Josef Stalin interviewed by HG Wells [1934].

I loved reading this interview. I've never read Stalin before (partly because I find his politics to be atrocious), but it turns out he was very good at explaining Marxism; and Wells, with his "Anglo-Saxon Socialism" and mishmash of liberal sociology and worship of order for the sake of order, was very good at making Marxism sound appealing.

(Mirror: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm)

Pretty animated graphs! Suicide has become the number one violent cause of death.

"The only player in the game unworthy of “civil” is the defendant, because the object of the game is to put him in prison. And that’s why judges don’t find cops to be liars. It’s the same reason judges grow disgusted with criminal defense lawyers who won’t let the wheels of justice grind smoothly. We mess up the game."

“The Scriptures are clear that God condones the use of deadly force in killing whenever we are threatened,” Eipper said.

"In 1971, I was part of a group of activists called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI who broke into a small FBI field office in Media, PA. I trained myself as a locksmith and used tools I made to pick the lock to the office door."

"As a group, our goal was strictly to reveal to the public what those inside the movement already knew from first-hand experience: the FBI was not fighting crime they were fighting change."

"This Day in WikiLeaks was created on November 8, 2011 as a daily blog for news related to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and other matters of transparency, whistleblowing, and surveillence. Its mission is to create an accessible, regular, and accurate source for WikiLeaks news."

"The drawbacks of using police sweeps to deliver people to social services are especially relevant in Arizona, where the length of mandatory jail sentences start at 15 days and increase each time a sex worker is convicted."

100 years ago today in Ludlow, Colorado.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Ha. I had no idea Grooveshark depends on DMCA's safe harbour provisions. I assumed they had some sort of clever licensing scheme worked out with music publishers.

And don't forget how Google illegally conspired with Apple and Intel and friends to suppress wages: http://goo.gl/1Piuez

(Also, I like how Google's top lobbyist, Molinari, shares the name of the originator of market anarchism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_de_Molinari)

The fact that this guy is talking to Salon on a cellphone while in solitary gives me the impression that the Free Alabama Movement has done some impressive pre-strike organizing.

LA and Palo Alto have joined the list of cities where it is illegal to sleep in a car.

LAPD shot to death a homeless man in Hollywood while I was writing my essay about police who kill the homeless.

"A man facing deportation from Sweden has been granted a temporary reprieve after fellow passengers aboard his flight to Iran prevented it from taking off by refusing to fasten their seat belts."

"as long as our own freedom is secured through the segregation of others, into concrete abysses – even, or especially, if these others remain invisible to us – it is a false sense of freedom, and it diminishes our own capacities for critical awareness."

"This weekly round of deportations at the NWDC comes as Ramon Mendoza Pascual and J. Cipriano Rios Alegria continue their hunger strike in medical isolation, under solitary confinement sentences."

3 Quarks Daily is one of my favorite link-aggregator logs on all of the internet. It is strange and charming, and, um, top-ish. They post a lot of poetry, but that's usually easy to ignore. On Monday's they post original content.

"Yes, the cops raided Daniel’s home because they wanted to find out who was behind @peoriamayor, an account that had been shut down weeks ago by Twitter. When it was active, Daniel used it to portray Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, as a weed-smoking, stripper-loving, Midwestern answer to Rob Ford. The account never had more than 50 followers, and Twitter had killed it because it wasn't clearly marked as a parody."

"Mexican food was also associated with anarchism and union organizing. Tamale vendors were blamed for the Christmas Day Riot of 1913, when police raided a labor rally in Los Angeles Plaza. Milam Plaza in San Antonio, where the chili queens worked in the 1920s, was a prominent recruiting ground for migrant workers. Customers could eat their chili while listening to impassioned speeches by anarcho-syndicalists of the [Industrial] Workers of the World and the Partido Liberal Mexicano."

Here is a nice online/ebook version of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I've started reading this on my Kindle.

"On that morning three officers from Raleigh Police Department prevented us from doing our work, for the first time ever. An officer said, quite bluntly, that if we attempted to distribute food, we would be arrested."