Cable companies are trying to create an unequal playing field for internet speeds, but they’re doing it so boringly that most news outlets aren’t covering it.
John Oliver explains the controversy and lets viewers know how they can voice their displeasure to the FCC.
Having covered conflicts in distant lands, we now turn our attention to our own native homeland, the Internet; where the battle for the hypersphere has reached new heights, as netizens take up arms against Telcoms and the FCC, to preserve the fundamental ethos that made the Internet what it is today: Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality, and why is it so important to the future of the Internet? Find out by joining Robert Foster as he takes a whimsical trip into the World Wide Web, with its founder Tim Berners-Lee. Let’s just hope no shady mega-corporatist, elite oligarchic malefactors pop up to mess with us on the way…
Written & created by Giordano Nanni & Hugo Farrant in a suburban backyard home studio in Melbourne, Australia, on Wurundjeri Land.
Nor·mal·i·za·tion: a “colonization of the mind” whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor’s reality is the only “normal” reality…and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with.
Those who engage in normalization either ignore this oppression, or accept it as the status quo that can be lived with.
In an attempt to whitewash its violations of international law and human rights, Israel attempts to re-brand itself or present itself as “normal” — even “enlightened” — through an intricate array of relations and activities encompassing hi-tech, cultural, legal, LGBT and other realms.
Normalization applies to relationships that convey a misleading or deceptive image of normalcy, symmetry, or parity despite a patently abnormal and asymmetric relationship of colonial oppression and apartheid.
Remi Kanazi: 2 days after Normalize This! is released, a university who had called me “controversial” & “politically polarizing” strips funding from my event. Calling for equal rights in the face of oppression will always be “controversial”, but luckily activists around the world are redoubling their efforts against Israeli apartheid, occupation, & ethnic cleansing!
THANK YOU to all who have watched, liked & shared my debut video! Please keep hitting that “SHARE” button if you enjoy the piece! #NormalizeJustice
The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”
Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and theNew England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one.
Comment: Remember that these men have never been found guilty of any crime whatsoever, yet they have been imprisoned and tortured for years, against all international and human rights laws. This force feeding sounds like one more torture technique they suffer for no reason at all.
One nurse, it was revealed this week via human rights group Reprieve, has refused to participate in the force-feedings. The nurse, who has not been named, has been assigned other duties at the prison camp. As the first and only medical professional to refuse to force-feed, specifically citing ethical grounds, he is to be commended.
As Reprieve attorney Cori Crider told the Guardian, “This guy is basically a hero, and he should be permitted to give care to detainees that is ethically appropriate.”
Crider is right to praise the nurse as a “hero.” There’s a reason that institutional lines don’t get crossed more often — there is a risk in crossing them. If rules were truly made to be broken, they wouldn’t be rules. Rules and orders can be resisted, but they persist with the assumption that they are there to be followed.
Herein lies the power and the problem of the hero. A hero is necessarily an exception — it’s inherent in the concept. So while the Gitmo nurse deserves praise as a hero, for the brutalized hunger strikers, this is no time for heroes. Or it is no time, at least, for heroes forced to stand alone. All the medical professionals at the camp should follow suit. It’s the least that should be done in a prison camp that shouldn’t exist at all.
Kent Sepkowitz, MD Deputy Physician-in-Chief for Quality and Safety
“All that is necessary for a triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” goes the phrase attributed to Edmund Burke, though it’s not proven he ever said those precise words. The 18th century statesman and political philosopher did, however, write something along similar lines: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle,” he noted in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
The two phrases — the popular and the precise — transmit the same general proposition. But the latter emphasizes something crucially lacking in the former. “The good must associate,” it stresses, “in a struggle.” The more famous saying, meanwhile, seems to put the onus on good men as individuals to resist inaction.
The resisting nurse cannot be faulted for inaction. But one good man here is not enough. As a spokesperson for the military southern command that oversees Gitmo said, the nurse’s protest is “being handled administratively.” This one ethical act of refusal can be absorbed by military management, and the torturous practices at Gitmo can continue unabated, even while legal challenges mount and international censure has been issued.
It is not enough, after all, that people act for good. In the struggle against the horrors of Gitmo, ethical actors must, as Burke urged, “associate” such that there’s no room nor need for heroes at all.
The National Defense Authorization Act which was passed in 2012 and extended in 2013 and 2014, authorizes the U.S. military to arrest anyone, anywhere on the planet, to deny them access to a lawyer, and to detain them indefinitely without at trial. Furthermore the U.S. government claims the right to do all of this in secret.
The right to a fair trial, is gone, and without the right to a fair trial, you have no rights at all.
the most notable thing to take from this report is that we only find out about these vile practises of OUR government – using OUR tax money, overseen by OUR elected officials – from the foreign press. american media is policy and/or agenda-driven, ie – worthless.
this is a “holder” intro piece. i hope to archive the entire article, along with supplemental ones, over the next few days.
The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, as seen from the air, January 29, 2010. AFP PHOTO/Saul LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
NSA targets the privacy-conscious
Months of investigation by the German public television broadcasters NDR and WDR, drawing on exclusive access to top secret NSA source code, interviews with former NSA employees, and the review of secret documents of the German government reveal that not only is the server in Nuremberg under observation by the NSA, but so is virtually anyone who has taken an interest in several well-known privacy software systems.
von J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge
The investigation discloses the following:
Two servers in Germany – in Berlin and Nuremberg – are under surveillance by the NSA.
Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.
Among the NSA’s targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called “the Linux Journal – the Original Magazine of the Linux Community”, and calls it an “extremist forum”.
It is a small server that looks like any of the other dozens in the same row. It is in a large room devoted to computers and computer storage, just like every other room in this industrial park building on Am Tower Street just outside the city of Nuremberg. That the grey building is surrounded by barbed wire seems to indicate that the servers’ provider is working hard to secure their customers’ data.
Yet despite these efforts, one of the servers is targeted by the NSA.
The IP address 212.212.245.170 is explicitly specified in the rules of the powerful and invasive spy software program XKeyscore. The code is published here exclusively for the first time.
After a year of NSA revelations based on documents that focus on program names and high-level Powerpoint presentations, NDR and WDR are revealing NSA source code that shows how these programs function and how they are implemented in Germany and around the world.
The NSA program XKeyscore is a collection and analysis tool and “a computer network exploitation system”, as described in an NSA presentation. It is one of the agency’s most ambitious programs devoted to gathering “nearly everything a user does on the internet.” The source code contains several rules that enable agents using XKeyscore to surveil privacy-conscious internet users around the world. The rules published here are specifically directed at the infrastructure and the users of the Tor Network, the Tails operating system, and other privacy-related software.
“The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.” – Japanese Proverb
Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the latest addition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it looks that way. The manual identifies a mental illness labelled as “oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD. It’s defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior.” (0) It’s also included in the category of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
The manual is used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses, and it seems that with each new issue a new, made up mental illness is added to the list. This isn’t something new, in the Soviet Union, a systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem. Mental illness has been used for political repression, those who were/are non-conformant and do/did not accept the beliefs of authority figures (like government agencies) face labels that do not represent them at all, and have no scientific backing what so ever. (1)
“On the first glance, political abuse of psychiatry appears to represent a straightforward and uncomplicated story: the deployment of medicine as an instrument of repression. Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a deep affront to human rights with deception and fraud. Doctors who allow themselves to be used in this way betray the trust of society and breach their most basic ethical obligations as professionals.” (1)
The entire psychiatric disease model today is based on the theory that a brain-based, chemical imbalance causes mental illness. Dr. Mark Graff, Chair of Public Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association said that this theory was “probably drug industry derived.” (source)
“There’s no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, I have a biological imbalance, I say, ‘show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?” – Dr. Ron Leifer, New York psychiatrist (source)
“If a psychiatrist says you have a shortage of a chemical, ask for a blood test and watch the psychiatrist’s reaction. The number of people who believe that scientists have proven that depressed people have low serotonin is a glorious testament to the power of marketing.” - Jonathan Leo, associate professor of anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences. (source)
