The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide variety of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.

  • “Colombia’s main rebel group said Sunday it is freeing the last of the government captives it has held for years, and will abandon the practice of kidnapping, the Associated Press reported.”
  • “The African American Left’s failure to formulate a Black Agenda has made it ‘largely irrelevant during the greatest crisis of capitalism since at least the Great Depression, and the worst economic and social crisis for African Americans since the death of Reconstruction.’ The default Black Agenda is Obamaism, which is corporatism, and the death of Black politics. ‘If all that matters is Obama, then there is no need for a Black political agenda – except four more years of Obama’.”
  • “The most successful organizations for economic self-help of the last hundred fifty years have been labor unions, and in the US, African Americans have been more likely to form and join unions than any other group. So when President Obama imposed new restrictions on organizing unions, and make it easier for companies to dismiss and disregard union contracts he struck a blow first and hardest against black collective action for economic security.”
  • “Peter Gleick, the scientist behind the sting on the Heartland Institute, has announced he is stepping down – at least temporarily – from the institute he has led for more than 20 years. In a brief letter on Friday evening, Gleick asked the board of directors of the Pacific Institute to grant him a ‘temporary short-term leave of absence’, while it investigated his use of deception to obtain sensitive documents from Heartland, which he then leaked to the press.”
  • “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ comments about erasing the Arabic identity of Jerusalem inflammatory and contemptible, according to Reuters. Speaking at a conference in Qatar, Abbas said the 1967 annexations of Arab East Jerusalem by Israel “are null and void. East Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Palestine,” according to AFP.”
  • “At Bangon Books, a second-hand shop in the beating heart of Rangoon, U Htay Hong is doing a brisk trade in Aung San Suu Kyi’s collected writings, Freedom from Fear. That well-known ‘subversive’ George Orwell is also prominently displayed, as are editions of Thant Myint-U’s unauthorised history of Burma, The River of Lost Footsteps. ‘In the old days, these were considered “dissident” books and I had to keep them hidden in a back room,’ Hong explains. ‘Now, the intelligence police no longer seem to care’.”
  • From WBAI, New York. Prof Richard Wolff’s weekly broadcast, Economic Update. Prof Wolff speaks with Prof Richard McIntyre, whose current research is on why neo-liberal economics has been more successful in the United States than in Western Europe. Scroll down to Saturday, 25 Feb at 12:00pm.

Update: “WikiLeaks has begun releasing a cache of what it says are 5.5m emails obtained from the servers of Stratfor, a US-based intelligence gathering firm with about 300,000 subscribers.

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine. If you haven’t already, share this video with others.

The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.