29 September 2015

"Superpower" suppresses technology

Harry J. Bentham


Aggressive mass surveillance and the continued sanctions on Iran originate with the same ideological goal: relentless control over all things technological.


Many progressives find fault with the modernity of technology. In their view, all technological progress only favors the state and the corporate elite, and constantly disempowers ordinary people [1]. Such a perspective is based on prejudices, heralding pessimism that could only disempower and censor us even more. This essay offers a very different interpretation of the relationship between hegemonic and statist interests and the spread of new information technologies.

The global spies and punishers are the ones who have betrayed everything modernity stands for. They have turned their backs on the technological progress that marks us apart from the other apes. They are the Luddites. In their desire to monitor, restrict and control everything for themselves, they are retarding the potential of our technology to truly improve life and freedom for all. And, like the Luddites, they are doing this to keep their jobs.

The United States is indeed a focal point for most of the technological breakthroughs in the world, but the fruits of all these breakthroughs remain inadequately shared with the rest of humanity. By failing thus, we in the West fail to inspire or educate, and so fail to fulfill any supposed role as the leaders of modernity.

What exists in the United States and other Western countries is not an environment for true technological progress. It is environment for profits and hoarding. As the celebrated physicist Michio Kaku has pointed out, there is a “brain drain” by which the US is supported by foreign scientists and takes credit for their accomplishments [2]. At the same time, the US allies threaten countries with sanctions and airstrikes if they appear to be progressing beyond the rigid bounds of technology delineated by the US and its cruel apologists, as it is with Iran.

What has been stated above may seem like a hard case to present, as it is not comparable with many other statements being made in the present politics. However, it finds good theoretical support between the lines of a similar economic theory. The particular theory explaining the imperative behind such a drive for monopoly and restrictions on the circulation of decisive technologies is the theory of the “capitalist world-economy”, as articulated by US social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein in his lectures and essays [3]. This theory portrayed the world as divided between the struggling countries of the global periphery and the self-appointed club of the rich core (who also happen to be the Bilderberg powers and OECD signatories) [4].

The core countries, which are primarily led from Washington, maintain their dominance by having a higher level of monopoly within the global production process [5]. They control decisive new areas like the genetic engineering and microcomputer industries, as well as emerging technologies [6]. It is from their centers, such as Silicon Valley, that the most valued industrial technologies begin to contribute to the global production processes.

The division of the world into low-tech and high-tech producers is the axial division of labor, long necessitated by the nature of a profit-driven world divided in terms of national borders and by the restriction of countries to having a specific economic base determined by their history (agrarian or industrial?) By reducing other countries to a state of dependency, the industrialized core is able to wield a more powerful military and obtain more political rights on the global stage [7]. This injustice, in turn, allows them to legitimize further oppression on the grounds that they are the most advanced and that the others need them more than they need the others. It is inevitably this injustice that gives the rich countries the ability to impose sanctions on others whom they disagree with.

As the core countries possess the more powerful position in the production process, it follows that they may at times deliberately thwart development, degrading technology and with it health and life in the rest of the world. There have been events that confirm the validity of this thesis. From US hostility to Japan’s rapid technological advancement to present US hostility to Iranian scientific progress, the rich and powerful remain as equipped and poised as ever to “set them back a decade or two or three”, as US Republican congressman Duncan Hunter ranted [8]. A comparable sentiment was found in the infamous words of Curtis LeMay concerning North Vietnam, and the threats of mass murder issued by Zionist Israel against the hapless Gaza Strip.

The core countries’ unilateral spying on the world only reinforces this thesis. What they are doing, in that case, is amassing capabilities and hiding them. They are subverting technology, arresting its natural destiny to empower the common man. They sought to hide these capabilities, to preserve them without challenge and so maintain the status quo. This, they knew, would maximize their power and profits.

Rather than allowing civilization to adjust and progress by knowing about and overcoming the brute technological arsenal of the state, the monopolistic powers are in love with secrecy for exactly the same reasons that the corporations are in love with intellectual property. The more barriers they set up to prevent others knowing what they have, the less the likelihood that anyone will be able to see the pathways to overthrow their unjust preponderance of power and wealth.

Julian Assange’s consideration of the perpetual use of security fears to attack internet freedom is particularly informative in this regard. Speeches on terrorism, narcissistic caressing of the US regime as the world’s only responsible custodian, and assumptions that some among humanity are just too irresponsible to hold certain capabilities, are always used [9].There is no fault in the analysis that the same arguments used to attack internet freedom are being recycled to attack Iranian scientific progress. These phobic arguments, which reject any notion of the human family, are deeply paranoid at best and racially aggravated and at worst.

Statist and hegemonic restrictions on technology’s potential in the name of security are nothing but Luddite policies swimming against the technium’s tide of freedom described in the works of Kevin Kelly [10]. Such restrictions presuppose that allowing the inevitable freedom of access to knowledge and the human right to develop independently will culminate in a security threat. What the defenders of the paranoia and monopoly fail to mention is that their actions interfere in creativity. Attempting to hoard all capabilities and strike others who attempt to develop is a blatant attack on technology itself – an affront to the natural force of the technium.

We can learn two very important conclusions from what has been exposed by the state’s massive betrayal of modernity and attempt to circumvent it. First, the view that the NSA’s sinister mass surveillance is a manifestation of out-of-control technological progress is opposite to the truth. It is the NSA and the statists themselves who fear today’s technological explosion and its liberating potential. The NSA’s violation is an attempt to retard the liberating effects of technology in the world today. They have tried to stab modernity in the back. As such, the opponents of the spies need not use Luddite arguments. They should instead be exposing the paranoid state and its supporters as Luddites – sluggish and archaic authorities opposing the freedoms that modernity stands for.

Second, we must more eagerly prepare for the near future when monopoly, state power and the appropriation of knowledge by companies are made impossible by the very acceleration and democratization of technology itself. A top theory of this awakening was authored by Yannick Rumpala, who speaks of a radical change in the capitalist mode of production as a consequence of new manufacturing technologies [11]. Although Rumpala’s paper itself is mainly discussing the implications of additive manufacturing (3D printing), the inclusion of K. Eric Drexler’s atomically precise manufacturing (APM) revolution [12] and J. Craig Venter’s synthetic biology revolution [13] makes the experiment of a networked economy with no factories, no corporations and no state increasingly possible.

Our other possible world may only be decades away, making our prescience of the political ramifications now truly important. It may have the potential to radicalize and transform everything about our economic and political existence, violating the former paradigm entirely and replacing it with something no-one can accurately predict.

Let us not fall for the view that mass surveillance is a case of our technology breaking bad. It is a clear manifestation of the doomed state’s paranoia in the face of the common man’s technology. What we have seen from the surveillance state, massive monopolistic corporations and the neoconservative ideologues defending the two is a pure Luddite manifestation of the phobia of technology. As George W. Bush once admitted, the “gravest danger” to US hegemony is “at the crossroads of radicalism and technology” [14]. In addition to this, neoconservative thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama have stood strongly against the movement encouraging the most radical vision of humanity’s liberation through technology: transhumanism [15].

Information wants to be free. The unrestrained democratization of knowledge and technology is the world’s inheritance, the freedom of humanity to achieve its noblest aspirations.

The dramatic booklet CATALYST: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013) explains these theories fully and is the founding document of The clubof.info Blog

[1] J. Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: How Democratic Societies must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview Press, 2004) p. 130-131
[2] M. Kaku, “The Secret Weapon of American Science”, Big Thinkhttp://bigthink.com/videos/the-secret-weapon-of-american-science, retrieved 15 March 2014
[3] I. M. Wallerstein, “Modernization: Requiescat in Pace”, p. 106-111 in The Essential Wallerstein (The New York Press, New York, 2000), p. 111.
[4] Id. “Class Formation in the Capitalist World-Economy”, p. 315-323 in The Essential Wallerstein (The New York Press, New York, 2000), p. 316.
[5] I. M. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An introduction (Duke University Press, Durham, 2004) p. 17-18.
[6] Ibid. p. 28-31
[7] Ibid. p. 11-17
[8] B. Armbruster, “Congressman Says U.S. Should Use Nuclear Weapons If It Attacks Iran”, Think Progresshttp://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/12/04/3018431/duncan-hunter-iran-nukes/#, retrieved 15 March 2014
[9] J. Assange et al. Cypherpunks (OR Books, 2012) p. 72
[10] K. Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking Penguin, 2010) p. 269-270
[11] Y. Rumpala, “Additive manufacturing as global redesigning of politics”, h+ Magazinehttp://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/07/additive-manufacturing-as-global-redesigning-of-politics/, retrieved 15 March 2014
[12] K. E. Drexler, Radical Abundance (PublicAffairs, 2013) p. 286-287
[13] J. C. Venter, Life at the Speed of Light (Viking Adult, 2013) p. 178
[14] The New York Times, “Text of Bush’s Speech at West Point”, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/international/02PTEX-WEB.html?pagewanted=2, retrieved 28 June 2013
[15] F. Fukuyama “Transhumanism”, Foreign Policyhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/09/01/transhumanism, retrieved 30 June 2013

Harry J. Bentham


Originally published on 23 March 2014

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Emerging tech has promise of liberation

The Blog


Nothing could improve the lot of the world’s poorest people more than uncurbed advances in certain emerging technologies – the only things that could offer serious remunerations for the people struggling with scarcity at the feet of Western bully-states and corporations. Products from synthetic biology and other emerging technologies, uncontained and unsupervised, should be circulated as the greatest hope for people in the world’s poorest countries. In the future, this might mean democratically circulating biotech machinery for farmers to genetically modify their own crops, and circulating synthetic life-forms that can enhance industry in the poorest countries and make economic participation better than a zero sum game for the world’s poor. Nothing could be better for people in poor countries in the long-term than explosions in inherently democratic emerging technologies – developments that should be counted among the few things that can seriously overcome the dependency of poor countries on rich countries.

It is completely misguided to predict emerging technologies to be jewels in the crown of the Western world, because these technologies more than anything else are destined to finally break the chains of the world’s poor and create the closest possible conditions to equality. These technologies have more potential than anything else to eradicate the division of labor that keeps the poor in servitude to powers that hold an undeserved level of monopoly over advanced technologies. The uncertainty surrounding today’s defining technological developments represents a threat only to oligopoly. Abandoning all prudence to place a secure confidence in the promise of technology-powered liberation will be the key to tackling the unfair conditions and privileges ever sustaining global inequality.

Excerpt from Bentham, H. J., Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013)

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25 September 2015

Close the bases, dismantle the Empire

The Blog


Writing on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, activist Jack Balkwill argued for protests and direct action aimed at closing the overseas military bases that the United States uses to occupy the world.


It is believed that the American regime has between 800 and 1000 foreign military bases globally, from which is exerts a threatening and occupying presence over most of the world. It uses the bases to carry out wars of aggression against dissenting states, in violation of the United Nations Charter.

Balkwill states that these bases do not keep Americans safe or maintain stability in the world, nor does the regime show any concern for Americans in its own territory while its armies continue to occupy the world. The American political system has degenerated into what Franklin D. Roosevelt considered to be fascism "wrapped in the American flag" (Chris Hedges), Balkwill notes.

Americans need to rise up and trash the "military state" to regain any semblance of democracy, Balkwill concludes. Calling wars of aggression around the world "defense" is offensive propaganda because the American public does not support war and would otherwise not buy into arguments for more military spending.


The American "Empire" which exerts itself through its vast number of foreign military bases, can be dismantled if the American people discredit those military bases and the rationale behind them. This is what Balkwill calls for, and a large part of such a movement to discredit the Empire is to revolve around disseminating the right information, as we already do at The clubof.info Blog and our associated channels:
We must get information out around the corporate media to persuade our fellow citizens to oppose Empire, showing that it does not serve the American people, but the international investors and international corporations, as an instrument of fascism.



Balkwill refers to Abby Martin's new show The Empire Files (episode embedded above), which documents and airs the crimes of this global Empire of thugs and killers calling itself the United States. He stated that the series is "urging us all to fight against the empire and bring it down. The Empire does not serve the American people, it subjugates them, just as it does people in other nations."


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Big government vs big tech?

The Blog


Responding to Robert B. Reich's New York Times article "Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful", an antistatist writer blamed big government for the very problems Reich was suggesting the government should solve.


Writing at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) Joel Schlosberg rejected Reich's claim that the government must intervene in free markets in order to maintain them. Reich claimed that "There can’t be a market without government", which Schlosberg considers ignorant of abundant examples ranging from international trade (considering there is no world-government) to trade among individuals in the anarchic spaces of the Internet.

Also rejected by Schlosberg was the need for intellectual property as the pillar upholding innovation - by creating artificial scarcity in order to guarantee the existence of high-tech markets. Schlosberg instead advocated an alternative economy, saying "A full-fledged mutualistic economy of the digital age would instead be like the bazaars of eBay and Etsy, but for everything.".

Schlosberg concluded by pointing out that Reich contradicts himself in the New York Times op-ed, at first rejecting the way corporations aggressively use intellectual property to shut down competition (and thus innovation), and then parroting the fallacy that intellectual property is the fuel of innovation. Intellectual property, like national security and protectionism, is one of several legal constructions used by political and corporate oligarchs to slow innovation and inhibit the spread of new technologies.


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22 September 2015

Will Russia eviscerate Obama in Syria?

The Blog


Political op-ed writer Mike Whitney believes Russia is going to throw itself into the path of any future attempt by the US and its allies to remove President al-Assad from power in Syria.


The US can't figure out what the Russians' intentions in Syria are, and are hoping that US military escalation of the air war over Syria from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey will result in the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's government, Whitney theorizes. At the same time, the Russians may be increasing their presence in the country, strengthening lines of supply to Assad, and setting up extremely advanced new air defenses in the besieged country.

A 14 September Reuters report on Russia positioning T-90 tanks at a strategic airfield in Syria accompanies similar sensational reports of Russian fighter jets landing at Syrian airfields, Russia's latest air defenses being deployed in the country to deter US aggression, and the latest Russian armored personnel carriers being handed over to the Syrian Arab Army. Videos already exist of the Syrian Army operating fully upgraded T-90 tanks, which (until the Armata platform was unveiled in 2015) were Russia's most advanced battle tanks.

Sensing a growing barrier to their attempts to remove Assad from power, Washington has groveled before Moscow by restoring the same military talks that it had earlier closed over Russia's alleged role in the Ukraine crisis. With sanctions already on Moscow over other issues such as the Ukraine War and Russia's support of US dissident Edward Snowden, the US regime has no diplomatic or economic options to persuade Russia to disengage from Damascus or change course. Refusal to cooperate with Russia has severely inhibited the aggressive US regime's attempts to interfere in Syria and increased the incentives for Russia to sabotage and block US policy in the country.

A weak attempt was made to close off European airspace to Russian transports heading to Syria, but Russia quickly found routes around the areas and drastically increased its cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran to support Syria. Evidence seems to suggest an imminent new round of confrontation between the West and Russia like the Ukraine crisis, this time over Syria, with the West again acting as a blatant aggressor trying to redraw the map of the world with military force.

Writing at Counterpunch, Whitney offered the conclusion that the US may succeed in weakening Syria and creating areas that remain under terrorist control, but that Russia will inhibit any effort to remove Assad from power. Meanwhile, the US war machine cannot be turned off. It is likely that the US regime's despotic leaders will continue hurtling towards a confrontation in Syria until they suffer severe military losses and further political and diplomatic defeats at the hands of Putin.

US President Barack Obama's fate in Syria, Whitney concludes, is in the hands of Vladimir Putin. If we consider how hostile and threatening the US has become to Russia, Obama will be eviscerated. According to Business Insider, Obama's "rebel" army in Syria, created to rule Syria after Assad, now only consists of four men. One White House official tried to distance the President from the defeat, shifting the blame by implying that Senator John McCain is to blame for recommending the failed strategy.


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US wants a terror attack to justify spying

The Blog


In a chilling leaked email, a top US government lawyer hopes for a terrorist attack to justify spying on Americans.


If we are to go by what Bill Maher and other pro-government propagandists in the media tell us, the US state's spying on millions of Americans is about protecting against terrorist attacks. Evidence cited against this consists of the basic fact that the digital surveillance against Americans has not stopped any terrorist attacks.

Perhaps better still is the evidence that the US government uses terrorism to justify the spying, to the point of wanting terrorist attacks to happen.

Lawyer Robert S. Litt wrote, "the legislative environment is very hostile today … [but] it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement." A government official also called for dead children as a way of persuading the public to accept tyranny to protect them:
People are still not persuaded this is a problem. People think we have not made the case. We do not have the perfect example where you have the dead child or a terrorist act to point to, and that’s what people seem to claim you have to have.
C4SS (Center for a Stateless Society) writer Jason Farrell sees this quest for an impervious "national security" state as a threat to the actual security of American citizens, concluding as follows:
The leak underscores the problems associated with secret laws, secret courts, secret spying programs and the failure of the democratic process to secure privacy rights. The competitive nature of domestic spying programs could compel states to further erode privacy rights within their own borders in the pursuit of “national security.” What sort of security that leaves us with remains to be seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjEEM1XCfTk

When Glen Greenwald was in the above (linked) interview with Bill Maher, Maher described US whistleblower Edward Snowden as "batshit" for thinking the US government spies on American citizens for any reason other than to keep them safe. Reality shows otherwise.


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18 September 2015

Topple: press "clowns" attack Corbyn

The Blog


Steve Topple has penned an analysis slamming the UK mainstream media's coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's new leadership of the Labour Party and calling for "boots on the ground" activism to derail public reliance on mainstream media.


An unreserved left wing writer, Topple praised Corbyn's party leadership election campaign as "grassroots activism, social media mobilisation and people telling an Establishment organisation to “get stuffed”". However, there is also a warning that these very modern methods used by Corbyn to win leadership of the party might not work on the whole national electorate.

"It was 251,417 people, to be precise – out of an electorate of 45 million", Topple pointed out. Most people still rely on a couple of mainstream television stations as the source of all their news shaping their worldview.

Topple's conclusion that "editorial rooms are not “cut off” from what the public think – they decide what we think, as has always been the case" resembles the arguments advanced in the booklet Media Control by Noam Chomsky. Namely, the idea that we live in fraudulent democracies in which, rather than deciding on the values of the state and putting the questions to our leaders as citizens of a true democracy would do, we instead get all our information stuffed down our throats and told what to believe.


Since all the questions and options posed to "democratic" leaders are pre-scriped in a studio, it is legitimate to question whether these leaders have any mandate from the public at all. According to Glen Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, the problem is worse in the US regime, but many of the facets of this problem have infected the British mainstream press corps as well.

Contacted for comment on his article, Topple explained his meaning of the "boots on the ground" action. The idea revolves mainly around direct action, including possibly DDOS cyber sit-ins, protest actions and strikes, as well as possible offensive cyber actions by groups like Anonymous.

Steve Topple is an anti-establishment writer, prolific Twitter user and contributor to Common Space who has been a listed brother of the Mont Order dissident society since April 2015.




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Encryption, anonymity as human rights

The Blog


In May of 2015, a UN report asserted that secure encryption and anonymity on the Internet are human rights.


From the UN report:
Encryption and anonymity, today’s leading vehicles for online security, provide individuals with a means to protect their privacy, empowering them to browse, read, develop and share opinions and information without interference and enabling journalists, civil society organizations, members of ethnic or religious groups, those persecuted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, activists, scholars, artists and others to exercise the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. 
The US regime has vowed and sought to implement a so-called "golden key" that will allow it to break through all encryption, contrary to the UN's above recognition of encryption as a human right. As of Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, they were making significant gains against such protection, but they had not yet succeeded.

Dan Froomkin at The Intercept had written on the month of the report's release:
Encryption is not the refuge of scoundrels, as Obama administration law-enforcement officials loudly proclaim – it is an essential tool needed to protect the right of freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age, a new United Nations report concludes.
More recently, at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) in September, Jason Farrell concluded, "Governments do not have a right to see every communication on the web", and dismissed the so-called national security arguments of the White House. He wrote that "Even if the battle against terrorism, drug cartels, hackers, spies or other criminals becomes more difficult, “going dark” remains the right of all human beings."

A "golden key" to thwart encryption will not just allow the US regime to aggressively monitor and follow its own citizens without any legal justification, but will allow repressive regimes all over the world to do the same once they get access to US government information. Therefore, what the US is doing has become an example of what Martin Luther King Jr called 'an injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere', potentially allowing the entrenchment of dictatorships all over the world.

However, the US's development of the ultimate tools of dictatorship and the repression of opposition should not be surprising. In all international conflicts, the US has proven repeatedly that it is on the side of armed coups and repressive dictatorships, using their territory to extra-judicially torture and murder its opponents over decades.


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15 September 2015

Terror against US regime is a reprisal

The Blog


What the media try to describe as unprovoked terrorist attacks against Americans are actually reprisals against a barbaric and warlike US regime that has left a trail of death and destruction across the world. The US is the world's most dangerous terrorist state, massacring civilians on a daily basis, and pretends to be shocked that anyone would try to retaliate.


This was the tone of antistatist writer Chad Nelson, writing recently at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) market anarchist think tank based in the US. Highlighting the secrecy under which President Obama's drone wars thrive in order to protect his sensitive image as a dove rather than a hawk, Nelson offered the following commentary on how Americans are tricked about why they are targeted by terrorists:
When retaliation for these actions arrives at our shores or against Americans abroad, as it inevitably does, the American public is shocked and appalled, wondering what could possibly prompt such heinous actions. Hungry for answers, Americans are then fed simple explanations by politicians, such as, “they hate our way of life,” or “their religion commands them to commit such acts.” Never are we provided the context in which such reprisals occur.
Americans go on to tolerate a monstrous, intrusive police state which invades their own lives supposedly to hunt down the militants who are only reacting to the same undemocratic regime's aggression around the world. Americans are subjected to 24/7 surveillance and the bulk collection of all their correspondence, and have no guarantees that they too won't be arbitrarily detained or assassinated by their criminal regime in Washington without trial.

In Afghanistan, the US-led NATO aggression has reached its most sordid and illegitimate scale, with children confined to home and unable to go to school for fear of being hit by Obama's criminal drone attacks. As a result of this, the remote-controlled aggression goes beyond merely creating resentment among the people affected by them, but can even inflame regional or global resentment of the United States for its endless aggression.

Obama will never be remembered as a man of peace, Nelson argues, because he has escalated his drone program to a scale ten times greater than George W. Bush. It is worth noting that none of the current leading candidates for the 2016 Presidential election in the US opposes drone strikes, and even Bernie Sanders has called merely for the strikes to be conducted with more caution, despite their record of failure.


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Science and technology can end poverty

The Blog


The following quotes and major points on the constraints preventing scientists and engineers from making poverty history come from the L'Ordre blog, and were published on 12th September 2015. Of particular interest are technologies that could ease industrialization in poorer countries if directly donated to them, such as artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and synthetic biology.

rather than use humanity’s one redeeming feature – ingenuity – as our deliverance, we have wasted the world’s resources trying to stunt the growth of technology in countries such as Iran, allowing ourselves to be driven by a will to self-destruction and fear. This usurps the natural human yearning to create and evolve, in the spirit of our earliest ancestors
  • Billionaire entrepreneurs profess to help humanity but have done nothing remarkable to actually enrich, strengthen and boost the survival of poor peoples and states in the Southern Hemisphere. These people are more often placed under economic sanctions for their progress, rather than helped by richer countries
  • Most people who claim to favor the world's poor seem more interested in creating more refugee camps and inviting billions of people to live in Europe and North America. This more closely resembles the way Native Americans were treated during genocide rather than the heroic desire to arm the world's oppressed people against the world's rich and heavily armed powers
  • "Where science and technology cross with anti-colonialism, liberation movements and the desire for a mass uprising against injustice and inequality, there is the greatest source of hope for humanity."
  • Synthetic biology can create self-replicating chemical products including fuels and fertilizers to any extent, and such products don't need to be sold or owned by anyone but could just be given away to radically improve life and development in poorer countries
  • "Self-gratifying charity" of NGOs and philanthropists claiming to help the world's poor is hollow. They should be arming the world's poor to resist oppression and fraud with the latest technologies through direct action
  • Everyone takes risks with technology, so we have no right to resist the risk involved in giving out all the world's most potent technology to the world's poorest people
  • Science and technology need to be depoliticized and national security doctrines should not be used to stop the spread of new technologies, which should be applied to help the poor immediately upon being created
  • The full extent of this argument can be found in the Catalyst techno-liberation thesis
The post concluded that synthetic biology (the artificial genetic sequencing and creation of new living things) is the most important stride that could help the world's poor at minimum cost to the donor, due to its self-replicating nature and simplicity. The blog proposed that it will become "the key to ending all the world’s resource shortages, environmental problems and wars".


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11 September 2015

Mont slams Ukrainian war criminals

The Blog


The worldwide Mont Order dissident club has declared the embattled regime in Ukraine, which has been created by so-called "democracies" in Europe and North America, to be illegitimate and deserving massive condemnation.


In a statement published on Sunday, 6 September, the members of the Mont Order Security Council unanimously expressed their condemnation of the illegally installed regime ruling from Kiev. Accusing the regime of "numerous war crimes inside Ukraine, including massacres of civilians in Odessa Oblast and Donetsk Oblast", the Order was overwhelming in its disgust at this "so-called state" and advised its members and global civil society to stand up to its terrorism.

From the Mont Order statement, which can be read in full at the Mont Order society's official blog:
The Mont Order considers that this is an illegitimate regime, and that it has not been sufficiently condemned in the international community and by civil society for its fascist associations and its crimes against humanity. As a civil society body, the Mont Order believes that an avalanche of criticism of this criminal regime using all the tools of the Internet is necessary. The Order considers that anyone who supports the current Ukrainian regime in or outside of the conflict zone should be given the treatment of a Nazi collaborator and any state providing funding or arms to Ukraine is a state sponsor of terrorism.
The Mont Order, which takes its name from a more mysterious group depicted in urban legend, sees itself as a latent civil society body. Led by its Security Council formed earlier in 2015, it has been gaining strength through the use of Mont dark web locations and Mont social media campaigns to expand its influence and capabilities as a pressure group. This has already resulted in numerous publications, journalists and movements being aligned with the Order.


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Saudi Arabia to starve 100,000 children

The Blog


Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have been blocking food and humanitarian aid transit to the people of Yemen, in hope of starving the country to death.


Images of emaciated children have already started to appear on social media showing that the starvation of the country during the Saudi regime's illegal war is a reality. Commentators warn that nearly 100,000 children are facing the specter of starvation as a result of the Saudi and US-backed "coalition" cutting off humanitarian aid to the impoverished country. While the Saudis claim to be targeting Houthi rebels, their actions tell another story as millions of civilian lives are deliberately destroyed by blockades and indiscriminate airstrikes.

The figure comes from the UN children's agency, which has said 96,000 children are starving and close to death in Yemen's port city of al-Hodeidah, as reported by Al Jazeera. In addition, almost 20,000,000 people lack sufficient access to water, which is almost the entire population, as a result of the aggression against the country. As the Al Jazeera station is funded by Qatar, which also takes part in the aggression, its short report conveniently eschewed placing blame on anyone for the mass starvation.

Some accounts state that Saudi Arabia has been refusing access of food aid to Yemen or even destroying transports and ships carrying such aid, unless it is bound for specific ethnic groups regarded as allies by Saudi Arabia. Activists point out that this makes Saudi Arabia's actions beyond a war crime, and that these actions amount to a genocide being directed against millions of civilians in Yemen.

The ongoing aggression consists of blockades and bombardments against Yemen, and is motivated by Saudi Arabia's desire to restore former President Hadi to power. Saudi Arabia appears determined that Hadi must rule Yemen again, despite the mass opposition to the corrupt Saudi-backed politician over the guilt he bears for starting the war.

Saudi aggression against Yemen has the full backing of the United States and its allies. The Saudis argue that the Yemeni Houthi political coalition is the source of the violence in the country, but their campaign has primarily targeted the people of Yemen, using collective punishment against the whole country for defying Saudi Arabia. Yemeni retaliation has also been recently gaining momentum, with Houthi fighters inflicting severe losses against foreign soldiers with cross-border rocket attacks.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, and has a population as high as Saudi Arabia itself. However, Saudi Arabia's military actions against Yemen's internal political factions show that the Saudi Kingdom does not accept Yemen's sovereignty and sees itself as the master of the whole Arabian Peninsula.


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8 September 2015

"Propped up" Ukrainian regime doomed

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The Ukrainian regime imposed by the 2014 Coup in Kiev is increasingly weak, fractured and being propped up by foreign powers.


Ukraine's debt has been steadily mounting as the broken, civil war-plagued puppet state has continued to beg its American owners for more money. Recent violence in the streets of Kiev has been sparked by the same extremists who led the Coup and have been involved in massive war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Donetsk, Luhansk and Odessa Oblasts.


Russia has been placed under sanctions by bellicose "democracies" such as the UK and US for its military maneuvers near the unstable state and its reintegration of the Crimean Peninsula with Russia, as well as its diplomatic protests against Ukraine's massacres of civilians. A recent analysis by Mark Chapman argued that sanctions against Russia have failed. They were founded upon a familiar "arrogant", colonial, condescending view of Russia (much like the view informing the campaign of failed sanctions against Iran). They were quickly circumvented by the Russian people, who feel no dependence on the arrogant powers and financial institutions and see a growing moral duty to not cooperate with discredited war criminals and murderers in Washington.

Russian officials have already challenged the US to place more sanctions on their country, saying that they refuse to obey the arrogant powers and will instead confront them if necessary.

The following embedded television debate covered many of the main points about the immorality, confusion and futility of the costly war being waged by the US-backed regime in Ukraine. Most significantly, the way that US regime leaders openly associated and posed with neo-Nazis in Kiev and are now trying to dismiss these same Nazis as "a few bad apples" is exposed by the speakers on the program.

Mark Sleboda portrayed the Ukrainian regime as doomed and argued that it "would have collapsed many times over" if it was not being "drip fed" by the US regime and European puppet states which fear the collapse of the current oligarchy.



The regime ruling Ukraine has censored the media, killed and arrested thousands of civilians, assassinated journalists, assassinated and intimidated political opposition, banned opposition parties, and waged war against all dissenting elements of its own people since it came to power illegally in 2014. The US has refused to condemn the regime and has eagerly supplied it with training, weapons and funding to support its terrorism. There has also been a silence from alternate media and civil society bodies on the escalating and inconvenient war crimes of the dysfunctional and fake "democracy" supported by the US.


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US Black protesters to receive weapons?

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Writing at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), analyst Ryan Calhoun praised an initiative by a local chapter of the Oath Keepers militia to arm protesters in Missouri with assault rifles.


The Oath Keepers are a decentralized militia in the United States who conform to a libertarian interpretation of the United States Constitution. While Calhoun noted that adherence to the Constitution is not a perfect ideology, with the Constitution itself being responsible for some historic injustices like slavery at certain times, he noted that more faithful adherence to the Constitution may result in a better regime in the United States at this juncture.

The national leadership of the Oath Keepers has continued to hold a "colonial" attitude towards its relationship with the Black communities most subjected to injustice by police forces in Missouri, seeing its role as the defense of businesses from the "rioters", as the American regime prefers to call Black protesters. The local chapter of the group in Missouri, however, has other intentions.

"The Missouri Chapter of Oath Keepers want to arm 50 black protestors with AR-15s", Calhoun points out, and this has caused a kind of schism within the Oath Keepers, as the chapter would prefer to arm the Black community and enable it to defend itself from police brutality rather than simply backing up the police state for the sake of protecting businesses.

Calhoun praised any move to arm the police-occupied Black community for the purpose of "handing over the power of a rifle to men and women who we, as a society, have stripped of the right to self-determination".

Whether or not the Missouri Chapter's efforts succeed, the next time the US police state tries to forcibly suppress protests, the regime might not just have to watch out for Black protesters but for militias of all races who recognize the plight of this minority and its need for armed defense.


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4 September 2015

Elections irrelevant to the world-system

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Creator of the world-systems approach to political science, Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that anxiety-based electoral campaigns in the US and elsewhere will have no impact on the crisis of the world-system.


While noting that wise elections of more humane leaders can "minimize the pain" of the world's impoverished social classes and regions, Wallerstein stated that nothing can change the crisis of the modern world-system and the need to replace the current world order with a better one. Wallerstein terms the alternate economy he is referring to as a "post-capitalist" one, and has referred to it in past essays as a "socialist" world government of sorts.

Immanuel Wallerstein is not a radical left-wing philosopher and is actually the world's top sociologist, who sees the current world economy as unsustainable and destined to replaced by the aforementioned global alternative.

Commentating on the candidacy of Donald Trump in the US 2016 elections, as well as Bernie Sanders, Wallerstein described both of them as campaigning on the basis of "anxiety" that comes from growing global unemployment - although in their cases they focus on the US's part in it. Wallerstein characterized Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric as something that will be unavailing, with geopolitics and the forces of the world-system in the end dooming this rhetoric to fail as any kind of policy.

Wallerstein dismissed that the most Trump could accomplish through his anti-immigrant rhetoric is "there is some tightening on the entry of migrants and some tightening of welfare state expenditures for the poorest sectors of the population. There is some increased anti-minority violence within the country."

While labeling such possibilities as "negatives", Wallerstein stressed that the real battle is not about elections or who wins them, and rather we "have to fight the longer middle-run (20-40 years) battle of transforming the capitalist system into the kind of post-capitalist one that will be better and not worse than the present one. If Wallerstein's sociology is credible, the futuristic alternative would be a world where authority is diminished significantly, ownership and rent are nonexistent much as the Venus Project advocates, and the world is governed as a single human community rather than a set of protectionist nation-states.


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UK reform harms the disabled: petition

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A petition started at the UK Parliament's public petitions portal calls on the government to assess the negative impact of benefit reforms on the lives of disabled people in Britain.


Titled "Assess full impact of all cuts to support & social care for disabled people", the petition points out that the UK government has ignored public calls to assess "the impact of Welfare, Social Care & NHS reform on disabled people and their families".

The number of disabled people living in absolute poverty has increased as the Cameron government has revised the benefits system. Many disabled and ill people in the United Kingdom are effectively forced to work (sometimes even with only a few weeks left to live).

The petition can be found and signed at the UK Parliament's petitions portal. The government will have to respond if there are more than 10,000 signatures and Parliament will consider a debate on the issue if there are more than 100,000 signatures.

In many testimonies, disabled people are being arbitrary deemed fit for work by fake medical organizations like "Atos Healthcare" which are paid by the government solely to ignore real doctors' advice and force thousands of ill and disabled people to work. Another area of controversy surrounds similarly fraudulent organizations contracted by the Conservative government to be cheap and incompetent conveyors of the government's "work program". In every case, these fake and parasitic corporations are run by government cronies trying to profit from unemployment and thus allowed to usurp non-competitive public sector work.

Because they are private organizations and not state agencies, private organizations doing government work are allowed to observe no ethics, no credible commitment to government targets, and no commitment to actually end the social problems they are exploiting in their contract with the government. The Conservative government wishes to make the NHS similarly driven by capricious businesses who (rather than competing with other businesses) receive the gift of government contracts for nothing more than being a crony.


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1 September 2015

Reform demands from a UK dissident

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A white paper on social reform for Britain has been published by UK dissident Simon Tomlin writing at The Daily Agenda blog.


In the paper, titled "The Act of Reformation", the dissident and Mont Order Security Council seat holder puts forward the following 21 essential demands to make the UK a more functional democracy. In particular, The Daily Agenda called for the long-delayed transformation of Britain into a democratic republic (something that has never gained any political traction in the UK, as noted by Tomlin) rather than a constitutional monarchy, and the creation of a Freedom of Speech Act that would provide similar protections to journalists and whistleblowers as the First Amendment in the United States.
  1. "Proportional representation guaranteeing all political parties a place in Parliament based on the share of the vote to ensure all electors are represented according to their views at a General Election." The current system is a dictatorship of two parties.
  2. "The unelected House of Lords is to be abolished in its entirety."
  3. "The Constitutional Monarchy is to be abolished"
  4. "The Magistrates Courts are to be scrapped in the public interest to eradicate the nepotism between the police and Magistracy."
  5. "The system of sentencing and remand prior to conviction is to be overhauled to significantly reduce the prison population and alleviate the massive cost to the public purse."
  6. "All district judges sitting in the Magistrates Courts are to be promoted to the Crown Courts" Half of the Magistrates Courts are to be scrapped to reduce the cost to the public.
  7. "Membership of the Freemasons organisation or any secret organisation [with the exception of the Mont Order] committed to influencing the legal framework of the nation, shall become illegal"
  8. "The Criminal Cases Review Commission will be scrapped"
  9. "The prison system shall undergo a sweeping reform of all of its services with the key emphasis being on restoring discipline and encouraging widespread rehabilitation of offenders. The prison population will be reduced in significant numbers"
  10. "It is proposed that prisoners are sent to prisons that reflect their nature of their crimes." Non-violent offenders should not be sent to the same prison facilities as violent offenders.
  11. "The ‘Independent’ Police Complaints Commission shall be abolished and replaced with a Police Standards Authority to restore public trust in the police service."
  12. "DNA samples retained by the police service where the person arrested has not been charged will be destroyed under the supervision of the PSA."
  13. "The post of Police Commissioner is to be scrapped to eradicate the current nepotism between political parties and like-minded senior police officers.."
  14. "Parliament shall enact a law guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression to all British citizens and people shall have the right to express whatever opinions they hold without fear of criminal prosecution and repression by Parliament."
  15. "Secret trials will be dispensed with in the public interest to engender greater public trust and transparency in the legal system."
  16. "Absolute privilege for solicitors and barristers shall be abolished to prevent them from making character assassination attacks on a defendant, then reported as ‘fact’ in the media, thus causing serious defamation to the defendant, particularly where or she is acquitted by a jury."
  17. "Legal Aid funding in the criminal courts shall not be available to any defendant convicted of three offences and this measure is designed to curtail career criminals, who will have to pay for their own legal representation and if they cannot afford to pay, they should seek alternative law abiding careers."
  18. "Parliament shall enact a law – similar to the First Amendment in the USA – that ensures freedom of expression shall be available to everyone on British soil without fear of harassment from the State for expressing opinions unpopular with certain political factions."
  19. "The Right of Assembly shall be an automatic right to all citizens wishing to protest against any socio-political issue which needs to be highlighted to the majority."
  20. "The intelligence agencies MI6, MI5 and GCHQ will be merged into the National Intelligence Service and the number of employees reduced as the surveillance machinery of the State is dismantled in the public interest."
  21. "The National Public Order Intelligence Unit NPOIU shall be scrapped and the police will have no powers to run undercover spying operations against political activists and political groups operating within the framework of the law."
This is an abridged version of the demands only. A full version with more detailed, concrete policy suggestions can be read at The Daily Agenda main blog.

The Daily Agenda is a member of the Mont Order Associates, as well as the Mont Order Security Council, whose global dissident network has been expanding rapidly throughout 2015 using the tools of the Internet. Simon Tomlin, who edits the publication, is himself an award-winning journalist, an eloquent political writer and strong supporter of the Order.


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Abundance's own rentier parasites?

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Antistatist technologies enthusiast and accomplished writer Kevin Carson exposed the real behavior of corporations that claim to triumph latent network-based management and production made possible with new technologies.


In a defiant post called "Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For", Carson pointed out that in reality, corporations such as Apple, Uber and Lyft do not create anything. Rather, they stifle other people's creativity and undermine humanity's yearning for an alternative economy driven by networks and peer-to-peer production.

Instead of creating anything, such corporations make network technologies available that could have made corporate hierarchies and the state obsolete, yet then they extract rent from them by getting the state to protect them by enforcing the suffocating idea of intellectual property.

According to Carson, intellectual property is being used as a last-ditch defense by management hierarchies who feel that new network technologies will oust them. These organizations spend less time inventing new technologies that could empower networks and individuals and make them independent of hierarchy, than they spend trying to maintain dependency so that people will not be able to use such technologies without going first to such corporations.

This situation was not necessary, Carson argues, and it will become increasingly apparent that it is not necessary as a result of new network technologies that shall "render the corporate form entirely superfluous". Carson pointed to "the rise of the open-source hardware, micromanufacturing and peer production movements" as the best observation supporting this conclusion.

While today, one cannot obtain the needed technologies to network without first going to a corporation, this is the result of deliberate steps keep to corporations in power. The entire current global mode of production has been corrupted by corporate hierarchies desperate to entrench themselves, in order to extract rent from works that they do not rightfully own - the most apparent of which today is the Internet itself.


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