Bruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better known - for the 'Rat Park' experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the 'addictiveness' of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander's observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.

To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats' responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median forebrain bundles.

Since it came to light in 2004, it has become the quintessential holy image to appear on an item of food: the face, many say, of the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich. While it has sparked little piety—the Catholic church has not sanctioned it as divine—it has become the subject of controversy and ridicule and has even suffered insinuations of fakery. I once had custody of the curious item, and I was actually able to photograph and examine the image under magnification. Here are my findings. [...]

After Bolivia's new constitution was passed in a national referendum on Sunday, thousands gathered in La Paz to celebrate. Standing on the balcony of the presidential palace, President Evo Morales addressed a raucous crowd: "Here begins a new Bolivia. Here we begin to reach true equality."

Polls conducted by Televisión Boliviana announced that the document passed with 61.97% support from some 3.8 million voters. According the poll, 36.52% of voters voted against the constitution, and 1.51% cast blank and null votes. The departments where the constitution passed included La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, and Pando. It was rejected in Santa Cruz, Beni, and Chuquisaca.

The constitution, which was written in a constituent assembly that first convened in August of 2006, grants unprecedented rights to Bolivia's indigenous majority, establishes broader access to basic services, education and healthcare and expands the role of the state in the management of natural resources and the economy.

>>the goat cried out in an inhuman voice<<

In the fifties and through most of the sixties few if any Hollywood films dealt in a serious and authentic manner with black life. The only one that readily comes to mind is Michael Roemer's (a white filmmaker) Nothing But a Man (1964), starring Ivan Dixon as an itinerant black laborer in the Deep South of the early 60s. Nothing But a Man was a low-budget, realist film that managed to capture the humiliation of being a second-class citizen in the 60s south, and, more distinctively, African-American society's class differences and the fragility of its family structure.

There were no working black directors in Hollywood, and also only one genuine black film star during that period, Sidney Poitier. His self-possessed, charismatic, heroic presence graced a number of films ranging from Stanley Kramer's work of liberal poster art, The Defiant Ones (1958) to the glossy, chaste interracial romance Guess Who's Coming Home to Dinner (1967).

Poitier was the black star who Hollywood had designated as their token African-American. In fact, he was the first African-American actor to achieve leading man status in Hollywood films. In film after film he played a, character whose humanity and dignity made him consistently successful with white audiences. Poitier never bowed or scraped to whites, but he was so reasonable and humane that white audience knew that his anger, no matter how much he would smolder, would always stay within acceptable bounds, and that there was nothing to fear from the characters he portrayed. His characters were the type of men who could only arouse the hatred or abuse of the most ignorant or racist of whites.

During the more militant, and race-conscious sixties, black activists often put down Poitier's persona as middle-class, masochistic, and liberal. Nevertheless, he was one black actor who no longer had to sing, dance, clown, and roll his eyes to have his image appear on the screen. And though Hollywood's handling of the race problem was neither bold nor imaginative, given the conformist and racist political tenor of the time, the emergence of a token black star could still be viewed as a minor triumph. [...]

Barack Obama was sworn in on 20 January with a historic mandate for change. Extraordinary times call for bold actions and visionary ideas. Big government is back. Hopes are for an administration that is not only more progressive, but also smarter.

This could be good news for the arts—as long as they can build a convincing case that they serve the public interest. Long banished to the periphery of public affairs, arts policy is poised to make a comeback under various 21st-century guises: from economic stimulus programmes to "soft diplomacy" initiatives to digital-age intellectual property regulation. The opportunity to rethink government's role comes at a time when it is readily acknowledged among arts professionals that cultural support in America is outdated in its assumptions, sclerotic in its methods, biased in its outcomes, and inefficient in its use of philanthropic and taxpayer dollars. It's time to move on. But where?

So the typical Dane or Swede doesn't believe all that much in God. And simultaneously, they don't commit much murder. But aren't they a dour, depressed lot, all the same? Not according to Ruut Veenhoven, professor emeritus of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Veenhoven is a leading authority on worldwide levels of happiness from country to country. He recently ranked 91 nations on an international happiness scale, basing his research on cumulative scores from numerous worldwide surveys. According to his calculations, the country that leads the globe — ranking No. 1 in terms of its residents' overall level of happiness — is little, peaceful, and relatively godless Denmark.

The connection between religion — or the lack thereof — and societal health is admittedly complex. It is difficult to definitively establish that secularism is always good for society and religion always bad. However, the often posited opposite claim is equally difficult to substantiate: that secularism is always bad for a society and religion always good. To be sure, in some instances, religion can be a strong and positive ingredient in establishing societal health, prosperity, and well-being. And when considering what factors contribute to the making of a good society, religion can be a positive force.

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."

Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960's, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the "Space Race" became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world.

Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California's bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.

Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.

California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.

"Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age."

So begins '2 B R 0 2 B', a clever short story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the author of far more famous works such as Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and many others. The story first appeared in the January 1962 issue of the pulp sci-fi magazine Worlds of If.

Its modest utopian beginnings quickly open up to an underlying dystopia: the only way to maintain the perfect balance on this seemingly perfect far-future Earth is to limit the population to precisely forty million souls. But old age has been beaten. To maintain eternal happiness, should birth control fail, one must acquiesce to either infanticide or suicide – choose your pleasure. Those few adults who decide they want to die are encouraged to call the Federal Bureau of Termination's hotline at 2 B R 0 2 B (pronounced 2 B or naught 2 B) and make an appointment for euthanasia, thus opening the door for the birth of a new human. No one is forced into death, unless you count social pressure, although there is plenty of that in a society where the most admired man on the planet is Dr Hitz, "responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago."

Behind the screen, there is nothing. Not darkness, not fantasy, not even the flickering lights of consciousness aroused. And yet, within the screen, the case is quite the opposite -- here, within the delirium of technological living we encounter an intensified imaginary, new worlds of interactive possibility, in short, new opportunities for the falsification of being.

This provocation has strategic purpose, for the question of screen culture is less about the technological possibilities initiated by invention, and much more about the delirious seduction of a life screened-in. Here, amidst the growing participatory potential of interactivity, the icy prophecy of Marshall McLuhan's "cool technology" is brought to the cold light of the Lacanian mirror. For, as Lacan knew well, behind the mirror there is also nothing, which is why it becomes so urgent to invent a fantastic something to which technological effect can be attributed. The mirror, one might posit, is the first screen, the first "cool technology" -- the instance where the participatory performance of living first takes on its split dynamic between the "hot" social and cultural self and its "cool" other.

The screen, however, also does something that the mirror never could -- namely, it allows for its fantasy to be realized, and not only in potential. The very condition of screen-culture rests on a will-to-delirium implicit in the amplification of imaginative possibilities.

What follows is a series of three meditations on aspects of the screen as it relates to knowledge and technological living, three variations on a theme, or three delusions of technological grandeur. Respectively, these contemplations will proceed from paradox, to illusion and, finally, to hallucination as representative elements of a culture screened-in. [...]

2009 marks the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, arguably the most famed and influential writer in American history. Not only does his work entirely limn the culture, but he also created no fewer than two genres of popular fiction — mystery and modern horror — almost single-handedly. Virtually anyone in the U.S. can recite his poetry (a few lines here and there, at least). His personal life and ambitions inform the clichés of the starving writer in his garret and that of the mad genius. And it's nigh impossible for someone to graduate from an American high school without having read him.

Poe was also a player of hoaxes, a plagiarist, had a substance abuse problem, and couldn't keep a roof over his head. Poe was a proponent of slavery, the worst sort of would-be social climber, and married a 13-year-old girl in his cousin Virginia Clemm. None of this information is new, of course — these fun facts are probably the answers to a fill-in-the-blank quiz given each year in some sixth-grade classroom in Ohio. The problem is that Poe has been so completely taught that he is very rarely read with the eyes of a reader.

[...] a compilation of some of the most interesting animal tool use yet observed. Much more likely remains to be found: until Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks, scientists had been reluctant to credit animals with such sophisticated behavior — perhaps because, as Charles Darwin noted, "Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It's a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It's about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It's about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

The series took place on the "Supertrain", an imagined nuclear-powered bullet train that was equipped with amenities more appropriate to a cruise ship than a train, such as swimming pools and shopping centers. It was so big it had to run on very broad gauge track (not two sets of tracks as depicted in some advertising). The train took 36 hours to go from New York City to Los Angeles. Much like its contemporary The Love Boat, the plots concerned the passengers' social lives, usually with multiple intertwining storylines, and most of the cast was composed of guest stars. The production was elaborate, with huge sets and a high-tech model train for outside shots.

At the time, Supertrain was the most expensive series ever aired in the United States. The production was beset by problems, including a model train that crashed, and while it was heavily advertised during the 1978-1979 season, it suffered from bad reviews and low viewership; despite attempts to salvage the show by reworking the cast, it never took off and left the air after only three months.

This is the last of the posts I promised, showing what loanwords, including Wanderwörter, look like from the standpoint of mainstream historical linguistic methodology. After this I'm going to have to stop posting for a while; term is starting, with a full load of teaching and advising, and unfortunately I’m also chair of my department at the moment.

The first three words discussed here are possible or probable loanwords into subgroups of Indo-European; whether you want to call them Wanderwörter depends on how much wandering you want to see demonstrated before you apply the term. The last word fits the definition of a Wanderwort unproblematically. [...]

The most exciting thing that can happen is when theoretical dreams that started as fantasies, as desires, become projects that people work hard to build. There is nothing like it; it is the ultimate tribute. At one moment you have just a glimmer of a thought and at another moment squiggles on paper. Then one day you walk into a laboratory and there are all these pipes, and liquid helium is flowing, and currents are coming in and out with complicated wiring, and somehow all this activity is supposedly corresponds to those little thoughts that you had. When this happens, it's magic.

In the early 1990s there was near unanimity in the media, in Western political circles, and even among academics that the collapse of the Cuban revolution was imminent. Even today, many observers regard it as only a matter of time for Cuba to undergo a transition to democracy (understood as a narrowly defined polyarchy) and a "market economy."

But the fact that Cuban socialism has survived the extraordinary rigors of the "Special Period" and is still functioning nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall should give pause for thought. Even the prolonged incapacity of Fidel Castro and his subsequent resignation as president has not led to chaos or upheaval, as many predicted. Why then has Cuba survived, and what does it mean for socialist and progressive politics today?

Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance

My pointing something out to you is a request for joint visual attention to the same object. It is based on a highly explicit general sense of the kind of creature you are: unlike other creatures, (most) humans have an unequivocal sense that others have minds. On top of this, there is a specific sense of your knowledge being defective compared with mine, based on my observation of your (literal) point of view. We are reminded just how remarkable this is when we encounter human beings who lack this sense: people with autism who have no integrated sense of themselves, and no sense of other's sense of themselves. A poignant early sign of autism is the failure to point – a gesture which usually appears towards the end of the first year of life, before the emergence of language. Pointing, in short, is a potent testimony to the infant's sense (again unique to human beings) of living in a shared, common world, a public reality, and of its communicative urge.

Pointing is pre-linguistic, but it is important not to exaggerate the sense in which it is proto-linguistic. Individual words belong to systems of signs and make sense only as part of such systems – as loci in semantic fields stitched together by grammar. By contrast, the field of pointing is the visual field, and its grammar is almost non-existent. St Augustine's notion that parents teach their children to speak by pointing at objects and uttering their names was brilliantly criticised by Wittgenstein in the opening pages of Philosophical Investigations, and led to some of his most famous theories about language. Reflecting on the modest role played by pointing as a bridge from babbling to speech awakens one's sense of the mysterious nature of language. Investigating the scope and limits of ostensive definition – defining words by literally pointing out their objects (eg "That's 'vermilion'") – casts an interesting light on the nature of linguistic reference, of universals, and of the very complex relationship between the arrays of material objects that surround us and the world as it is captured in spoken and written discourse.

When Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on novelist Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, it was the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom. Two decades later, the violence continues, and Muslim fundamentalists have gained a new advantage: media self-censorship.

Police in the western German city of Duisburg have admitted they removed flags a student had hung in his apartment in support of Israel during a pro-Palestinian protest march in the city. Officers broke down his door and removed the flags. (...)

"Suddenly," the student explained, "I saw a police officer on the balcony on the second floor" in the apartment located directly beneath his. The officer ripped down the Israeli flag that had been affixed to P.'s balcony. A short time later he witnessed an officer inside his own apartment taking down the flag that had been hung in the bedroom.

The police's moves caused loud cheering amongst the protesters -- a fact not only reported by the student, but also confirmed in videos of the event that have been widely circulated on YouTube. The incident first came to the attention of the media after journalists at the local blog "Die Ruhrbarone" reported on it. The objects reportedly thrown at the apartment included what appeared to be small chunks of ice, a folded up pocket knife, nail clippers and also what looked like a stone.

Most corporates, of course, do both things--swindle the earth as well as invest in religion. And they take care to bribe the auditors in both places. Especially in India, where Hindus actually worship wealth as a goddess called Laxmi, and where the acquiring of vaibhav (worldly stature, replete with wherewithal) is an endorsed spiritual goal. Like religious institutions of the top order the world-over, the Vatican for one, some of India's temple trusts are among the richest corporates going, and the classes and the masses have an appropriately unequal access to their sanctum sanctorums. And those that are out of caste have none, even as many gods that are installed within have not even a human face.

Join us Wednesday, March 11 for LateTech, our [somewhat] late night soiree where tech meets comedy, magic and more! Be more than just a spectator or passive member of the audience. LateTech is our showcase of conceptual tech wizardry where the audience becomes part of the spectacle.

The LateTech program includes the incomparable hi tech magic of Seth Raphael, the tech-meets-comedy stylings of Brian Malow, and presentation from Johannes Grenzfurthner of Monochrom, a favorite of the ETech community (Watch this clip from ETech '08)—capping off a fantastic night of artistry that already includes Zoë Keating, Andrew Schneider and the ETech Fest, the ETech emerging arts fest, as part of a full featured evening at ETech. Open to conference attendees as well as FreeTech attendees.

Networks have become a powerful metaphor to explain the social realities of our times. Everywhere we look there are attempts to explain all kinds of social formations in terms of networks: citizen networks, corporate networks, gamer networks, terrorist networks, learning networks… and so on. Information and communication technologies—in particular the internet—and the structures they enable have greatly influenced how we imagine the social. It's similar to what happened in cognitive science when the computer was taken as the favored metaphor for explaining how the brain works, except that now we are attempting to explain how the social works.

But is there something anti-social about imagining and organizing our social realities in terms of networks?

Quakers are non-doctrinaire Christians with a fine tradition of work for peace and social justice. This collection of eight essays by Quaker activists and academics attempts insights into the nature of human rights and the thinking which informs them. It takes its title from the vivid remark of Jeremy Bentham that natural rights are nonsense and inalienable natural rights are 'nonsense on stilts'. Bentham denied that rights could be deduced from nature, but he would have been quick to agree that basic principles for the protection of the individual could and should be enshrined in law. This collection of essays avoids the abstract question of the naturalness of rights, but takes as read that human have legal rights, and tries to bring a specifically Quaker perspective to the issue.

Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society. Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small entrepreneurial class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties, meanwhile, were 'given more to hyperbole and public meetings than to organizing and resisting. A large part of the opposition is either ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in power.' A police state would use either a kind of developmental-fascist ideology (as happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would rely on religious fundamentalism, and would find an eager sponsor in the United States. 'Unfortunately,' the article concludes, 'the democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.'

The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed's analysis remain valid today. The military has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing social forces weaker and divided, with democratic and revolutionary groups only weakly developed. At the epicentre of the War on Terror, Pakistan's current predicament brings together the inability of the state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous imperial sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and the cooptation mechanisms of 'democracy promotion'. Despite an absence of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy, and shrinking capacity to respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan's military dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and political alternatives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the regime is based on the absence of feasible alternatives.

Challenging both capitalism and the values of Western civilization, the gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other causes, free love, recycling, nudism, women's suffrage and prison reform, Carpenter's work anticipated the sexual revolution of the 1960s and placed him at the epicenter of the literary culture of his day.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this major new biography situates Carpenter's life and thought in relation to the social, aesthetic and intellectual movements of his day, and explores his friendships with figures such as Walt Whitman, Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Isadora Duncan and Emma Goldman. Edward Carpenter paints a compelling portrait of a man described by contemporaries as a "weather-vane" for his times.

You could now literally count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate.

Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers’ intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers’ intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect.

Spectacular Acts of Terrorism create Events which are designed to shift the public discourse by rupturing processes of dialogue and understanding. A Big Bang such as planes that crash into buildings, or trains that explode, or discotheques that blow up, or a rain of bullets across a city -- brings about a quantum shift in every single aspect of individual perception and public policy -- immediately. This is the deliberate outcome of such Spectacles -- they are planned to disrupt incrementalist and rational development of thought processes at every level of a pluralist functioning state and society. This is why they happen unannounced, this is why they happen simultaneously at multiple locations, and this is why they target places of public prominence.

Who carries out such Spectacular Acts? We hear that the terrorists in Mumbai were young men in jeans with rucksacks who went for carnage with smiles on their faces. It is foolish to assume that the terrorists who go for such Spectacles are desperate people interested in alleviating genuine grievances. Of course, terrorists fight for a cause. But that cause isn't what they kill for; the specificity and legitimacy of their cause (Iraq, Kashmir, Gujarat, Chechya, Afghanistan, whatever they may think it to be) is condensed into the general and universal terms of violence and hatred by those who recruit them and radicalise them. By the time they spray bullets and hold hostages, asking for justice on their own terms, they have long betrayed themselves and become prisoners of manipulated representations.

How do people become violent terrorists?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: ACT FAST.
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 05:24:20 -0800
From: mino malo
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

YOU LISTEN CAREFULLY NOW,I AND MY BOYS HAVE BEEN PAID TO KILL YOU,WHEN YOUR DETAILS WAS GIVEN TO ME,YOU HAPPENED TO BE SOMEBODY I KNOW IN THE PAST AND AS A RESULT OF THAT I COULD NOT COMPEL MYSELF TO HARM YOU,I AM WILLING TO HELP YOU UNLESS YOU GIVE ME A REASON NOT TO.

NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY AND FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS,YOU HAVE TO PAY THE SUM OF $30,000(USD)I NEED THIS MONEY TO SETTLE SOME OF MY BOYS THAT CAME FROM THE NEIGHBOURING STATE FOR THIS PARTICULAR ASSIGNMENT SO THAT THEY CAN STAY OF YOUR BACK AND GO BACK TO THERE DESTINATIONS,AFTER WHICH I WILL HANDLE THIS PERSONALLY AND YOU WILL BE SAVED.
IMMEDIATELY YOUR IDENTITY WAS GIVEN TO ME AND YOU HAPPENED TO BE SOMEBODY I KNOW,I DECIDED TO TAPE-RECORD THE SECOND CONVERSATION I HAD WITH MY EMPLOYER OVER THE CONTRACT TO ASSASSINATE YOU,I WILL SEND YOU THIS TAPE AS A CONCRETE EVIDENCE FOR YOU TO GET HIM ARRESTED AND POSSIBLY PUT HIM BEHIND BARS,BUT THAT MUST BE AFTER I HAD SETTLED THE BOYS AND BE ASSURED OF YOUR MAXIMUM CO-OPERATION.
WARNING:THIS IS NOT A MATTER FOR THE POLICE AND MIND YOU,YOUR MOVEMENT IS BEING MONITORED BY THE BOYS,ANY FALSE MOVE,I WILL RUN OUT OF HELP FOR YOU AND YOU WILL HAVE YOURSELF TO BLAME.

NOW,ARE YOU READY TO PAY OR NOT?

GET BACK TO ME ASAP IF YOU REALLY NEED MY HELP,
MIND YOU,TIME IS OF ESSENCE,
GOODLUCK.

The book is about the need for Marxists and anarchists to lay down their ideological weapons and create a single Left resistance to what capitalism is doing to the world. The hostility between the two traditions is a little like a feud between extended families handed down from generation to generation: Hatfields and McCoys in American history, or the families of Romeo and Juliet. In reality Marxism and anarchism should be like two hands, the one analyzing the structure of things, the other throwing up unending prefigurative initiatives. Neither tradition has been so successful that it can speak of the other with lofty dismissal or contempt. We need each other.

Shortly after the first world war, the French literary critic and historian Henri Massis (1886-1970) preached a crusade against the dangers threatening European values and thought – largely identified with those of France, in his mind. He wasn't entirely misguided: across the world, colonised nations were in revolt. He wrote: "The future of western civilisation, of humanity itself, is now under threat... Every traveller, every foreigner who has spent any time in the Far East agrees that the way in which the population thinks has changed more in the last 10 years than it did over 10 centuries. The old, easy-going submissiveness has given way to blind hostility – sometimes genuine hatred, just waiting for the right moment to act. From Calcutta to Shanghai, from the steppes of Mongolia to the plains of Anatolia, the whole of Asia trembles with a blind desire for freedom. These people no longer recognise the supremacy that the West has taken for granted since John Sobieski conclusively stemmed the Turkish and Tartar invasions beneath the walls of Vienna. Instead they aspire to rebuild their unity against the white man, whose overthrow they proclaim".

These fears are resurfacing today in a very different context, also marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the end of the cold war, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and above all the restructuring of the global order in favour of new powers, such as China and India. Various authors, many of them highly regarded, have picked up on the Manichean view of history as an eternal confrontation between civilisation and barbarism as they excavate the roots of what Anthony Pagden calls the "2,500-year struggle" now bathing the world in blood.

Many divorces turn acrimonious, but a New York divorce has turned potentially life-threatening. But a new litmus test has emerged for real acrimony: has your soon-to-be ex asked for a donated organ back? Only then do you know you are in a truly deadly divorce!

According to Newsday, a New York surgeon, Richard Batista, is asking his wife, Dawnell Batista, for the kidney he gave her in 2001 back, or if she can't live without it (ha ha)--for $1.5 million in exchange for his regret over the gift.

The recipe for making any creature is written in its DNA. So last November, when geneticists published the near-complete DNA sequence of the long-extinct woolly mammoth, there was much speculation about whether we could bring this behemoth back to life.

Creating a living, breathing creature from a genome sequence that exists only in a computer's memory is not possible right now. But someone someday is sure to try it, predicts Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a driving force behind the mammoth genome project.

So besides the mammoth, what other extinct beasts might we coax back to life? Well [...]

Today, the most fervent attention in biofuel development has shifted from soil to the sea, and specifically to marine algae. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, along with researchers at UCSD’s Division of Biological Sciences, are part of an emerging algal biofuel consortium that includes academic collaborators, CleanTECH San Diego, regional industry representatives, and public and private partners.
Scripps scientists see algae as a “green bullet,” science and society's best hope for a clean bioenergy source that will help loosen broad dependence on fossil fuel, counteract climate warming, and power the vehicles of the future.

As the financial meltdown reaches historic proportions, free-market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism as it is called in some quarters, is losing both its claim to legitimacy and its claims on democracy. Once upon a time a perceived bastion of liberal democracy, the social state is being recalled from exile, as the decades-long conservative campaign against the alleged abuses of "big government" - its euphemism for a form of governance that assumed a measure of responsibility for the education, health and general welfare of its citizens - has been widely discredited. Not only have the starving and drowning efforts of the Right been revealed in all their malicious cruelty, but government is about to have a Cinderella moment; it is about to become "cool," as Prince Charming-elect Barack Obama famously put it. The idea has enchanted many. The economist and recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, has argued that the correct response to the current credit and financial crisis is to "greatly expand the role of government to rescue an ailing economy," with the proviso that all new government programs must be devoid of even a hint of corruption. Bob Herbert has called for more government regulation to offset the dark cloud of impoverishment that resulted from the last thirty years of deregulation, privatization and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. And there are others, sophisticated thinkers all, such as Dean Baker, David Korten, Naomi Klein and Joseph E. Stiglitz, who have traced the roots of the current financial crisis to the adaptation of neoliberal economic policy, which fostered a grim alignment among the state, corporate capital and transnational corporations. Even New York Times op-ed writer Thomas Friedman has found a way to live comfortably with the idea. He wants to retool the country's educational mainframe, teaching young people to be more creative in their efforts to build "the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure," - even as the stated goal unhappily recapitulates the neoliberal fantasy that unchecked growth cures all social ills. And a contrite Alan Greenspan, erstwhile disciple of Ayn Rand, recently admitted before a Congressional committee that he may have made a mistake in assuming "that enlightened self-interest alone would prevent bankers, mortgage brokers, investment bankers and others from gaming the system for their own personal financial benefit."

Like the shepherds, the color print has nearly vanished. Today, you get some glossies sent out as holiday cards, and some lucky ones get matted and framed, but the vast majority of color photographs now taken - and there are countless millions of them - pass before us, just briefly, on a screen.