Last Straw

Sirocco the Kakapo, a nat­ive par­rot of New Zea­l­and, gets frisky. An extract from Stephen Fry’s and Mark Carwardine’s new BBC doc­u­ment­ary, Last Chance to See: (via Frogblog)

Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protest­ing against repres­sion in Iran. She has a page on Wiki­pe­dia. Pho­tos and video and of her death have been widely broad­cast by the West­ern media, with copi­ous amounts of faux sym­pathy. She deserves our sym­pathy because she appears to be a […]

The Guard­ian has video of two women being bundled to the ground by police for dar­ing to ask a police officer for his badge number.

RNN inter­view with Noam Chom­sky, who quickly gets to the nub of things as usual, e.g.: … for example, take … the AIG bonuses that are … caus­ing such anger, right­fully. Dean Baker poin­ted out that there’s an easy way to deal with it. Since the gov­ern­ment pretty much owns AIG any­way (it just doesn’t […]

Incred­ible clip from the sixth and last epis­ode of the BBC’s Nature’s Great Events.

This video clip was taken with a mobile cam­era imme­di­ately after a ter­ror­ist Israeli air strike hit a busy mar­ket early on Sat­urday 03, Jan 2009, Gaza.

Noam Chom­sky dis­cusses the mean­ing of President-Elect Barack Obama’s vic­tory and the pos­sib­il­it­ies ahead for real demo­cratic change at a speech last week in Boston. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

This is video is of Michael Albert, an eco­nomic vis­ion­ary and one of my favour­ite people, attempt­ing to describe an altern­at­ive eco­nomy  —  Par­ti­cip­at­ory Eco­nom­ics  —  in 30 minutes. I think he does quite well. There’s more here, includ­ing a Q & A ses­sion and a descrip­tion from Jes­sica Azu­lay on how she and oth­ers put one of the insti­tu­tions of pare­con  —  bal­anced job com­plexes  —  into practice […]

This was hedge fund man­ager Hugh Hendry on Dis­patches tonight. Is he really advoc­at­ing the abol­ish­ment of fractional-reserve bank­ing, a sys­tem where banks cre­ate money out of thin air and are required to keep only a frac­tion of their depos­its in reserve. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see this unbe­liev­able scam ter­min­ated, but does Hugh […]

Bril­liant inter­view with Chom­sky where he gets to the nub of things as usual. People should vote against McCain and for Obama  —  but without illu­sions. Part II: Chom­sky on the eco­nomy Cur­rent crisis demon­strates anti-democratic nature of fin­an­cial system