thenatureofmind

Nico Sell: ‘To me, the NSA and Edward Snowden are just the tip of the iceberg’

You’ve claimed that privacy is the new fame. Can you explain that?
It’s now so difficult to be private that it will be the new state everyone strives for. But I don’t think we have to convince people of the need for privacy, it’ll just happen naturally… [just as] fashion is always going from skinny jeans to bell-bottoms and back again. The generation below always over-corrects to the one before, and you can already see this happening.

Nico Sell: ‘To me, the NSA and Edward Snowden are just the tip of the iceberg’

Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

President George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong?

Several answers to this question present themselves. The first and most important is that the expectations to which Obama–mania gave rise were from the outset utterly unrealistic. But consider this irony: the people who George W. Bush had brought to power eight years prior harboured many of those same expectations regarding the exercise of what pundits and politicians like to call American global leadership.

Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like GDP, commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically attacked rather than advanced. 

More than any prior stage of history, we know not what we are doing at that macro level of life organization, nor why no uptick of American sales can remotely solve the problem of collapsing social and natural life support systems. Greece – the world’s emblem of the sacrifice of society to debt servicing – is now 45% more in debt than it was before the “austerity” programs started. Global social and ecological collapse proceed in lock-step with the ruling paradigm’s transnational corporate and bank prescriptions, and they increase in their demands the more they fail to provide for societies life needs and development. 

The “Cancer Stage of Capitalism”: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

There Are Several Thousand Secret Photos of America's Horrific Torture Program.

You may recall, from the dark days of Abu Ghraib, that there was a batch of photos that was never released—images the Pentagon deemed so inflammatory that they needed to stay under wraps. The ones we saw were disturbing enough: the piles of naked Iraqi prisoners, the soldier giving a thumbs up next to an ice-packed corpse, the prisoners being menaced by dogs. And who can forget that iconic shot of a hooded man (his name is Ali Shalil Qaissi), standing on a box in a shower with wires attached to his fingers—a mock execution. There are as many as 2,100additional images, according to the ACLU, which sued the government in 2004 demanding their release. President Obama has resisted the legal efforts, noting in a statement that to make the photos public would "impact the safety of our troops."

There Are Several Thousand Secret Photos of America's Horrific Torture Program.