subtruth

… an obvious contender, really:

The American Association of Professors says clauses in contracts offered to scientists by BP would restrict them from publishing any academic research undertaken for the oil giant, sharing the results with other researchers or even talking about them for as long as three years, The Daily Telegraph said Friday.

(…)

Professor Cary Nelson, the head of the AAP, said the oil giant was making “hugely destructive” decisions.

Source: UPI.com

It’s like asking for more faeces in the middle of a shitstorm. It proves a complete unability to get out of pure corporate thinking, which you would definitely have to do here.

As much as i found the whole BP bashing a bit unfair in the first days of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, now i’m sure they deserve every bit of bad press about them.

I’m wondering how long it will take for BP to dismantle – and how much of it will go to the Chinese. By now, they are busy with their own oil spill.

that i won’t choose one:

A court-ordered study has found that electromagnetic waves beamed by Vatican Radio leave residents living near the station’s antennas at a higher risk of cancer, Italian media said Wednesday.

“There has been an important, coherent and meaningful correlation between exposure to Vatican Radio’s structures and the risk of leukaemia and lymphoma in children,” the report said, according to the daily La Stampa.

The report also warned of “important risks” of dying of cancer for people who had resided at least 10 years within a nine-kilometre (5.5-mile) radius of the radio’s giant antenna towers near Cesano, some 20 kilometres north of Rome.

Source: AFP via Google

Forward to 2:34.

Eating is the most ancient form of social link. From the many milestones of our lives to the simple meeting with friends or family, gathering around a table for a meal is an undisputed tradition… because there is actually nothing to dispute here. As Robin Fox at the Social Issues Research Centre notices:

Food is also an occasion for sharing, for distributing and giving, for the expression of altruism, whether from parents to children, children to in-laws, or anyone to visitors and strangers. Food is the most important thing a mother gives a child; it is the substance of her own body, and in most parts of the world mother’s milk is still the only safe food for infants. Thus food becomes not just a symbol of, but the reality of, love and security.

All animals eat, but we are the only animal that cooks. So cooking becomes more than a necessity, it is the symbol of our humanity, what marks us off from the rest of nature. And because eating is almost always a group event (as opposed to sex), food becomes a focus of symbolic activity about sociality and our place in our society.

So one can only rejoice at initiatives using food as a medium for political thought, like Conflict Kitchen:

A few months ago artists John Peña, Jon Rubin, and Dawn Weleski opened Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. Nowadays the Iranian food is served at the counter. More precisely, the kubideh, a dish made of grilled ground meat in freshly baked barbari bread with onion, mint, and basil. The food is wrapped in a paper covered with facts about Iran, its government, culture and the way the U.S. perceives it. Every four month, a new country takes center stage. For each iteration of Conflict Kitchen, events, performances, and discussion will explore further the culture, politics, and issues at stake.

Read more, including an interview, at we make money not art.

Less arty, the Food Not Bombs idea/slogan is turning 30 this year. It has spread all over the USA and is still going strong in some parts of Germany. Distributing food scavenged from supermarket trash containers for free is a critical statement per se, and linking this semantically with the waste that war represents creates a strong argument.

In the same vein, the practice of the Volkskücke (also VoKü or Volxküche) is well developed in Berlin. Volksküchen allow for healthy food for very little money (if at all). The intensity of their political background depends on the place and the occasion, but most of them are meant to support some political activity (they are then sometimes calles Soli for “solidarity”) and pretty much all are organized by groups associated with the alternative left-wing. If you are in Berlin, visit the Vétomat on a Wednesday for a nice and relaxed VoKü.

This is all good but very Western. I will be looking for more examples of food as medium. Tell me if you know about any.

EFF is turning 20!

EFF’s defense of your digital rights is needed now more than ever. From onerous user agreements with monstrous blocks of legalese that take away your rights, to new forms of tracking and surveillance that erode your privacy as you use the Internet, to international efforts to force ISPs to monitor subscribers and become “copyright cops,” the threats to our freedom and rights online continue.

Awesome work. Keep it up.

Did you know, Putnam, that more murders are committed at 92 Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower temperatures, people are easygoing. Over 92, it’s too hot to move. But just 92, people get irritable.

From It Came From Outer Space (1953)

It’s got to be well over 92 °F here in the German capital, but i did not go out to check. I cannot see anyone on the streets doing it either. But the insane heat reminds me of my favorite song by Siouxsie & The Banshees:

Can you feel the hot tension building up?

Some years before that, a young Nick Cave also sung about Evil Heat:

Flame on!

Post links to your favorite heat songs below.

It looks good on paper and has no advertisement – so far.

I have tried so many services in the past, none of which could convince me. Let’s give it a try.