Ray Adams is the man in the latest Murdoch scandal

By Michael Collins, COTO Report

Ray Adams is a name you will hear more frequently as the latest and perhaps most fatal Murdoch – News Corp. scandal emerges.

When Murdoch was setting up his BSKYB cable network in England, he had some serious competition. ITV had a digital service called ITV Digital. The British broadcaster was prepared to go head to head with Murdoch’s network. As the services rolled out, ITV Digital became subject to furious hacker attacks. The hackers broke the ITV encryption code and distributed it widely allowing so many people to get free ITV service, the venture failed, largely due to the piracy of its service, and Murdoch had a clean road to mega profits with BSKYB.

The BBC’s Panorama television show broke a story (not yet available in the United States) accusing a Murdoch owned firm, NDS, of hiring hackers to break the ITV code, thus sabotaging the Murdoch competitor. The rest is history and huge profits. BSKYB is the dominant British cable network. It’s spreading throughout Europe.

During the time ITV was hacked out of existence, Ray Adams was the head of operational security for NDS. The firm hired hackers to anticipate and check security problems with its own encryption system. But there’s more. Reports from Great Britain and Australia document NDS using hackers to target rivals. Australia’s Financial Review just broke a well document story outlining the same pattern of hacking behavior by NDS in behalf of Murdoch cable operations there. The publication documented the story with 10,000 emails it received from, you guessed it, the computer of Ray Adams.

More...

How Homeland Security Is Hiding the Feds' Role in Occupy Crackdown

From: PCJF Obtains New DHS Documents: Critical Analysis Shows DHS Is Playing Three Card Monte

A trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.

On September 17, 2011, a Secret Service intelligence entry in its Prism Demonstrations Abstract file records the opening of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The demonstration location that the Secret Service was protecting? The “Wall Street Bull.” The name of the Protectee? The “U.S. Government.”

American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.

The DHS’s Game of Three Card Monte to Deflect Disclosure of Law Enforement Operations

These documents, many of which are redacted, show that the highest officials in the Department of Homeland Security were preoccupied with the Occupy movement and have gone out of their way to project the appearance of an absence of federal involvement in the monitoring of and crackdown on Occupy.

On the street it would be called “Three Card Monte,” a swindler’s game to hide the ball -- a game of misdirection. The House always wins.

The DHS, as revealed in the newly released documents, has engaged in what appears to be a effort to avoid looking for Occupy related materials where it is likely to be found, including in Fusion Centers and DHS sub-divisions such as the Operations Coordination & Planning sub-division which is responsible for DHS coordination with local and federal law enforcement partners.

On November 16, DHS Press Secretary Matthew Chandler transmitted an e-mail to top ranking DHS officials, including the Chief of Staff to Janet Napolitano, the Chief of Staff to the DHS General Counsel, among others, in which he reports:

“We’re getting inquiries from CBS, AP, Daily Caller and others on an un-sourced Examiner.com piece that says that DHS and FBI are collaborating with cities by providing tactics and information on removing Occupy protestors. A check of I & A [Intelligence and Analysis] and FPS [Federal Protective Services] shows that this type of outreach is not occurring in any wholesale manner.”

The Press Secretary is careful to couch the official statement, that such is not occurring in any “wholesale” manner, leaving the door open to possible future revelations of such conduct.

But this official statement was based solely on a mid-November inquiry to two DHS sub-sections: Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and Federal Protective Services (FPS). And by the date of that statement, Federal Protective Services and apparently also the I&A Directorate had already purged, “restricted and/or rescinded,” any Occupy related intelligence products, as discussed further here.

In other words, having looked into only two drawers - - which had already “restricted and/or rescinded” all Occupy related intelligence products - - it is not surprising that Press Secretary Chandler’s statement that no “wholesale’ coordination of Occupy related actions is based on incomplete information.

More...

A Universe of Self-Replicating Code

George Dyson, Edge

When I started looking at the beginnings of the modern digital universe—at the origin of this two-dimensional address matrix—I became interested in the question of what had been done with it at the beginning. Of course, one of the things was the work on the hydrogen bomb.

Another thing that surprised and delighted me was to find that a Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist and viral geneticist, Nils Aall Barricelli, had tried to come to Princeton in 1951, as soon as he heard this machine was being built. He had trouble getting a visa, so he finally shows up in early 1953 when the machine is running, and immediately begins these experiments, to see if he could inoculate this two-dimensional matrix with random strings of one-dimensional numbers that can self-replicate and cross-breed, and do all the things that we know that code does in biology, and see what happens.

And he observed. He was an observational biologist. He saw all sorts of behavior that he read all sorts of biological implications into. He was way too far ahead of the time, so no one paid attention and this was forgotten.

We now live in a world where everything he dreamed of really did happen. And, for some reason, von Neumann never publicized Barricelli's work. I don't know if there was a personal rivalry or what happened, but von Neumann died, and his papers on self-reproducing automata were published posthumously [edited by Arthur W. Burks] and there was no mention of Barricelli. Part of it was this fear that it really would provoke the public. They called computers "electronic brains" at that time. It was scary enough that we might be building machines that would think. But the idea of producing artificial life was even more Frankenstein-like. I think that's one reason we never heard about that.

Just as we later worried about recombinant DNA, what if these things escaped? What would they do to the world? Could this be the end of the world as we know it if these self-replicating numerical creatures got loose?

More...

In Moscow, Little Girl Soldiers

Kristen Joy Watta, Lens

They prepare for classes and make their beds together, gently setting a teddy bear and a stuffed crocodile on pillows. They look intently at themselves as they fix oversize white bows, meant to symbolize purity, in their hair.

And they wear gas masks for training drills.

They are “the Little Spies of Putin” — or at least that’s what a French publication called them in a piece that inspired the photographer Sergey Kozmin to document them for his series “Girl Soldiers.”

They can “strip down an AK-47 Kalashnikov in the time it takes most kids to send an S.M.S.,” Mr. Kozmin said.

The young students attend the Moscow Female Cadet Boarding School No. 9 — which Mr. Kozmin calls “one of the elite military academies in Russia.” It is a state school, free to all who attend, though the competition to be admitted is intense.

More...

Who's the greatest threat to world peace asks Noam Chomsky: Iran, Israel or U.S.?

Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. In the Arab world, Israel and the U.S. are regarded as the pre-eminent threat.

More...

Henry Miller & Anaïs Nin on Death and Dreams

Henry miller talks of real Death the living death we live with : the world of work, religion, war, etc.

"The neurotic man is the man of the future he continues..."
"A man should not adapt to this world because it's a bad world. "
~ Henry Miller

Anaïs Nin on how schools are prisons and learning to find your own way

Philosophy of a Knife - 2008 - Official Trailer

According to Rotten Tomatoes:

"The true history of Japanese Unit 731, from it's beginnings in the 1930's to it's demise in 1945, and the subsequent trials in Khabarovsk, USSR, of many of the Japanese doctors from Unit 731. The facts are told, and previously unknown evidence is revealed by an eyewitness to these events, former doctor and military translator, Anatoly Protasov. Part documentary and part feature, the story is shown from the perspective of a young Japanese nurse who witnessed many horrors, and a young Japanese officer who is torn between his sincere convictions that he is serving the greater purpose, and the deep sympathy he feels for an imprisoned Russian girl. His life is a living hell as he's compelled to carry out atrocious experiments on the other prisoners, using them as guinea pigs in this shocking tale of mankind's barbarity. Philosophy of a Knife is truly one of the most violent, brutal and harrowing movies ever made."

Borders (1989)

Via RAWarchive

http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.co.uk/

Borders (1989)

A philosophical flume ride through the physical, political and moral borders that inhibit the free movement of people and ideas. Mixing commentary, computer graphics, dramatisations, and investigative journalism, "BORDERS" probes the unsettling paradoxes behind immigration, drugs, Star Wars, and other topics.

Staring: Robert Anton Wilson, Michio Kaku, Margaret Randell, Juanita Kreps, Brian Freemantle & Steve Buscemi.

Written/Produced/Directed by: Merrill Alidighieri & Joe Tripician.

Foreclose the Banks

Foreclose the Banks from FtheBanks on Vimeo.

This year let's foreclose the big banks, not our homes. Visit fthebanks.org to gear up with materials, info, and more.

Directory of Photography: Jeremy Baron, jeremybaronphotography.com/
Second Camera: Andrew Stern, andrewstern.net/
B Roll: OWS Community

U.S. adds Vatican to money-laundering ‘concern’ list

The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the U.S. State Department’s list of money-laundering centres but the tiny city-state is not rated as a high-risk country.

The 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was made public on Wednesday and Washington’s list of 190 countries classifies them in three categories: of primary concern, of concern and monitored.

The Vatican is in the second category, grouped with 67 other nations including Poland, Egypt, Ireland, Hungary and Chile.

It was added to the list because it was considered vulnerable to money-laundering and had recently established programmes to prevent it, a State Department official said.

More...

G. A. Cohen - Against Capitalism

Gerald (Jerry) Cohen was a Marxist political philosopher. He was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and subsequently Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Cohen

'Capitalism is a flawed economic order that is palpably failing humanity. Is it curable?'

From Denial and Demise by Sir John Whitmore:

Greed is not new. It pre-existed capitalism by millennia. It just shows up in even sharper relief at a particular stage of social evolution. This assertive/competitive state of consciousness is the fuel that drives individuals and businesses to strive for ever more and ever bigger. This stage is best described as the need for status and recognition, and naturally we have an economic system commensurate with that need. Capitalism glorifies it, such that it becomes our way of life, and keeps people stuck there. They see it as an end in itself, rather than as the passing level of immaturity that it reflects. This was accentuated when the Berlin Wall fell, since, in simplistic dualistic thinking, some people became convinced that capitalism was indeed the right or the best social structure for the world from then on.

A basic understanding of the evolutionary process should tell us that it is time to move on up to the next level, now the current system has become obsolete and the harm it is doing is intolerable for much of the world. Capitalism was invented in the West for Westerners and it offered riches to others who joined the club. It soon became so pervasive and dominant that other cultures were obliged to abandon their own evolutionary choices and adopt the Western system or die. Many of them die anyway, for Western capitalism does little to feed them: it serves Westerners first. Communism was seen as the only alternative, and it had some appeal as a collective counterweight to self-serving capitalism, but, at least in the way it was imposed and malpractised in the Soviet Union, it was doomed anyway.

More...

Antisemitism and the (modern) critique of capitalism

The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism. I will first look at some contemporary expressions of antisemitism, and theses IV and V explore Adono’s and Horkeimer’s (1989) and Postone’s (1986) understanding of Nazi antisemitism.

More...

The Critique of the Crisis of Capitalism Critique by HowTheWorldWorks

A critique of howtheworldworks video from a left wing/anarchist perspective.

ANONYMOUS Revolution 2012 New Message What we are capable of!

http://cafunonymous.blogspot.com/

-What are we capable of 2.0-
Each of us has our own path, but each of us share the same goal, a free humanity,together we stand.
People all around our world have made the choice to rise against this corrupted system.
The resistance continues. 2011 will forever be remembered as a year of global uprising. 2012, the whispers of revolution blow in the wind.
We are anonymous.
We continue to support the people as we "occupy" because we truly believe another world is possible, a world where choices are made from the Heart, a world free of fear.
As Humanity continues to connect at an accelerating rate...we continue to cross all borders. With knowledge comes understanding, with understanding we can overcome our issues, we must live in a world free of censorship.
As you watch this video governments around the world continue to arrest Anons and beat peaceful protesters. They fear us because we are evolving faster than they can control. We can no longer exist in their world of fear.... It is time to make our own change.
Now is the time to make our stand. There is no ONE right answer, our resistance must be as colourful as the spectrum. You can only disturb the hive so much before you get stung!
The people will only take so much!
You can no longer contain us!
We are just getting warmed up!

We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect Us.

WTO upholds ruling, Boeing's illegal aid tops $5.3bn

The 27-nation bloc says a solution to the trade dispute, the world’s most costly, must only come through negotiations. “I have always been saying we are ready to start unconditional discussions,” De Gucht said. “That remains so.”

The dual cases have become increasingly important as competitors from China, Canada and Brazil emerge, and the rulings may set industry-defining guidelines for government support in the $70 billion civil-aviation industry.

Judges originally found that Boeing got at least $5.3 billion in illegal aid between 1989 and 2006 and was slated to get $3 billion to $4 billion in incompatible future aid based on Washington state tax measures. Today’s appellate ruling means the harm caused by the subsidies may be found to exceed $5.3 billion, though the panel didn’t name a figure.

The EU has estimated the total amount of subsidies between 1989 and 2006 at $19.1 billion. The amount of harm is important because it is the basis on which a government can request permission to impose a specific level of sanctions.

Aid Breakdown

The illegal aid includes NASA research and development programs for $2.6 billion between 1989 and 2006 and Department of Defense programs with aid as high as $1.2 billion in the same period. There were also three Washington state tax breaks valued at as much as $4 billion from 2006-2024 and foreign sales corporation export subsidies amounting to $2.2 billion until 2006, as well as $476 million in Kansas aid.

More...

Data points on tactics and revolution

An article by George Lakey is circulating around the Internet under the headline, “The More Violence, The Less Revolution.” While title is a quotation from 1930s radical Bart de Ligt, the thrust of the piece is to read Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s large-scale study Why Civil Resistance Works (website) under this headline. Chenoweth and Stephan do make a serious and wide-ranging attempt to measure the outcomes of tactical choices made by movements, and both their data and conclusions should be read widely among people interested in changing their societies. Chenoweth and Stephan’s expansive category of civil resistance is actually one that spans across existing internal debates in the Occupy Movement (and earlier generations of tactical debates in the global justice movement and elsewhere). Vitally, their analysis of what conditions make civil resistance successful can help us focus our tactical conversations in a very productive direction.

George Lakey, while an opponent of both violent tactics and property destruction, issued a strong rejoinder to Chris Hedges’ The Cancer in Occupy, arguing: “The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again. Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.” Lakey has developed a nuanced, historically informed position on nonviolence. His strategic approach to thinking about nonviolence that has been surprisingly contagious internationally. And Lakey is willing to have difficult conversations with people who profoundly disagree with him, to his credit.

[ ... ]

Surveying across the data, I would say: The shortage of nonviolent social revolutions places the burden on advocates of nonviolence to explain the methods by which large amounts of property without violence to explain how this will happen. On the other hand, the shortage of violent democratic revolutions places the burden on advocates of a military conflict to explain how their methods will allow for a participatory democracy to emerge. No one can look at the history of the past century and point to consistent success of their method at achieving revolutionary transformations.

(Looking across this panorama, the heavy weight of external intervention, often by the United States, becomes a crucial factor. Unless we can stop the next Clinton from strong-arming or overthrowing the next Aristide, the conversation about how to start transformative revolutions is irrelevant for important parts of the world. From the positive side, movements seeking social transformation have the challenge of creating enduring new orders that can resist that kind of external pressure, something that has historically happened through limits on democratic freedom. Civil resistance as the defense against such coups, which succeeded in 2002 in Venezuela and 2008 in Bolivia, could alter this balance.)

More...

America Beyond Capitalism

Gar Alperovitz describes a model that challenges private monopoly ownership without a powerful bureaucratic state.

This Day in History: Gandhi Leads Civil Disobedience in India

On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.

Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India's poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. He declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience.

More...

Civil disobedience at risk all over—Georgia, Virginia, Chicago and “colonial Williamsburg”

Via News from Underghround:

GEORGIA:

1) Georgia Law Would Outlaw Picketing; Make Sit-Downs A Felony
By Kenneth Quinnell
http://crooksandliars.com/kenneth-quinnell/georgia-law-would-outlaw-picketin

2) SB 469 Would Make Civil Disobedience a Felony in Georgia
Written By: GLORIA TATUM
http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/interspire/news/2012/03/01/sb-469-would-make-civil-disobedience-a-felony-in-georgia.html

CHICAGO:

3) Outlawing dissent: Rahm Emanuel’s new regime
Bernard Harcourt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/19/outlawing-dissent-rahm-emanuel-new-regime

VIRGINIA:

4) Your Body Under Arrest: Police in Riot Gear Remove Peaceful Women’s Rights Protestors in Virginia
by Jodi Jacobson
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/05-6

5) City may corral protests, preaching
By Steve Vaughan
http://www.vagazette.com/articles/2012/03/04/slide_show/doc4f5173d7497a4985952351.txt

War Tax Resistance resources and Tax Day (mid-April) plans

To those interested in war tax resistance/refusal and supporters in Maine,

With US weapons arming the world and continuing US troop invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world, it’s more important than ever to know where your tax dollars are going and how to pay for peace, not war. And where our tax dollars actually SHOULD go are just as important.

More...

Women War Resisters: Oral Histories, Contemporary Visions

by Rosalie G. Riegle, Bad Subjects

From 2004 to 2007, I interviewed 157 war resisters from the U.S. and Europe. Many of these were women--young and old, married and single, living with families or in community.

Women have always resisted war. As mothers and lovers, they grieve the loss of their companions and the maiming of body and soul caused when their warrior men fight other warrior men. Most tolerate uneasily the false heroism of their male companions’ beer talk, hearing instead the battle nightmares of the dark. Some do more than quietly tolerate. They resist, both by saying no in legal protest and tax resistance and by “acting no” with their bodies when they take part in nonviolent direct action for peace. Some resisters call this civil disobedience; others use the term “civil resistance” reasoning that they are obeying international law, while their government is disobeying it. These actions disrupt their lives and often mean long jail or prison terms.

[ ... ]

One of the most successful---and least remembered---raft board raids was “Women Against Daddy Warbucks,” an action framed specifically as feminist in philosophy and execution. Linda Orell, a woman arrested for that action, wrote me, “[There was] massive chauvinism. At that time, a lay woman who did not cower in her niche as a married person was on just about as low a rung . . . as one could get.”

After careful planning, five women spent the entire night inside a building containing several Manhattan draft boards, shredding over 6000 A-1 files without being apprehended. Two days later they turned themselves in at a dramatic Rockefeller Center rally, raining the shredded files like confetti over the crowd, and the waiting FBI. While several arrests were made and a grand jury attempted, in the end no one was prosecuted because Federal judge Constance Baker Motley, a former civil rights activist, dismissed the charges.

More...

SOLIPSIST

Directed by Andrew Thomas Huang
andrewthomashuang.com

WINNER at SLAMDANCE 2012 of the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short

View here.

Uprising: 2012

http://www.freedominfonetwork.org
FIN on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/freedominfonetwork
FIN on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/freedominfonet

For a full transcript of the monologue contained in this video: http://pastebin.com/A68LxS4b

This video was created by EndFear for the Freedom Informant Network.

Music: (In order)

NiN - Right Where it Belongs V2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnV1DGqK6us&feature=related

John Murphy - The Boathouse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_PkkMcb55Q

Future World Music - New Beginnings (remix) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9QUSBk2UnU

The more violence, the less revolution

George Lakey writes for Occupy Washington DC:

...Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

[ ... ]

The good news is that regimes can be overthrown, even though dictators bring out the police and army to try to stay in power. The bad news is that the people didn’t always win; when they used violence they won only one time in four. They did, however, double their chances of success when they used a nonviolent strategy.

In our research for the Global Nonviolent Action Database, my students and I found a number of cases in which movements first tried violence, found it didn’t work, and then switched over to nonviolent struggle and won.

Researcher Anthony Phalen tells us, for example, that the Latvians tried guerrilla war against domination by the Soviet Union for years without success, then switched to a nonviolent strategy and succeeded...

More...

Papoutsis: “Tear Gas is the Mildest Form of Reaction Across Europe”

Former Minister for Citizens’ Protection and aspiring PASOK leader Christos Papoutsis defended his work at the ministry and the (often extensive) use of tear gas during protests in Athens and other Greek cities. He said that chemicals are better than water and that he never gave orders to police to dissolve demonstrations because they caused problems to the government.

“These chemicals are the mildest form of reaction throughout Europe. they are not rubber bullets, they’re not water. I was criticized because I did not allow that for what I was blamed to[sic]: a police state. If we would have police state, there would have been dead in Athens” Papoutsis said speaking in REAL FM.

More...

The Real Democracy

From VII VISIONAIRES:

An updated summary of the charming record of US foreign policy. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States of America has …
1.Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
2.Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
3.Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
4.Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
5.Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. ...
More...