We stand on the cusp of one of humanity's most dangerous moments

Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

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Online investigations: Searching the Web and organizing your information

Tools Shared During the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism

By the Online Journalism Working Group Professors and Students of the School of Authentic Journalism
Class of 2010, School of Authentic Journalism

March 4, 2010

On February 7, the investigative journalism and online reporting teams held a joint plenary on online investigations.

Presenters demonstrated a few tools that are used to locate information and carry out online investigations.

These tools include online databases on various topics, internet archives, and ways to back up controversial or damning information so that it can't be removed from the internet. Some of the tools and databases search the Deep Web, which is the part of the web that is not searchable by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Other tools are used to organize the often copious amounts of electronic documents that online investigators often have to manage.

The investigative and online teams are making the tools they mentioned during the plenary available online.

This is an interactive blog post. The online and investigative journalism teams will continue to update the post with more tools.

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President Fox guarding narco hen-house?

Mexico press said Fox close to top drug trafficker, raising questions about curious Bush-Clinton links to Fox

[ This story was originally published at WorldNetDaily.com on February 15, 2001. Interestingly, it was re-posted without censorship but with a great deal of comment at FreeRepublic.com on July 28, 2001. President Bill Clinton had earlier met former Mexico President Ernesto Zedillo at the coastal ranch of alleged narcotics trafficker Roberto Hernandez Ramirez in 1999 for the U.S.-Mexico "anti-drug" conference, after which new President Vicente Fox vacationed with Ramirez. Curiously, reports at the same time revealed that then Texas Governor George Bush "loaned" Fox one of his top media consultants to assure his election, validating secret Bush links to the Mexico president (the consultant used fake names to hide the ties during his 40 visits with Fox), all of which is mostly unknown to the American people and the United States Congress--well, most of Congress. This, despite multiple Mexico press allegations.

To add to the outrage, Ramirez is also on the board of directors of New York CitiBank and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, after having sold his BanaMex bank to CitiGroup in 2001 for $12.5 billion.

Revealing photo and map evidence with testimonial allegations about Ramirez ran daily in Por Esto during Clinton's Cancun conference, alleging Ramirez was running a drug trafficking operation from his huge property, complete with an airport which allegedly smuggled one-third of Central America's cocaine into the U.S.A. This, according to the three largest daily newspapers in Mexico, raising questions about side agendas as President Bush himself meets with Fox on Thursday and Friday in Cancun, adjacent to the property owned by Ramirez, who the press referred to as "El Narcotrafficante."

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DR-Congo: EU urged to ban 'conflict minerals'

After the United States senate's move to stem the flow of money from mineral mines fuelling the brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the watchdog group Global Witness (GW) is calling on Europe to follow suit.

"We are calling on the European Union (EU) to introduce legislation to exclude conflict minerals from eastern DRC coming into the European market," Lizzie Parsons from GW, an international organisation investigating the links between natural resource exploitation and human rights abuses, told IPS.

According to GW, armed groups control much of the mineral trade in the eastern DRC. These armed groups profit from the multi-million dollar mineral trade by forcibly controlling the mines and exacting bribes or taxes. Those buying the "conflict minerals" include companies based in EU member states.

The role of the mineral trade has been recognised as one of the factors fuelling the violence and contributing to human rights violations in eastern DRC since the start of the war.

Human rights activists have long called attention to how "conflict minerals" are sold to purchase arms by rebel groups that regularly commit horrific abuses against civilian populations, including mass murder, rape, torture and forced recruitment.

Over the last few months, GW gathered information in the region and visited mines that are under the control of armed groups.

Parsons says the armed groups would have been a lot poorer and much less well-armed without the trade. "We do know that the mineral trade is a significant proportion of their income."

GW is calling on suppliers that source minerals from DRC to identify the mines they come from. They are also recommending spot checks and audits to back these declarations. According to the watchdog group a few companies have made some efforts, but that is not enough.

"The companies' policies have purely been on paper. And a number of companies, including for example Apple, have not acknowledged the problem at all," Parsons says.

The "conflict minerals" - tin (cassiterite), tantalum (coltan or columbite-tantalite), and tungsten (wolframite) - are, after they are mined, moved from DRC to East Asia where they are processed into valuable metals needed for electronic products. The metals are used in i-pods, digital cameras, cell phones and laptops worldwide.

Global Witness states that, so far, governments have done little to curb the trade in conflict minerals. But last year the U.S. made a move. In May 2009, a draft legislation requiring U.S. companies to disclose the origin of their mineral supplies was introduced in the senate.

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Fake TV torture show prepares to shock France

Would you torture a fellow TV game show contestant just to please the audience? A stunning documentary suggests that most people are willing to inflict extreme pain on an innocent person if it keeps a baying crowd happy.

The makers of the French documentary "The Game of Death" -- to be aired in France tonight -- set up a fake game show called "The Xtreme Zone," complete with a beautiful hostess, a rowdy audience and a flashy set. Some 80 potential contestants were asked to put general-knowledge questions to another participant named Jean-Paul, who was played by an actor. If the actor got the answers wrong, the questioner could pull a lever and punish him with electric shocks.

Although the participants didn't know the contestant was a plant, most were willing to give in to the presenter's and audience's loud demands for "punishment!" whenever an incorrect answer was given. According to director Christophe Nick, 64 of the 80 players zapped the actor with what they were told was the maximum 460 volts, even though no cash prize was offered. Sixteen people quit the quiz in disgust.

And while Jean-Paul was out of sight of the contestants, his whimpers and cries of "Let me go!" made it clear he was in pain. At the highest voltage, the actor would fall silent -- suggesting he had either passed out or died.

Program maker Nick said his crew was "amazed" that so many players were willing to go along with the sadistic whims of the host and crowd, albeit often reluctantly. "They are not equipped to disobey," he told Agence France-Presse. "They don't want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don't manage to."

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