Tuesday 3 July 2012

US officials pursue Julian Assange

The evidence that the US is pursuing to have Wikileaks founder Julian Assange extradited to America is becoming more obvious. Assange still awaits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for political asylum to South America, but while he remains trapped, democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein has issued a statement to an Australian newspaper demanding that the whistleblower be prosecuted. Trevor Timm, an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins us with more on the hunt for Assange

Caring conservative o'the day department

...worse is seeing Sophie Mirabella recoil in horror, rather than help

What music will we probably enjoy for the rest of our lives?

Never Knew That Department

Never knew that Radiohead had to amend Creep's writing credits to include the writers of this song...

‏@pourmecoffee

So far, Anderson Cooper coming out does not appear to have threatened the sanctity of traditional newscasts.

Is There a Right Way to Come Out?

The Institute of Continuing Education

Keith Laws who is now a Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology but who in a previous life was the keyboardist in The The has started a new music blog. At the moment he is posting primarily Throbbing Gristle related flyers etc.
HERE
Keith and I have already remarked on how many of the same gigs we were at back in the day and I used to have a lot of these flyers etc used to advertise TG gigs too...

Higgs boson: US physicists find strongest evidence yet of 'god particle'

Monday 2 July 2012

Moving Borders (The Politics of Dirt)

Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized sites and border zones. Struggles by refugees and migrants around issues of detention, deportation, regularization and freedom of movement have debunked some of the most cherished assumptions about political subjectivity. While refugees, irregular migrants and the undocumented have long been associated with victimhood, helplessness and dependency, recent theorizations of citizenship challenge these assumptions, showing how migrants negotiate, contest and evade borders and, in doing so, constitute themselves as political subjects. These studies represent a shift in how we conceptualize citizenship, from a formal status to an enactment of political subjectivity through unexpected, unfamiliar and irregular acts. They also enable an appreciation of what a growing and fascinating literature calls ‘noncitizen citizenships’.1

Some commentators, especially those working from the ‘autonomous migration’ perspective, have posited that there is something primary – or, better, uncontrollable, indefinable, uncapturable – about human movement, with borders and their various apparatuses of control coming only afterwards.2 We typically think of migrants confronting borders. Less often do we consider the ways in which borders are also always following migrants, being forced to adapt to the inventiveness of human mobility. For the migrant is not the only mobile agent at the border. The border, too, moves. While there has been some very interesting work on the proliferation of mobile borders in their virtual forms (e.g. biometrics and dataveillance),3 there is comparatively little analysis of the movement of borders in material terms. When I speak of the moving border, I mean exactly that: the movement of the territory – the dirt, the soil – that constitutes the border. In this context, smuggling takes on new and quite literal terms. It is not only people and goods, licit or illicit, that are being smuggled across the border; it is the border itself...

Policing England's Riots

Police officers from across the country describe their experience of tackling last year's riots. Eight police forces allowed the Guardian and London School of Economics unprecedented access to officers deployed on the front line during the disturbances as they battled to regain control of towns and cities across the country.
Via

Reading the Riots: reflections on interviewing police officers

Challenging the Surveillance State

Andre Kuipers, space station astronaut, sends pictures to Earth via Twitter

The lights of London are captured by ESA astronaut Andre Kuipers, from his vantage point high above the Earth on board the International Space Station. He has been capturing jaw-dropping views since he arrived on the space station in December, and tweeting them to his followers from his Twitter profile, @astro_andre.
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