A Series of Tubes

I think I am required to post this:

Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a boob:  here.

One might think that the recent occupations at UCSC are an isolated incident.  The method of students occupying buildings on campus is being tried in Vienna.  I must say that the protest in Vienna is putting the UCSC protests to shame.  I’ll talk more about that later.

To begin, I need to first talk about Bologna.  Bologna is two things.  First it is a delicious sausage that originated in a city with the same name in northern Italy.  Second, and more applicable, Bologna is the city that holds the oldest University in the western world and is the location where sweeping EU wide University reforms have recently been proposed.  The reforms, called the Bologna process, are a framework to standardize the educational system in the EU, making degrees and courses from differing Universities comparable, so a physics class in one University will teach the same thing as a similarly named class at another.  It would also standardize degrees from various Universities as well, so different universities would give out similar degree types, like the bachelor/masters degrees given out in the US.  For science and engineering courses, this would help people to transfer to other Universities since credit from one course would easily transfer to a new institution.  For art institutions, this is a double edged sword.  Creativity is not something that can be standardized, however requiring students to have a broad set of courses in order to get a degree could be beneficial.

Now that I’ve talked about both sausage and University reforms in the EU, it’s time to get to the protests.  There are two protests/actions that happened in Vienna.  Since most of the writing about it is in German, many of the bloggers and interpreters in the US conflate the two.  The first one was at the Academy of fine arts, Vienna in Austria.  If you click on the link for their homepage, you will notice the ]a[ logo that the University uses.  This matches the photos from the demonstration that happened on Tuesday the 20th:

I can understand why an Art Academy would resist a program of standardization.  It also makes sense why the website that describes the protests is called “paint by numbers” (malen nach zahlen), as a witty way of pointing out the difficulties inherent in standardizing art.  The Academy of fine arts Vienna has a student body of about 900, according to wikipedia, making it about 1/16th the size of UCSC.  Looking at the picture I would say that they had a phenomenal turnout.  Unfortunately the second action has more images and press and I can’t tell what is still happening with the original Academy of fine Art occupation anymore.

Not wanting to be outdone by the Art Academy, students at the University of Vienna decided to stage their own protest on the 22nd.  This protest started in ways that reminded me of the UCSC Occupation.  Just a little bit of info about the University of Vienna: The student population at the University of Vienna is about 74,000, making it more than 82 times bigger than the Academy of fine Arts Vienna and more than 4 times bigger than UCSC.  The reason I say it reminded me of the UCSC occupation is because of the series of events surrounding the Occupation of the University of Vienna.  First there were marches and rallies which ended with the Occupation of a lecture hall.  Various participants were encouraged to speak at the podium.  After the speakers, participants broke up into groups so that a document could be formed outlining what exactly they were protesting.  Since the Bologna process is less of a rallying cry for a University with a prestigious science program that has generated many Nobel laureates, the demands made were very general and overarching.  The result of this process was the following list of demands: Read more

Executive Vice Chancellor Kliger sent out a comment on the new occupation.  You can see his comment along with two photos of a building tagged and a door being barricaded here.  His post is titled Vandalism at Humanities building.

In response to this, one of the occupiers wrote a blog post.  It is a must read:

http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/letter-to/

There are two things about the post that I want to highlight.  First is the assertion that the intent of the protest was peaceful: “Most American school children with even a cursory knowledge of the history of nonviolent protests from Gandhi to Dr. King, would not fail to recognize the true nature of last night’s events.”

This is an awesome and comically false assertion.  Take a look at the photos on Kliger’s post.  There is a picture of the building tagged with the words “RIOT: coming soon.”

Also read the words of previous posts in order to gain support for the occupation here:

“We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.”

fires of insurrection sure sounds peaceful to me.

“Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline.”

I mean seriously occupy CA, do you even read your own posts?  This quote is hands down a rejection of peaceful protests.

The second point that occupyca makes that I want to comment on is this:

“as to EVC Kliger’s assertion that students were provoking police officers, this is simply untrue. He was not there, and has relied upon the accounts of the police officers who were. Perhaps he would be interested in hearing what others saw, but I doubt it. There are dozens of eyewitnesses who saw, as well as video footage showing, what actually happened”

Watch the video and see if you hear the words “fuck the police”.  There is yelling and obvious provocation.  If occupyCA is reading this, please watch and listen to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNxCaXi28OQ&feature=player_embedded

Update: I have a picture, below, and a video, at the end.

Photo from indybay.

The Occupiers have moved from occupying the Graduate Student Commons to Occupying the Dean of Social Sciences. There are two statements for the occupation that I found, one on indybay and one on occupyca. There is also a facebook group despite facebook being a company that plans to make money using the personal information of its users to sell to advertisers, but I’ll try to stay more positive since the occupiers appear to have moved up the food chain, closer to those more responsible for budget and salary decisions at UCSC.

This building is actually owned by the University and not by graduate students so there is a much greater urgency for the University to respond.  The University will also have lawyers ready to prosecute the occupiers, so there is a greater chance that the administration will send police in with orders to make arrests.  After the first occupation, the police will be on high alert, giving them a faster response time to a second occupation.  As I write and research this I found that it is already over, and the police already responded!  The second occupation didn’t last 1 day.  That is what happens when you occupy a building the university cares about.

Here is a video (poor quality probably due to it being dark outside and the camera used was probably on someone’s phone, but you can still hear the action):

With Halloween coming up I decided to go to goodwill to see what I could get on the cheap. After getting a shirt, hat, and a plastic cleaver, I have my costume.  I just need to grow the mustache (and eyebrows).  I think the people around me will be annoyed by the number of times I say bork. To see a demonstration of my future behavior see:

Every year the Nobel prizes get awarded and every year I cringe whenever I hear someone say “Nobel Prize in Economics”.  The reason I cringe is because there is no Nobel Prize in Economics.  Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite, made a ton of money, and dedicated his money to be used handing out prizes for Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Literature, and Peace.  The first prizes in these categories were given out in 1901.  Nobel didn’t give a rats ass about economics.

There are people that give a rats ass about economics though: Bankers.  The Swedish National Bank is called “Sveriges Riksbank“.  In 1969 they decided to start giving out prizes to economists.  The name of their prize is “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences”.  Of course nobody cares about a prize given out by the Bank of Sweden, so they dedicated their prize to Alfred Nobel, making the full title of the award “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel“.  In order to help people make the common mistake of labeling it the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Prize is awarded in the same manner and with similar ceremonies.  The winner also gets to stand with the actual Nobel Prize winners in a ceremony on Dec. 10th.  instant prestige with only a minimum amount of gerrymandering.

In the New York Times article about the recent winner of the fake Nobel prize, the author states that the prize was started by the bank and that the prize is in memory of Alfred Nobel.  The full title of the prize is never given in the article, however Nobel’s name is used in the title, the first sentence, and throughout the article.  There is one mention of the Swedish Central Bank, but only in passing, and also right before giving some bio information about Alfred Nobel to make the reader forget that Swedish Bank stuff.

Of course the fact that the New York Times even made a token mention of the Swedish Bank is impressive.  Most people just call it the Nobel Prize in Economics (especially business writers).

Read more

Nathan Coombs over at the guardian has an interesting read about the new communist movement and how the Santa Cruz Occupation fits into that (see the link here).  I apologize to my Anarchist readers, but the article’s author, like me, identifies the Occupation of the graduate student commons as a communist revival more than an Anarchist action.

I find this fascinating since I am currently reading books on Mao and Che and I quite recently read the motorcycle diaries.  The new communists correctly identify a major problem with previous revolutions: massive human rights violations perpetrated by a totalitarian state.  The idea is to maintain a large distance from the state, this would then prevent a link between communism and totalitarian systems of government.  Instead of installing a new government, the communists would instead install a system of worker owned coops (in order to obtain the means of production of say a factory, the communists would occupy the building).  The problem with the model is that large corporations can charge slave wages and undercut the coop prices.  In order for this new communist plan to work, it needs some sort of government subsidy or massive government intervention to compete.  This is where the theory and the practice butt heads since in practice, a strong and supportive state is needed, but the theory wants to keep the State far away in order to avoid past errors (aka.  deaths).

What you end up with at the end of it is a confused Occupation movement that wants a communist coop model, but has no practical political theory to acheive this end.  I guess the question is whether or not the new communists will figure this out or if instead we will have ineffective occupation son campus with vauge goals and demands.

I’ve recently found out that Bodum, the makers of press pots, is running a razor/razorblades business model.  Admittedly the razor isn’t cheap for Bodum, so my analogy isn’t exact.  I’m currently on my 3rd glass container for their press pot and this morning it inexplicably broke.  I’m assuming it has to do with glass expanding and contracting due to a sudden change in temperature.  Regardless of the physics of how it happened, the economics of the situation is that I should have bought a more expensive stainless steel press pot for a larger initial cost because constantly buying glass carafes is expensive. The psychology of the situation is that I’m an unhappy customer.  See my broken pot below:

If I had done more searching I would have know this was a problem, see the review here.  I’m not going to be suckered into buying another glass carafe.  Of course Bodum knows that you will eventually get fed up with buying the glass carafe and makes an insulated stainless steel one as well.  Sneaky sneaky.  I will not be lured into your money trap Bodum (and apparently your steel one doesn’t hold heat in very well).  I’ll have to see if Frieling pots are any better (the bar has been set pretty low).

At least one person associated with the GSC occupation is trying to portray the occupation as a success.  The blogger repeats in different words: “We leave not to retreat but to plan further modes of escalation.”  I can image the meeting where that decision took place:

Hey guys, the occupation has been going great.  It’s going so good that it’s time to move on to phase 2.  What’s phase 2 you ask?  Well it’s the most cunning and brilliant part.  We leave the GSC, and start planning.  I know what some of you are thinking “Why is phase two of our current planned occupation to scrap the occupation and get a new plan?”  The fact of the matter is that all great revolutions really get going and escalate when they stop whatever they are doing, disband, and then have a planning pot luck.  Viva la revolution!  I’ll bring the couscous.

The Simpsons recently made fun of the secret, which is a book/dvd detailing how to get stuff you want.  It reminded me of the following video about the secret from an Australian TV show.  Perhaps the occupiers used the secret in taking the GSC…