text:
- Independent support broker helping disabled and older people get the personalised health and social care they want, accredited with the London Brokerage Network in November 2012
- Completed PTLLS (Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector) in March 2013, accredited at Level 4 (May 2013).
- Twelve years experience facilitating employability training programmes for people with mental health disabilities
- Volunteer mentoring a young person in employability skills with Inspire, Motivate & Engage since March 2013
- Teaching a six year old how to play the guitar since January 2013
- Licensed Football Association coach with a Certificate in Coaching Football Level 1 Award at Middlesex County FA since November 2012
- Not a podcaster since April 2011
Support4Life is the trading name I'm using to work as an independent support broker. This means that I help older and disabled people plan their own support to get the personalised health and social care they want, so that they can stay in control of their lives.
Chief cook and bottle washer.
Not in Richmond. Not a fellowship.
Co-creator and designer of unique and beautiful triangular stained glass lamps, Spitalfields Market stallholder, white van man (furniture removals), careers advisor and mental health trainer.
Design and implementation of a comprehensive therapeutic activities programme for frail elderly people with physical, sensory and memory impairments. All singing, all dancing, quizmaster, bingo caller, party planner, minibus driver, cake maker, counsellor, advocate and befriender of the infirm and the incontinent. Friday afternoons in the pub.
Wiping arses.
Playing a football manager demo over and over again. Late mornings, early lunches, afternoons in the pub. European travel. I'm genuinely surprised I lasted so long.
'This Is Not A Podcast' is very pleased to welcome the founder of StatusNet and CEO of E14N - Evan Prodromou.
Evan clarifies the pronounciation of Pump I/O - much to David's disgust who wanted a 'dot'.
David tries to endear himself to Evan by composing and devoting a song 'Pump Dot IO' to the great man which brings Evan to tears. Literally.
Evan talks about the demands of giving sensible interviews to technical and non-so-technical audiences and recommends:
Evan discusses some of the lessons learned from StatusNet, the rationale for creating yet another social networking platform and development of different clients including the notorious OpenFarmGame, the mere mention of which makes Andy hyperventilate.
Andy plays Devil's Advocate to ask deep, probing, uncomfortable questions about the lack of a StatusNet to Pump bridge, limitations in the Web client, broken notifications etc.
Evan sheds light on the future of StatusNet/GNU Social and discusses the business model for Pump which is rather different from StatusNet.
Evan senses an increased level of developer interest and participation in the Pump platform, with the development of libraries, clients and services for a relatively young platform.
Evan is honest enough to give his post-mortem analysis on the now legendary StatusNet to Pump migration which overran slightly and his thoughts on the pros and cons of dealing with demanding users.
Andy gets bored of the technical talk and gives Evan a quick French test.
The 'Quick Fire Question Round' attempts to reveal the man behind Evan Prodromou. Some of his answers will amuse, entertain and occasionally shock you.
Evan outlines his short term goals for version 0.3.0 which are to address fundamental usability issues in the Pump software.
The team also help Evan by helping him practice for his Canadian Citizenship examination.
The lads are left momentarily speechless as Evan rejoins his family for croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice on vacation.
Andy and David mourn the passing of Google Reader, demand explanations from Luke and welcome our newest listener - the NSA.
Neighbourhood Watch turns its attention to a flurry of criminal activity in Leith (nr. Scotland) and we summarise a recent spate of celebrity deaths and illnesses.
'Gardener's Question Time' features David's roundup of his attempts at self-sufficiency in West London (without the aid of Felicity Kendal).
Devoid of any football matches whatsoever, we celebrate another British success in the Tour de France and talk about music instead.
Podcast Watch has enjoyed Duffercast - a bunch of old duffers discussing a wide ranging and frankly bizarre set of topics and Douglas' latest addition to the Sportazine media empire - TINT.
Andy celebrates Nev Wilshire, the David Brent like boss of a Swansea call centre who motivates new hires with a karaoke version of 'Mr. Brightside'.
The longest TINAP episode ever is rounded off by a spontanous outburst of 'Rant-O-Cast' by Andy where he impersonates Richard Wilson and sounds off about various people and activities that irritate him.
Ogg (mono): ogg (27.1 MB)
MP3 (mono): mp3 (28.1 MB)
Ogg (stereo): stereo (38.5 MB)
0:00 Are we recording ?
4:00 It's The Pump Dot IO Song!
8:38 Beep beep
9:33 Federation / It means nothing to me
14:23 Motivation, inspiration
18:20 The last resort
19:58 OFG! Heavy breathing
21:45 Change, masochism
23:58 Love, hate, fragmentation, money
31:47 The future for Status.Net
34:59 Pump.io business model / Headless social server
38:45 Butt plugs / Pi pumps / Ouya Hoohah!
42:00 PaaS support / OpenShift etc.
45:25 Family federations
48:58 Developer community
53:10 The future for IdentiCurse / Muon and PyPump
55:30 Hit me with a hard one
1:00:10 What's the point of migrating Identi.ca ?
1:04:10 Our number one listener
1:10:10 The Persians
1:11:20 Parlez vous Francais ?
1:13:45 The Quick-Fire Question Round
1:16:57 Why don't my notification indicators go down to zero ?
1:18:15 People need to get off my case and stop bothering me
1:19:10 3rd party development / PumpMigrate / Pump2RSS
1:20:20 Evan's dad (NSFW)
1:22:10 The Prince of Aberystwyth
1:25:30 This whole thing is kind of ridiculous !
1:28:30 Do you guys want me to get off ?
1:29:10 The death of Google Reader / the NSA / Encrypted email
1:34:47 Murder in Leith / Torturing children with rhubarb
1:36:20 The Curse of TINAP
1:38:00 The pineapple didn't take off
1:39:32 Sports Section / TDF / Drugs
1:42:00 Music Section / The Stone Roses gig / Open mic nights / 20lb Sounds / Glastonbury / The National
1:47:25 Podcast Watch / TINT / The Duffercast
1:52:06 TV Round-up / The Call Centre
1:53:58 Andy's Rants / split scarves / split rounds / pint drinkers / transfer talk / TZAG
1:58:09 Outtakes
'Where the hell have you lot been ?'
In the laziest podcast competition with sawtell, we finally capitulate and blink first. We held out for 15 months though.
Some interesting folk who have been entertaining us recently:
Apparently, there is another podcast named 'This Is Not A Podcast'. Our lawyers have been instructed.
Andy moves his blog yet again (from Drupal to Octopress) and David still feels guilty about abandoning Habari.
Luke swaps the hills of Aberyswyth for the mountains of Switzerland.
In the 15 month hiatus, TINAP has a new domain name, new web site, new subscription options (separate subscription options for Ogg/MP3/Stereo) and the reassuringly same old crap audio quality (this time courtesy of Luke who is halfway up the Matterhorn).
Ogg (mono): ogg (30.4MB)
MP3 (mono): mp3 (29.7MB)
Ogg (stereo): stereo (31.3MB)
0:00 Welcome to Season 2
1:15 The Sawtell stand-off
2:05 Screwing around with the sound system
2:20 Luke moves to Switzerland
3:10 Andy's wife reads the Daily Mail
3:40 David gets down with the kids
4:00 How's about this then?
7:00 Gardeners' Question Time
8:18 #RhubarbRhubarb
9:30 New and interesting folk on Identi.ca
11:45 Stav's TINAP Identi.ca poll
13:00 How not to make a podcast
15:26 Andy's minor health issue
16:43 Space jump
17:26 Google Zurich
19:30 Virtual Andyc
23:04 Andy's new Virgin Media router arrives
25:06 A very curious death to solve
25:57 How we all abandoned Habari
27:06 Deep psychological analysis
28:48 It's just a head fuck
30:58 Cuckoo clocks, cowbells and Swiss maids
31:49 Zurich to Aberystwyth via Wolverhampton
40:38 @Marjoleink yak shaving
41:37 Solus OS
43:08 Goobuntu
44:50 Feedback
46:18 Name and shame
49:33 Amazuntu
52:15 Being: Liverpool - the bizarre world of Brendan Rodgers
57:24 Luke live microblogs the football
58:34 Outtakes
Footballers being twits on twitter. Yawn.
We discuss the strange motivational techniques of Brendan Rogers. David thinks he will lose his job by Christmas.
David reminds himself how to use Audacity by creating a special 'Worst Of' compilation of 'This Is Not A Podcast'.
Ogg: Ogg (9.0MB)
Digitally remastered and cynically released in time for Christmas, this 10 minute TINAP trailer is handy for:
Do not stand at my grave and cry
TINAP is not there; TINAP will never die.
In order to initiate the TINAP globalisation strategy, Luke Slater is flown first class to California only to discover a note on Josh Wood's door saying 'Gone Fishing'.
Undeterred, we call upon Richard Cutts who graces us with his presence on the sofa, brandishing a bottle of Hooky Gold and meekly covering his 'Inner Circle Of Trust'.
Long standing identi.ca user, Richard, founded the 'First Against The Wall' (fatw) group, coined the legendary 'Good Moaning' greeting and regales the world with his daily commuting woes on 'Northern Rail'. Richard also has a strange hybrid Yorkshire/Geordie accent - mainly to confuse Richard Fontana.
Richard sings the praises of Josh Wood and Luke claims he once understood one of his American literature references without recourse to Google.
James Robertson expands his media publishing empire with the exciting launch of multiple branded 'JR' microsites:
Some identica folk produce some exciting experiments pushing the envelope with the rich media capabilities of Google Plus.
Richard and Ed post artistic self portraits and invite the Internet to answer '#amihotornot' while Josh posts a recipe for fricassee with plenty of paprika (without cat piss).
If you can't see these links, then you're not in the appropriate 'Inner Circle Of Trust' but to hell with our guests' privacy, civil liberties and FREEDOM.
A classic recursive thread on identi.ca involving the use of 'Acronyms used before set'.
Scott Evans lets us down and dents our confidence in all Australians by failing to provide his promised feedback. He is now blacklisted, black balled and banned from the premises.
Oxbrow Luke reads a prepared statement from Josh Wood explaining (sort of) his absence from the sofa which David struggles to understand.
There is no Errata section. Episode 6 was perfect in every regard.
David gives a shout out to the Open Tech Exchange Podcast hosted by Mark Clarke and Darlene Parker.
David gels his hair into a sharp quiff and listens to some psychobilly, blues and ska coutrtesy of the Goat Rodeo hosted by Andy Barilla.
We all have a bloody good laugh at the Linux Action Show's childish spat with Linux Outlaws and an even better laugh at the hosts ('Beavis and Butthead') with their oh so stylish 1970's haircuts.
David looks at open source alternatives to Google Plus and we struggle
to pronounce
Diaper, Disprin, Diaspora and
Friendika - Ulrika's Johnsson's entry into social networking.
David also assists Michele creating a powerful spamming utility that simultaneously cross posts to identi.ca, Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook.
Matt Lee shows great spirit and answers random, probing questions from Luke and David for a full hour.
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MP3 (mono): TINAP7.MP3 (29.5MB)
0:00 TINAP theme tune
0:32 Big Ben and The Little One
1:12 A tightly coiled spring
2:14 A flagrant waste of syllables
3:33 The running order
4:43 Indoctrination
5:14 I hate freedom
6:51 Hooky Gold and Maltesers
7:45 Twatface
8:30 Speaking of football…
9:51 Beautiful women and sick bags
10:46 Danger level high
12:30 Andy's pyramid friend scheme
13:56 My ass is twitching
14:51 Gone fishing
15:34 On the train
16:41 A message from our sponsors
17:18 The JR media empire
19:22 Single use whiteboards
22:26 #microbeating
23:28 Erections and rotting fish
24:27 Multiple orgasms and Google+
26:40 The StatusNet federation
27:51 IdentiThing and dialects
29:05 Hot or not?
32:30 Feedback
33:49 Oggcast Watch
36:08 The German anal to Josh Wood segue
38:47 Podcast Watch
40:44 A 70s' mullet and Jesus
45:58 Hot beverages with milk
46:34 Google Windmills' private hangout
52:57 A handy checklist of people not to talk to
54:03 The entire internet needs to know my gender
56:51 Diaper*
59:10 Friendika-ka-ka-ka-ka!
1:03:21 When worlds collide
1:09:30 StatusNet 1.0
1:11:03 Corporate evil
1:11:56 You disgust me!
1:15:00 Cheesecake eating bastards
1:15:56 Our friend Ted
1:20:54 #Innovation
1:22:48 Pimping @jpope's wallpaper
1:24:00 The sports section
1:25:20 Outtakes
An infinitely long identi.ca thread on why Google is evil (part 1,297,539 of 20 billion)
Paul Adams' lengthy (224 slides) presentation about the development and rationale behind the design of Google Plus.
David shows off his culinary expertise in the kitchen while Luke shows some hidden artistic tendencies pondering on windmills and the true meaning of Google Plus.
Another aspring creative type, Jeremy Pope, makes his excellent, crisp, striking photography available for use as wallpapers.
Unfortunately, Evan's back problems means he has to adopt a standing up desk having previously declared war on standing up.
Evan also announces at OSCON that the official StatusNet song will now be Radiohead's 'Sit Down, Stand Up'.
The legendary and surreal deluxe paprika thread.
Patrick Archibald kindly adds TINAP to his list of freedom loving OggCasts with handy access to the identi.ca dents and groups for each podcast.
Patrick has also created a handy Web site, dentimage.com to quickly grab an image of your favourite dents.
If you don't want to divulge your gender to Google. Other social networks are available:
Matt Lee shows a great sense of humour in a free and open (in every sense of the word) question and answer session on identi.ca.
Welcome to the wonderful and frightening world of Ted Smith, womyn's rights, feminism and rape apologists.
After a decent rest, the team reassemble to produce a bumper edition timed at the duration of a football match (including injury time).
In an effort to give both listeners a slim chance of identifying the British accents and regional dialects, the gang perpetually introduce and thank each other profusely by name throughout.
Fresh from the triumphant completion of his first year's undergraduate course at Aberystwyth, Luke reviews a couple of fast food outlets available in that fine city.
In the new 'Takeways' section inspired by Tim Bray, Luke favours 'Finger Lickin' Chicken' for its close proximity to the Pier nightclub although he docks 10 points for only selling Coca Cola Light. Finger Lickin' just edges out Sam's Fried Chicken ('hard chicken, sometimes live') but enjoys an excellent location adjacent to the legendary 24 hour Spar.
Like all embryonic podcasts, the urgent need for a TINAP Code of Conduct (CoC) is finally recognised which inevitably leads to 43 minutes of smutty, Viz style innuendo and endless double entendres.
Helpful hints and tips for coping with the stresses and strains of commuting are discussed in a vain effort to restore Richard (train rambler) Cutts' sanity.
r7 corrected loads of embarrassing musical related errors which we are pleased to correct.
The fine art of podcast plagiarism is discussed so David introduces a brilliant new innovation - Room x11r5 - which is, in no way, inspired by Room x1101 from The Dick Turpin Roadshow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Dr. Michael C. Harris and Andy are locked in a deadly embrace of not having the requisite knowledge to appear on each other's fictional podcasts.
StatusNet appoint a new CEO, Mark Ruddock, who won't actually eat his own dog food and use identi.ca. Luke is dispatched to Canada with a tin of Pedigree Chum and a pair of rusty pliers to rectify this situation.
David claims he's an intellectual (like Josh Wood) by joining a social network aimed at ferocious, voracious readers called 'Byliner'.
A recent unplanned 6 hour outage on identi.ca forces us to confront the elephant in the room and contemplate escape routes if identi.ca ever, God forbid, became permanently unusable.
David expresses an interest in self-hosting his own StatusNet instance but is completely bamboozled by reading 'INSTALL' so goes back to smoking his pipe and reading books.
Andy produces documentary evidence that a Web based installer was included in Laconica 0.7 that made installation as easy as the famous 5 minute WordPress installation.
We anticipate the release of StatusNet 1.0 by pondering on how close Evan is to his stated target of 1,000,000 StatusNet instances.
Luke has concerns about whether the StatusNet 1.0 API will be extended to support development of fully functional StatusNet clients (e.g conversations).
Despite wearing industrial ear defenders, we are deafened by the prolonged and very loud Telecaster feedback kindly provided by Fabian Scherschel.
Podcast Watch enjoys kevie's new TuxJam podcast with an interesting mix of music and Open Source software and his soft Scottish accent which brings poet Ivor Cutler to mind.
The incredibly busy Fab partners with Bradley Kuhn to start the Rant o'Fab & Kuhn podcast and discuss 'Godwin's Law' (You're just like Hitler, you are').
Doug Whitfield and Tim Ray produce two podcasts - MusicManumit together with a talk show while Stephen produces a show with a more political slant - CyberUnions.
Andy splashes out on an Acer netbook, installs Chromium OS on it (rendering the 250GB hard disk redundant) and enjoys the experience until he lost his internet connection for 3 hours.
Andy and Luke are privileged enough to witness The Mighty Fall in person in London and Manchester respectively and confirm they are 'Always different, always the same'.
'This Is Not A Podcast' is very proud and honoured to present the wonderful 'I Am Not Left Handed' introducing their latest single 'Alone (It's not so bad)' from the forthcoming album 'The Fire And The Sigh'.
The sports roundup mourns the death of Rob Daley, the father of young British diver, Tom Daley and provides the exciting and predictable conclusion to Andy's London Olympics ticket saga.
We also look at Wimbledon, or at least the footage of Pippa Middleton and a pretty blonde lady sucking on a strawberry in a suggestive manner.
Episode 6 - 'Get Your CoCs Out' (1h 36m 06s).
Ogg (mono): TINAP6.ogg (30.0MB)
Ogg (stereo): TINAP6stereo.ogg (36.6MB)
MP3 (mono): TINAP6.mp3 (33.0MB)
Running order
00:46 Dick Turpin's is 19 inches long
01:11 In praise of The Dick Turpin Roadshow
01:25 Shall we try and do this better ?
03:00 The bells, the bells !
05:58 Finger Lickin' good !
06:34 Coca Cola Light considered harmful
08:15 Sponsored by 'So near, so Spar'
09:09 Plucking is extra
11:04 Self calibration
12:26 Calls for abuse via audio
13:30 CoC !
14:41 We do what we want
16:24 Just kill me
17:00 Richard Cutts is a tightly coiled spring
18:21 Free love
18:44 CoC assignment for all guests
21:58 XMPP's broken. Again
22:12 What would David do ?
22:50 Crush with byliner
26:44 1 million StatusNet instances ?
30:37 Corporate bullshit
33:04 Whistle right, left wheel
36:43 Zoom on that
39:00 Room x11r5
44:37 Prolonged, ear splitting, loud feedback
46:32 Farmyard noises most welcome
46:55 Dictaphone at Morrisons
50:15 My other laptop is a data centre
52:42 Then I saw the light, embraced freedom and grew a beard
55:22 I often hit the hotspot
58:00 Linux Outlaws - best Linux podcast !
58:30 Jousting on horses at OggCamp
60:48 John Peel under the covers
61:00 Grits for tea, Ma'am
62:00 Portuguese sirens
62:28 See you in court
64:18 I'm a Communist
66:44 Camden's full of tossers
68:33 Humping the lift counterweight
71:17 Just an old folk band
72:11 Morrissey is murder
74:00 Coldplay rant
75:11 U2 turn Yellow
78:12 Music: I Am Not Left Handed - 'Alone (It's not so bad)'
82:54 Gonna be a rock journalist
83:23 Commuter rant
83:50 Buy some bloody shoes
84:04 Impatience on the iPad
85:01 Walk fast in a straight line !
86:23 Luke loses at Waterloo
89:07 Olympics tickets verdict
89:43 Super Sloppy Seconds
93:18 Suck on my strawberry
95:12 Emotional farewells
Further Reading
The Parlementum site provides a live preview of the look and feel of StatusNet 1.0.
The history of Fab's Telecaster from the man himself:
The guitar is called Leilani and started life as a Made in Mexico (MIM) Standard Telecaster with sunburst finish. I bought it in 2004. I have since changed the neck (the current neck is from a MIM Baja Tele) and stripped down the paint on the body. I've refurbished it late last year in vintage blonde myself. The electronics are all custom by now with a modded Leosounds neck pickup and a 52' RI bridge pickup and corresponding old-style bridge. I've also build in an S3-switch and change the whole cabling while shielding the inside as well. So in short, it's a true Frankencaster now, all modded to hell but exactly as I like it.
Dan Lynch's excellent review of Unity.
Podcast Watch
Celebrity Feedback
'My main 'Takeway' from TINAP 6 was the Takeaways' - Tim Bray
The long awaited episode 5 finally emerges and welcomes Ed Morgan (mo6020) to share a can of Red Stripe on the virtual sofa. We hold Ed to his bold promise that 'TINAP is awesome and could only be improved by me appearing on the show'. Ed is forced to endure the standard 'This Is Not A Podcast' initiation ceremony of waiting for a full 75 minutes while Andy fails to configure his audio from a Cairo hotel room (again).
However, the show must go on and the 'ABORT ABORT ABORT' message broadcast on identi.ca is subsequently aborted with just seconds to spare. Which was nice.
Ed tries to make up for the fact he isn't a Geordie by telling us he in possession of a stolen respirator unit from the British Army.
The gang attempt to spice up the show - mainly for r7's benefit - with occasional hidden, oblique references to The Fall.
In tribute to our newly married Prince and Princess, we blast out a hearty rendition of the National Anthem (apart from the staunch Republican David) although, inevitably, his resolve weakened and he joined in.
The new, exciting 'Errata' section, detailing all our cock ups and mishtakes with fulsome apologies to all and sundry, lasts most of the show.
Ed gets his guitar out to introduce the legendary 'Feedback' section as we review Richard Fontana's assorted and cryptic thoughts on the show.
Luke tries and fails to impersonate an ocean liner by blowing over a can of Kronenburg 1664.
'Podcast Watch' reviews the inaugural epsiode of The Dick Turpin Road Show tdtrs featuring Dick Turpin and Matt chatting en-route in a car (with the radio on) to Rathole Radio in Liverpool.
We fuel rumours of another UK based podcast being fermented in Scotland by Gordon Sinclair and Kevie (with occasional random contributions from weeguy).
Andy reviews the Royal Wedding street party and bemoans his defeat in the scooter racing to a four year old girl.
Luke spends 3 days scanning a BBC panoramic HD photo of Daily Mail readers thronging the mall and manages to locate an idiot proudly waving a stick minus his flag attachment.
Kjetil Hoiseth (hz) kindly offers his Mumble server and also spends 47 minutes playing the ever popular TINAP game - 'Listen to Andy swearing a lot and failing to configure his audio (again)'.
Andy celebrates his 30,000th dent and bores everyone rigid by reading out assorted highlights from his first 10,000.
'Innovation Watch' is hugely impressed by James Robertson's (jrobertson) recent attempts to remember 40 random numbers overnight and David senses a business opportunity here as a lastpass alternative.
We wonder whether Google's Chromebook will appeal to Auntie Betty and Uncle Harry and whether a price of £349 is too much for Yorkshire people.
The inevitable Gnome 3/Unity discussion ensues and Ed impresses everyone with the fact that his Dad is a serial distro hopper.
Episode 5 - 'Canny Bag O'Tudor' (1h 10m 03s).
Ogg (mono):
TINAP5.ogg (24.5MB)
Ogg (stereo): TINAP5stereo.ogg (28.9MB)
MP3 (mono): TINAP5.mp3 (24.1MB)
Running order
0:00 It's a long story…
1:00 Press the eject button and stand well back
1:22 Welcome to Ed Morgan
2:49 Screaming baby alert
4:37 They shoot deserters don't they?
5:34 Massive truncation of everything
6:27 The National Anthem
8:58 Sir George Michael of Hampstead Heath
11:08 The I Am Not Lefthanded fiasco
13:02 Something else we said we'd never ever do
14:00 Jon The Not So Nice Guy
15:04 Serial killers, beards and Germans
18:00 Disturbing feedback
20:50 When the boat comes in
22:50 Microsoft Skype
24:46 Listen to The Fall
28:08 Podcast Watch
31:20 Celebrity Watch
33:04 Alternative Vote
34:38 The Royal Wedding
37:19 This is episode 6
38:45 Waking up with a Haiku
40:35 Andy's 30k dents
45:20 The Maxime Pelletier Slot
46:15 Innovation
48:18 Chromebook
52:23 Unity and Gnome 3
1:01:13 Internet dating
1:03:28 RIP Seve and 'Enery
1:05:23 Football roundup
1:06:26 Fog On The Tyne
Further Reading
Kate Middleton wastes no time in getting down to her royal duties.
We attempt to appease Jon The Nice Guy (jontheniceguy) by mentioning his Top of the Creative Commons Music Charts site.
ScaryDuck notes a worrying but undeniable correlation between bearded people and prolific serial killers.
If you've never heard of The Fall before, people tend to love them or hate them. This video, from a recent show in Paris, gives a flavour of lead singer's Mark. E Smith's unique singing style, the current lineup and the superlative wall of noise.
A couple of brave United fans display a '19' banner at Anfield during 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.
The intrepid trio produce episode 4 using Mumble, an open source VOIP technology. This strategic decision costs TINAP £750,000 in lost sponsorship from Skype but that's the price you pay to fully embrace freedom.
Luke is fairly subdued after getting his GSOC application rejection letter and drinking large quantities of absinthe the night before.
In a effort to create recursive meta-meta recursion and avoid paying any more royalties, David creates some genuine real-life feedback for the 'Feedback' section using an electric guitar.
Prompted by Marie Axelsson, the chaps convene an Extraordinary General Meeting live on-air to discuss whether the pros and cons of the Flattr micro-payment system and why Andy's OCD means a Flattr badge is unlikely to appear on the TINAP site.
Andy foolishly writes his own P45 by discussing Oracle's decision to reliquish control of OpenOffice but thinks whispering will help.
Andy reviews Android clients for identi.ca, feels slightly queasy at the amount of Twitter-speak he encounters and ultimately finds no compelling application to dislodge the wonderful Mustard.
We confront the thorny issue of meta micro blogcasting, addiction and, unlike many podcasts, provide Samaritans style guidance on how to cope with suicidal feelings.
We are forced to confront an oversized grey animal sitting quietly in the corner of the studio and Luke separates Josh and Gordon outside a virtual public house, screaming 'Come on now. Come on. Just leave it. He's not worth it, mate'.
'Podcast Watch' unearths a gem of a podcast from Down Under complete with suboptimal audio, hilarious show notes and two men babbling on and laughing at their own jokes. Kudos to Matthew Davidson and Ruben who produce the wonderful Sawtell podcast. In fact, it's so good we immediately launched a successful DDOS attack to bring their servers down.
Luke enjoys the monthly Libre.fm podcast which showcases the most popular freely available music while David hates all podcasts and podcasters.
David and Andy both enjoyed the simultaneous video and audio streams from the Rathole Radio Live gig from Liverpool but were unable to attend the event in person due to their Mancunian accents.
In response to popular demand, the football section is extended to cover the exciting climax to the domestic season, Champions League semi-finals and the outpourings of idiotic footballers on Twitter.
In other news, Andy has secured a second mortgage and applied in the ballot for London 2012 Olympics tickets primarily to see girls in leotards and men sporting miniscule Speedo swimming trunks.
Episode 4 - 'One take, no overdubs' (1h 11m 0s).
Ogg (mono): TINAP4.ogg (23.2MB)
Ogg (stereo): TINAP4stereo.ogg (27.2MB)
MP3 (mono): TINAP4.mp3 (24.4MB)
Running order
0:00 A message from our sponsors
0:40 Ready to Mumble
1:17 Andy's impressions
2:39 Why we use Mumble
3:39 Luke's GSoC #fail
4:44 Our Mumble set up
5:50 Getting started with Mumble
7:03 Mumble features
7:54 Top secret guest list
8:28 Live feedback
9:40 How did I miss this?
11:16 My work here is done
12:50 Monetising TINAP
13:50 Megapayments > Flattr
20:27 Oracle and OpenOffice.org
23:32 Status Net clients for Android
26:07 IdentiCurse for Android 'not really very useful'
26:50 Identi.ca killed my blog
33:45 Cold turkey, addiction and suicide
36:20 The elephant in the room
40:56 Sawtel podcast
43:36 Libre.fm podcast
44:27 Rathole Radio Live
45:43 The Place That Won't Take Me Back by I Am Not Lefthanded
51:01 Rowche Mumble
53:16 Denticator all time world wankings
54:24 The Fall's Rowche Rumble
56:10 Welsh sports roundup
56:33 Girls in leotards / Olympic tickets update
1:00:26 Tick tock
1:02:13 Footballing Twitters
1:03:56 Imploding Arsenal
1:07:12 'United' TV drama
1:09:55 The Royal Wedding
1:10:49 Outtakes
Further Reading
Mumble - the only game in town for open source VOIP. This episode used a free 10 slot Mumble server kindly provided by our new sponsors, UK Game.
A proud moment - identi.ca founder Evan bookmarks TINAP with the immortal tag #howdidimissthis.
ArseTechnica's coverage of Oracle's decision to relinquish control of OpenOffice and hand it over to the community.
Maloki is in charge of FlattrChattr and Linux Outlaws used Flattr to help fund the Minecraft server
StatusNet have had five projects accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2011.
StatusNet clients for Android
We are forced to confront the elephant in the corner of the room.
If you missed the excellent Rathole Radio Live, episode 51 of the podcast includes a comprehensive roundup including the sets from all three bands.
Music - 'The Place That Won't Take Me Back' by the wonderful 'I Am Not Left Handed'
Matthew and Ruben's excellent Sawtell podcast and the Libre.fm podcast.
Another reason not to use Twitter. Wayne Rooney [although the account appears to have been subsequently removed] is there but Darron Gibson picked up his ball and went home.
David ('Mystic Meg') forecasted the outcome of Arsenal's season a full 8 months ago.
BBC's powerful and moving drama - United tells the story of the Munich air crash in 1958 where 23 people lost their lives.
David foolishly upgraded to Skype 2.2 beta and lost the ability to speak. This hiccup nearly sabotaged episode 3 and embarrassed us as we welcome Gordon Sinclair (thistleweb) as our first guest on the virtual sofa.
Gordon's an experienced podcaster on TechBytes and Hacker Public Radio and has also produced a series of excellent screencasts which are invaluable for any novice/intermediate Mint and Drupal users.
This episode is dedicated to the memory of dearly, departed listener Maxime Pelletier. To paraphrase the CRM saying, 'It takes years to acquire a new listener and seconds to lose one'.
His damning words still haunt us so we open the broadcast in French just for Maxime.
Sorry, but can't listen to the first episode of #tinap. It's giving me an headache.
Inspired by episode 200 of Linux Outlaws and in answer to hundreds of enquiries from listeners ('How the hell do you produce audio of that quality ?'), we describe the comprehensive and expensive studio setup and audio equipment that powers 'This Is Not A Podcast'.
Clearly this is very complicated to describe so David helpfully created a 'schematic' to illustrate our infrastructure.
We bask in the glory of our first written review from Dick Turpin who loves the 'running order' and celebrate the creation of the !tinap group on identi.ca.
We discuss whether Direct Messages are useful and consider Bradley Kuhn's idea for a 'Must Read' list which is coming in StatusNet 1.0.
We commit to taking frostbite up on his very kind offer of making a Mumble server available that may meet our simple podcasting needs. Mumble/Murmur is an open source VOIP solution that may enable us to uninstall Skype and lose that lucrative sponsorship deal.
Oil is poured over recent controversies regarding Skype (yawn), KDE versus Gnome and CrunchBang's decision to use BitTorrent as the sole means of distribution.
In response to feedback, the unpopular 'Sport' section completely ignores football and focusses instead on Sheepdog Trials in Wales.
Episode 3 - 'My Unicycle Has A Puncture' (54m 57s).
Ogg (mono): TINAP3mono.ogg (13.7MB)
Ogg (stereo): TINAP3.ogg (17.7MB)
MP3 (mono): TINAP3.mp3 (18.7MB)
Communitise the community and use BitTorrent.
Running order (accurate to 1/10 second)
00:00 Mon monocycle a une crevaison
00:26 Och aye the noo, Gordon!
01:15 TechBytes
02:24 Hacker Public Radio
03:03 Linux Mint and Drupal
04:19 TINAP Sound System
05:09 I don't really want to bring it to people's attention
05:41 I thought it was some phallic symbol
06:32 Stereo for life
08:11 It was a bit ropey
09:52 @dickturpin's review
11:44 How to deal with a bad review
12:02 Free sex
13:16 We're all big boys and we can take it
13:41 Short fat hairy legs
15:11 Where recursive acronyms lead
16:38 I'm not Welsh!
17:45 A bit like the French
19:01 The best thing to come out of Scotland
20:03 The mouse in my room
21:18 Andy's Inner Circle of Trust vapourware
22:55 Identica > Twitter
23:57 I'm taking my bra off
25:15 Self-promotion
26:32 Kevin Smith
27:33 Skype is the only game in town
29:13 We've got a very strict timetable
30:42 Skype War
33:00 Rowche Mumble
34:07 KDE War
36:59 OpenSuse 11.4
37:42 Gloating GNOME people
38:15 Torrentgate
40:13 CrunchBang
42:10 Ubuntu GNOME Remix and Elementary OS
43:52 Sheep shaving and Caerphilly cheese
46:09 Yoga not yoghurt
47:03 Tea break
48:11 Has Fernando Torres Scored For Chelsea? (via @rpcutts http://identi.ca/notice/70933762 )
49:15 Any predictions, Luke?
50:12 Music - 'Jimmy Carter' by 20lb Sounds
54:02 Outtakes
Further Reading
Many thanks to our special guest Gordon for appearing on the show. Gordon has produced a series of excellent Drupal/Mint screencasts and blogs over at Digital Prism. Gordon also presents a podcast which is a podcast - TechBytes.
Dick Turpin (who is not an ageing, bald headed highwayman from Wolverhampton) was kind enough to post a detailed review of 'This Is Not A Podcast'.
Stav created an identi.ca group !tinap for tinap enthusiasts with a brilliant logo.
Richard makes Andy's life complete by inventing a recursive acronym for 'tinap'.
Gordon recommends two British TV comedies - 'Absolutely' and 'Still Game' and would like film producer Kevin Smith (Smodcast) to have a presence on identi.ca.
Jonathan, who produces a series of 'This Week in…' podcasts kindly offers TINAP access to a Mumble server to evaluate this open source VOIP technology.
This week's heated discussions on identi.ca
David is 'keeping an eye on' Ubuntu Gnome Remix. [The phrase 'keeping an eye on' is © Linux Outlaws and appears with kind permission of Dan.]
Bradley Kuhn's suggestion for a 'Must Read' list and Evan's response with similar functionality coming in StatusNet 1.0.
Andy's logical extrapolation of this concept is the 'Inner Circle of Trust'.
Andy's idiotic decision to run 'yum update', within hours of the broadcast, screws his Fedora 15 ('Mother's Meaty Beefballs') laptop up completely but David saves the situation by recommending he uses his Android phone to preserve his suboptimal audio quality and high dropout rate.
Luke decides to abstain by drinking Diet Coke while Andy and David slowly get inebriated to numb the pain.
The Unholy Triumvirate review (mostly positive) feedback from listeners for episode 1 so thanks to all of you who listened and contributed.
We are delighted to discover than Google Listen delivers the damning verdict: "'This is not a podcast' is not recognised as a podcast". Comprehensive testing shows that most podcatchers and RSS readers work fine with TINAP while all the rubbish ones don't.
Luke talks about the application process for the Google Summer of Code, we all take a look at the recently released Habari 0.7 blogging platform and Andy gives his first impressions of the Gnome 3 desktop environment.
Fab is not mentioned in this episode at all. Well not often anyway.
We then correctly forecast the results of all this week's Champions League fixtures and look at Michael Jackson's erection in South West London.
David ponders on the relative lack of coverage on identi.ca of the situation in Libya and Andy explodes on a political rant and then drops off (again).
This podcast is all about freedom so, in an exciting development, this episode is now available in glorious stereo and good old fashioned mono. Just hunt high and low for a 'Mono' button on your music player and your channels will be equalised.
Episode #2 File: TINAP2.ogg Duration: 1h 12m 30s Size: 28.8 MB
MP3: TINAP2.mp3 Size: 24.9 MB
This is not a podcast is not in stereo for all the mono lovers.
0:00 Jambo!
0:50 Lenny Henry's purple hotel chain
1:20 Corenominal's mo-no button
1:42 In Belgium they speak several different languages
2:03 Is this show just gonna be 'what Fab said next'?
2:56 Getting down with the kidz
3:25 How to make a podcast
4:14 From The Pub
5:14 Configuring Arch
6:44 #tinap feedback
7:40 The winner of the first TINAP free draw
8:40 Thank you to everyone who listened
8:55 The Identi.ca review show
9:49 One of the few people whose business is up
10:18 The vision
11:06 Do you know any pilots?
12:23 Country yokel special
13:02 The posh show with Luke
13:16 Don't make episode 2
14:10 The show must go on
14:44 Some other things that didn't work #metapodacasting
15:13 This is not a podcast is not recognised as a podcast
16:23 Nothing to do with lingerie
17:15 It's not worth repeating
18:53 Habari?
20:08 Wordpress
20:57 Using and contributing to the Habari project
25:43 Developments on Identi.ca
26:24 Google Summer of Code
27:53 Libre.fm and GNU Social
28:25 Freelish.us
29:28 The linkblogger king from Australia
30:15 Hampr.com
30:42 It's totally, totally awesome!
31:40 The reason I stopped using bookmarks
32:17 Diigo
32:58 He had a Brazilian did he?
33:27 Frank's red jelly castle
34:31 Congratulations to Robyn and Becky
35:22 Move to Wales and walk up hills
37:00 First against the wall !fatw
37:57 What. Fuck. What.
38:48 What was that wailing noise?
39:26 The difference between !groups and #tags
39:52 TechBytes podcast
40:25 I am !enraged! !ffs
43:10 Unity
44:11 April Fools
45:38 Swift
46:00 Brion Vibber joining Gwibber?
46:11 We've had enough of your attention seeking
46:55 With your trilby hat on and your bayonet
48:02 Torres hasn't scored yet
48:57 The massacre of Upton Park
49:46 Michael Jackson's erection
50:21 The Aussie captain who lost three Ashes series
50:54 London Olympics 2012
52:00 Luke and the sheepdog trials
52:27 What's telematics?
53:15 Clive King
55:30 The awkward second unarmed uprising syndrome #libya
60:15 Fire drill
1:01:02 !Listening to #music
1:01:33 Björn & Gorden - Electrr - IV
1:04:54 Violet Youth - Together
1:10:22 Donations
1:10:34 How to deal with a bad review
1:10:59 We need to start loving each other a bit more
1:11:48 One day I'll be like the rest of you and normal
1:12:10 Outtakes
Interesting links
How to make a podcast (Episode 200, soon to be released)by Linux Outlaws.
From The Pub, Adam Wilcox's podcast.
Feedback for the show in Identi.ca.
Becky puts us to shame by running a long way. You can still sponsor Becky's effort for charity.
Robyn also completes a marathon while her lesser half Frank sits at home building castles made out of cheese skins, listening to The Fall asking 'When will dinner be ready ?'
Rob Connolly is busy working on an Android podcatcher called SwallowCatcher.
Habari - a blogging platform with a minimalist GUI and a lean core written in Object Oriented PHP. Habari also includes a brilliant community providing help, support and jokes. Habari 0.7 was released last week.
Adam WIlcox's useful tips on podcasting using Tumblr and his own 'From The Pub' podcast.
Status Net announce Freelish.us and the world says 'Is this an April Fool ?'
Hampr is an alternative bookmarks manager that uses a Firefox extension (rather than a bookmarklet) developed by fo0bar.
XMPP enthusiasts might be interested in Swift - a new XMPP client developed by remko and kevin.
Andy proudly takes delivery of the Exadata rack for Linux Outlaws.
The origins of the This is not a podcast 'Vision'. Inevitably, this was a piss-take.
Luke attends a talk by Clive King of Sun about the complexity of different programming languages.
Unfortunately, the book review where the author popped in to respond with 'Fuck off' has now been removed but it will live long in the memory. And the Google cache.
Follow http://exador.status.net/ for Libya updates.
thistleweb's excellent set of screencasts on Drupal and Mint and the TechBytes podcast.
Musical credits
'Together' by Violet Youth.
In this inaugural episode, David, Luke and Andy conquer technology and eventually manage to talk to each other using a variety of VOIP technologies. David then succeeds in recording the resulting antics.
This bizarre 'Menage A Trois' address the thorny issue of naming this podcast and take a light hearted look at recent events on identi.ca, stir up recent
flame fests passionate discussions, ponder on the attractions of Minecraft and then pay a fulsome tribute to the best dent of all time as well as a fleeting look at football and politics.
The spontaneous and unexpected interruptions for the fire alarm and room service were not beautifully crafted comedy moments - just a welcome accident of timing.
This broadcast was conducted via freedom hating (and new sponsors) Skype complete in full Dolby stereo. The audio quality is pretty good given Andy was located deep in Osama Bin Laden's cave with a kettle on his head.
Kudos to David for a sterling job on the incredibly time consuming and tedious task of converting Gigabytes of rambling, stuttering audio from a short 3 minute show with 72 minutes of out-takes into what became episode #1.
The main driver behind this experiment was purely the fun and enjoyment we all get from the discussions and interesting people on identi.ca. Many thanks to all the folk who post there and to Evan and the StatusNet team for creating this open source micro blogging platform which made it all possible.
We're new to this. We made a few (lots - Ed) mistakes. We're not professional podcasters. We don't use studio microphones. We don't record separate audio streams. We're unlikely to be able to give up our day jobs.
However, if you have anything to say; constructive, abusive or anything inbetween, please run, don't walk, to the 'Feedback' section.
Episode #1 File: TINAP1.ogg Duration: 1h 12m 24s Size: 17.5 MB
MP3: TINAP1.mp3 Size: 24.6MB
This is not a podcast is not in stereo for all the mono lovers.
00:00 Intro
00:25 Protesting about not being able to protest
01:10 I am probably angry about something
02:17 The Hound of the Baskervilles
04:32 Good moaning Vietnam
05:10 I'm about to carry a bag of sand
06:00 Blinking morse code
06:40 This is not a podcast
07:20 Operation Sandbags At Dawn
07:28 Another Freedom do - Flaming Fab
08:07 Endorsing OggComp and Oracle's commitment to Freedom
09:25 I believe I was inebriated at the time
10:35 <Skype endorsement>
11:57 Ruby dicks
12:19 Holy nuclear war
13:43 <Skype enforcement>
14:46 Ruby dickheads
15:12 You're still angry - you're just worse at it
17:10 Twitter migration
18:58 Spam
20:18 !Twitterfree
22:25 Scores on the Doors
24:28 Time travel
25:50 Fire drill
26:08 Where were we?
27:30 #whyidenticarocks
28:57 The new Identica
30:25 StatusNet 1.0 - fork it!
33:53 API - in Evan we trust
35:07 #s Hashtags
35:52 #disturbing
36:54 Popey and Fab have agreed about something
37:23 That is all
37:59 Someone's gone off to the east!
39:20 Room service
40:22 And suddenly, it's 4am three weeks later
41:44 #Whinecraft
44:17 Mr & Mrs
45:09 Fuck the system
48:42 We just need another flame war
49:17 And then these fucking horrendous bras arrived
50:33 Lock up your daughters
51:20 Learning how to use Unix systems
52:40 Can anyone remember what I just said?
54:17 For God's sake, talk to people!
56:05 The British Broadcasting Cunts
58:20 Aberystwyth riots
59:25 Pissed off with the police
1:00:02 Cambridge riots
1:00:50 London riots
1:01:44 <Endorsing acupuncture>
1:02:01 Benefit scrounging scum
1:03:36 I will get it up at some point
1:04:21 Welfare to work
1:05:44 #BigSociety
1:07:14 The Wolfman of Alberquerque
1:08:00 On the way out with Mario Bibotelli
1:10:56 I was not fazed in the slightest
1:11:41 Outtakes
Further reading
We fully appreciate you may not use identi.ca and even if you do, you may not read every single dent posted by every single person so here's some handy links to the various issues discussed.
If you see a story below and think 'Hey - they never discussed that', well we did so turn your computer off, turn the TV/boyfriend/husband/partner off and listen to the entire show again. From the start. Carefully.
People often write in and ask 'Why ?'
Michael Stipe explains:
'This really is not a show. This is a live rehearsal. This is the first time we are attempting this experiment in terror.'
Clearly, the answer, left for readers to arrive at on their own, is that these "successful" US airstrikes in Iraq must be carried over into Syria - where mission creep can do the rest, finally dislodging the Syrian government from power after an ongoing proxy war has failed to do so since 2011. After arming and aiding the Kurds in fighting ISIS in Iraq, the US will attempt to make a similar argument regarding the arming of terrorists in Syria and providing them direct US air support to defeat ISIS - and of course - Damascus.In less than 24 hours, the New York Times would report in its article, "U.S. General Says Raiding Syria Is Key to Halting ISIS," that:
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria cannot be defeated unless the United States or its partners take on the Sunni militants in Syria, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday.
"This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated," said the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, in his most expansive public remarks on the crisis since American airstrikes began in Iraq. "Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no."The NYT would also report:
Airstrikes in Syria would also draw the White House more deeply into a conflict from which it has sought to maintain some distance. But there is also risk in not acting, because it is very difficult to defeat a militant group that is allowed to maintain a sanctuary.And finally, the NYT would claim:
Another step that some experts say will be needed to challenge the militant groups is a stepped-up program to train, advise and equip the moderate opposition in Syria as well as Kurdish and government forces in Iraq.In reality, US special forces and other Western operatives have been inside and operating in Syria for years. The only missing ingredient the US seeks to justify is direct, open military intervention including airstrikes on Syrian territory.
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
ISIL [ISIS] is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen," Hagel said. "They're beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. Oh, this is beyond anything that we've seen. So we must prepare for everything.
Your brain needs to forget in order to grow.
The mainstream media is hyping the "biggest ever" Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We are told that the dread disease, which produces symptoms like something out of a horror movie, is spreading to the USA. Some Americans are canceling their vacations and refusing to fly, believing that they might catch Ebola on an airplane. People […]
The post Ebola Threat: Real Or False Flag? appeared first on The Total Collapse.
Leo Abse MP on dealing with George Thomas MP's young blackmailer:
"Over the years, given his exposed position, it was inevitable that he would fall victim to blackmail. On one occasion, after a distraught recounting to me of the pressure upon him, I insisted I would meet and deal with the young criminal in his constituency into whose hands he had fallen.
My reputation in Cardiff's criminal underworld stood me in good stead in dealing with the wretch. As a lawyer, I had often acted in the courts on behalf of the local prosecution department, and even more frequently, I had defended the city's gangsters. As one-time chairman of the watch committee, I had the duty of supervising the local police.
The blackmailing cur, therefore, had no doubt that, unless he desisted, I would carry out my threat to ensure he was put behind bars for 10 years; shortly after our encounter he found it was politic to quit the city."
Leo Abse MP on how George Thomas MP helped Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe escape prosecution for 'a homosexual offence against a minor':
"Yet the slightest tremor of scandal, however faintly reverberating into his private domain, reduced him to jelly. One such ocasion was in 1976 when, summoned to his sitting-room in the Speaker's house, I found him grey-faced and trembling. Investigative journalists, some from the BBC, were pursuing inquiries into the then Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe.
They had evidently reached the conclusion that, some 16 years earlier, under a Conservative government, politival intervention had saved Thorpe from being prosecuted for a homosexual offence against a minor. They also believed that, when Thorpe became embroiled in another scandal in 1964, he feared that the records in the Home Office of his earlier misbehaviour would wreck his efforts to free himself of his new dilemma.
The journalists had discovered that Thorpe – using his friend, the fraudulent Liberal MP Peter Bessell, as an intermediary – had turned to George, who was then a parliamentary under-secretary at the Home Office, for help. Yielding to Bessell's importuning, George had set up a private meeting between Bessell and the home secretary."
Police are currently investigating allegations that George Thomas MP raped a nine-year-old boy. BBC News
Sunday Times, 18th March 2001
The captive is bound. The device is ready. The hour is here. How you and your comrades act in the next few minutes will determine whether the captive dies today or lives on.
You've got your reasons for ending that life. No-one was ever executed without a reason: politics, philosophy, profit or pleasure. Usually a handful of those. The stage has been set long before dawn.
Executions differ in the details but in essence think the same way: that this single human life is worth less than the point being made or the benefit being sought.
When a jihadist beheads a journalist for propaganda we see this clearly. We're outraged and rightly so. We see the naked politics, the lustful exercise of power, the callous indifference to human suffering and the value of life. We condemn it.
When the state lawfully executes a criminal many of us find it harder to see the same things, but they're there just the same, dressed respectably.
Some people have done great harm: They have murdered, destroyed, betrayed us. Some are unrepentant or indifferent. We may need to stop them doing future harm. We may want to show our rejection of their values and actions. But that doesn't need us to end this life here today. Nothing does.
So it comes down to this: The bound captive, defenceless. The lethal weapon ready. The clock striking the hour. And us, ready to lower the blade or to say no: not for this reason, not for any reason. No matter what they've done, no matter what we want. Ready to say: Not for this person, not for anyone. Not for you and not for us. Always and everywhere. Loudly.
I have studied in particular the Hindu philosophy of the Gita and other major philosophical works. I have further studied the Vabishya Purana (It is a lesser text of Hindu scriptures that predict future course of actions taken by humans in the age that was to follow). By the term "age" the author of the purana was describing the time that will follow after the advent of Yavans (Greeks and Muslims) in India.
These scriptures tell us to watch out for 6 vices- Excessive sexual urge, Excessive anger, Excessive greed, Excessive attachment, Excessive indulgence in intoxicants, and Indulgence in bestiality in any form. These vices will represent the Satan. The increase of these vices will be proportional to increase in the power of the Satan.
The Satan is but the filth that keeps accumulating in a sieve from the beginning of the sieving process of any substance. Life and its activities constitute the substances, which when filtered through the sieve of time will accumulate these filth as a infallible process of existence.
The texts tell us about the activities of humans that will tell us the amazing powers of the Satan that slowly spreads its wings amongst us. It says, that in future some marked unique activities would be considered normal. To quote a few-
1. Girls and boys as little as 8 years will start bearing children.
2. The only virtue of a woman will be money
3. What is a Satanic (Tamasik) ritual will be considered holy, while a Vedic ritual will be considered foolish.
4. Thieves will rule the world and will steal every penny out of the poor.
5. The poor will be driven to live life like nomads, in hiding
6. Jokes will be the measure of one's intelligence
7. Gods will be held hostage to Shudras (lowly people) while the Brahmins (Brahma Gyani- the enlightened ones) will have to take their permission to enter the temple.
8. Water will be so scarce that even a small puddle will become a holy place
9. There will be no regard to human life
10. Mind will be utterly delusional so as to differentiate between right and wrong….
The list is long.
But I am amazed at the accuracy of both these scriptures, and the basis of such actions pinpointed in these 6 vices long before we have been experiencing the Satan amongst us. The particular topic we are talking about is pure bestiality.
The Satanic cult must have been there, and you are very right in pointing it out through accepted scientific research.
I wish your work will be taken up by mainstream media and highlighted, so that these activities do not remain secret. Satan wins as long as it can keep itself hidden. The moment we are aware about it, it has no other option but to retreat.
The post Satan in the Hindu Scriptures appeared first on The Vigilant Citizen.
According to The Wire, he went missing near Aleppo, Syria, on Aug. 4, and his family said they were aware of the situation but did not want to publicize the information. He was being held in Raqqa.
Warnings from an international research group and the Federal Aviation Administration underscore the rising threat to commercial aircraft posed by hundreds of anti-aircraft weapons that are now in the arsenals of armed groups in Syria and could easily be diverted to extremist factions.
Armed groups opposing the Assad regime in Syria have already amassed an estimated several hundred portable anti-aircraft missiles that are highly mobile, difficult to track and accurate enough to destroy low-flying passenger planes, according to a new report by Small Arms Survey, a respected Switzerland-based research organization that analyzes the global flow of weapons.
With depressing frequency in this summer of diverse horrors, we hear tales of desperate human misery, suffering and depravity – and because we live now in an era where virtually every phone is a globally connected camera, we are confronted with graphic evidence of tragedy.
The footage of the apparent beheading (to refer to the atrocity as an execution serves only to lend a veneer of dignity to barbarism) of the US photojournalist James Foley at the hands of a British Isis extremist has raised particularly strong feelings.
Social networks are banning users who share the footage. Newspapers are facing opprobrium for the choices they make in showing stills or parts of the video. Others, of course, will seek out the video after seeing the row, or else post it around the internet in a juvenile form of the free speech argument.
Before considering the rights and wrongs of the position, there is one fact we should face: we are presented with images of grotesque violence on a daily basis. Last month the New York Times ran on its front page the dead and broken body of a Palestinian child.
Like Foley, that child was someone's son, someone's brother, someone's friend, and in a connected world there is just as much chance his family saw the photo and its spread as Foley's will see the latest awful images of their loved one.
That photo raised little controversy in comparison to the use of images of Foley. Photos of groups of civilian men massacred by Isis across Iraq and Syria – widely shared on social media and used by publications across the world – caused no outcry whatsoever.
It's hard to look at that and not see a double standard: like many other courageous and talented people, Foley had chosen to travel to the region, and knew the risks that entailed. Others were killed simply fleeing their homes. In a strange and bitter irony, one of the duties of photographers such as Foley is documenting bloodshed in order to show the world.
To see an outcry for Foley's video and not for others is to wonder whether we are disproportionately concerned over showing graphic deaths of white westerners – maybe even white journalists – and not others.
That's not to say there aren't good reasons for outlets to think hard when selecting what, if anything, from the footage they should show. Foley's apparent beheading was released not at the editorial decision of a photojournalist, but as a propaganda tool by thugs. Outlets should consider whether they are furthering or challenging such aims when they use such images.
There is also simple human decency, and the difficult trade-off of not insulating comfortable western audiences from the world's horrors, while not needlessly causing a dead person's loved ones additional suffering by showing gratuitously violent imagery.
The Guardian's stance on Foley is a demonstration of the fine balance of those decisions: at present, one image of Foley from the video is used, but not as a lead picture. None of his forced speech is portrayed, and the short audio elements from the video – some of his murderer's speech – have been used against a still image.
But more relevant by far is the choice each of us makes about whether to view the many horrifying real-life murder videos that circulate the internet. Before clicking, serious self-examination is required: why do you want to see this? Do you need to see it to understand something important? Still deeper self-examination should certainly be engaged before even contemplating sharing such material.
It's that self-examination, or self-censorship, that best serves ourselves. As individuals, we're making very different decisions to publishers and news outlets, but we should trust our own judgment rather than rush to ask social media companies to become the arbiters of our free expression on a knee-jerk basis.
There is a coda to this tale, another aspect of James Foley's life that is also being shared far and wide across the world. It is the short statement by his mother, released on his Facebook page.
"We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people," her statement began.
It has already been shared more than 2,500 times. This is how we win: not by suppressing the worst of us, but by sharing and saluting the best – people such as Foley and his family.
(sadly not satire – it's the UK today)
There are now numerous cases of terminally sick cancer patients being told by the DWP they are unable to receive sickness benefit because they are supposedly 'fit for work'.
The latest victim of the coalition government's slashing of help and support for the sick, disabled and dying was Chris Smith, a plumber from Leicester with terminal cancer who died last month:
Help for the sick and disabled in the UK has now effectively disappeared and the welfare state – in England and Wales at least – has already gone.
Here's the proof that sick people – even cancer patients – are now regarded as malingerers:
Thousands of Cancer Patients Wait For Six Months or More For Disability Benefits
Cancer patients to lose up to £94 a week
DWP blames cancer patient for her illness
Mother's plea for son who lost benefits after missing signing on because of cancer operation
Throat cancer victim – "this is not the England they fought and died for!"
Let's be clear – Tory and Lib Dem MPs have decided terminally ill patients should work or starve
40% of cancer patients can't afford to heat their home properly
Man living on flour and water and woman forced to stop chemotherapy
Life in the PIP queue: One year and counting for claimant with cancer
Cancer sufferer left penniless after waiting six months for vital financial help
Cancer sufferer loses disabilty benefits appeal
Benefits office 'treating me like a liar', says Dundee cancer sufferer
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Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a form of psychotherapy that was popularized in the 1990s. It is based on the premise that people with mental illnesses experience cognitive distortions, and that these distorted, broken patterns of thought are responsible for their feelings of depression and distress.
One of the cognitive distortions identified by cognitive-behavioral therapists is catastrophizing - the tendency to worry about something uncertain, and then immediately update toward believing that the worst possible outcome is true. Rumination - an involuntary replaying of social memories viewed through a harshly self-critical filter - reliably produces worries for the mind to turn into catastrophes.
At first glance, catastrophizing seems silly and self-defeating. The catastrophes predicted rarely come to pass. So why do brains continue to do this even after years of evidence of their own poor predictive powers? Why would a person tend to instantly and without evidence believe the worst, over and over again?
It is my hypothesis that catastrophizing is a completely rational behavior when viewed from the perspective of a self involuntarily trapped in a mind, attempting to minimize pain inflicted on it by the mind. It is a literal "mind hack" - gaming the emotional and cognitive system, rather than meeting opponents in the external world.
First, the self obtains information about the pain-delivering algorithm of the mind. A major feature of this algorithm, descriptively speaking, is that the worst pain is generally delivered in response to a loss - a loss in resources, perhaps, but more importantly a loss of social status or social belonging. A change in social status or other resources appears to matter much more to the pain-delivery algorithm than absolute levels of either. The mind rewards the self when the level of external resources or social status increases, punishes the self when it falls, and does not do much when it is stable. Another major feature is that a loss has much more impact than an equivalent gain, in absolute terms. The self's best strategy is to minimize the likelihood of loss in the future, and it is motivated to do so by rumination and fear.
However, the self has another option to avoid being punished by the mind for losses over which it has limited or no control: the self can manipulate its own beliefs to avoid perceiving a loss as a loss. It accomplishes this by catastrophizing.
When the self catastrophizes, it updates toward believing that a loss has already happened. Since this epistemic manipulation is, first, imaginary, and second, under one's own control, the ordinary pain response to loss is not engaged. Meanwhile, one's internally-tracked "position" is made less precarious and vulnerable to uncontrollable factors; instead of risking a fall from a tightrope, one climbs down to the bottom by catastrophizing.
Should the catastrophe materialize, the self will not be punished by the mind (as much), since it did not subjectively experience a loss - it experienced the world being the same as it predicted. More commonly, should the catastrophe fail to materialize, the self will experience a reward, since from the self's perspective, its position just went from rock bottom to much improved.
In summary, catastrophizing is a strategy the self employs in order to "game" the reward and punishment system of the mind - in a manner that is likely totally at odds with the genetic interests of the organism hosting the self. Rumination, fear, and the infliction by the mind of intolerable levels of pain or shame are likely predictors of the catastrophizing "mind hack."
August 18. Two links related to the ongoing drama in Ferguson, Missouri, where police shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. This article is about another incident a few days before, where police shot and killed a black man for holding a toy gun in Walmart: I'm black, and I'm not afraid of the police -- because the police are merely channeling the increasing racism of American culture. The best part is where he points out that white people walk around stores with actual guns all the time and nothing happens.
And a long article, The Civil Rights Movement Is Going in Reverse in Alabama. It's about Hank Sanders, a state legislator who has spent decades working to help poor black people, and in the last few years it's all been undone. But notice: in the 1960's, many laws were passed that explicitly mentioned race. I'm sure the new laws don't mention race at all -- they're just cutting support for the poor. Now, the right wing position might be, "We just want the poor to pull their own weight -- it's not our fault if most of them happen to be black." And the liberal position might be, "Racists are attacking black people and disguising it as an an attack on poor people." I think it's mostly the other way around: These laws are being made by people who hate the poor, and they are marketing an attack on poor people as a defense against black people, to get poor white people to go along with it.
Why would anyone hate someone for having less money? The issue of poverty is haunted by the idea of laziness. Conservatives believe that the poor deserve to be poor because they're less willing to work and therefore morally inferior. They won't say this in public but they hint at it. Then liberals argue that the poor actually work harder than the rich. I don't like this move because it accepts and reinforces what I think is a framing error. A healthy culture would not even have the concept of "lazy". Humans prefer meaningful and autonomous activity to doing nothing, so a society in which work is meaningful and autonomous does not need to tell itself that work is morally virtuous. "Laziness" exists only in the context of a system that depends on work that nobody will do unless they're forced to do it through economic and social pressure.
Maybe the best response to an insane society is not to "work hard" and succeed on the terms it dictates, but to do as little as possible to survive, and use the rest of your energy to undermine the system, build better systems through the cracks, and have a good time.
Another week, another celebrity under suspicion for abusing children. Quite rightly, and not before time, the last couple of years have seen the police and the Crown Prosecution Service under much more pressure to investigate and prosecute historic cases of child abuse in a way they haven't been in the past.
It's a scandal in itself that it took the cases of celebrities such as Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris, and the media interest that attended them, for the establishment and the mainstream media to recognise the reality: that abusers often operate with impunity for years or even decades, including within trusted public institutions (in these cases, the BBC and the NHS); how difficult it can be for victims to come forward and be believed and to get their accounts acted on by the authorities; and why we've long needed a more committed approach to investigating and prosecuting abuse that reflects the hidden and often historic nature of these crimes (historic because it's commonly the case that victims take time to come forward, and often haven't been believed or have been silenced when they have). Victims of abuse and their supporters have been saying all of this for years.
The Saville case in particular has served to propel other stories into the mainstream. This summer, long-circulating allegations and suspicions of (possibly organised) child abuse at Westminster in the 1980s, including but not limited to Cyril Smith and Peter Morrison, have also finally forced the Government to establish two inquiries – one into the Home Office's original response to a dossier alleging abuse in the 1980s, the other into the wider issue of how the state and other institutions have handled accusations of abuse over the past four decades.
Such stories have been common currency in the non-mainstream media for years, investigated and championed by committed independent journalists, and even Norman Tebbit has suggested there may have been a political cover-up of child abuse allegations involving politicians in the 1980s. As Laurie Penny wrote in the New Statesman last month, "The question now is not whether it happened, but how much of it went on. The question is who knew about it, and who helped to ensure that survivors were not believed, that evidence was suppressed."
Victims' groups weren't impressed by the Government's choice of Baroness Butler-Sloss to chair the judge-led inquiry, due to concerns that she wouldn't be independent given her brother's role in previous investigations more than 30 years ago. In what was perhaps a positive indication of power shifting to the people who should have been listened to in the first place, Butler-Sloss fairly quickly resigned, but it remains to be seen whether the inquiries will amount to more than a stage-managed scandal alleviation exercise (c.f. Scott, Hutton and possibly Chilcot).
Laurie Penny has written about how the Westminster abuse allegations shouldn't be isolated from the other scandals that have shed light on the political class over the past few years. Again, from her New Statesman article: "The broader pattern takes in the MPs' expenses scandal of 2009 to 2011 as well as the Leveson inquiry into phone-hacking and other press abuses by the Murdoch media group. As decades of dust and selective amnesia are scraped away, a picture begins to emerge. It is one of a political culture that accepts corruption and abuse as the price of stability. It is a picture of a political culture that would rather harbour criminals than hold itself to account."
Perhaps, but the abuse allegations concern historic cases rather than the still-recent history of expenses and phone hacking. Today's politicians (David Steel perhaps excepted) can't be held accountable for the crimes of their predecessors, though the institutions they work in can and should be. Further, the establishment and virtually all institutions have a tendency (which is not necessarily evil in terms of intent) to want 'sleeping dogs' to lie, particularly when they lie some time in the past (though for victims, abuse often lives on in the present).
Perhaps the more pertinent contemporary point is made by Laurie Penny when she asked the following question: "What kind of culture harbours politicians who believe the privilege of office extends to privilege over the bodies of the young, poor and powerless?" The Westminster abuse allegations may be about the past, but this culture of privilege is alive and well in our current politics, indeed it seems stronger than ever, in the sense of a fundamentally authoritarian type of politics that depends on hierarchy, complicity, silence, and seeing people – including but by no means limited to children – as objects.
Laurie Penny expanded on this point in a related article in the New York Times in July, headlined 'Britain's crime of complicity' in relation to Saville: "It is a culture of complicity that cuts across every major institution in public life: from Parliament to the police, from broadcasters to charities, from public schools to children's homes. It operates on the tacit understanding that the rich, the powerful and the famous are permitted to exploit and hurt young people, sure in the knowledge that the elite will look after its own. Thus the scandal cuts to the bone of what sort of society Britain understands itself to be."
By an 'authoritarian' type of politics, I don't mean totalitarian in the historical sense. Rather, I mean how the German psychologist Alice Miller among others described the nature of the 'traditional family' and how this is mirrored in common assumptions about authority in society. For Miller – a passionate proponent of the rights of children, including their right to grow up free from abuse of all kinds – families can be places where society's 'dynamic of violence' is born, replicated and legitimised, not just through sexual abuse but also by seemingly 'minor' forms of mistreatment such as humiliation and derision, in part due to an acceptance and obedience to the right of 'authority' figures to 'discipline' those less powerful. To Miller, societies tolerate (and are complicit in) this abuse because the origins of human violence in childhood have been and still are being ignored, and it is crucial that this is challenged.
As we have witnessed in cover-ups of abuse, protecting institutions and the establishment ('the family') is often deemed to be more important than what happens to children and the impact of abuse on them, including into adult life. Obedience to authority is thus normalised, even when authority behaves abusively (as untrammelled authority often does).
Guerilla Policy was in Boston recently. The unravelling of the silence surrounding abuse by clergy, particularly in the Catholic Church, and child abuse more generally, owes much to what happened in Boston in the early 2000s, when victims, campaigners and the Boston Globe newspaper challenged the authority of the Church and its complicity in and covering-up of abuse. Within two years of the first of the Globe's many hundreds of articles on clergy abuse appearing in January 2002, the archbishop of Boston Cardinal Law had resigned, 150 priests in Boston had been accused of sexual abuse, more than 500 victims had filed claims, and church-goers' donations to the archdiocese had slumped by 50%. Subsequently, Boston became the home of a Church reform movement, far less deferential to the religious hierarchy and calling for a new kind of Catholic organisation.
The Westminster abuse scandal may turn out to have involved far fewer abusers, though that's no comfort to the victims. But our response requires a similar rejection of deference and an equivalent call for a new type of politics. The issue is our toleration of dehumanisation, as it always was. It is our complicity in regarding others as objects, to be marginalised, derided and characterised as 'problems' to be 'fixed' (or 'disciplined', in the terminology of the family).
On the same day as many of the Sunday papers led on the latest celebrity to be under suspicion for child abuse, the front page of the Sunday Times (a Murdoch paper of course) was a Government-briefed story about how much 'troubled families' are costing 'us' ('Rise of a new underclass costs Britain £30 billion'), accompanied by the obligatory picture of two hoodied, smoking/drinking 'yoofs'.
Our collective revulsion regarding child abuse could go beyond holding the establishment to account for what happened (what was done) in the past, important though this obviously is. It could also find positive expression in the present, in a wholehearted rejection of the Government's blaming of welfare recipients, and in challenging its cuts to rape crisis centres, social services and social care, legal aid, mental health services and child protection. It's in this sense that historic abuse cases can also speak to politics today and why the way we make policies needs to change radically – starting with listening to the most vulnerable rather than denying their humanity in the way we've done to victims of childhood abuse.
American police can generally get away with killing someone, whether it was a reckless mistake or an act of sadism. Few expect the NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who fatally strangled suspected loose-cigarette vendor Eric Garner, to get convicted of felony charges by a Staten Island jury; or for officer Darren Wilson to be convicted of felony charges for shooting unarmed teenager Michael Brown to death in Ferguson.
Even if a law enforcement officer is convicted, the penalty tends to be light — for instance, Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle's two-year sentence for shooting Oscar Grant execution-style on New Years Day, 2009.
But heaven help the civilian who even unintentionally harms a cop.
As Marcell Dockery was marched out of the precinct on April 7, his face ran through several confused expressions, something you often see in sixteen-year-olds even when their hands aren't cuffed behind their backs and their lives wrecked. New York's two most widely read newspapers freeze-framed Dockery's face into a "wicked grin" to help package this adolescent as a hate-figure for mass consumption.
Dockery is accused of setting fire to a mattress on the thirteenth floor of his housing project in Brooklyn's Coney Island neighborhood on April 6. Two police officers, Dennis Guerra and Rosa Rodriguez, took the building elevator up to the blaze. Carbon monoxide inhalation killed Guerra; after weeks of hospitalization, Rodriguez is on permanent disability leave at half pay. Dockery is being charged with second-degree murder.
This case is important: One life has been lost, another seriously injured, a third life stands to be ruined by lengthy incarceration. But the prosecution of Marcell Dockery is also deeply emblematic of how American police and prosecutors respond to violence.
Because contrary to reassuring liberal legend, it is not just nonviolent drug offenders that fill American jails and prisons. In fact, even if every nonviolent drug offender in the United States — they make up only one-fourth of our total number of prisoners — were released tomorrow, the US would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world, barring a few tiny outliers.
The prosecution of Marcell Dockery is a microcosm of what makes American justice uniquely brutal, with several distinctive features of our criminal law and penal culture violently intersecting in it.
First, although Dockery's alleged act of teenage boredom carried no specific intent to kill, he is being charged with murder. This is the "felony murder" rule, under which any death resulting from a felony act means murder charges for everyone involved — not just the triggerman but, for example, the getaway driver and the lookout. No specific intent to kill is required.
The felony murder rule, with vague and ancient roots in the English common law, has in the past century been snuffed out in most of the Anglophone world, from India to Canada to the United Kingdom. But this medieval atavism flourishes in forty-three of the United States, including New York, where it means instant second-degree murder charges carrying a penalty of twenty-five years to life.
The felony murder rule leads to harsh grotesqueries. In Florida, this rule led to a twenty-year old, Ryan Holle, being sentenced to life without parole for lending his car to his roommate, then going back to sleep. The friend drove off and murdered someone in the course of a drug robbery — enough to get the car owner, even though he was not otherwise involved, life without parole.
Or the case of Brandon Hein, a Los Angeles youth who in 1995 was part of a drunken teenage brawl in which one kid — not Heim — fatally stabbed another. But that was enough to get Heim — who, again, killed no one and wielded no weapon — sentenced to life without chance of parole. (Both Holle and Heim, by the way, had clean records.)
Defenders of the felony murder rule take its deterrent value on faith: Surely this harsh penalty ought to discourage people from taking part, even tangentially, in crimes that could turn lethal, or at least commit felonies with greater care. But empirical research (if we care about such things) finds no appreciable deterrent effect from the felony murder rule.
In fact, the most recent study of FBI data, by Anup Malani of the University of Chicago Law School, finds that felony murder rule "seems to increase the number of felony deaths in a state" through perverse incentives.
In the felony murder charges against a youth like Dockery, the rule is doubly wrong. As Robert Reuland, a former Brooklyn homicide prosecutor turned defense attorney, told me, "What are you really deterring here, sixteen-year-olds acting stupid? Good luck with that!" In no other industrialized country would Marcell Dockery face murder charges for his alleged act of arson.
There is also the fact that Dockery, age sixteen, is being prosecuted as an adult. This is not the choice of an ambitious prosecutor; it is hardwired into New York law, where sixteen-year-old defendants, for misdemeanors as well as felonies, are tried automatically as adults — one of the last two states, along with North Carolina, to do so. Other states give prosecutors discretion to try kids as adults (a discretion that is rampantly abused, as a recent Human Rights Watch report on Florida documented).
But some states are moving away from prosecuting adolescents as adults. In 2010, Connecticut raised the age of majority for all defendants to eighteen. This year, Illinois moved the age of majority in misdemeanors and most felony prosecutions to eighteen. Contrary to the usual panic-mongering, these two states have not seen a spike in youth crime since they changed their laws.
The age of majority for criminal offenses could and should be pushed higher still. Germany, for instance, tries roughly two out of three defendants age eighteen through twenty-one as juveniles — a policy that, despite rumbling from the authoritarian wing of the Christian Democrats, remains securely in place.
Dockery's counsel, veteran criminal defense attorney Jesse Young, informed the media on May 1 that his young client's confession to the police was coerced. Dockery's confession was certainly made without presence of a lawyer, the teen having, according to the police, waived his right to counsel during an hours-long interrogation, as bewildered young (and older) people often do.
Is the confession true? We don't know. But we do know that extracting false confessions from kids is easy.
For instance, the Central Park Five, who in 1989 falsely confessed to rape and assault after marathon interrogation sessions. Or Marty Tankleff on Long Island, who in 1988 falsely confessed to the murder of his parents under police pressure while the local law enforcement ignored obvious leads to another suspect. Or the seven-year-old and eight-year-old on the South Side of Chicago, who falsely confessed to murder under police pressure in 1998.
The Dockery case also illustrates how pretensions of impartial justice have been overwhelmed by a vindictive lust to punish, a spirit stoked by media frenzy and institutionalized in "victims' rights" statements granted time in trials. This is amplified by several orders of magnitude when a police officer is killed or dies in the line of duty. It is also amplified by the fact that the accused is a black youth.
Immediately after Dockery's arrest, his juvenile arrest record was illegally leaked to the tabloid press, with the New York Daily News and the New York Post eagerly reporting Dockery's earlier charge in 2010 for reckless endangerment involving a fire set at school.
How were these charges resolved — conviction, plea bargain, acquittal? We don't know. Only the charges were leaked, the better to smear the young defendant. Dockery is not a poster child, and the odds are high that neither, dear reader, are you. Sainthood ought not be a prerequisite for fair treatment and impartial justice in the United States.
What does the extreme prosecution of Marcell Dockery say about the US justice system?
In the past dozen years, Washington has spent millions of aid dollars to make Afghan criminal justice less of a kin-based exchange of vendettas and more of a dispassionate system to resolve conflict and contain violence. Meanwhile, our own justice system has grown more openly vengeful.
Peel back the veneer of procedure and one finds more and more often instances of Lex talionis, an eye for an eye, under the guise of compassion for the victims. As angry and as sorrowful as Officer Guerra's family must be, the fate of Marcell Dockery should under no circumstances be up to them. Nor should it be up to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, whose leader, Pat Lynch, has called Dockery "a murderer" and demanded he be tried as an adult. Grief and anger are no license for vengeance if we have any pretensions at all to real justice rather than blood vendettas.
The Dockery prosecution is a test of the new Brooklyn District Attorney, Ken Thompson. By most accounts, Thompson has made some effort to make law enforcement less gratuitously brutal. But the new DA's efforts to stop prosecuting low-level marijuana offenses have been stymied by hard pushback from the police department, to which the progressive new mayor Bill de Blasio has responded with a feckless shrug.
What will happen to Dockery? Very likely his case will meet that of 95% of all criminal cases in the United States: a plea bargain and no trial. Dockery could wind up pleading to the lesser-included charge of first- or second-degree manslaughter, which carry maximum penalties of twenty-five and fifteen years.
That these sentences are less than that for second-degree murder (twenty-five years to life) should not inure us to its incredible harshness on a sixteen-year-old. A fifteen-year sentence has a strong chance of wrecking a young man's life, with devastating side effects for other family members, as well.
There is no doubt that the fatal asphyxiation of officer Dennis Guerra is a brutal misery. If this teenage boy did in fact start the fire, he will and should carry Guerra's death with him for the rest of his life. But even if Marcell Dockery did what he is accused of doing, there is no purpose served by charging this adolescent as an adult with murder — no purpose other than vengeful sadism. The unintended death of a police officer should not require a blood sacrifice.
Personalisation is focused on choice and control but older budget-holders often have different priorities
Personal budgets have allowed us to take charge for the first time
The recently announced extension of personal budgets is a clear sign that the government's ambition for self-directed support shows no sign of waning. Not content with overhauling the structures for funding and delivery in adult social care and elements of the NHS, advocates of personalisation now push for the holy grail: integration.Continue reading...
Defenders of the warrior cop in situations like the one in Ferguson, Missouri argue that all of these trappings of military occupation are necessary because of the oh-so-dangerous environment the police supposedly face.
Policing is not the country's safest job, to be sure. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries shows, it's far from the most dangerous.
The 2012 data reports that for "police and sheriff's patrol officers," the Fatal Injury Rate — that is, the "number of fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers" — was 15.0.
That includes all causes of death — of the 105 dead officers recorded in the 2012 data, only 51 died due to "violence and other injuries by persons or animals." Nearly as many, 48, died in "transportation incidents," i.e., crashing their cars.
Here are some occupations with higher fatality rates than being a cop:
And for good measure, some more that approach the allegedly terrifying risks of being a police officer:
While being a cop might not be all that dangerous, being in the presence of law enforcement certainly is. In 2012, there were a minimum of 410 people killed by police, and that includes only those voluntarily reported to the FBI under the creepy category of "justifiable homicide." Nobody keeps full and accurate statistics, and the real number is probably closer to 1000.
To put this level of violence in perspective, the total number of murders committed in 2012 by anyone in Canada — a country of 35 million people, with a murder rate that isn't even particularly low by rich country standards — was 543.
The United States is a dangerous place, and the workplace in particular is far too dangerous for far too many. But if you want to thank someone for bravely facing down danger in order to make your way of life possible, thank your garbage collector or your taxi driver. When it comes to the cops, they're mostly a danger to others.
Instead of issuing them heavier armor than the occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be talking about disarming them in the name of public safety.
(not satire!)
Ever thought it a bit strange how so much expense and effort is being made to bomb a small and relatively defenceless enclave like Gaza?
Have you been wondering why western powers are so keen to turn a blind eye to schools being bombed, civilian homes destroyed and 450 children killed (so far) in Gaza?
Well this map might go some way to explaining it:
The largest triangular shaped block in which hydrocarbons have been found and which also contains huge potential gas fields – belongs to Gaza:
Gas finds in east Mediterranean may change strategic balance
That BBC report was from May 2013. But despite its huge relevance to the situation these days, there's not much mention of it in the international mainstream press now.
And why specifically Cameron's silence?
British Gas has concession rights to explore for gas offshore the Gaza Strip – and it would make life so much easier if Israel and not Hamas were in control of it.
You won't read about that in the Daily Mail.
Related articles by Tom Pride:
Can't decide who to hate more – ISIS or ISRAEL? Use this handy guide:
The Most Wanted Middle-Eastern Terrorists
Israel left reeling after Cameron almost criticises it
Explosions at Manchester school kill at least 16 women and children
Syria crisis: the top 10 fashion hits and misses – in pictures
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August 13. So I've read a bunch of comments on Robin Williams' suicide, and my favorite is this one by David Wong of Cracked.com, Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves. He explains the close connection between being funny and being unhappy, and advises us to be there for our funny friends when they stop being funny.
Unrelated, except that it's also about understanding the struggles of other people, this is a transcript of a TED talk from last year, Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? The speaker, Dr. Peter Attia, argues that obsesity is not the cause of insulin resistance, but a symptom that actually makes insulin resistance less harmful:
We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic disease I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts.
So what is the cause of insulin resistance? We don't know for sure yet, but the evidence seems to point to refined sugars and starches. As I mentioned the other day, these are massively subsidized, which is why poor Americans tend to be fat and unhealthy.
As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some five thousand Isis fighters are using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, Isis fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gasfield, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated three hundred soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counter-attacks finally retook the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria's oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.
The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.
The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of Isis and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of Isis becoming weaker and less capable of resistance: in Iraq the army shows no signs of recovering from its earlier defeats and has failed to launch a single successful counter-attack; in Syria the other opposition groups, including the battle-hardened fighters of al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, are demoralised and disintegrating as they are squeezed between Isis and the Assad government. Karen Koning Abuzayd, a member of the UN's Commission of Inquiry in Syria, says that more and more Syrian rebels are defecting to Isis: 'They see it's better, these guys are strong, these guys are winning battles, they were taking territory, they have money, they can train us.' This is bad news for the government, which barely held off an assault in 2012 and 2013 by rebels less well trained, organised and armed than Isis; it will have real difficulties stopping the forces of the Caliphate advancing west.
In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hour's drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. 'We were frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got used to crises
over the last 35 years,' one woman said. Even with Isis at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
'It is truly surreal,' a former Iraqi minister said. 'When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.' Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shia cleric. But these militiamen are now streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. 'They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,' the former minister said, 'so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?
Probably the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil revenues of $100 billion a year to steal from. The sole aim of many officials has long been to get the largest kickback possible and they did not much care if jihadi groups did the same. I met a Turkish businessman in Baghdad who said he had had a large construction contract in Mosul over the last few years. The local emir or leader of Isis, then known as al-Qaida in Iraq, demanded $500,000 a month in protection money from the company. 'I complained again and again about this to the government in Baghdad,' the businessman said, 'but they would do nothing about it except to say that I could add the money I paid al-Qaida to the contract price.' The emir was soon killed and his successor demanded that the protection money be increased to $1 million a month. The businessman refused to pay and one of his Iraqi employees was killed; he withdrew his Turkish staff and his equipment to Turkey. 'Later I got a message from al-Qaida saying that the price was back down to $500,000 and I could come back,' he said. This was some time before Isis captured the city.
In the face of these failures Iraq's Shia majority is taking comfort from two beliefs that, if true, would mean the present situation is not as dangerous as it looks. They argue that Iraq's Sunnis have risen in revolt and Isis fighters are only the shock troops or vanguard of an uprising provoked by the anti-Sunni policies and actions of Maliki. Once he is replaced, as is almost certain, Baghdad will offer the Sunnis a new power-sharing agreement with regional autonomy similar to that enjoyed by the Kurds. Then the Sunni tribes, former military officers and Baathists who have allowed Isis to take the lead in the Sunni revolt will turn on their ferocious allies. Despite all signs to the contrary, Shia at all levels are putting faith in this myth, that Isis is weak and can be easily discarded by Sunni moderates once they've achieved their goals. One Shia said to me: 'I wonder if Isis really exists.'
Unfortunately, Isis not only exists but is an efficient and ruthless organisation that has no intention of waiting for its Sunni allies to betray it. In Mosul it demanded that all opposition fighters swear allegiance to the Caliphate or give up their weapons. In late June and early July they detained between 15 to 20 former officers from Saddam Hussein's time, including two generals. Groups that had put up pictures of Saddam were told to take them down or face the consequences. 'It doesn't seem likely,' Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on jihadists, said, 'that the rest of the Sunni military opposition will be able to turn against Isis successfully. If they do, they will have to act as quickly as possible before Isis gets too strong.' He points out that the supposedly more moderate wing of the Sunni opposition had done nothing to stop the remnants of the ancient Christian community in Mosul from being forced to flee after Isis told them they had to convert to Islam, pay a special tax or be killed. Members of other sects and ethnic groups denounced as Shia or polytheists are being persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. The moment is passing when the non-Isis opposition could successfully mount a challenge.
The Iraqi Shia offer another explanation for the way their army disintegrated: it was stabbed in the back by the Kurds. Seeking to shift the blame from himself, Maliki claims that Erbil, the Kurdish capital, 'is a headquarters for Isis, Baathists, al-Qaida and terrorists'. Many Shia believe this: it makes them feel that their security forces (nominally 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police) failed because they were betrayed and not because they wouldn't fight. One Iraqi told me he was at an iftar meal during Ramadan 'with a hundred Shia professional people, mostly doctors and engineers and they all took the stab-in-the-back theory for granted as an explanation for what went wrong'. The confrontation with the Kurds is important because it makes it impossible to create a united front against Isis. The Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, took advantage of the Iraqi army's flight to seize all the territories, including the city of Kirkuk, which have been in dispute between Kurds and Arabs since 2003. He now has a 600-mile common frontier with the Caliphate and is an obvious ally for Baghdad, where Kurds make up part of the government. By trying to scapegoat the Kurds, Maliki is ensuring that the Shia will have no allies in their confrontation with Isis if it resumes its attack in the direction of Baghdad. Isis and their Sunni allies have been surprised by the military weakness of the Baghdad government. They are unlikely to be satisfied with regional autonomy for Sunni provinces and a larger share of jobs and oil revenues. Their uprising has turned into a full counter-revolution that aims to take back power over all of Iraq.
At the moment Baghdad has a phoney war atmosphere like London or Paris in late 1939 or early 1940, and for similar reasons. People had feared an imminent battle for the capital after the fall of Mosul, but it hasn't happened yet and optimists hope it won't happen at all. Life is more uncomfortable than it used to be, with only four hours of electricity on some days, but at least war hasn't yet come to the heart of the city. Nevertheless, some form of military attack, direct or indirect, will probably happen once Isis has consolidated its hold on the territory it has just conquered: it sees its victories as divinely inspired. It believes in killing or expelling Shia rather than negotiating with them, as it has shown in Mosul. Some Shia leaders may calculate that the US or Iran will always intervene to save Baghdad, but both powers are showing reluctance to plunge into the Iraqi quagmire in support of a dysfunctional government.
Iraq's Shia leaders haven't grappled with the fact that their domination over the Iraqi state, brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is finished, and only a Shia rump is left. It ended because of their own incompetence and corruption and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilised the sectarian balance of power in Iraq. Three years on, the Isis-led Sunni victory in Iraq threatens to break the military stalemate in Syria. Assad has been slowly pushing back against a weakening opposition: in Damascus and its outskirts, the Qalamoun mountains along the Lebanese border and Homs, government forces have been advancing slowly and are close to encircling the large rebel enclave in Aleppo. But Assad's combat troops are noticeably thin on the ground, need to avoid heavy casualties and only have the strength to fight on one front at a time. The government's tactic is to devastate a rebel-held district with artillery fire and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, force most of the population to flee, seal off what may now be a sea of ruins and ultimately force the rebels to surrender. But the arrival of large numbers of well-armed Isis fighters fresh from recent successes will be a new and dangerous challenge for Assad. They overran two important Syrian army garrisons in the east in late July. A conspiracy theory, much favoured by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that Isis and Assad are in league, has been shown to be false.
Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it's a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their official policy is to get rid of Assad, but Isis is now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he falls, it's in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a 'third force' of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private Western diplomats admit this group doesn't really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirms that this Western-backed opposition 'is getting weaker and weaker'; he believes supplying them with more weapons won't make much difference. Jordan, under pressure from the US and Saudi Arabia, is supposed to be a launching pad for this risky venture but it's getting cold feet. 'Jordan is frightened of Isis,' one Jordanian official in Amman said. 'Most Jordanians want Assad to win the war.' He said Jordan is buckling under the strain of coping with vast numbers of Syrian refugees, 'the equivalent of the entire population of Mexico moving into the US in one year'.
* * *
The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn't mean the jihadis didn't have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: 'Such things do not happen spontaneously.' In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policy towards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are 'deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom'. It's unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, was doing everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until his dismissal. Fearful of what they've helped create, the Saudis are now veering in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late. Saudi jihadis have little love for the House of Saud. On 23 July, Isis launched an attack on one of the last Syrian army strongholds in the northern province of Raqqa. It began with a suicide car-bomb attack; the vehicle was driven by a Saudi called Khatab al-Najdi who had put pictures on the car windows of three women held in Saudi prisons, one of whom was Hila al-Kasir, his niece.
Turkey's role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia's in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels' 'civil war within the civil war'. Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco's Interior Ministry said recently that 1122 Moroccan jihadists have entered Syria, including nine hundred who went in 2013, two hundred of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say Isis is no longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, it no longer needs so much outside help.
For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of Isis and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably.
The belief that Isis is interested only in 'Muslim against Muslim' struggles is another instance of wishful thinking: Isis has shown it will fight anybody who doesn't adhere to its bigoted, puritanical and violent variant of Islam. Where Isis differs from al-Qaida is that it's a well-run military organisation that is very careful in choosing its targets and the optimum moment to attack them.Many in Baghdad hope the excesses of Isis – for example, blowing up mosques it deems shrines, like that of Younis (Jonah) in Mosul – will alienate the Sunnis. In the long term they may do just that, but opposing Isis is very dangerous and, for all its brutality, it has brought victory to a defeated and persecuted Sunni community. Even those Sunnis in Mosul who don't like it are fearful of the return of a vengeful Shia-dominated Iraqi government.
So far Baghdad's response to its defeat has been to bomb Mosul and Tikrit randomly, leaving local people in no doubt about its indifference to their welfare or survival. The fear will not change even if Maliki is replaced by a more conciliatory prime minister. A Sunni in Mosul, writing just after a missile fired by government forces had exploded in the city, told me: 'Maliki's forces have already demolished the University of Tikrit. It has become havoc and rubble like all the city. If Maliki reaches us in Mosul he will kill its people or turn them into refugees. Pray for us.' Such views are common, and make it less likely that Sunnis will rise up in opposition to Isis and its Caliphate. A new and terrifying state has been born.
President Barack Obama recently announced that he authorized the United States military to begin bombing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq, where the radical Islamist group has taken over large swathes of territory. But what Obama didn't mention in his speeches on why he began military operations again in Iraq is that citizens of U.S. allies, mostly in Gulf Arab states, have helped the rise of ISIS. This is deeply embarrassing to the U.S.
America's closest allies, like Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, have played a role in financing the activities of ISIS, which has declared an Islamic "caliphate" stretching across the borders of Syria and Iraq and which has killed those they deem enemies of Islam, like Shiites and Yazidis. Turkey, in particular, gave ISIS an easy way into Syria through the border between the two countries. ISIS transited weapons and fighters from Turkey into Syria to fight in the ongoing civil war there—a civil war that has allowed ISIS to gain valuable battlefield experience.
That U.S. allies play a dual role in the "war on terror" is an old story. In public, they pay lip service to battling extremism, but have not taken bold steps to halt the flow of private financing to extremist groups in Syria and across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, is adept at playing this game. The Saudis want to use radical Sunnis in their war against Iran and Shiites, but also do not want these extremists to attack their own country, as Patrick Cockburn recently pointed out in the London Review of Books.
Fifteen of the hijackers who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were from Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 Commission Report said that Saudi Arabia was the main source of financing for Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda has also attacked Saudi Arabia itself. More than a decade later, little has changed. In 2010, State Department cables published by WikiLeaks showed that the U.S. had concluded "it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority...Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."
Today, the vast majority of ISIS' funding is self-generated. Most of ISIS' money comes from activities like siphoning oil from Iraq, extorting money, kidnapping ransoms and bank heists like one in Mosul, Iraq in June that gave the organization $420 million. But a portion of its money comes from private financiers in Gulf Arab states. At least one branch of the U.S. government—the Treasury Department—has said as much. In late June, the Associated Press reported that "the U.S. Treasury Department believes money is being raised in Kuwait and Qatar" for ISIS.
Kuwait is a key hub for the financing of ISIS. Weak laws related to the financing of extremist groups abroad have allowed donors there to raise and send money to groups in Syria, where ISIS has become the most effective force fighting against Bashar al-Assad's regime, much to the chagrin of the West and the rebel groups allied with the U.S. A 2013 report published by the Brookings Institution and authored by journalist Elizabeth Dickinson states that hundreds of millions of dollars from Kuwait have flowed to radical groups in Syria. The money has also transited through other U.S.-allied states, including Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
The Kuwaiti government is not actively encouraging the financing of ISIS or groups like it. The Brookings report says that the government has taken some steps to combat the flow. "But gaps still exist and there is little indication that established funding channels have been affected by government actions," writes Dickinson, the author of the report. And Saleh Ashour, a Kuwaiti Parliament member, alleged to Dickinson that "the Kuwaiti government could not stop [these donations]...It's a weak government that we have; they are chicken."
Another source of private financing is Saudi Arabia. In late June, the Atlantic's Steve Clemons reported that a senior Qatari official told him that "ISIS has been a Saudi project." Clemons alleges that a Saudi government official, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, may have supported ISIS as part of a covert strategy in Syria with the aim of trying to overthrow Assad, an enemy of the Saudis. Bandar has since been relieved of his duties in the Saudi government, which is now reportedly wary of ISIS' rise.
"Like elements of the mujahideen, which benefited from U.S. financial and military support during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then later turned on the West in the form of al-Qaeda," wrote Clemons, "ISIS achieved scale and consequence through Saudi support, only to now pose a grave threat to the kingdom and the region."
Cockburn's reporting has added more detail to Saudi involvement in ISIS. "The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations," wrote Cockburn in August, "which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: 'Such things do not happen spontaneously.'"
By now you have probably heard the tragic news about the Robin Williams suicide. Like many creative artists, Williams battled the demons of depression.Like many creative artists, Williams battled the demons of depression. Read more
As climate change alters habitats, once-disparate animals are shacking up, creating hybrids that challenge our notion of what it means to be a species.
Image: British propagandists took this picture inside Russia. No evidence
whatsoever suggests the armor crossed the border with Ukraine, leaving
only the Guardian's "word" to depend on. The Guardian's word, however,
is of little worth.
Syrian officials shut down nationwide internet access on Thursday and closed Damascus airport as rebels mounted offensives nearby and tried to advance on the capital from four directions. Phone networks were also crippled in much of the country, causing fear and confusion on both sides and fuelling claims that a new rebel push was gaining momentum.With absolutely no evidence, and even with claims by the Syrian government itself denying involvement, the Guardian shamelessly accused Damascus of cutting off the Internet, thus fueling a propaganda campaign designed to make the government in Damascus appear overbearing, tyrannical, and despotic, while attempting to create panic with a "rebels are making gains" narrative.
|Image: The BBC disingenuously posted pictures of dead bodies from Iraq in its propaganda stampede regarding the alleged "Houla massacre." While at the time such a massacre was claimed to be so brutal, the "Syrian rebels" surely could not have been capable of it, it is now revealed that these "rebels" are the ISIS terrorists now openly carrying out identical massacres on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi borders.
The BBC was today accused of a "cover-up" over the Jimmy Savile scandal after it published heavily censored evidence from a probe into the affair.
More than 3,000 pages of transcripts, including bitter recriminations by senior BBC staff about the dropped Newsnight investigation into the paedophile, contained significant portions of blacked-out passages.
The transcripts are based on the evidence of 19 people, including Newsnight host Jeremy Paxman, director of global news Peter Horrocks, former BBC director-general George Entwistle and BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, who were interviewed as part of the probe.Indeed, the BBC, while not lying about the world beyond its newsroom, is busy covering up improprieties and horrific crimes within its newsroom. The "integrity" and "objectivity" of the BBC, the Guardian, and in fact, newsrooms on both sides of the Atlantic parroting the false narratives emanating from London and Wall Street, is non-existent on any perceivable level.
In an era of budget shortfalls and a market-based solutions, the American penal system is quickly becoming a for-profit enterprise.
Private prisons, once an isolated and temporary solution meant to house low-level inmates, incarcerate eighteen times more people than they did just a couple decades ago. In certain states, private probation companies perform all of the work of an exhausted legal system — from levying fines to collecting payments for misdemeanors — without any need for a judicial authority.
But while the privatization of criminal justice may appear to be a recent development, it is more a reversion than an innovation, a return to the common — and blatantly corrupt — standards of the American and British legal systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
During that time, both American and British jails were run as private businesses and typically functioned as debtor's prisons. With little oversight, they operated as organized extortion rackets. Prisoners were charged for every minor accommodation, from clothing and food to the shackles on their feet. Any host of superficial reasons could be concocted by the jailers to add on more fees, which only served to keep prisoners perpetually in debt and extend their stay.
Entering the prison cost a fee — a "garnish" — and those who couldn't pay had to surrender their clothes. Even leaving the prison at the end of their sentence had a price. Prisoners who couldn't afford the exit fare had to work crushing grain into flour on large tread wheels to pay their way.
Otherwise, jobs within the prison were scarce. Desperate for money to pay for food and clothing, women and children regularly prostituted themselves to the wardens and other prisoners. Many spent their lives paying off their debts, sometimes raising families behind the prison walls. An idle debtor, whose only original crime was being poor, could be consigned to a life of indentured servitude.
The incentive for jailers to maximize revenue and cut costs on accommodations meant that most prisoners lived in utter depravity. Rooms were cramped and filthy, with no sense of order. For those with money, private quarters with decent food, drink, and bedding were available, but everybody else lived in abject squalor. In London's Newgate prison, also known as the city's "prototype of Hell," there were almost a hundred prisoners for every guard and a prisoner for every few square feet.
Without bedding, clothes, or anything in the way of medical treatment, the prisons were plagued with disease. Typhus, otherwise known as "gaol fever," was rampant, and many died just from being temporarily detained. The stench of such condensed humanity filled the air.
As Captain Alexander Smith wrote in 1719, "Newgate is a dismal prison … a place of calamity … a habitation of misery, a confused chaos … a bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers."
Running a private debtor's prison was an immensely lucrative business for the jailers. Not only were they paid by the state for handling prisoners, they racked up thousands of pounds in fees and effectively received free labor. Jailers used their outsized wealth and influence to bribe police officers and judges so they'd find more people guilty of more crimes and have them sent to their particular jail.
In both London and America, many judges' remuneration was fee-based, making them particularly prone to corruption. Without a salary as a regular source of income, the justices regularly exchanged favors for decisions — a practice known as "trading justices." Judges that indulged in selling their decisions were viewed as beneath contempt; their base venality made them "indistinguishable from the criminals with whom they dealt."
For magistrates in London's notoriously corrupt Middlesex County, anything could be bought, from a stay of execution for defendants to an automatic guilty verdict for plaintiffs. A not-guilty verdict could be purchased for half a dozen chickens. Magistrates could be paid off by businesses to avoid prosecution, or they could be bribed by the jailers to give a guilty decree without evidence. Justices colluded with plaintiffs on false charges and then split the winnings from the trial.
Because of their payment on a per-hearing basis, some magistrates went so far as to encourage more vice within the community they served. The accused didn't need to be found guilty — as long as there was a trial, the justices got paid. Justices manipulated the costs and quantity of court and procedural fees to make sure they received a hefty income.
They could make witnesses appear out of the ether to unnecessarily lengthen trials.Whether these supposed witnesses had anything to do with the case was beside the point. Such costs additionally burdened the poor, who might avoid a vigorous defense or plead nolo contendere just to avoid legal expenses.
Police of the era were also hopelessly corrupt and were commonly accused of fomenting crimes to give them — and the justice and gaolers with which they conspired — more business. In America, constables trolled the night looking for the "generally friendless, comfortless, houseless, destitute of a morsel to appease the most urgent calls of nature" or those of "unbridled festivity."
Once captured, they were taken before magistrates who piled on the fees. Those unable to pay were sent to workhouses to pay off their indenture. The constables and trading justices that collaborated in such a way were often considered the basest of scoundrels, whose abuse of power made them "lost to every principle of humanity."
In London, the proliferation of crime encouraged magistrates to offer rewards to ordinary citizens as unofficial policemen. Dubbed "thief-takers," they were paid to inform on and apprehend criminals. But such a piecemeal financial motivation also encouraged the thief-takers to create crime for their own benefit. They often became "thief-makers" who convinced the gullible to commit nefarious acts, and either collected the reward for turning them in or extorted a higher amount out of the guilty party to remain quiet.
Organized criminals like Charles Hitchen and Jonathan Wild exploited the reward system with little compunction. They would use low-level thieves to commit crimes, take a percentage of their earnings, and then turn in the perpetrators to the police for the reward money. Wild was said to maintain a ledger detailing every thief and crook throughout London. Those within his organization received a cross next to their name. Those to be purged and handed over to the police received a double cross (this is where the term "double-cross" originated).
By playing each side against the other, manipulating both the police and petty criminals and coordinating with jailers, they controlled the London underworld through a complex array of extortion, blackmail, and bribery. They became pillars of the community and were seen as "master policemen" for their vigilance against the crimes that they were actively facilitating. Wild even had the audacity to appear at the public hangings of lowly fall guys within his own criminal empire that he had excommunicated.
A public handbill distributed around London titled "The Rat-Trap, or Villainy in Full Bloom" levied a litany of offenses at the corruption between the justices, the solicitors, the jailers, and the police: "there is a good understanding kept up between the amiable trio, justice, solicitor, and thief-catcher, it is almost impossible to determine in many cases which ought to receive the reputation of hanging the innocent or screening the guilty."
The perverse incentives of a privatized justice system have been repeated numerous times since, in different eras and in different locations. In particular, the Reconstruction-era South was well known for the convict-leasing system, where prisoners could be lent out to work on private work projects.
By legalizing prison labor in for-profit industries, convict leasing created a pernicious relationship between the jails, the police, and the private industries that benefitted from free prison labor. The local police could be surreptitiously paid to arrest the innocent for minor infractions like vagrancy and then ship them off to work in cotton fields without pay.
Eventually, such opportunities for corruption were abolished. Convict leasing in the United States disappeared as news reports highlighted stories of the system's barbarity. In some states, abandoning fee-based prisons reduced the prison population by half.
In London, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 ensured that all judges would be paid for their work independent of how many trials they oversaw or what verdicts they handed out. Rewards for thief-takers were eventually eliminated by Parliament through what was eventually referred to as Jonathan Wild's Act. For-profit prisons were dismantled in Britain in 1814 under the assumption that a fee-based prison system only encouraged abuse.
And that gets at the core of the problem with privatized criminal justice, both during the Victorian era and today: it makes "justice," even more so than usual, a pawn of profit.
Ever wondered where our money goes? The National Audit Office has. So has Adur Voluntary Action, who are "mega pissed off" by the grim story painted by Radio 4′s analysis last night of the chaos that is the Big Society Network. "The receipt, and use, of funds by the Big Society Network's associated projects…is a grim story for … Continue reading
A new report released in the Kremlin today by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is stating that the reason(s) for President Obama's "mysterious and unscheduled" return to the White House this weekend is due the United States facing an "apocalyptic attack" from an estimated 3,000 "Ebola Martyrs" who are already in America and warned are […]
The post 3,000 "Ebola Martyrs" Warned Ready To Strike America appeared first on The Total Collapse.
This quick and simple tutorial is going to show you how to set a time delay on start up application in Ubuntu Unity.
All you need to do is adding a parameter into the command to start the startup program. It will create a .desktop file automatically under ~/.config/autostart/ with the "X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay" parameter.
NOTE that this will not work for Dropbox because it re-writes its .desktop file every time it runs.
To get started, first open Startup Applications utility from Unity Dash.
When it opens, highlight the program you want to delay and click the Edit button.
In the Command box add sleep 30; at the beginning, which means the program will delay 30 seconds to start.
Just so easy! After you saved the changes, it takes place in next boot.
Equipped with fatigues, assault weapons and armored vehicles, the police response in Ferguson, Missouri was proof that America is quickly becoming a militarized police state.
The shooting and killing of 18 year-old Michael Brown by a police officer sparked outrage in Ferguson, Missouri – a city that is predominantly Black but where the police force is overwhelmingly White. According to eye witnesses, the young man was shot about eight times, even though he was unarmed and had his hands in the air. Ferguson police officials stated that Brown was attempting to take a police officer's weapon – a version of the story that was contradicted by various eye witness accounts.
The death of the young man at the hand of police caused protests which degenerated into looting and rioting. Far from attempting to calm the situation, local authorities turned Ferguson into an occupied war zone as police showcased its vast array of military equipment. Ferguson, an inner-suburb of the Midwest suddenly occupied by soldiers equipped with military fatigues, kevlar vests, helmets, tear gas and assault weapons, followed by armored vehicles topped by snipers. Some war veterans even noticed that "police officers" were better equipped than they were while serving in Iraq.
This kind of upsetting scene is becoming increasingly common in America as police forces across the country have been actively purchasing military equipment in the past few years.
Walter Olson from the Cato Institute stated:
Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? ("'This my property!' he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.") Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that "We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone"?
In 2013, Evan Bernick from the Heritage Foundation noted that
"The Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment. Federal agencies of all stripes, as well as local police departments in towns with populations less than 14,000, come equipped with SWAT teams and heavy artillery."
Ferguson police also a tactic that is seen in Gaza-like war zones when they actively targeted journalists and anyone filming policemen at work.
The arrests and tear-gassing of journalists in an American city is an outrage—in part because everyone is the media now. "Stop videotaping!" It's about the first thing you hear in the handheld video Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery took of his being arrested by police in Ferguson, Mo., Wednesday night, along with Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, for "trespassing"—in an open McDonald's—while covering the unrest after the shooting death by police of Michael Brown. The two journalists were detained, roughed up and held in a cell before being released later the same night. (…)
Others in the streets were tear-gassed and hit by rubber bullets as police met the protesters, outfitted in SWAT gear and accompanied by snipers on armored vehicles. Nor were they they the only journalists targeted: here you can see footage of an Al Jazeera America crew fleeing their video equipment after getting hit with tear gas, after which a SWAT vehicle pulls up and police take down the camera and lights.
A SWAT team. To take out cameras. In the United States of America. Because you know how dangerous it is when people start pointing those things around.
- Time, "It's Now Guns vs. Camera in Ferguson"
After a few nights of confrontation, authorities switched strategies and replaced military-style forces by state police. Almost immediately tensions evaporated and protests took a pacific turn, proving that a repressive and confrontational approach by police only exacerbates tensions and leads to more violence.
Events in Ferguson nevertheless prove that America is turning into a militarized police state and that it doesn't take much to point military gear on American citizens.
The post Ferguson : Proof That America is Turning Into a Militarized Police State appeared first on The Vigilant Citizen.
In this interview given in 1974, Jacques Lacan prophetically warned of the dangers of the return of religion and of scientism. For him, psychoanalysis is the only conceivable rampart against contemporary anxieties. These are arguments of surprising present-day relevance.
As if by magic, Lacan lives again with full force in this interview given to the Italian magazine Panorama in 1974. The Italian interviewer Emilio Granzotto noted that 'we hear more and talk more of the crisis of psychoanalysis'. Fortunately in Jacques Lacan we can find real frankness, good sense, lucidness and precision – far from the 'comforting' psychoanalysis established by some of Freud's students, who ritualised techniques of therapy that gently re-adapt the patient to his social environment. 'This is the very negation of Freud', Lacan tells us. What were his fears, at that time? Showing his talent for prophesy, Lacan feared already in 1974 both the return of religion and the triumph of science. Sex in evidence everywhere? No. Rather, a fake liberalisation, without importance. But scientific meddling – well, that's a different matter…
Emilio Granzotto: We hear more and more talk of a crisis of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud has been left behind, they say, as modern society has discovered that his work is insufficient for understanding man or for deeply investigating his relationship with the world.
Jacques Lacan: This is tittle-tattle. In the first place, this so-called crisis. It does not exist, it could not. Psychoanalysis has not come close to finding its own limits, yet. There is still so much to discover in practice and in consciousness. In psychoanalysis, there are no immediate answers, but only the long and patient search for reasons.
Secondly, Freud. How can it be said that he has been left behind, when we have still not yet entirely understood him? What we do know for sure is that he made us aware of things that are entirely novel, that would not even have been imagined before him, from the problems of the unconscious to the importance of sexuality, from access to the symbolic sphere to subjection to the laws of language.
His doctrine put truth itself in question, and this concerns everyone, each individual personally. It is hardly in crisis. I will repeat: we are far from Freud. His name has also been used to cover for a lot of things, there have been deviations and epigones who did not always loyally follow his model, creating confusion about what he meant. After his death in 1939, some of his students also claimed to be exercising a different kind of psychoanalysis by reducing his teachings to a few banal formulas: technique as a ritual, practice restricted to treating people's behaviour, as a means of re-adapting the individual to his social environment. This is the negation of Freud: a comforting salon psychoanalysis.
He had predicted it himself. He said that there were three untenable positions, three impossible tasks: governing, educating, and exercising psychoanalysis. These days it doesn't much matter who takes the responsibility for governing, and everyone claims to be an educator. As for psychoanalysts, thank God, they are prospering as experts and as quacks. To offer to help people means guaranteeing success, and the customers are banging down the door. Psychoanalysis is something quite different to this.
What exactly?
I define it as a symptom – something that reveals the malaise of the society in which we live. Of course, it is not a philosophy. I abhor philosophy, for an awful long time it's had nothing new of interest to say. Nor is psychoanalysis a faith, and I am not keen on calling it a science. Let's say that it's a practice, and it is concerned with whatever is not going right. Which is a terrible difficulty because it claims to introduce the impossible, the imaginary, into everyday life. Thus far it has obtained certain results, but it still has no rules and is prone to all sorts of ambiguities.
We must not forget that it is something entirely new, with regard to both medicine and psychology and its outliers. It is also very young. Freud died barely thirty-five years ago. His first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900, and met with very little success. I think they sold only three hundred copies across the first few years. He had a handful of students, who were considered mad, and they did not even agree amongst themselves on how to put into practice and to interpret what they had learned.
What isn't going right with people today?
This great listlessness in life, a consequence of the rush for progress. Through psychoanalysis people expect to discover how far it is possible to draw out this listlessness.
What is it that drives people to have themselves analysed?
Fear. When something happens to someone and they do not understand it, even if they wanted it to happen, they are afraid. They suffer from not understanding, and little by little they fall into a panic. This is neurosis. With hysterical neurosis, the body becomes ill from the fear of being ill, and without really being so. With obsessive neurosis, the fear brings bizarre things to mind, thoughts that cannot be controlled, phobias in which forms and objects acquire different meanings that make people afraid.
For example…
The neurotic person may feel constrained by a terrifying need to go dozens of times to check if a tap is really turned off, or if something is in the place that it should be, even though they already know for certain that the tap is off and the thing is in the right place. There are no pills to cure that. It is necessary to find out why that happens and what it means.
And the cure?
The neurotic is an ill person who is treated by speech, above all his own. He must speak, recount, explain himself. Freud defined psychoanalysis as the subject's assumption of his own history, insofar as this history is constituted by the words addressed to another person. Psychoanalysis is the realm of speech, there is no other remedy. Freud explained that the unconscious is not deep as much as it is inaccessible to conscious examination. And that in this unconscious, the speaker is a subject within the subject, transcending the subject. The great strength of psychoanalysis is speech.
Whose speech? The ill person's or the psychoanalyst's?
In psychoanalysis the terms 'ill person', 'doctor' and 'remedy' are no more appropriate than the passive formulas that are so commonly used. We say: 'have yourself psychoanalysed'. This is wrong. The person doing the real work in the analysis is the speaker, the subject analysing himself. That is the case even if he does so in the manner suggested by the analyst who indicates how he ought to proceed and who makes helpful interventions.
The subject is also provided with an interpretation, which at first sight seems to give meaning to what he himself says. In reality, the interpretation is rather subtler, tending to efface the meaning of the things from which the subject is suffering. The goal is to show him, by way of his own narrative, that the symptom – or let's call it the illness – has no relationship to anything, and lacks any kind of meaning. Even if it is apparently real, it does not exist.
The routes by which this act of speech proceeds demand a great deal of practice and infinite patience. Psychoanalysis's tools are patience and moderation. The technique consists of moderating the degree of help that you give to the subject analysing himself. Psychoanalysis is thus no simple matter.
When we speak of Jacques Lacan, we inevitably associate his name to a formula, the 'return to Freud'. What does this phrase mean?
Exactly what it says. Psychoanalysis is Freud. If you want to do psychoanalysis, you have to go back to Freud, his terms and definitions, read and interpreted literally. I founded a Freudian school in Paris with precisely this goal in mind. For more than twenty years I have been expounding my viewpoint: to return to Freud simply means to sweep the ground of the deviations and ambiguities of existential phenomenology, for example, as well as of the institutional formalism of psychoanalytical societies, and to resume a reading of Freud's teachings that follows definite, enumerated principles based on his own work. Re-reading Freud just means re-reading Freud. Whoever does not do so is abusing words if they speak of psychoanalysis.
But Freud is difficult. And Lacan, they say, makes him utterly incomprehensible. Lacan is charged with speaking and, above all, writing in such a way that only very few adept scholars can hope to understand…
I know, I know, I am taken for an obscurantist who hides his thinking behind smokescreens. I ask myself why. I repeat, with Freud, that analysis is the 'inter-subjective game by which truth enters into the real'. Isn't it clear enough? Psychoanalysis isn't child's play.
My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. On the contrary, I have never made the least effort to cater to my readers' tastes, no matter who they are. I had things to say, and I said them. For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not understand, well, let's be patient. As for the number of readers, I have had more luck than Freud. Maybe my books are even too widely read – I find it astonishing.
I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent, like a good glass of beer. Perhaps then they'll say 'This Lacan, he's so banal!'
What are the characteristics of Lacanianism?
It's a little early to say, since Lacanianism does not yet exist. We can just about get a whiff of it, a premonition.
In any case, Lacan is a gentleman who has been practicing psychoanalysis for at least forty years, and has been studying it for just as long. I believe in structuralism and the science of language. I wrote in my book that 'what the discovery of Freud drives us to is the enormity of the order in which we are inserted, into which we are – so to say – born for the second time, emerging from the aptly termed stage of infancy, in which we are without speech'.
It is language – as a moment of universal, concrete discourse – that constitutes the symbolic order on which Freud based his discovery. It is the world of speech that creates the world of things, which initially blur into everything that is in-becoming. Only words give a finished meaning to the essence of things. Without words, nothing would exist. What would pleasure be, without the intermediary of speech?
My thinking is that in outlining the laws of the unconscious in his early works – The interpretation of dreams, Beyond the pleasure principle, Totem and taboo – Freud's formulations were a precursor to the theories with which Ferdinand de Saussure some years later opened the way to modern linguistics.
And pure thought?
Like everything else, it is subject to the laws of language. Only words can engender thought and give it substance. Without language, humanity would never make any forward step in its efforts to understand thought. This is true for psychoanalysis also. Whatever the function you attribute to it – a form of cure, of training or of making soundings – there is just one medium that you can employ, the patient's speech. And all speech deserves a response.
Analysis as dialogue, then. There are those who interpret it more as a substitute for confession…
But what confession? You confess precisely zero to the psychoanalyst. You give yourself over to telling him simply whatever comes into your head. Words, that is. Psychoanalysis's discovery is man-as-speaking-animal. It is up to the analyst to order the words he hears, giving them sense and meaning. For a good analysis to be possible there needs to be an agreement, an understanding between the analyst and the subject analysing himself.
Through the latter's discourse, the analyst seeks to get an idea of what is at issue, and going beyond the apparent symptom locate the tangled knot of truth at the heart of the matter. The analyst's other function is to explain the meaning of the words used in order to allow the patient to understand what he can expect from the analysis.
A relationship that demands a great deal of trust…
Or rather, an exchange, in which the important thing is that one person speaks and the other listens. As well as silence. The analyst poses no questions and adds no ideas of his own. He only gives the answers that he wants to, to the questions that he wants to. But ultimately the subject analysing himself always goes where the analyst leads him.
You just mentioned therapy. Is there a possibility of being cured? Can one emerge out of neurosis?
Psychoanalysis is successful when it clears the ground, goes beyond symptoms, goes beyond the real. That is to say, when it touches the truth.
Could you put the same concept in less Lacanian terms?
I call a 'symptom' everything that comes from the real. And the real is everything that isn't right, does not work, and is opposed to man's life and his engagement with his personality. The real always returns to the same place. And it is there that you will always find it, in the same trappings. There are scientists who make out that nothing is impossible, in the real – and it takes some nerve to say things like that, or, as I suspect, total ignorance of what one is doing and saying.
The real and the impossible are antithetical and cannot go together. Analysis pushes the subject toward the impossible, suggesting to him that he ought to consider the world as it truly is – that is, an imaginary world without meaning. Whereas the real is like a gluttonous seagull, and only feeds on meaningful things, actions that have some meaning.
We often hear it said that we have to give meaning to this or that, to one's own thoughts, aspirations, sex, life. But we know absolutely nothing about life. Experts run out of breath trying to explain it to us.
My fear is that through their failings, the real – this monstrous thing that does not exist – ends up winning. Science substitutes itself for religion and is all the more despotic, obtuse and obscurantist. There is an atom-god, a space-god, etc. If science or religion wins, psychoanalysis is finished.
What relationship is there today between science and psychoanalysis?
For me the only true, serious science worth following is science fiction. The other, official science with its altars in the laboratories gropes its way forward without reaching any happy medium. And it has even begun to fear its own shadow.
It seems that the experts will soon be facing anxious moments. Donning their starched shirts in their aseptic laboratories, these rather elderly toddlers playing with unknown things, making ever more complex devices, inventing ever more obscure formulas, begin to ask themselves what might happen tomorrow, what these ever-novel research projects might bring to bear. Enough, I say! And what if it's too late, biologists and physicists and chemists now ask themselves. I think they are mad. They are already changing the face of the universe, and it only now occurs to them that perhaps this might be dangerous. And if everything blew up in their faces? If the bacteria so lovingly raised in their shiny laboratories transformed into our mortal enemies? If hordes of these bacteria overran the world as well as all the crap that lives there, starting with these laboratory experts themselves?
In addition to Freud's three impossible positions – government, education, and psychoanalysis – I would add a fourth, science. But the experts are not expert enough to know that their position is untenable.
So you have a rather pessimistic view of what they call progress…
No, it's something else entirely. I am not pessimistic. Nothing is going to happen. For the simple reason that man is a good-for-nothing, not even capable of destroying himself. Personally, I would find the idea of an all-encompassing plague, produced by man, rather marvellous. It would be the proof that he had managed to do something with his own hands and head, without divine or natural intervention.
All these bacteria overfed for amusement's sake, spreading out across the world like the locusts in the Bible, would mark the triumph of mankind. But this isn't going to happen. Science happily saunters through its crisis of responsibility: everything will return to its natural place, as they say. And as I said, the real will win out, as always. And we'll be as fucked as we ever were.
Another paradox of Jacques Lacan. As well as the difficulty of your language and the obscurity of your concepts, you are reproached for your jokes, word games, puns, and, rightly, for your paradoxes. Your reader or listener has the right to feel a bit disoriented.
I am not joking, the things that I say are very serious. I merely make use of words in the same way that the experts of which I speak make use of their alembics and their electronic circuitry. I always try to refer to the experience of psychoanalysis.
You say: the real does not exist. But the average Joe knows that the real is the world, everything around him that he can touch and see with the naked eye.
First off, let's get rid of this average Joe, who does not exist. He is a statistical fiction. There are individuals, and that is all. When I hear people talking about the guy in the street, studies of public opinion, mass phenomena, and so on, I think of all the patients that I've seen on the couch in forty years of listening. None of them in any measure resembled the others, none of them had the same phobias and anxieties, the same way of talking, the same fear of not understanding. Who is the average Joe: me, you, my concierge, the president of the Republic?
We were talking about the real, about the world that all of us see.
OK. The difference between the real – what is not going right – and the symbolic, the imaginary – that is, truth – is that the real is the world. To see that the world does not exist, that there is no world, it is enough to think of the great mass of banalities that an infinite number of imbeciles believe the world to be. And I invite my friends at Panorama, before they accuse me of paradoxes, to reflect carefully on what they have just read.
People will say that you're becoming ever more pessimistic.
That isn't true. I am not among the ranks of the alarmist or the anxious. Woe betide the psychoanalyst who hasn't gone beyond the stage of anxiety. It's true: everywhere around us there are troubling, all-consuming things, like the TV that eats up so many of us. But that is only because there are people who allow themselves to be eaten up, who even invent an interest for themselves in what they are seeing.
And then there are other monstrous things that are just as voracious: rockets that go to the moon, research at the bottom of the oceans, etc. All sorts of things that consume people. But there's no point in making a big deal out of them. I am sure that when we have enough of rockets, TVs and these wretched quests into the void, we will find something else with which to busy ourselves. It's a reincarnation of religion, isn't it? And what monster is more voracious than religion? It is a continual feast, to be enjoyed for centuries, as we have already seen.
My response to all this is to note that man has always been able to adapt himself to the bad. The only real that we can conceive, that we can have access to, is precisely that, the need for a reason: to give some meaning to things, as we said earlier. Otherwise, man would not have anxiety, Freud would not have become famous, and I would be teaching in some grammar school.
Are anxieties always of this nature, or are there anxieties linked to certain social conditions, historical eras or geographical climbs?
The anxiety of the expert afraid of his discoveries may seem a latter-day phenomenon. But what do we know about what happened in other times? The dramas of other researchers? The anxiety of the worker enslaved to the assembly line like the rowers on a galley – that is today's anxiety. Or, more simply, this anxiety is linked to today's words and definitions.
But what is anxiety, in psychoanalysis?
Something that is situated outside our body, a fear, but a fear of nothing, that can be driven by the body, including the mind. The fear of fear, in sum. Many of these fears and anxieties, at the level that we perceive them, have to do with sex. Freud said that for the speaking animal called man, sexuality has no remedy and has no hope. One of the analyst's tasks is to find the relation between anxiety and sex, this great unknown, in the patient's speech.
Now that sex is promoted everywhere you look – sex at the cinema, at the theatre, on TV and in newspapers, in songs and on beaches – you hear it said that people are less anxious about problems linked to the sexual sphere. The taboos have fallen, they say, and people are no longer afraid of sex.
The invading sex-mania is just an advertising phenomenon. Psychoanalysis is a serious matter that concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relation between two individuals, the subject and the analyst. There is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses.
The fact of sex being spoken about, shown off on street corners, treated like some detergent on the TV merry-go-round, does not bring any promise of joy. I do not say that this is a bad thing. Certainly it is insufficient for treating particular problems and anxieties. It is part of fashion, of this fake liberalisation that so-called permissive society gives us, like some gift from on high. But it is of no use at the level of psychoanalysis.
Translated by David Broder
To read the original interview in French at Le Magazine Littéraire click here.
To read Élisabeth Roudinesco's interview on the 30th anniversary of Jacques Lacan's death click here.
The Universal Basic Income (or Basic Income, or Unconditional Basic Income) is a great way of debasing some of the pressures on inequality that are repeatedly exploited in a wayward economy, and will be a positive step forward in the redistribution of wealth which is the greatest divide of our times.
When we mentioned the UBI before a commentator took great offence that people should receive something for nothing, at the idea that there is this much money for people and a worry that we will descend into a feckless, workshy populus. Such faith.
These comments speak highly of the fear we have come to feel of our own capability and independence in a world where we are barraged with the constant alienation and villification of each other, the idea that everyone is out to get what's yours, where the economy isn't so much controlled by us as 'happens to us', where the fetishisation of work has penetrated consciences as a virtue in and of itself no matter how low the pay, and the idea that there must be this degree of suffering in falling working conditions and treatment as it is the crappy badge of honour we must all share to keep the this tragic system of going.
It is a fear of a world where people might decide more for themselves, than be governed. It is a fear that if we don't continue doing as we're told we might do something crazy, like live a more fulfilling life. This system is one that makes us think that taking steps to give ourselves more time and resources to live as we please is 'radical' and somehow underserved, yet we bear witness to the growing army of food bank users, growing inequality, a growing number of people in poverty – many of these in work, growing debt and growing mental health issues. What system of work is being protected here exactly?
So to alay some of these fears that probably cross all of our minds in some way when the notion of the Universal Basic Income comes up, this article will walk us through the concept.
How much and from where?
The Swiss surfaced the idea of the Universal Basic Income a few months back with a referendum and a suggested allowance of £1750 a month. This is quite a lot, and while the suggestions for UK rates are lower, the Swiss are an example of what might be achieved.
Natalie Bennett, Green Party leader, backs the idea of the Universal Basic Income and has noted that around £7000 a year could be allocated to every UK citizen through the removal of the over-complicated benefits system and staff. The Citizens Income Trust estimate that £10,000 for everyone could be achieved through these measures and adjustments elsewhere.
The idea of getting money for nothing
George Osbourne has repeatedly been banging the drum to end the 'something for nothing' culture, as if it were a notion no sane human being would walk within yards of, temporarily forgetting his birthplace got him something for nothing, the interest on the bank accounts of those with money get them something for nothing, the housing crisis the same Chancellor is driving is giving homeowners something for nothing as house prices increase far beyond comprehension and the means of everyday people, and of course, a bailout with no conditions for banks is indeed, a whole lotta of something for less than nothing, a deficit in fact.
Getting 'something for nothing' is common in our economy, but it seems it is only distasteful and linked to 'fecklessness' when the lower classes benefit from it.
We are also kidding ourselves with the idea that this economy fairly gives someone what they are owed. And I say this while there are hundreds of thousands of food bank users who are in work, while 93% of new housing benefit claimants are in work, while nurses are seeing blocks to pay rises of even 1% while bankers pay themselves millions in bonuses for abject failures. We hear time and time again about abolishing the something for nothing culture, and yet hardly a peep that there are plenty out there getting 'nothing for something.'
And thus, in a such a clearly unequal and unforgiving economy, shouldn't we be worrying less about getting something for nothing and concentrate more on giving everyone some basic subsistence to live?
Perhaps we need to focus on why we think giving everybody some money to live seems a reckless idea. Could it be to do with the blanket coverage of benefit cheats, immigrants, the unemployed, the disabled and the young who have taken centre stage in the austerity villification games. These people, with nothing, are bleeding the system dry. But we never hear, during this harsh austerity when 'every penny counts', that the FAILED (thankfully) student loan-book sell off cost £12bn which could have paid each student £5100, or that the work programme is costing us tens of thousands of pounds per person in work, or that the the Universal Credit system has wasted so much money that IDS uses even more of our money to fight the case for releasing the failures of his almighty UC in a report. We're paying to not be told the truth. We're paying for crooked ministers to cover their arses. So why on Earth is it radical to take some of this money back into our own hands?
Our system is maintaining and growing the insane Wealth Gap…
We can't rely on this broken economy, engineered so well that 99% of us are fighting over 6% of the world's wealth, to suddenly choke out some better results. But in agreeing that every person deserves the amenities to live, we can move towards better wealth distribution and equality.
UBI is a real step towards equality, demolishing the too handy and too oft turned to political tactic of scapegoating. Like the lie that if repeated comes to be believed, the government have repeatedly set about filling the public airwaves and newspapers with blame on the country's poorest for a situation caused by the country's richest. The hardest hit are always the already hardest hit. Single mothers, the disabled, the young, the unemployed, immigrants. All of these people are the ones who then have to jump through the expensive and bureaucratic hoops because their vilification in the media and on the street is not enough. I wonder what the papers will fill their pages with if the constant hate-spew upon the money these groups receive were no longer applicable. The UBI will at least restore some dignity for those the government have preyed on throughout austerity, to make their claims more difficult and longer to process, to prod and mock them for being ill, just to prise some more money, time and self-worth from the most in need.
The Universal Basic Income is a policy which moves us forward with the technological advances taking place. Checkouts are being replaced up and down the country, removing jobs from people who, in our current system, are then punished for not having a job. The takeover of technology is going to become more commonplace, and we need to move with it. Technological advances can, will and should free us from the tedious and mundane.
Yes, people's attitudes to work may change, but the UK needs more flexibility as we are currently seeing one section of society work so much they are driven to poor health, and another section who cannot find work and are driven to poverty. John Ashton, a leading UK scientist remarked on this earlier last month:
"When you look at the way we lead our lives, the stress that people are under, the pressure on time and sickness absence, [work-related] mental health is clearly a major issue. We should be moving towards a four-day week because the problem we have in the world of work is you've got a proportion of the population who are working too hard and a proportion that haven't got jobs", Ashton said.
"We've got a maldistribution of work. The lunch-hour has gone; people just have a sandwich at their desk and carry on working," added the leader of the UK's 3,300 public-health experts working in the NHS, local government and academia."
Perhaps a deeper focus on the jobs we have will happen. But is this not what we need? We have all bore witness to the things a profit motive drives alone. It is the reason Cameron and predecessors like to arm the conflicts around the world. It is the reason our care industries have become so neglected, while we instead hold up occupations such as bankers and stock market brokers as achievements and success with more than ample payment and respect despite the amassing of money and risk-taking providing no social good.
Also, how many call centres do we need? How many jobs are aimed at catching us out, or annoying us, in the hope that because of our busy lives we will just say yes to be done with it? How many of these would we honestly miss?
The UBI won't remove any healthy competition but it will redress some balance of profit with human need and quality of life.
"If people are working because the economic system forces them to, and pays them below what they feel they deserve but they are forced to accept it to even barely scrape by, then our economic system isn't functioning for the population, it's functioning for itself. Basic Income is an economic systemic equaliser."
If the UBI were to come into being, there would need to be some work done and decisions made around some housing benefit claims which the proposed UBI amount may not cover. But again, the escalating housing and rent prices are something that need tackling, as our current government have simply resolved to do nothing about the rising prices, instead punishing claimants by capping their housing benefit which could push them into arrears. We have spoken before about why the government doesn't want to solve the housing crisis or help control prices as it contributes to growth, but housing policies need to be a huge part of any future plan for Britain, so we welcome some focus on the need to provide affordable housing and rents.
The other issue would be any backlash formed from granting the UBI to the rich too. Personally, I say, they would have got it anyway, through tax breaks or some other scheme, so if the majority are finally getting something out of this, and it is truly universal and unconditional, then that is positive.
It's time we stopped trying to diminish the true qualities of life – time, friends, family, freedom, creativity. The books we want to read, the people we want to see, the new advances and ideas that could propel us even further forward in our evolution have no time live in the minds of those spending every waking moment trying to scrape by.
The government aren't going to encourage these things. But when was the last time you heard them say they were doing something for your personal freedom? To give you more time to be, well, a human being and not a workhorse. When did you last hear Cameron or Clegg speak about your quality of life as they do about our need to be hardworking citizens?
That's why it's up to us to make the UBI a demand.
Over the weekend, police in Ferguson, Missouri murdered Michael Brown, a black teenager. While details are still trickling in, it's clear that during a confrontation with a squad car a block away from his grandmother's house, an officer shot and killed the unarmed teen in the middle of the street. Witnesses say Brown was running away from the policeman and had his hands in the air just before the officer shot him.
Ferguson is a city with a large concentration of poor blacks under the control of overwhelmingly white institutions. The killing immediately struck a nerve. Rallies and protests soon erupted as people took to the streets — eventually culminating in a riot. People went from holding candle light vigils at the site of Brown's death to burning down a number of businesses and lighting molotov cocktails during confrontations with police. How did we get here?
Far from a mindless, violent mob, the people of Ferguson were engaged in concerted political consciousness-raising leading up to the insurrection. A video taken at the scene shows a number of political
agitators talking with the crowd, converting momentary outrage into political unity. One speaker in particular, a young black male, offers a cogent political analysis that frames the injustice of police brutality as a byproduct of the community's economic dislocation.
We keep giving these crackers our money, staying in they complexes, and we can't get no justice. No respect. They ready to put you out [if you] miss a bill … You got to be fed up.
Riots, like other forms of political action, can build solidarity. They can create strong feelings of common identity. The outrage in Ferguson quickly attracted marginalized people throughout the region. Rather than evidence of illegitimacy, the presence of these "outsiders" reflected the magnetic power of the political moment.
From the outset, the anti-police police rallies that preceded the riots had a clear "us versus them" dynamic. At one point during the rally, the woman holding the camera says, "Where the thugs at? Where the street tribes when we need y'all?" and the crowd then begins to call on various street gangs to abandon "black-on-black" violence and unite in struggle against oppression. The community was unified and ready to take action. The police were the problem, and they had to be stopped.
The crowd was not irrational and apolitical. They were attempting to use this opportunity to address their broader political needs. They knew that intraracial violence within the community was also an issue, and that in most cases the perpetrators of violence are the communities' own children, cousins, friends, and neighbors. Though many claim that black people don't care about violence within our communities, the crowd's calls for gang unity demonstrate that anti-police uprisings provide unique opportunities to unite people in ways that seek to resolve long-term issues like gang violence.
Following the insurrection, participants continued to discuss the uprising in political terms. DeAndre Smith, who was present at the burned down QuikTrip, told the local news, "I believe that they're too much worried about what's going on to their stores and their commerce and everything. They're not worried about the murder." A second man added, "I just think what happened was necessary, to show the police that they don't run everything." Smith then concludes, "I don't think they did enough."
In a second interview, this time with Kim Bell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Smith expanded on his belief in the riot as a viable political strategy.
This is exactly what's supposed to happen when an injustice is happening in your community … I was out here with the community, that's all I can say … I don't think it's over, honestly. I think they just got a case of what fighting back means, in St. Louis, the last state to abolish slavery. Do they think they still have power over certain things? I believe so.
This is how they receive money: businesses and taxes, police stopping people and giving them tickets, taking them to court, locking them up — this is how they make money in St. Louis. Everything is all about money in St. Louis. So when you stop their flow of income they have things organized in a certain way … 'we're gonna eat, you're gonna starve,' gentrification — put you in a certain neighborhood by yourself and see if you can starve … It's not going to happen, not in St. Louis.
Smith identifies what so many self-styled anti-racists and leftists fail to understand — that racism is not an issue of moral character. He recognizes that the broader economic order facilitates and benefits from racial subjugation, and so he's looking for ways to intervene and disrupt that process. Not only is this a more substantive analysis than what is often offered on the Left, but acting on this analysis is the only way to eradicate entrenched racial hierarchy.
Typically, when events like the Ferguson rebellion occur, well-meaning people rush to condemn the participants. At a minimum, they dismiss rioting as unproductive and opportunistic — a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. This is precisely the attitude that Deandre Smith was criticizing in his first interview. Most detractors, some of whom are black themselves, seek to police these communities with "respectability politics" — a call for subjugated people to present themselves in ways that are acceptable to the dominant class in an effort to make political gains.
As the political scientist Frederick Harris wrote in an article this year:
What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to 'uplift the race' by correcting the 'bad' traits of the black poor has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama, a governing philosophy that centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society touted as being full of opportunity.
But the politics of respectability has been portrayed as an emancipatory strategy to the neglect of discussions about structural forces that hinder the mobility of the black poor and working class.
Whereas riots are often galvanizing community events with the potential to unleash concerted political energy in dynamic and unpredictable directions, the stale politics of respectability only leads to further marginalization and dislocation. Now, it's possible to disagree with the utility of insurrection. But these communities' responses to subjugation must be discussed in political terms and not simply dismissed out of hand.
We live in a context of white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, where race-neutral policies are being used to maintain class exploitation and racial hierarchy, and any overt attempts to address racism are being dismantled or disregarded. These policies only intensify the economic dislocation and poverty experienced by those at the margins.
What both the local news interviewees and the crowd at the scene of Brown's death seemed to understand was that they needed to disrupt the interplay between racial subjugation and capitalism. They felt that a march or some other acceptable form of benign indignation would not address their political needs — and they weren't wrong.
Many of us rush to condemn these types of disruptions because we're actually content with neoliberalism's post-racial illusion. At the burned down QuikTrip, someone left a sign addressed to their "corporate neighbor," in the hopes that the business would return: "Dear Corporate Neighbor, I am sorry this act of robbery & violence has happened. Please return soon. I stop in 2-3 time[s] per week."
On the surface, addressing the effects of rioting is an important political issue. By framing themselves as a customer in need of their "corporate neighbor," it's possible that this person is acting not out of concern for the working people that lost their jobs — their actual neighbors — but from the fear that their shopping routine will be disturbed. Like Deandre Smith observed, we identify more strongly with broken windows than broken people.
From the Boston Tea Party to Shays' Rebellion, riots made America, for better or worse. In the past, white rioters have had access to institutional power, which allowed their grievances to be legitimized and politically resolved to the extent possible in a capitalist society. The key for the Ferguson uprising, as with any unsustainable political moment, is to transition outrage and disruption into constructive political organization. Easier said than done — but it's a better reaction than dismissing the riot's inherent political content and only making it more difficult for the people to accomplish this herculean task.
Malcolm X reminds us that media is a key instrument of subjugation because it determines which acts are respectable and which are extreme and thus illegitimate. Instead of following that familiar script, let's push back against narratives about rioters being filled mindless and devoid of politics. Let's find ways to honestly observe and discuss their political needs, rather than simply criticizing their responses.
Solidarity to the people of Ferguson, Missouri, and a hearty fuck you to the cops, their bosses, and to anyone who wants to blather about "rioters" and otherwise engage in bogus "both sides" equivalency instead of keeping the focus on the extrajudicial executions of these state-sanctioned death squads. See also Robert Stephens II for an excellent analysis of the actions of the people in Ferguson as part of a process of political mobilization rather than simply undirected vandalism.
What is happening in Missouri is horrifying, yet unusual only in the attention it's receiving. I hope it at least wakes people up to the nature of our heavily militarized police forces—Ferguson is in no way unusual. The other day I sent my editors a draft manuscript for the longer-form adaptation of Four Futures. In discussing the fourth of those futures, Exterminism, I describe the widespread militarization of the police in the United States, which has its roots in the 1960′s but has intensified in the post-9/11 period.
This is a literal case of "bringing the war home." Many of the tanks and other equipment that can be found even in small towns are surplus military equipment, given away to police departments when no longer needed in Iraq or Afghanistan. And of course many cops are veterans, who had a chance to learn from the American government's callous approach to civilian life abroad. I struggled to finish that chapter, because it seemed every day brought a new and more horrifying example of what I was writing about.
It all leads here:
This isn't a movie scene #reality RT @FOX2now: Officers stand in a mist of tear gas. Protected by masks. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/afsqru8rwg— Trinna Leong (@trinnaleong) August 12, 2014
But I'm only repeating what many are now saying. As some kind of substantive contribution, I figured I'd refute a specific canard that arises from defenders of the warrior cops in situations like this. That is, that all of these trappings of military occupation are necessary because of the oh so dangerous environment the police supposedly face.
Policing is not the country's safest job, to be sure. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries shows, it's far from the most dangerous. The 2012 data reports that for "police and sheriff's patrol officers," the Fatal Injury Rate—that is, the "number of fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers"—was 15.0. And that includes all causes of death—of the 105 dead officers recorded in the 2012 data, only 51 died due to "violence and other injuries by persons or animals." Nearly as many, 48, died in "transportation incidents," e.g., crashing their cars.
Here are some occupations with higher fatality rates than being a cop:
Of these, construction labor is the one I've done myself. This was what our required body armor looked like.
And for good measure, some more that approach the allegedly terrifying risks of being a cop:
Of course, nobody who knows anything about what police actually do, and isn't pushing a reactionary political agenda, thinks cops actually need to be dressed in heavier armor than the occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan. And the fact that you have a better than 1-in-1000 chance of dying in any given year in certain jobs it itself scandalous. But perhaps looking at these numbers helps put the real nature of American policing in a somewhat different perspective.
If you are an American politician today, as well as an entourage you also have a new, modern addition. You have what's called a "digital tracker". They follow you everywhere with a high-definition video camera, and they are employed by the people who want to destroy your political career.
It's called "opposition research" and the aim is to constantly record everything you say and do. The files are sent back every night to large anonymous offices in Washington where dozens of researchers systematically compare everything you said today with what you said in the past.
They are looking for contradictions. And if they find one - they feed it, and the video evidence, to the media.
On one hand it's old politics - digging up the dirt on your opponent. But it is also part of something new - and much bigger than just politics. Throughout the western world new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.
We can't properly see what is happening because these systems are operating in very different areas - from consumerism, to the management of your own body, to predicting future crimes, and even trying to stabilise the global financial system - as well as in politics.
But taken together the cumulative effect is that of a giant refrigerator that freezes us, and those who govern us, into a state of immobility, perpetually repeating the past and terrified of change and the future.
To bring this system into focus I want to tell the history of its rise, and its strange roots - the bastard love-child of snooping and high-level mathematical theory.
It begins with the grubby figure of the early 1960s in Britain - the Private Detective. Up till then private detectives mostly did divorce work. They would burst into hotel rooms to find a married person engaged in adulterous activity. Often these were prearranged situations, set up to supply the necessary evidence to get round Britain's tough divorce laws.
Then two things happened. The divorce laws were reformed - which meant the bottom fell out of the market. But at the same time home movie cameras became cheap and available. Private detectives began to spend their time hiding round corners and behind bushes - recording what their suspects got up to.
Here are two clips I've put together. The first is one of the old-school private detectives going to a hotel room in Brighton to "surprise" the occupants. Followed by a wonderful item from 1973 where one of the new breed shows how he can film people without them noticing. Or so he says. From the evidence you'd doubt it.
He mostly works for the insurance companies - following people and filming them to see if they are faking an injury they are claiming for. I love the 8mm cameras he uses.
The item also includes an interview with a man who is opposed to this snooping. The interviewer says surely they are just trying to find the truth - that a film can't lie. The man's response is great:
"A film can lie very easily - the insurance company or the investigator can edit the film. Supposing someone has a bad limp that only occurs on wet days, or it's a nervous spasm that comes on some days rather than others. The film is shown in court - and shows only the good days when there's no limp"
It's wonderfully silly - but he has a point. Bit like documentary films.
Then - in the early 1970s - the private detectives found they could buy another kind of technology really cheaply.
Bugging equipment.
A new business grew up - often based in tiny rooms above electronic hardware shops in central London. An odd collection of electrical engineers and refugees from the music industry spent their days soldering together miniature transmitters and microphones - and selling them to the private investigators.
Here's a really good film made about this new world in 1973. It not only reports on what is happening - but also catches the essence of what was coming. Most of the film is just set in one room where there are three hidden bugs as well as the normal camera and microphone recording the presenter who is called Linda Blandford. But she doesn't know where they are.
The film evokes the strange repetitive nature of an enclosed world where everything is recorded and played back. Way ahead of its time. It's a smart bit of reporting.
But then - at the end of the 1970s - people began to get worried. It began with revelations that the security agencies were eavesdropping not just on enemy spies but on their own people. Trades unions, radical journalists, politicians had all had their phones bugged.
It quickly spread to a wider concern about all the snooping and bugging that was going on, not just by the state but by private investigators, and by journalists. It was the start of the concern that Britain was becoming a "surveillance society".
Here is a bit report from that time about the growing fears. By now the private detective had become a man in a phone box blowing a harmonic whistle into the mouthpiece.
Journalists also started to get keen on all this new technology. It allowed them to snoop and listen to people in new ways. Here is great section from a fly-on-the wall documentary made about the News of the World in 1981.
There's a wonderful assistant editor who is convinced that Special Branch is bugging his phone. While reporter David Potts is testing his bugging equipment that's going to be used by Tina the junior reporter to expose a child sex ring in North London.
What then happens to Mr Potts' scoop is very funny. And it shows how difficult it was back then to bug someone. It's obvious that what they needed to find was an easier way of snooping on peoples' lives.
In 1987 the growing paranoia finally burst out. The trigger was a BBC television series called The Secret Society made by an investigative journalist called Duncan Campbell.
In 6 half-hour films Campbell pulled what had been happening all together - and drew a frightening picture that still haunts the imagination of the liberal left.
Not only were the security services and the police secretly watching and listening to you - but dark elements of the "security state" had a corrupt relationship with the private security world. The films showed how investigators could easily buy confidential information on anyone.
And at the same time other secret bureaucracies were building giant listening networks - and keeping them hidden from politicians. One of the episodes was about the plans to launch a spy satellite called Zircon. Campbell revealed that the project had been kept hidden from the very politicians who were supposed to oversee it.
The government and the head of GCHQ panicked and put enormous pressure on the BBC, who caved in and said they wouldn't transmit the episode. It was an enormous scandal - and it seemed to prove dramatically everything that Campbell was saying about the secret state who watched you - but didn't want you to know things.
Here are some extracts from the series. In one bit Campbell reveals how, as well as the state, the private sector have developed huge computer databases full of information about millions of ordinary people. In a great sequence he goes to a market in Knaresborough in Yorkshire and asks people if they'd like to see what these databases know about them.
Their reactions of horror to what they are shown are so innocent. It's like a lost world.
I've also included a brief bit from the Zircon film - so you can see what all the fuss was about. It didn't remain banned for long - and has been shown since.
Looking back you can see how programmes like the Secret Society were part of the growing distrust of those who governed us. They seemed to prove that there were hidden, unaccountable and corrupt forces at the heart of the British state.
And the paranoia about surveillance carried on growing.
But at the very time as this happened - a new system of watching and monitoring people rose up. It would do pretty much what the spies and the private detectives had been trying to do - but much much more. It would record not just all our actions - but also be able to understand what was going on inside our heads - our wishes, our desires and our dislikes.
It was called the internet.
The problem was that the only way for the systems on the internet to work would be with our willing collusion. But rather than reject it - we all embraced it. And it flourished.
The key to why this happened lies in an odd experiment carried out in a computer laboratory in California in 1966.
A computer scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum was researching Artificial Intelligence. The idea was that computers could be taught to think - and become like human beings. Here is a picture of Mr Weizenbaum.
There were lots of enthusiasts in the Artificial Intelligence world at that time. They dreamt about creating a new kind of techno-human hybrid world - where computers could interact with human beings and respond to their needs and desires.
Weizenbaum though was sceptical about this. And in 1966 he built an intelligent computer system that he called ELIZA. It was, he said, a computer psychotherapist who could listen to your feelings and respond - just as a therapist did.
But what he did was model ELIZA on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back the the patient what they had just said. And that is what ELIZA did. You sat in front of a screen and typed in what you were feeling or thinking - and the programme simply repeated what you had written back to you - often in the form of a question.
Weizenbaum's aim was to parody the whole idea of AI - by showing the simplification of interaction that was necessary for a machine to "think". But when he started to let people use ELIZA he discovered something very strange that he had not predicted at all.
Here is a bit from a documentary where Weizenbaum describes what happened.
Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details.
His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines.
But others argued that, in the age of the self, what Weizenbaum had invented was a new kind of mirror for people to explore their inner world. A space where individuals could liberate themselves and explore their feelings without the patronising elitism and fallibility of traditional authority figures.
When a journalist asked a computer engineer what he thought about having therapy from a machine. He said in a way it was better because -
"after all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you"
ELIZA became very popular and lots of researchers at MIT had it on their computers. One night a lecturer called Mr Bobrow left ELIZA running. The next morning the vice president of a sales firm who was working with MIT sat down at the computer. He thought he could use it to contact the lecturer at home - and he started to type into it.
In reality he was talking to Eliza - but he didn't realise it.
This is the conversation that followed.
But, of course, ELIZA didn't ring him. The Vice President sat there fuming - and then decided to ring the lecturer himself. And this is the response he got:
Vice President - "Why are you being so snotty to me?"
Mr Bobrow - "What do you mean I am being snotty to you?"
Out of ELIZA and lots of other programmes like it came an idea. That computers could monitor what human beings did and said - and then analyse that data intelligently. If they did this they could respond by predicting what that human being should then do, or what they might want.
They key to making it work was a system called Boolean Logic.
It had been invented back in 1847 by a mathematician called George Boole. One day he'd been walking across a field near Doncaster when he had what he described as a "mystical experience". Boole said that he felt he had been "called on to express the workings of the human mind in symbolic or mathematical form".
Boole's idea was that everything that went on in the human mind could be reduced to a series of yes or no decisions that could be written out on paper using symbols.
His idea was pretty much ignored for over a hundred years - except by Lewis Carroll who as well as writing Alice in Wonderland, wrote a book called Symbolic Logic - that laid out and developed Boole's ideas.
But when computers were invented people immediately realised that Boole's idea could be used to allow the computers to "think" in a reasoned way. Computers were digital - they were either 0 or 1 - and that was the same as "yes" and "no". So Boolean Logic became central to the way computers work today. They are full of endless decision trees saying "if this happened then this, and not this".
Here is a picture of George Boole taken in 1864. It was just before he died and it is one of the earliest portrait photos - he'd stopped off at the new London School of Photography at 174 Regent Street.
In the early 1990s researchers became convinced they could get computers to predict what people might want.
It started in 1992 with a small unit set up in the University of Minnesota. They called themselves GroupLens. Their idea was that if you could collect information on what people liked and then compare the data, you would find patterns - and from that you could make predictions.
They called it "Collaborative Filtering" - and the logic was beautifully Boolean. As one researcher put it -
"If Jack loves A and B and Jill loves A, B, and C then Jack is more likely to love C."
They began by comparing the news articles that people recommended in online newsgroups-
"GroupLens monitored user ratings of news articles. After a user had rated several items GroupLens was able to make recommendations about other articles the user might like. The results were astounding. Users read articles that we recommended highly three to four times as often as those we didn't"
Then, in 1994, a young professor at MIT did the same with music. She was called Pattie Maes - and she designed a system called RINGO. She set up a website where people listed songs and bands they liked. One user described how it worked
"What Ringo did was give you 20 or so music titles by name, then asked one by one whether you liked it, didn't like it, or knew it at all. That initialized the system with a small DNA of your likes and dislikes. Thereafter, when you asked for a recommendation, the program matched your DNA with that of all the others in the system. If some of the matches were not successful - saying so would perfect your string of bits. Next time would be even better"
Again it worked amazingly well. And Maes started to do the same with movies. Then the University of Minnesota group had a brainwave. If these systems could tell you what articles and songs you would like - why couldn't they tell you what products you would like as well?
So in 1997 they set up a company called Net Perceptions. And one of their first clients was Amazon.
But one of Amazon's young software engineers called Greg Linden soon realised that there was a problem with these systems. You had to spend all your time finding out what people said they liked. And as the systems became bigger and bigger - this was proving incredibly cumbersome.
Plus - people were fickle and they changed their mind a lot. Or - in computer engineer speak - they were "dynamic".
Linden saw what the solution was. You give up finding out what people said they liked and instead you just look at what they've done in the past. You assembled all the data from people's history - all the stuff they've looked at and bought in the past - and then compared that with other peoples' past.
Out of that came patterns and correlations that the human brain could not possibly see - but from those correlations you could tell what individuals would want in the future.
Linden was part of what was called The Personalization Group in Amazon. He said:
"the joke in the group was that if the system were working perfectly, Amazon should just show you one book - which is the next book you are going to buy."
And it worked - sales soared, and Jeff Bezos who runs Amazon allegedly crawled up to Linden on his hands and knees saying "I am not worthy".
What Amazon and many other companies began to do in the late 1990s was build up a giant world of the past on their computer servers. A historical universe that is constantly mined to find new ways of giving back to you today what you liked yesterday - with variations.
Interestingly, one of the first people to criticise these kind of "recommender systems" for their unintended effect on society was Patti Maes who had invented RINGO. She said that the inevitable effect is to narrow and simplify your experience - leading people to get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of themselves.
Stuck in the endless you-loop. Just like with ELIZA
But like so much of the modern digital world - these new systems are very abstract. And there is little to see that happens apart from endless fingers on keyboards. So it's difficult to bring these effects into any kind of real focus.
Last year - in a live show I did with Massive Attack - I tried to evoke this new world. I used a song from the 1980s called "Bela Lugosi's dead" - which I love because it has a very powerful feel of repetition. The audience were surrounded by 11 twenty-five foot high screens.
I'm not sure how successfully I did it - but I was trying to show how your past is continually being replayed back to you - like a modern ghost. And it means we stand still unable to move forwards. Like a story that's got stuck.
I've put a short bit of it together from some camera-phone videos shot by the audience in New York. It's a bit rough - as is the sound - but you'll get a sense of it.
For all the online companies that use these systems, the fact that they tend to inhibit change is an unintended consequence.
But there are other - more powerful systems that grew up in the 1990s whose explicit aim is exactly that. To prevent the world from changing, and hold it stable.
And they operate in exactly the same way - by constantly monitoring the world and then searching their vast databases for patterns and correlations.
ALADDIN is the name of an incredibly powerful computer network that is based in a tiny town called East Wenatchee - it's in the middle of nowhere in Washington State in North America.
Aladdin guides the investment of over $11 trillion of assets around the world.
This makes it incredibly powerful. Aladdin is owned by a company called Blackrock that is the biggest investor in the world. It manages as much money as all the hedge-funds and the private equity firms in the world put together. And its computer watches over 7% of all the investments in the world.
This is unprecedented - it's a kind of power never seen before. But Blackrock is not run by a greedy, rapacious financier - the traditional figure of recent journalism. Blackrock is run by the very opposite - a very cautious man called Mr Fink
Here he is. He's called Larry Fink
Back in 1986 Mr Fink was working his way up the First National Bank of Boston when an unpredicted fall in interest rates caused a disaster for the bank. He swore that it would never happen again - and for 20 years he built Aladdin.
It has within its memory a vast history of the past 50 years - not just financial - but all kinds of events. What it does is constantly take things that happen in the present day and compares them to events in the past. Out of the millions and millions of correlations - Aladdin then spots possible disasters - possible futures - and moves the investments to avoid that future happening.
I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world - it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics.
And it raises really important questions. Because its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force.
But it's boring. And there is no story. Just patterns.
Here is some video of Aladdin. A few weeks ago I was filming in Idaho - and decided to go and have a look at the buildings that house Aladdin. I had asked Blackrock if I could have a look inside. Surprisingly the guy in charge of their PR said yes. But a little while later he left the company in what seemed to be a reorganisation.
But it didn't really matter - because you know what it will look like. Row upon row of servers roaring away, and surrounded by giant batteries that will rescue the system if the power supply goes.
Here's the shot from the car driving past the computer sheds that house Aladdin. A 37 seconds tracking shot, and you can see how dull it is.
It is the modern world of power - and it's incredibly boring. Nothing to film, run by a cautious man who is in no way a wolf of Wall Street. It's how power works today. It hides in plain sight - through sheer boringness and dullness.
No wonder we find it difficult to tell stories about it.
There are also a growing number of systems that use data from the past to predict whether individuals are going to commit crimes in the future.
On the surface it's laudable. But it's also rather weird - and in some cases can be false and dangerous.
In every case the systems monitor individuals' behaviour and then sees if that shares similar characteristics with groups of other people stored on the databases who have behaved dangerously in the past.
There is software being used by the Department of Work and Pensions that detects fraudsters by analysing the voices of people who ring its call centres. If you ask the wrong kind of questions - or even ask the right kind of questions in the wrong way - it puts you in the dangerous group.
The government also has what they call a Social Exclusion unit which has an Action Plan. It's aim is to use data to predict when things might go wrong in poor families - even before birth. In one scheme the unborn child of a pregnant mother might be categorised as potentially being a future criminal.
This is based on things like the mother's age, her poor educational achievements, her drug use and her own family history. If the system decides that the unborn child is a potentially dangerous criminal the response is not exactly Philip K Dick - a nurse is sent round to give advice on parenting.
But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even after they have served their full sentence.
STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age, number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of sex-offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms - that the offender will do it again.
The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an individual will do. A recent very critical report of such systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be as great as between 5% and 95%
In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might do something bad in the future.
Opposition Research - the constant recording of everything a politician says and does fits into the same pattern.
But it's a system of wonk-driven surveillance that goes even further - because it has the unforeseen consequence of forcing politicians to behave like machines. It leads them to constantly repeat what they said yesterday, and unable to make imaginative or creative leaps
Every night the digital tracker sends back what that politician said or did today. The first aim is to find something outrageous in that day's video that can be given to the media.
Here is one classic example. It is Jon Bruning who compared welfare recipients to racoons. His speech up to that point is actually a very funny right-wing attack on the absurdity of environmental protection. But then he went too far.
And he was shamed. And he lost the election.
But the other - bigger - task of the opposition researchers is to spend hours comparing what the politician said today with their recorded past that is stored in the computers. They look for contradictions and if they find one they release the videos to the media and again the politician is shamed.
So the politicians become frozen and immobile - because they have to have a blameless history. Which again seems laudable. But it means they can't change their mind. They can't adapt to the world as it changes.
Although if ALADDIN has its way that won't matter
George Boole - who helped start all this with his Boolean Logic had an extraordinary family.
One of them, his son-in-law was called Charles Howard Hinton. He too was a mathematician and he became famous at the end of the nineteenth century when he wrote a book called The Fourth Dimension.
It said that time was an illusion. That everything that has happened and that will happen already exists in a four-dimensional space. Human beings, Hinton said, don't realise this because they don't have the ability to see this four-dimensional world.
Our idea of time - Hinton said - is just a line that goes across this four-dimensional space like a cross section. But we can't see it.
The cumulative effect of all today's systems that store up data from the past is to create something rather like Hinton's world. Everything that has already happened is increasingly stored on the giant servers in places like East Wenatchee.
It never goes away. And this past bears down on the present - continually being replayed to try and avoid anything that is dangerous and unpredictable.
What is missing is the other half of Hinton's world. The future - with all its dangers, but also all it's possibilities.
But George Boole had another daughter called Ethel. She had an amazing life - which showed that there is another way. Because Ethel believed in the future.
Here she is in a Boole family photo - taken after her father died. Ethel is to her mother's right. (Incidentally the rest of the Boole family that you see in this photo also had amazing lives - but that's another story)
When Ethel was 15 she read a book about the Italian revolutionary Mazzini. It inspired her - and she wore clothes like him, dressing in black in mourning for the state of the world.
In 1889 she met a Polish revolutionary called Wilfred Michail Voynich. He had escaped from Siberia and had arrived penniless in London. They fell in love and married, and Ethel went off to Russia to smuggle in illegal revolutionary publications.
Then she met the master-spy Sydney Reilly. He is one of the most extraordinary figures in the odd world of espionage. He'd been born in the Ukraine, but turned against his family and faked his own suicide to escape.
After all kinds of adventures, including rescuing three British intelligence agents from the swamps of the Amazon jungles, Reilly went to London where he spent his time gambling - and he and Ethel began a passionate affair. They eloped to Italy where Reilly bared his soul to Ethel - telling her the extraordinary story of his life.
Then Reilly deserted her - and went off to Russia where he worked as a secret agent for the British. Ian Fleming is said to have used Reilly as the model for James Bond.
Ethel was heartbroken - and she wrote a novel called The Gadfly which, although she never admitted it, her biographer says is obviously based on the early adventures of Sydney Reilly.
It's the most amazing book. It's an over the top melodrama set in Italy about the hero, Arthur's battle against the church and the corrupt state - and his treacherous family. At the same time it is about his passionate love for an english girl - Gemma. It ends with Arthur being slowly tortured and then condemned to be shot.
Its message though is a revolutionary one. Arthur is sacrificed so that humankind can be redeemed and open the way to a realisation of the future possibilities for the world - once the old oppressive forces have been overthrown.
Here is Ethel with a wonderful revolutionary look in her eyes
The Gadfly was published in 1897 in New York - under Ethel's married name, E.L. Voynich. No British publisher would touch it because of its "outrageous and horrible character". But then it was published in Russia and became an astonishing success. One writer describes how all the young Bolsheviks read it and "it virtually became the bible of the revolution".
By the 1960s it was estimated that 250 million Russian teenagers had read the Gadfly in translation. And polls showed that Arthur was consistently the favourite hero of Soviet youth. And in 1955 a film version was made - with a soundtrack by Shostakovich - which won an award at the Cannes film festival.
In 1920 Ethel went back to her husband Wilfred Voynich. He had moved to New York and had become one of the world's greatest expert and dealers in rare books.
His most famous purchase was a mysterious manuscript written in code that has come to be known as The Voynich Manuscript. No one has ever been able to break the code - it seems to have many scientific references, and herbal and astronomical illustrations.
Voynich believed that it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon - and then came into the possession of the legendary John Dee who was a mathematician at the court of Queen Elizabeth.
After Voynich died, Ethel kept the manuscript in a safe deposit box in New York for thirty years - and then sold it in 1960. And it ended up in Yale University. One of the great experts in cryptography wrote:
"The Voynich manuscript lies quietly inside its slipcase in the blackness of Yale's vaults, possibly a time-bomb in the history of science, awaiting the man who can interpret what is still the most mysterious manuscript in the world."
Ethel Boole died in 1960 at the age of 96. Still believing in the power of revolution to change the world. Here is one of the most beautiful sections of Shostakovich's music for the Gadfly - cut to images of the strange Boolean world that we live in today.
From the crises in the Middle East to mass shootings in U.S. schools to the reckless striving for wealth and world domination, there is one overarching theme that almost never gets media coverage—the sense of insignificance that drives destructive acts. As a depth psychologist with many years of experience, I can say emphatically that the sense of being crushed, humiliated and existentially unimportant are the main factors behind so much that we call psychopathology.
Why would it not follow that the same factors are at play in social and cultural upheavals? The emerging science of "terror management theory" shows convincingly that when people feel unimportant they equate those feelings with dying—and they will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves to avoid that feeling.
The sense of insignificance and death anxiety have been shown to play a key role in everything from terrorism to mass shootings to extremist religious and political ideologies to obsessions with materialism and wealth. Just about all that is violent and corrupt in our world seems connected to it.
So before we rush to judgment about the basis of violence in our world, we would do well to heed the terror management theorists and consider missing pieces of the puzzle. Economic, ideological and biological explanations take us only so far in unpacking the bewildering phenomenon of slaughtering people in cold blood, or playing recklessly with their health, safety or livelihoods. Granted, some violence is defensive and perhaps necessary to protect the lives of sovereign individuals and states. But too often violence is provocative, and when it becomes so betrays a common thread of psychological destitution—the sense of insignificance, the sense of not counting, of helplessness, and of emotional devaluation. We have stories daily about both lone gunmen and soldiers who seek vengeance and "prestige" to cover over their cultural and emotional wounds. Correspondingly, such stories parallel the kind of psychopathy of some in the corporate sector who speculate, pollute and militarize at will.
How do we prevent such terrorizing cycles from continuing to arise? How do we transform people who feel so utterly estranged and stripped of value that they are willing to do virtually anything to redress perceived injustices? That transformation is not likely to occur through political or military coercion (as is now being contemplated in Iraq), nor through the ingestion of pills nor anger management programs (as was the case with several mass shooters), nor through the usual hand-wringing about stricter gun laws and increased diplomacy, which are imperative, but don't go far enough.
What is needed is no less than a "moral equivalent of war," to echo the philosopher William James, but at a fraction of the cost. The rampant sense of insignificance needs to be addressed at its root, and not with simplistic bromides. This means that alongside providing affordable short-term public mental health services, we also need to provide affordable long-term, in-depth mental health services. Such services would emphasize the transformative power of deeply supportive, subtly attuned relationships over short-term palliatives and would likely be life-changing (as well as life-saving) in their impact.
We could (and should) also provide cadres of group facilitators to optimize encounters between people in power. These encounters could include heads of state, members of diplomatic corps and legislators. Such facilitators could be schooled in well-established approaches to mediation, such as nonviolent communications, and would likely be pivotal in the settlement of intractable disputes. While the most hardened extremists may be unreachable, there are many others who might surprise us and engage the opportunity.
There is no theoretical reason why such practices would not work with the appropriate adaptations; we see these practices work every day in our clinics and consulting rooms, and often with the most challenging personalities.
The range of violent upheaval in the world is alarming. The quick fix, militarist solutions to this problem are faltering. In many cases, they are making situations worse (as we have seen with recent military operations). The time for a change in societal consciousness is at hand. By focusing our resources on the root of the problem, the many people who feel they don't count, we not only bolster individual and collective lives, we provide a model that others will find difficult to ignore.
Everyone has an opinion to explain the massacres committed by the State of Israel in Gaza. While in the 70s and 80s, it was seen as a demonstration of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, many interpret it today as a conflict between Jews and Arabs. Reviewing the long period of history - four centuries -, Thierry Meyssan, a consultant to several governments, analyzes the origins of Zionism, its true ambitions and determines who the enemy is.
Many of us take pride in experimenting with adventurous new foods, especially when we travel abroad. But, as tempting as these mysterious delicacies can often appear, some of them can make us violently ill or even worse can be fatal. So without further ado, here are 10 of the world's most dangerous foods according to Conde Nast Traveler, that you can eat but probably shouldn't. You have been warned!
1. Raw Cashews. Most of us wouldn't hesitate to buy a bag of these delicious nuts from the local bodega. But, what you don't know is that the 'raw' cashews you purchase from the store shelf are not exactly 'raw.' The kernels have actually been steamed to remove the dangerous chemical urushiol which is related to poison ivy and can cause an unpleasant reaction on your skin. In large amounts, raw cashews can be fatal, so steer clear!
2. Elderberries. While elderberries are often used as a medicinal plant and found in homeopathy remedies to treat skin wounds and colds, the leaves, twigs and seeds contain a deadly chemical related to cyanide, which can cause severe illness and nausea if ingested. While some varieties are safe to eat, those that aren't ripe or cooked properly can cause diarrhea and seizures.
3. Fugu. Also known as the puffer fish, fugu is a Japanese delicacy that if not prepared correctly can kill you or cause asphyxia. The fish, normally eaten raw, can only be served by highly trained chefs with years of experience in preparing fugu. This is because its internal organs contain the lethal poison tetrodotoxin. This substance is 1,200 more toxic than cyanide, which for the more daring foodies provides a slight tingling sensation. When consumed, the toxin does not enter the "blood-brain barrier" so a person can remain completely unaware that his/her central nervous system is slowly closing down, before experiencing paralysis, according to News.com.au. But this hasn't stopped the Japanese, who continue to consume 10,000 tons of the fish every year.
4. Cassava. Cassava is a tropical root crop, known also as tapioca, that is found in South America, Asia and Africa and used as a filler in chips and cakes. Imported raw cassava is particularly dangerous because it contains a toxin called linamarin which the body converts to the deadly cyanogenic glycoside when eaten raw. The only way to ingest it safely is to first peel it and then boil it thoroughly.
5. Blood Clams. Blood clams are harvested in areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Unlike other varieties of clams that are safe to eat, the blood clam can ingest viruses and bacteria including hepatitis A, typhoid and dysentery because it lives in lower oxygen environments. Conde Nast Traveler advises to query where exactly your blood clams herald from when dining and to especially avoid all blood clams from Chinese waters which have been known for hepatitis outbreaks.
6. Casu Marzu. Ready to be turned off your food for life? What the Sardinians call tradition and an aphrodisiac is none other than rotten maggot cheese. Say what? Yes, this sheep's-milk cheese is laid outside in the open to allow flies to lay eggs inside which then hatch into maggots and feed on the cheese causing fermentation. When ingested, the larvae survive and wiggle through your intestinal walls causing severe illness. This "delicacy" has been banned by the Europe Union but there's still a black market for it and shepherds continue to produce it, according to reports. When consuming, local recommend wearing eye protection because the maggots can jump six inches into your eyeballs. Enough said!
7. African Bullfrog. Those thrill seekers trekking across southern Africa may come across this amphibian on the menu in places like Namibia. But be warned: the African bullfrog contains a variety of substances toxic to humans. Locals say that young frogs who have not yet begun to mate are the most lethal because of a toxin they carry. But, even if you eat the wrong parts of a post-mating frog at any time of the year, you risk kidney failure. Best advice? Avoid eating or as many others around the world do - keep it as a pet!
8. Hákarl. Described as the "worst tasting food on earth," this rotten smelling shark from Greenland is considered a traditional Icelandic food and makes the list because it does not have a kidney or urinary tract. Why does that matter, you ask? Well, put simply, it means all the waste and toxic substances are filtered directly into the animal's skin so is essentially a recipe for food-borne illness. In order to filter the waste appropriately to ensure it is safe for human consumption, chefs must ferment the shark and hang it to dry for up to six months.
9. Ackee. Taking a bite of Jamaica's national fruit can cause severe vomiting known as Jamaica Vomiting Sickness thanks to a poison it contains called hypoglycin. It can also cause coma or death if eaten before it's fully ripe. Originally indigenous to West Africa, the black seeds of this fruit are always toxic, but the yellow-hued flesh is apparently okay to consume if the red fruit has burst open. Best to avoid.
10. Sannakji. Last on the list is this Korean raw baby octopus, which is particularly deadly because it continues to move after it has died even after it has been chopped up into small pieces. Even when the limbs have been removed from the body and covered in sesame oil, its suction caps still conserve their gripping power so they are able to latch onto your mouth and throat, becoming a choking hazard for novice eaters and causing asphyxiation. Then again sannakji connoisseurs actually get off on the sensation of the octupus' legs attempting to climb back up the throat. Advice for beginners? Chew before swallowing!
"Only a third of depression cases treated" - Guardian headline, 14th August 2014
The front page of today's Guardian covered an interview with Professor Simon Wessely, the new President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who raised what he sees as a lack of parity in the way mental and physical disorders are treated.
The headline estimate – that a third of sufferers of depression are treated – is actually higher than the one used by NHS England, which says the proportion is about a quarter. When we contacted them the Royal College of Psychiatrists said they also use that estimate, and weren't sure were the "one third" figure came from.
The "quarter" estimate is of the proportion of people who were assessed by a survey as having depression or an anxiety disorder (or both) and who receive treatment. It doesn't tell us anything about the proportion of those diagnosed with a disorder who are treated.
The estimate of a quarter comes from research conducted in 2007, so the proportion could well have risen to a third since then. We're going to be in touch with Professor Wessely to see if he can clarify.
One quarter: where the estimate comes from
The last Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) was carried out in 2007. Another one is being carried out this year.
Survey respondents screened positive for disorders if they met certain criteria. For example, to screen for Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), respondents were asked if they had experienced a traumatic event. If they had, they were asked if they had experienced any of ten symptoms, including jumpiness or difficulty sleeping, twice in the past week. Those who answered yes to six of the ten symptoms screened positive for PTSD.
Participants were also asked if they were currently being treated for a mental or emotional problem. It's important to note that some people treated had suffered more than one of the conditions the survey looked at, and might not have been receiving treatment for all of them. In other words, some people who were depressed might be counted as receiving treatment even if this treatment wasn't for depression.
The proportion in treatment broken down by condition
At the time of interview:
The survey looked at several other psychiatric conditions, but wasn't able to produce reliable estimates of the proportion treated in all cases. For instance, the number of people with a personality disorder or who were dependent on drugs was too low to draw reliable conclusions from.
The post Mental health problems: how many are treated? appeared first on Full Fact.
(not satire)
A 15-year-old girl who used to work in a grocery shop owned by Margaret Thatcher's father said that he had regularly molested her.
In 1997, the girl told a journalist from The Independent:
"He was a bad one. He came round and put his arms around me, feeling my breasts. He used to put his tongue in my mouth. I got quite frightened. I didn't like it and I'd push him away."
She also said Thatcher's father used to regularly molest other teenage girls who worked in his shop:
"He'd say nothing and go, but then he would come back again. He used to chase other girls round the counter."
Looks like abusing helpless people was a bit of a family trait in the Roberts family.
Please feel free to comment. And share. Thanks:
I realised some time ago that I wanted to leave Facebook.
It wasn't that my newsfeed was punctuated by sponsored posts, trying to sell me products I had no interest in. Facebook is a business (and I am aware I'm more valuable as a commodity than as a customer). It wasn't the fact that the platform acted like my own personal problem child from the back seat every 80s vacation movie, needling me as people from my past drove by 'Are you friends yet? Are you friends yet? … how about now?' (No, problem child. No stray thread of curiosity could ever tempt me to unravel that knot of history.) It wasn't the ever-evolving layout design, and the inevitable cacophony of 'bring back the old Facebook!' that erupted every other release cycle.
It was that spending time on Facebook made me feel somehow broken.
Like most hopeful insomniacs, I will occasionally succumb to the theory that if I can find a task repetitive enough, I may eventually lull myself to sleep. Which is how I would find myself scrolling through my newsfeed at 3am, trawling for updates, for photos, for new links — even for old links, that had entertained me well enough the last time they were an act in my web-based circus.
I count myself genuinely lucky to have met some smart, funny and fundamentally lovely people, and Facebook offered me a chance to sneak a peek into their stray thoughts, to glimpse the life of friends living thousands of miles distant. Instead of feeling connected though, I found myself feeling increasingly distant from the people I had previously wanted to hold closer, if only in the most virtual sense of the word possible.
The endless stream of happiness, of excitement, the snapshots of their most blissful afternoons and most tender moments all blurred together in a feeling of "What am I doing with my life? Shouldn't I be doing better?" I wanted to broadcast success from those blue and white bannered rooftops. I wanted to people to enjoy the photos of my pup goofing around on a beach at sunset as much as I did. Uncharacteristically, I found myself yearning to be liked, in all senses of the word.
It wasn't that I couldn't be happy for each of the people involved. I adored seeing photos of my friends' kids growing up. I loved hearing about the latest promotion, engagement, random encounter on a subway. It was just that, as I closed out that tab and returned to the dark, I found that happiness tainted by this sensation of being left behind. Instead of being excited to hear good news on any platform, I found myself horrified to be part of a generation that rolls its eyes and says "I remember when people had big news, they at least had the decency to choose their favourite twenty people and send a mass email". Facebook was an open mouth, and it's ceaseless proclamations of joy and prosperity twisted themselves into a snide comments on the quality of my own life.
There was no defining moment. No single event that made me want to walk away. There was just a day where I was done. I left one final message, and removed the shortcut from my browser.
I was surprised by how each new person exclaimed afterwards (usually over tea) 'Good God, I wish I could do that! What's it like?' It's been hard, it's been mildly amusing — Facebook has clearly taken a personal interest in my well-being and is still trying to coax me back with emails and reminders. The answer, ultimately, is that it's as much a relief as it is a disappointment. It's breaking the seal on a mutually agreed upon and intrinsically false closeness, a pact that you've made with world in the hope of feeling that little bit more connected, that little bit warmer and so getting a good night's sleep.
I logged back in to Facebook 24 hours after I ostensibly left, because a friend mentioned I should be pleased with just how much support my farewell status had garnered. Afterwards, I shut down my phone, and lay in the dark, and once again wondered what I was doing with my life, and shouldn't I be doing better.
With the cost of bringing up a child now approaching £90 a week, the government needs to do more to help low-earning families, says Katie Schmuecker.
Now the summer holidays are in full swing, it will not come as news to many that having children can be costly. New research published today by Child Poverty Action Group and JRF calculates it costs a couple £83,000 over 18 years, or £89 a week, to raise a child with an adequate standard of living (this figure does not include rent or childcare costs – factoring these in increases it to £154,000, or £165 a week).
There are two important things to note about these figures:
The report demonstrates how difficult it has been for a lot of families to meet this standard of living in recent years. The cost of essentials has soared ahead of earnings, at a time when state support for family living costs, through child benefit and child tax credits, has been reduced.
For families in low-paid work, the cost of formal childcare emerges as a major contributor to the rising cost of living. Since 2008, childcare costs outside London have increased by 42 per cent on average.
The government has made childcare costs central to its approach to helping families with living costs. Their plan to help low-income families with 85 per cent of their childcare costs through Universal Credit will make a big difference (compared to support with 70 per cent of the cost currently available through tax credits). However, the policy also, understandably, sets a maximum for the level of childcare costs that the state will support. The problem is that support is currently capped at £175 for one child – a figure that has not changed since 2005. Given how quickly the cost of childcare has increased in recent years, it won't be long before the average price of childcare outside London exceeds the cap. Inside London, average full-time fees are already well above the limit.
If the government isn't careful, its positive plan to support family living costs will be undone. Alongside greater help with childcare costs for low-income families, it should look at increasing the cap in line with the rising cost of childcare. This would make a significant contribution to helping some low-income families meet the cost of raising a child.
The Onion, as ever, is on point with its "coverage" of the worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, and the first in West Africa, infecting some 1,779 people and killing at least 961. "Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away," read the cheeky headline of the July 31 news brief.
Our shorthand explanation is that if the people infected with Ebola were white, the problem would be solved. But the market's role in both drug companies' refusing to investment in research and the conditions on the ground created by neoliberal policies that exacerbate and even encourage outbreaks goes unmentioned.
Racism is certainly a factor. Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease specialist and the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest medical research charities in the world, told the Toronto Star: "Imagine if you take a region of Canada, America, Europe, and you had 450 people dying of a viral hemorrhagic fever. It would just be unacceptable — and it's unacceptable in West Africa."
He noted how an experimental Canadian-developed Ebola vaccine had been provided on an emergency use basis to a German researcher in 2009 after a lab accident. "We moved heaven and earth to help a German lab technician. Why is it different because this is West Africa?"
But Ebola is a problem that is not being solved because there is almost no money to be made in solving it. It's an unprofitable disease.
There have been around 2,400 people killed since Ebola was first identified in 1976. Major pharmaceutical companies know that the market for fighting Ebola is minute while the costs of developing treatment remains significant. On a purely quantitative basis, some might (perhaps rightly) warn against focusing too much on this one disease that kills far fewer than, for example, malaria (300,000 killed since the start of the Ebola outbreak) or tuberculosis (600,000).
Yet the economic constraints retarding progress in developing Ebola treatment also explain why drug companies are resisting developing treatment to those diseases as well as many others.
The last decade has actually seen a tremendous advance in research into therapies for Ebola, usually in the public sector or by small biotech companies with significant public funding, with a variety of treatment options on the table including nucleic-acid-based products, antibody therapies, and a number of candidate vaccines — five of which have successfully protected non-human primates from Ebola.
Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been telling everyone in the press who will listen to him in the last fortnight that an Ebola vaccine would be within spitting distance — if it weren't for the corporate skinflints.
"We have been working on our own Ebola vaccine, but we never could get any buy-in from the companies," he told USA Today.
"We have a candidate, we put it in monkeys and it looks good, but the incentive on the part of the pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine that treats little outbreaks every thirty or forty years — well, that's not much incentive," he told Scientific American.
Almost everyone familiar with the subject says that the know-how is there. It's just that outbreaks are so rare and affect too few people for it to make development worthwhile — that is, profitable — for large pharmaceutical companies.
"These outbreaks affect the poorest communities on the planet. Although they do create incredible upheaval, they are relatively rare events," Daniel Bausch, the director of the emerging infections department of Naval Medical Research Unit Six (NAMRU-6), a biomedical research laboratory in Lima, Peru, told Vox. "So if you look at the interest of pharmaceutical companies, there is not huge enthusiasm to take an Ebola drug through phase one, two, and three of a trial and make an Ebola vaccine that maybe a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will use."
John Ashton, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, wrote a vituperative opinion piece in the Independent on Sunday decrying "the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research to produce treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don't justify the investment.
"This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of an ethical and social framework," he concluded.
This situation is not unique to Ebola. For thirty years, the large pharmaceutical companies have refused to engage in research into new classes of antibiotic. Due to this "discovery void," clinicians expect that within twenty years, we will have completely run out of effective drugs against routine infections. So many medical techniques and interventions introduced since the 1940s depend upon a foundation of antimicrobial protection. The gains in life expectancy that humanity has experienced over this time depended on many things, but would certainly not have been possible without antibiotics. Prior to their development, bacterial infections were one of the most common causes of death.
In April, the World Health Organization issued its first ever report tracking antimicrobial resistance worldwide, finding "alarming levels" of bacterial resistance. "This serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country," the UN health body warned.
The reason for this is straightforward, as the companies themselves themselves admit: It simply makes no sense to pharmaceutical companies to invest an estimated $870 million (or $1.8 billion accounting for the cost of capital) per drug approved by regulators on a product that people only use a handful of times in their life when suffering from an infection, compared to investing the same amount on the development of highly profitable drugs for chronic diseases such as diabetes or cancer that patients have to take every day, often for the rest of their lives.
Every year in the US, according to the CDC, some two million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. 23,000 die as a result.
We see an identical situation with vaccine development. People purchase asthma drugs or insulin, for example, for decades, while vaccinations usually require only one or two doses once in a lifetime. For decades now, so many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned not just vaccine research and development but production as well, that by 2003, the US began to experience shortages of most childhood vaccines. The situation is so dire that the CDC maintains a public website tracking current vaccine shortages and delays.
But with respect at least to Ebola, where the market refuses to provide, the defense department is comfortable intervening and setting aside free-market principles in the interests of national security.
Virologist Thomas Geisbert of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston told Scientific American about his hope for the VSV vaccine, one of the most promising options against Ebola:
We're trying to get the funds to do the human studies … but it really depends on financial support for the small companies that develop these vaccines. Human studies are expensive and require a lot of government dollars. With Ebola, there's a small global market — there's not a big incentive for a large pharmaceutical company to make an Ebola vaccine, so it's going to require government funding.
William Sheridan, the medical director of BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, the developer of experimental anti-viral drug BCX4430, describes the financial predicament facing Ebola treatment research and development: "It just wouldn't make the cut at a major company."
But for a small company like his, the federal government has both backed research and promised to purchase stockpiles of anti-Ebola drugs as preventative measure against bioterrorism. BCX4430 is also co-developed with the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). "There is a market, and the market is the US government," he told NPR.
USAMRIID, along with Canada's Public Health Agency, is also backing the development of ZMAPP, a serum of monoclonal antibiodies by a small San Diego-based biotech firm MAPP Biopharmaceutical, which was administered last week to two American doctors, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, working with the evangelical Christian missionary group Samaritan's Purse.
The pair had fallen ill in Liberia while taking care of patients infected with Ebola. Brantley's condition had been rapidly deteriorating and had phoned his wife to give his farewells. Within an hour of Brantley receiving the experimental serum, his condition had reportedly reversed, with his breathing improving and rashes fading.
The following morning, he was able to shower on his own, and by the time of his arrival in the US after being evacuated from Liberia, he was able to climb down out of the ambulance without assistance. Writebol is now similarly "up and walking," after her arrival in Atlanta from the Liberian capital.
We should be extremely cautious about drawing any conclusions from this development and claiming that the drug has cured the missionaries. We have a sample size of just two in this "clinical trial," with no blinding or control groups. The drug had until now never been tested on humans for safety or efficacy. And as with any illness, a certain percentage of patients will recover on their own. We do not know whether ZMapp was the cause of the apparent recovery. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to state that this turn of events gives great hope.
Two of the ZMapp antibodies were originally identified and developed by researchers at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and at Defyrus, a Toronto-based "life sciences biodefense company," with funding from the Canadian Safety and Security Program of Defence Defense R&D Canada. The third antibody in the cocktail was produced by MappBio in collaboration with USAMRIID, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The companies then partnered with Kentucky Bioprocessing in Owensboro, a protein production company that was bought earlier this year by the parent firm of RJ Reynolds Tobacco, to pharm the antibody-laden tobacco plants.
On hearing of the role of the Pentagon and Canada's defense establishment, some have jumped to conspiracy theories. Indeed, ZMapp appears to be a perfect storm of crunchie nemesis: GMOs, Big Tobacco, the Pentagon and injections that look a bit like vaccines!
But the Defense Department funding should not be viewed as nefarious. Rather, it is evidence of the superiority of the public sector as shepherd and driver of innovation.
However, not all unprofitable diseases are subjects of the colonels' bioterror concern. And why should the private sector get to cherry pick the profitable conditions and leave the unprofitable ones for the public sector?
If, due to its profit-seeking imperative, the pharmaceutical industry is structurally incapable of producing those products that are required by society, and the public sector (in this case in the guise of the military) consistently has to fill in the gaps left by this market failure, then this sector should be nationalized, permitting the revenues from profitable treatments to subsidize the research, development and production of unprofitable treatments.
In such a situation, we would no longer have to even argue that prevention of malaria, measles or polio deserve greater priority; we could target both the big name and neglected diseases at the same time. There is no guarantee that turning on the tap of public funding will immediately produce a successful result, but at the moment, private pharmaceutical companies aren't even trying.
This is precisely what is meant when socialists talk of capitalism being a fetter on the further development of the forces of production. Our concern here is not merely that the refusal of Big Pharma to engage in neglected tropical disease, vaccine and antibiotic R&D is grotesquely immoral or unjust, but that the production of a potential cornucopia of new goods and services that could otherwise benefit our species and expand the realm of human freedom are blocked due to the free market's lethargy and paucity of ambition.
Focusing on a vaccine or drugs is critical. But without paying attention to the deterioration of public-health and general infrastructure across West Africa, and the wider economic conditions that contribute to the likelihood of outbreaks of zoonotic diseases like Ebola, is at best using a bucket to empty the water out of a leaky and sinking boat.
Phylogeographer and ecologist Rob Wallace has described well how neoliberal fallout has established the ideal conditions for the epidemic. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are some of the poorest countries on the planet, ranking 178th, 174th and 177th respectively out of 187 countries in the UN's Human Development Index.
Were such an outbreak to occur in northern European countries, for example, nations with some of the best health infrastructure in the world, the situation would more likely have been contained.
It is not merely the dearth of field hospitals, lack of appropriate hygiene practices in existing hospitals, absence of standard isolation units, and limited cadre of highly trained health professionals that are able to track down every person that may have been exposed and isolate them. Or that better supportive care is a crucial condition of better outcomes, whatever the treatment available. The spread of the disease has also been exacerbated by a withering away of basic governmental structures that would otherwise be able to more broadly restrict movement, to manage logistical difficulties, and coordinate with other governments.
Epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist Daniel Bausch, who worked on research assignments near the epicenter of the current outbreak, describes in a paper on published in July in the Public Library of Science journal Neglected Tropical Diseases how he "witnessed this 'de-development' firsthand; on every trip back to Guinea, on every long drive from Conakry to the forest region, the infrastructure seemed to be further deteriorated — the once-paved road was worse, the public services less, the prices higher, the forest thinner."
Wallace notes that here, as in many countries, a series of structural adjustment programs have been encouraged and enforced by Western governments and international financial institutions that require privatization and contraction of government services, removal of tariffs while Northern agribusiness remains subsidized, and an orientation toward crops for export at the expense of food self-sufficiency. All this of drivespoverty and hunger, and in turn, competition between food and export crops for capital, land, and agricultural inputs leads to an ever greater consolidation of land ownership, in particular by foreign companies, that limits access of small farmers to land.
Ebola is a zoonotic disease, meaning a disease spread from animals to humans (or vice versa). Some 61 percent of human infections throughout history have been zoonotic, from influenza to cholera to HIV.
The single biggest factor driving growth in new zoonotic pathogens is increased contact between humans and wildlife, often by the expansion of human activity into wilderness. As neoliberal structural adjustment forces people off the land but without accompanying urban employment opportunities, Wallace points out, they plunge "deeper into the forest to expand the geographic as well as species range of hunted game and to find wood to make charcoal and deeper into mines to extract minerals, enhancing their risk of exposure to Ebola virus and other zoonotic pathogens in these remote corners."
As Bausch puts it: "Biological and ecological factors may drive emergence of the virus from the forest, but clearly the sociopolitical landscape dictates where it goes from there — an isolated case or two or a large and sustained outbreak."
These outcomes are the predictable result of unplanned, haphazard development in areas known to be the origin of zoonotic spillover, and without the sort of infrastructural support and egalitarian ethos that permitted, for example, the elimination of malaria from the American South after World War II by the CDC in one of its earliest missions.
Over these past few months, the worst Ebola outbreak in history has exposed the moral bankruptcy of our pharmaceutical development model. The fight for public healthcare in the United States and the allied fight against health care privatization elsewhere in the West has only ever been half the battle. The goal of such campaigns can only truly be met when a new campaign is mounted: to rebuild the international pharmaceutical industry as a public sector service as well as addressing wider neoliberal policies that indirectly undermine public health.
We could take inspiration from HIV/AIDS activist groups from the late 80s/early 90s like ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group, and, in the 2000s, South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which combined direct action and civil disobedience against both companies and politicians with a scientifically rigorous understanding of their condition.
But this time, we need a larger, more comprehensive campaign covering not just one disease, but the panoply of market failure with respect to vaccine development, the antibiotic discovery void, neglected tropical diseases, and all neglected diseases of poverty. We need a science-based treatment activism that has the long-term, ambitious but achievable aim of the pharmaceutical industry's democratic conquest.
We need a campaign to destroy the unprofitable diseases.
Last week I spent a frustrating morning trying to open a business bank account. I assumed banks would make it as easy as possible and so I was surprised how frustrating it was. I'm easily put off by small but easily-avoidable annoyances and I found plenty of those.
I had no idea how to choose a bank and bank account. I don't have any obscure requirements: let people pay me; let me transfer money; a debit/ATM card; online banking. Charges for business current accounts vary, but not enough to make a wild difference. I had few good reasons to choose one bank over another.
A couple of friends recommended Barclays, mainly because it can integrate with FreeAgent without going through a third-party service. It sounded pretty broken — one friend registered for both online and mobile banking, and with "data services", but still needed to separately request a "phone banking PIN" to enable a feed into FreeAgent. But, once that was navigated, it apparently worked well.
I wasn't wild about Barclays. I don't like their shade of blue, I don't like their now insipid eagle/shield logo, and I still associate them with closing my first ever bank account in the 1980s over their support of apartheid in South Africa. But these days it's just another bank, I guess.
You can start an application online but, for a limited company, you will subsequently have to book an appointment in a branch anyway. So, given the website said this:
at 9am I was in my local branch, Moorgate. "If they can't open business accounts in the City of London, there's no hope!" I thought to myself. They can't, there wasn't.
A polite man insisted that I would have to call a central Barclays phone number to book an appointment at the branch in which I was standing. I couldn't speak to anyone at the branch, not even to arrange when to come in later. But it says "visit your nearest branch"! Why does it say that?! I was amazed and annoyed and walked out.
I still don't understand. Even if I could have made an appointment in the branch, to see someone in that same branch later, why tell me to visit the branch to do so? Only tell me to visit the branch to apply for an account if I can apply for an account when I get there!
In the 1980s, when I closed my Barclays account, I walked up the high street into NatWest and opened one there. So I'm slightly more fond of it than most anonymous international banking corporations. Plus, out of all the banks, I like their logo the most:
Despite their current credit card advertising campaign which emphasises simplicity, fairness and transparency, finding their business banking charges wasn't simple or transparent, being buried in a PDF and not listed in any navigation. But still, two years' free banking was at least fair.
(Incidentally, that URL for NatWest's "Start-up package" is 780 characters long. Which is an improvement on the 1,126 it had when I looked last week.)
If I read this correctly, applying online means waiting five working days for a further discussion. Or I could call them or visit a branch. Having been bitten by Barclay's branch-visiting, I called the number helpfully displayed on the right.
But, ha ha, despite being displayed in a box headed "Apply now" on a business banking page, that number is not the number to call if you want to apply for a business bank account. The woman who answered gave me the number to call (she couldn't transfer me).
I pressed on, and called the new number. Before we could get started on the application process, the next woman had to read some standard stuff out to me in the "I am reading this" voice. The first of these was that in 2016 my account would move to a new bank, Williams & Glyn. Oh. I've just made the arbitrary decision to bank with NatWest and now you're telling me I can't. Hmm.
Unable to make snap decisions on the phone, I thanked her and hung up. Next!
A couple of friends said they'd walked into branches of Metro Bank and opened up accounts on the spot. This sounded good and in line with Metro Bank's aims of shaking up the system, gently.
I routed round an initial hiccup — the link Google displayed for Metro's business banking was a 404 — and checked that I should be able to open a business account by walking into a branch. Yes! "Please visit your local store to apply for this account."
I walked to the Cheapside branch around 10am and entered their small, quiet replica of a Reno casino. Unfortunately, a helpful woman told me that the "CSR" was busy at the moment and I'd have to wait for 90 minutes. Oh. This is the downside of inviting people to just walk in: you need the capacity to handle them. There seemed to be more staff than customers but they must have been the wrong kind of "CSR"s. So I left.
The day was far too hot already and I was getting nowhere, with something I thought would be simple. I couldn't believe it was so difficult.
A couple of friends said they were with the Cater Allen private bank, but their business bank account page didn't really encourage me to simply open an account. A lot of text, talk of "an Application Pack for your client", a lot of documents to download, and a ten day processing time.
I moved on. I really wanted a bank to sell itself to me, simply, and make it as easy as possible for me to become their customer.
Someone suggested Triodos, who I'd forgotten all about, despite having had a savings account with them for a while. They're an ethical bank, who do good things, and have a business current account. You don't get a credit or debit card but I was past caring, and figured I could get a credit card elsewhere.
To apply for an account you have to call to make sure your business is suitable, which is fair enough. I called, had a chat ("Well, I'm not planning on making websites for arms dealers, ha ha!") and was emailed a link to the application form.
For some reason this link, at the end of a long email, wasn't clickable. But, undeterred, I worked out how to get to the form. This is, however, as far as I got. The form wanted to know "the main activities of your Organisation" and "your main sources of income". The first field needed at least 50 words (or, as the error message put it, 200 characters), and the second needed at least 25 words (or 150 characters). It's just not that complicated. I design and make websites, people pay me money to do so. At this point, and given the limitations of the account, I was beyond making up nonsense to please a form's validation algorithms and closed the tab.
Belatedly, I remembered another friend saying Santander had been quick to set up their business account. So, despite disliking their stagey, awkward adverts featuring sports people, and their renaming of the combined Abbey National and Bradford & Bingley, I just wanted a bank account.
Ignoring the forest of stock photography showing industrious white people, I quickly found their current account for new businesses, for which I could apply online, with a nice clear list of requirements. The form was simple, with a minimum of onerous questions, and it was soon completed.
Within 24 hours I received an email telling me my new account was open! Easy! The email said:
We're pleased to let you know that we've opened a Santander Business Bank Account for you and you can start using your account straightaway.
Your account is now open and ready for use…
Except there was no account number or sort code, and the details for accessing online, mobile and telephone banking would be sent in two letters within 7 to 10 days.
So the account is only "open and ready for use" in the sense that it exists as an entry in a database somewhere. And I can only "start using your account" in the sense of… I don't know. That just doesn't make any sense.
Still, it's done. Or soon will be.
A lot of the above is going to seem petty. And, yes, it is. I could easily have ignored many of these little difficulties and applied for an account a few hours sooner than I did. But no one should have to encounter these difficulties.
They're mostly easy things to get right if you want to make it easy for people to use your service. Putting the correct phone number on the page. Giving people the correct instructions. Making it easy to find information and fill in forms. It's not just making good websites, it's about making the whole company and service work how someone would expect.
Banks seem to be like electricity suppliers or mobile phone companies. They're desperate to seem special but for many customers they're simply interchangeable utilities. But we have to use at least one of them. There's a huge barrier to new companies entering the market and doing things in new ways. Consequently we have to put up with the above petty silliness, clunky online banking, Verified By Visa, and everything else that could be done so much better if only the services focused on the people who use them. Or want to use them.
After the previous post's long sequence of service design failures, here's one little thing that should be easy to get right, and which causes incredible frustration at exactly the wrong moment.
When buying a train ticket online in the UK, in advance, you can choose to collect the ticket from a machine at the train station. You receive an email containing all the relevant details.
When you get to the station the machine offers this screen:
It asks:
Please enter your booking reference:
You check the email you've kept handy on your phone and look for the "booking reference":
There it is, near the bottom:
Your booking reference is 2106902679.
You type it in to the machine, although the input field is the wrong length, which is odd.
The machine rejects your booking reference.
You try again, because you must, but no joy.
In desperation you scroll through the rest of the email because you don't know what else to do and your train leaves in a few minutes:
Hmm. What's this?
Collection reference: R2T4KB9C
But the screen wants the "booking reference", which was the first number.
It's worth a try…
Ah, this "collection reference" is the right length…
And, yes, the machine starts printing your tickets!
So, what the collection machine calls a "booking reference", the email calls a "collection reference" or (in the subject line) a "booking confirmation". And the email contains a "booking reference" number which appears to have no purpose, even though it's the first reference in the body of the email.
When starting a project, and throughout its life, it's important to ensure everyone involved calls things by the same names. I'm guessing that in this case different teams, or even companies, built the software that sends the emails and the software that runs the collection machines. Due to a mismatch of internal vocabularies the single piece of information the user needs at the most crucial part of the process has been muddled.
It's probably a nightmare of laborious and expensive change request processes to fix this simple piece of wording, which has already been wrong for months, if not years. But that's another issue.
Survivors of abuse need good mental health services now, otherwise they are simply being failed all over again
There is a sense of national outrage at the seemingly endless stream of revelations concerning the sexual abuse of children by people in the public eye. While such outrage is understandable, I can't help being struck by the simultaneous lack of concern about the cuts to the services and support many survivors of sexual abuse depend on.
Mental health problems are a very common consequence of sexual abuse. An overview of research in this area, conducted by Anne Lazenbatt for the NSPCC suggests that as many as 80% of young adults who have been sexually or physically abused, or both, are found to meet the diagnostic criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder by the time they are 21. By the time they reach their late 20s, they are twice as likely to have attempted suicide as someone who has never been abused.Continue reading...
The text below is translated from the poster at the centre of this image of the destruction of Gaza by the Israeli state. But it refers not to this horror but another in 1943 when the Nazis crushed the Warsaw ghetto, wiping out the poorly armed organised resistance that operated out of a warren of bunkers & sewers hidden beneath the ghetto. This poster was by one of the armed factions that defended the Ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB)
All people are brothers;
Yellow, brown, black, and white.
Talk of peoples, colors, races -
Is all a made-up story
Channel 4 Dispatches has looked at the problem of nuisance phone calls, documenting the irritation and inconvenience that it can cause people around the country. Our acting director, Emma Carr, contributed to the investigation. Here, we have compiled the advice that is currently available for people concerned about any nuisance calls that they are receiving.
Ofcom has created a video on what to do if you receive nuisance calls
What are nuisance calls?
The Information Commissioner's Office's (ICO) Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 covers the way organisations make direct marketing telephone calls.
According to the ICO, nuisance marketing calls can be live sales calls or calls where a pre-recorded message is played. What these calls have in common is that there is an attempt to promote a product, service, aim or ideal to you.
There are two types of marketing calls:
Live marketing calls should not be made to anyone who has registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS), unless they have told the caller that they wish to receive such calls from them. They should also not be made to anyone who has told the caller directly that they do not wish to receive marketing calls.
Automated marketing calls should only be made to you when you have previously agreed that the organisation can make these calls.
Ofcom has also provided the following guides and information:
Other advice from the ICO:
What can I do to avoid nuisance calls?
To help stop nuisance live marketing calls you can:
What can I do if I am receiving nuisance calls?
If you receive a live marketing call which you think breaches the Regulations you should write to or email the organisation concerned (remembering to keep a copy of all correspondence). Tell them about the problem and allow them time to put things right.
If you continue to receive live nuisance calls 28 days after registering with the TPS, you can complain to the TPS. You can also report your concerns to us.
If you are receiving calls that ask you to phone a premium rate number (one beginning with 090) you can contact PhonepayPlus. They regulate products or services that are charged to users' phone bills or pre-pay accounts.For all other nuisance automated calls, you can report your concerns to us.
Who to contact to make a complaint?
our culture is obsessed with avoiding death and acute physical injury, while being unaware of the grinding emotional trauma of going to school, looking for a job, being deep in debt, and generally being treated like cattle in a giant scheme to concentrate wealth and power ever more densely at the center.
trying to capture the essence of your life in a form that can be experienced by another, is one of the most interesting technological challenges in the world.
It's obvious that someone lying on the ground with a broken leg can't walk, so no one expects them to get up and pop into A to get it set, and then get on with their business, but it seems it is much harder for many to believe in the physical anguish, debilitations and incapacitations of mental illness, and see the need to offer relief.
She tried to fill up the void with eating, drinking, sex and drugs. 'I am starving. Nothing I put into me satisfies me. I could devour the world, but I chew myself (my nails, my hair) instead.
"The catalyst for breakdown is always stress: it's life events. If you want to depict mental illness accurately, then the interplay needs to be shown. Fiction can do that."
good teachers were the most creative and served as role models. They mentored their class on a journey of lifelong learning.
Industry analysts argue endlessly about what the breakeven price of shale gas is for various fields, but my general takeaway is that it could mean a doubling of wholesale prices.
the most revolutionary political change of the 21st century, the unconditional basic income, will be necessary to keep the system stable, to turn the unemployed majority from hungry militants back into consumers.
Not jobs, then, but free access to resources is what people need to be free from dependence on others, and equal in any meaningful sense.
Thatcher and her successors have done all they can to sell off the nation's bricks and mortar, only to be forced to rent it back, at inflated prices, from the people they sold it to.
Many people who bought their council houses sold them on to private landlords, who rented them to people on housing benefit who couldn't get a council house, at double or triple the levels of council rent. Right to Buy thus created an astonishing leak of state money – taxpayers' money, if you like to think of it that way – into the hands of a rentier class.
it was the instability of (close-to) full employment — unstable because it left workers with the capacity to resist arbitrary authority in the workplace and wage restraint in bargaining — that contributed to the profit squeeze and crisis of the 1970s. And it was that crisis that was so central to the consequent neoliberal attack on the working class and the institutions that supported it.
Armed police had to be called in to man information desks and deal with furious passengers who were stranded or delayed, one man told the BBC.
the food stamp program "is a very important business to JP Morgan. It's an important business in terms of its size and scale...The good news from JP Morgan's perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume.."
Selves are fictional, we are both author and authored, and as such our only hope is to become better writers – more fluent, more practiced, and courageous enough to create on the blank pages of the unknown future.
The formal laws, decrees and regulations which formed apartheid may have been removed, but the free market is almost as effective a mechanism for ensuring that the geography and economic structure of apartheid persists.
In the real world, Capitalist private propert was established via violence, by the process of primitive accumulation: Land was forcefully enclosed and taken from the peasants that owned it, mercantile monopolies broke the small producers and obtained gigantic fortunes, foreign populations were enslaved and stolen from in order to accumulate wealth; and thus a society of property owners with huge sums of accumulated wealth and of a dispossessed majority that was forcefully kicked out of their means of production was formed. The story of Capitalism was written in letters of blood and fire, as Marx put it.
British diplomat Smallbones suspected that the outbreak of violence had been triggered by "that sexual perversity … very present in Germany."
If we take natural wealth into account when looking at economic activity, it turns out that we consistently destroy much more wealth than we create: the economy is mostly a negative-sum game.
the birds and the turtles were more important than they were, because these animals could survive without them, but they could not survive without these animals.
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