Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

The US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are becoming impossible to ignore.

Dozens of new books appear to provide an answer: we can save the world by embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for example, the Guardian published an extract of the new book by Sheherazade Goldsmith, who is married to the very rich environmentalist Zac, in which she teaches us "to live within nature's limits". It's easy: just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book also contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word: you can save the planet in your own kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment then summed up the problem in seven words. "This is for people who don't work."

How many pipe bombs might it take to end U.S. democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on September 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist "incident" or if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of "public order" or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have uncovered a molecular mechanism that governs the formation of fears stemming from traumatic events. The work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dorkbot Vienna #3 (hosted by J. Grenzfurthner/monochrom)

H a c k i n g  G a m e  M a c h i n e s

with Martin Pichlmair and friends.

June 23, 2007 @ Vienna's Metalab

Games are a defining medium of our time. The majority of them is produced by multinational corporations, designed to appeal to the mass audience, locked on drm-protected and region-coded data media, and sold, shrink-wrapped in plastic. yet resourceful hackers and artists are working on the liberation of this medium. serious games, homebrew games, and game art are results of their great efforts. Martin Pichlmair and his guests will present a number of game machine hacks - from a modified pinball machine dating back to the 70s to musical instruments running on the nintendo ds.

Let's crack open the game machine a bit further.

Click To Play

Takfirism is a centuries-old belief that suddenly revived among Islamic militants in Egypt after the Israeli victory in 1967. It claims that the Muslim ummah (the community of believers) has been weakened by deviation in the practice of Islam. Takfirism classifies all non-practising Muslims as kafirs (infidels) and calls upon its adherents to abandon existing Muslim societies, settle in isolated communities and fight all Muslim infidels.

Small isolated groups of Takfirist militants survived throughout the Arab world in the 1970s. They regrouped alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, during the war of resistance against Soviet forces. The Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Uzbek leader Tahir Yuldash and Sheikh Essa, who were later the top leadership of al-Qaida, were among the fiercest proponents of Takfirism in these years. After the US invasion it flourished in Iraq, where the al-Qaida leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, killed in June 2006, was a leading exponent.

After 2003 Takfirism gained support among al-Qaida's middle leadership and the rank and file. These ideologues were no longer defined by their hatred of the US military machine. Takfirism encompassed the belief that infidels within Muslim societies gave strength to the enemy and were a danger to be eliminated. Leaders of infidel Muslim societies were prime candidates for elimination before those who had been led astray from Islam could be brought back into the fold. The Takfirists were enemies of all non-practising Muslims. The difficult, isolated terrain of North and South Waziristan was their new sanctuary. [...]

What will it take to shine a spotlight on the vast income gap between the very rich and everyone else in the US today, in the way that Michael Moore's film Sicko exposes the injustices of privatized health care? Ten years ago, on August 4, 1997, when 185,000 UPS workers went out on strike, they made headline news. They forced a discussion of inequality onto the front pages of national newspapers and they tapped into the economic anxiety of the vast majority of Americans, so that the public sided with the Teamsters against UPS by a 2-to-1 margin. The Teamsters then went on to win one of the best contracts ever from UPS and they showed the power that unions have in taking on large, powerful, multinational corporations.

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!...

The most famous thing ever written about surfing, Tom Wolfe's essay, "The Pump House Gang," doesn't have much to do with surfing. Instead, Wolfe focuses on the hostility between adult society and surfing understood as an outsider cult and defined, more or less, by mindless adolescence. This is a strange position for Wolfe (of all people) to take, since embedded within actual surf culture is something that should be right up his alley: an elaborate, informal, borderline inscrutable code of masculine status.

Many high-quality surf spots are governed by a "pecking order," for example. And those who surf the biggest, most dangerous waves are called "hellmen" and "gladiators." So it's no surprise that—despite all the clichés about blissed-out surf-stoners—the most serious and ambitious surf movies convey a traditional, indeed heroic ethos. And it's probably no surprise that they sometimes share a peculiar fate with other films that offer idealized portraits of heroic masculinity, such as this year's 300—the tendency to have clueless film critics misread them as "homoerotic." [...]

The SiFeet Pussy Foot is the ultimate fantasy sex toy for foot fetishists. This size 6, 100% silicone foot is cast in pure silicone from a real life actual, beautiful female foot. In the sole of this lovely foot is a fully functional and totally fuck-able silicone vagina.

"There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like 'ginormous,' " said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. "But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power."

Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.

Visitors to www.galaxyzoo.org will get to see stunning images of galaxies, most of which have never been viewed by human eyes before. By sorting these images into "spiral galaxies" (like our own Milky Way) or "elliptical galaxies", visitors will help astronomers to understand the structure of the universe. The new digital images were taken using the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico.

So, the options are as follows: al-Qaeda is so angry about the iPhone's inflated pricetag, lack of user-changeable battery and 3G capability that it is planning something really big; or Ozzie's sidekick Ayman al-Zawahir has been stunned into reluctant admiration by Apple's audacious UI and crisp-as-a-Baghdad-winter-morning MP3 playback.

A dynamic system with magnetic interaction between its parts visualizes the increasing difficulty of prediction the farther into the future we attempt to look.

In "A New Deal for Globalization," (Foreign Affairs July/August 2007), Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter have made a contribution by recognizing that what they call "a protectionist drift in public policy" in the U.S. is a result of the fact that the majority of the US labor force has seen little (in recent decades) or no (in the last five years) income gains. They even acknowledge that "it is plausible that there is a connection" between the "skewed pattern of income growth" in the United States and globalization, something that most of the economics profession is still in denial about.

"Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people... [But] the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along."

Oiwan reached out to Jake for help via Flickr mail. She blames the photo-sharing site's recently implemented content rating/blocking system in part for the legal situation she now faces in Hong Kong.

Jake believes the program, as implemented, amounts to censorship, and helps governments which are already unfriendly to online free speech limit that speech more efficiently.

They aren't the world
They aren't the children
They're just fossils and bureaucrats and rock 'n' roll has-beens...

In November 2006 over six thousand officials from 180 countries, along with representatives from international business and labour movements, NGOs and faith groups, schoolchildren and a host of other observers, gathered in Kenya for two weeks of discussion. They were there to attend the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Second Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. Chauffeured from the airport, through the vast slums that constitute much of the country's urban landscape, and sequestered in Nairobi's tree-lined UN compound, they came, ostensibly, to agree current and future actions to meet the overall objective of the convention: to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change. That is, they met apparently to avoid catastrophe.

This catastrophe has several names – salinity valves, carbon pumps, methane outbursts, glacial retreats, deep water formation – together signifying the collapse of the material basis for life itself. The breakthrough that climate observers, NGOs and at least some delegates wanted to see most is agreement on an international treaty to take over from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The European Union, in particular, has called for warming not to rise more than two degrees above preindustrial levels, representing about 400–450 parts per million (ppm) of greenhouse gases to non-greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If this can be done then everybody can apparently rest easy: a few extra hurricanes, a couple of submerged islands, some odd weather events, but overall an environment the rich can get richer in, the poor supposedly become less poor. After hours of discussion, silent and exhausted, rows of impassive middle-aged men and women with coffee-stained grey hands clapped the final smack of the gavel that sounded the end of the conference. And achieved an agreement to carry on talking.

The political process to agree what needs to be done is frozen. Such paralysis has a particular poignancy, for at stake in this process – the earth's climate – is what should, by definition, be common to the totality of any imagined global community. Indeed, for some, it is this aspect of climate change that has been seen to offer a certain perverse form of political hope, as a phenomenon that, observable and empirical as it is, also possesses some inherently transcendental force of appeal. Certainly, the ultimate horizon of the earth as condition of possibility for human existence itself (at least for the present) takes the visible threat of climate change into a different realm than just another example of the many in history that constitute the so-called 'tragedy of the commons'. If Kant once thought that the global form of the earth itself offered hope for 'perpetual peace', today, from the perspective of current planetary transformations in its ecology, the earth appears as something like an apocalyptic pure sum. Emissions circulate equally throughout the system. With global warming it precisely makes no difference where greenhouse gases are emitted. [...]

When the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress in 2002, the view that "values matter," once marginal in Democratic circles, suddenly became the talk of the town. To be sure, some analysts continued to argue that the Democrats had plenty of good policy ideas and simply required a better campaign strategy and effective policymaking once in office. But a new conversation had started, beginning from the premise that Democratic success depended on reclaiming the moral high ground.

John Kerry's defeat in 2004, assumed by many to be the product of perceived Democratic deficiencies in "moral values," gave this conversation renewed energy. And while some in the "new values" camp pointed to the importance of a specifically religious morality, others urged the Democrats to focus on a secular but morally demanding vision of the common good. In spring 2006 Michael Tomasky argued in The American Prospect that the Democratic Party should restore the idea of the "common good" to its proper place at the core of the party's political identity. This argument provoked a widespread debate, and the term is now increasingly visible in the liberal apparatus of bloggers, think tanks, and even consulting groups.

The idea of the common good is the right place to start, but it is not well understood. More often than not it is used as a decorative term, a sound bite. Consider even Tomasky's description: the liberalism of the Democratic Party, brought to power by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and upheld for three decades thereafter, "was built around the idea—the philosophical principle—that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest." As a definition of the common-good tradition, this is uncontroversial if somewhat redundant. Probing further, however, he describes the common good as the "moral basis of liberal governance—not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity." The contrast he ultimately makes here, separating the common good from concepts of justice, equality, and rights, is jarring, and the argument loses its bearing. In what seems a throwaway line, it becomes clear why. The common good, he claims, is a matter of "faith" rather than ideology—but "not religious faith." It's about "faith in America and its potential to do good." [...]

Attention, parents, kids, anybody who appreciates good movies and great food! Ratatouille is a feast so fantastic you'll go running back for seconds. And if you pay close attention, you'll also see that it's a film that tells two great stories at the same time.

The first story is what you'll see on the big screen. And the second—at least the way I see it—is a more subtle, almost allegorical re-telling of what really happened to one of the 20th century's most-loved and enduring pop culture icons .... Walt Disney himself.

Once upon a time, there was an adventurous French chef named Auguste Gusteau (think Walt Disney) whose Paris kitchen (think Disney studios) was famous for awe-inspiring cuisine (Disney's classic animated features, like Pinocchio).

Gusteau knew his strengths and focused on them, serving up heaping plates of excellence to the delight of the customers at his self-titled restaurant. Gusteau's and its namesake became legendary worldwide.

But then, for one reason or another, the quality of his work began to falter. He died, and his successors (think .... Michael Eisner?) sold out, stamping the Gusteau (Disney) name on all manner of mediocrity. The master's face and name eventually flew like a banner over mediocre microwave meals (frivolous features like Pocahontas, and disposable straight-to-video sequels to Disney classics). And eventually his name represented fare that seemed completely unrelated to his legacy (The Muppets?).

And while the masses seemed content to choke down anything contained in a Gusteau can (or released on a Disney label), it looked like Gusteau's name would become synonymous with trash. [...]

"c-base space station", which is a vital part of Berlin's governmentally unfunded subculture, is under pressing threat of closure. Until the 08/30/07 they have to come up with several months' worth of outstanding rent, otherwise they will be evicted and the space station will have to close.

If that happens an important and fertile ground for ideas and projects (e.g. berlin's free wavelan networks "freifunk.net" and the wikipedia regulars' table ), event location (e.g. exhibitions, concerts, open stage sessions) and space for open knowledge transfer and last but not least a home for creatives, utopians and space cadets will dissapear from berlin's cultural landscape.

YOU can help to avoid this, by getting engaged and involved: drop by at the facilities in Rungestrasse, Berlin,Germany and participate, become a member or just go online and hit the donation button on their website http://www.c-base.org.

The International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award (I.L.E.C.A.)
Sponsored Motorola Information Protection Services, USA

The Society For The Policing Of Cyberspace (POLCYB) and Motorola Information Protection Services are pleased to announce The International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award (I.L.E.C.A.) Call For Entries.

Created jointly by POLCYB and Motorola Information Protection Services, the International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award recognizes innovation and best practices pertaining to prevention, detection, and/or response to cybercrimes. This is your chance to spotlight your law enforcement agency for fighting cybercrime by using proactive and successful inter-agency collaboration with community partners.

The International Law Enforcement Cybercrime Award program honours achievements in one or more of the following goals:

* Prevention of Cybercrime
* Detection of Cybercrime
* Response to Cybercrime

Rowling has neither the depth of a Pullman, nor the comic exuberance of a Roald Dahl, nor the mythological gravity of a C S Lewis. Not by a long chalk. But - as the astonishing success of her books shows - she has something, and she has it in spades. We can call it, for want of a better word, magic.

A revival in vinyl sales suggests that there may be a future for music sold as a physical arte-fact. Six times more 7-inch singles were sold in 2006 than in 2001, and with their current single, Icky Thump, the White Stripes have achieved higher weekly sales of 7-inches than any band for 20 years.

Police and securocrats know that there aren't enough real terrorists in the world, which is why they have to keep manufacturing them. [...] Today we have news from London, where a "big [explosive] device" was discovered inside a parked car near Piccadilly Circus. The device consisted of petrol, propane gas cylinders, and nails. The car containing it had been abandoned after its driver was observed piloting it erratically, crashing it, then running off, like a true professional. Ambulance workers called to assist nearby noticed what they initially thought was smoke inside the car, but which likely was petrol vapour, and contacted police. [...] Ah, if it had detonated. Yes, it could have been a real horror. Only, the device could not have detonated. Not under any circumstances. You see, the terrorist wannabe clown who built it left out a crucial element: an oxidiser.