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Police sources told Kathimerini that yesterday and Wednesday's attacks came at a time when a large number of riot police had been sent to various parts of Greece to hep quell unrest at the country's prisons.

Anarchists had reportedly shouted slogans in support of the prisoners during their attack on various properties in Exarchia on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the protests at prisons wound down yesterday as inmates at the high-security Malandrino Prison in central Greece, which witnessed the first uprising on Monday, ended their action.

Some 200 convicts spent a third chilly night on the roof to demand better conditions at the jail and shorter sentences.

However, they returned to their cells in the afternoon.

Riot police had encircled the prison but stood by as authorities expected the protest to wind down due to the worsening weather and prisoners becoming hungry.

The Union of Prison Guards issued a statement saying there is a severe shortage of personnel at jails.

It claims that only half the positions are currently filled, while the number of inmates keeps increasing.

(((You wouldn't have guessed by the jolly, affirmative demeanour of the Athens populace that any of this was going on....

unless, that is, you were counting the occasional clusters of armored Greek cops with automatic weapons.))) Pos...

Anyway, I've been invited by kind Trebor to join your newsgroup and discuss/defend/critique my ideas.

Trebor will post my anti Web 2.0 manifesto (aka: Adorno-for-idiots).

So that should provide some lite afternoon reading for y'all.

All the very best from sunny south-central Berkeley, Andrew THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen 1.

The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion.

This cult promises that the latest media technology - in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts - will enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists.

It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.

2.

The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism.

“Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic.

Taste must reside with an elite ("truth makers") of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art.

The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy.

The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

3.

To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires).

Unchecked technology threa...

More here.

Like others, Cathy McCaughan has put a lot into this issue: My mind and body are drained of ability.

In the past two weeks, I have learned about the uplifting good and depressingly bad sides of Knoxville politics and communities.

I need to process and get beyond some of the raw wounds before I try to post my observations.

Time for sleep now.

Doug McCaughan, Cathy's husband: The Knox County School rezoning has caused quite a stir and last night roughly 130 people came together in a meeting that was planned only 4 days ago.

Of the 7 organizers of the meeting, 4 are bloggers and others are readers of blogs.

Even in the crowd there were mutters of "Thank you for your website" "I read your post" and so forth.

Doug has a nice roundup here.

Brian Hornback: The message needs to be that this was a flawed process thus the results were flawed.

The three action points going forward is 1) Request the School Board members to cast a No vote.

2) The Process was flawed and 3) Move forward with a new and better process.

Also, more than 100 comments at this posting.

Posted by Michael Silence on April 27, 2007 at 08:31 AM Share this post: Digg It!

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