commonunity:
follow the link to read the complete two page article.
The anthropologist David Graeber has a strong claim to being the house theorist of Occupy Wall Street. A veteran of the antiglobalization uprisings in Seattle and Genoa, he helped orchestrate the first “General Assembly” in New York this summer, and has since become one of the movement’s most outspoken defenders. For him, the encampments in cities across the country prefigure the kind of anti-hierarchical, stateless society that ought to be our future. In a recent opinion article in The Guardian of London, Graeber proclaimed OWS “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.” For a movement that has attracted an array of political sympathies, his voice reminds us that at its organizational core, Occupy Wall Street cleaves to anarchist principles.
But Graeber’s most important contribution to the movement may owe less to his activism as an anarchist than to his background as an anthropologist. His recent book DEBT: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $32) reads like a lengthy field report on the state of our economic and moral disrepair. In the best tradition of anthropology, Graeber treats debt ceilings, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps as if they were the exotic practices of some self-destructive tribe. Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt — where it came from and how it evolved. Graeber’s claim is that the past 400 years of Western history represent a grievous departure from how human societies have traditionally thought about our obligations to one another. What makes the work more than a screed is its intricate examination of societies from ancient Mesopotamia to 1990s Madagascar, and thinkers ranging from Rabelais to Nietzsche — and to George W. Bush’s brother Neil.
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Why aren’t great open access journals more widely read and cited? I am sure that the people who think about these things professionally know the real answer to this, but here’s my answer: alerting monopolies.
We are ‘alerted’ (made aware) of new content in AAA journals because the AAA ‘pushes’ alerts to us — in the old days, they used to actually send you a paper copy of the journal. These days there are email alerts, twitter alerts, and other ways of reaching anthropological audiences. A lot of these methods are opt-in, so you have to actually go sign up to receive emails about new issues. But because we interact with the AAA website and organization regularly, it is much easier to get people to sign up for these alerts.
If you are the kind of person who already knows about Tipiti and reads it regularly, on the other hand, then you are already savvy enough to hunt down some of the more obscure edges of the Internet for open access content. But how will the more mainstream anthropologists get signed up for alerting and be able to locate content from these journals?
It’s an interesting question. I’m increasingly thinking that as the amount of open access material increases we need to build services on top of it to aid discovery — as the old methods of publication change the old ways that scholars process them will probably have to change as well.
(Source: feedproxy.google.com)
Here are some fresh thoughts on the enduring and important questions surrounding “climate sensitivity” – how much warming will result from a substantial buildup of greenhouse gases.
After my post on a much-discussed paper trying to clarify the extent of greenhouse-driven heating to expect in coming decades, I sought input from the lead author, Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University. (As I mentioned, another author, Nathan Urban of Princeton University, provided one valuable view in a long interview posted on the Planet 3.0 blog.)
Here’s Schmittner’s reaction, focused less on specific technical criticisms and more on overarching insights and issues raised by his work. The research drew lessons from paleoclimate studies of the Last Glacial Maximum, the cold peak of the last ice age, that relate to the extent of warmth possible in an era of accumulating greenhouse gases:
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Millions of Americans still want to force women with unwanted pregnancies to stay pregnant against their will — in effect, to be unwilling breeding machines.
For millennia, women’s reproductive rights have been legislated, adjudicated and religiously controlled by those who would never have to experience an unwanted pregnancy —men. For millennia, poor young unskilled mothers had to do whatever it took to find food and shelter for their children. This often meant becoming sexual and domestic slaves to men. Also, for literally millennia, unwanted pregnancies were often followed by extremely dangerous abortion attempts and/or by the wrenchingly painful smothering to death or abandoning of new-born infants.
But as science and technology continued to advance, particularly in the last century, birth control methods became increasingly effective, early abortions finally became much safer than giving birth, and powerful religious patriarchies began to weaken. The long sought for reproductive emancipation of women was finally beginning to take giant steps forward. Since Roe v Wade (1973), over 40 million American women have opted for an early safe legal abortion. That’s more women than there are people in the entire state of California! That’s over 40 million women who had a major second chance to control their own destiny.
Yet, four decades after Roe there still remains in the U.S. a powerful backlash by America’s religious-political patriarchy and their followers. The overwhelming majority of anti-abortion voices in power today—in our pulpits and political machines—are white, conservative, Christian male voices—the same voices that once opposed both suffrage and birth control for women.
Today, abortion facilities still remain in only 13% of our nation’s counties, while state and national efforts to further weaken Roe continue unabated. The right of women with unwanted pregnancies to not be forced to stay pregnant against their will continues to lose ground to nation-wide campaigns like Personhood-USA with its well-financed attempts to have embryos, blastulas and microscopic zygotes protected by law as persons.
5 months ago
The answer to one of today’s most difficult urban planning problems may lie in the Middle Ages. In cities and towns across America, freeways cut through communities, creating urban dead zones that sever neighborhoods from each other. To heal that damage, the city of Columbus, Ohio built a type of urbanized bridge that was common in Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries.
5 months ago
Middlesex University generously provided us with a copy of the quotes the researchers used. See if you can tell the difference between the rapists and the lad mags:
1. There’s a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex … The way they dress, they flaunt themselves.
2. Some girls walk around in short-shorts … showing their body off … It just starts a man thinking that if he gets something like that, what can he do with it?
3. A girl may like anal sex because it makes her feel incredibly naughty and she likes feeling like a dirty slut. If this is the case, you can try all sorts of humiliating acts to help live out her filthy fantasy.
4. Mascara running down the cheeks means they’ve just been crying, and it was probably your fault … but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out.
5. What burns me up sometimes about girls is dick-teasers. They lead a man on and then shut him off right there.
6. Filthy talk can be such a turn on for a girl … no one wants to be shagged by a mouse … A few compliments won’t do any harm either … ‘I bet you want it from behind you dirty whore’ …
7. You know girls in general are all right. But some of them are bitches … The bitches are the type that … need to have it stuffed to them hard and heavy.
8. Escorts … they know exactly how to turn a man on. I’ve given up on girlfriends. They don’t know how to satisfy me, but escorts do.
9. You’ll find most girls will be reluctant about going to bed with somebody or crawling in the back seat of a car … But you can usually seduce them, and they’ll do it willingly.
10. There’s nothing quite like a woman standing in the dock accused of murder in a sex game gone wrong … The possibility of murder does bring a certain frisson to the bedroom.
11. Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants … they’re just displaying their body … Whether they realise it or not they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a beautiful body, and it’s yours if you want it.’
12. You do not want to be caught red-handed … go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.
13. Some women are domineering, but I think it’s more or less the man who should put his foot down. The man is supposed to be the man. If he acts the man, the woman won’t be domineering.
14. I think if a law is passed, there should be a dress code … When girls dress in those short skirts and things like that, they’re just asking for it.
15. Girls love being tied up … it gives them the chance to be the helpless victim.
16. I think girls are like plasticine, if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them.
Are Sex Offenders And Lads’ Mags Using The Same Language? [University of Surrey]
Answers. 1. Rapist, 2. Rapist, 3. Lad mag, 4. Lad mag, 5. Rapist, 6. Lad mag, 7. Rapist, 8. Lad mag, 9. Rapist, 10. Lad mag, 11. Rapist, 12. Lad mag, 13. Rapist, 14. Rapist, 15. Lad mag, 16. Lad mag
5 months ago
The State Parks and Recreation Commission plans to issue layoff notices to nearly a third of its full-time staff as it responds to lagging Discover Pass sales.
Most of the 160 eliminated positions will be replaced with seasonal jobs, which might be filled by the same employees but only for about five months of the year.
Fewer people than expected are buying the parking pass that lawmakers required for state recreational lands. The parks agency now projects the Discover Pass will bring state agencies $23.8 million less than the $64.2 million it originally predicted.
Most of that drop-off affects parks. The commission today agreed to bridge the agency’s roughly $14 million shortfall over the next year and a half by dipping into reserves and making $11 million in cuts.
“We’re not giving up on the Discover Pass, saying it’s a failure or anything,” said the acting deputy director of parks, Ilene Frisch. “It’s a brand new program that hasn’t had time to gel yet.”
But officials have to cut in order to cope because the parks agency was cut off from the state’s general fund this year with the exception of some bridge money. And commission members decided they shouldn’t close parks at a time when they are trying to convince people to pay to use them.
Parks spokeswoman Virginia Painter called the cuts “pretty devastating” to an agency with 518 year-round employees.
Fewer workers will mean less frequent maintenance in the parks, she said. “We’re not going to be as well cared for. We’re just really trying to hold things together so we can be stronger later.”
About two-thirds of the year-round field positions being eliminated will be replaced with seasonal jobs.
In addition, up to 15 staff at park headquarters and up to 25 staff in regional offices will receive layoff notices, Frisch said. Some may be rehired in different positions.
The commission also agreed to draw its three months worth of reserve down to about two months, and to reduce spending on equipment and office leases.
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Global carbon emissions soared 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest increase ever recorded, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists that tracks carbon emissions. The increase comes after a short-lived decline in emissions in 2008 and 2009 and is a sign that global CO2 emissions are once again on the rise as world economies bounce back from recession. The overall jump of more than 500,000 million tons of CO2 emissions from 2009 to 2010 was likely the largest absolute increase since the Industrial Revolution, according to the Global Carbon Project.
Emissions in China, the world’s largest source of CO2 releases, rose by 10.4 percent to 2.2 billion tons of carbon injected into the atmosphere. Emissions in the U.S., after dropping 7 percent in 2009, rose by 4 percent last year, according to the report. On average, fossil fuel emissions increased about 3.1 percent from 2000 to 2010, about three times the rate of increase during the 1990s. The combustion of coal represented more than half of the growth in emissions, the report said.
Glen Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the Global Carbon Project, said the steep rise in emissions is evidence of a trend that portends severe climate change in the future. “Each year the emissions go up, there’s another year of negotiations, another year of indecision,” said Peter
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