Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers - video

When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

Daniele Ganser -Important 9/11 Investigation

Daniele Ganser is one of those people who seriously question the official story of 9/11. Daniele is a Swiss historian and professor of modern history at the University of Basel. In 2001 he received his PhD from the University of Basel and is currently the president of the Swiss branch of the Association for theStudy of Peak Oil and Gas. He has been rigorously studying the topic of 9/11 and working hard to determine what truly happened that morning, as well as who caused it to happen. His conclusions do not align with the official 9/11 commission report nor do they align with the theory of Islamic terrorists committing the act.
This is a video lecture he performed in 2012 where he describes his fascinating findings about 9/11 and reveals his stance on the matter. This is a powerful lecture and I highly recommend checking it out if you are seriously looking to learn more about the topic of 9/11.
A 12 year and incredibly costly war, both financially and in terms human lives, has come as a result of the 9/11 attacks which began the idea of pre-emptive wars. The US now has better control over oil, other commodities in the areas invaded and a tighter security squeeze on their citizens. While argued, it seems more than obvious that the idea of terrorism is now a piece politicians use to pass what would otherwise be un-passable acts and bills. It is also a term thrown around heavily by mass media that immediately draws attention, builds fear and gains the support of people for almost anything. But is it possible that Islamic terrorism is not a serious threat regardless of what governments and mass media has said? Many seem to think so and it isn’t just the “crazy conspiracy theorists” as the media and government like to call them. People from all walks of life, levels of education and social status’ have been questioning 9/11 since the day it happened. They have reason to, the story simply does not add up.

San Francisco se destapa como la capital tecnológica del mundo

El eje de Silicon Valley se ha desplazado a San Francisco. La que antaño fuera capital del movimiento hippy se ha convertido en la high-tech capital del mundo. 500 empresas del sector tecnológico han cambiado su rostro.

Desde que Ron Conway se mudó a San Francisco en el 2004, la ciudad empezó a cambiar de rostro. Considerado el ángel inversor de Silicon Valley, amasó una fortuna apostando en sus inicios por empresas tan exitosas como Google, Facebook, Twitter y otras start-ups.

Conway acarrea consigo la fama de conseguir todo aquello por lo que apuesta, y desde hace algún tiempo su atención está centrada en San Francisco. Hace algo más de un año lanzó la web sf.citi, una iniciativa que aúna todo el poder y la influencia de las compañías tecnológicas para resolver los problemas de la ciudad y dar respuesta a los nuevos retos.

500 compañías del sector tecnológico, las mismas que han desplazado su centro de operación de Silicon Valley a San Francisco, forman ya parte de sf.citi, a quienes muchos ven como una poderosa plataforma con tentáculos en la política.

Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks

The World Is a Battlefield (video)

In Obama administration a lot of people are being led to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war.

Scahill discusses secret operations in Africa, the targeting of U.S. citizens in Yemen and the key role WikiLeaks played in researching the book.  He also reveals imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning once tipped him off to a story about the private security company Blackwater.  

 

 

 

 

 

'Terrorism' and the Perpetual Emotion War Machine -Norman Solomon

As a perpetual emotion machine -- producing and guzzling its own political fuel -- the “war on terror” continues to normalize itself as a thoroughly American way of life and death. Ongoing warfare has become a matter of default routine, pushed along by mainline media and the leadership of both parties in Washington. Without a clear and effective upsurge of opposition from the grassroots, Americans can expect to remain citizens of a war-driven country for the rest of their lives.

Paul Krugman -The Excel Depression

In this age of information, math errors can lead to disaster. NASA’sMars Orbiter crashed because engineers forgot to convert to metric measurements; JPMorgan Chase’s “London Whale” venture went bad in part because modelers divided by a sum instead of an average. So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?

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The story so far: At the beginning of 2010, two Harvard economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, circulated a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that purported to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.

Paul Krugman -Crisis economica

En esta era de la información, los errores matemáticos pueden llevar al desastre. La Mars Orbiter de la NASA se estrelló porque los ingenieros olvidaron hacer la conversión a unidades del sistema métrico; el plan de la ballena de Londres de JPMorgan Chase salió mal en parte porque quienes hicieron los modelos dividieron por una suma en lugar de por una media. De modo que, ¿fue un error de codificación de Excel lo que destruyó las economías del mundo occidental? Esta es la historia hasta la fecha: a principios de 2010, dos economistas de Harvard, Carmen Reinhart y Kenneth Rogoff, divulgaron un artículo, Growth in a time of debt (Crecimiento en una época de endeudamiento), que pretendía identificar un umbral crítico, un punto de inflexión, para la deuda pública. Una vez que la deuda supera el 90% del producto interior bruto, afirmaban, el crecimiento económico cae en picado.

El poder estructural de Alemania

Alemania, que se siente incómoda teniendo que ejercer el liderazgo en Europa y que está cansada de que le acusen de imperialista, ha optado por intentar que su visión económica sea la única viable en la zona euro que salga de la crisis. Cuando los países del sur de Europa despierten de la pesadilla económica en la que están inmersos, puede que se vean obligados a alemanizar sus economías sin que Alemania tenga que hacer nada para imponérselo. Esta es la aparición del poder estructural en la Unión Europea y supone un cambio radical en su funcionamiento.

The United States of Inequality

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

The great legacy of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is his new vision and method

The method of philosophy is the method of grammatical clarification – that is, the description of the logico-linguistic structures of language for the purpose of dissolving philosophical problems. 
Wittgenstein transformed the philosophy of logic, of language, and of philosophy of mind.

But after the mid-1970s his influence waned. The kinds of work and methods he advocated in philosophy of language were displaced by the effort to produce a so-called ‘theory of meaning for a natural language’. Similarly, his methods and preoccupations in philosophy of mind were displaced by the new pseudo-discipline that goes by the misleading name of ‘cognitive science’ – misleading, since it is neither scientific nor cognitive. His general conception of philosophy as an elucidatory activity that contributes to human understanding rather than adding to human knowledge was set aside by philosophers who embraced a cognitive conception of philosophy allied with the natural sciences.
Wittgenstein’s new vision and method is a transition from the quest for truth to the quest for sense or understanding. 
Philosophy is characterized by its problems, which are not empirical, scientific problems. They cannot be answered by experiments, and they do not call for new discoveries. They often appear to be questions about the nature of things. But, Wittgenstein argued, they are typically questions in search of a sense, stemming from certain kinds of unclarity – conceptual unclarity.  And they are to be resolved, or often dissolved, by conceptual clarification.
Clarity is to be achieved, primarily (but not only) by a careful description of the uses of words. 

Judith Butler -Resignification as subversive repetition

Power works in part through discourse and it works in part to produce and

destabilise subjects.

The notion of performativity, and performative speech acts in particular

-understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name. This is

the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly specific way. So what I'm

trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the

capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean

rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a

certain kind of repetition and recitation.

To make the problematic of reproduction central to the sexing of the body?

I am not sure that is, or ought to be, what is absolutely salient or primary in the sexing

of the body. If it is, I think it's the imposition of a norm, not a neutral description of biological

constraints.

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what

conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological

differences become the salient characteristics of sex.

The heterosexual matrix [in Gender Trouble] became a kind of totalising symbolic, and

that's why I changed the term in Bodies That Matter to heterosexual hegemony. This

opens the possibility that this is a matrix which is open to rearticulation, which has a

kind of malleability. So I don't actually use the term heterosexual matrix in Bodies That

Matter.

There's a very specific notion of gender involved in compulsory heterosexuality: a

certain view of gender coherence whereby what a person feels, how a person acts, and

how a person expresses herself sexually is the articulation and consummation of a

gender. It's a particular causality and identity that gets established as gender coherence

which is linked to compulsory heterosexuality. It's not any gender, or all gender, it's that

specific kind of coherent gender.

The politics of queer theory, the ideas of subversive repetition and

transgressive reinscription

Bernie Sanders in Bill Maher "Real Time"

Overtime - Episode # 277

Peter Hacker on Ludwig Wittgenstein (articles)

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/TheDevelopmentOfWittgensteinsPhilosophyOfPsychology.pdf

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Philosophy%20for%20RIP.pdf

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Relevance%20of%20W's%20phil.%20of%20psychol.%20to%20science.pdf

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Emotions%20-%20conceptual%20framework.pdf   (Damasio's theory of emotions)

Los niños del plomo -La Oroya (Peru)

Existe un pueblo en el Perú donde las casas, las calles, el hospital, el colegio y unas pocas áreas verdes están cubiertos por un polvo gris. Entre las partículas de esa nube negra que parece arena, hay plomo. El plomo que sale de las chimeneas de una fundición de metales que ha traído trabajo, “progreso” y docenas de historias de niños que no engordan ni crecen y que tragan esa tierra tóxica cada vez que se meten los dedos en la boca.

Daniel Alarcon -Election night in Peru’s largest prison

To understand a place like Lurigancho, it’s best not to dwell on words like prison or inmate or cell, or on the images these terms generally connote. The 7,400 men who live in Lurigancho, Peru’s largest and most notorious penal institution, do not wear uniforms; there is no roll call or lockdown or lights-out. Whatever control the prison authorities have inside Lurigancho is nominal. They secure the gate to the prison, and little else.

The complex’s twenty housing blocks can be divided roughly into two sections: the better-off inmates live in El Jardín (the Garden), the odd-numbered blocks. The greenery withered long ago, but the name and its cachet have remained. Many residents carry the keys to their own cells and are free to wander the grounds as they wish, though some prefer not to leave the relative calm of their territory. The other side of Lurigancho is known as La Pampa (the Plain), the even-numbered blocks, home to thousands of accused murderers and petty thieves. The density here can be twice that of El Jardín, 

Lurigancho held nearly a quarter of Peru’s inmates, and overcrowding had reached a crisis point. The prison, originally built for a couple thousand men, had become home to more than 11,000. Shanks were sold openly, as were crack pipes, ingeniously fashioned from bent scraps of metal. Thin, bare-chested men slumped against the walls, covered in scars, wearing the downcast, narrow gaze of drug addicts. Tuberculosis was rampant. Lurigancho was producing some thirty tons of trash a week, much of it uncollected, while the poorest inmates fed themselves by sifting through this refuse for anything edible. A gray scarf hung from an old radio tower, the prison’s unofficial flag — a memento of a drug-addled inmate who’d escaped from the psychiatric clinic, climbed the tower, and hanged himself. So severe was the crowding that a few hundred homeless squatters had taken over an abandoned building to create an informal twenty-first housing block. In most prisons, if inmates had access to hammers, concrete, bricks, shovels, spades, and the like, one imagines they’d use them to escape. Instead, when I visited Block Twenty-One, I found the residents hard at work, building a wall around their new home so they could have a safe place to walk .

http://www.revistaanfibia.com/cronica/lurigancho-el-gobierno-de-los-presos