critical.org

Created by: Criminology.com

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – Juvenal

Via: LA Times

This pretty much sums up my feelings on the film.  Go see it on the big screen. Incredible. And buy the soundtrack.

Cannes 2011 Review: Pedro Almodóvar’s Brilliant ‘The Skin I Live In’ | FirstShowing.net.

I love Ai Weiwei.  I think he is the best example that Critical.org could try to follow. He’s provocative, creative, and concerned about the wellbeing of his fellow humans.  A beautiful man.  And the tax authorities—regardless of nationality—are evil.  I appreciate that taxes are designed to give everyone a better life, but in the end, they are the tool of the powerful to wield their authority over the individual.

Via Time.com:  To Help Dissident Artist Ai Weiwei Pay Tax Bill, His Supporters Try Microlending – Global Spin – TIME.com.

Faced with a $2.4 million tax bill, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has begun to receive money from thousands of supporters in China—a surprising public rebuke to the official case against him. The campaign has drawn upon the large online following that Ai, 54, cultivated before his 81-day detention this spring. The authorities accuse Ai of income tax evasion, while he contends the investigation is retaliation for the vocal stance he has taken against the Chinese leadership in recent years.

As of Monday afternoon Ai had received $830,000—more than one third of the bill—from 18,829 sources, according to Liu Yanping, a volunteer at Ai’s Beijing studio. “These people all felt very frustrated when the state handed me such a huge bill,” Ai said in an interview. “They use their money as a ballot. I was very impressed.” The funds have come via bank and postal transfers, Paypal and delivery to his studio in Beijing’s Caochangdi district. “People are coming in and throwing money over the wall during the night,” Ai says. “We saw the cats playing with something and said, ‘What is this?’ Then we realized it was money.”

Ai says he will continue fighting the income tax evasion case, but plans to try to pay the bill to avoid facing further charges. The artist says he considers the recent contributions to be loans, not donations, and plans to pay them back within a year. On Twitter and even Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblog where political content is censored, some activists have posted messages about becoming “Ai’s creditors.” “There has been such a great discussion,” Ai says. “People say this is the only opportunity you have to borrow from us and we are so proud. People say Chinese people don’t care and they are selfish. I don’t think so. I just think they have no way to express themselves. Chines people are very beautiful and have a kind conscience and they really want to be involved.”

On Monday the English and Chinese editions of the Global Times, a Communist Party-run tabloid, played down the campaign, saying that as China was a large country the donations did not represent a significant trend. “Ai’s political preference along with his supporters’ cannot stand for the mainstream public, which is opposed to radical and confrontational political stances,” the paper wrote in an editorial. The paper further suggested that the donations could land Ai in further trouble for participating in illegal fundraising. Ai said he was not concerned about the possibility of additional charges. “They are just trying to scare me,” he says. “If (the authorities) want to do something unlawful they will do it anyway. They don’t need an excuse.”

Kalle Lasn, editor-in-chief of Adbusters, is widely credited with having sparked the #OWS movement.

Jason Rockwood <rockwood.jason@gmail.com>

To the Editor
3 messages

We all use open source data (Twitter, Facebook posts, etc.) for intelligence gathering. In marketing, we call it “Social Media Listening” or “Social Media Monitoring”.  The scale at which the CIA is doing this is pretty huge, however, and their ability to zone in on specifics is extremely powerful.  This is a great example of how increased transparency in communication can lead to a more intelligent government, but using that same technology to tramp down opposition is problematic. Social media can shift the balance of power to the general public, which is why David Cameron wanted to shut down the internet during the London riots.

Via: Associated Press

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets – up to 5 million a day.

At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms – anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center’s director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts – the actual number is classified – track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

Central planning works great, when it is confined to local-level communities.  Using central planning at an inter-national level is dangerous, because it leaves no alternatives.  At least, no official ones.  People will form their own alternative economies in order to survive, but will the government let them?

Via: Foreign Policy

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call themdébrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

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In many countries — particularly in the developing world — System D is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. But even in developed countries, after the financial crisis of 2008-09, System D was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated — in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D — fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations. Studies of countries throughout Latin America have shown that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial crisis.

This spontaneous system, ruled by the spirit of organized improvisation, will be crucial for the development of cities in the 21st century. The 20th-century norm — the factory worker who nests at the same firm for his or her entire productive life — has become an endangered species. In China, the world’s current industrial behemoth, workers in the massive factories have low salaries and little job security. Even in Japan, where major corporations have long guaranteed lifetime employment to full-time workers, a consensus is emerging that this system is no longer sustainable in an increasingly mobile and entrepreneurial world.

So what kind of jobs will predominate? Part-time work, a variety of self-employment schemes, consulting, moonlighting, income patching. By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D. There’s no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation. Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D.

It’s frustrating that those who actually stop to critique the government for reckless behavior are frequently labeled paranoid; when articles like this appear it is only of mild comfort. A long article, but a great one to read in full. Highlights below.

Via: ProPublica

On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.

One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.

…

Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices.

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Regulation of electronic products in the United States began after a series of scandals. From the 1930s to the 1950s, it was common for a child to go to a shoe store and stand underneath an X-ray machine known as a fluoroscope to check whether a shoe was the right fit. But after cases arose of a shoe model’s leg being amputated and store clerks developing dermatitis from putting their hands in the beam to adjust the shoe, the practice ended.

In 1967, General Electric recalled 90,000 color televisions that had been sold without the proper shielding, potentially exposing viewers to dangerous levels of radiation. The scandal prompted the creation of the federal Bureau of Radiological Health.

“That ultimately led to a lot more aggressive program,” said John Villforth, who was the director of the bureau. Over the next decade, the bureau created federal safety standards for televisions, medical X-rays, microwaves, tanning beds, even laser light shows.

But in 1982, the FDA merged the radiological health bureau into its medical-device unit.

“I was concerned that if they were to combine the two centers into one, it would probably mean the ending of the radiation program because the demands for medical-device regulation were becoming increasingly great,” said Villforth, who was put in charge of the new Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “As I sort of guessed, the radiation program took a big hit.”

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Michael Chertoff, who had supported body scanners while secretary of Homeland Security, appeared frequently on TV advocating their use. In one interview, he disclosed that his consulting firm, Chertoff Group, had done work for Rapiscan, sparking accusations that he was trying to profit from his time as a government servant.

Despite the criticism, little has been revealed about the relationship. Rapiscan dismissed it, asserting that the consulting work had to do with international cargo and port security issues — not aviation.

“There was nothing that was not above board,” Kant said. “His comments about passenger screening and these machines were simply his own and was nothing that we had engaged the Chertoff Group for.”

In a statement, the Chertoff Group said it “played no role in the sale of whole body imaging technology to TSA” and that Chertoff “was in no way compensated for his public statements.”

A public records request by ProPublica turned up empty: The Department of Homeland Security said it could not find any correspondence to or from Chertoff related to body scanners. DHS also said Chertoff did not use email.

The TSA plans to deploy 1,275 backscatter and millimeter-wave scanners covering more than half its security lanes by the end of 2012 and 1,800 covering nearly all the lanes by 2014.

According to annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, OSI Systems, the parent company of Rapiscan, has seen revenue from its security division more than double since 2006 to nearly $300 million in fiscal year 2011.