Readers outside the UK may not be aware of what’s been going on in this country in the past few weeks. In a nutshell, our politicians have taken advantage of the long hot lazy days of summer, with lots of people away, to allow in the energy companies to begin exploratory drilling work for shale gas… otherwise known as fracking.
“The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we’re on auto-pilot and don’t even realize we’re following a course of action that we haven’t consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they’re behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call ‘free choice’ is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don’t realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species’ preference for survival.”
Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007, Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded… For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”
In this sense, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more accurately perceived as the opening salvos of the Cold War, rather than the final shots fired in the Second World War – the Cold War was, after all, defined essentially as a balance of nuclear powers; realpolitik and the primacy of power where the arms race and military insanity took supremacy over diplomacy.
One of the purported achievements of the Coalition government’s disastrous economic policy of austerity, has been the unemployment figures. Pundits say that at 7.8% (2.51m) they are nothing to shout about but not the disastrous rates seen in states such as Greece (26.9%) or Spain (26.3%). In reality, the unemployment rate is more than double this in many areas, while those in employment are facing ever worsening conditions to retain their non-jobs.
Hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army have once again claimed a high profile scalp, compromising the blogs at British broadcaster Channel 4.
The hackers, who back the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, took over the blog of the station’s veteran news presenter Jon Snow and posted a story about a tactical nuclear strike against Syria.
“The mistreatment of animals can all-too-often be normalised in our society and we regularly see newspapers reporting “cute” or “funny” stories about animals in which the individual animal’s welfare may be compromised. I must say, though, I have never read a news report which takes a clear example of animal abuse, and a potential breach of the Animal Welfare Act 2006, and twists it into an attempt to gain cheap laughs from its readership. A person punching, hitting or otherwise attacking an animal is never funny. I am surprised and saddened that a newspaper like the Sun, which has strongly supported animal protection campaigns in the past, has chosen to highlight a serious incident in this thoughtless manner”
What would US foreign, military and so-called “national security” policy look like if the media reported the most important facts about it? There would be a lot fewer corpses abroad and returning home. And we wouldn’t be cutting “meals on wheels” or other nutrition programs for the poor or elderly in order to sustain the world’s most fantastically bloated military budget.
“The NSA has previously claimed that 54 terrorist plots had been disrupted ‘over the lifetime’ of the bulk phone records collection and the separate program collecting the internet habits and communications of people believed to be non-Americans. On Wednesday, Inglis said that at most one plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone.”
That day, for nearly two hours, I sat at my computer and poured over undercover footage from inside factory farms. How could it be that in 30 years, no one had told me that this is how animals we eat become our food? I saw the terrified looks on the animals’ faces, the cruel beatings and torment they endured. I heard the desensitized farm-workers screaming in their faces. And inside, I felt hollow because I knew what this felt like. I knew it from growing up. I knew what it’s like to be bullied.
Citizens and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies! Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.
“Gentlemen, we have a golden opportunity here. We are under siege by defector spy Edward Snowden – liberated by the Soviets – and that terrorist hack Greenwald. Snowden may be winning: even among US public opinion, there’s a growing perception we may be more of a threat than al-Qaeda.
So we must show we are vigilantly protecting our freedoms. Yes; we’re gonna scream Terra, Terra, Terra!”
