Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali speak with Julian Assange

recorded at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London...

 from rt...

A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West's structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That's the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week's guests on Julian Assange's show on RT.

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Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador

following denial of his appeal to avoid extradition...


ap...

Ecuador's foreign minister says Wilikeaks chief Julian Assange has taken refuge in the South American nation's embassy in London and is seeking political asylum.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino says Ecuador is weighing the request.

glenn...

Can anyone claim that Assange’s fear of ending up in American custody is anything other than supremely reasonable and rational? Just look at what has happened to people — especially foreign nationals — over the last decade who have been accused of harming the national security of the United States.

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David Cameron is a total product of an elitist school of banking schmucks

max keiser on rt...



the rich plunder the poor and are rewarded for it... the poor plunder the rich and the rich demand unreasonably harsh jail sentences... what a wonderful world we live in...!

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You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?

this "man-on-the-street" quote from the london riots is one of the most trenchant comments i've ever read...

Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.

[...]

In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

[...]

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets. The looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

it's not going to stop in the uk... buckle up...! it's going to be a rough ride...!

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Getting re-acquainted with an old friend

jazzfm is a london jazz station that i used to listen to a lot back in 2001-2002... then, for some reason, they started blocking their url in the u.s. so i just gave it up... a couple of days ago, i looked them up and have been listening and enjoying once again... we'll see if accessing their url is still a problem when i get back to the u.s...

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Some backstory on Yemen and the latest "terrorist" incident

why does none of this come as any surprise...?

from the yemen post...

Mohammed al-Shaibah, Air Cargo Director for Yemenia Airways said to Yemen Post, "No UPS cargo plane left Yemeni lands over the land 48 hours. These accusations are false and baseless."

He added, "No UPS or DHL cargo packages heading to Chicago through Yemen took place in the last 48 hours as well."

"All packages are checked very carefully in Yemen, and there is no evidence to prove that this package came through Yemen."

from the yemen news agency...

No UPS cargo planes left Yemen to other countries in the last days and there are no direct flights from Yemen to the United Kingdom or the United States, a Yemeni official said, after allegations that British and U.S. officials had found suspicious packages on planes that originated in Yemen.

The official wondered how the media mentioned the name of Yemen reporting that an explosive device was found onboard a cargo plane that landed in London coming from Yemen.

UPS planes never land or take off in Yemen, the official made clear.

The security measures at Yemeni airports are tightened and the authorities search passengers and luggage well, the official said, adding that Yemen has recently installed modern checking systems that can detect dangerous or suspicious materials to the safety of passengers and planes.

We urge the media not to make hasty judgments about sensitive issues and the media should wait until investigations reveal the truth, the official said, as he pointed out that Yemen has launched an investigation into the allegations and planned to coordinate with the United Arab Emirates, Britain and the U.S. over the issue.

but, of course, none of this is being reported by our ever-diligent news media in the u.s...

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Off to Glasgow and the Hebrides tomorrow

the short time in london has been terrific but tomorrow the real adventure starts... we fly to glasgow, meet my daughter, pick up a car and head off for the outer hebrides... can't wait... the ash cloud is mostly impacting southern spain and morocco in north africa right now so there shouldn't be any volcano-caused flight delays, knock on wood...

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Made it...!

five hours late after being routed north of iceland and then straight down the north sea between the uk and the netherlands followed by a hard right turn to london's heathrow airport... listened to an irish music jam at our b&b hotel/pub, ate italian down the street and slept like a log...

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I'm outta here [UPDATE]

for those few who may be paying attention, you'll notice i haven't posted since last wednesday... i periodically lose motivation and/or momentum when i can no longer abide the dearth of good news... well, that's not entirely true... there's always good news when i bother to find it but it generally is good news on a micro, very personal scale... that doesn't make it any the less significant or valuable but, being the big-picture guy that i am, i'm looking for the BIG good news stories and those seem to be damn few and far between...

so, with the motivation and momentum problem, i'm now tossing in another reason for a lack of posting... this afternoon, my son and i are headed to london where we'll meet up with a london-based friend and colleague to spend a few days kicking around things like westminster abbey, the tower of london and other such tourist attractions... but the big deal starts on wednesday when the three of us fly to glasgow where my daughter and her roommate are flying in from the u.s.... there we pick up a car and set off to explore the outer hebrides islands of scotland for two weeks before swinging back inland through inverness and edinburgh... i visited the latter two cities many years ago and have very pleasant memories but i'm really pumped about the hebrides... something about the far northern latitudes, the long, long days and the spiritual quality of the air and the light i think will make it a most special time...

stay tuned for pics but pro'ly not very many posts...

p.s. the volcanic ash cloud spewing forth from iceland is currently causing transatlantic flight delays as planes are re-routed further north or south, adding as much as an hour to flight times... our route from san fran to london follows a far north route anyway so i'm not anticipating a problem at this point, but we'll see won't we...?



[UPDATE]

so much for "no problem"... the flight from san fran to london is on a 5-hour delay and that's on top of the 4-hour layover that was already built in to the original schedule... sigh... 9 hrs. sitting on our butts in san fran... guess we oughta consider taking the bart into town...

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I didn't think the U.S. could go any more over the top than it did with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq

i guess i was wrong... take a gander at this complete with moat...


A model of the US Embassy in Battersea, complete with
moat 30m wide and rolling parkland

The United States has unveiled plans for its new $1 billion high-security embassy in London — the most expensive it has ever built.

[...]

A moat 30 metres (100ft) wide and rolling parkland will separate the building from the main road, protecting it from would-be bombers and removing the need for ... blast barriers... .

The State Department sought to play down the cost of security measures, noting the expense of London building work. But the price puts the London embassy above the US’s most fortified missions, including the Baghdad embassy, which cost $600 million (£390 million) but required a further $100 million of work on air conditioning, and the Islamabad embassy, still under construction, which has cost more than $850 million.

kinda makes me nostalgic for the mere $600M+ spent to construct the u.s. embassy in iraq...


U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, Iraq

i wasn't aware of it, but there's also a new u.s. embassy under construction in islamabad, pakistan, at the hefty price tag of $850M... is it any wonder people in other countries hate us...?

(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

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Traveling can be a bitch

it's now 8 a.m. saturday and i'm in heathrow airport, london, where i arrived about an hour and a half ago... i fly out to dubai where i land at midnight and transfer to the 03:30 kabul flight... by the time i land in kabul at 07:00 sunday morning, i will be burnt toast...

i haven't slept well for the past few nights anyway and i didn't get much more than a couple of hours of restful sleep on the flight from d.c. to london... i doubt i will get much on the flight from here to dubai either... needless to say, i will crash once i hit kabul... they may see me in the office briefly tomorrow afternoon... then again, they might not...

i'm a pretty resilient traveler and generally manage long flights and multiple time zones well, but there's no question that it takes a toll...

p.s. let me add a very positive note... yesterday in d.c., i asked the taxi driver taking me to dulles airport where he was from... i know the world is full of serendipitous coincidences so i was only mildly surprised when he told me he was from afghanistan... i told him i was on my way there for the 5th time and we had a wonderful, wonderful conversation for the 45 minutes it took to get to the airport from georgetown... we compared perspectives, shared details of our work and our families, and mutually deplored the despicable extremism we're witnessing in both his country and mine... it's those kind of encounters that brighten a day and make life just a little bit more worthwhile...

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Friday photoblogging from Wednesday in Aqaba and today in London

yeah, yeah, yeah... i'm traveling - again...

i left aqaba, jordan, on thursday morning, spent last night in amman, jordan, and am currently awaiting the flight to buenos aires here in london... i spent a truly delightful 9 hour layover here walking through battersea park with my friend and colleague who then treated me to a delicious south indian meal at a local indian deli in west hounslow... it was a brisk, chilly but sunny day in london but tomorrow i will be back in the mid-summer weather of argentina... how nice to know at this late stage of my life that winter is not an immutable fact...


Sunrise, Aqaba, Jordan
6:28 a.m., 28 January 2009


Albert Bridge, Thames River, London
Viewed from the riverwalk, Battersea Park
30 January 2009


Building renovation, Lower Sloane Street, London
30 January 2009


Sign detail building renovation
Lower Sloane Street, London
20 January 2009

sorry... that last one was simply too good to resist...!

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What are the odds that President Bush is innocent of war crimes?

hmmmmmm... < ponders, scratches chin, gazes off into space, ponders some more >

london sunday times...

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

[...]

It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.

lemme see... how about zip...? zero...? nada...? zilch...? no way, josé...?

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In Britain, an average person is caught on camera up to 300 times a day

THEY'RE WATCHING: A wall of video monitors
images from closed circuit television
CCTV) installed in central London.
Britain has the highest number of CCTV
cameras -- about one for every 14 people.

smile... wave...

By some estimates, 4.2 million CCTV cameras, or one for every 15 people, quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, monitor the comings and goings of almost everyone -- an average person is caught on camera up to 300 times a day.

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Making damn sure the poor stay poor

for reasons i cannot effectively articulate, jerome a paris over at daily kos often puts my nose out of joint, and so i usually make it a habit to NOT read his diaries... however, the title of this one caught my eye and i think it's well worth posting here...

The poor must remain poor

by Jerome a Paris [Subscribe]

Thu Aug 23, 2007 at 05:16:46 AM PDT

An excellent exchange between ThatBritGuy and someone in the Salon (the daily round up of international news and stories prepared by Fran over at the European Tribune) this morning, about the deal between Venezuela and London to provide subsidized transport to the poorer Londoners, and the outrage it generated:

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, has struck a discounted fuel deal with London mayor Ken Livingstone in exchange for expertise on tourism and public transport in Caracas. The move will give up to a million Londoners living on benefits half-price fares on the city's buses.

But Livingstone's critics slammed the deal as "immoral", asking why one of the world's richest capitals should accept developing world subsidies.

Angie Bray, the London Assembly Conservative leader, said the mayor should have requested for financial help from the British treasury instead.

Which triggered this series of comments:

Right. 'Cause the tories are usually so happy to provide public funding for 'hand-outs to the poor'.

A blisteringly unappealing insight into the mind of the Right - not only do they not want to share their own wealth, they hate the idea of help for the poor, even when it's coming out of someone else's pocket.

Ah, but I am sure that they do see it as coming out of their own pocket. After all, the oil wealth which this program is based on has been wrongfully appropriated by an ugly, leftist government. It ought to go into the pockets of investors of oil majors

And there we have it all in a nutshell: neoliberalism is superior to all systems because it could afford to help its poor, and therefore does not need to actually do so. The potential it has, that unfulfilled promise, is, in itself, enough to make the system superior for all to all other modes of economic regulation. But of course, actually implementing that promise would weaken the magic wealth creation machine (mostly, it seems, because the poor would no longer be properly motivated to work hard) and should thus be avoided at all costs.

nothing like threatening the status quo of the super-rich power and money grabbers to elicit a strong response, eh...?

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New York City to adopt London's big brother surveillance tactics

every day brings another story about the erosion of privacy and the ever-increasing ways in which we're being watched as we go about our daily lives...

By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.

The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.

i posted at the end of may on privacy international's huge and comprehensive study of the state of surveillance around the world (PDF)... this is taken from their report on the uk (PDF)...

There has been a proliferation of CCTV cameras in hundreds of towns and cities in Britain. It is now estimated that there are over four million cameras in Britain, one for every 14 residents, a 300 percent increase in just three years.5573 The camera networks can be operated by police, local authorities or private companies, and are partly funded by Home Office grants. Their original purpose was crime prevention and detection, though in recent years the cameras have become important tools for city center management and the control of "anti-social behavior." Many of the systems have been enhanced with technology for facial recognition but the jurisdictions that have installed the systems have admitted that the technology has yet to result in an arrest. In London, a system for "congestion charging" uses a sophisticated number plate recognition system to charge motorists who drive into central London during business hours. It was later revealed that the system was organized in cooperation with the intelligence services that use it with facial recognition systems to monitor the drivers of the cars. The government announced in January 2005 that it was expanding its pilot program of automatic number plate recognition nationwide.5575 Traffic cameras have also spread across the country.

and, as usual, nobody's connecting the dots... note that new york city is also planning a "congestion charging" system for manhattan which, no doubt, will involve technology similar to that being used in london...

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to reduce traffic by charging people who drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan received significant support on Thursday as Gov. Eliot Spitzer endorsed the idea and the Bush administration indicated that New York stood to gain hundreds of millions of dollars if the plan were enacted.

If the measure is approved by the Legislature, New York will become the first city in the United States to impose a broad system of congestion pricing, which was introduced in London in 2003 and has been credited with reducing traffic there.

now, why do you think new york would stand "to gain hundreds of millions of dollars" from the bush administration if the plan were enacted...? hmmmmmmmm...? do you suppose it might have anything to do with the fact that it would provide an excellent new surveillance platform...? nah... i'm just being cynical again...

[UPDATE]

and in the very same nyt edition that reported on the "Lower Manhattan Surveillance Security Initiative," comes this op-ed...

There are legitimate concerns about exactly how congestion pricing would work. A commission can be appointed later to hammer out the details. But first, the state needs to sign off on a general plan, so New York does not let as much as $500 million in federal money needlessly slip away.

yep, hurry up and get that money so we can be spied on sooner...

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The UK terror threat: "Hopeless" "Incompetent" "Ludicrous" "Laughable"

via casey, tpm offers us this view of a former scotland yard detective on the hysteria promulgated by our esteemed media, ever vigilant in their efforts to get us to pee our pants in abject fear...



if you want to pee your pants, please, be my guest... i prefer to wait until i'm old, incontinent, and wearing depends...

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"House to house searches seem like the logical next step"

read this comment about the london terrorist threat and then tell me where you think i got it...

[W]hy isn't the army going house to house looking for people building bombs in the UK and the US, or is that just something we have our boys doing half way around the world. Lets get these animals. I think it would be prudent to kick some doors in and check things out before this type of behavior gets to be a nuisance. House to house searches seem like the logical next step. No sense collecting all of this intelligence and spending all this money if we are not going to kick in some doors right here in our backyard.

i'll check back later, post the link and the source, and see if anybody was successful in tracking it town... (hint: it's not a blog...)

[UPDATE]

well, reading the comments so far, nobody's nailed it... the comment was posted on the abc news site, the blotter, under a story entitled, Sleeper Terror Cell on the Loose in the U.K.... considerably more disturbing to me than sleeper terror cells are people who believe that beginning house-to-house searches in the u.s. and the uk are called for in our efforts to deal with domestic terrorism threats... somehow, i would actually feel better had the comment come from a malkin or a coulter rather than just an average joe or josephine commenter... at least we can keep an eye on those two... this character might just be standing in front of you in the supermarket checkout line...

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Keith Olbermann talks with Larry Johnson about the UK terror threat

it's pretty much the same line of thinking that i posted on friday in connection with juan cole's perspective...



however, in all fairness, i did run across the following diary on daily kos this morning...

I have to say that the Larry Johnson diary made my eyes pop when I first saw it on top of the RecList on Friday. There I am, sitting at my work desk, two floors above Oxford Street, with police cars screaming down the road throughout the day, and news of tube cancellations and evacuations coming through in the office email - and here is this diary on my monitor, saying it's all a crock of crap. It's true that American media has a tendency to blow everything way out of proportion. ... But for Larry Johnson to be so dismissive when he is so ill-informed was a very poor reflection on this great website.

[...]

It's true that these terrorists seem to be a bunch of utter incompetents and belong on the set of a farce. But you only need to get lucky once. There are still too many crazies out there who are itching to kill innocents. And I say this as a Muslim myself.

it would be a completely useless exercise for me to sit here, listening to the hot wind blowing across the high desert of the great basin, and pretend that i know anything more or less than anyone else about what the REAL situation is in london... but, i do know this... i no longer take anything i'm told as true, particularly when it involves terror threats and the level of fear the media attempts to create in their reportage of them...

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Juan Cole on the London car bomb threat: book a flight to London

i just checked in to my hotel in the n.e. part of the state in a smaller town where i will be teaching this evening and tomorrow... while driving over, i stopped a couple of times, once for gas, and the other for coffee... in both places, tv's in the cashier areas were on and tuned to the news which was showing breathless reporters describing the london car bomb threat... i couldn't help but think back to the end of april when an explosive device was discovered outside a women's health clinic in austin, texas, where abortions are performed... THAT story barely made a dent in the national newscasts, although it was at least as big a threat as the discovery in london...

juan cole doesn't seem too thrilled with the london coverage either...

As I write, London police are using a robot to investigate a parked car near Buckingham Palace. The operation comes hours after a car was discovered packed with explosives and ready to detonate outside a nightclub in Picadilly Circus.

The proper response of Americans to these events? Book a vacation in London immediately and make sure to visit Picadilly Circus.

Whoever planned this operation at the height of the tourist season is trying to hurt the UK economy.

Britain is perfectly safe, in fact the murder rate there, including political violence, is one-fourth that of the US. A ticket to the UK can be found inexpensively and there are reasonable places to stay, and as urban historians have pointed out, London is a giant toy that is endless fun to play with.

i've walked all over central london on numerous visits and i hope to be able to do it again soon... if austin, texas, had any attraction for me whatsoever, i would happily walk around there too... i am simply not going to buy in to the fear-mongering that our media so eagerly attempt to shove down our throats...

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