Animals are those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind."-John Stuart MillIn South Africa, the elephant has emerged at the center of heated political debates and culture wars, as the government and national park system maneuvers to return to the practice of "culling"-a hideous euphemism for mass murder of elephants.[2] Culling advocates-including government officials, park service bureaucrats, ecologists, "conservationists," large environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, farmers, and villagers-argue that elephants have had deleterious effects on habitat and biodiversity and their herds need to be "managed" and reduced.Farmers and villagers complain that elephants are breaking reserve fences, destroying their crops, competing with their livestock for food, endangering physical safety and sometimes attacking and killing humans.The consensus among these parties is that biodiversity, ecological balance, and human interests trump the lives and interests of elephants, and that the most efficient solution to the "elephant problem" is the final solution of culling thousands of lives.Opponents of culling include animal activists in South Africa and the world at large, ecologists, and thousands of Western tourists fond of elephants and the desire to see them in their natural habitat.In addition to the moral argument that elephants have intrinsic value and the right to exist-quite independent of their utility for humans-The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Toal Liberation

This study aims to verify the skill of a radar-based surface precipitation type (SPT) product with observations on the ground. Social and economic impacts can occur from SPT because it is not well forecast or observed. Observations from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office’s weather radar network are combined with post-processed numerical weather prediction (NWP) freezing level heights in a Boolean logic algorithm to create a 1 km resolution cartesian-gridded map of SPT. Here 5 years of discrete non-probabilistic outputs of rain, mixed phase, and snow are compared against surface observations made by trained observers, automatic weather stations, and laser disdrometers. The novel skill verification method developed as part of this study employs several tolerances of space and time from the SPT product, indicating the precision of the product for a desired accuracy. In general the results indicate that the tolerance verification method works well and produces reasonable statistical score ranges grounded in physical constraints. Using this method, we find that the mixed precipitation class is the least well diagnosed which is due to a negative bias in the input temperature height field, resulting in rain events frequently being classified as mixed. Snowis capturedwell by the product which is entirely reliant upon a post-processed NWP temperature field, although a single period of anomalously cold temperatures positively skewed snow scores with low-skill events. Furthermore, we conclude that more verification consistency is needed amongst studies to help identify successful approaches and thus improve SPT forecasts.

Capitalism originated in—and would have been impossible without—imperialism, colonization, the international slave trade, genocide, and large-scale environmental destruction. Organized around profit and power imperatives, capitalism is a system of slavery, exploitation, class hierarchy, inequality, violence, and forced labor. The Global Capitalist Gulag was fueled, first, by the labor power of millions of slaves from Africa and other nations, and, second, by massive armies of immigrants, former artisans and craftsmen, domestic workers, and urban masses that comprised an utterly new social class, the industrialized proletariat.

We live in dark, disturbing times: we are witnesses to prolif-erating wars, perpetual genocide, predatory global capi- talism, rampant militarism, unparalleled government surveillance and repression, and a phony "war on terrorism" that fronts for attacks on dissent and liberties. We are facing the ever-present threat of financial collapse and global depression, climate change, the sixth great extinction crisis in the earth's history, and systemic planetary meltdown. Scientists warn that we are at a tipping point of global ecological collapse, and report the shocking speed of catastrophic changes such as those that turn icecaps into water and forests into savannas.

Globally, the vegan and animal advocacy movements are in crisis, one so profound that it has evaded critical attention. As global social and ecological problems deepen, and the animal holocaust claims billions more victims each year, the vegan and animal advocacy movements grow correspondingly weaker, not stronger in response.

ABSTRACT Patrick Bateman to be the incarnation of a proto-typical Empire citizen. He is Vampire's Empire's dream come true: Maximising his score in the top-of-the-line investment banking league, celebrating his determination to partake and push through the game at maximum speed-too fast to be determined by any reference system-always on the verge of disintegration. Quite literally, he cannot change his mind. Nobody can. Yet, from this point of view, he pursues every option to bring about change. Just like a whole generation of super-hero managers, an attitude change is not feasible because the confession of failure is not an option. Vanity, to please ones mirror image, remains a driving desire. Affiliation? In October 2001, one month after the 9-11 attack, the Bush administration forced through Congress an assault on civil liberties perversely titled the USA Patriot (a surreal acronym for Uniting & Strengthening America Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). Exploiting the new climate of fear, the Bush team claimed that a free nation must give way to a secure nation. From the offices of a stolen Presidency, we now have neither. The Patriot Act violates numerous constitutional rights, such as the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of assembly, the Fourth Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizures, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to basic protections during criminal proceedings. Among other things, the Bush administration arrogated to government the power to demand from librarians and bookstores lists of material checked out or purchased, to undertake clandestine sneak and peek operations in homes and workplaces, to monitor citizen communications by phone or the Internet, and to detain foreigners indefinitely without legal counsel. In the new Surveillance State, all government agencies can collect and share information on anyone without judicial review, as the office minimizes the information citizens can collect on it and corporations through Freedom of Information requests. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Patriot Act created a new legal category of domestic terrorist that is defined broadly enough to have a chilling effect on free speech and political activity. Casting its dragnet across the land, the Patriot Act states that the crime of domestic occurs when a person's action appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion. Interestingly, through this new form of citizen coercion the Patriot Act falls under its own definition and by logic should annul itself. Instead, civil disobedience and virtually any protest activity meets the definition of terrorism and could easily land one on the radar screen of the state. In a the role of citizens precisely is to influence government policy, but now this is considered coercion and so in Bushspeak, citizen = terrorist. In the era of the Patriot Act, the branch of government usurps ever more power, and thereby destroys the checks and balances among the three branches of government crucial for the functioning of liberal democracy, such as it is. When the branch makes important legal and policy decisions, Congress often is ignored and the courts are stripped of independent review and decision-making power. Consequently, one can expect more state repression and less accountability to Congress, the courts, and citizens alike. As stated by the Center For Constitutional Rights in their Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Post 9/11 Era report, Executive Order and agency regulations violate the laws of the U.S. Constitution, the laws of the United States, and international and humanitarian law. As a result, the war on terror is largely being conducted by fiat and the constitutional liberties of both citizens and non-citizens alike have been seriously compromised. …

Introduction Chapter One: Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours Chapter Two: The Corporate War Economy Chapter Three: The Security Industrial Complex Chapter Four: The Media-Military Industrial Complex Chapter Five: The Criminal (Justice) Industrial Complex Chaper Six: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: The Non-Profit Industrial Complex Chapter Seven: Higher Education's Industrial Model Chapter Eight: The Agricultural Industrial Complex Chapter Nine: Origins and Consequences of the Animal Industrial Complex Chapter Ten: Bad For Your Health: The U.S. Medical Industrial Complex Goes Global Chapter Eleven: College Sports: It's All About the Money! Chapter Twelve: Driving to Carmageddon: Capitalism, Transportation, and the Logic of Planetary Crisis Afterword

The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination is a groundbreaking collection of essays by a diverse set of leading scholars who examine the entangled and evolving global array of corporate-state structures of hegemonic power—what the editors refer to as “the power complex”—that was first analyzed by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic work, The Power Elite. In this new volume edited by Steven Best, Richard Kahn, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, the power complex is conceived as co-constituted, interdependent and imbricated systems of domination. Spreading insidiously on a global level, the transnational institutional relationships of the power complex combine the logics of capitalist exploitation and profits and industrialist norms of efficiency, control, and mass production, While some have begun to analyze these institutional complexes as separate entities, this book is unique in analyzing them as overlapping, mutually-enforcing systems that operate globally and which will undoubtedly frame the macro-narrative of the 21st century (and perhaps beyond). The global industrial complex—a grand power complex of complexes—thus poses one of the most formidable challenges to the sustainability of planetary democracy, freedom and peace today. But there can be no serious talk of opposition to it until it is more popularly named and understood. The Global Industrial Complex aims to be a foundational contribution to this emerging educational and political project.