The Postmodern Anarchist

Since any excuse to travel is a good reason to travel, I'm taking off for the West Coast in support of the relocation of netweed world headquarters to San Francisco. I'm going to try to stay out there for a few weeks and am looking forward to blogging on the road. So, starting next week, I'll give you the Postmodern Anarchist's view of San Francisco. Or, perhaps, of the gutters outside me favorite bar. Ah, city life!

Till then, here are some useful knowledge nuggets:

More on the seizure of Indymedia servers in an interview with a lawyer and Indymedia participant.

Salon did a sobering feature recently on government intelligence cooperation against internationally mobile activists.

The move to legalize marijuana continues to grow in multiple locations in the U.S. and I have to say that I feel really good about that.

My home town used to have a 7-Even, Rarotonga has 6 Elevens and Iraq has MaDonal.

I was oddly relieved when, after checking my stats for visitors and finding an url that included "arghfuckkill", the site turned out to be a blog called loveecstasycrime. And it led me to Anarchogeek, who's created Anarchoblogs, a link and newsfeed page featuring anarchist bloggers.

BBC News has coverage of the return of the servers. Indymedia still doesn't know why they were taken though various details are emerging, including some at Wired.

In the New Left Review:

"The current global conjuncture as a collision between brute imperial interests and blunders in hegemonic control of the image-world. State power and spectacular warfare after September 11, in the view of the Bay Area’s Situationist collective. "

More details of the FBI seizure of web servers in the U.K. are related in BBC News.

Analysis and commentary in The Register.

I'm sure much will be written about the work of Jacques Derrida now that he's passed on. I found this particularly well done look at his life in the Telegraph.

Some Derrida Resources:
Derrida Online
DERRIDA - documentary film
I'll have to wander all alone - Essay by Jacques Derrida on the death of Gilles Deleuze.

"American authorities have shut down 20 independent media centres by seizing their British-based webservers.

On Thursday a court order was issued to Rackspace, an American-owned web hosting company in Uxbridge, Middlesex, forcing it to hand over two servers used by Indymedia, an international media network which covers of social justice issues and provides a "news-wire", to which its users contribute.

The websites affected by the seizure span 17 countries."

Story continues at The Guardian.

Here's how my mind works when I get that first cup of coffee kicking in.

So I see this article at Wired on an antiterrorism database effort by the U.S. government that, of course, implies another step towards an integrated database of U.S. citizens, and I remember hearing something on the news about terrorists in another country with U.S. school diagrams and I'm wondering if they got that idea from the Columbine kids and I realize that if they (any they, really) took a few schools hostage like that school in Russia, which should have triggered a highly colorful terror alert but didn't cause it was during the RNC, but if they did that, took those schools hostage, then everybody would be going online to provide information for those databases and standing in line to get those embedded spy chips cause, like somebody, probably a lot of somebodies, pointed out, they always do it for the safety of the kids or of the nation but somehow you always end up with a bigger permanent record and less freedom of motion.

Usually I just give you the links.

Um, I think I need another cup of coffee.

While U.S. industry is finding every possible avenue for dumping genetically modified food on the market, Europeans have said no GMOs.

Face corsets rock!

Cryptographer and security analyst Bruce Schneier has a blog called Schneier on Security.

Someday I'll have one of those smart looking blogs with lots of pretty pictures, like The Thoughts Of A Dirty Intellectual Whore, notes from somewhere bizarre or Wooster Collective.

In truly fucked up news, ABC has some much needed mainstream coverage of the involvement of organized crime in the trafficking of women. Huge networks of criminals are moving large numbers of women around the world. Women who relocate for job offers and then are forced into prostitution.

One of the things I hadn't heard about the Edwards/Cheney debate was Cheney's comparison of Afghanistan to the so called "civil war" in El Salvador in the 1980s. Although we did not commit troops in El Salvador, we supported death squads and a lot of other nasty shit that left a lot of dead and abused humans behind. Cheney is a fucking asshole, as usual.

I thought this article on creating an anthropology portal for the research community was going to be about an open access portal cause I found out about it at Open Access News. But it turns out that AnthroSource is a member benefit of the American Anthropological Association. It's a good article if you're interested in the information needs of academic communities and it was in Open Access News partly because it's in the October issue of First Monday, the open access Internet research journal.

Other articles of particular interest:
Grey Tuesday, online cultural activism and the mash–up of music and politics
Between rhizomes and trees: P2P information systems

For open source fans, the November issue of First Monday will focus on FLOSS: Free/Libre Open Source Software.

Open access devotees will be happy to note that the new issue of Open Access Now is online.

Over at Hip Hop Logic, Clyde has been posting on How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.

netweed relaunches October 5th, so I'm busy till then helping out. Check back Tuesday.