The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants $10 million to investigate space-based weapons over the next year. As Pentagon budgets go, it is small change, but it is also a red flag for critics who worry that such plans could turn space into a shooting gallery.

Most of the $8.9 billion the Bush administration plans to spend on missile defence over the next year will go towards developing systems based on the ground, at sea, or in the air.

These defences "could be greatly enhanced", however, by adding space-based interceptors, Lieutenant General Trey Obering, head of the MDA, told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

What does the term 'chimera' conjure up for you? The fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology with the head of a lion, body of a goat and tail of a serpent? Or the biological version of a chimera – a mixed organism such as a cultivated plant consisting of two genetically different kinds of tissue as a result of mutation? British scientists are challenging the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Act 1990, which makes it illegal to mix human and animal eggs and sperm. They have submitted applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to proceed with experiments which will involve fusing human cells with eggs from rabbits, cows and goats. They hope to benefit from an established exception, the 'hamster test', by which doctors are allowed to test the quality of human sperm by fertilising a hamster egg and then destroying it no later than at the two-cell stage.

The scientists' aim is to create 'chimeric' embryos that would be 99.9% human and 0.1% animal in order to produce embryonic stem cells. Stem cells are known to be basic 'building-blocks' of the body and can develop into all other types of cells. If permission is granted, the embryos would be destroyed after fourteen days. At present human eggs are supplied by IVF patients, but as demand increases these are no longer sufficient. If given the go-ahead, Dr Stephen Minger of King's College London hopes to use cloned hybrid embryos to create stem cells carrying the defects responsible for conditions such as Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's, thus facilitating research.

Opponents have expressed strong views; Josephine Quintavelle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: "This is abhorrent ... there is a basic human feeling that animals and humans do not mix in these areas." Calum Mackellar of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics said "In this kind of procedure you are mixing at a very intimate level animal eggs and human chromosomes and you may begin to undermine the whole distinction between animals and humans."

"What we are witnessing is not so much the imminent death of CDs, but the death of the old methods of selling CDs. It's still possible to make money in the CD business--any business with more than $7 billion in retail sales should allow someone, somewhere, to make a profit. The incumbents are getting killed, but upstarts are thriving, using different methods."

There is talk once again of a one-state bi-national solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Oslo peace process failed to bring Palestinians their independence and the withdrawal from Gaza has not created a basis for a democratic Palestinian state as President George Bush had imagined: the Palestinians are watching their territory being fragmented into South African-style bantustans with poverty levels of over 75%. The area is heading to the abyss of an apartheid state system rather than to a viable two-state solution, let alone peace.

"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said her invention.
The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man by surgery, which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.

When police responded to a report that something smelled of smoke in the middle of the night, they found an old school bus that had been converted into a supersized oven for Passover matzos - complete with a smokestack, exhaust fans and working fire.

A building inspector said that while the bakery bus wasn't nearly up to code, it was "very creative."

Two things you can almost always count on:

1. Everything you touch is crawling with germs and viruses.

Not to freak you out or anything, but it's a fact. And, because of that fact, you're going to catch a cold or the flu eventually. I do, usually about once a year. I think that's about normal. And because I like being normal, the cold and/or flu usually hits me during the months between October and March, when it's coldest and when, frankly, it's more fun to be sick.

2. Cable TV is crawling with Sandra Bullock.

This is also a fact. It's much less of a freakout than the germs and viruses, but it's just as true. This week alone, on four different channels, you could watch "Hope Floats," "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous," "28 Days" and "The Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood." The last three are on twice.

In my life, these two phenomena are inextricably entwined. Now, "Premonition" notwithstanding (a film I saw in a private screening room two weeks ago because my job is to review movies — fancy, I know), I don't often watch Sandra Bullock's work in theaters, seated upright or wearing pants. I'm usually on the couch, in pajamas, covered in a blanket, eating soup. Because I like her best when I'm sick.

In Memoriam: 1929-2007

Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a thinker whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic, actually became a complex sign of the social reality of the postmodern century. In his thought there was always something simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction and terror.

In 1918, Igor Stravinsky composed The Soldier's Tale, a new-music/theatre piece designed for a performance tour; it was initially unsuccessful and lost money. In 1976, Philip Glass premiered his own theatrical production, Einstein on the Beach; it was quite successful, playing to capacity audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, it also lost money. (Glass wrote that during Einstein's brief, sold-out run at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the deficit was $10,000 a night.)

What happened? Stravinsky had the misfortune of seeing his planned tour cancelled due to a worldwide influenza outbreak. Glass fell victim to a subtler ailment: Baumol's cost-disease.

Baumol's cost-disease (sometimes more prosaically referred to as the Baumol-Bowen effect) is well-known among economists and arts administrators. First described by economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in 1966, the main symptom of the disease is this: labor costs in the performing arts will always inexorably rise, and at a faster rate than other industries. That's because in most industries, technological advances allow for increased productivity without an increase in labor. This doesn't happen in the performing arts, though.

monochrom's polytheist community wants to dissociate itself from any religious back-to-the-roots-movement in Western society, which aims to replace the dominant local monotheism with some older form of religious practice. A practice which they believe to be rooted in the original doctrine of that region and the people grounded in it.

One example for such a practice is given by the neo-pagan movement that is popular in the gothic, dark wave, and parts of the industrial scene.

[...]

A fiendishly complicated mathematical challenge has finally been conquered by mathematicians.

The team has exhaustively explored an esoteric 248-dimension structure called E₈ and the results take up 60 gigabytes of data. If written out in tiny print, the results would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

"E₈ was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood," says the team leader Jeffrey Adams from the University of Maryland in College Park, US.

E₈ (pronounced E-eight) is an example of a so-called Lie group. A Norwegian mathematician invented Lie groups in the 19th century to study symmetry. A Lie group underlies objects like balls, cylinders or cones that are symmetrical when rotated by small amounts.

Erwin Nyiregyhàzi (1903-1987) is the Velikovsky of classical music. If he is right, all the rest of us are completely wrong. And yet it is clear that he was in his own way a unique genius, and he was hailed as such from early childhood on by many of the world's musical elite.

The brain thinks, not man. Man is just a cerebral crystallization.

-- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

I don't pretend to account for the Functions of the Brain. I never heard of a System or a Philosophy that could do it.

-- Bernard Mandeville

What can a philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? More specifically, what can a materialist philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? At first glance, a phenomenon by which our 'corporeal imagination' -- what La Mettrie in the eighteenth century called the "magic lantern" working within the brain, projecting images created by our memory and intellect -- induces us to feel pains in a missing limb might seem like profound evidence that naïve, scientistic views of consciousness are false or at least useless. How could science with its measurements ever grasp the irreducibly subjective construction which my body is? Notice that in any case, regardless of our answer to such a question, a somato-psychic phenomenon like phantom limb syndrome raises significant issues regarding good old-fashioned notions such as the self, and slightly less old-fashioned notions such as the tandem 'self and brain'. Namely, if the self has already been deflated -- since Hume and Nietzsche in their respective traditions, and in recent times since Dennett -- what about the brain?

Tree-Nation is an ecological project with a focused objective: To plant 8 million trees in the Sahara to fight desertification! Large-scale plantation of trees will increase the land's productivity and re-generate the soil.

Tree-nation is an online community in which you can buy your own tree and become the guardian of a real and happy tree that we will plant in our park in Niger.

Our objective is two-fold:

Primarily environmental, but also closely linked to the humanitarian aid that it will provide in the long term. The project will benefit local populations in terms of welfare, education and farming practices. And that's not all... The benefits of preventing desertification extend beyond trees to other kinds of plant and animal life. Any opportunity to re-introduce and/or help prevent any endangered species will therefore become an integral part of our mission.

Office art (especially office drawing) is a regular technique used by people in white-collar working situations. There may not necessarily be a creative impulse to create office work, but the impulse of overcoming general work boredom or the necessity to help office workers keeping focus during telephone conversations and/or office meetings. This page is dedicated to collecting office art.

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin's godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just how inheritance works.

Unfortunately, everything in the previous paragraph is nonsense, apart from the Origin's publication date (and even that is wrong in Morse Peckham’s recently reissued variorum edition, which claims it was November 26). Nonetheless, statements like the ones I've just made summarize the popular view of Darwin and his great book; variations on them are made regularly throughout the media - even by those who really ought to know better. Take, for example, the mythical clash between science and religion. The Victorian "crisis of faith" predated the Origin by many years; Tennyson found himself stretching "lame hands of faith" when confronted by "nature red in tooth and claw" in 1850, almost a decade before Darwin went public. When Nature gave voice in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, instead of demonstrating the existence and beneficence of the creator, she expressed complete indifference for species, the "types" of living things: "'So careful of the type?' but no. / From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, 'A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go'".

>>Buy a cheap Lonely Planet Guide copy off the markets in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, India or any where else. Even a used and trashed copy or a rip-off pirate copy will do fine. Then, go to work modifying the covers and content of this Lonely Planet guide you bought using the same fonts and general style of the original. Your cover should illustrate a reality The Lonely Planet Guide never managed to convey.<<

In the summer of 1998 I discovered a number of postcards from the year 1942. They were sent by a twenty-something woman named Flora who traveled the United States alone, sending postcards to her family. The postcards moved me because Flora and I have many things in common: our ages, upbringing, and struggles, and our travels. This piece focuses on studying the cards, the messages they shared, and my own impressions gathered from them. I was able to categorize the cards into four dominant themes: age, sense of place, time, and communication (primarily with family), and from those themes I created a storyline. The storyline here deals with the marriage of a friend and the tension between independence and love.

Lionsgate and the Firm are partnering on a feature adaptation of Thomas Kinkade's painting "The Christmas Cottage," aiming for a holiday season release.

The project's part of an overall film-TV producing deal that Lionsgate made with Kinkade, who's become a successful artist via paintings with glowing highlights in idealistic settings, such as country cottages and streams.

Kinkade's company asserts it's sold $1.7 billion of artwork at retail over the past 15 years along with $2.4 billion in licensed product sales -- such as greeting cards and calendars -- over the past decade, resulting in Kinkade art being found in one out of every 10 U.S. households.

Imperialism is the system by which a dominant power is able to control the trade, investment, labor, and natural resources of other peoples. It takes different forms in different stages of capitalist development and has elements in common with the imperium of ancient empires. I want to lay out these structural elements, contrast them with the mainstream economists' view of exchange regulated by free market principles, and then discuss the specific form imperialism takes in our own time. Any essay on this subject written from the left must acknowledge the influence of the writing of Harry Magdoff and on this occasion his influence is highlighted.

It is an honor and a privilege to be here with you today, with the leaders and organizers of one of the most vital, just and cutting edge struggles of our time. I am very grateful to Javier Rodriguez and the other conveners of this conference for inviting me to participate. I want to start by highlighting three things that are unprecedented and interconnected, three current "upsurges," and I am not referring to Bush's escalation in Iraq.

The first is an upsurge in Latino immigration to the United States. Officially, there are 34 million immigrants in the U.S., 12-15 million of them undocumented, although we know that these are underestimates. Migration levels in recent years have surpassed those of the turn of the 19th century. Of these 24 million, 18-20 million are from Latin America, the majority from Mexico, but also from Central America, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere.

The second is the upsurge of repression, racism, and discrimination against immigrants – the minutemen, the denial of drivers licenses, attacks, evictions, escalating raids, public segregation and anti-immigrant jim crow, and so on. We are witnessing the criminalization of immigrants and the militarization of their control by the state.

Third is an unprecedented mass immigrant rights movement. We saw last Spring the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. They had the powers that be quite frightened. This is what poder popular looks like; what "power of the people" means.

What is the larger context and backdrop of anti-immigrant politics and immigrant struggle? In an attempt to answer this question I would like to put forward 10 points for analysis and discussion. [...]

THE TAUG SHOW, or Weird Scenes in the Gemeinschaft

by Steven Gray

The Taug Show is a talk show, it is
like a big mirage
of media and interviews,
they're wearing camouflage

as if they are invisible,
but everyone can see them
wearing little microphones,
some people want to be them.

Show your solidarity
by going to the show,
an intellectual lost and found,
they'll show you what they know.

The last show had a chemist doing
bondage, a guitarist
and a lawyer, there was no time
for a terrorist,

maybe next time. It is necessary to explode
your mind, the fall-out lasts forever,
you can take it on the road,

becoming open-minded with
a Marxist education,
putting things into perspective
more than Euclid did.

I'm going to Vienna for a
leftwing sing-along,
we need to network while the U.S.
keeps on going wrong,

and wallow in the absurdity
of theater, it's called
a theater of the absurd.
Your parents are appalled,

you need transparency: father, son and holy ghost
have been transformed into a German-
speaking talk-show host.

The show appearing once a month,
they do it on location,
powered by a full moon and the
analytic conversation,

but no go-go dancers, they rely on government funding.
Like the polyamorous
and polymers they're bonding

with each other and a brutal
zeitgeist and that's show biz,
a laptop and projectors and they
tell you what it is.

It's important to dissect
a middle-class facade,
and do it with the joi de vivre
of the Marquis de Sade.

The inside information that
outsiders can collect,
it keeps the women interested
and the men erect,

and when the show is over they are
standing at attention,
clapping for the Taug Show, its
dementia and dimension.

In the 70s, Jamaica has known lots of wonderful singers ... Sweet voices could be heard at almost every corner, coming from every studio's window ... One of those voices was Winston McAnuff's. The "Electric Dread", born in 1957 in Christiana, Jamaica, recorded his first album "Pick Hits To Click" in 1977 with legendary producer Derrick Harriott. [...] We met Winston just one hour before at he last show of this tour.

Late one night in the Tenderloin, 1968, my girlfriend (if you could call her that) was talking to one of her topless-bottomless dancing friends at an unlicensed bottle club deceptively called Coffee Ron. I ignored the riffraff staring at me for reading a book. Suddenly three men pulled a gun on the manager, and beat up the bartender who tried to intervene. Panic, screaming. My two lady escorts rushed behind me for protection. I held the Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism (1947) over my chest in an equally absurd attempt to protect myself from bullets.

It was horrible what happened next. The manager, a naive ex-prize fighter named Gene Echols, was beaten almost to death. In the hospital for weeks. Of course no one called the police, and when they asked questions afterward, no one talked. This was a typical night in the Tenderloin shortly after the Summer of Love.

Around the time I was living in that black hole, a San Francisco journalist wrote, "The Tenderloin seems overwhelming and eternal and no one can really say for sure what is happening within its sprawling reaches." As close as most people got was reading about it in the paper - salacious stories of sordid sex, thug wars, and murder. Having lived there, I can tell you it was indeed a horrific place. But the cost of living was cheap.