Derrick Jensen on Identification

Here's a clip from a recent movie/film/documentary called What A Way To Go, featuring Derrick Jensen. I've been lucky enough to meet Derrick, and I'm really glad he exists, even if occasionally I disagree with some of the places that his logic brings him (for example, I'm a big fan of his books Walk of Water, and A Language Older Than Words, and not so much of Endgame: Resistance)

http://blip.tv/file/977048/

(Thanks Brett)

keeping our own records straight

"The world's leaders appear to have lost touch with life down here on the ground, to have forgotten the human beings they lead. Or perhaps the led - so numerous and so mute - have ceased to be quite real, not living people but calculated casualties. For we are led and must follow whether we want to or not; there is no place to secede to. But we need not follow in silence; we still have the right and duty, as private citizens, to keep our own records straight. As one of the millions of the led, I will not be herded any farther along this imbecile road to nothingness without raising my voice in protest. My NO will be as effective as one cricket chirp. My NO is this book."

Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (1993:376).

More information:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/martha-gellhorn.shtml

Edwidge Danticat

"I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free. I didn't feel guilty about burning my mother's name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too.

"It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames."

Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994:203).

I finished this novel on the bus home from Cambridge (UK) the other day. I once went to listen to Edwidge Danticat speak, in Santa Barbara, about four years ago, and I was very impressed. I remember who I went with, and I remember that I asked Edwidge something about the ability of novelists to address important issues in ways that many academics might envy. I can't remember what she said. I had no idea at that time of the echoes that would ripple through her writing for me by the time I got around to reading. As it happens, I came across this book in a shop in Derry, at the most unlikely of times, at the most apposite of times. I suppose sometimes books find us. Breath, Eyes, Memory is the kind of novel that perhaps requires the wearing of emotional armour for the reading, but its heart, wisdom, and embrace of possibility and hope makes the journey worth every intake of breath.

More information:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1355196,00.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwidge_Danticat

Massive Cancer Information Giveaway

By Aaron Rowe June 21, 2008 9:01:44 PM
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/massive-cancer.html

Scientists at GlaxoSmithKline spent a small fortune studying cancer cells, and then gave most of their precious information away -- for free -- to the research community. That massive donation, which was announced on Friday, could accelerate the discovery of new oncology drugs and blood tests by giving brilliant, but underfunded, researchers a chance to pick through boatloads of data.

For the pharmaceutical giant, sharing makes a lot of sense: They rely upon academics and small companies to do pioneering work -- identifying new targets for medications, discovering early warning signs, and figuring out the underlying biological malfunctions that cause cancer. Once those groundbreaking studies have been done, Glaxo and other large corporations can step back into the picture and create new products.

Most of the data was gathered by microarrays, chips that can record lots of biological information. Its new home is the caBIG website, a massive repository of genetic information run by the National Cancer Institute. Glaxo gave the online community information from three hundred different sets of cells, which were taken from diseased breast, prostate, lung and ovarian tissues.

Reading Karl Marx's Capital with Prof. David Harvey

From Indymedia Ireland
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/88015

David Harvey makes his long-running City University of New York course on Volume One of Karl Marx's Capital available for free online.

Capital is perhaps the most important text Karl Marx wrote. It is one of the most influential books ever written, particularly in terms of left wing theory and political economy. However it is more often talked about than actually read and it has an only partially justified reputation for being difficult to understand.

For nearly 40 years, Professor David Harvey, the eminent social geographer and urban theorist, has been teaching a course on the book to postgraduate students at universities including the City University of New York and John Hopkins University in Baltimore. This is a very well known course in academia and quite a few prominent Marxist and other left wing academics took it themselves. The course consists of 13 two hour lectures, an introductory lecture and then 12 more dealing with specific sections of the text, mostly two chapters at a time.

For the first time Prof. Harvey is putting all of these lectures online for free, under a creative commons license similar to the one used by Indymedia Ireland. Each lecture he gives in this course at CUNY is filmed and then placed on his website, including questions and discussion from his postgraduate students. The idea is that people who are interested in learning about Capital can follow the course online, first watching the introduction and then reading the assigned chapters of the book before watching the next lecture.

Prof. Harvey is himself an interesting thinker and he is an engaging speaker who knows Capital inside out. For anyone who is thinking about reading or re-reading Capital (Vol. 1) and grappling with the ideas contained in it, this is likely to prove an extremely useful resource.

The lectures are placed at http://www.davidharvey.org as they are completed.

The text of Capital can be found here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/inde...x.htm

Fieldnotes on the Compassionate Life

http://www.compassionatelife.com/

Verbal Self-Defence

http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm

Some interesting academic Ph.D. research online

http://www.inclusional-research.org/theses.php

Inclusional Research

http://www.inclusional-research.org/

It seems like these guys are doing very similar work to myself. I think I'll get in touch.

Social networking sites don't deepen friendships

James Randerson, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk,
Monday September 10 2007

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

"Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," said Will Reader at Sheffield Hallam University.

Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard University members but has since expanded to over 34m users worldwide. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has over 200m users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for $580m.

Previous research has suggested that a person's conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.

But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face.

The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around 5 close friends. Also, 90% of contacts that the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face.

"People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships," added Dr Reader.

He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy.
"What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people," he said.

But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy. "We invest time and effort in them in the hope that sometime they will help us out. It is a kind of reciprocal relationship," said Dr Reader, "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them ... It's very easy to be deceptive on the internet."

Short article on friendship

A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Friendship Research
Monika Keller
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/institut/dok/full/keller/acrosscu/ISSBD.pdf

Academic Friendship Resources

http://www.friendship.com.au/writing/resources.html

Writing Through Cancer

http://www.writingthroughcancer.com/writingthroughcancer.html

Writing Through Cancer is a website designed for those of you whose lives have been touched by cancer. Each week, I'll post a writing prompt designed to inspire you to write from your experience of cancer. Each prompt will be available on the site for one month.Why write from the pain and struggle that comes with cancer? Studies have shown it can actually be good for you. When we repress emotions and silence our stories, we weaken our ability to heal. Writing allows us to unearth and express all that we think and feel. Through the creation of stories, we learn, as we have always done, how to make sense of our worlds. Writing is a form of self-expression that is readily available to you. You can do it just about anywhere: at home, on the train, in a waiting room, or at a cafe. All you need is pen, paper or your laptop and whatever is in your heart and mind. I hope that you'll find new inspiration from the prompts offered here-- inspiration that encourages your stories of the journey of cancer.

Best Wishes from Sharon Bray, Ed.D.

What If

If you can keep your money when governments about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust your neighbour when they trust you not
And they be very nosy too;
If you can await the warm delights of summer
Then summer comes and goes with sun not seen,
And pay so much for drinking water
Knowing that the water is unclean.

If you seek peace in times of war creation
And you can see that oil merchants are to blame,
If you can meet a pimp or politician,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you cannot bear dis-united nations
And you think this new world order is a trick,
If you've ever tried to build good race relations,
And watch bad policing mess your work up quick.

If you can make one heap of all your savings
And risk buying a small house and a plot,
Then sit back and watch the economy inflating
Then have to deal with the negative equity you've got.
If you can force your mind and body to continue
When all your social services have gone,
If you struggle on when there is nothing in you,
Except the knowledge that justice cannot be wrong.

If you can speak the truth to common people
Or walk with Kings and Queens and live no lie,
If you can see how power can be evil
And now that every censor is a spy;
If you can fill an unforgiving lifetime
With years of working hard to make ends meet,
You may not be wealthy but I'm sure that you will find
That you can hold your head high as you walk the streets.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Teaching and craft

The practice of a craft now includes the teaching of it for so many craftsmen that we need to look at this teaching more carefully, as part of our study of craft. In the field of education teaching is often regarded as a craft in itself and I wonder if perhaps thinking of teaching in this way, as a separate entity from the material it deals with, isn’t either a symptom or even a cause of the poor quality of much of modern education. Because teaching, the relationship between teacher, student, and material, is so difficult to understand, there is a tendency to simplify the problem by separating education itself from the field in which the education takes place. This separation has the effect of cutting teacher off from a natural cycle: to receive/take in, to produce/express, to give back/transmit. When we regard education as a thing apart, we lead inevitably to the partial truth that "those who can’t do, teach."

(Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft, 1993, 2nd ed, p. 113)

Peace Direct Champions Programme

http://www.championsprogramme.org/

Census Alert

The next UK Census (in 2011), in which participation is compulsory, might be run by an arms company with close links to the United States government, and which also focuses on intelligence and surveillance work. See below for more info.

The decision is now imminent. Sign the petition today: (Deadline to sign up by: 15 June 2008)

Petition on the Downing Street website - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/census-alert/ <http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/census-alert/>

What's the problem?

The process of running the 2011 Census will be contracted out by the Office of National Statistics to a private company.

One of the two contractors in the final round of selection is the arms company Lockheed Martin, 80% of whose business is with the US Department of Defence and other Federal Government agencies.

This might concern you because: The Census rules mean that every household will be legally obliged to provide a wide range of personal information that will be handled by the chosen contractor.

Lockheed Martin produces missiles and land mines which are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and which are illegal in many countries.

They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide `integrated threat information´ that combines information from many different sources.

New questions in the 2011 Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details.

This information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin´s intelligence work, and fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.

Census Alert is therefore campaigning to stop Lockheed Martin from being given the contract.
The campaign is supported by the Green Party, politicians from Plaid Cymru,Labour and the Scottish National Party, and others opposed to the arms trade and concerned about personal privacy.

We are not opposed to the Census itself. Aggregated, the information collected is important in allocating resources to local authorities and public services.

But personal privacy is important too, and we are concerned that Lockheed Martin's involvement could undermine public confidence in the process and lead to inaccurate data being collected.

What can I do?

There is still time to stop this happening and we are not calling for a boycott of the Census at this stage.

Before the final decisions on the contract are made, we are asking you to do the following:
Sign our petition opposing arms company involvement in the Census.Contact your MP and ask them to raise the issue in Parliament. Contact your local Councillor and ask them to highlight their concerns about the allocation of local authority resources.