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"As often as their skins are wholly burned, we shall give them in exchange other skins" (Koran 4:56) The Bureau of United Religions proudly presents: The Empathy Box© the new revolutionary machine for improving your life and faith http://www.empathybox.biz/ The best scientists and theologians gathered together to contribute to its creation and now the result is in your hands! Let's bring together all your friends, your beloved family and colleagues. Turn on the Empathy Box© and you are ready to experience a genuine and sound spiritual sensation. Touch the metal spheres, hold your hands and get ready to feel an electric shock that will make your soul burn for joy! Forget all those long and boring ceremonies you got used to: now religion can be enjoyed completely with no frills merely by sitting in your living room. The Empathy Box is distributed by http://iocose.org Please contact us for a free demonstration! "An empathy box it's an extension of your body; it's the way you touch other humans, it's the way you ...

From: Ravikant What happens when a corporate giant like yahoo lays off people? Who is the first to be fired? Never thought it would be somebody working with its so-called commons project! It was just the other day in Taipei we celebrated George's efforts at bulding the flickr commons. Read this account in her own words and follow the link if you want to explore more.- ravikant http://george08.blogspot.com/2008/12/not-quite-what-i-had-in-mind.html December 15, 2008 Not quite what I had in mind. by George Oats I wrote this 3 days ago on a plane. I've been cooking up an end-of-year blog post, feeling like my 35th year was one of the best so far. I've been unbelievably fortunate to spend quite a lot of it traveling the world to tell people about The Commons on Flickr. I've spoken in front of hundreds of people, sat in meetings in the bowels of museums, pored over a photographic archive in person, sent a ton of emails that I enjoyed writing (wtf?), met too many fascinating people to list, made...

Bwo INURA list Dear Tino, Yes, it would be very valuable to share perspectives among Inurians. We all need it. Both of these calls are related to the Athens Polytechnic occupation, solidarity and common causes around the world. And there are many more calls every day that make it happen. From students, immigrants, youth, workers, prisoners, communities and so on coming together. There is not much time for translations but I am sure a lot of these have reached you. (context: there had been two, apparently contradictory, calls for solidarity demos) I am in Berlin, not in Athens right now. These are extraordinary times. People in Greece are on the streets every day in tens of thousands and whenever possible report exceptional things. Because the state system (especially police, courts & prisons as you have seen) systematically ignones, misrepresents and punishes (=murders literally on occasion) everyone around (except the 'unknown' few). Along with everything these days and a distinguished history of Greek and g...

Original email from Variant Magazine: Sign this letter to urge MSPs to withdraw their support for Creative Scotland Following a public meeting in Glasgow on Wednesday 10th December 2008, the following letter has been complied from artists' concerns about the formation of Creative Scotland. Creative Scotland has been deemed as a wholly negative proposal that will have a major impact on culture, and on artists based in Scotland This matter has reached a crisis point and requires urgent attention. If you support the majority of concerns raised in this letter and the request for MSPs to stand against the formation of Creative Scotland, we ask you to electronically sign below. The letter will then be sent to those stated. Please sign and return by 20th December 2008 To be included as a signatory, send you confirmation to: arts.futures.scotland@googlemail.com Please include your full name and email address. The letter will then be compiled and sent to: Cross-Party Group in the Scottish Parliament on Culture and Med...

> Since I've been reading a lot of (post)autonomist theory these days, this > essay did catch my eye, but it does an odd job of advancing a few touch-ups > on the theory of cognitive labour while, at the same time, seemingly turning > around to grasp after a discourse that doesn't seem to accurately describe > (or inspire) what is going on anymore. I agree completely, this article could have been published on a journal such as Derive&Approdi in the 1990s and one could not tell the difference. His author is (or was) a member of Sapienza Pirata, a Negrian collective of the University of Rome La Sapienza. > There is nothing 'central' to cognitive labour save for knowledge production > itself, which both Negri (in Porcelain Workshop) and Marx muse is 'in the > brain' of the worker. What is central is each and every individual, which is > where Negri's theory of the multitude draws its strength: resistance is > everywhere. Exactly and resistance is everywhere because we have entered the phase of what Hardt and Neg...

On 17-Dec-08, at 9:20 PM, onto wrote: >> From New York City: > > With solidarity and love from New York to Greece, > To Italy, France and Spain, > To the coming insurrection. ...and add Canada to this. I know we are not occupying universities and we are not making the media, but we have been fighting quite a bit in the past year. York University Teaching Assistants, Contract Faculty and Graduate Assistants have been on (quite a battled one) strike since November 6. our first priority is to target the casualization of education and job precarity in academia. you can read some info here ( http://www. 3903strike.ca/) . we have "cloned our university (www.yorku.ca) website (yorkisus.org), we have posted youtube videos to denounce the increasingly corporate situation of our academic institutions and the appalling isolation and humiliation of part-time faculty. a group of undergraduate students have joined us too. the university is fighting back using its big corporate power and its highly paid lawyers with big med...

it is worth remembering that this occupation follows the vote of no-confidence in Bob Kerry, President of the New School since 2001 and former governor of Nebraska. This New York Times article provides useful background information to understand the context of this struggle: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/nyregion/11kerrey.html onto wrote: >>From New York City: > >We have just occupied New School University. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

> We need to find a new and public line of escape Who exactly is this 'we' you speak so highly of? > We need to organize self-educational practices Is not our desire to force organization upon a population contradictory to properties of self-educational practices? > autonomous institution can there be such a thing? do we want there to be? i am not sure d&g would agree with all that you propose.... cheers! mark ____________________ mark edward grimm | m.f.a | ed.m syracuse u. | vpa foundations | timearts ________________________________________   --- On Tue, 12/16/08, Stevphen Shukaitis wrote: > From: Stevphen Shukaitis > Subject: No Future > To: "Nettime" > Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 4:23 PM > No Future > Paolo Do # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: rel="...

>From New York City: We have just occupied New School University. We liberate this space for ourselves, and all those who want to join us, for our general autonomous use. We take the university in explicit solidarity with those occupying the universities and streets in Greece, Italy, France and Spain. This occupation begins as a response to specific conditions at the New School, the corporatization of the university and the impoverishment of education in general. However, it is not just this university but also New York City that is in crisis: in the next several months, thousands of us will be losing our jobs, while housing remains unaffordable and unavailable to many and the cost of living skyrockets. So we stress that the general nature of these intolerable conditions exists across the spectrum of capitalist existence, in our universities and our cities, in all of our social relations. For this reason, what begins tonight at the New School cannot, and should not, be contained here. Thus: with this occupati...

Since I've been reading a lot of (post)autonomist theory these days, this essay did catch my eye, but it does an odd job of advancing a few touch-ups on the theory of cognitive labour while, at the same time, seemingly turning around to grasp after a discourse that doesn't seem to accurately describe (or inspire) what is going on anymore. > The number of registered students has been constantly increasing ever > since the Second World War: this gives us a measure and an idea of how > much it has changed, of how central it has become. Sure, universities are everywhere and now every Western child is expected to have a post-secondary degree. But the rise in numbers (quantitative change) does not necessarily entail a change in status of the university (qualitative change), a change that is moreover spatiogeographic to the orbit of power (becoming a 'center'). Moreover, shouldn't we first propose & analyze that the rise in numbers is more likely indicative of the rise in population...? And I have to ask, these days...

I waded through the essay with high initial hopes. But it mostly appears to be a swamp of assertions without much to back them. (Maybe my reaction is due to an American perspective.) Corporations do play an ever-more prominent role in universities, here as elsewhere, which is mostly deplorable, but what the essay actually has to say about why this is happening , what it means, and what to do about it seems vague at best. As to the notion that strikes and other actions demonstrated the worker's reasserting their intellectual role vis a vis Fordism, that sounds hopeful but certainly does not accord with my reading of what happened, at least in this country. Nor does it bear on how universities have evolved. The prescriptions offered seem to have little to do with the critique, and seem highly implausible now, though something like them were taken up forty years ago, in '68. Best, Michael On Dec 16, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Stevphen Shukaitis wrote: > No Future > Paolo Do > ; from ephemera volume 8 number 3, "universit...

Re: 7 plants Amy maxigas - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: Amy Subject: Re: 7 plants Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:21:23 -0500 I for one would prefer if the plants could controll their own growth On Dec 13, 2008, at 6:03 PM, maxigas wrote: > hi! > > it would be perhaps more interesting to control the growth of the plants > according to statistics of poverty or environmental conditions on each > continent. interestingly, though, publicity will likely reproduce the > same divides. :j > > maxigas > > From: "info@collectiefmei2007.nl" > Subject: 7 plants > Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:02:43 +0100 > >> In a world dominated by faster and faster digital machinery, it's time >> to stress the merits of 'slow computing' and the beauty of non- digital >> visualization, as i...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k73DtP85pON2RWRoqw # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

Wed., Dec. 17 at 1:30, Federal Plaza, Chicago Please join us! We have a permit. We have bubbles. We have purpose. We have people (we need more). And we have had enough. http://bubbleover.net Statement by Wade Tillett, Chicago Public School Parent and Teacher. Bubble (Pro)test Press Conference Wednesday, December 17, 2008 Federal Plaza, Chicago Bubble Over It???s time for bubble tests to be over. Instead, learning must bubble over with the strengths, interests, and personality of each student. A bubble, like the ones floating around here today, is a film of soap inflated with air inside. A bubble test is a set of questions given to students where they choose one of a number of answers by filling in the circle, the bubble, that corresponds to the answer they think will be counted as correct. Which kind of bubble do you think is best for eight-year-olds? The basic problem with bubble tests is this: it turns each, unique human being into a number. After that, the brutality is abstract. Things are done to those ??...

---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: HAR2009 CALL FOR PAPERS From: "Koen Martens" Date: Tue, December 23, 2008 12:21 To: nettime-nl@nettime.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS HAR2009 (http://www.har2009.org) Hacking At Random, International Technology & Security Conference August 13-16, 2009, near Vierhouten, The Netherlands (please circulate, pdf version at http://har2009.org/index.php?p=86) >From the ancient days long before the first wayback-machine snapshot, hackers have a track record for appropriating technology that was meant for something completely different and putting it to alternative uses. And every four years since 1989, the international hacker community has descended upon The Netherlands in great numbers for a conference that focuses on contemporary and future issues surrounding technology and its social and political consequences. One reason that these conferences have be...

Bwo Sarai Reader-list/ Taraprakash (Click 'n' hit with the Ducati Model 271 on http://www.sockandawe.com ;-) Bush Shoe' Gives a Turk Firm Footing In the Market. By SEBNEM ARSU. ISTANBUL. When a pair of black leather oxfords hurled at President Bush in Baghdad produced a gasp heard around the world, a Turkish cobbler had a different reaction: They were his shoes. We have been producing that specific style, which I personally designed, for 10 years, so I couldn't have missed it, no way,' said Ramazan Baydan, a shoemaker in Istanbul. As a shoemaker, you understand. Although his assertion has been impossible to verify -- cobblers from Lebanon, China and Iraq have also staked claims to what is quickly becoming some of the most famous footwear in the world -- orders for Mr. Baydan's shoes, formerly known as Ducati Model 271 and since renamed 'The Bush Shoe,' have poured in from around the world. A new run of 15,000 pairs, destined for Iraq, went into production on Thursday, he said. A British distributor has asked...

Here's a recent entry from my blog http://goldhaber.org/blog/?p=168 . I've been suggesting a somewhat different longterm view. Money?s Dream Life Gets Nightmarish ?? And Just Might Stay That Way Sunday, December 21st, 2008 A couple of years ago, I pointed out that in some ways money was losing its hold on reality. Routine activities and producing things to which can be assigned some relatively stable amount of money now occupy far less than majority of human effort ? while more and more energy goes into the new attention economy, which is only loosely connected with money or markets. At the same time, the growing financial sector takes on the possibility of treating money as a pure symbol, without any underlying or inherent meaning. Financial money can grow or shrink, and this has real effects in what is left of the market economy, but many of the shenanigans within finance do not really do anything beyond the purely symbolic. Now the future of money has become more imbued with the excesses of money?s dream l...

On 26/12/2008, at 8:19 PM, Felix Stalder wrote: > [This is the last third of a NYT article about an issue I understand > less and less. Why are the Chinese continuing to buy US debt particularly > now that the yield is effectively zero? The short term logic is > understandable and well explained below. To keep the system going. But > what about the long term? Contrary to what this article suggests, I > doubt that this is going to last forever. But how is this going to > break? Through massive inflation and much higher interest rates? This is > all puzzling to me, even if I suspect this is a key piece of the puzzle. > Felix] Felix, Yes I read that article last night (my time) too. Several things spring to mind. In any crisis there is a 'flight to quality', in other words, people with cash seek to minimise exposure to risk. In a small crisis this might mean that smaller or risk-exposed companies suffer and large stable companies operating in sectors not regarded as affected (the sectors might vary according to ...

One might expect the US to default on its debts to China, and dare the Chinese to do something about it, sabers rattling. The PRC cannot withdraw its money any more than can US taxpayers. Yesterday an economist, at the New School in New York, proclaimed that the financial crisis is no threat to the the US so long as it is the sole superpower. Money exists only as data, is in fact nothing tangible, and cannot prevail against military might. The PRC floats in a small boat. Paulson is supremely confident in his capabilities as bankers are forever wont -- the world cannot function without banks, no matter a few ups and downs the system eventually self-corrects its self-regulation, sure there will be felons going too far, and over- reaching debtors must go under or else whither faith in financial markets. Paulson knows nothing else and is thus a perfect mouthpiece. Imagine that the second $350 billion was distributed as generous unemployment benefits, say $5,000 per week to each person seeking a job futilely, to s...

http://mpettis.com/2008/12/no-f-ing-way-these-numbers-are-awful/ Where he discusses also the prospects of policy reactions during the unfolding crisis. He adresses it as an overcapacity problem, requiring adjustment on the Chinese side. Whilst the Chines central bank tries to blame the Americans for overconsumption. One should look at the unequal couple China / US not only in terms of debtor/producer and creditor/consumer but also from a different angle. Main interests in both countries were perfectly well served throughout the last years. The capitalists in the US made a bargain by profiting from wage arbitrage, selling stuff to their increasingly indebted consumers. China has run an incredible development programme, rushing a process of industrialisation and modernization within the 20 years. The credit to the US served for something like an inverse development aid programme, directed at China's own economy. The trade inequality, the overproduction, the dollar peg - all were necessary ingredients, welcome o...