David Cameron: The next age of government

h/t to Chairman Sterling. The talk is quite optimistic and not sure if this age of government is all that novel as there still is government to begin with and the ubiquitous corporate powers that be won’t likely let people power really be people power. but still an interesting talk.

(via orlingrabbe)

I think he inhaled.

Wikileaks and Whistle-blowers on Vimeo

recommended.

Thousands rally in ‘Day of Wrath’ against Putin day before bombing underneath FSB Intelligence Agency in Moscow

• The bombing happened underneath the offices of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, according to the BBC. Now reports are coming in that the organization claiming responsibility used Shahidka female bombers. Of course they are not Islamic, but Wahhabi…a favorite sect for the global intelligence/drug trade/terror network. Interesting to note that former KGB agent Putin is known to have used terror to secure his Dark Rise to Power.

Tarpley: US gov uses Google proxy to attack China

“Google is an arm of the US Gov’t. Google is cohabiting with the National Security Council…This is essentially a US Gov’t attack on China.”

Thanks to a FOIA request, new evidence has emerged from the FBI’s own internal communications that appear to support many of the claims made by Sibel Edmonds regarding (largely though not exclusively) GOP collusion in the spying activities of the Turkish government.

This is no small matter, as it involves blackmail and bribery of high-level officials like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, PNAC signatory Richard Perle, Congressman Roy Blunt, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Turkish Ambassador Marc Grossman, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Asst. Sec. Def. Douglas Feith, Congressman Dan Burton and others to “look the other way” from those engaged in spying activities with a foreign government against the United States.

Per the report from the Boiling Frogs website:

Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.

The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted, but they do support many of Edmonds’ claims, including:

• There were a number of very serious FBI investigations into “Turkish activity in Chicago” involving a number of targets, including TACA.
• These investigations were related to “National Security” among other things.
• These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.
• Congressional corruption was involved.
• The FBI repeatedly conducted actual “physical surveillance” against Turkish and American targets.
  Some of these investigations were shut down in 2001.

What makes it more suspicious is the near universal silence on the part of the corporate media about this whole affair. They spent more energy investigating the deaths of Lacey Peterson or Michael Jackson than they have on this.

It should also be noted that this incident is also tied up with the events surrounding the Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings outing.

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

Developing world violence aside, we’ve become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest.

But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive. Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5.

The spying includes attempted covert following, photographng, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.

I, and others were in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a new package of laws designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship. As such, the spying has an extra poignancy.

The possible triggers:

• our ongoing work on a classified film revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S, general, David Petraeus.
• our release of a classified 32 page US intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks (expose our sources, destroy our reputation for integrity, hack us).
• our release of a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the U.K. over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”.

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

Keep following this one.

A scary tweet from Wiki:

1. If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible. 7:33 PM Mar 23rd via bit.ly

• The images were shocking - and strange. On Tuesday, thousands of Thai protesters splattered buckets of their own blood outside the Prime Minister’s office in Bangkok as a Brahmin priest in flowing white robes lit incense, chanted spells and cast a curse upon the government.
• As theater, it was both effective and mysterious: clips of the blood curse led international news broadcasts, with viewers and analysts bewildered as to what the protesters were trying to achieve. But in Thailand, it was anything but an aberration. Curses, dark rituals and black magic have long been part of the political culture of the country and some of its neighbors. And to some Thai analysts, the strange rite was a rare public revelation of a more covert aspect of the ongoing conflict between the country’s political movements - a war of the supernatural.
• The protesters, known as the Red Shirts for the color they wear, were supporters of fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup and has fled the country rather than serve a prison term on a corruption conviction. His opponents include the current Democrat-led government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, the military, a rival group of protesters known as the Yellow Shirts and, according to some, Thailand’s monarchy. Thaksin’s followers are comprised largely of the rural poor, and so it was easy to dismiss, as many commentators did, the bloody curse as a desperate act by uneducated farmers. But in Thailand, despite modern commuter Skytrains, gleaming new international airports, and a populace with a passion for the latest IT gadgets, members of all classes regularly pay deference to the supernatural. From hit men getting tattoos they believe will repel bullets, to aristocratic ladies trading stocks on the advice of astrologers, and ministers who pay tens of thousands of dollars for amulets they believe will ward off evil, the unseen is a serious, and potentially lucrative, business.
• Thailand is a nation that prides itself on its Theravada Buddhist heritage. But Buddhism in Thailand is blended with a brew of Hindu, animist, Khmer, pagan and other beliefs. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the country’s 82-year-old constitutional monarch, spent time as a Buddhist monk but also retains astrologers and Brahmin priests at court, as is tradition. So it’s no wonder that coup plotters, Prime Ministers and lawmakers have frequently consulted fortune-tellers before making important decisions. Performing dark rites to increase one’s power and defeat your adversaries is as pervasive among the political class as bribery and vote buying. Even Thaksin, who became a billionaire from satellite services, computers and telecommunications, once declined to answer a reporter’s question because “Mercury [was] not in the right house.”
• In fact, according to Wassana Namnuan, a Bangkok Post reporter, Thaksin and his opponents have been deeply engaged in black magic battles for dominance of the country for several years. “Both sides have been casting curses and spells upon each other,” says Wassana who has written a book on the subject in Thai called Secrets, Trickery and Camouflage: The Improbable Phenomena. According to Wassana, Thaksin believes he is the reincarnation of a Burmese king who killed many Thais, and so has engaged in elaborate cleansing rituals to wash away the sins of his past lives. While in power, Wassana says Thaksin performed several saiyasat, or black magic rituals, that he hoped would prolong his rule for life. While visiting Burma he sought counsel from a deformed astrologer nicknamed “ET” who is favored by the generals that have kept the country in their iron grip for more than half a century.

I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

• “I started getting emails saying ‘have you heard of Benjamin Creme?’ and ‘are you the world teacher?’” he said. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’”
• Their reasoning? Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or “the world teacher”…
• There are many elements of his life that tick the prophetic checklist of his worshippers: a flight from India to the UK as a child, growing up in London, a slight stutter, and appearances on TV. But it is his work that puts him most directly in the frame and causes him the most anguish – the very things the followers of Share believe will indicate that their new messiah has arrived…
• While his goal appears to match Share’s vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.
• “What I’m arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works,” he said.
• “I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it.”

poortaste:

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

90% of U.S. Media is owned by 6 Corporations

The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. Here is information about the largest U.S. media firms.

Click through to find out who and what they all own.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.