Wednesday, 15 December 2010

Interview with Richard Lowenstein on Sydney's FBi radio this morning focusing on Autoluminescence, the doco he's doing about Rowland S Howard but also talking about Dogs in Space, Melbourne in the eighties, Michael Hutchence, and filming rock videos in exotic locations.

@'FBi'

(Download)
Stagefright_Richard Lowenstein.mp3

♪♫ Chintu Ji - Akira Kurosawa

An Interview with Gnosis, the group behind the Gawker hacking

A Peek Inside A Suspected California Pimp's Real 'Business Plan'

Young Henry Rollins Produced An Album By Charles Manson

NaomiAKlein We have been living in a New Dark Age. #Wikileaks is turning on the lights. No wonder the rats are scurrying. 7 minutes ago via web

Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001)

Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.

Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it.

“Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”

@'Monoskop/log'

Stem cell transplant has cured HIV infection in 'Berlin patient', say doctors

Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.

The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.

The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.

They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”...