Read moreThat, Iain said, was how he’d envisaged the Culture coming about. Conflicts of interest between classes and other groups there would be, but the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak.
Quotes
Read more…the over-arching reason for the clamp-down on dissent, migration, and freedom of expression, and the concurrent emphasis on security in the developed world, constitutes the visible expression of a pre-emptive counter-revolution.
…I believe what we’re seeing is a move towards the global imposition of a police state in the developed world, leveraging the xenophobia that naturally emerges during insecure times, by a ruling elite who are themselves feeling threatened by a spectre. Controls on movement, freedom of association, and speech are all key tools in the classic police state’s arsenal. What’s new about this cycle is that the police state machinery is imposed locally, within national boundaries, but applies everywhere: the economic system it is intended to protect is transnational and unconstrained. Which is why even places that were largely exempt during the cold war are having a common police state agenda quietly imposed. There is to be no refuge, other than destabilized “failed states" where the conditions of life make a police state look utopian in comparison.
This system has emerged organically, from the bottom up, and is not the result of any conspiracy; it’s just individuals and groups moving to protect their shareholdings in the Martian invaders, by creating an environment that is safe for the hive intelligences to operate in.
The way that iOS devices stay can stay linked even when they change hands can lead to a lot of weirdness.
A number of months back, I was mugged and my iPhone was stolen. I changed my passwords, dissociated it from my Apple account, and and got a new iPhone. Then, a couple of months later, I started getting another person’s pictures in my photostream. I have no idea why this is happening: the phone should be completely divorced from my account. I never updated iOS on that phone and it did not have photostream on it; my best guess is that when the phone got updated and needed to set up a photostream, it looked for the last account that it had been tied to.
The pictures are voyeuristically amazing. As far as I can tell, my stolen phone is in Yemen now, owned by a young man who takes a lot of selfies with a wad of qat tucked into his cheek. He either helps work on a qat field or just visits one from time to time. He takes a lot of pictures of his family: an older man sleeping on the couch, children in ceremonial garb playing in rubble. But most of the images are screenshots of Facebook. Sometimes these are of messages that are in a language I can’t read, but they are usually of images that his friends have posted. A lot of the pictures are of bales of money, bales of drugs, solid gold machine guns, jeeps and tanks, racist caricatures of Obama, and propagandish pictures of Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, amidst these are plenty of pictures of unicorns, flowers, and cute little kittens lying under rainbows. It’s a bizarre look into a world that is entirely unlike my own.
How I Recovered My Stolen iPad | MetaFilter, via Mike M. (via new-aesthetic)
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Serco has welcomed the increase in asylum seekers in its annual report. But it says its future profits in Australia will depend on the ”country conditions” in the Middle East and Asia. … Serco admits its ”very strong organic growth” reflects – at least in part – its capitalisation on its existing contracts, including with the government. In particular, it says, its profits in Australia reflect ”an increase in the amount of work undertaken for the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship [DIAC]”. ”In immigration services in Australia, the level of irregular maritime arrivals has increased in 2012, leading to a growth in the number of people in our care,” its annual report notes. ”The level of our future activity is still likely to fluctuate based on country conditions in the Middle East and Asia, where most people in our care originate, and the prevailing government policy, speed of visa processing and the application of the Australian government’s recent offshore processing legislation.” … University of Sydney economist Bob Walker, who has written extensively on privatisation, said research had shown that privatising or outsourcing services was often as expensive or more expensive than governments running the services themselves. ”Essentially the profits of Serco reflect the loss to the taxpayer of outsourcing services that the public service could perfectly well do themselves.” A Serco spokesman said the increase in the value of the contracts reflected the increase in the amount of work undertaken for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. ”When we commenced the contracts in 2009, we were caring for 800 people,” he said. ”We currently look after more than 8000, and employ more than 3000 people in immigration services.”
http://m.smh.com.au/national/serco-profits-rise-as-detention-contracts-hit-186bn-20130419-2i5ln.html
Read moreThe firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.
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Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.
In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.
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I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.
Serco is among the biggest of them all. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at £302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fonder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.
The current chief executive of the global Serco Group is 49-year-old Chris Hyman, born in Durban, South Africa. His annual remuneration is around £700,000, plus bonuses; in 2011, the value of his total package rose 18%, to £1.86m (the company’s finance director had to slum it at £948,295).
In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”
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Work for the British government accounts for 40% of Serco’s revenues; to quote from the Daily Telegraph. “Without Serco, Britain would struggle to go to war”. That gives you some idea of how deeply its work penetrates the state, and how unthinkable any kind of corporate crisis would be.
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“Interestingly, we are looking at this. The National Audit Office is doing work around the development of quasi-monopoly private providers, which is the world we’re moving into. We don’t really understand the size of their empires. We’ve got to start getting hold of this. It’s a new phenomenon.”
Read moreIn 1953, he founded the World Government of World Citizens. The demand for its documents proved so brisk that he established the service authority the next year.
More than half a million world passports have been issued, though there are no statistics on the number of people who have successfully crossed borders with them. A half-dozen countries — Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Mauritania, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia — have formally recognized the passport. More than 150 others have honored it on occasion, according to the service authority.
Fees for the passport range from $45 (valid for three years) to $400 (for 15 years). The passport has text in seven languages, including Esperanto, the artificial international language.
Carrying world passport No. 1, Mr. Davis spent decades spreading his message, slipping across borders, stowing away on ships, sweet-talking officials, or wearing them down, until they let him in. The newspapers charted his comings and goings:
1949: “Garry Davis Arrested in Paris”; 1953: “Garry Davis Held Again: Arrested When He Camps Out Near Buckingham Palace”; 1957: “France Expels Garry Davis”; 1979: U.S. Court Rules ‘World Citizen’ Davis Is an Alien and Rejects His Passport; 1984: “Japan Expels American ‘World Citizen’ ”; 1987: “ ‘World Citizen’ Announces Presidential Bid.” (It was the United States presidency this time.)
In 1986, Mr. Davis ran for mayor of Washington, receiving 585 votes.
Mr. Davis was arrested dozens of times, usually for attempting to enter a country without official papers. He had canny ways of circumventing authority.
In the 1950s, when France was trying to deport him, he conspicuously shoplifted items from a Paris department store. (His haul, United Press reported, was “$47 worth of peach-colored lace panties, black-silk brassieres, black garter belts, lace petticoats and pink slips.”) He made certain he was arrested.
As a result of his arrest, Mr. Davis was legally enjoined from leaving the country.
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In old age, Mr. Davis was far from idle. Last year, he had a world passport delivered to Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
Just weeks before he died, Mr. Davis had a world passport sent, via Russian authorities, to Mr. Snowden, the fugitive former national security contractor accused of violating espionage laws, whose United States passport was revoked in June.
Mr. Snowden could not be reached for comment.
Read moreFor a large portion of the American/Western/advanced-industrial film audience, travel might be the activity in which geopolitics most noticeably intrudes on their lives — in the inconvenience of borders, passports, languages, currencies, customs. But none of that fazes the spy. He either circumvents restrictions entirely or he comes equipped with the tools he needs to pass through them. He doesn’t wait in line unless he’s in disguise.
What’s the first thing the spy does after arriving in a new city? You and I haul our bags to the hotel and stand shifting our weight while a bored clerk pecks at a keyboard; the spy is led briskly to an all-white room where he’s left alone with a safety deposit box. Inside the box: multiple passports, a wad of cash in different currencies, a gun with a silencer, an envelope with the name of a contact — everything he needs to navigate his new surroundings. If we see his hotel, it’s luxurious. If we see him on a plane, he’s either flying it himself or it’s a private jet. We are repeatedly shown — more often, or at least more indelibly, than in the books some of these stories are based on — that the elements of travel we ourselves find exhausting and stressful have been magically made easy for the spy.3 The spy never worries about not understanding a language; whatever it is, he already speaks it, and fluently, with no trace of an accent. Instead of sitting around in train stations and dealing with subway platforms, something he’ll do only if it’s part of a chase, the spy procures a car (who knows how) or a helicopter, or a speedboat, or whatever vehicle he needs, which he always knows how to operate expertly, even if it’s a Soviet tank. And you’d better believe he knows his way around at 100 miles an hour — he’ll take shortcuts the locals haven’t discovered yet. None of your panicked on-the-fly deciphering of Parisian road signs in your rented Renault Twingo.
When you and I pack for a trip, we’re so preemptively defeated by the thought of weather and strange places that we take crushable hats and wicking layers and comfort-fit pants with legs that zip off at the knee. The spy, whether he’s stylish like Bond or casual like Jason Bourne, never looks like he’s traveling. But rain or shine, he always has just the right outfit. That may be why, whereas we stick to tourist areas and look in a guidebook to figure out where to have dinner, the spy can go anywhere he wants. He strolls into the classiest and most dangerous bars, the finest and grimiest restaurants, the ritziest and seediest casinos.
Read moreStone tools discovered in this site confirm the continuity of human settlement in Europe, the researchers said.
The finding contradicts the theory of some researchers who believe Europe was populated in small waves without continuity by groups doomed to extinction because of their inability to adapt to new surroundings, they said in their statement.
“Even though they are very archaic tools, they reflect complex activities such as recovering animals that fell into the caves,” which functioned as traps, the statement said.
Researchers have also found the remains of a large bear which is an ancestor to the brown bear that exists today.
Various remains of this species were found at the site, as well as those of other animals such as rhinos, giant deer, bison and wild donkeys.
Read moreBut more often than not, you have J.J. Abrams able to successfully convince much of the movie-going populace that Khan was *not* the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, a feat made much easier by casting Benedict Cumberbatch in a role made famous by Ricardo Montalban.
Benicio del Toro was first offered the role of Khan in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek sequel.But since he is the only English-speaking Hispanic person currently pursuing a career in film acting, the Bad Robot clan had no choice but to seek out the whitest white guy they could find. With as much pressure as Paramount was putting on the film to deliver overseas box office, you’d think there would have been an incentive to make the film’s cast a bit more ethnically diverse to appeal to differing overseas markets. Nothing against Cumberbatch, but why no one at Paramount thought “Hmm, let’s ask recent Oscar nominee Demián Bichir if he’d be interested in playing one of the most famous villains in modern American history?” remains to be answered.
So long as people are hungry—so long as parents dream for their kids—people will cross whatever border you put in front of them.
Jose Antonio Vargas (via immigrantstories)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 