UK: LRB Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters | Journal of the mental environment What insightful and thought-provoking websites have you across throughout the years? Here are mine. : AskReddit MIT Technology Review The Idea of a Local Economy A TOTAL ECONOMY is one in which everything — “life forms,” for instance, — or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes — and especially democratic processes — are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. In default of government protections against the total economy of the supranational corporations, people are where they have been many times before: in danger of losing their economic security and their freedom, both at once.
UK: The Drouth European Countries Refuse to Release Information on CIA Rendition Flights Romania's National Registry Office for Classified Information (ORNISS) headquarters building is seen in the background of this image taken in Bucharest, December 9, 2011. International media has reported that between 2003 and 2006, the CIA operated a secret prison from the building's basement, bringing in high-value terror suspects for interrogation and detention. ORNISS has denied hosting a CIA prison and the CIA has refused to comment. Rights groups accuse Europe of CIA flights coverup (AP): Rendition on Record - Using the right of access to information to unveil the paths of illegal prisoner transfer flights (Access Info Europe):
10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change our common perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean. 1. Great glaciation is the theory of the final state that our universe is heading toward. 2. Solipsism is a philosophical theory, which asserts that nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness. Don’t you believe me? As a result, which parts of existence can we not doubt? 3. George Berkeley, the father of Idealism, argued that everything exists as an idea in someone’s mind. The idea being that if the stone really only exists in his imagination, he could not have kicked it with his eyes closed. 4. Everybody has heard of Plato. In addition to this stunning statement, Plato, being a monist, said that everything is made of a single substance. 5. 6. Enternalism is the exact opposite of presentism. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Glory of the Commons by Timothy Noah July/ August 2013The Glory of the Commons Jonathan Rowe’s brilliant posthumous meditation on the shared, non-commercialized realms of life that sustain us. By Timothy Noah Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That Makes Everything Else Work by Jonathan Rowe Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 123 pp. One of the sharper satirical jabs in People, a recent play by the English writer Alan Bennett, occurs when a consortium of wealthy investors decides to purchase Winchester Cathedral. What makes the joke funny is our understanding that a hallowed monument like Winchester Cathedral could never belong to anyone but the public. Jonathan Rowe, alongside whom I worked at the Washington Monthly in the early 1980s, and who died two years ago at the distressingly young age of sixty-five, would describe Winchester Cathedral as part of “the commons.” Our Common Wealth makes the case for the sort of social arrangements that are seldom acknowledged except to be attacked or dismantled. Similar examples abound.
Canada: this Magazine Phone hacking a “bog-standard journalistic tool”, ex-Mirror reporter tells Inquiry A former financial reporter at the Daily Mirror has told the Leveson Inquiry that phone hacking seemed to happen daily at the paper, and was “openly discussed”. James Hipwell, who wrote the City Slickers column for the paper from 1998 before being jailed in 2006 for writing about firms he owned shares in, stood by his witness statement in which he said phone hacking was a “bog-standard journalistic tool”. He told the Inquiry the practice was openly discussed by the showbiz desk, recounting that the team had deleted a message from a celebrity’s voicemail to stop the rival paper, the Sun, intercepting and getting the story. “It didn’t seem to me to be an ethical way to behave, but it seemed a generally accepted method to get a story,” Hipwell said. He said he did not report the practice to former editor Piers Morgan because it seemed that it was “entirely accepted” by senior editors on the paper.” He said Morgan was the tabloid’s “beating heart” and “dear leader”.
The 6 Most Creative Abuses of Loopholes The best way to get away with cheating isn't to avoid getting caught... it's to technically not do anything wrong, and still get all the rewards. That's where you find the line between lawbreakers and those who simply think outside the box... and that line is very thin indeed. Bar Declares Everyone to be Actors to Circumvent Smoking Ban Back in 2007, Minnesota followed a national trend by passing an anti-smoking law that banned smoking in pretty much every public building, including bars. "...or, we could get stoned and play Xbox." The good owners of the Barnacles Bar were determined to find a loophole that would let their nicotine-addicted clientele feed their deadly vice in peace. There was a line in the law that said if you were an actor in a play, and your character smoked, then you'd get a pass. "Now can I fucking smoke?" The thing was, the law didn't bother to specify what was meant by "stage performances," and really, how do you argue? Man Flies Free Thanks to Pudding