The future of Pakistan is directly linked to that of the United States, which is why we can not discuss one without discussing the other. The reasons for this coupling vary depending on ones perspective. Some are slanted towards technology, ideology, religion, and even human rights, while others contend that it is simply a racket, one of its main purposes, to decide which parties get to control our dwindling resources.
To become familiar with the perspectives that are simply slanted towards technology to human rights, you can follow any western mainstream media sources (I’m hoping that news from mainstream media outlets in other parts of the world is more diverse).
If you would like an introduction to the resource wars, specifically related to our energy problems, then begin with the following information:
“Governments are power systems. They follow the interests of the concentration of domestic power to which they’re committed.”
One of the primary methods in which governments maintain control is by allocating tax revenues to projects that expand their power. In most cases, the projects that have been deemed worthy of financing guarantee the prosperity of the ruling class.
For fiscal year 2008, the US Federal Government collected $2.52 trillion, while “spending $2.98 trillion, generating a total deficit of $455 billion, which was added to the United States public debt”, which as of 18 June 2009 was sitting at over $11 trillion.
For 2007, the single largest source of revenue for the Federal Government was individual income taxes, accounting for 45% of the receipts.
“On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: ‘According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.’ According to a report by the Inspector General, the Pentagon cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.”
It is quite important to remember that this announcement occurred one day prior to the events of 911.
2.3 TRillion $$ of the TAXPAYER's MONEY IS MISSING
“Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of increased defense spending. True to his word, Obama's 2010 fiscal year budget calls for $527 billion in defense spending (not including the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan). That is more than the U.S. allocated for defense in 2009 and equals what the Bush administration budgeted for 2010.”
P.W. Singer: Military robots and the future of war
This cycle of perpetual war will continue until either citizens of the United States stop funding their Federal Government, which is clearly in the business of war, or until they completely dismantle and restructure this corporation which has been empowered, legally or not, to run the affairs of their republic.
The solutions to our woes are simple, as Bill Hicks states, this is what we can do to change the world for the better:
“Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”
News reached the press today in Sweden - The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.
A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either!
TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there's not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen.
We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!
If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us.
The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets - quite the opposite. Now we're fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It's win-win-win.
The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!
No matter how they try to sugar coat it, you are right, The Pirate Bay and a big part of the internet just died.
This is part of an ongoing prediction I've had for quite a while.
The Golden Age of the Internet existed between 2001 - 2007. When dsl/cable high speed access reached a zenith and content was unregulated.
Future generations will look back on this time, (if they can) through proxy filters and marvel at the freedom this medium once had. The death of The Pirate Bay, for me, is another hammer blow to the coffin. Australia's crackdowns, Germany's banning of certain games, it's all rising in a crescendo of freedom dying.
Goodbye old friend.
I shall now commence downloading every movie and album I never even wanted.
EDIT : To those of you saying all will be well, we can lose TPB etc, I ask for pause. An internet icon just died tonight. The leaning ship in the sheltered bay is no more. If its services can be reproduced elsewhere than all is well and good but deep in my cynical heart I see the erosion of internet freedom, the encroachment of big money and the taking over of free assembly on the internet. I see only ominous clouds gathering.
TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about.
Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue.
The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to.
All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement.
And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff.
/krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.
Press release from Global Gaming Factory X, a company which has “the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world”, follows:
Acquisitions of The Pirate Bay and new file sharing technology, P2P 2.0
- Pave the way for compensation model
The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) (GGF) acquires The Pirate Bay website, http://www.thepiratebay.org, one of the 100 most visited websites in the world and the technology company Peerialism, that has developed next generation file-sharing technology. Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.
"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site" said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.
"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers' need faster downloads and better quality" continues Hans Pandeya.
Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is John Pilger’s first documentary about Cambodia. This award winning 1979 film explains how US bombings had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, and showed the shocking human effects of the embargo. “Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States.” When Pilger “flew to Washington and offered it to the national public broadcaster, PBS, (he) received a curious reaction. PBS executives were shocked by the film, and spoke admiringly of it, even as they collectively shook their heads. One of them said: “John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role, so we have decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.”
"The term 'journalistic adjudicator' was out of Orwell. PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he gave my film the thumbs-down. One of the PBS executives confided to me: 'These are difficult days under Ronald Reagan. Your film would have given us problems.'"
Following the film is an excerpt from Pilger’s book "Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs" providing some additional details about the film and the period which it chronicles.
‘It is my duty,’ wrote the correspondent of The Times at the liberation of Belsen, ‘to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.’
That was how I felt in Cambodia in the summer of 1979. The ghostliness of Phnom Penh, the deserted houses, the flitting figures of skeletal orphaned children, like tiny phantoms, the millions of dollars in Cambodian banknotes washing through the empty streets in the monsoon downpour, the stench of death from wells jammed with bodies and the nightly chorus of distress: these are indelible.
The following piece is drawn from many dispatches and chapters in my books, Heroes and Distant Voices. It covers more than twenty years: from the American bombing of the early 1970s, to ‘Year Zero’ in 1975, to the overthrow of Poll Pot in 1979 and the United Nations sponsored ‘peace’ in 1992.
Cambodia consumed much of my life. Apart from written work, I made four documentary films, beginning with Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979), which told of a dark age in South-East Asia, in which Pol Pot’s infamy was shared with ‘our’ governments.
My reports first appeared in the Daily Mirror on 12 and 13 September 1979.
The 12 September issue was devoted almost entirely to Cambodia: thousands of words and eleven pages of Eric Piper’s historic photographs; a feat of tabloid design. It was one of the few Mirrors ever to sell out completely.
Within twenty-four hours of publication, more than £50,000 arrived at the Mirror offices, a vast sum then and most of it in small amounts. I calculated that this was more than enough to pay for two fully-laden relief aircraft, but no insurance company would underwrite a flight to Cambodia. A Miami charter company with one old propeller-driven Convair agreed to fly, then the owner rang back to say the pilot had suffered a heart attack. British Midland Airways was considering the lease of a Boeing 707 when an executive phoned me to say the company had been ‘warned off’ by the Foreign Office, which had claimed that relief aircraft might face a hostile reception by Vietnamese troops’. This was disinformation; the Vietnamese had been asking for international help. Finally, an Icelandic company, Cargolux (‘Fly anything anywhere’), had a DC-8 available. On 28 September, filled with enough penicillin, vitamins and milk to restore an estimated 69,000 children, the aircraft took off from Luxembourg, all of it paid for by Mirror readers.
My documentary Year Zero was shown on television soon afterwards. Forty sacks of post arrived at Associated Television (ATV): 26,000 first-class letters in the first twenty-four hours. A million pounds was reached quickly and, once again, most of it came from those who could ill afford to give. ‘This is for Cambodia,’ wrote an anonymous bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage.
An eighty-year-old woman sent her pension for two months. A single parent sent her entire savings of £50. People stopped me in the street to write cheques and came to my home with toys and letters, and petitions for Thatcher and poems of indignation for Pol Pot, Nixon and Kissinger. The BBC children’s series Blue Peter announced an appeal to help the children of Cambodia, the first time the BBC had responded to a programme broadcast by its commercial rival. Within two months, children throughout Britain had raised an astonishing £3,500,000.
Following Year Zero’s showing around the world, more than $45 million was raised for Cambodia. This paid for medicines, the rebuilding of schools and clinics and the restoration of water supply. I was in Phnom Penh when the first textile factory making brightly coloured clothing was re-opened; under the Khmer Rouge, everybody had to wear black. Under the weight of letters, telegrams, phone calls and petitions, the British Government became the first Western government to ‘de-recognise’ the Pol Pot regime, although Britain continued to vote for the seating of Pol Pot’s man at the United Nations (who was eventually given asylum in the United States, where he now lives in luxurious retirement).
For many people, as disturbing as the harrowing images in Year Zero was the revelation that, for Cold War geo-political reasons, the American and British governments were sending humanitarian aid only to Cambodian refugees in Thailand while denying it to the majority in Cambodia itself. Eleven months after the overthrow of Pol Pot, the total Western aid sent to Cambodia through the Red Cross and the United Nations Children’s Fund amounted to 1,300 tons of food: effectively nothing.
Moreover, both governments had secretly joined with Pol Pot’s principal backer, China, in punishing both the Cambodian people and their liberators, the Vietnamese. An embargo, reminiscent of the economic siege that was to devastate Iraq in the 1990s, was imposed on both countries, whose governments were declared Cold War enemies.
Two subsequent films of mine, Year One and Year Ten, disclosed that the Reagan administration was secretly restoring the Khmer Rouge as a military and political force in exile in Thailand, to be used as a weapon against Vietnam, and that British SAS troops were training them in bases along the border. ‘You must understand/ Margaret Thatcher had said, ‘there are reasonable Khmer Rouge.’
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