“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe

A Plague of Black Dots: “In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations.

This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries ‘liberated’ without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

This is the mark of the people who want the Kyoto Protocol for the environment, who want the International Criminal Court for greater justice, who want a world where all nations, including the U.S.A., are free of weapons of mass destruction, and who pledge to take their country back.

A bus stops in traffic, a major logo on the back is covered with a funny black spot. Hey, is that supposed to be there? A sultry model leans forward on a billboard; a round, dark blob is stuck on her cleavage. Huh?

Take the pledge and spread the meme.” Adbusters

Call your elected officials!: “A month ago the FCC dramatically relaxed media ownership regulations, stifling the cornerstone of American democracy: a free, fair, and open public debate.

Because one million Americans raised their voices against the FCC decision, the Senate Commerce Committee recently sent a bill to the Senate floor for a vote that would roll back many of the rules. Today the challenge is to get that bill to the floor of the Senate and House for a vote.

Call your Congressional representatives and demand that they support the rollback. Enter your zip code and find out if your elected officials are currently supporting rolling back the FCC. If they are supportive co-sponsors, then thank them for their support and ask that they keep the bill alive. If they are not a co-sponsor, ask them to become one.” Media Reform Network

“The latest signs of ad creep make it clear – advertisers are anxious. Mega-roaster Starbucks sends its copyright goons off to a remote northern island to sue a local coffeehouse. And McDonald’s is also a kids’ literacy champ? Watch out everybody, the giants are getting desperate.” Adbusters

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Light of Day talks: “In the end I produce a novel and it is there for the public, it’s there for the reader and it’s not part of the package that they should know how it was for me as I wrote it…” identity theory

“Now, when one receives a jar of dried kangaroo excrement in the mail what should one do? What’s the protocol?” spark

Gerald Wallace Goode: “Accompanied by the whistle of a freight pulling out of the Phoenix yard, the four of us held a sort of wake for Caleb Weehunt whose remains lay in the ditch separating Ed Collo, Frank Marsh, and Milt Ralls from me.” Troika

“Baghdad has not figured so prominently in the news since the days when the caliph Harun al-Rashid earned his place in the Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor flew to safety on a giant roc. That was 1,200 years ago, and today’s city is no longer a place where Neo-Platonist philosophers lock horns with Islamic theologians and palace ladies eat off jewel-studded golden platters. But Baghdad in the age of the Abbasid caliphs was the greatest of all cities, the political and military heart of the Islamic Empire at its height. Between its founding in A.D.762 and its destruction in 1258, the city was home to a huge advance in the breadth of human knowledge, so that it is remembered today not only as a place of pomp and luxury but as a city of scholarship and philosophy…” The Wilson Quarterly

“What qualities would someone need in order to defeat George W. Bush? An imaginary dialogue”. — Jack Beatty, The Atlantic

“Simon Winchester, the author of Krakatoa, talks about the natural and cultural reverberations of a famous volcanic eruption.” The Atlantic

“The aim of this activity is to tell you something about your moral intuitions. It comprises twelve questions.

…The intention is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. One important tension has to do with how central the idea of harm is to many moral frameworks. Previous research suggests that… most people judge the scenarios presented here to involve neither harm to the protagonists nor to anybody else; but that, regardless, plenty of people still think that these scenarios depict acts which are morally wrong… ” The Philosopher’s Magazine

An interview with Kenan Malik: “In his book, Man, Beast and Zombie, Kenan Malik argues that human beings are quite unlike any other organism in the natural world. We have a dual nature. We are evolved, biological creatures, with an evolutionary past, and in this sense we are simply objects in nature. But we also have self-consciousness, agency, and the capacity for rationality, and as a result we alone in the natural world are able to transcend our evolutionary heritage and to transform ourselves and the world in which we live. Science, though, is taking its time in getting to grips with this dual nature of human beings.” The Philosopher’s Magazine

The Branding of Human Culture — Douglas Rushkoff, M/C Journal

The Politics and Play of ®TMark: “®TMark is an online centre that organizes and directs funding for the ‘information alteration’ of corporate products (otherwise known as “sabotage”). In 1993, ®TMark was involved in its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As befits a project affiliated with ®TMark, the critical content of BLO’s act was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary. The protest lies within the ˜information alteration” of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues. The BLO offensive drew attention to the questionable labour practices of Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie, thereby undermining the perceptions on which Barbie’s popularity rests.” M/C Journal

“…Performers such as Manny and Kali are interesting not simply because they belong to a vast population of sub-celebrity performers people know so little about but because they belong to a far more special category: a distinct subculture that harbors some of the pop-culture entertainment world’s greatest risks and most creative energies. I call this culture the other bohemia.” — Alison Pearlman, Southwest Review

“Conservatives love to impose cost-benefit analysis on regulatory issues. So why not apply it to the Iraq War?” — Joan Claybrook, president of the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen and former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; and Alan Morrison, co-founder and director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, The American Prospect

The Syrian Bet: “Did the Bush Administration burn a useful source on Al Qaeda?” — Seymour Hersh, New Yorker

“When beliefs can change as easily as the weather, so do your chances of hitting the jackpot — or experiencing revelation…” Donald Miller:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.” Killing the Buddha

The National Funeral Directors Conference: “Schedule: 2 p.m. — Relieving Rigor Mortis:

City coroner Tak Hirimoto demonstrates the art of relieving

corpse stiffness with either shiatsu, Swedish or deep tissue massages. Say goodbye to broken limbs and difficult dressing forever!” Opium Magazine

“The joke was bad, the refusal to apologize worse. But Berlusconi’s gaffe may be a symptom of a European disease that’s hardly funny at all“. -Daniel Hudson, Telepolis

“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe