“U.S. Chief District Judge Mark Wolf ruled this week that the Department of Correction violated federal law protecting religious freedom and ordered the department to provide Daniel Yeboah-Sefah a diet in line with his Buddhist beliefs.”
Discerning Brute blogs about Guillermo Vargas Habacuc’s plan to starve another dog as part of an exhibition. As artists and viewers of art, we must take a firm stand against this exhibition. Not a stand against any form of art, but a stand against cruelty and slavery, torture and murder.
Discerning Brute is right on here - it’s the trend toward cruelty based shock art that is so disturbing. Let’s modify the old art school adage to reflect this trend:
“If you can’t do it well, do it big.
If you can’t do it big do it red.
If you can’t do it red, do it in multiples.
If you can’t do it in multiples, add animal cruelty for shock value and you’ll be right on your way to some Biennial or another”.
“Natural Charcoal”
I contributed a little story about a food producer and their sugar refinery to The Discerning Brute. You can read it here.
I verified that the Domino refinery in question does not use cow bones. I read something recently that claimed it takes something like 7,800 cows to produce the ‘bone char’ for one industrial sugar filter. The sugar industry calls it “Natural Charcoal.” Right, like “Healthy Forests” and “No Child Left Behind.”
From: Susan Norrell
Date: Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Subject: RE: Industrial productsHello Michael,
Our Yonkers refinery has never used natural charcoal filter (also known
to some as the bone char). They use a carbon filter process. If you
have any other questions, feel free to email me.Regards,
Sue Norrell
Consumer Affairs
Domino Foods
The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration is prepared to begin directing our most advanced spying technology on our own citizens. This includes advanced satellite systems.
We are entering the era of total surveillance. Every movement will soon be tracked - every cell phone call will enable location tracking - with clear line of sight, this technology will mean that you can be watched, from space, by your government.
Every time we tag a photo in facebook, we’re contributing to the facial recognition database. And every time we walk down the street our faces are captured by CCTV. Every book we list on myspace is entered into the matrix and one day, soon - perhaps you will have engaged in the requisite activities to be considered an enemy.
Will we see a movement toward wearing hoods and masks in public at all times? And will there be an attempt to regulate this? What if the hoods are worn for religious reasons? Will the face covering practice of fundamentalist Islam become the last refuge of the revolutionaries?
Devices are always watching us - and feeding data into the network. This OS X screensaver by Michael Zoellner searches for CCTV feeds and displays them. Very eerie.
And how does Honda’s reaction to this fall make you feel? One youtube commenter said the reaction made him feel like Asimo had “been murdered.”
How much storage do you have on you right now?
Can technology provide not only access to, but understanding of the origin of our design/evolution? According to Arianna Huffington, some family and friends of Google are getting into the business of decoding genomes. The Mountain View company 23andMe, Inc. is offerring to help you “make sense of your own genetic information.” According to thier web site, this means understanding:
“the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint (plus your mitochondrial DNA), bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits.”
To make sense of our own genetic information. To see what the genotype under the phenotype is. Is this like choosing “view source” on your web browser? To those who wonder about the ‘great web developer in the sky’ and its intentions for them, viewing that source code might come as a shock. Even with the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, how long will it be before a religious idea like “chosen people” becomes something verifiable through the revelation of ‘fact’?
From a summary of the preceedings of the 2000 AAR meeting: “Models of God in Religion and Science”
“Cyborg religion” also came up at a Religion and the Social Sciences section devoted to, “The Moral Life of Cyborgs: Issues in Forging, Navigating, and Resisting Virtual Communities.” A foursome from Union Theological Seminary, including Rachel A. R. Bundang, Nancie Erhard, Davina C. Lopez, and Aana Marie Vigen, offered a fascinating exploration into this cutting-edge topic.
This Union Theological Seminary group argued that virtual technologies are profoundly re-mapping “the actual way in which human beings relate within the world.” Presenters situated cyberspace within the larger political-economic-cultural context of an emergent visual age. Four themes were discussed: (1) the impact of visual images upon people, (2) the impact of cyberspace upon ecological relationships in the non-human world, (3) issues of morality as they are related to the body and sacred community of life, and (4) the relationship between the proliferation of information technologies and changes in patterns of human labor within the internet economy.