10 reasons to be cryogenically frozen

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It's been on my mind recently that the future - the far future, say 1000 years from now - will be much better than now. The civilisation we live in is in a process of decay, even as technological capitalism speeds across the planet, transforming all culture into something that looks and feels very similar, crowded, urban, fast...so here are my reasons why I think cryogenically freezing myself for 1000 years is the best bet to time travel into a very different now.
1. The five day week is a theft of time by capital and renders the victims unfree, robbed of our most precious resource - time. In the future it will disappear as will wage labour.
2. Population growth will go into reverse. The planet will be much less crowded and pleasant to live on.
3. Advertising will disappear as the wastefulness of consumerism is replaced by a more rational distribution of goods. Planned obsolescence in production will be replaced by self evolving technology that never needs replacing. Production and art will merge back into the common human activity.
4. Disease will be abolished and humans will effectively be immortal as cell structure comes entirely under technological control. This development alone will radically alter the way we perceive our life and will be cause humans to turn away from short-term selfish thinking
5. Inter dimensional travel will eliminate polluting traffic. We will never need to commute again as anyone and anywhere will be close by.
6. Languages will have merged and technology will instantly translate any unknown meanings. We will all understand one another.
7. Finance and banking will be as relevant as feudal knights are now. Abundance will have eliminated the need for hoarding and speculation and money, if it exists at all, will be something quaint for collectors.
8. All tedious and arduous repetitive work will be eliminated. People will devote their lives to creativity, socialising and interplanetary exploration
9. Politics as we know it will be replaced by direct mass intelligent decision making - a single human brain combining all thought to reach rational decisions about human needs.
10. Owning stuff will not matter anymore. Life will be about experience and using your time for leisure and self realisation.

Of course I could be wrong as I cannot predict the future but for sure lots of very stupid things will have been abolished. Perhaps what will be lost is the joy of struggling against the odds to live a good life. Because everyone will actually live a good life.

FT and NYT back Occupy Wall Street

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The Financial Times published an editorial three days ago supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. The rightwing media including the Daily Mail have also been sympathetic.

The FT says:

So far the protests in the US have been largely peaceful. They may be diffuse and inchoate. But the fundamental call for a fairer distribution of wealth cannot be ignored. What is at stake is the future of the American dream. The bargain has always been that all who work hard should have an opportunity for prosperity. That dream has been shattered by a crisis brought about by financial excess and political cynicism. The consequence has been growing in­equality, rising poverty and sacrifice by those least able to bear it – all of which are failing to deliver economic growth.

The frustration of protesters railing against the global financial system, and of the 54 per cent of Americans who polls suggest support their calls, is legitimate. The wonder is why it has taken so long for citizens to come out in popular protest across political boundaries. For the last three years, the country has been paralysed by a political gridlock that has put its future on the line.
…
Politicians in both camps have failed to spot and channel the righteous anger of those who have seen government spend billions on bailing out banks, while bickering over how to create jobs or educate children. One opportunity after another has been squandered – most recently in the failure promptly to pass a proper jobs bill.

It ends by saying that this “cry for change” must be “heeded”.

Last week the New York Times also published an editorial supporting the OWS movement.

The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.

Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.

When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society. Before the recession, the share of income held by those in the top 1 percent of households was 23.5 percent, the highest since 1928 and more than double the 10 percent level of the late 1970s.

That share declined slightly as financial markets tanked in 2008, and updated data is not yet available, but inequality has almost certainly resurged. In the last few years, for instance, corporate profits (which flow largely to the wealthy) have reached their highest level as a share of the economy since 1950, while worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the mid-1950s.

The NYT is missing the elephant in the room which is asset ownership - in this the top 1% own the same as the bottom 50%. Does this mean that the intellectuals of the US capitalist class, and the likes of Buffet and Soros, realise something must be done or the protests could begin to threaten the system? Or is it that they don't threaten the system and there is a desire to keep these protests cuddly. In the crisis of 1979-81, the most severe postwar crisis before now, there were strikes and riots too. The occupy movement is new, it is more middle class than traditional strikes or the riots, perhaps as impoverishment hits the new graduate classes of the 21st century. Perhaps that's why politicians and the media are less quick to condemn it. Michael Moore got a respectful hearing on Newsnight on Wednesday - Paxo just listened rather than barking at him for being a lefty. Strange, unfamiliar territory...

An explosive new 9/11 charge....from US counterterror chief

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In a new documentary, former national-security aide and 9/11 insider Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up.
Former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks. The source of the explosive, unproved allegations is a man who once considered Tenet a close friend: former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who made the charges against Tenet and the CIA in an interview for a radio documentary timed to the 10th anniversary. Portions of the Clarke interview were made available to The Daily Beast by the producers of the documentary.
In the interview for the documentary, Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11. Clarke speculates —and readily admits he cannot prove—that the CIA withheld the information because the agency had been trying to recruit the terrorists, while they were living in Southern California under their own names, to work as CIA agents inside Al Qaeda. After the recruitment effort went sour, senior CIA officers continued to withhold the information from the White House for fear they would be accused of "malfeasance and misfeasance," Clarke suggests.
Clarke says it is fair to conclude "there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information." Asked who would have made the order, Clarke replies, "I would think it would have been made by the director," referring to Tenet. Clarke said that if his theory is correct, Tenet and others would never admit to the truth today "even if you waterboarded them."

Clarke's theory addresses a central, enduring mystery about the 9/11 attacks— why the CIA failed for so long to tell the White House and senior officials at the FBI that the agency was aware that two Al Qaeda terrorists had arrived in the United States in January 2000, just days after attending a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia that the CIA had secretly monitored. In a written response prepared last week in advance of the broadcast, Tenet says that his partner in lies Clarke, who famously went public in 2004 to blow the whistle on the Bush White House over intelligence failures before 9/11, has "suddenly invented baseless allegations which are belied by the record and unworthy of serious consideration." The CIA insisted to the 9/11 Commission and other government investigations that the agency never knew the exact whereabouts of the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, inside the U.S.—let alone try to recruit them as spies. Agency officials said the CIA's delay in sharing information about the two terrorists was a grave failure, but maintained there was no suggestion of deception by CIA brass. Tenet has said he was not informed before 9/11 about Hazmi and Mihdhar's travel to the U.S., although the intelligence was widely shared at lower levels of the CIA. The 9/11 Criminal Commission investigated widespread rumors in the intelligence community that the CIA tried to recruit the two terrorists—Clarke was not the first to suggest it—but the investigation revealed no evidence to support the rumors. The commission said in its final report that "it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA" about the two terrorists.

But in his interview, Clarke said his seemingly unlikely, even wild scenario—a bungled CIA terrorist-recruitment effort and a subsequent cover-up—was "the only conceivable reason that I've been able to come up with" to explain why he and others at the White House were told nothing about the two terrorists until the day of the attacks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmWFnnIb8g

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/11/september-11th-anniversary-r...

Orwellian plot used by US to attack Iran

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This implausible plot, allegedly by a dodgy Iranian car salesman from Texas, to kill the Saudi ambassador, is being used by patsy Obama and his friends in Israel and Saudi Arabia to ratchet up pressure on Iran. Since 9/11 we have seen Orwellian manipulation of the terrorist threat to arouse US and global opinion in support of US and Zionist aggression. The UK media have on this occasion immediately questioned the authenticity of this new plot - thankfully - yet somehow there is a sense that the Americans don't care if no one believes this to be real. They needed something to beat Iran with, and lacking anything substantive, they have found this ludicrous plot. Only Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s can compare with US false flag terror plots, leading to the most elaborate of all - 9/11 itself. Stalin's henchmen thought up outlandish plots allegedly carried out by his rivals such as Trotsky and Bukharin in alliance with fascist and bourgeois enemies. This was used to hound them, arrest them, beat them into confession. Then they were put on show trials. Their execution ended the story - rather like the execution of Osama bin Laden. No trials for these people - America only dared put one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers on trial (the 20th) after he was waterboarded 83 times and 'confessed' to masterminding the plot.
The Nazis used false flag attacks - on the Reichstag - and later on the Polish border, first to seize power in Germany and then to launch their war in Europe.
Seventy years later, the Neocons used 9/11, WMDs and other alleged terror plots to whip up war hysteria at home and abroad. This latest plot is the most implausible of all. But they don't care. It serves its purpose - and our politicians will very likely go along with it. Orwell would know all too well what this was all about - manufacturing lies for truth. War is the goal. A good analysis can be found here.

And who said this?

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"Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality … Civil government supposed a certain subordination. But as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

Answer: Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations 1776

My iPhone and the miraculous Abu Talal

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After Bashar Al Assad, you must come to Homs, said Abu Talal, the man who came 100 miles to give me my lost iPhone, the one I dropped in the mountains of Petra. I love the way Abu Talal says this, in the sure knowledge that Syria’s time of trouble will end. Petra had wowed me, swept me up in its breathtaking grandeur, both natural and man-made. Only at the end of the day back at the hotel did I realise I no longer had my cherished iPhone. The hotel staff made some calls to the restaurants in the heart of Petra – two are located at the end of the Roman road that completes the world’s Seventh wonder. The 2300-year-old Nabatean metropolis is set amid majestically slung gorges and mountains, sculpted and layered in implausible forms and colours, a trade hub of the ancient world lost for a millennium.

Tanushka had extolled to me tirelessly the hospitality and grace of her Jordanian parentage. Since arriving here, I have experienced this on enough occasions to know it is something undeniably real. We are talking cab drivers who, when asked how much, shrug and say ‘No problem.’ And mean it - until you insist on paying. Shopkeepers who give you water for lack of the right change. Our daughter is showered with gifts – jewellery, drinks, kisses. A little Arabic and an adorable toddler help to endear, but the Jordanians are always sincere in their generosity. Almost never have we suffered from the harsh sales tactics and double dealing that are part of the tourist package elsewhere in the world.
Abu Talal topped anything I had so far experienced in Jordan, or could reasonably expect – even if he was Syrian. My phone could have fetched a fair sum on the open market if someone wished to sell it. I left Petra with a shrug. C’est la vie. You get to see the Seventh Wonder of the World, climb to the top of a valley and see a mad man in a Bob Marley T-shirt climb up an 80 foot Nabatean temple carved from the mountain. You watch this cracked Bedouin jump from ancient stone roof to hanging buttress, and pirouette from the highest pinnacle to the nervous awe of the tourists and Bedouin traders below. All it needed was a New Yorker to shout ‘Go on, buddy, jump!” He didn’t. In fact he risks his life to wow the crowd once an hour, before descending into the empty chamber of the temple where he listens to reggae and smokes the stuff that numbs his fear. I climbed the final stretch to the summit where a Bedouin tent overlooks the Arabian desert far below. The horizon is lost in infinite dunes. A Bedouin with intense blue eyes framed by a black headscarf plays a mean Arabian blues on his oud. He tells me he sleeps here most nights because here you can only hear silence and the wind. He has travelled all over the Arab world but always comes back. He loves this place because of the history, he says. People have been here since the stone age, leaving their tools amid the more elaborate encryptions of the peoples that came after. Nomads from the Arabian desert, the forefathers of today’s Bedouin, arrived 25 centuries ago. Later as their wealth grew, they added their magnificent tombs to the very rock that is the meaning of the word ‘Petra’. There has always been water and this has always been a place of refuge, trade and pilgrimage. Before earthquakes and changing trade patterns ended Petra’s golden age in the Seventh century, all wanted a piece of its riches. Now its wealth is in tourism. Its £50 to get in, up massively in recent years, but how can you price something that surpasses all superlatives for an ancient wonder?
Next to Wadi Rum, an earthscape of crenelated rocks and high-walled valleys that rise from the desert as if carved from the very mind of God, declaring forever the miracle of creation. In the valley of Rum, the camels stand motionless in the dry mid-afternoon heat beneath a sculpted cliff of sandstone split by a gorge, while black vultures circle in the indigo sky to the ethereal imploring of the muezzin. David Lean eat your heart out.
Aqaba, by contrast, is a bustling Arabian port and burgeoning tourist hub, taking on its rival Eilat only a stone throw away in Israel across the bay. Here the top of the Red Sea joins the southernmost tip of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Israel. At our borrowed apartment on the hill we receive a call from Amman. I have some good news, says Nabil, our celebrated host in the capital. Nabil is a true household name here in Jordan. Say to almost any Jordanian – like our taxi driver – ‘Nabil Sawalha’ – and they will exclaim his name back to you. Nabil Sawalha, I love him, they say. He is a satirist, TV and film star, and much loved radio raconteur. We watched his home videos of his Ramadan sketch show which he performed at the Amman Sheraton last month. Nabil as Gamel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Syria’s Hafez al Assad (the late father of current Bashar), Saddam Hussein and last but not least Brother leader Muammar Gadaffi. And the late King Hussein of Jordan of course. After his whirwind tour of recent Arab big men, Nabil comes on stage as himself, lamenting the lack of such characters in the Arab world today. This one is not for broadcast, Nabil explains from his sofa.
Back to that call. Someone’s found your phone. He was on the mountain climbing up to the temple when his son saw it and gave it to his dad. Abu Talal took it to a phone shop, charged it up, went through the numbers and found Nabil, a Jordanian name. He rang it, and hey presto. I was amazed that this considerate and resourceful man had bothered to track me down. Nabil explains that Abu Talal lives in Ma-an, 100 miles up the Desert Highway. He gives me the number. Tanushka calls him and in her basic Arabic thanks him and says we will call back tomorrow. We mull over how to retrieve the phone. Next morning Hassan, our ever helpful taxi driver, says he will get it back ‘No problem’. The same day, mid afternoon, he calls us at our flat in Aqaba. In Arabic he tells us he is with Abu Talal and they want to come round with the phone. Abu Talal here? In Aqaba? They’ll be round in two minutes. Suddenly, they are here. Hassan, and two other guys – one large-framed with a moustache and wearing a traditional white dishdash. Abu Talal. Hassan says he has seen the pictures I took on the phone and wanted to see our faces to be sure that it is indeed us. Abu Talal leaves nothing to chance. We are effusive in our thanks. Tanushka rushes inside and grabs whatever she can find – her favourite pashmina for his wife, some dates and bananas. After the expected refusals, my saviour accepts our meagre gifts. He tells us he is from Homs, heart of the Syrian revolt, the city that has suffered more than any from Assad’s brutal crackdown. You must come to Syria, says Abu Talal. Well, yes, we had planned to go there before the uprising erupted. We promise we will come to Homs, after Basher al Assad is gone. He gives me my phone and Hassan drives them away. I check the phone is working. It’s now connected to an Arab network. Even better, the keyboard is now in Arabic. I also discover that he has left me a video of him eating lunch with his friends, a little memento to remember him by. Thank you Abu Talal.