Anarchoblogs

• 'Kettled' anarchists increase worry for G20 demonstrators
  "...If I was a young person, fed up, no job on the horizon, watching my future implode thanks to a system I did not believe in, and I was being treated as a criminal by the police for simply wearing black, I too might feel stirring resentment. Is this really the best way to handle protesters?"
• Police shootings of dogs may reveal attitudes toward public
  Officers in Buffalo, New York, stormed into a home during the course of a search for drugs, gunned the dogs down in front of the family, and then left without making any arrests. How do officers wield force when they think they can get away with it? These shootings may offer a disturbing answer to that question.

Das läßt sich nicht so einfach beantworten, ist aber die folgerichtige Frage für die hartnäckige Weigerung der CDU / CSU die NPD zu verbieten. Es sind vor allem die konservativ regierten Länder, die Parteistrukturen durch den Verfassungsschutz aufbauten und den Bestand der Strukturen weiter subventionieren. Zwar schaumschlägern immer wieder auch konservative Innenminister medienwirksam gegen [...]

On March 31, 1999, The Matrix was released upon the world. This amazing film blended the perfect combination of sci-fi, action, philosophy, and stunning imagery into a powerful and subversive thrill that nobody has been able to replicate.

I didn’t catch it while it was in the theater, but I VHS’d it like crazy in high school. It got my friends and me running on walls and ducking flying objects by bending backwards Neo-like.

The anti-authoritarian tone of the film is pretty obvious. Anyone who doesn’t get it needs to unplug.

The sequels were disappointing. But The Animatrix is definitely worth it for Matrix fans.

Michael Moynihan at Reason's blog shares with us video of an appalling performance by The Nation's editor and publisher (as in, the most important person at the magazine) Katrina vanden Heuvel, who dismisses critics of Putin with regards to journalistic freedom by noting The Nation's ties with Novaya Gazeta, saying "they're thriving." Uh, I guess if you ignore the constant threats to their journalists' lives by the Kremlin.

She even has the gall to blame "the neo-Nazi groups" for the Novaya Gazeta lawyer and journalist killed recently in Moscow. Funny, because her dear friends at Novaya Gazeta have a distinctly different take on the murder:

In the opinion of the Novaya Gazeta staff, of which I am a member, the Russian security services or rogue elements within these services are the prime suspects in the murders of Baburova and Markelov. The boldness of the attack by a single gunman in broad daylight in the center of Moscow required professional preliminary planning and surveillance that would necessitate the security services, which closely control that particular neighborhood, turning a blind eye. The use of a gun with a silencer does not fit with the usual pattern of murders by nationalist neo-Nazi youth groups in Russia, which use homemade explosives, knifes, and group assaults to beat up and stab opponents to death.

Update: Here is an article from 2006 by Katrina vanden Heuvel, arguing that the American and British media were unfairly biased against Russia in their fairly unanimous opinion that Putin or his coterie were behind Alexander Litvinenko's radiation poisoning. Honestly – how dense can you be?

Counterpunch has more on what I think ought to be a bigger story: the ongoing failure of subsidized "green" energy sources. This one's about cellulosic ethanol, an "advanced" or "second-generation" biofuel, which promises all the energy independence and environmental cred that the first ethanol (corn ethanol) boasted (of course, it had neither), with the added benefit that it's not produced from food crops so it won't cause food prices to spiken across the world (also not entirely true). Anyway, here is the article, and here is an earlier article in Counterpunch about basically the same thing (though I think the more recent one is better).

Here's a pretty long excerpt about the eternal promise that commercially viable non-food biofuels are "just around the corner":

Of all the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest – and the most consistently wrong – cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with his 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, a piece which arguably made his career in the energy field. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins argued that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely fossil fuels and nuclear power plants.) Lovins argued that the U.S. should be working to replace those sources with other, “greener” energy sources that were decentralized, small, and renewable. Regarding biofuels, he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.”

Lovins went on “Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” He even claims that given enough efficiency in automobiles, and a large enough bank of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”

In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Midgley made 45 years earlier: Given enough money – that’s always the catch isn’t it? – cellulosic ethanol would provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.

The funny thing about Lovins is that between 1976 and 2004 -- despite the fact that the U.S. still did not have a single commercial producer of cellulosic ethanol -- he lost none of his skepticism. In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins again declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”

Lovins continued his unquestioning boosterism in 2006, when during testimony before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.

Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns