exist - in fact, two massive solar flares erupted just days ago, sending bursts of solar radiation into space - but they are part of the sun's normal 11-year cycle. Radiation from solar flares can damage orbiting satellites, but Earth's magnetosphere shields its inhabitants from the blasts, and the flares are not a health concern.' (Scientific American article).
'As "domestic extremism" police units are reorganised, we say goodbye to an old favourite of protesters - the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU). Despite the government's attempts to present these reorganisations as "cleaning up" the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) following the Mark Kennedy scandal, these plans are from before Kennedy was revealed as an infiltrator and the second Ratcliffe Trial collapsed. They are due to be completed by summer 2011. Here we will chart the rise and fall of NETCU and its sister organisations, the effect they have had on protest movements in the UK, and consider what the future might hold.' (Corporate Watch article).
'The murder of the Gulf of Mexico by BP shouldn’t surprise us. It is precisely what industrial capitalism does. Years ago I wrote of the catastrophe in Bhopal: when you intentionally fabricate bulk industrial chemicals, many of which are toxic, it should not qualify as an accident when some of these chemicals kill people. Likewise, the spill in the Gulf should not be considered an accident. There are 10,000 oil spills per year. Oil has devastated the Amazon. It has devastated the Niger Delta. It has devastated the Gulf of Mexico.
'Likewise, after the catastrophe at Bhopal, it was discovered that there was no antidote for the poison. One advocate for the victims noted sensibly: “No one should be allowed to make poisons for which there is no antidote.” The same is true for the other destructive activities of this culture.
'And corporations will not voluntarily rein themselves in. Limited liability corporations exist in order to limit liability. Their function is to privatize profits and to externalize costs.' (Press Action article & WMNF audio stream).