Del.icio.us links for May 10th through May 19th:
- Smallpox Vaccine May Protect Against HIV – Vaccination with the smallpox vaccine called “vaccinia” may boost a person’s ability to resist infection with HIV, new research suggests.
If true, the finding could link the rapid, late 20th-century spread of HIV to the simultaneous vanquishing of smallpox disease and the removal of the smallpox vaccine — and possible HIV firewall– from worldwide distribution.
Tags: medicine studies vaccination hiv disease research - Saudi woman beats up virtue cop – It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
Tags: feminism gender patriarchy religion islam saudiarabia despotism resistance - we are the public option – The super hard core right wing takeover of the Texas State School Board has been completed. Under the guise of eradicating liberal bias, the school board created a set of standards that require schools to teach factually incorrect right wing propaganda in lieu of history.
Tags: texas usa rightwingbullshit christianfundamentalism crazies stupid education - Why neoliberalism persists – “There is an obvious question that arises here: in what way are these cuts good for capitalism? After all, what is being proposed here is that approximately £150bn should be taken from the public sector over the next four or five years, and redistributed to the financial sector. This could be regarded as an example of what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession”, since the assumption of the government is that reduced public sector investment will be matched by increased private sector investment. In an economic landscape increasingly marked by the dearth of profitable investment opportunities, the privatization of public wealth and industries have facilitated some of the few growth. But this particular act of redistribution is different in the sense that it does not of itself produce the investment opportunities that, say, the privatization of the utilities and public transport did.”
Tags: economics neoliberalism britain recession publicspending capitalism analysis - I Feel Sick To My Stomach: I Was A Teenage Anarchist – I got into radical politics when I was 15 years old, shortly after discovering punk music. At first I thought punk was just nihilism, misanthropy, self destruction, Sid Vicious. Then when I was 15 I got beat up by the cops; the experience changed my life. [...] The experience politicized me. I dropped out of high school. I started doing a zine. I started a distro of political pamphlets and Anarcho-punk records. I started a Food Not Bombs chapter with a group of friends. We met other like minded people across Florida and started a radical activist network. We organized protests, we organized gatherings, workshops, participated in direct action.
Tags: againstme punk anarchism activism radicalism autonomy - Ghosts Of The Future: Borrowing Architecture From The Zone Of Alienation – Even now, when cities can be raised procedurally from the blank canvas of a game engine, perhaps it’s worth taking a look at the real world and the mythology that has been strewn around it. If borrowing architecture from the zone proves anything, it’s that simulation should not exist in a vacuum.
Tags: gaming design stalker architecture urbanenvironments urbandecay - Ascii Dreams: No Aliens Allowed – The reason I’m asking is that telling a single player story about the near future demands a certain level of rigour in game design and narrative which a far future or apocalyptic story does not. You are held to higher standards, because the story you’re telling is so close to the real world that you risk future events invalidating it, you can’t invent as much handwavium to make combat play fun when the weapons are close to real world standards, you certainly can’t insert the level of variety of enemies when you’re restricted to the dull human chromosome.
Tags: gaming sf futurism gamedesign writing - BBC News – Cameron’s government: A guide to who’s who -
Tags: electoralpolitics britain coalition liberaldemocrats conservativeparty - What the coalition means. – Cameron is not a progressive. He is an old school Thatcherite whose record on economic as on social issues is reactionary – from demanding tax cuts for the rich to support for homophobic legislation. He and his party spent the 2010 general election race-baiting on immigration. Cameron himself is an opponent of multiculturalism, and he was quite happy to participate in the Muslim-bashing fiasco when it reached a nasty crescendo in 2006. His foreign policy is impeccably neoconservative, and William Hague is already sending out the policy signals [...] On the whole, Cameron is a man who instinctively identifies with wealth and privilege, and oozes disdain in every nuance of his speech and comportment for the poor and oppressed. If Cameron’s policy record, rather than his broken record PR spin, is what is at issue here, then calling him a progressive is as perverse as labelling the Pope a member of the Saviours Sect.
Tags: coalition electoralpolitics conservativeparty liberaldemocrats recession publicservices cuts - Lib Dem tax policy “fails the fairness test” – Nick Clegg’s planned policy of “tax cuts for people and families on low and middle incomes” would be deeply regressive according to a detailed analysis by Tim Horton and Howard Reed for Left Foot Forward.
Tags: economics liberaldemocrats coalition electoralpolitics - Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss … not. – “So we have a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government (those words, I think, throw the difference between the British and American political weltanschaung into stark relief).” Charlie Stross’s initial thoughts on the coalition govt.
Tags: uk britain politics electoralpolitics coalition - How to screen-print T-shirts at home | Life and style | guardian.co.uk -
Tags: screenprinting tshirts clothing diy tutorial crafts - The 5 Kinds Of Music That Teens Are Into – Oldz like to think that Kids These Days are completely different from the way oldz were back in the day. When oldz are exposed to new developments in youth culture, they usually get angry and confused, and say things like “[CURRENT BAND] fucking sucks, what’s wrong with kids these days? Ugh. They should listen to [OLD BAND THAT NOBODY UNDER 30 CARES ABOUT], that’s what’s up.” But the truth is that the more things change, the more they stay the same: the stuff kids like today is the same stuff we liked, just with slightly different clothes and haircuts (and flagrant autotune abuse). In fact, there are basically only 5 kinds of music that teens like, and they are THE SAME ONES that us oldz liked when we were teens. I will provide examples, then map the current version of each kind against the version for oldz to illustrate my point.
Tags: popculture music alternative youth teens funny