Read moreIf, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
Author: m1k3y
Jake’s an ever more polished statesman for the nascent postgeographic pirate civilization. Population: $COUNT, Territory: fractal and multidimensional.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Read more
Read moreConcerned about Google’s complicity with the NSA, the Indian government plans to ban the use of Gmail for official correspondence. The matter has also become a key issue in the run-up to the German federal elections in the third week of September.
Google is fast developing a reputation as a rogue company that pursues its own agenda at the expense of the rule of law. At the time of writing the Dutch data protection authority has published a ruling that outlaws Google Analytics – a decision that mirrors bans by Germany and Norway. Google has simply refused to offer a lawful contract.
Earlier this year Sweden banned public sector use of Google’s cloud services over privacy concerns, while France and Spain have ruled that the company is operating unlawfully in those countries.
It is now becoming a momentous task to document all the findings against Google by trade and privacy authorities, but the true threat posed by the company goes much further than mere transgressions of law. Google is now claiming immunity from the law itself.
Read moreIn extreme cases, these armed groups are substituting for the state as the sole arbiter of disagreements between citizens. Many set themselves up as one of the few defenses against the onslaught of the myriad criminal organizations that plague poor, under-serviced Central American neighborhoods. Along the way, some of the larger gangs have become power brokers, managing political campaigns and getting out the vote in collusion with local and national parties. In extreme cases, they set up their own political organizations with the power to sway domestic and even international agendas.
Such is the case in El Salvador, where the most prominent parties have protected high-ranking traffickers, presumably in return for sizeable campaign contributions. The extent of this kind of corruption came to light during an infamous case in 2007, when three members of the Central American Parliament were killed, along with their bodyguard, by alleged drug traffickers as they drove from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Surprisingly, four of the suspected killers, all policemen, were captured. However, each of them was assassinated in their jail cell days later .
Throughout the region, violent gangs consort with some of the most powerful bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians. They provide start-up capital, secure contracts, finance campaigns, and keep pesky investigators at bay on behalf of their partners. It is ordinarily a symbiotic relationship and with complicity reaching the highest levels of power.
Along with being killed and extorted with reckless abandon, Central Americans are also being displaced in ever-greater numbers. In an eerie echo of the region´s civil wars during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of residents have packed up and crossed a border. A small proportion of them – more than 25,000 – recently sought asylum in neighboring countries as refugees. Yet most undocumented migrants prefer to maintain a low profile for fear of being forcefully repatriated. And while many of the displaced join the vast caravan of economic migrants to the United States, the vast majority of victims remain internally displaced, seeking sanctuary in their country of origin.
This includes Sabine Moreno , who fled from her small town to San Salvador after seven members of her family, including her grandfather, were killed by the MS-13 street gang. The MS-13 and the Barrio 18, the two most prominent gangs in the region, have created invisible borders throughout the Northern Triangle. As locals well know, if you live in one gang’s neighborhood, you simply cannot enter the rival’s area.
There are unsettling similarities in the ways violence plays out across the region. In spite of a recently brokered gang truce in 2012, Salvadorians continue leaving because of threats posed by gangs – more than 8,000 at last count. Meanwhile, ruthless drug enforcer gangs like the Zetas have contributed to the displacement of at least 6,000 Guatemalans from their homes. An estimated 230,000 people fled Mexico or were internally displaced over the past half-decade for fear of being targeted by drug cartels, maras, militias, or soldiers. Meanwhile, Costa Rica is hosting more than 20,000 refugees while Panama supports 17,000 more. Entire neighborhoods are emptied and fields are going fallow. Yet because there is no international group dedicated to monitoring the conflict, the scale of the suffering generated by displacement is still largely hidden from view.
And after all this, many of these nomadic populations continue to be persecuted after being displaced. Some of them are enslaved by criminal groups, forced to cook and clean for them in the best of circumstances, and work as prostitutes in the worst. Recruitment into the ranks of armed groups is common, mostly for youth who face dim employment prospects as they bounce from city to city. Professionals are also not immune. Criminal gangs in Mexico are kidnapping engineers and computer scientists to help them build their sophisticated communications systems that sometimes surpass the government’s.
Read moreWe experience cultural continuity with our parents’ and our children’s generations. Even when we don’t see eye to eye with our parents on political questions or we sigh in despair about our kids’ fashion sense or taste in music, we generally have a handle on what makes them tick. But a human lifetime seldom spans more than three generations, and the sliding window of one’s generation screens out that which came before and that which comes after; they lie outside our personal experience. We fool ourselves into thinking that our national culture is static and slow-moving, that we are the inheritors of a rich tradition. But if we could go back three or four generations, we would find ourselves surrounded by aliens – people for whom a North Atlantic crossing by sail was as slow and risky as a mission to Mars, people who took it for granted that some races were naturally inferior and that women were too emotionally unstable to be allowed to vote. The bedrock of our cultural tradition is actually quicksand. We reject many of our ancestors’ cherished beliefs and conveniently forget others, not realizing that, in turn, our grandchildren may do the same to ours.
Read moreImage description: This is an animation of the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights), eight days after a record-setting solar flare sent a shower of charged particles towards Earth. From Earth, this glowing ring would appear as a curtain of light shimmering across the night sky.
Image captured by NASA IMAGE satellite courtesy of NASA Space Place.
Awesome
Read moreThe takeaway from all of this is not that this is just a crazy professor spinning esoteric nonsense as an excuse to keep the human race from advancing. It is that if and when helium 3 fueled fusion power and lunar mining becomes viable, we should be prepared for another environmentalist assault on yet another new form of energy production. It is enough to make one want to leave the planet and start anew somewhere.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 