THE GOOD READ THREAD (WORLDWIDE)

[Dubby]

Article from last year about Scott Storch, 6 pages tho

Scott Storch raked in hip-hop millions and then snorted his way to ruin

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2010-04-22/music/scott-storch-raked-in-hip-hop-millions-and-then-snorted-his-way-to-ruin/

[Yuri]

Brilliant article on the Greek financial crisis, one of the most bizzarre stories you're likely to read.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010

Great find, thanks for posting

[RYDER.]

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/09/four-levels-of-social-entrapment.html

[Goddaz]

THE REAL DEAL (the truth about the music industry)

by Jeriko One

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench,

a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free,

and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

- Hunter S. Thompson

The truth is that big business controls the types of music and artists that get exposure and become popular. The record industry is a $14 billion dollar business. The five major record labels; Sony, Universal, BMG, EMI and Time Warner dominate 85% of the market when it comes to sales of Compact Discs. Leaving only 15% for the hundreds of independent record labels and thousands of artists out there. And when indies get too big or an artist starts making noise these major companies usually pick up the artist or label. This way they control the artist/label, get a percentage of the sales and keep competition to a minimum.

The Big Payoff (radio payola)

Ever wonder why you hear the same songs on the radio all the time? It's because major record companies are paying radio stations thousands of dollars to play their records! That's why you rarely, if ever, hear independent music on commercial radio. Most people don't know that virtually all the pop and rock songs they hear on the radio have been paid for by the major record companies. The record labels pay millions of dollars a year to middlemen (independent radio promoters), referred to as "indies," who in turn pass on some of that money to radio stations (they get a portion too), which accordingly play what the promoters ask/tell them to. In exchange for paying the stations an annual promotion budget ($100,000 for a medium-size market), the indie becomes the station's exclusive indie and gets paid by the record companies every time that station adds a new song.

Launching a single at rock radio can cost between $100,000 and $250,000. If the song's a hit and gets played at hundreds of stations across the country (with added charges for multiple plays a day) the costs can skyrocket enormously. Mercury Nashville president Luke Lewis told attendees at a music conference that his label spent more than $1.5 million on promotion for a Shania Twain single that crossed over to pop radio!

According to payola laws passed by Congress in 1960, it's a crime for a station employee to accept payment for playing a song if the station fails to notify listeners about the financial arrangement. That's partially the reason major record labels use huge indie promotion companies like Jeff McClusky and Associates and Tri State Promotions and Marketing, if sh*t ever happens the promoters will take the fall for it. But no one wants to rock the boat so everyone in the industry keeps their mouth shut and indies make tons of money for basically being nothing more than pay-off people. Overnighted packages stuffed with cash are shipped off to recipients with phony names, American Express money orders made out to programmers and sent to home addresses, travel and vacation packages... all of this is being used by major record labels and independent radio promoters to buy airplay of their songs on the radio. New and independent artists have no chance to receive airplay on radio and listeners are bombarded with the same music hour after hour.

Who pays for all of this? The artist. Most record companies recoup their costs for independent promotion from the artist's CD royalties - which of course would not be as high if they did not receive radio airplay. And, ironically enough, the radio stations pay as well, since money that might be used for promotions to build a larger audience is instead diverted into radio programmers' personal bank accounts.

Big Fish Eat Little Fish (monopoly)

There are three companies that own most the radio stations in the US - EMMIS, Radio One and Clear Channel. Over the past two years the Clear Channel company has been on an acquisition binge, spending almost $30 billion on buying radio stations, concert venues and advertising companies. The company is building a "monopolistic multimedia empire" that has decreased competition, reduced consumer choice, and driven up ticket prices for concerts.

Prior to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a radio company could only own 40 stations nationwide and only four in a particular market. Since that has changed Clear Channel now owns 1,170 radio stations nationwide! One out of every ten radio stations across the United States broadcasts under the Clear Channel’s banner and the company’s approximate 1,170 stations bill a full 20% of total industry revenue. Clear Channel broadcasts in every top ten market and in 47 of the top 50. These stations take to the airwaves across all 50 states, in almost every major market, reaching nearly every demographic. Clear Channel stations broadcast to over 110 million listeners every week.

Clear Channel also acquired SFX Entertainment, the world’s largest promoter and producer of live entertainment events, including concerts, theater and sporting events. Clear Channel now owns 135 venues, producing 26,000 shows last year (attended by 62 million people) - 70% of the total "live concert" market! Buying entertainment giant SFX cost Clear Channel $4.4 billion, making it instantly the nation's biggest promoter with $2 billion in live-event revenue a year.

Clear Channel Outdoor owns over half a million outdoor displays (770,000 billboards) around the world. This gives them and their customers the ability to, as they state on the Clear Channel website "reach over half of the entire U.S. population and over 75% of the entire U.S. Hispanic population". Outdoor is more than just billboards, other products they provide include; bulletins, posters, street furniture, airport displays, convenience store posters, mall displays, mass transit displays and mobile ads.

Now there's rumors that Clear Channel wants to start their own record label... hmmm. Think about it. They can play their artists on their radio stations, tour them in their venues and advertise them on their billboards.

What can you do? Support college & non-profit radio stations in your local area. These independent radio stations program alternative music as well as specialty shows (hip-hop, jazz, electronica etc.). Also support your local independent bars & clubs.

Product Placement (retail co-ops)

Isn't it great when you can buy your favorite artist or a new CD on sale at the record store. Ever notice those special displays (called endcaps) at the entrance, window or at a prime location in a large record chain store. Guess what? It's not the store that is putting it on sale, record companies have to pay to have it on sale in the store. This is what is called a Retail Co-Op and it works like this. For example if a label wants to put one of it's new CD's on sale in a 'un-named' chain store they would have to pay about $3,000 to have it's CD in 100 of its' stores. In exchange for the $3,000 the Chain store would bring in around 1,300 units and give them good placement in the stores, put them on sale and feature them in their listening stations in those 100 stores for one month. There are many different Co-Op programs with independent and major chain stores and they can be very expensive. There are a few problems with this system. First, for the record label it does not guarantee that the CD's the store brought in will sell. And since stores do not 'buy" but take product on 'consignment' it is all 100% returnable (see Retail Returns below). Second, major record labels spend so much money on Retail Co-Ops so that stores bring their product that stores aren't left with much money in their monthly budget to bring in independent music.

The big "R" (retail returns)

Most people think that a 'return' means that someone returned a CD to a record store because of a defect. That is called a return but in the record business 'returns' means something else - death. Music stores do not buy CD's and then sell them. They take CD's, sell what they can and return the rest - only paying for what sold. And there usually isn't a time frame so a company can return CD's to a label/distributor even a year or more later, usually with cracked jewel cases and all stickered up. The problem with this is record stores/chain stores can (and do) over-order a release because they can always return it. Bomb Hip-Hop spent money with one chain store on a Retail Co-Op for a new release and a few months later the chain store returned 88% of the CD's! Bomb Hip-Hop ended up being gaffled by the chain store and spent a lot of money it really didn't need to. The distributor made money, the retailer made money and Bomb Hip-Hop lost money from the program. Returns can kill any record label.

Too Greedy (price gouging)

Major record labels and retail chains stores have become too greedy by charging $18-19 for a CD that usually doesn't have more than 3 good songs on it. Universal priced Ja Rule's album Pain Is Love with a sticker price of $19.98! But it is not always the record label overcharging. In the past Bomb Hip-Hop has found it's releases that have a suggested retail price of $16.98 being sold for $18.98 in retail chain stores. The price to the store is based on the suggested retail price. For example a $16.98 list price CD is sold to stores for $11 per loose CD or $10.79 per CD by the box (usually 30 CD's in a box). These chain stores that price the CD at $18.98 will probably not sell very many because it is priced to high for underground hip-hop and/or a new artist. These stores do not care because in the end whatever they took is 100% returnable.

In Conclusion (the end)

There are approximately 27,000 music titles released every year. Of the 7,000 "new" titles released every year by major labels less than 10% are profitable. Major record labels sign only what they hope will sell, jumping on the latest trend and flooding the market with sound-alikes. Everything radio and video shows play sound and look like they came off an assembly line. Major record companies focus on radio-friendly and videogenic acts and unfortunately exclude new and experimental artists and genres of music. Consumers have become lazy and in turn are easily brainwashed by what they hear on the radio, see on tv and read in magazines. People need to be more educated and take a pro-active approach to music. Seek out new artists and new types of music, don't let big business influence and control what you think is good music or what you purchase. Take what you have just read and inform others of what you have learned - each one teach one. Much respect to all starving artists and independent companies, you are not forgotten and you are appreciated. Keep what you're doing and have fun making music.

A few book suggestions for reading

1. HIT MEN by Fredric Dannen

2. LIFE AND DEF by Russell Simmons with Nelson George

3. OFF THE CHARTS by Bruce Haring

4. BLACK VINYL WHITE POWDER by Simon Napier-Bell

5. LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

6. LOSING MY VIRGINITY by Richard Branson

7. THE RISE AND RISE OF DAVID GEFFEN by Stephen Singular

8. BAD BOY by Ronin Ro

[Supermalt]

http://the99percent.com/articles/6775/Is-Consumerism-Killing-Our-Creativity

Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity?

[Axiom]

AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA

http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n10/htdocs/old-doctor-survived-hiroshima-114.php?country=nl

Japan is still (as of press time on this issue) the only country in the world that has been a victim of the atomic bomb. Since the demons dropped onto the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 63 years ago this past August, the country has continued to quietly suffer from the repercussions. One 91-year-old hibakusha [that’s Japanese for “A-bomb survivor”] doctor continues to call out the dangers and brutality of the A-bomb to the rest of the world. His name is Shuntaro Hida. On August 1, 1944, a year before the bomb dropped on the city, Dr. Hida was posted to Hiroshima’s army hospital as a military doctor. He experienced the bomb blast at just 3.5 miles away from its epicenter, and he has since seen everything there is to see as a doctor specializing in the treatment of A-bomb victims. Dr. Hida knows the effects of the bomb not only from the perspective of someone who was actually there but also from the specialized viewpoint of an army medic. It’s no wonder then that almost 6,000 radiation-sickness sufferers in Japan and around the world have sought his expertise. So what exactly happened on that fateful day in Hiroshima? Vice spoke to Dr. Hida, who remembers every single detail about the experience.

Vice: How did you manage to avoid being hit by the bomb directly, despite being in Hiroshima at the time?

Dr. Hida: I was dozing off on my futon the night before the bombing on August 6, when somebody suddenly shook me awake. It was an old man who came from Hesaka village, which is a couple of miles away from Hiroshima. His granddaughter had cardiac valvular disease and often had seizures, so I regularly went to the village to check up on her. That night she suffered another one, so I got on the back of the old man’s bicycle and he rode me to their place. This meant that I got out of Hiroshima just in time to be saved from being directly hit. I was exposed to the radiation, but from a distance of just over three miles from the epicenter.

Did you actually see the moment when the A-bomb was dropped?

Yes, I did. I think I’m the only person who actually saw it with his own eyes and then wrote about the experience later, because most people in Hiroshima were killed the instant they saw that bright flash of light.

Let me explain how I actually saw the bombing. I spent the night at the old man’s place after looking at the child. The next morning, I decided to give her a sedative before going back to the hospital, because if she woke up and started crying she might have another seizure. I took out a small syringe from my pocket, tilted it upward, and pushed out some liquid to let any air out. Suddenly I saw a plane flying above Hiroshima in front of me.

That must have been the Enola Gay. Tell us what you saw when the bomb hit Hiroshima.

The first thing I saw was the light. It was so bright that I was momentarily blinded. Simultaneously, I was surrounded by an intense heat. The bomb released a 4,000-degree heat wave in the instant that it hit the ground. I panicked, covered my eyes, and lay low on the floor. I couldn’t hear any noise and the trees weren’t rustling. I thought something was up, so I cautiously looked through the window toward where I’d seen the flash of light. The skies were blue with no cloud in sight, but there was this bright red ring of fire high up in the skies above the city! In the middle of the ring was a big white ball that kept growing like a thundercloud—this really round thing. It kept getting bigger and bigger until it finally hit the outer fire ring, and then the whole thing blew up into a huge red fireball. It was like I was witnessing the birth of a new sun. It was so perfectly round! When I was a child, I saw Asama Mountain erupt from really close up, but this was much more full-on. The clouds were white, but shining in rainbow colors as they rose up. It was really beautiful. People call it the “mushroom cloud” but it’s actually a pillar of fire: The bottom part is a column of flames and the top part is a fireball, which metamorphoses into clouds as it keeps rising up.

Then, below the pillar of fire, pitch-black clouds started spreading horizontally above the mountains surrounding Hiroshima. They consisted of sand and dust that were being pushed up from the ground due to the pressure generated from the blast. They were coming toward me like a tidal wave. We were on a hill and there was a cliff next to us, but the next moment the dust clouds had crept right up. Before I knew it, the old man’s house was swallowed up and crushed by the wave. Luckily the thatched roof acted as a cushion, saving the child and myself. It was then that I realized that something terrible must have happened, and rushed back to the hospital in Hiroshima on the old man’s bike.

What was the first example of a human casualty from the A-bomb that you saw?

I encountered the first victim halfway back to Hiroshima. This black thing suddenly popped out from the side of the road, swaying unsteadily. I had no idea what it was. I slowed down my bicycle and gradually moved closer and realized that it was a person.

I tried to look at its face, but it didn’t have one. There were these two big swollen balls where the eyes should be, a gaping hole for their nose, and the lips had puffed up so big that they were covering half the face. It was hideous. And it had a black thing that looked like a sleeve draped off its arm, so I initially thought that it was wearing rags. I was wondering what all this meant when suddenly the person started moving toward me. My first reaction was to move back. But then it tripped over my bike and fell down. Being a doctor, I immediately rushed forward and tried to take its pulse. But the skin from the entire arm had slipped off and there was nowhere for me to touch.

I realized then that the person was not wearing rags but was entirely naked. What I had thought were sleeves was actually raw skin that had peeled off from the body and was dangling down. The skin on its back had also burned and peeled off completely, and there were dozens of small shards of glass piercing the surface. The person suddenly twitched a couple of times, and then lay completely still. It was dead.

Dr. Hida in 1942, three years before the bomb hit.

That’s a really shocking image. Did you encounter any other traumatic scenes?

Yes. I was somehow able to get to the hospital, but there was a huge blaze and I couldn’t go inside. I thought about the situation and decided that since I was a doctor and was still alive, the best thing to do was to go back to the village. Hesaka is the nearest village to Hiroshima so all of the evacuees would surely flee there, and I could probably treat the injured. I spent another three hours riding upstream along the river until I finally arrived at the village’s elementary school. I glanced around the schoolyard. It was peppered with charred black people lying on the ground, as if someone had scattered seeds across it. There must have been around 1,000 people there. Three other army doctors had gathered at the school, so we discussed taking a course of action. But the victims were all severely burned and in critical condition. There wasn’t much we could do. What we did that night though was pick out the dead from the living among the 1,000 or so people lying on the ground, and start clearing away their bodies.

While I did this, the hibakusha all stared at me. I tried my best to avoid eye contact. But then I accidentally locked eyes with someone, and felt like I had to go over and pretend to treat them. As I moved closer, he glared at me with his two eyeballs, a horrendous stare. The dying people there had absolutely no clue what had happened to them, so they all had these beastly eyes. Have you ever seen the eyes of a pig being slaughtered? Frightening, right? This person glared at me with those same eyes. They still haunt me in my dreams to this day. Each year around August 6, I dream about those eyes every night. I never want to see them again, but they keep haunting me. That’s how deep of an impression they left.

When did you start treating the surviving hibakusha?

On the third morning after the bomb, we were finally able to begin treating those who looked like they might pull through. That’s when we first discovered the acute symptoms of radiation. First, the victims get a high fever of over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It was so high that I thought the thermometers were broken. Also, when you tried to get close to their faces, you noticed that they had unbelievably bad breath. It was almost impossible to go near them. I guess in medical terms you would describe the smell as a combination of necrosis and decomposition. When you peered into their mouths, they were completely black. Because the white blood cells in their bodies were completely dead, the bacteria in their mouths had multiplied profusely. And since there was nothing to protect the inside of the mouths anymore, they started to rot very quickly without even going through the usual stages of inflammation or pus formation. This rot was what we were smelling. It’s a smell that only the medics who experienced the aftermath know about.

Next, purple blotches started appearing on any unburned skin. In medical terms we call this purpura, and they usually form just before a patient who has a blood disease like leukemia dies. I was extremely surprised when I found these on the victims, because I had no idea why they were appearing. After that, their hairs would all fall out, as if their heads had been swept with a broom. Radiation usually targets healthy cells, so hair roots are the first to go. The final symptoms are vomiting blood, as well as hemorrhaging from the eyes, nose, anus, and reproductive organs. The victims only last a few hours after this before they die. At the time we were all extremely scared, because obviously nobody knew what was causing all this.

You said that you were exposed to radiation yourself. Have you suffered any symptoms?

The predominant symptom that I experienced was that my bones aged very fast. Right now my backbone is in a pitiful state. I had lower-back problems after being exposed to the radiation, and underwent surgery many times. At the worst of times I was crawling on the ground because of the pain. However, the aging finally stopped when I was 80 years old, when I began a treatment which consisted of walking up and down a swimming pool. Just this past Atomic Bomb Day, I walked around Hiroshima and Nagasaki without my walking stick. But the biggest fear that we hibakusha have to live with is the anxiety that we might one day develop cancer. We can’t plan our lives like everyone else. When we enroll in school, when we marry, when we have children, we constantly have to confront this anxiety. We have been robbed of our human rights. And not only have our rights to live as human beings been violated, we are forced to live with the knowledge that we will one day inevitably develop some sort of disease as a direct result of being exposed to the bomb. But we don’t know exactly when that will happen, so until then, we must live in fear. Even if we sued our country in court and were paid money, it wouldn’t solve a thing. Money can’t buy back the 63 years that I have lived in suffering.

[Benicio del Toney]

What was the first example of a human casualty from the A-bomb that you saw?

I encountered the first victim halfway back to Hiroshima. This black thing suddenly popped out from the side of the road, swaying unsteadily. I had no idea what it was. I slowed down my bicycle and gradually moved closer and realized that it was a person.

I tried to look at its face, but it didn’t have one. There were these two big swollen balls where the eyes should be, a gaping hole for their nose, and the lips had puffed up so big that they were covering half the face. It was hideous. And it had a black thing that looked like a sleeve draped off its arm, so I initially thought that it was wearing rags. I was wondering what all this meant when suddenly the person started moving toward me. My first reaction was to move back. But then it tripped over my bike and fell down. Being a doctor, I immediately rushed forward and tried to take its pulse. But the skin from the entire arm had slipped off and there was nowhere for me to touch.

I realized then that the person was not wearing rags but was entirely naked. What I had thought were sleeves was actually raw skin that had peeled off from the body and was dangling down. The skin on its back had also burned and peeled off completely, and there were dozens of small shards of glass piercing the surface. The person suddenly twitched a couple of times, and then lay completely still. It was dead.

Nutz.

It's as if you are reading Akira or something.

[Yuri]

Bet he's frauding

[MARVELL]

Its like 1981 all over again. read this article written in 1981 after the riots then...look at the demographics of rioting and the reasons blamed for the rioting.

govts almost never learn from history. or is that just a human thing.

some quotes..

The biggest confrontation was in Toxteth, Liverpool. It began with a relatively small disturbance the same night as Southall (3 July): the police tried to arrest a black youth who, they claimed (wrongly) had stolen the motor bike he was riding; a crowd rescued him, but another black, whose family had been subject to a campaign of police harassment, was seized. The next evening rioting erupted on a huge scale. Barricades were built with overturned cars and a builders’ compressor; scores of petrol bombs were thrown at the police; rioters donned Ulster-style masks to avoid identification.

he rioters seized a fleet of milk floats and a concrete mixer to drive at the police lines, forcing the 800-strong force to retreat. Several buildings were burnt down, including the National Westminster Bank and the businessmen’s club, the Racquets. With the area clear of police, ‘there was an assumption that anyone who was not police would help themselves’ in the wholesale looting of shops. [2] Reports told of middle aged women, white and black, queuing with shopping trolleys to loot supermarkets. Of the rioters, ‘fewer than 40% were black’.

The deputy chief constable, Peter Wright, made it clear that ‘at the savage climax of the trouble, the rioters were mostly white.’ There were smaller, ‘imitation’ disturbances in white areas like Kirkby, Scotland Road, Walton, Woodchurch and Birkenhead.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1981/xx/riots.html

[LevelLouie]

sick reads

[Axiom]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/decline-and-fall

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic powernow under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the U.S. financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise -- and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66%.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the U.S. Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region -- logistics, exchange rates, and naval power -- evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S. aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [u.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As U.S. power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-styleslums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region -- Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 17 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

[Yoshie]

2 Years In Prison - A Man's Story

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=136858&currentpage=All

Just spent the last 30 minutes reading this, truly f*cked.

The guy writing it seems so intelligent too, also seems too detailed to be fake.

[ThirdOption]

Strike on Syria is technically feasible, former French general says

http://euobserver.com/13/113245

A Nato strike to disable the Syrian army is technically feasible according to experts, such as former French air chief Jean Rannou. But it could make the country's internal situation worse.

Nato member countries would begin by using satellite technology to spot Syrian air defences. A few days later, warplanes, in larger numbers than Libya, would take off from the UK base in Cyprus and spend some 48 hours destroying Syrian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and jets. Alliance aircraft would then start an open-ended bombardment of Syrian tanks and ground troops.

The scenario is based on analysts in the French military, from the specialist British publication Jane's Defence Weekly and from Israel's Channel 10 TV station.

The Syrian air force is said to pose little threat. It has around 60 Russian-made MiG-29s. But the rest - some 160 MiG-21s, 80 MiG-23s, 60 MiG-23BNs, 50 Su-22s and 20 Su-24MKs - is out of date.

Its latest SAMs could shoot down a handful of Nato pilots. In the past three years, Syria deployed hundreds of Russian-made SA-17s, which come up on radars for a very short time before firing. Israel in 2007 bombed a suspected nuclear site in Syria using a cyber attack to cut electricity to air defences. The SA-17s are believed to be cyber-insulated and Israel might not share its secret with Nato, however.

Syria in 2006 bought around 30 Russian-made Pantsyr-S1 anti-aircaft cannon. But these are said to be in Iran. It has stocked up on modern SA-18 missiles from Belarus and Russia. But these are short-range weapons that would only pose a danger to Nato helicopters in a later stage of the operation.

There are also assymetric threats - Nato countries have troops in Unifil, the UN mission in neighbouring Lebanon, which could become targets.

Syria is said to have two Scud missile brigades armed with conventional and chemical warheads (VX, Sarin and Mustard gas), as well as M600 chemical-ready missiles, which it could fire at Israel in retaliation.

Assad allies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, could also attack Israel. But experts say Hezbollah would not start an Israel-Lebanon war to save Syrian President Bashar Assad. And Hamas is seeking international support for the Palestinian bid to gain UN membership.

"I don't see any purely military problems. Syria has no defence against Western systems ... [but] it would be more risky than Libya. It would be a heavy military operation," Jean Rannou, the former chief of the French air force, told EUobserver.

He added that action is highly unlikely because Russia would veto a UN mandate, Nato assets are stretched in Afghanistan and Libya and Nato countries are in financial crisis.

Another reason is the political situation in Syria, however.

Rannou noted that unlike Libya, the Syrian opposition is not a credible ally: "Are people in Syria ready to govern the country if Assad falls? I think that's why no one is ready to go further - because the country, the region is too fragile."

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer in Syria, said there is small hope a Nato strike would bring peace: "Any force used on Syria would be a total shot in the dark, a hope the military under attack will turn on the regime. But when has this ever happened? It didn't with [late Iraqi leader] Saddam or [Libyan leader] Gaddafi."

Baer previously told this website the turmoil in Syria is more complicated than the image in mainstream media - of a downtrodden Sunni Muslim majority calling for reforms by the Shia Muslim ruling elite.

Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and high-level EU advisor who runs an NGO in Beirut, backed up Baer's views.

"Syrians want change. But whether Westerners believe it or not, most people in Damascus, in Aleppo, the middle classes, the merchant classes and the [sectarian] minorities believe Assad is the only person who can bring in reforms," he said. "They fear two things above all else - civil war and Western intervention ... They would like to avoid the example of Libya because it would lead them into civil war."

Crooke said two important forces behind events are Sunni radicals and Syrian exile groups in France and the US.

He said the radicals follow the teaching of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a late Jordanian Islamist, who aimed to create a Sunni emirate in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria called Bilad a-Sham. They are experienced urban guerillas who fought in Iraq and have outside finance. They infilitrate protests to attack Assad forces, as in Jisr al-Shagour in June, where they inflicted heavy casualties.

Crooke said the exile groups aim to topple the anti-Israeli regime. They are funded and trained by the US and have links to Israel. They pay Sunni tribal chiefs to put people on the streets, work with NGOs to feed uncorroborated stories of atrocities to Western media and co-operate with radicals in the hope that escalating violence will justify Nato intervention.

"There is a huge difference with [the revolution in] Egypt," he added. "But the picture you see in the European and American press is that you are dealing with peaceful protests and that Assad has nothing better than to do than to kill his own people."

[Captain Planet]

Hip-Hop: A Social Evil Or Just Misunderstood?

As I commute through the boisterous streets of London I’m attacked by a subliminal culture which through its adaptability and ambiguity silently injects its needle into the patchwork of society. I’m left in awe by its sleek trail of influence which arrogantly dictates our dialogue, rationale, attire but most imperatively the perception of ourselves, using music as its vehicle for the advancement of its fashionable tyranny.

This entity is indeed the uncompromising Hip-Hop folklore, which through its notoriety has consistently re-modified and re-modernised social interaction and expression. However being infected with a discernible frame and an intimidating nature, the ‘Hip-Hop’ brand has been made susceptible to the punitive attitudes of an incredulous mainstream who identifies it as a vice in the manifestations of societies malignant symptoms.

But the question still remains are the social persecutions fair????

READ MORE

[Captain Planet]

“Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.”

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

We live in a society where the consumer is the fuel to the economy, the acquisition of goods and services through the means of exchanging currency is very much the foundations upon which our econo-social model is built upon. If such a system were ever to even near collapse or falter truly the world as we know it would risk grinding to a halt, the panic that ensued in the banks, boardrooms and parliamentary offices during the financial crisis of recent years gone was exemplary of this.

Read more

[Trilliam]

Seen at least two things in here I need to have a look at later in the day.

[Esquilax]

AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA

http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n10/htdocs/old-doctor-survived-hiroshima-114.php?country=nl

Jesus Christ...

[Captain Planet]

AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA

http://www.viceland.....php?country=nl

WOW

[Esquilax]

Oddly I was thinking about Hiroshima the other day, what the impact was

You forget somehow that Japan is the only place to have had an atomic bomb be dropped on it with intent to harm the population

Can't believe it got to that point

[Supermalt]

bump

ill post suttin later

[Skola]

James Bond novels.

Gone through them quick in the last week or so currently on Bond 9 - Thunderball

[Niall Ferguson]

AN OLD JAPANESE DOCTOR WHO SURVIVED HIROSHIMA

http://www.viceland.....php?country=nl

Jesus Christ...

The way he describes the explosion seems fake.

[bRUZA]I'M NOT CONVINCED![/bRUZA]

[Supermalt]

http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/strange-love-black-men-and-rick-ross

[Lawrence.]

http://www.nytimes.c...20Inc&st=Search

Definitely one of the best reads I've had in a long time. I had an inkling that finance at it's highest level was a bit shady, but no idea it was anything like this. Even the comments are pretty informative.

[Goddaz]

Going to read that later Lawrence, bless.