Infinite Strike

From IEF

The Institute for Experimental Freedom's European appendages and friends are proud to release an English translation of “La Grève Infinie” (Infinite Strike). This text was written on Oct 27th 2010 from within the events transpiring throughout the French strikes and blockades. It has appeared throughout France, and is available in at nantes.indymedia.org/article/22087 and http://juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-la-greve-infinie-59845046.html.

Although the US is not France, we can't help but find a certain resonance with the strike, with the determinacy of struggle. We welcome the return of causseur, of the vandal, of course! We delight in the fine fractures that link our deep sense of despair with the its negation—the secret solidarity between our weakness our others strength. And so, as a means of reverberating the call, the IEF offers this text to those of us who are everywhere homeless, and everywhere foreign.

Within the text—which is just overheard within the event—we see a clear proposition. The elementary strategy of “shutting it all down.” Blockade the oil refineries, extend all self-reductions beyond ourselves, block the ports, defeat the police, shut down the nuclear reactors. Realize all strikes as a position.

Practice makes perfect.

INFINITE STRIKE

It's clear. The Party of Order seeks, with all the forces at its disposal, to have us return home. On this point, at least, the unions and the government are of one accord. Doubtlessly banking upon our most miserable inclinations, our insidious predilection for the emptiness and absences in which we have so perfectly forgotten how to live and struggle. Here they are mistaken. We will not go home; we who are everywhere homeless. For if there exists a single place that we might deem inhabitable, it's within this event, in the intensities taking shape therein, thanks to which we are living. In accordance, above all, with the means we will be able to provide ourselves.

It's clear. An insurrectional process gathers strength to the extent that the givens that make up its particular understanding of reality become, imperceptibly, blaring truisms. Being given that Capitalism is a universal lie, the form of its negation, inversely, will be that of a plurality of worlds combined jointly by the truths that hold them together.

The words by which a situation becomes comprehensible to itself directly determine both its forms and its spirit. The forced objectifications will manage, at best, to trace vague contours around a muchness. The diversity of analysis, be they those of the sociologists or those of the radical activist, put about the self-same concert of confusion: broken-winded apology or interested pessimism. In either case one is struck by the want of so much as a glimmer of the tactical sense by which a voice finds its real comprehensibility, a veritable Common which could liberate the possibilities opened-up by the situation, and through which one could rid oneself, like a nightmare upon waking, of our programed despondency. The trenchancy of this voice resides as much in its choice of words as in the positivity of its orientation.

An opening gesture proves necessary to set out the strategic intelligibility of the events in progress. That of situating oneself, of orienting oneself. To speak from somewhere, not simply from behind one or another point of view, but from the position of a party. ...

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~ PDF version ~

Nuclear collapse looms? Fukushima No. 4 reactor 'leaning'

A small group of evacuees have briefly been allowed inside the exclusion zone around Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. For the first time, the government gave permission for short visits so people could gather belongings and check on their properties. Meanwhile, a recent map of contamination released by Japan shows high levels of radiation well outside the evacuation zone. Dr Robert Jacobs can help shed more light on this. He's a Research Associate Professor of Nuclear History and Culture at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.

A grim dilemma: Treating the tortured prisoner

Medical involvement with torture is prohibited by international law and professional associations, and yet sometimes it is the right thing for doctors to do, argue two bioethicists. Their timely paper in the Hastings Center Report comes as news of the trail leading to the death of Osama Bin Laden points to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who were subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques," which many believe amounted to torture.

Despite its prohibition, torture remains widespread in more than a third of countries, according to data from Amnesty International cited in the article. And physicians and other medical personnel are implicated in at least 40 percent of cases, the article reports. Recently declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency on interrogation at Guantanamo Bay state, "OMS [Office of Medical Services] provided comprehensive medical attention to detainees . . . where Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were employed with high value detainees."

The dilemma physicians finds themselves in, according to authors Chiara Lepora and Joseph Millum, is that to care for tortured patients at the request of their torturers may "entail assisting or condoning terrible acts," but to refuse may in some cases mean abandoning a patient in need of a doctor's care or who desires such care. Chiara Lepora, M.D., is a visiting professor at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver who formerly worked for Doctors Without Borders as physician and emergency coordinator. Joseph Millum, Ph.D. has a joint appointment with the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics and the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health.

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Can you live without money?

... "I think everyone can make a transition towards being less dependent on money," Mark said. "For most people living completely moneyless is unrealistic, unless they are totally committed. But I think everyone wants to save money and have less of an environmental impact and have some fun in the process. It doesn't have to be a big sacrifice."

With this in mind, Mark spilled the (ethically sourced) beans on how he's managed to nab holidays, accommodation, garden tools… and a place to live, all for absolutely nothing.

How to get... a house

…well, a caravan at least. Mark picked his up at freecycle, an online community of millions of likeminded money savers. It works like this: If you've got a toaster that you don't want, you can post a message on the site saying "I've got a toaster" with your post code. You can also post wanted messages like "I need a new toaster". Then if someone does they'll email you back, saying "I have one, pick it up at so-and-so-time".

Mark says: "It's very simple, you can send out an email and in 15 minutes you'll usually have what you're looking for. I've got everything from mobile phones to tents to my caravan. This woman got in contact and said she had one that she couldn't be bothered to fix-up so I just took it off her hands. It was worth £500 and in really good condition." ...

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Larry Hagman - All Politicians Should Use LSD

Watch here.

WikiLeaks and the Future of Whistle-blowing

In the run-up to a debate on WikiLeaks, Julian Assange’s attorney discusses the uncomfortable relationship between the free flow of ideas and the inclination of governments to make everything a secret.

By Emily Badger, Miller-McCune

Miller-McCune: In what way has WikiLeaks permanently altered what you refer to in this debate as “the information war”?

Mark Stephens: The genius of Julian Assange was really to spot the gap in the market.

For years, traditional media have had the drop box where you can anonymously put a brown envelope to the newspapers, and many people have done that. But the problem with this [type of] whistle-blowing was that people are often able to identify the leaker by the documents, because many of the documents are now in a situation where governments put secret identification features into them, such as a zero or an O will be filled in on page 12, 13, 14, 15, depending on which personnel it was distributed to. That’s a very basic idea, but there are similar kinds of things you can do so you can go back and track — if you ever get the document — who it came from.

What Julian did was he made an organization which was stateless, and therefore, not as susceptible to the national laws in any individual state. He also made the organization international in the sense that a thousand people work with WikiLeaks around the world, and so if he becomes indisposed — as he was when he was in prison — for any length of time, there are many other people who can step in and did, and the organization carries on. He’s got resilience built in. And as far as the person who is leaking is concerned, through his computer genius, he’s been able to devise code which makes it impossible for the person receiving the electronic files to know who sent them.

This is incredibly important, as documents which are given to journalists [today] tend to come in CDs full of material, rather than the old-fashioned folders of documents. The material is downloaded from computers, it’s a lot more material, a lot more to digest. From that perspective, you’ve got a sea change in the way in which information is flowing to the media. And of course, what has happened is it’s obviously been successful by the very fact that traditional media has followed WikiLeaks to try and develop their own electronic drop boxes.

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Ritual Abuse And Extreme Abuse Clinician’s Conference 2011

A one day conference preceding our regular conference will be open to licensed practitioners in related fields to discuss issues in working with clients suffering from ritual abuse and extreme abuse symptoms. Students studying in related fields and retired licensed practitioners may write smartnews@aol.com by e-mail for more information.

Internet conference information is available at: http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/ritual-abuse-and-extreme-abuse-clinicians-conference-2011/

The conference will be held on August 5, 2011 from 8 am until 5 pm at the DoubleTree near the Bradley International Airport, 16 Ella Grasso Turnpike
Windsor Locks, CT.

Scientists Afflict Computers With 'Schizophrenia' to Better Understand the Human Brain

Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found.

The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry.

"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."

The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren't real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story.

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Rainbow Gathering Photos

What is a Rainbow gathering :
Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities, typically held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media.

~ Photos here and here. ~