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Computers, unlike flesh-and-blood creatures, entirely lack the charms of spontaneity, playfulness, affection, sensuality, passionate attachment, and so forth.  Yet recent films, to my continued bafflement, offer bizarre scenarios of “intimate relatedness” between humans and synthetic sentients (for instance, “Her,” “Ex Machina”–and even more sickeningly, the human clones of “Never Let Me Go.”)  Two hundred years ago, the 19-year-old Mary Shelley showed more acute insight than today’s technophiles–by conjuring up a startlingly ironic contract between the coldly grandiose Dr. Frankenstein and his suffering and emotionally sensitive “monster.”

Whence this fascination with “artificial intelligence”—(dis)embodied, calculating ratiocinators which are presumed to be somehow superior …

The Palestinian Embassy in London recently released a statement by President Mahmoud Abbas telling the world ‘It’s Time for Palestine’.

He starts by saying:

The Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and national independence has reached a decisive moment. The two-state formula is under serious threat, due to systematic Israeli policies and practices that have seriously undermined the solution, threatening to make it impracticable in the very near future.

Abbas reminds us that in 1988, Palestine unilaterally recognized Israel over 78 percent of historic Palestine, in addition to accepting United Nations resolutions as the framework for a peaceful solution to the conflict.

But, he …

Recently, the news hit social media that comedian and actor Russell Brand is embracing cryptocurrency. Well known for his political activism, Brand has now teamed up with Max Keiser, host of a popular financial program on RT to help fund his ideas for changing the world. Keiser, together with UK based entrepreneur Jamie Scott, co-founded StartJOIN, a crowdfunding website that combines the platform with its own unique currency called StartCOIN. Calling it a “currency of revolution”, he predicted that “cryptocoins such as Bitcoin or StartCOIN will put all central banks …

Michael Blake died last week.

You probably don’t know the name.

You probably don’t know about his life.

You probably don’t know most of what he wrote. That’s probably because he didn’t write diet and exercise books. Or cookbooks. Or “feel good” books. Or books about celebrities. Or books that advanced junk science or conspiracy theories.

Michael Blake fused history and social issues, writing about social justice. Writing books that mattered. Writing screenplays that were never produced and then discarded.

He was born in Fort Bragg, N.C.; his father was in the Army, and later became a telephone executive. But it was his mother, Sally, …

The good news is that an appellate judge in Canada has had the courage and good sense to uphold the release from jail on bail of Omar Khadr, a native of Canada who was captured as a child soldier at the age of 15 in Afghanistan by US forces back in 2002 and shipped off to Guantanamo, where he became one of the children held in captivity there illegally.

The bad news is that Khadr, who spent 13 years in captivity, most of them in America’s Guantanamo hellhole, should never have been imprisoned in the first place. Brought along at the …

V-E Day, or Victory in Europe Day, is celebrated every May 8th in Western Europe and the United States, but is celebrated as Victory Day every May 9th in Russia. Why? Because the Soviet Union’s representative had no authority to sign the German document of surrender at Reims, France, on 7 May 1945, but also because, on 8 May, Soviet forces were still shelling German units in Czechoslovakia that had refused to surrender. Thus, when the surrender ceremony was repeated in Berlin on 8 May, it already was 9 May in the Soviet Union.

Recently, the Ukrainian Prime Minister told German …

May 8. Today’s payroll jobs report is more of the same. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that 223,000 new jobs were created in April. Let’s accept the claim and see where the jobs are.

Specialty trade contractors are credited with 41,000 jobs equally split between residential and nonresidential. I believe these are home and building repairs and remodeling.

The rest of the jobs, 182,000, are in domestic services.

Despite store closings and weak retail sales, 12,000 people were hired in retail trade.

Despite negative first quarter GDP growth, 62,000 people were hired in professional and business services, 67% of which are in administrative …

Suddenly, the mass media is writing about or televising the conditions in West Baltimore. Conditions that Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, summarized as decades long “suffocating poverty, dysfunction and despair.”

Suddenly, reporters and camera teams are discovering Baltimore’s inner city—crumbling or abandoned housing; mass unemployment; too many merchants gouging the locals (the poor pay more); too many drug dealers; schools, roads and sidewalks in serious disrepair; debris everywhere; lack of municipal services (which are provided to the wealthier areas of the city); and, as always, grinding poverty and its many vicious circle consequences.

Suddenly, media highlights a report by Harvard economists putting …

It is wrong to believe that postwar American suburbanization prevailed because the public chose it… Suburbanization prevailed because of the decisions of large operators and powerful economic institutions supported by federal government programmes… ordinary consumers had little real choice in the basic pattern that resulted… Essentially city planners saw the atomic threat as a means to accelerate the trend of suburbanization. Plans to circle American cities with open spaces, highways and circumferential life belts was long overdue…The federal government played a more effective role in reducing urban vulnerability [to atomic attack] in future residential development by working through the Federal …

(Full article …)

Trust between the West and Russia is broken. It has been for quite some time, but now it is broken irreversibly. A good thing, because what kind of trust there could be between fascist imperialism and the forces that are fighting for the freedom of mankind?

It is really easy to trick the Russian people. It takes very little to gain their trust; sometimes only a kind smile, a handful of loving words, a few sincerely sounding pledges and promises. Russians can be easily ‘bought’ with kindness. They are very trusting, vulnerable people.

When approached with tenderness and sympathy, they soon open …

While congress ponders the merits of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, a bill which revises the business records provisions of the Patriot Act, a panel of judges in a federal appeals court has just thrown a clump of sand into the gears of the global panopticon. Overturning an earlier ruling, where federal judges dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata is illegal.

The Good News

In their ruling the judges focused heavily on the scope of …

Picture this! Your child is browsing through the latest teen magazine and she’s analysing all the latest ‘in-crowd’; Victoria Beckham, Lindsay Lohan, etc, who generally have a body mass index that would rival that of an infant suffering from malnutrition. She stops and looks closer and then declares “Gosh I wish I had a figure like that!”

I remember when my daughter was seven (she happened to be built like willow the wisp!) attempted to grab her tiny tummy, as she stood analysing herself in my mirror and announced that she was too fat! At which point I told her …

In the early morning of March 23, Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Lanakila Mangauil heard that construction of the world’s largest optical telescope had begun atop the Hawaiian sacred mountain Mauna Kea. He immediately spread the word to the community, who had been keeping vigilant watch, and ran up the summit to stop the desecration of this wahi pana, a place of cultural significance and practice. Others followed Lanakila’s lead, however, nobody expected that this would spark a global movement to protect one of our planet’s sacred sites.

…

The Nabil Test
 
In order to grasp the way in which contemporary solidarity terminology operates to deceive and derail the Palestinian cause, we will look at a few theoretical simulations that will help to clarify the corrosive nature that is the contemporary pro Palestinian discourse.
 
Nabil is a fictional 25 year old Palestinian, 3rd generation refugee born and living in Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon. Nabil is unemployed. No prospect of a future for him. As a Palestinian refugee his chances of higher education or a decent job are non-existent. Nabil cannot even obtain a travel document. He is stranded in the …

So his motorcade comes to Portland and clogs traffic. The mainstream news yammers on about where he might end up for pie or a smoke or which trendy place Barack might get an artisan beer or vegan cheese sandwich. All the rotten facts about his bullet and missile proof Cadillac. How the Murder Incorporated Entourage will have secret service, local SWAT, special forces and a slew of private mercenaries around to protect this GQ guy? America, 2015, and that 3 billion dollar Obama smile, in stumptown.

Portland, Oregon, hobbled by high taxes to the middle class, gentrification, no affordable housing, a …