Big Brother WILL snoop on your calls and clicks: Ministers resurrect plan to log all communications

James Slack reports for The Daily Mail:

Hugely controversial 'Big Brother' plans to store details of every internet click, email and telephone call that we make are being revived by the Coalition, it emerged last night.

Police, security services and other public bodies would be able to find out which websites a person had visited, and when, where and to whom a text or call was made.

Security officials insist that monitoring communications data is vital in the fight against terrorism and serious organised crime.

But the plan – which was kicked into the long grass by Labour amid a public outcry – will put the Government on a collision course with civil liberties groups.

They argue it is a 'snooper's charter' which will allow the state to spy on millions of innocent citizens.

So far ministers have insisted they want to provide a 'correction in favour of liberty' when it comes to the powers required to protect the public.

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'Something bad may happen to me soon'

From Landslide - Rebecca Gould interviews the descendants of Titsian Tabidze, Guernica Magazine

The Soviets were a menace to Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze's generation. As his daughter and granddaughter recount, the legacy continues.

[ ... ]

Like every poet with a conscience in Russia at that time, Esenin had been infected with enthusiasm for the revolution. Propelled to despair, Esenin had killed himself shortly after returning to Moscow from a sojourn in the Caucasus. Although they died twelve years apart, the reasons for Esenin's and Titsian's deaths are hardly unrelated. Titsian could not have known for certain that his head was destined to roll “into a deep pit,” as were those of his fellow poets, Paolo Iashvili and novelist Mikhail Javaxishvili. But already in 1925 he could detect signs boding disaster.

Luckily for us, fear did not keep Titsian from writing. If anything, fear emboldened him with greater clarity and courage. If he was going to die anyway, Titsian knew he had little to lose by honesty.

In the poem “Gunib,” Titsian protested a double treachery: first the Russian colonization of the Caucasus, which resulted in the brutal subjection of Chechens, Daghestanis, and other indigenous mountain peoples, the effects of which are still felt today. Titsian and his people were directly implicated in the second, the aid that Georgians, including poets such as Grigol Orbeliani, provided by serving in the Tsarist army, participating in conquest, and helping subdue the mountaineers. “Gunib,” named after the site where the colonial war was officially decided in Russia's favor, reads, in part:

But this battle moves even me to ecstasy.
I don't want to be a poet drunk on blood.
Let this day be my penitence.
Let my poems wash away your treachery.

Georgian literary modernity was liquidated by the Soviet state from the nineteen thirties onwards. The first casualty was Titsian's close friend Paolo Iashvili. Knowing he was doomed to be executed, Paolo brought a hunting gun with him to a meeting in the Writer's Union in downtown Tbilisi and shot himself. Even more than Esenin's, Paolo's suicide was a statement. If he had to die, Paolo decided, let it not be silently, in forced labor camps or prison, cursed by the state.

Those who survived Stalin's regime, like Titsian's cousin Galaktion Tabidze, were no less wracked by despair; Galaktion ended his life at the age of sixty-nine by jumping out the window of a Tbilisi psychiatric hospital. Only one Georgian fully escaped the despair that enveloped the times: novelist Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, Titsian's one-time rival for the love of his wife Nina. Gamsakhurdia, however, had to write novels glorifying Stalin, never producing poetry comparable to the other modernists.

Russia's Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak had been so taken by Titsian's poems that he translated many into Russian, garnering fame for his friend. One of the poems Pasternak helped make famous in Russian runs:

I don't write poems; poetry writes me.
This poem walks with my life.
A poem is a landslide which carries me away
and buries me alive.

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OKUPA

Void Network and Free Art Zone presents OKUPA - a short film dedicated to the legacy of the Global Squatting Movement.

Kaleidoskop -Trailer 2 min.

A collection of short documentaries about the squatting movement in Germany, Holland and Spain from the 70s, 80s till now.

EU Dictators Plan Fresh Looting Of Tax Slaves

By Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com

The sprawling, blood-sucking, dictatorial, EU is trying to fill its coffers at a time when everyone else is being told they must tighten their belts and accept draconian austerity measures, by preparing to impose a new direct tax on European citizens already financially destitute as a result of the economic collapse.

If you want a taste of how the global tax to fund the expansion of world government will be implemented, look no further than the European Commission, which has laid out no less than eight different forms of direct taxation that it wants to impose on citizens of all 27 member states, despite the fact that the majority of people in all of these countries would rather their governments cease all financial commitments to the EU entirely.

Not content with national governments from every member country already sending taxpayer money to the bloated, anti-democratic EU bureaucracy, globalists in Brussels are now desperate to sink their teeth in further, in an effort to increase their budget by 6 per cent even in the midst of a national debt crisis which affects the majority of European nations.

The unelected bastards in Brussels are set to once again display their “insatiable appetite for power and taxpayers' money,” as MP Douglas Carswell warns, by flexing the muscles of their completely illegitimate and autocratic voting system to loot taxpayers of whatever meager amounts of disposable income they have left.

“Options expected to be proposed in an EU report today include levies on carbon emissions, air transport, financial transactions or bank profits. There could even be extra taxes on petrol,” reports the Express.

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Nine stories the press is underreporting -- fraud, fraud and more fraud

By Dan Froomkin, Nieman Watchdog

If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news -- that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place -- would pretty much clinch it.

And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn't connected the dots.

 

What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account,  employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.

 

So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist -- in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads, and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One".

 

I first interviewed Black in April, and recently checked back in and asked him about this ongoing problem of the mainstream media's inability to properly cover this story.

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