This.
Category General
The life and death of favourite US and Israeli thug-in-chief Omar Suleiman
This week saw the death of former Egyptian intelligence head and thug, Omar Suleiman. Closer to Mubarak during his time in power, he was courted by Israel and America while his record of enabling terror was ignored. Of course. Australian citizen and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mamdouh Habib alleges Suleiman personally attended sessions when he…
Sing along to the G4S theme song
Vulture capitalists get a theme song. Despite some still claiming privatisation is a wonderful thing for society, common sense and evidence proves that outsourcing massively reduces accountability. Not to worry, G4S has a theme song to get you fired up (via New Statesman): You love your job and the people too Making a difference is…
Wikileaks documents know more about Afghan war than US military
Almost funny. This is what a floundering empire looks like (via Wired): Insurgencies are amongst the hardest conflicts to predict. Insurgents can be loosely organized, split into factions, and strike from out of nowhere. But now researchers have demonstrated that with enough data, you might actually predict where insurgent violence will strike next. The results,…
Time is now to fight vulture capitalism
I’m currently working on a film and book about disaster capitalism. Britain is currently experiencing a text-book example of the phenomenon. Here’s Seumas Milne in the Guardian with a necessary call to arms: If nothing else, the spectacular failure of G4S, the world’s largest security firm, to get even close to meeting its Olympics contract…
The news is now YouTubed
Fascinating new results on how we now consume news and what this may mean for the future of journalism (via Journalism.org): Worldwide YouTube is becoming a major platform for viewing news. In 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months,…
How the US is expanding its African reach
Nick Turse writes in TomDispatch: They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.… Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment…
The US still doesn’t know who the Taliban are and have thankfully lost the Afghan war years ago
Via Wired: Since January 2011, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan claims it’s killed or captured over 100 insurgent “leaders.” Too bad it doesn’t have any clear idea what “leader” means. Any insurgent who commands another person apparently qualifies. And worse, by that criteria, Taliban and aligned insurgents have killed twice as many U.S. troops in…
#LeftTurn given a thorough and critical review
The following review appears in the Crikey blog Lit-icism: Guest post by Adam Brereton… Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, in the introduction to their new book… Left Turn: Political Essays For The New Left, invite the reader to imagine current examples in popular culture that envision a future ”˜in which the world to come is, in…
Talking #LeftTurn on The Small Picture Podcasts
I was interviewed last week by Stuart Beaton for The Small Picture Podcasts. We talked #LeftTurn, the mainstream media and alternative political realities. He’s based in China: