The state of most media today is sad, pitiful, and hopelessly unbelievable. From BBC to the New York Times, any semblance of believability is gone. What makes matters worse though, are what amount to popularity factions in social media. The information world has never been so polarized, while the public sinks into a kind of […]

An account of modern Russia, which in its investigation into media manipulation is “absolutely in [George] Orwell’s own tradition” has won the UK’s most prestigious prize for political writing, the Orwell prize for books. Chair of judges for the prize Lord William Waldegrave compared Arkady Ostrovsky’s The Invention of Russia to George Orwell’s novels Nineteen […]

In his famous novel, 1984, George Orwell describes his nightmarish totalitarian society, a police state with complete surveillance and control over its inhabitants. Last night, we took another step forward in that direction. Obama just renewed the Patriot Act that was originally created right after the events of 9/11. While the Patriot Act is supposed […]

There are few pieces of literature that describe the current state of American politics so accurately as one George Orwell quote from the novel 1984: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” For those unfamiliar with the novel, it is the story of a citizen living in a totalitarian state […]

EUROPE’S elite have announced a sweeping crackdown on freedom of speech online which has been branded “lamentable and Orwellian” by pro-democracy campaigners. Brussels bureaucrats are launching a flagship blitz on what they term ‘hate speech’ on social networks such as Facebook – but critics warn it includes anything deemed contrary to the federalist project’s aims. […]

As part of an 80-point plan to fight terrorism, France is setting up about a dozen “reinsertion and citizenship centers” around the country to reeducate young Muslims whom the government believes have been radicalized. Critics of the plan, which will round up people who have not been convicted of any crime, warn that it sounds […]

The FBI is working with researchers to develop a state of the art program that will allow law enforcement to track and sort people based on their tattoos. An Electronic Frontier Foundation investigation reports that the new software allows officers to identify an individual “affiliation to gangs, sub-cultures, religious or ritualistic beliefs, or political ideology.” Cataloging […]

The state of most media today is sad, pitiful, and hopelessly unbelievable. From BBC to the New York Times, any semblance of believability is gone. What makes matters worse though, are what amount to popularity factions in social media. The information world has never been so polarized, while the public sinks into a kind of […]

We live in an age of indifference. 67 years on from the publication of George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 on June 8, 1949, our digital conversations are monitored, humans are denied basic rights around the world and political systems are still anything but fully democratic – and yet, a blank indifference is the defining legacy which […]

The fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the Holocaust business. The Russians turned over to the International Red Cross all the German “Death Registers” they had seized in 1944 when they overran Auschwitz in 1944. The Germans, with typical German efficiency, had scrupulously documented all the deaths at Auschwitz. Not four and […]