#UC Berkeley

[givemearmstopraywith]

Passover seder at UC Berkeley’s Gaza solidarity encampment (via twitter)

[mysharona1987]

[wh1msii]

just found out that UC Berkeley is having both a class about TMA and a class about Malevolent through their Decal Program right now I am actually going to lose it I am so jealous

[inter-volve]

John Oliver - May 5th 2024

[i-am-aprl]

A Berkeley Law professor assaulted a law student as she was speaking up about UC Berkeley’s ties to Israel’s genocide in Gaza at a dinner on the final night of Ramadan. The institution has over $2 million invested in weapons companies that supply Israel.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preexisting global averages.

Read more.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Source

[power-chords]

The first place that “do not fold, spindle or mutilate” was taken off the punch card and unpacked in all its metaphorical glory was the student protests at the University of California-Berkeley in the mid-1960s, what became known as the “Free Speech Movement.” The University of California administration used punch cards for class registration. Berkeley protestors used punch cards as a metaphor, both as a symbol of the “system” — first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally — and as a symbol of alienation.

[…]

Because the punch card symbolically represented the power of the university, it made a suitable point of attack. Some students used the punch cards in subversive ways. An underground newspaper reported:

Some ingenious people (where did they get this arcane knowledge? Isn’t this part of the Mysteries belonging to Administration?) got hold of a number of blank IBM cards, and gimmicked the card-puncher till it spoke no mechanical language, but with its little slots wrote on the cards simple letters: “FSM”, “STRIKE” and so on. A symbol, maybe: the rebels are better at making the machine talk sense than its owners. (“Letter from Berkeley” 12; Draper 113)

Students wore these punch cards like name tags. They were thought sufficiently important symbols of the Free Speech Movement that they were used as illustrations on the album cover of the record that the Movement issued.

Another form of technological subversion was for students to punch their own cards, and slip them in along with the official ones: Some joker among the campus eggheads fed a string of obscenities into one of Cal’s biggest and best computers — with the result that the lists of new students in various classes just can NOT be read in mixed company. (Berlandt, “IBM Enrolls” 1)

These pranks were the subversion of the technician. The students were indicating their ability to control the machines, and thus, symbolically, the machinery of the university. But it also indicates, like the students’ and administrations’ shared use of the machine metaphor, something of the degree of convergence of student and administration beliefs and methods. This sort of metaphorical technical subversion rarely rises above the level of prank.

Perhaps more radical, or at least with less confused symbolism, were students who destroyed punch cards in symbolic protest: the punch cards that the university used for class registration stood for all that was wrong with the university, and by extension, America. Students at Berkeley and other University of California branches burned their registration punch cards in anti-University protests just as they burned draft cards in anti-Vietnam protests.

—Steven Lubar, “Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate”: A Cultural History of the Punch Card

[grayscale-sparks]

Has anyone taken/planning to take the Malevolent or TMA courses at UC Berkeley? I don’t go there, but I would love to see what the class is like.

[anonymous-badger-238]

pick a best friend

You know that meme where they show you different outfits and you think of names of the people who would wear them and talk about their personalities?

I have no idea how true this is but pick a Rad Lab "boy"

(P.S. I love how I'm catering to one person like I have five followers but @un-ionizetheradlab is the only one who seems to care /lh)

[queerbrownvegan]

Decolonize Research through Critical Ecology

How do we ask better questions about what it means to be a researcher? My work with Critical Ecology Lab, featuring Dr. Suzanne Pierre, allowed me to understand more of how research must also extend itself to liberation rather than extraction for science.

----------------------------------------------------

If you want to learn more about her work, I highly recommend watching the episode- love you all!

[agentfascinateur]

From Gaza to the Student Protest Movement, with love:

Thank you 💜

[palestinegenocide]

UC Berkeley students and faculty reject university condemnation of protest of anti-Palestinian speaker

The UC Berkeley chapters of Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, and Faculty and Staff for Justice In Palestine respond to the university's condemnation of a protest of an event featuring Israeli genocide apologist Ran Bar-Yoshafat.

[link]

[fatfemmalewife]

Michael V. Drake on Monday directed chancellors of all 10 campuses to strictly enforce rules against encampments, protests that block pathways and masking that shields identities amid sharp calls to better rein in the kind of demonstrations over the Israel-Hamas war that roiled universities in the spring. …

The letter linked to a CSU website that listed banned activities, including "camping, overnight demonstrations, or overnight loitering" and "unauthorized temporary or permanent structures, walls, barriers, barricades, furniture, or other objects." The policy states, in part, that illegal activity includes "vandalism, property damage, trespass, occupation of a building or facility, refusal to disperse in violation of the law" and promoting or inciting violence or harm."

[News source linked]

[news4dzhozhar]