P.S. Kinetik and Montreal were awesome.

Last year I went to


Which was held at





Which is in


This year


are going to


Which is located at the north end of the


However, we're staying at the


I chose to stay there because it is


It is also located in


I'll be largely getting around one the


The closest station for which is at the


Which is part of






There is an excellent archaeology museum there, the


Where you can learn some things about the





This year, I hope I have time to visit




Last year I popped into




This year, however, we are going to




The city has some lovely























Last time I was there, many shops were closed because of Easter, including


Hopefully there will not be any


Eventually, we'll have to go back to


P.S. Happy

Community Forum on the Sheraton B-more City Center Hotel Boycott

Wednesday, April 30, 2008
6:00pm - 9:00pm
Hotel Workers Union Hall in B-MORE
7-9 W Mulberry Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
Baltimore, MD

April 14th marked the two-year anniversary of the expiration of the workers’ union contract at the Sheraton Baltimore City Center Hotel. The owner/operator of the hotel, Columbia Sussex Corporation is a multi-million dollar hotel and casino company based in Kentucky. It has a practice of undercutting quality jobs and cutting staff at the properties it owns. At the Sheraton, Columbia Sussex is demanding increased workloads, decreases in workers’ rights, benefits and compensation, and to have the unlimited right to contract out the work that employees perform in the hotel.

Last year the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the company for allegedly illegally implementing its demands. The company rescinded the implementation. Now management is trying to impose its will on the employees once again. During this serious attack on their livelihood, the men and women who cook, clean and serve at the hotel have continued to take great pride in their work by providing excellent service to our city’s guests.

On October 18th, 2007, the workers took an extraordinary step and voted to boycott of their own hotel because of the severity of the situation. Community members, students and church leaders have joined with the workers at rallies, picket lines and other actions to raise awareness around the struggle. Customers from Baltimore and across the country have pulled over $2 million in business from the Sheraton Baltimore City Center hotel in just five short months.

You are invited to a Community Forum on our struggle on April 30, 2008 at 6pm. It will be held at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Joint Board office at 7-9 W Mulberry Ave., Baltimore, MD.

Just needed to remind everyone who is interested in the best tv show in history, that if they don't got cable they can still watch every single episode streaming for free now. If you haven't seen or heard of "The Wire," you are missing out. There is NO show or movie in my knowledge that tackles urban american life so sophisticatedly and honestly. This is not some typical primetime "Law and Order" crap, it's about institutions of power and how we are all connected. It mean there's a gay gansta who robs drug dealers like robin hood in it. Can it get any better?

If you don't like tv, stop whining - the streams have no commercials, and the show is like 5 seasons of one long movie of class warfare in the ghetto...
http://www.surfthechannel.com/show/television/the_wire.html

The first of the public events of the Utopian Design Collective--a lecture on Vertical Farming in Philadelphia--went well. commiefag did a very good job with turnout, as there were around a hundred people filling the room with latecomers having to stand. It has been the largest group that Dickson Despommier has spoken to on the issue. We eventually had to cut off questions.

Dinner was great, good company and a lot of speculative thought and cross-fertilization of ideas.

I've been making a lot more use out of google reader. So, I also have a blog set up specifically for items I share from google reader. Most of the items there are currently tagged "udc" for the "Utopian Design Collective". It's a lot of articles on the cutting edge of more ecologically sustainable technology. There is still some politics in there (ofcourse).



I'd like us to continue the lecture series, and start with survival priorities and to work our way up from base physiological needs to further up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Vertical farming addresses water and food. Other priorities are air, shelter and fire (or more accurately, power. My preference is the giant ball of hot fusion our planet spins around). Since so many of these basic needs aren't being met adequately for many people, it seems like the best place to start a discussion on utopia. That is to say that we can't ignore all the other needs.

I'll quote Kropotkin at length on this:
"MAN, however, is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied, other needs, of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward the more ardently. Aims of life vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.

"Even to-day we see men and women denying themselves necessaries to acquire mere trifles, to obtain some particular gratification, or some intellectual or material enjoyment. A Christian or an ascetic may disapprove of these desires for luxury; but it is precisely these trifles that break the monotony of existence and make it agreeable. Would life, with all its inevitable sorrows, be worth living, if besides daily work man could never obtain a single pleasure according to his individual tastes?

"If we wish for a Social Revolution, it is no doubt in the first place to give bread to all; to transform this execrable society, in which we can every day see robust workmen dangling their arms for want of an employer who will exploit them; women and children wandering shelterless at night; whole families reduced to dry bread; men, women, and children dying for want of care and even for want of food. It is to put an end to these iniquities that we rebel.

"But we expect more from the Revolution. We see that the worker compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to ignorance of these higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain these joys for all, which are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.

"No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to satisfy it the worker's child must go without bread! But in a society in which all can eat sufficiently the needs which we consider luxuries to- day will be the more keenly felt. And as all men do not and cannot resemble one another (the variety of tastes and needs is the chief guarantee of human progress) there will always be, and it is desirable that there should always be, men and women whose desire will go beyond those of ordinary individuals in some particular direction.

"Everybody does not need a telescope, because, even if learning were general, there are people who prefer examining things through a microscope to studying the starry heavens. Some like statues, some pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess an excellent piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes vary, but the artistic needs exist in all. In our present, poor capitalistic society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them unless he is heir to a large fortune, or by dint of hard work appropriates to himself an intellectual capital which will enable him to take up a liberal profession. Still he cherishes the hope of some day satisfying his tastes more of less, and for this reason he reproaches the idealist Communist societies with having the material life of each individual as their sole aim.--"In your communal stores you may perhaps have bread for all," he says to us, "but you will not have beautiful pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry--in short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human tastes. And in this way you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides the bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the grey linen in which all your lady citizens will be dressed."

"These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider, and which the founders of new societies, established in American deserts, never understood. They believed that if the community could procure sufficient cloth to dress all its members, a music hall in which the "brothers" could strum a piece of music, or act a play from time to time, it was enough. They forgot that the feeling for art existed in the agriculturist as well as in the burgher, and, notwithstanding that the expression of artistic feeling varies according to the difference in culture, in the main it remains the same. In vain did the community guarantee the common necessaries of life, in vain did it suppress all education that would tend to develop individuality, in vain did it eliminate all reading save the Bible. Individual tastes broke forth, and caused general discontent; quarrels arose when somebody proposed to buy a piano or scientific instruments; and the elements of progress flagged. The society could only exist on condition that it crushed all individual feeling, all artistic tendency, and all development.

"Will the anarchist Commune be impelled by the same direction? Evidently not, if it understands that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind."

The Conquest of Bread: The Need for Luxury, Kropotkin, 1906

Hope is so much better than despair. With hope you can have efficacy. With efficacy, you can change the world.

deep6 Productions Presents
Sunday Mar 23, 2008 9:00 PM
DC 9
1940 9th St NW
Washington DC, DC 20001
United States

The closest stop to DC9 is U Street (Green Line). Take the exit labelled: African-Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo (10th Street Exit). We are also within close walking distance from Dupont Circle (Red Line). Metro has an excellent trip planner for Bus or Rail. Please click the image below to visit Metro and plan your trip!


Sunday March 23rd is not to be missed deep6 productions Brings together an evening of some of the finest Industrial, Dark Electronic, IDM, Rythmic Noise and Drum and Bass acts in North America.




Live Sets by:


Iszoloscope (Montreal, QC)

http://www.iszoloscope.net/

http://www.myspace.com/iszoloscope



Iszoloscope's Yann Faussurier has always distinguished himself from his contemporaries in the rhythmic noise scene by focusing on atmospheric tones and sounds over the more purely beat-oriented abstraction favored by many of his fellow Ant-Zen artists. His dance material is always eminently danceable, of course, but he seems to have released as many purely ambient albums as club tracks. His latest release certainly seems to start off that way with "The Audient Void," an extended arrangement of low, droning moans that eventually builds into a slow march punctuated by occasional bursts of orchestral noise. "The Sum Of Us All" continues the low-key creepiness with eerie samples and more unsettling drones, but gradually a rhythm kicks in, eventually building into a straight-up four-on-the-floor beat that, though still overpowered by the moaning ambience, would probably play well in the power noise clubs. By "Raudivian Device," though, Faussurier is ready to ditch the spooky soundscapes in favor of all-out dance assault; with its reliance on hard beats and well-placed samples, this track is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Terrorfakt track with the urban violence replaced by zombie-film clips. "Insubstantiality," "From Hollow" and "Unto Deeper Calling" are some of the hardest-hitting tracks Faussurier's ever done, adding frantic drum 'n' bass rolls to evil thrashing power noise, but it's "The Path Of Totality (Part One)" and "Heard Voices" that really highlight the creativity of the Iszoloscope experience. They're eerie, evocative, and unpredictable, alternating unexpectedly from soft ambience and warped speech samples to frenetic up-tempo drum machine patterns and squealing feedback, simultaneously showing off both Faussurier's morbidly meditative side and his wicked dance music attitude. Check this one out if you're ready for something that's equally challenging in the club and on your headphones. ~Matthew Johnson @ Grave Concerns





Memmaker (Montreal, QC)

http://www.memmaker.ca/

http://www.myspace.com/memmaker



Attention cadets, incoming transmission! Destruction is imminent: Memmaker are here to destroy all human eardrums and interface with your women, undermining earth society forever. Comprised of Guillaume Nadon and Yann Faussurier (of Iszoloscope), Memmaker have forged a rare and explosive compound of hard-trance, driving electro grooves, and immense industrial beats against which mankind is utterly defensless. Limbs will be shattered and tossed like straw as the full force of their unstoppable sonic barrage is unleashed upon humanity, animating those torn and smashed extremities in a violent whirl of fists and bodies as their complete takeover of your central nervous system compels you to MOVE. Bodies will be tossed on concussive tremors of bass, and the screams of ecstasy and resignation will drown in the impossibly infectious rhythms.

The only hope for survival is to assimilate into the robot ranks and take to the streets. You are all soldiers to the cause now, and the Uprising is in motion - the insatiable iron lust of your new mechanical rulers will be satisfied! This robotic takeover is a cooperative venture between Hive Records Global Noise Corporation and the Embodiment Records Woldwide Control Apparatus.





Synnack(Boston, MA)

http://www.synnack.com

http://www.myspace.com/synnack



Synnack fuses elements of ambient, noise, industrial, and IDM musical styles with new media performance mediums. Musically, synnack has been compared to a combination of the Dada/Futurist audio experimentation and chance methodologies implored by John Cage in the early 20th century, and the rhythmic and melodic components of more contemporary audio artists such as Coil and Autechre. Live, synnack consists of 2 musicians who use a combination custom computer environments and live instruments to remix and manipulate audio at fundamental levels. Though computer generated, synnack is said to sound strangely organic and no two synnack performances are the same.





Worms of the Earth (Baltimore, MD)

http://www.woundsoftheearth.com/wote.html

http://www.myspace.com/wormsoftheearth



Worms of the Earth is an industrial project located in Baltimore, MD. He began the project in the year two thousand and three. The only member is: dan barrett, sometimes refered to by ID [.d4n b4rr3tt.]. "WORMS OF THE EARTH: a band that is nearly visionary in forecasting the sounds that we believe are going to sweep elektro into an entirely different form. It is hypnotic, damn great elektro and we urge you: Don't miss this rocket ride into desolation and dementia. Worms of the Earth is already possessed of its own identity, full-grown and ready to do battle. War streams into our consciousness once again….Worms of the Earth offers you an awakening, a becoming. Experience "Earth" as the last stop en route to the Apocalypse." - blc productions



deep6 Myspace

deep6 Website

deep6 Live Journal

The Community College of Philadelphia Architecture Program and the Utopian Design Collective are proud to present a Lecture by Dr. Dickson Despommier of the Vertical Farm Project. As an agricultural and environmental crisis looms, Dr. Despommier, a Columbia university luminary, has dared to dream. His vision of an urban agriculture presents an elegant solution to feeding the world, and confronts the challenge of creating sustainable urban space. The multi-disciplinary approach of his project combines environmental science, emergent materials technology and architecture to create the possibility of a radically green city. Join us as we learn more about the realities of Vertical Farms.

March 17th 2008 6:30PM

Community College of Philadelphia

Bonnell Building Auditorium BG-10

16th and Spring Garden

Entrance on 16th or 17th

Lecture Hall on First Floor Large Auditorium.

The Vertical Farm project has been featured on CNN, Wired Science, the BBC and Popular Science. To Learn more about The Vertical Farm Project you can go to www.VerticalFarm.com. This is a Free event.

The Utopian Design Collective is an amorphous grouping of dreamers, technophiles, and eco-geeks whose mission it is to spread the word about the liberatory possibilities of design and technology.



Utopian Design Collective

Andrew Flood on Anarchism in Ireland

March 7th, 7:30 PM at Red Emmas (800 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland)
There are events in Philadelphia (3/6), DC (3/9) and Richmond (3/11) as well.

A decade ago the active anarchist movement in Ireland consisted of little more than a dozen people in two small organizations. Today hundreds of people are active and one banned libertarian demonstration in 2004 saw 5,000 people take part. Anarchists are increasingly replacing Irish republicans as the bogeyman of the mainstream media. This talk explains how this breakthrough happened and details the various struggles anarchists have been involved in.

The Shell to Sea Campaign

Fights Against Higher Municipal Taxes and Charges

The Struggle Against Police (Garda) Brutality

Andrew is an active anarchist organizer and writer, with twenty years experience in Ireland, most of that time as a member of the Workers Solidarity Movement. More recently, he has been working as a founder member of Common Cause, Ontario. His publishing record includes well over one hundred articles, translated into over nine languages, chapters published in three books, and articles in seven English language anti-authoritarian magazines and newspapers. As well as numerous events in Ireland he has been the speaker at meetings in Britain, Italy, Canada, the Czech Republic and the USA and attended conferences in the Netherlands, France, Spain and Mexico.

He has been editor of the anarchist publications Workers Solidarity, Red & Black Revolution, Against War and Terror and Linchpin. He was on the editorial group of the first anarchist site to use the internet, Spunk Press, which predated the invention of the web (it used gopher). He has or is also on the editorial groups of A-Infos, Anarkismo.net, WSM.ie and Struggle.ws. He is currently involved in the launch of the new anarchist discussion site AnarchistBlackCat.org.

A partial archive of Andrew's writings, radio interviews and
translations can be found at
http://www.struggle.ws/andrew.html

Baltimore Flyer
http://www.nefac.net/~flint/baltflood.pdf

Tour Blog
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/blog

From Privacy International

U.S.A. is the world's #1 incarcerator, both in incarceration rate and total number of prisoners*. U.S.a.! #1! U.S.A.! #1!

In the U.S.A.:
1 in every 99.1 adults is incarcerated.
All men 18 or older: 1 in 54
White men 18 or older: 1 in 106
Hispanic men 18 or older: 1 in 36
Black men 18 or older: 1 in 15
All men 20-34: 1 in 30.
Black men 20-34: 1 in 9.

All women 35-39: 1 in 265
White women 35-39: 1 in 355
Hispanic women 35-39: 1 in 297
Black women 35-39: 1 in 100

Total state spending on corrections
1987: $12 Billion
2008: $49 Billion
2011 (estimate): $74 Billion




From the Pew Center

* China and North Korea's incarceration numbers are sometimes disputed, with accusations that they do not accurately report the quantity of prisoners

Also, according to ACLU, the FBI terrorist watch list now exceeds 900,000 people. I think they are going to need a lot more prisons. Be sure to write!

What Privilege Do You Have?

Father went to college - yes. GI Bill
Father finished college - no
Mother went to college - yes
Mother finished college - yes. Masters in Social Work
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor - no
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home - yes
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home - no; but if we counted my grandparent's... maybe. My family also made extensive use of the library, with regular trips there; both to the public library and the local university. I have more than 500 books in my library now, partly because I lack time to use the public library and partly because I couldn't afford to buy books I wanted when I was younger. I really should circulate some more of them, but I have a mild bibliophilia.
Were read children's books by a parent - yes
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 - no
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 - no
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively - yes. More accurately it's probably to say that my family strove to dress and talk like people portrayed positively in the media.
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18 - no
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs - no
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs - no
Went to a private high school - no
Went to summer camp - Yes. Boy Scouts. I often worked all of summer camp as a counselor, which made camp free and even gave me a small amount of pocket money.
Had a private tutor before you turned 18 - no
Family vacations involved staying at hotels - no. We camped.
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 - yes
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them - no
There was original art in your house when you were a child - no
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 - yes
You and your family lived in a single family house - yes; not so unusual for rural West Virginia, though we lived in a trailer for awhile
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home (see above) - yes. This was also probably the great burden for my mother to afford as a working single mom.
You had your own room as a child - yes
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course - no; I still did well.
Had your own TV in your room in High School - yes. 12" black and white
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College - no.
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 - no.
Went on a cruise with your family - no
Went on more than one cruise with your family - no
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up - yes. My mother regularly took us to museums and art galleries.
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. yes. Coal power plants!

In the group exercise which was originally designed for college students, staff and faculty, everyone stands in a line and steps forward if any of these things are true for them.

If we were all in a big room, I would have taken more than 15 steps forward. How about you? How many would you have taken? How many steps will your kids have taken by the time they're 18?

Notice that each of these are things that were given to you or provided for you rather than things you necessarily earned yourself. The exercise instructions note that just because you've taken a lot of steps doesn't mean that you haven't worked hard to get where you are. But perhaps consider the things you've had handed to you that others didn't have.

To participate in this blog game, copy and paste the above list into your blog, and bold the items that are true for you.

(Exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game please acknowledge their copyright.)

I have a lot of issues here with the "steps"; as in the size of steps definitely aren't equal. Having your college education completely paid for by your parents or a trust is a huge advantage; while having a telephone in your room is not so much. Also, how old you are probably effects how expensive some of these options were, and a private television in the 1960s would be very unusual, but in the 1990s, not so much. Still, it's an interesting exercise, and Mom... if you ever read this, thank you for dragging me to the museums, art galleries and libraries so often! Also, thank you for the Commodore 64 when I was 14, that was an excellent investment.

taken from neveranygrey

96% Mike Gravel
90% Dennis Kucinich
77% John Edwards
70% Joe Biden
70% Barack Obama
70% Bill Richardson
67% Chris Dodd
66% Hillary Clinton
38% Ron Paul
31% Rudy Giuliani
29% Mike Huckabee
28% John McCain
24% Mitt Romney
17% Tom Tancredo
17% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

They are all, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, "Ball-less, soul-less, spirit-less, corporate little bitches, suckers of satan's cock, each and every last one of them".

Chemlab put on an amazing show in Vancouver - too bad almost no one showed up. They deserve better.

Pics behind the cut.



me and TJ

Me and Jared (lead singer of Chemlab)

Jered and Tessa (the one who took the pictures)

... so I'm gonna go meet at the bus stop and welcome her to the city.

welcome to the Goodship Lollipop... Population: not many with pulses.

For those interested..

Each year there is an alternate Remembrance Day commemoration held at the Spanish Civil War memorial, next to the legislature. For those who haven't seen it, the memorial is of the Spanish "goddess of liberty" holding a victory wreath, and has a plaque with the anti-fascist slogan "No Pasaran". It's located by where the horse-drawn carriages usually line up during tourist season, near the water-fountain with the armourial plaques of each province.




The ceremony takes place at the same time as the main one, and is more focused on remembering anti-fascist war dead, specifically Canadians who fought in the Spanish Civil War and volunteered for service through World War II, and various other anti-fascist conflicts.

Specifically commemorated are the first Canadians to fight Nazi Germany, those who joined the CNT-FAI Columns and then later the Mackenzie-Papneau International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

I would like to stress the memorial is NOT oppositional to the main remembrance ceremony, and seeks to preserve the memories of Canadians who are not commemorated or remembered at the main ceremony in any official capacity, yet spent the longest of any fighting the armies of Nazi Germany during WWII. So, please do not show up if you want to disturb the main event, or to make a protest sentiment against the main ceremonies.



x-posted to Victoria_bc

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched C-beams glitter in the dark at Tannhauser Gate. All those... moments... will be lost -- in time; like tears, in rain."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WAapKx2TvM

I was amazed at how great [and therefore perverse and WRONG my fixation was] this song was.

Then I realized it's a rip of New Order's "Blue Monday".

It's the kind of music that makes you think maybe you shouldn't be working in an office cubicle 8-5, that I'm squandering something by doing so.