What can we learn from BitTorrent’s success 20 years later? If we want to accept the Internet’s “offer of freedom,” as envisioned by optimistic earlier generations, we must (re)learn this vital lesson: the Internet we are made to pay for is not the only way to connect to one another. We merely need to pave our own digital pathways, to create our own lowercase-i “internets.”
We already have the power, the materials and the motive to win back the Internet. But we have to start with the first step first: owning our own infrastructure.
When mentioning the year 2001, most people may think of the attacks on 9/11. But five months prior to that historic date, another event occurred that would continue to shape history in less dramatic but equally profound ways. In April that year, American computer programmer Bram Cohen began designing BitTorrent, a new file sharing protocol that would almost single-handedly change the music, TV and movie industries for decades to come.
“Let those who think I am wrong about Trump and Biden being players in the same show, consider this. If Trump is truly the opponent of the Deep State, the Swamp, the corrupt establishment, he will pardon Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden who have been persecuted by these forces. He has nothing left to lose as he exits stage right.”
“They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt,” wrote the marvelous New York journalist, Pete Hamill in “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” in New York magazine. He added:
The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians…
Refugees on the Island of Lesbos, Greece, 2020. | Photo: Twitter/ @franceculture
Telesur
The refugees were transferred to the Kara Tepe area after the Moria camp burned down in September.
The NGO Refugee Support Aegean (RSA) reported that over 7,000 refugees, who live at the Reception and Identification Center (RIC) in the area of Kara Tepe on Lesvos island, face winter with no protection against the cold.
“There are not enough blankets. We do not know how we will go through this winter… What breaks our heart is that we do not have humane conditions, they perceive us as animals,” Saeb, a victim of torture from Afghanistan, said.
The refugees were transferred by the Greek authorities to that location after the Moria camp burned down in September. So far, however, the refugees live in unheated tents that are unprepared to withstand the winter rains.
“Despite government assurances on the improvement of reception conditions, coupled with the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, low temperatures and increased humidity, refugees, including hundreds of children as well as many people belonging to vulnerable groups, are living in tents during winter, without knowing whether and when they will be sheltered in containers,” RSA stressed.
Western agribusiness has been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time, long before the coup. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. An article by Oriental Review in 2015 noted that since the mid-90s the Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council had been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.
The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers are being criminalised and even made to disappear when it comes to the struggle for land. They are constantly exposed to systematic expulsion.
While the United States shudders in the shambles of another election year, whether from a collective sigh of relief or fear of what’s to come, a different system of governance blooms in a swath of woodlands jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. This shandy shoreline now part of what is called Long Island has always been home to the Shinnecock people. A group of Shinnecock women, organized as the Warriors of the Sunrise, are called to rise up in the face of invasive settlement. This is not their first battle.
Warriors of the Sunrise addressing media after the lighting of a ceremonial fire to kick-off Sovereignty Camp 2020.
Members of the Shinnecock Nation know of a time before there was a Southampton, before there was a State of New York. Since the land emerged after the last Ice Age, able to support human life thousands of years ago, the Shinnecock people have lived on what has only recently been called Long Island. Since European settlers arrived in the region in the early 1600s, the Shinnecocks have been fighting against dispossession and intentional, exploitative underdevelopment.
While the uber wealthy flock to their multi-million homes in the Hamptons and continue their leisure practices on the sacred grounds of Shinnecock Hills, the original peoples of the land struggle to raise themselves out of poverty every year. This is not for lack of effort, knowledge and collective will. The land has always been abundant and Shinnecock people have continued to steward incredible ecosystems despite the environmental destruction which followed residential encroachment by the elite. For decades modern-day settlers and colonists have given no regard to the calls of the Shinnecock people to respect and preserve their ancestral grave sites; they have continued to build their mansions and golf courses as they unearth the remains of Shinnecock tribal members. Forcefully relegating the Shinnecock to small reservations, surrounded by the hollow grandeur of seasonally empty mansions and dried up swimming pools, the town and state would prefer to act as if the Shinnecock simply do not exist.
Normal is Over 1.1: Solutions to Reverse Global Ecological Decline
Directed by Renee Scheltema (2019)
Film Review
What intrigued me most about this documentary, is that it validates claims the economic downturn preceded the WHO declaration of the COVID 19 pandemic in March 2020. I also like the way Scheltema expands on the present ecological crisis to include mass species extinction, the global economic crisis and increasing inequality, as well as catastrophic climate change.
The film uses the 1973 Club of Rome report Limits to Growth as her point of departure. The latter employed MIT mathematical modeling to predict that resource depletion would force global economic growth to end some time between 2000 and 2010. Just as they predicated it ended (everywhere but China) with the 2008 global financial crash. the latter unleashed an epidemic of unemployment, homelessness and poverty (especially among young people and minorities) from which the developed world never fully recovered.
Scheltema follows this introduction with a very elegant explanation by economist Charles Eisenstein linking the present growth imperative to our debt-based monetary system. At present nearly all our money is created by private banks as loans. Because we currently have no other way for money to come into existence, businesses and individuals must continually seek new products and services (including their own labor) to sell to repay ever increasing public and private debt levels. This frenzied drive to produce, in turn, drives ever heavier resource extraction.
The solution? Scheltema uses the bulk of the film to highlight the efforts of high profile sustainability champions:
Vandana Shiva – fighting to restore lower cost, less polluting natural organic farming through the Navdanya Institute she founded in India)
Beth Terry – founder of My Plastic Free Life)
Reverend Billy – founder of the Church of Stop Shopping
The “Lord of the Flies” – one of numerous scientists pioneering the use of fly larvae for organic waste treatment
African activists fighting to reverse desertification in the sub-Sahara through tree planting
Michael Baumgart, co-founder of the Cradle to Cradle upcycling movement
Kate Raeworth -British economist campaigning for a new distributive and regenerative economy *
Lester Brown – US environmental analyst who calls for 80% reduction in CO2 by 2030
Bernard Lietaer – Complementary (local) currency champion
In a telling move that could hint of good things to come, a committee of the British Parliament has called for rules that would force tech companies and giant vendors like Amazon and eBay to recycle the electronic gear they sell. In addition, they propose that companies should be responsible and pay for the return and safe recycling of those products.
In a telling move that could hint of good things to come, a committee of the British Parliament has called for rules that would force tech companies and giant vendors like Amazon and eBay to recycle the electronic gear they sell.
In addition, they propose that companies should be responsible and pay for the return and safe recycling of those products.
Also included in their plan are proposals that would guarantee the user’s ability to repair the products themselves, and a reduction in sales taxes on repair services.
Global giants such as Amazon and Apple should be made responsible for helping to collect, recycle and repair their products to cut the 155,000 tonnes of electronic waste being thrown away each year in the UK, MPs say.
An investigation by the environmental audit committee found the UK is lagging behind other countries and failing to create a…
Federal agencies and nuclear corporations continue to wrestle over what to do with the already tens of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste (at least 90,000 at last count) generated by America’s commercial nuclear power plants — all casked up with nowhere to go (and a lot of it still in the fuel pools). Because, absent alchemy, that waste is always going to be somewhere, even if we can’t see it.
Why we shouldn’t be talking about nuclear waste “disposal”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
(Note: Please join a webinar on nuclear waste hosted by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Washington, DC, and moderated by Beyond Nuclear, to discuss the World Nuclear Waste Report with its editor, Arne Jungjohann, and US chapter author and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair, Allison Macfarlane, on December 3 from 1pm-2:30pm Eastern US time. Click here to register.)
Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat. You don’t “dispose” of nuclear waste.
The ill-suited, now canceled, but never quite dead radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain was not a “disposal” site.
The radioactive mud being dredged from the sea bed at the Hinkley C nuclear site in the UK, is not going to get “disposed of” in Cardiff Grounds (a mile off the Welsh coast).
When Germany dumped radioactive waste in drums into the salt mines of Asse, it…
The new outlook comes amid a wildly awful year for the fossil fuel giant, which has lost more than $1 billion since the pandemic began. Last month, Chevron overtook Exxon as the biggest energy company in the U.S., and soon after, Exxon analysts said it is facing financial losses for the third quarter in a row.
The economic fallout of the covid-19 pandemic has hit the oil industry hard, and Exxon in particular is feeling it. Internal documents show the company’s not expecting to make a grand recovery any time soon despite putting on a good face for shareholders.
Exxon is expecting oil prices to fall over most of the next decade. The firm has lowered its projections for future oil prices for each of the next seven years by between 11% and 17%, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing a report composed at September financial planning meetings it obtained.
The top secret project, also known as Operation Paperclip, was a nefarious undertaking that allowed Nazi scientists to migrate to the US without prosecution. Some had studied brainwashing and other mind control methods first-hand in the concentration camps; many were rocket scientists who had been directly involved in the development of Germany’s feared V-1 and V-2 rockets. The latter’s contribution would pave the way for NASA and the Moon landings, and also for America’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program.
As stated in the chapters in the mind control section of this book, America’s mind control programs stemmed from the US Government’s Project Paperclip, but it wasn’t just Nazi brainwashing techniques the Americans inherited. They also seized Nazi scientists whose number included known war criminals.
The top secret project, also known as Operation Paperclip, was a nefarious undertaking that allowed Nazi scientists to migrate to the US without prosecution. Some had studied brainwashing and other mind control methods first-hand in the concentration camps; many were rocket scientists who had been directly involved in the development of Germany’s feared V-1 and V-2 rockets. The latter’s contribution would pave the way for NASA and the Moon landings, and also for America’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program.
Project Paperclip was as much about denying German scientific expertise to the Soviet Union…
