Comrades all over the world!

I still shiver! My heart is filled with universal anger!
Something unspeakable happened!

Again, the mainstream online media outlet "Boing Boing TV" reports about the diplomatic visit of His Excellency Ambassador Nikita Chrusov to the "United States"! Just a friendly vacation trip!
And they label it as "Terrorist Training!"
What an unforgivable insult!

They cut a nice little color holiday film of 12 hours and 35 seconds down to a mere 4 minutes in black and white! Completely out of context, the Ambassador and his secretary look like incapable imbeciles! And moreover, they pretend that they cracked our glorious cypher! This is a LIE! Data engineer [NAMEENCODED] told me that they will never break the code:
"They will never break the code, Sir Blogging Officer Sir!"

Instead they add silly jokes and silly American (!) cats!
I curse those Westerners and their weak immune system! They think they can insult us in their stupid comments and hide behind liberal pseudonyms, but they wet their pants when they hear "universal healthcare!" Stupid assholes!

This video is an incredible symbolic assault!
Fight the great fight of ignoring that crap!
Saw off the Society of the Spectacle!

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why. [...]

In this year of symbolic optimism, when a black man is a leading contender in the presidential race—as well as being a leading recipient of contributions from Wall Street, big insurance, and military contractors—the need to describe life as it is actually lived by millions of African Americans has never been greater.

Although our black presidential candidate would have us believe that African Americans are, as he has said many times, "90 percent of the way" to freedom, justice, and true equality, the facts seem to say otherwise. As recently as 1964, a majority of all U.S. prisoners were white men. But since 1988—the year Vice President George H.W. Bush rode to the White House stoking white fears with an ad campaign featuring convicted black killer and rapist Willie Horton—the black one- eighth of America's population furnished the majority of new admissions to its prisons and jails.

Every 11 years or so, the sun gets a little pissy. It breaks out in a rash of planet-sized sunspots that spew superhot gas, hurling clouds of electrons, protons, and heavier ions toward Earth at nearly the speed of light. These solar windstorms have been known to knock out power grids and TV broadcasts, and our growing reliance on space-based technology makes us more vulnerable than ever to their effects. On January 3, scientists discovered a reverse-polarity sunspot, signaling the start of a new cycle — and some are predicting that at its peak (in about four years) things are gonna get nasty. Here's a forecast for 2012.

Ft. Mason Center, Bldg C, room 362
http://fortmason.org/directions

China's crackdown against Tibetan protesters ahead of the Summer Olympics in Beijing carries with it a brutal echo from the past. Scores of people, including school children are reported dead and more repression has been promised. The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), said "[We must] resolutely crush the 'Tibet independence' forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities."

Even after decades of occupation, the ruthlessness of the crackdown has shocked much of the world. It happens the week after the US State Department removed China from its list of the world's worst human rights offenders.

The brave, unflagging Mars rover Spirit, who has lived on the Red Planet for almost four years, has been given a death sentence by the U.S. government. Right now, the little robot is resting on a sunny slope, waiting out the winter and preparing to do more tests on the Martian atmosphere. But now it looks like Spirit has rolled on its six wheels and done science experiments for the very last time. The U.S. government has forced NASA, this country's national space agency, to cut its budget by 4 million dollars. And that means only one rover, Opportunity, will survive. To say that this is a tragedy is an understatement.

The Mars rovers have been one of NASA's most proud achievements, and the information they gather today can help future planetary colonists tomorrow. While NASA is planning to land another rover on Mars within the next year, it's a shame to shut down a perfectly serviceable rover that could be supplementing what the new rover will learn.

Does a boomerang thrown in space return to its pitcher? It does if it was thrown inside an airy environment like the International Space Station, a Japanese astronaut proved last week. But scientists say he would have had different results if he had tossed the boomerang outside the orbiting outpost.

Takao Doi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, did the experiment while visiting the space station as part of NASA's latest space shuttle mission, which is scheduled to land on Wednesday.

The boomerang behaved no differently than on Earth, flying back to Doi after he threw it. "It flew just like on Earth, and I was really surprised and impressed," Doi told his wife in a chat from space, according to Japan's Mainichi Daily News.

A few months ago, about 125 leaders from religious institutions, civic organizations, and social service groups met at Etz Chaim synagogue in the town of Lombard, in DuPage County, to wrestle with a new reality: a budget crisis. Budget crises aren not supposed to happen in places like west suburban DuPage. It is home to nearly one million souls and more than 600,000 private sector jobs. It boasts a median income of $70,000, one of the highest in the nation. And yet the county, strapped for cash, was threatening to cut convalescent services, veterans’ services, housing assistance, breast cancer screening, and many other essential public functions.

The elegant, tapering signature of the Eiffel Tower is to be reshaped, altering the skyline of Paris, in time for the structure's 120th anniversary next year, the Société d'exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (Sete) has just announced.

Serero Architects of Paris has won the competition to redesign the structure's public viewing platform and reception areas. The winning design (above), which will be 276 metres (905ft) above the ground, will not require any permanent modification of the existing structure. It will double the capacity of the public viewing area on the tower's top floor.

The new platform will be bolted onto the tower using a web of Kevlar, an extremely strong and lightweight carbon fibre used in the construction of racing cars and body armour. The new platform will use a cantilevered design similar to the way that an aircraft's wings are attached to the fuselage.

At a press conference last December 18 at New Orleans' City Hall, Martin Suber of the Coalition To Stop Demolition explained the purpose of the fight to stop the razing of the city's four largest public housing complexes (aka "The Big Four"): "They're using New Orleans as an experiment, to privatize schools, cut back on bus service, and knock down housing projects. That's what we're fighting against and that's why people have come from all over the country to support us."

Arse Elektronika 2008: Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?
Call for Papers

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ARSE ELEKTRONIKA 2008
Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?
Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction

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Taking up where the successful conference in autumn 2007 left off, this year's Arse Elektronika stands under the motto "future" -- and the ways in which the present sees itself reflected in it. Maintaining a broadened perspective on technical development and technology while also putting special emphasis on its social implementation, this year's conference focuses on Science and Social Fiction.

The genre of the "fantastic" is especially well suited to the investigation of the touchy area of sexuality and pornography: actual and assumed developments are frequently depicted positively and approvingly, but just as often with dystopian admonishment. Here the classic, and continuingly valid, themes of modernism represent a clear link between the two aspects: questions of science, research and technologization are of interest, as is the complex surrounding urbanism, artificiality and control (or the loss of control). Depictions of the future, irregardless of the form they take, always address the present as well. Imaginations of the fantastic and the nightmarish give rise to a thematic overlapping of the exotic, the alienating and, of course, the pornographic/sexual as well.

In order to intelligently contextualize the abundance of queries that are involved here, this year's conference will be structured around three day-long discussion panels, each devoted to a specific theme. The impossibility of fitting many of these issues and relationships into such neat categorizations is not only accepted, but also encouraged.

Panel 1: Narration
Narrative positions and narrative media are closely linked in the treatment of the sexual and the pornographic. In the area of fantasization and its great variety of media differentiations (film, literature, computer games, etc.) this fundamental phenomenon is also expanded through the facet of a highly influential fan fiction. Submissions for this panel should deal e.g. with specific aspects of individual media, media complexes, distribution or reception.

Panel 2: Technology
Sexuality and pornography are manifestations of a social reality and are directly linked to questions of technological innovation, whereby fantasizing can also function as a motor of innovation. Submissions for this panel should deal e.g. with the present and future of technological developments, with social-technological aspects (e.g. space travel, plastic surgery, etc.) or with conditions of technologically driven development.

Panel 3: Politics
Science (and social) fiction, sexuality and pornography are often infused with colonialization strategies, conceptions of social norms and political strategies. Here the utopian, the dystopian and the xenophobic are mixed into a dangerous and interpretationally potent concoction. Submissions to this panel should deal with e.g. the juridification of the body, biopolitical standardization processes, political systems of domination and taboos surrounding interracial sex.

Submission requirements:

The 1-2 page submission, written in English, should be thematically oriented toward one of the three discussion panels. It should contain clear information regarding the methodology and up-to-dateness of the thesis it puts forth and detail the technical equipment required for the lecture's delivery. Submissions should be mailed to arse2008 AT monochrom.at no later than 2 May 2008. Organizational considerations make it impossible to take into account submissions received after this date.

Each participant's written lecture notes should reach the organizers no later than 15 September 2008, the version for publication in the proceedings of the symposium by 15 November 2008.

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This year marked the tercentenary of the birth of two of the greatest naturalists of the eighteenth century – the Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) and the Frenchman Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–88). In April, Linnaeus’s 300th birthday was celebrated in the scientific journals, museums put on special exhibits, newspapers published articles about his influence. But for Buffon’s birthday, in September, there were no candles on the cake. Even in France, not much fuss was made – a conference in Dijon, a few displays at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, a flurry of publishing; and that was it.

Fame is relative – Buffon has a crater on the Moon named after him, Linnaeus does not – but while the name of the Swedish thinker should provoke a glimmer of recognition in most biology students, that of Buffon is more likely to conjure up the athletic Italian goalkeeper than the father of French natural history. This is unfortunate, as Buffon was one of the great figures of biology, and one of the publishing sensations of the Enlightenment. Buffon’s ambition was astonishing: he wanted to summarize all human knowledge about the natural world, under the title L’Histoire naturelle, which began to appear in 1749. Not surprisingly, he did not complete this mammoth exercise – he managed to publish "only" thirty-six volumes in the space of thirty-nine years, limiting his focus to mammals, birds and minerals, while a further eight volumes appeared after his death.

On 26 March 1827 one of the undisputed geniuses of Western civilization, Ludwig von Beethoven, died in his room at Schwarzspanierstrasse 15 in Vienna. Seventy-six years later the address would become famous once again for another death. In the same room on 3 October 1903, shortly after the publication of his magnum opus, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), the 23-year-old Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger shot himself in the chest. He was found the next morning, fully clothed and covered in blood, and was taken to hospital but died soon after. Weininger had only recently returned from Italy, where he had gone for a holiday, after completing the work for which, if at all, he is remembered today. That he banked a great deal on the book's reception is evident from a remark he made to a friend shortly after finishing it. "There are three possibilities for me," he declared. "The gallows, suicide, or a future so brilliant that I don't dare to think of it." What actually happened can be seen as a self-fulfilled prophecy. Weininger had expected his work to excite critical acclaim, and while it was cordially received, it failed to make the stir he had hoped for. Disappointed in his masterpiece's reception, and troubled by his own depressions, Weininger, who considered himself a kind of 'Redeemer', decided to end his life where one of his greatest heroes had ended his, thus forging a link between Beethoven's genius and his own, genius in general and his own in particular being one of Weininger's central themes.

O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference is often ground zero for useful and meaningful tech stuff and the geeks who invent these things. In 2004, Flickr debuted here. In 2008, many DIY projects bloom, such as Socialbomb, ariel drones, binary LED watches, modular programmable open source gadgets and cheap open source robots. We talk to a few of their inventors.

Just to prove you are a human, please answer the following math challenge.
Calculate:
d/dx (3*sin(2*x + pi/2) + 3*cos(4*x - pi/2)) @ x=2*pi

Tonight! Corporate Anthems!

If you don't already have super St. Patrick's Day plans for this evening then you definitely want to head to Machine Project to check out Johannes from Monochrom talking about (and probably singing) the history and future of corporate anthems. If you are familiar with any of the above you know it'll totally be worth it, if you aren't, well you'll have to take my word on the fact that it will be damn amusing.

To do in LA: "Corporate Anthem" talk by Johannes from monochrom

The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.

His Excellency Ambassador of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, Nikita Chrusov, is entering the Marriott Hotel in San Diego, during O'Reilly ETech conference, to attend a corporate afterparty sponsored by Disney.com.

After four weeks of sea travel on a cargo ship and two weeks of journey in a Greyhound bus, the Ambassador is eagerly awaiting a meeting. He wants to confront Disney executives with a couple of questions, especially talking to them about their "sugar-coated bullets", that threaten the very existence of his country by brutal cultural force.

But then -- he is forcibly ejected from party, like cosmonaut from spaceship escape hatch. Commissar Chrusov calls this act "an unbelievable act of political shortsightness" and complains about mysterious green "poisoned pudding."

The term guerrilla communication refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Communication guerilla is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for political interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification. The talk's starting point will be a rather trivial insight: information and political education are completely useless if nobody wants to listen. Guerrilla communication doesn't focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In its own way, it inhabits a militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social communication. But it doesn't aim to destroy the codes of power and signs of control. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, they focus on detourning and subverting the messages transported. But what's new about all this? Nothing. But standing on the shoulders of earlier avantgardes, communication guerilla doesn't claim the invention of a new politics or the foundation of a new movement. It is merely continuing an incessant exploration of the jungle of communication processes, of the intertwined and muddled paths of senders, codes and recipients.

[...] I went in with dear friend Scott Beale, and was delighted to see about an hour into the party the arrival of character "His Excellency Ambassador of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Nikita Chrosov", dressed in a full Russian officer's uniform, accompanied by a live cameraman. He proceeded to liven up the party, meeting guests in character to a "t", endeavoring to meet and network with Disney executives, hoping to learn the strange customs of Disney and our country — he told me he wanted to meet a Disney rep and discuss what he called the effect of the "sugar coated bullet" of Disney on his people. [...]

--- Urgent message ---

March 4, 2008; 11 PM PST. San Diego, Marriott Hotel // His Excellency the Ambassador of Soviet Unterzoegesdorf, Nikita Chrusov, was expelled from a corporate afterparty organized by Disney.com. Commissar Chrusov calls this act "an unbelievable act of political shortsightness" and complains about "a poisoned pudding".

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It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.