To be honest, we all already knew this fact anyway. But, fortunately for those of you who don’t like Tool, the Independent’s written this fun little article with which you may wipe your Razorlight and Kaiser Chief-stained noses.

A survey which was carried out among students at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, a cohort drawn from the top 5 per cent of the nation’s youngsters, drew praise for metal’s “visceral brutality” with more than a third rating it among their favourite styles. Researchers admitted they were surprised to find that “intelligent” genres traditionally associated with the precociously bright, such as classical and jazz, were the least popular.

What they discovered instead was that youngsters liked to let off steam to hardcore sounds, particularly if it had an emotionally charged or overtly political message behind it. One respondent said: “You can’t really jump your anger into the floor and listen to music at the same time with other types of music.”

Answering questions in an online survey, one student said Systems of a Down’s anti-war track, “Bring Your Own Bombs” particularly appealed. Another track, “Aenima” by Tool, was praised for its subject matter – “the stupidity of the celebrity culture”.

From here. So, there you have it. The most intelligent kids in the country prefer metal. Quite what Maynard Himself would have to say about what constitutes intelligence is obviously another matter entirely, but still. Good stuff. It’s just a shame that the article also name-checks Slipknot.

This is possibly the most hilarious interchange I’ve ever witnessed in the House of Commons. People say politics is boring, but what do they know? Enjoy!

Ann Coulter displays just a small morsel of her vast wealth of ignorance.

In this next clip, angry singer and political activist Henry Rollins writes to Ann Coulter, offering her an alternative to her current path in life.

First things first, despite its title, I’d just like to clarify that this website is not cannabis-orientated in any way. Any more. That said, The Independent has made some big claims in today’s cover feature, and I’m going to have a look at them in detail here.

The article starts with an “if we had only known then what we know today” warning, a justification basically, an admittance that back in 1997, the Independent was ignorant about cannabis, or at least its harmful effects. Of course, a little look around back in 1997 would easily have dug up this. But still, moving on…

Record numbers of teenagers are requiring drug treatment as a result of smoking skunk, the highly potent cannabis strain that is 25 times stronger than resin sold a decade ago.

Does this seem to anyone else like a bit of a cop-out? To me, it’s saying, “When we wrote our article in 1997, asking for cannabis to be decriminalised, the only cannabis around was resin, which was much less harmful than the skunk you hear about today.” It’s a fairly absurd claim, especially when you consider this… “Journalist Sue Arnold wrote in The Observer in September 1997 of how smoking Skunk temporarily restored her vision.” from here. In addition, this website claims that “The most commonly used varieties of cannabis were dark Moroccan ‘soap’, and “skunk”. When the figures are weighted, dark “soap-bar” Moroccan accounted for 36.46% of the total reported market, and “skunk” for 27.64%.” So, with some rounding, 1 in every 3 purchases was resin, and 1 in every 4 was skunk. It’s pretty obvious that skunk was easily as accessible as resin, in 1997.

More than 22,000 people were treated last year for cannabis addiction – and almost half of those affected were under 18. With doctors and drugs experts warning that skunk can be as damaging as cocaine and heroin, leading to mental health problems and psychosis for thousands of teenagers, The Independent on Sunday has today reversed its landmark campaign for cannabis use to be decriminalised.

Okay, we’ve got no sources for any of this, but I’ll take their word for it. Obviously, it’s shocking that so many children are hooked on cannabis, but I seriously have to question the notion that cannabis is as ‘dangerous’ as cocaine or heroin. Firstly, I know a lot of people who’ve used cocaine. The people I know who’ve used heroin generally had a much worse time than those who used cocaine, due to addiction, health problems, and all the general fun that goes along with injecting hazardous chemicals directly into your bloodstream. So first things first, how can one drug be as damaging as two other drugs, when the two other drugs are not equally damaging?

Now sure, cannabis can be very harmful, if you react badly to it. But then, so can everything on this planet. Peanuts kill nearly a hundred people a year, and affect 1 in every 125 people, remember. Simple solution: If you know that something has the potential to kill you, stop putting it inside your body.

New research being published in this week’s Lancet will show how cannabis is more dangerous than LSD and ecstasy.

Another simple solution in order to prevent inconsistency: make LSD and ecstacy Class C as well.

“The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”

This can’t be refuted. Everyone who’s ever known more than one smoker of cannabis knows the people who’ve gone ‘wrong’ from using it. If it doesn’t work for you, you just shouldn’t smoke it. But then, we also all know the people who can smoke it all day, and not be affected even slightly by any such psychosis.

Personally, I hold a slightly different theory about what is causing this psychosis in cannabis smokers. This is based only on my own meandering experience, and obviously I have no science to back it up, but this is a general pattern I’ve noticed. People who only smoke cannabis socially (as in, with other people around), generally never complain of paranoia, or go, what I would describe as ‘wrong’. In the context of this article, in 1997, x-boxes, myspace, youtube and terrorism didn’t dominate the lives of teenagers. Sure, you might have played on your Playstation, but socialising didn’t take place over text message, or MSN messenger, or Myspace, people used to meet up in places. And there was no cancelling meeting up by text, because hardly anyone had a mobile phone. Life was much more sociable, and a lot of people smoked cannabis with their friends.

Contrast that with today. You can now socialise by sitting in your house on your own. You can play computer games with people from the other side of the world, and you can stay on the internet for limitless hours, on or off-peak, while only paying a set charge. And in my experience, it’s the people who spend their time smoking cannabis alone in their houses, who experience psychosis problems. Paranoia usually arrives on the scene when it’s just you left with your own thoughts, and cannabis is a mood enhancer. If you’ve got no distractions from your thoughts other than colourful flashing boxes, then when your thoughts turn dark (as they do for everyone), the cannabis can enhance that darkness.

So, unsurprisingly, I’m blaming cannabis psychosis not on the drug itself, but on… capitalism. That’s right, we are encouraged from all sides to buy crap and isolate ourselves, which, for humans, is counter-intuitive, and is obviously going to cause some problems to us mentally.

Of those suffering from cannabis psychosis, I’d like to pose a question. How many of you only ever smoke when you’re with your friends, and how many of you smoke on your own, or in front of your tv? And how many of you, when you first noticed that you were getting paranoid when you were stoned, carried on smoking?

Here’s the link to the Independent’s article.

You’re being watched. Soz, that’s just how it is. Corporations have poured money into the companies whose servers your computer connects to on a daily basis, to monitor your buying habits, and where you go on the internet. Wherever you go, you leave your ip address, which is effectively a fingerprint to trace you by. Your ip address is a number assigned to you personally by your internet provider, so once The Man has it, he can check the logs at your provider, and can trace down your email address, your telephone number, your credit card details, and your home address. Until corporations are held accountable for their actions, they cannot be trusted with your information.

So what can you do about it? You can use proxies.

Now, proxies won’t give you total anonymity, but they will help to cover your tracks. One of the benefits of using public proxies is that the public are using them as well as you, so if anyone does try to trace you, they’ll have to trace everyone else who used that proxy as well, which is considerably more effort than most people will be bothered to put in.

If we think of an ip address as your fingerprint, think of a proxy server as a glove. It might leave a tiny amount of your (and its own) DNA behind, but on the whole, it will keep your fingerprints off the things that you touch. Again, it’s not 100% secure, so don’t try any credit card fraud or big time scams like that, but it’s good just for day-to-day stealth.

So, where to begin? First of all, you need to know what your ip address is currently. Head over to whatsmyip, and write down the ip address it tells you. Next, you need to find proxy lists. Head onto google, and type ‘proxy list’. Click on a few pages, and you’ll see reams and reams of numbers, that may well look somewhat like this:

203.190.254.51:80 elite proxy Bangladesh

To explain what this means, the numbers before the ‘:’ are the ip address of the proxy. The number after the ‘:’ is the port via which you’ll connect to that ip address. That’s all you need, but unfortunately these lists will contain a lot of pointless information that is usually highly inaccurate, so we need to remove it.

I find the best way to do this is to copy the list to a database document, like in MS Excel or whatever. From there, you can easily search and replace words such as ‘elite proxy’ with a space, and hopefully you’ll be left at the end with a list that looks somewhat like the following:

200.252.123.1:6588
200.220.205.40:8080
200.169.27.34:80
200.150.134.78:6588
150.165.15.1:3124
200.247.144.80:8080
200.242.252.12:8080

Save it as a .txt file, with no text formatting. You will need to collect up as many proxies as you possibly can, as I guarantee that the majority of them will not work. This is the fault of spammers.

So, now that you’ve got this list (let’s call it proxy.txt), what do we do with it? We head over to here, and download mutiproxy. Once it’s downloaded, open it up, and select Proxy list from the top menu bar, then options. Select the general options tab, and make sure your options are the same as mine:

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Proxy servers list’ tab, and then Menu – Files – Import proxy list… and select ‘proxy.txt’ wherever you may have saved it. If all goes according to plan, you should be presented with all of the proxies in your text file in a list, with red dots next to them. Click OK, and in the main Multiproxy window, click ‘Check all proxies’. This may take a while, so go make a cup of tea.

Once it’s finished, go back to Proxy list, Options…, Proxy servers list. Hopefully, a fair few of your proxies will have green dots next to them. This means that you can use them. Don’t worry if there are considerably more red dots than green dots, this is perfectly normal. Out of a list of over a thousand proxies, I found only about a hundred actually worked. Click on Menu – Proxy list – Delete non-responding. Confirm that this is what you want to do.

Okay, I should briefly let you know how multiproxy works, basically it sets up a server on your computer (don’t worry, it’s totally safe, only you can connect to it), and it opens up a port for you to connect to via your browser. Once your browser’s connected, Multiproxy tells it to connect using one from the list of proxies you supplied.

Nearly there.

The next step is to configure your web browser.

For users of Firefox, go to Tools, Options, General tab, connection settings. Select ‘Manual proxy connection’, and in the box next to ‘HTTP Proxy:’, type: 127.0.0.1 and in the port box next to it, type 8088. 127.0.0.1 is the ip address of your computer internally, and 8088 is the port that Multproxy has opened up on your computer (for you only). Click OK.

Now, you should be up and running. But you need to know for sure. Head back over to whatsmyip, and hopefully, if it all worked, it’ll tell you that you’re using a different ip address.

You may find surfing to be a little slow, or that google comes up with a random foreign google web page, rather than the one you’re used to. S-B fucks up sometimes as well, but when any of these situations occur, just have a look at the multiproxy window to see which proxy server you’re using. If it sucks, delete it. The great thing about Multiproxy is that it keeps on rotating which proxy servers you use, so any trace that you may leave is scattered considerably further across the globe than it would otherwise have been.

That’s about it, you should now be surfing considerably more anonymously than you once were.

If you want to know how to use proxies with file-trading software such as Limewire and WinMX, let me know and I’ll write another article, or extend this one a little.

Happy surfing people, stay safe.

Howard Zinn discusses his opinion of just and unjust wars, and the legitimacy and justification of both. An excellent interview, with some wholly valid points.

Why don’t the Palestinians have the right to a secure homeland, while the Israelis do?

From “The Intifada within the American, Israeli, Islamic Triangle”, a lecture given at The University of Pennsylvania, November 8, 1989.

When you think about going for a big shop, you, like I, most probably imagine walking into your local Tesco’s or Asda, being presented with millions of goods at discount prices, with the only major downside being that you have to leave the house and actually walk inside these places.

But there are many more downsides to giving Asda and Tesco’s your money. Sure, you might say, what difference does your sixty pounds a week really make, compared to the millions they usually rake in? And the only way to answer that question, is to remind you that every thousand mile march starts with you getting off your arse. If you feel that it’s okay to do it because everyone else does, remember that feeling, and remember that to everyone else, you’re justifying their actions, just as they’re justifying yours.

“Oh come on,” I hear you sigh, “You’re just hating on those successful and smart enough to create a billion-pound international empire, the supermarkets aren’t doing anything wrong…” And that’s a good point which needs refuting, and it would seem, the burden of proof lies with me.

Let’s begin with Asda, who are presently owned by Walmart. When a Walmart or Asda opens up, it’ll do so on the outskirts of a town. Let’s say that John Nobody owns a greengrocer’s in that town, and you’re one of his regular customers. But you’ve seen the posters, and it looks to you very much like Asda is charging 34p for its cucumbers, and John is charging 96p. Why the difference in pricing? Is John just being greedy, while Asda tries to help the locals get cheaper goods? Not really, because John, in his little greengrocer’s, cannot afford to buy in bulk in order to get Asda-sized discounts on his stock. You head off to Asda to buy your cucumbers, and John loses your business.

John decides that he needs to win customers back, so he slashes the price of his cucumbers down so that he is only able to break even from selling them, but still, he just can’t compete with Asda’s prices. After gradually losing customers, John begins to lose profits, and eventually, can’t afford to pay the bills. His greengrocer shuts down, and John is out of a job. But what employment opportunities are there for a 58-year-old ex-greengrocer in such a small town? Of course, he can work for Asda.

But when he gets the job there, he discovers that he’s not allowed to work full-time, due to initiatives in increasing labor productivity. Plus, in order to get some kind of job security, John joins the union. Soon after doing so, he’s offered a 10% wage increase, in order to quit the union, and foresake many of his rights as a worker. He refuses to do so, and finds himself discriminated against by management, constantly being given the worst jobs they can find for him. Hours he has worked begin to go missing from his payslip. He tries to get a job in management to even up the balance, but is told, because of the fact that’s he’s black, that there is no place for him in management. He can no longer afford his house, and his wife leaves him because she thinks he’s abandoned his principles.

If only you’d have kept buying this poor man’s cucumbers, right? Well obviously it’s not just cucumbers. Think about the last time you went to Tesco or Asda, and what you bought. That loaf of bread, you could have bought from a baker’s in town, and helped your local economy. That block of cheese, you could have bought from the deli. That warm roast chicken in a bag which you just love to delve into? Well, click here to see where they’re coming from. And for all that alcohol, I’m certain there’s a local off-license just waiting to take your money.

Sure, it might cost you slightly more to not shop at Asda. But your extra money is going into the pockets of your local community, upon whom Asda and Tesco have declared war. Would you just throw money to a foreign invader when they come to take your town? Or would your money go towards building defences to protect your people? Every time a Tesco’s open, 276 jobs are lost.

In 2002, Friends of the Earth discovered that less than half of the apples on Tesco’s shelves were sourced in this country. Not only are these crooks destroying your town as you know and love it, but they are in fact destroying the countryside you know and love it too, by refusing to buy British farmed produce. And why is this? It’s because farm workers wouldn’t work for the same wage as banana plantation workers in other countries, who are, for every pound of bananas sold, paid one penny.

If you truly have no other option than to buy from those who wish to destroy your town and force its inhabitants to wear the same uniform, then don’t let any of this stop you. We all do what we have to when times are desperate. But please, if you’ve got the spare cash, support your local industries, and join the fight against the Tesco and Walmart empires.

Sources:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/tesco_exposed.pdf

http://www.walmartclass.com/public_declarations.html

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/bostonherald/…

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/01/20/walmart20.DTL&type=printable#

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0625-04.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/26walmart.pdf

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4490434.stm

In case you’re wondering just how your local Tesco’s manages to get its chickens onto your shelves whilst maximising profits, this one’s for you:

That’s from Dispatches: Supermarket Secrets, an excellent documentary which, if you can get hold of the full version, is well worth a watch next time you’re thinking of heading out to your local Asda. I’m sure you’ve all watched, with a bizarre fascination, various little video clips of how chocolate bars and crisps are made in factories. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no vege’aryan, but I personally find it very disturbing that these sentient beings are treated in the same way as, well, potatoes.

A short and powerful message from Noam Chomsky, about our fate if we continue to embrace the system as it stands: