'The Celebrity Photo Hacker’s Message To All Women', by Jessica Goldstein

(via EWF)

on Limits to Growth

It seems unlikely that the quest for ever-increasing growth can continue unchecked to 2100 without causing serious negative effects – and those effects might come sooner than we think.

here

'finite planet'

Much has been said — and much more should follow — about the militarization of the police in American cities. The images coming out of Ferguson, MO these past weeks testify to the distribution of military-grade hardware, gear, guns, and vehicles to your everyday police officer.

Here I’d like to focus on just one small part of this distribution of military-grade equipment: the uniform.

here

[h/t: EWF]

28% of the market traders on the Rye Lane strip in Peckham, southeast London, speak four or more languages fluently (source: Dr Suzanne Hall, LSE).

'The high street is a space which includes those who are excluded from other spaces for economic/security reasons'.

more

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July, 2013. 40 abortion clinics in Texas (population approximately 26 million people*).

By September, 2014. Six abortion clinics in Texas.

* not sure what counts as a person in border zones sometimes, though, granted. or, any zone.

and how many deer, or how many trees, i could not say.

(sorry, just have had this lodged in my head since it started. writing as a meat-eater, yes.)

@_jonb and I see the ways we treat animals as a resource, a “standing reserve” as Heidegger would say, informs our acceptance of capitalism
— Rank Tributes (@svejky) June 7, 2014

All bodies are sovereign.

January 2013 archiving: An amazing mea culpa from the IMF’s chief economist on austerity

June, 2011. ICTY to Ratko Mladic: 'Genocide, persecution, murder, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer, torture, rape and plunder.'

Canny youth in London gares

Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen

- Fanon

Tiana Reid is everything [tumblr, columns at THE STATE].

Her recent dancehall mix is accompanied by this jewel. i hear it loud on cool tarmacadam and routed through hot metal in inner London.
Speaking of the four volumes of THE STATE so far, iv on Dubai.

---

Objects crystallise time, and demonstrate the work, as Caroline Osella might remind us.

yes

2011 archive re-up: DOUBLE MOVEMENT: THE RESURGENCE OF NEOLIBERALISM AND INEQUALITY

structure in the USA

(h/t: EWF)

(TY, EJ)

Jayati Ghosh archive on Unctad ("astute and progressive – so why don't developed countries like it?") here

Ness of Brodgar, Orkney, unearthed, considered once more, with feeling

Somali famine, 2011 - politics rules everything around you

Children, and Other People

mango

One from the 2009 normblog archives, A Climate of Fear by guest blogger Sean Coleman.

Decades of walled-off obscurantism and unquestioned power had managed to disguise the fact that the Irish Catholic Church had been running what was, effectively, an archipelago of brutal prison camps across the country

YOLLAND: Who's confused? Are the people confused?
OWEN: And we're standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can.
YOLLAND: Something is being eroded.

there are at least four different ways of reaching a figure based on the methods of, respectively, the US Department of Energy, BP, The Oil and Gas Daily (Texas) and Middle East Economic Survey (Cyprus)

- Fred Halliday (2005)

Wet Uluru, from the Mick Hartley archives. Stunning

summer '12 fresh easy re-up NYT social determinants of health in Mississippi, Persian linkages ...

Cox doesn’t know oak trees, but she knows how to talk to people. She knows when to ask if someone cannot afford insulin, or is not taking insulin, or is not keeping the insulin cold, or cannot keep the insulin cold because there is no electricity or refrigerator. Not having health insurance is a huge problem in Mississippi, but it isn’t the only one

Bhakti Shringarpure riffs from Concerning Violence, a new documentary on Fanon, by Göran Hugo Olsson. Quoting David Macey

In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticise Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence. By 1961, the violence was everywhere. It had even seeped into the unconscious.

A schoolteacher "somewhere in Algeria" set his pupils, aged between 10 and 14, the essay topic “What would you do it you were invisible?” They all said that they would steal arms and kill the French soldiers.

The children of Algeria dreamed of violence, and two of Fanon’s young patients in Blida acted out those dreams. Our prosperous societies do not have nightmarish dreams of massacres in Sétif or Philippeville or torture in their schools. Algeria had been having those nightmares for over a century.

Tokers, table football, cabbies, as many places. A day in Goma archived

"the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement"

(h/t RS)

Creating and Destroying the Universe in Twenty-Nine Nights
by David Shulman

Last spring - new genetic complexity discovered in mosquitoes

'Sex workers' rights are just workers' rights'

Guy Walks Into a Bar

from her archive: Samia Errazzouki responds to Chomsky on Western Sahara and the 'Arab Spring'

How warming impacts the Andes: one example

I think mistersloane (Jim Hollands) is superb here on District 9

Stanley Kauffmann, reply by Joan Didion

'If Philip Roth Hates Women, Why Does He Want To Have Sex With Them, Hmmm?'

On Smarm

Britain and empire: vessel of cruelty

"Short-term savings gained by drastic austerity measures should be weighed against their long-term costs".

Earlier this year, the New Scientist reported on a Greek austerity tragedy

(via the best fish.)

'Reorienting the discussion about sex work'

here

'Asked why he had not tried to leave, he said: "If we are caught, it is straight to the Palestine Branch. Anyone who goes in there does not come out."'

If, for example, you are an Aguaruna Indian in Peru, with a history of occasional revenge raiding stretching back the small handful of generations which comprise living memory (no Aguaruna can really know the extent to which such raiding was going on even a few generations ago, leave alone millennia), and if you have recently been pushed out of the forest interior into riverine villages by encroachment from oil exploration or missionaries, then your chances of being killed by your compatriots might even exceed those caught in Mexican drugs wars, Brazilian favelas, or Chicago’s South Side.

In such circumstances there would undoubtedly be much more homicide in Aguaruna-land than that faced by well-heeled American college professors, but also much less than that confronted by inmates in Soviet gulags, Nazi concentration camps, or those who took up arms against colonial rule in British Kenya, or apartheid South Africa.

If you find yourself born a boy in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the center of the world’s richest nation, your average lifespan will be shorter than in any country in the world except for some African states and Afghanistan. If you escape being murdered, you may end up dead anyway, from diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction, or similar. Such misery, not inevitable but likely, would not result from your own choices, but from those made by the state over the last couple of hundred years.

What does any of this really tell us about violence throughout human history? The fanciful assertion that nation states lessen it is unlikely to convince a Russian or Chinese dissident, or Tibetan.

oh

A hurricane's inequality

Caliban:
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

because you're a cunt

Just your typical randomised archive smear against the Met [linked to this], move along now

'It was while he in the custody area that Demetrio witnessed Harrington allegedly assault the 15-year-old, who was handcuffed. Demetrio told investigators he saw Harrington kick the young teenager in the back of the leg and, once he was on the floor, knee him in the back.

He said the alleged assault made an "echoing" sound and the teenager cried out: "I am on the floor now – you can't do anything to me. I am handcuffed and I am on the floor."

Demetrio said that medical staff were called to the scene after the teenager, whose identity is not known, began making "strange" breathing noises for several minutes.'

"a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die...Europe to go fuck off and stay away until we have finished the job"

- Radovan Karadzic

Tyee archive - 'Harperland'

A friend of mine died recently. J was only 50. He was well in all ways except health. This piece from last year about ATOS makes me feel.

Who defines an event as a 'famine' is a question of power relations within and between societies

- Alex de Waal

'Denying Rwanda: A Response to Herman and Peterson'

"Romney now complaining he wasn't born with all the advantages of blacks and Mexicans"

'On Holding Hands and Shouting in the Street'

"The crowd’s attention was drawn and people stared at us, two twenty something gayboys, holding hands in the street."

here

(via MT)

Like some people eat potato chips, Ferguson spots gays in history. It's just his thing.

here

Memo to the executive and legislative branches: there is no “unless it’s, like, a little inconvenient” exception to the Refugee Convention...An estimated 52,000 children have come to the United States since October, which is the mass-refugee-flow equivalent of a goddamned hangnail. That’s not even enough kids to sell out a One Direction show. The Met Life stadium can handle 90,000 screaming Harry Styles fans per night
here

"Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter's Comedy Central show.
...
Hill, who died in 1978, never did testify that Kissinger had urged on the Argentine generals, and the Carter administration reversed policy and made human rights a priority in its relations with Argentina and other nations. As for Kissinger, he skated—and he has been skating ever since, dodging responsibility for dirty deeds in Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Kissinger watchers have known for years that he at least implicitly (though privately) endorsed the Argentine dirty war, but this new memo makes clear he was an enabler for an endeavor that entailed the torture, disappearance, and murder of tens of thousands of people. Next time you see him dancing on television, don't laugh."
re-up from this January in Mother Jones

Some good points last year from the late Norm Geras [RIP], discussing the name of a certain pro gridiron team who ply their trade around the capital city of the USA. Am excerpting the closing money quote; should not have to do this obviously, but there we go. Emphasis is in the original at normblog.

"It is constantly surprising how stuck people can be over the view that racist prejudice is simply a matter of what one intends; and how stubbornly they resist the obvious truth that words and symbols carry meanings associated with their history and which cannot simply be disowned by declarations of good will."

For those interested, Lauren Chief Elk sometimes writes on the topic of the same NFL team, riffing on the name [Chief Elk's Twitter / tumblr].

RIP x

Let them live: Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, and Rihanna as erotic and holistic by Sesali Bowen.

A colleague of Bowen's has a short obit, which includes a embed of Dr Angelou reading Still I Rise here.

'Why Ed Miliband (and almost everyone else) defended Nigel Farage as "not-racist"' - JustinTheLibSoc on form, as ever

Kara Walker in conversation with her father, Larry Walker (h/t: AS)

massive MASSIVE tune

Taylor Parkes on Britpop, 20 years after

(h/t: JH)

About a year and a half ago I was mugged (in a public place in the middle of Adelaide on a Wednesday afternoon). Two white teenage males snatched my handbag and left me with a sprained wrist, several bruises and feeling very shaken. When giving my statement to the police the first thing they asked me was to describe the men, were they ‘Abos’, Africans, Arabs or Asians? When I replied that they were white I was asked if I was sure.
(via.)

I dropped into the Mitchell Centre [shopping mall in the City centre] to get something for lunch. It was busy as usual. I was walking down the main ‘mall’ section toward the supermarket. There was a young Aboriginal woman walking ahead of me. A police officer (walking in the opposite direction carrying a plastic bag full of groceries, obviously on his lunch break returning from the same supermarket) stopped her, ‘touching’ her arm to ‘ask’ - “What’s your name?” I didn’t hear her reply but her body language suggested she was certainly intimidated if not frightened. The cop then replied (as if frivolously), “Just checking.” And he carried on walking. All in one stride.
(via.)

For my very dear pal Q, who has shown me a lot of importance down the years, and taught me much

Kurdish musician Yabroni and one of his three daughters (i do not know her name). Father, daughter, and her two sisters all now live in the refugee camp at Harmanli in Bulgaria, having fled their native Al-Hasakah in Syria. (Credit to YouTube user Krassimir Yankov for the upload.)

The World Bank defines extreme poverty, as someone getting by on less than US$1.25 a day. This sounds arbitrary but it’s a baseline. Put aside, for a moment, valid debates about monetised baselines as the paradigm for measuring affliction in this world ruled by economists (and how human development seems to necessarily entail the scouring of our finite planet, and how this is all caught up in fundamentally unjust relations of power in a white supremacist world structured by European-authored imperialism).

The number of extremely poor is currently about 1.2 billion people, says the Bank: nearly one in five human beings.

Anyway, this chart has been doing the rounds as the Bank released a report last week. One in three very poor people (by this measurement) are in India, with its overall population of about 1.2 billion people. The DR Congo sticks out of the countries doing the worst in per head terms, though, if you consider its population; and Tanzania, really. China’s population is about 1.3 billion, Nigeria about 177 million, Bangladesh about 166 million. The DRC’s population is about 77 million and Tanzania about 50 million. (Pakistan’s population is about 196 million currently, Indonesia’s maybe 253 million, and Ethiopia’s about 96 million, whilst Kenya’s is a somewhat more modest 45 million or so. These population estimates for mostly mid-2014 were lifted from the CIA factbook.)

Their going looked like a disaster

'If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything'

In August-September 2005, during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the worst flooded area of “Central City” was, at 4,687 km², [inhabitants / sq km] the city’s largest population density and on the site of a former lake at 1.5 metres below sea level (New Orleans Community Data Center, 2005). The majority of inhabitants were low-income and black, an ethnic minority in the USA with a long history of disadvantage, which added to an already rich melting pot of vulnerability. Social, including political and economic, forces had obliged disadvantaged communities to occupy the most vulnerable areas of a vulnerable city. Those same forces created and perpetuated poverty, which enmeshed in this vulnerability and led to characteristics of place that were, to some degree, defined not just by the people and their poverty, but also by the fact that the people and their poverty developed according to the characteristics of the place. These characteristics of place were further defined by people in other, less poor places, who enjoyed the national advantages of New Orleans’ port and culture without concern for the consequences for other people living in the same city.

from here.

I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up.

- Adolf Hitler.

Fuck that. Turn the music back up.

RIP Jordan Davis, 1995-2012.

Colin Ward died four years ago today. There's a short interview with libcom's Rob Ray here in Colin's home village of Debenham, Suffolk. (via Will.)

SMH environment editor Peter Hannam writes "2013 Australia's hottest year on record"

Professor Pitman said 2013's likely rank as the world's fourth hottest year is more remarkable because the most significant driver of climate variation - the El Nino-Southern Oscillation in the Pacific - remains in neutral mode.

here

23 degrees Celsius in Melbourne in July

(h/t Bill McKibben on Twitter.)

Like the discipline of slavery, the murders and assaults of the postemancipation South convinced most African Americans to follow racial etiquette most of the time. They accommodated whites' expectations at least enough to stay alive in a hair-trigger environment, an environment in which black life remained cheap and unprotected despite economic development and other changes in the region between Reconstruction and World War II. But accommodation was not the same thing as acquiescence.

- p.47, Growing up Jim Crow (2006), Jennifer Ritterhouse

once childhood is seen as a racialized, gendered and classed position, the notion of childhood as having the possibility of being innocent, in the sense of existing outside of the symbolic and material nexus of political economy, has to be abandoned entirely.

- Karen Wells, 2009

"Exploiting tax-increment financing, City Hall ratified the same principle for Downtown: fiscal windfalls from the appreciation of publicly-subsidized real-estate were ploughed right back into further redevelopment. These fiscal closed circuits sustained high levels of public investment in container docks, terminal buildings, and downtown bank skyscrapers that, in turn, kept happy a huge constituency of pro-globalization interests, including airlines, stevedoring companies, railroads, aerospace exporters, hotels, construction unions, downtown landowners, the Los Angeles Times, Japanese banks, Westside movie studios, big law firms, and the politicians dependent upon the largesse of all of the above.

But the city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce."

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz 2nd edn. preface (2006)

Fortress Europe, 2013.

In infinite varieties, another day on earth.

"a concept of monumental emptiness"

- Wolfgang Sachs on development

"a past of struggle against slavery"

Montserratians now reside with uncertainty as a way of life...the vulnerability they experience, as a result of the natural disaster, is to some degree compounded by wider international and global processes. Montserrat is not alone in this, as Possekel points out: 'development achievements of the SIDS (small island developing states) in the Caribbean are also constantly crushed by natural disasters' (1999: 3).

[...]

All of the countries of the Caribbean, with the exception of the French Caribbean, which are politically and economically part of mainland France, and Cuba, which has followed a distinctive path to a different type of development, are in extremely vulnerable positions vis-à-vis globalization.
- Tracey Skelton, 'Globalizing Forces and Natural Disaster' in Globalization: Theory and Practice, edited by Kofman and Youngs (2003 edition)

- A.K. Possekel Living with the Unexpected: Linking Disaster Recovery to Sustainable Development in Montserrat (Springer, 1999).

Article 26
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Means-tested benefits, confined to the poor, isolate them so that the rest of society no longer has a real stake in defending and improving what is becoming an increasingly stigmatized system associated with failure

- Ruth Lister, 'Assessment of the Fowler Review' (1989)

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The underlying reason for the emergence of chaos and Islamist violence in Afghanistan in the 1990s was that the West had, after forcing the Russians to leave in 1989, abandoned interest in or activities related to that country.

Nothing could be further from the truth: far from 'forgetting' or 'abandoning' Afghanistan, the West, in violation of the April 1988 UN agreement on a Soviet withdrawal, continued to arm and finance the rebels and in the end brought down the reforming communist regime. In April 1988 the 'West', i.e. the US, Britain and its allies, Egypt and Pakistan, signed an agreement to stop supplying the Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan in return for a withdrawal of Soviet forces.
The Soviets left by February 1989, but aid to the guerrillas continued with the intention of forcing a collapse of the communist regime in Kabul. The US at the same time pressed hard for a cutoff in Soviet support for the Afghan regime after their troop withdrawal, but this was not successful until the change of government in Moscow following the failed coup of August 1991; then, in a deal brokered by US Secretary of State James Baker, Moscow cut off all aid to its former ally in Kabul.
The regime of President Najibullah, who had held power since 1987, fell the following April.
-number 54 from Fred Halliday's 100 Myths about the Middle East (SAQI, 2005)

The big loser are working-class Cypriots

writing five years ago, more David Harvey, on the 'right to the city', an idea with a surely global purchase (just off the top of my head, examples from Brazil, India and Pakistan spring to mind).

but also

Is the urbanization of China, then, the primary stabilizer of global capitalism today? The answer has to be a qualified yes. For China is only the epicentre of an urbanization process that has now become genuinely global, partly through the astonishing integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. The Chinese central bank, for example, has been active in the secondary mortgage market in the US while Goldman Sachs was heavily involved in the surging property market in Mumbai, and Hong Kong capital has invested in Baltimore. In the midst of a flood of impoverished migrants, construction boomed in Johannesburg, Taipei, Moscow, as well as the cities in the core capitalist countries, such as London and Los Angeles. Astonishing if not criminally absurd mega-urbanization projects have emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible.

a structural problem; the world economy must find $1.5tn in new investment opportunities each year, just to sustain growth at normal rates

- central David Harvey figure in this Lenny piece ('David Cameron's very own magic money tree')

still with UK left blogs, good stuff on 'power-blindness' from Chris Dillow here (not entirely sure about point number 1 with just world, mind points 2-4 hit the spot - k-punk's Capitalist Realism, anyone?), riffing on something the estimable paulinlancs over at Though Cowards Flinch came up with: appropriate bouquets for Duncan Weldon and Simon Caulkin, and brickbats for Owen Jones, in that piece.
Dillow's final par., sadly, superb.

and since we're link dumping, Roger Scruton on postmodern Tories here, this via my mates Alice and Jimmy. there's some flannel, and misdirections (on equality defining border control, on regulation, for two), naturally, though at least partly bang on re: the Tories historically defining parameters.

Social protection has acquired its prominent place in the Bank's work programme largely as a result of having to deal with the consequences of economic stabilization and structural adjustment. Far from being self-rectifying under adjustment, as had originally been predicted, poverty and vulnerability were exarcebated in many countries and for many groups.

- Anthony Hall, 'Social Policies in the World Bank' (2007)

covenants without the swords, are but words, and of no strength to a man at all.

- Hobbes

the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it.

- J.P. Nettl

The contemporary configuration of the world into political units, nations, peoples and religious communities results from a global process of carving out empires and spheres of influence through direct military interventions and indirect political meddling in the 'internal' conflicts of states that achieved or conserved political independence from the great powers in the nineteenth century.

- John Gledhill

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where- " said Alice.
Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, said the Cat.
"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
Oh, you’re sure to do that, said the Cat, if you only walk long enough.

Yasuni, Ecuador: Huge ecological wealth is at risk