Friday 27 August 2010

Tom Waits on The Don Lane Show 1979

Fixing A Hole In The Head

Film Review
I have to make a confession.  I have a soft posterior fontanelle.  When I press on that spot, my head indents noticeably — enough that you can actually see it.  Furthermore, I frequently feel a sort of need to do this.  And when I do it, it seems to help me feel less sleepyheaded and more focussed.  If I'm feeling a bit woozy, it helps me feel less so.  And, indeed, sometimes I feel as though I'd like to drill right into it — as though there is some sort of psychic G spot hungering to be stimulated and satisfied.  Naturally, I've been intrigued by trepanning — the practice of intentionally drilling small holes in the skull. 
Of course, trepanners don't necessarily aim for the fontanelle, although the spot is name-checked in A Hole in the Head, this wonderfully amusing award-winning 55 minute documentary on the topic. Indeed, since many of the contemporary enthusiasts for the practice do this DIY... while looking at themselves in the mirror (sort of like shaving!) — the front of the head seems to be favored. 
In fact, a couple of minutes into A Hole in the Head, we are confronted with a clip from a 1970 film — Heartbeat in the Brain — that was made showing Amanda Feilding's self-trepanation.  Feilding — the attractive English doyenne of contemporary trepanning and a leading figure in British '70s psychedelia — freshly trepanned, stares into a mirror, her face patched and speckled with blood, looking as happy and satisfied as Sooky Stackhouse after a long night with Bill Compton and Eric Northman. As she wipes blood from her teeth, there's the faint hint of a smile. 
Fans of grisly medical shows will definitely find satisfaction in this film.  The most disturbing scene, which is also toward the beginning of the film and runs for several minutes, shows an African woman's fully exposed brain matter being drilled by a witch doctor.
But shock is not the point here — or at least it's not the entire point.  The film is also informative. Toward the beginning, A Hole in the Head examines the history of trepanning — including the archeological evidence for the existence of the practice in various "primitive" cultures, as well as at various points in European culture where it was variously used as a "cure" for physiological problems and for "letting the demons out" for patients suffering from mental problems. 
The film primarily focuses on the contemporary trend for self-trepanation, which seems to be centered largely in Great Britain among psychedelic types.  There is even a quote from Paul McCartney from a 1986 interview in Musician in which he talks about how John Lennon seriously considered fixing (to get) a hole in his head and asked McCartney to join him.  The ever wily McCartney replied: "You go first" (or words to that effect.)  
The operant theory here is that the process increases "blood brain volume," leaving the trepanned person smarter, happier and a little bit high... permanently.  Testimonies from the people with the holes in their head are balanced out by interviews with skeptical neuroscientists, who pretty much all agree that the claims made by the advocates are absurd.  (One younger neuroscientist believes that it's vaguely possible that their could be some slight enhancement from increased blood flow, but that it needs to be tested, scientifically.)  The believers sound happy; the skeptics sound amused (and sane), and many who watch this documentary will likely be all of the above.
As for myself, despite my soft fontanelle, I will put my faith, for now, in the neuroscientists and not take a drill to my skull.  
R.U. Sirius @'h+'

♪♫ Sage Francis - Love The Lie (Music by Mark Linkous)

Four Tet remixes Eluvium

Listen: Four Tet Remixes Eluvium

Walker Brothers Psychadelic Chocolate

Australian of Year Patrick McGorry calls for a republic

Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry has criticised Australians for failing to seriously address the issue of a republic.
He likened the country to a 27-year-old who just won't leave home -- "a Gen Y nation".
Delivering the annual National Republican Lecture in Canberra last night, Professor McGorry said Australia needed to "emerge from its prolonged adolescence" and become a republic sooner rather than later.
Professor McGorry, who was chosen as Australian of the Year for his 25 years of service to youth mental health, said he saw parallels between his work with young people and Australia's path to full nationhood.
"Australia's adolescence has lasted more than 100 years since Federation," he said.
On the election campaign trail in north Queensland last week, Julia Gillard said she wanted Australia to become a republic when the Queen, now 84, no longer reigned, and said she planned to lead a national debate on the form the republic should take if she were re-elected prime minister.
"I would think the appropriate time for this nation to move to being a republic is when we see the monarch change," Ms Gillard said.
Asked yesterday if she would consider a referendum on a republic before the Queen died if there were a big enough public push for change, Ms Gillard responded that the issue was "not a priority".
"The Prime Minister supports a republic for Australia but it is not a priority at this time," Ms Gillard's spokesman said.
Tony Abbott, who was at the centre of the pro-monarchist cause in the 1999 referendum that rejected the notion of change, said last week he was certain Australia would never abandon the monarchy in his lifetime.
His spokeswoman said yesterday: "I've got nothing to add to his answer of last week."
But other prominent Australians, including Wayne Goss, Greg Barns and Mungo MacCallum, expressed their strong support for Professor McGorry's Republican appeal.
"While we have come far, we need to finish the journey by showing the world -- and, more importantly, ourselves -- that we proudly and independently stand on our own two feet," former Queensland premier Wayne Goss said.
But David Flint, national convener of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, said comparing Australia to an adolescent was "curious".
"We are one of the world's oldest and stable democracies, we have a Constitution which has been successful," Professor Flint said yesterday.
"Nations aren't individuals on a psychologist's couch . . . nations exist on sound institutions, and it would be foolish to change those institutions purely on the basis of a flippant psychologist's analogy."
Lanai Vasek @'The Australian'

Tobacco firms' use of YouTube probed

Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware

"I have a scheme..."

The Power and Money behind the Tea Party

Make no mistake. The Tea Party and other right wing groups like it are not grassroots movements. They are well funded and their agenda is to keep corporations' profits high, put right wingers in power and, at the moment, unseat President Obama. Key among the corporate funders are the billionaire Koch brothers. It's basically corporate electioneering as bribery that is funding a war against Obama.


The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny.
@'The New Yorker'

Koch Industries Reply

Thursday 26 August 2010

39匹のガチムチ達が吹っ切れた

Johann Hari: Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana – one of the front lines of this war – is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando – an event that no longer shocks the country.
Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their colleagues: "This is how you learn respect". It is a place where hand grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely, after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse".
Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs.
In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up – and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over an entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply route for the Western world's drug hunger.
Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the "balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another.
When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car, to a four-year-old child, to a family in the "wrong" house watching television, to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 per cent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.
The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: "Plata o ploma". Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since 2006 – yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang violence in an area massively increases.
This might seem like a paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang, you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.
This is precisely what happened – to the letter – when the United States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorised the population and bribed the police. Now 1,000 Mexican Al Capones are claiming their billions and waving their guns.
Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael Levine, who had a 30-year career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of the Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world in the 1980s.
Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'."
So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these murderous gangs really fear – take the source of their profits, drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of Budweiser. And, after legalisation, nobody would do it to sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.
The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called for legalisation, and he has been joined by a battery of former presidents across Latin America – all sober, right-leaning statesmen who are trying rationally to assess the facts.
Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon's claims in response that legalisation would lead to a sudden explosion in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.
Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users – to keep on fighting this war, while any mention of legalisation brings whispered threats of slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.
Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.
How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs? 

See our captain is in the news again...

England footballer wins continuation of gagging order

No wonder we have started SO badly this season, his mind is on other matters!

Sixteen months later...

Outcry in Belgium Over WikiLeaks publications of Dutroux dossier

Rules Committee to vote on measure urging removal of troops from Pakistan

The House Rules Committee will vote Monday evening on a resolution urging the removal of U.S. armed forces from Pakistan after newspapers published leaked documents suggesting that Pakistani intelligence has cooperated with Islamic extremist groups.
The privileged resolution, introduced by anti-war Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was drafted before the revelation of the documents. Kucinich introduced the measure in response to a Wall Street Journal report last week, which said that the United States is conducting special military operations in Pakistan.
The United States has publicly worked to enlist Pakistan in its efforts to root out Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban from neighboring Afghanistan.
The House Rules Committee said Monday it will take up the measure at 6:30 p.m. Kucinich and his co-sponsor, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argue the Obama administration has failed to notify Congress about armed forces in Pakistan, thereby violating the War Powers Act.
“The U.S. military has significantly increased its activity in Pakistan — both in troop presence and Predator attacks — at a time when there are, according to the CIA, very few al Qaeda members in that country,” Paul said in a statement last week. “This increasing U.S. military activity in Pakistan has little to do with protecting the United States and in fact is creating more enemies than it is defeating.”
If a vote is taken by the full House, Kucinich and Paul will likely receive time on the floor to speak on the issue. The leak of 92,000 secret documents by the organization Wikileaks on Sunday will probably further fuel the debate.
Since the resolution is privileged in nature — because it deals with war powers — it was scheduled to come up for a floor vote this week regardless of the leak issue. But the Rules Committee will make determinations on Monday about how the sensitive measure is brought to the floor.
The documents detailed in the leak show that the government believed Pakistani intelligence was covertly aiding the Afghan insurgency against the United States while Pakistan was taking American aid to help fight against it.
The Obama administration has strongly condemned the leak as a danger to national security, but war critics have used the information to argue the conflict has is increasingly becoming unwinnable.
Kucinich introduced a similar resolution earlier this year to force the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan immediately. It was easily defeated.
Jordan Fabian @'The Hill'

Jeff Koons CT Scanner for Advocate Hope Children's Hospital

RxArt is proud to introduce one of our most ambitious projects since our inception: an installation by world-renowned pop artist Jeff Koons at Advocate Hope Children's Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. As a result of this groundbreaking collaboration, Koons' iconic characters find a permanent home on a CT Scanner and surrounding exam room in the hospital's radiology department. The installation—the first of it's kind—aims to soothe and cheer young patients and brighten the potentially frightening testing environment. 
To transform the space, the Philips CT Scanner was painted a vibrant blue and decals featuring Koons' Monkeys were applied to the machine. His iconic Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, and Donkey imagery were also installed to brighten the room as wallscapes. The addition of colorful new flooring completed the project, and the result is an awe-inspiring, playful escape that has completely revitalized the once-sterile room.
This project was made possible through the generosity of Kiehl's Since 1851 and Jeff Koons, who generously took no artist fee for his participation in this project.
More images

Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.

The rise and fall of American Apparel

Dan Bull itsDanBull A cat in a bin is more newsworthy than the continuing plight of millions of flood victims in Pakistan. I wish news wasn't ruled by novelty

HA!

Photo in need of a caption

The Afghan/taliban mujahideen - documentary "Behind Enemy lines" - SBS Australia 2010

'What you can do with your new e-book' by Oslo Davis

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

German WWII plan to invade Britain revealed in MI5 file

WikiLeaks post CIA documents on home grown terrorists

The CIA feels that nations across the globe would start co-operating with it less in the wake of the Headley case and growing instances of home grown terrorists and start believing that the U.S. is an exporter of terrorism, according to a secret document posted by WikiLeaks.
The CIA concluded that foreign governments would be less likely to cooperate with the U.S. on detention, intelligence-sharing, and other issues, the whistleblower site said.
“Primarily we have been concerned about Al-Qaeda infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas,” said the document.
The CIA termed it as a thought provoking document. “These sorts of analytic products — clearly identified as coming from the Agency’s ‘Red Cell’ — are designed simply termed it to provoke thought and present different points of view,” CIA spokesperson, Marie Harf, told PTI.
The leaked document notes that Pakistani-American David Headley conducted surveillance in support of the LeT for the Mumbai attacks that killed 167 people.
“LeT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan and India,” the CIA document said.
Headley had confessed to plotting the Mumbai attacks and LeT’s role in it.
“If the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign partners may be less willing to cooperate with the United States on extrajudicial activities, including detention, transfer, and interrogation of suspects in third party countries,” the document said.
“As a recent victim of high-profile terrorism originating from abroad, the US Government has had significant leverage to press foreign regimes to acquiesce to requests for extraditing terrorist suspects from their soil.
However, if the U.S. were seen as an “exporter of terrorism,” foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty,” the CIA said.
The CIA documents running into a few pages said contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin.
“This dynamic belies the American belief that our free, open and integrated multicultural society lessens the allure of radicalism and terrorism for US citizens. Late last year five young Muslim American men travelled from northern Virginia to Pakistan allegedly to join the Pakistani Taliban and to engage in jihad.”
The document said: “Their relatives contacted the FBI after they disappeared without telling anyone, and then Pakistani authorities arrested them as they allegedly attempted to gain access to al-Qaeda training facilities.”
It said if foreign regimes believe the U.S. position on rendition is too one-sided, favouring the U.S., but not them, they could obstruct U.S. efforts to detain terrorism suspects.
For example, in 2005 Italy issued criminal arrest warrants for U.S. agents involved in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric and his rendition to Egypt.
“The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge U.S. bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts,” it said.
“If foreign leaders see the U.S. refusing to provide intelligence on American terrorism suspects or to allow witnesses to testify in their courts, they might respond by denying the same to the U.S.
In 2005 9/11 suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted by a German court because the U.S. refused to allow Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected ringleader of the 9/11 plot who was in U.S. custody, to testify.
“More such instances could impede actions to lock up terrorists, whether in the U.S. or abroad, or result in the release of suspects,” said the CIA document posted by WikiLeaks.

Pac-Man Hacked Onto a Touch-Screen Voting Machine Without Breaking "Tamper-Evident" Seals

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine....

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine with Pac-Man hacked onto it without disturbing any of the "tamper-evident" seals supposedly meant to protect it from hackers...

Any questions?...
Sequoia's voting machines, used in some 20% of U.S. elections, employ Intellectual Property (IP) still owned by a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia itself is now owned by a Canadian firm called Dominion. (Though Dominion, like Sequoia itself before it, lied about the continuing Venezuelan/Chavez ties in its recent announcement of the acquisition, as detailed exclusively by The BRAD BLOG, to little notice, in June.)
The Pac-Man hack onto the Sequoia/Dominion voting machine was revealed this week. It was accomplished without breaking any of the "tamper-evident" seals that voting machine companies and election officials claim are used to ensure nobody can physically hack into them without being discovered.
"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."
Here's a video of Pac-Man running on the hacked Sequoia touch-screen voting machine...
This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as "tamperproof." It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use the machines.
For example, the AVC Edge miscounted votes in New Jersey in 2008, the same election during which the systems also failed to even boot up when polls opened at a Hoboken precinct, forcing voters, including the state's then-Governor John Corzine, to wait some 45 minutes before they could cast votes on them at all. Whether those votes were recorded accurately as per the voters' intent, once the machines finally booted up, is scientifically impossible to know. Use of any touch-screen voting machine is the equivalent of a 100% faith-based election. No votes cast during an election --- none --- can be verified as having been accurately recorded on such systems.
Ever...
Continue reading
Brad Friedman @'The Brad Blog'

This one's for you Spaceboy!

Victory: Vedanta Mine Plan on Sacred Tribal Mountain Halted by Indian Government

Controversial plans to develop a bauxite mine on sacred tribal land in India [search] have been cancelled by India's environment ministry. The Dongria Kondh’s – an indigenous tribe who have lived since time immemorial around the mountain Niyamgiri in the Indian state of Orissa – demands have been met, and the area will remain wild, lush and sacred. Multi-national company Vedanta’s existing aluminum refinery in the area had polluted local rivers, damaged crops and disrupted the lives of the local tribe; and will now not be able to expand six-fold. This is a Dongria Kondh victory first and foremost.
The project has been delayed by four years because of the Dongria Kondh’s intense opposition locally – including the brandishing of bows and arrows – as well as from environmental and tribal rights group. Globally, a loosely coordinated campaign sought to persuade multi-national Vedanta's shareholders and financiers to distance themselves from the company. This is their magnificent victory as well – for Survival International and Amnesty International, various celebrity activists such as Bianca Jagger and Michael Palin, and numerous other loosely affiliated affinity campaigns, including most recently from Ecological Internet working with the Rainforest Information Centre.
“Yet again global people power has come to the aid of small, intact communities battling the ecosystem destroying economic growth machine. The Dongria Kondh’s amazing efforts should be placed in the context of a global people’s power movement to protect and restore ecosystems, and wrest control of land from industrial and speculative capitalism,” asserts Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet’s President.
“We are pleased to have contributed EI’s Earth Action Network’s [1] support – some 200,000 protest emails sent from nearly 100 countries [2] in a matter of weeks. I do not think it accidental that victory was achieved immediately after me and EI’s network, with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, launched our protests. We got exactly what we wanted from this timely, well-organized and locally coordinated cyber protest – Ecological Internet’s specialty!”
### MORE ###
The project had been thrown into doubt last week when a government inquiry said that mining would destroy the way of life of the area's "endangered" and "primitive" people. The four-person committee also accused a local subsidiary of Vedanta of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations. Because Niyamgiri Mountain is an important spiritual place, it had not thus far suffered the deforestation and degradation experienced by similar areas in India but contains an elephant reserve with Sambar, Leopard, Tiger, Barking Deer, various species of birds and other endangered species of wildlife. With the announcement, the area is free (for now) from the planned Vedenta bauxite mine.
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for environment and forests, said today that the government will issue what is termed a show-cause notice and take action against Vedanta. The news sent Vedanta’s shares down almost 6%, wiping almost £300m off the value of the business. "There are very serious violations of environment act and forest right act," Ramesh told Bloomberg. "There is no emotion, no politics, no prejudice in the decision. It is purely based on a legal approach." Vedanta, which can appeal against the decision, had wanted to expand its existing refinery in the area, generating a six-fold increase in capacity.
Survival campaigner Dr Jo Woodman said: "This is a victory nobody would have believed possible. The Dongria's campaign became a litmus test of whether a small, marginalised tribe could stand up to a massive multinational company with an army of lobbyists and PR firms and the ear of government…. Incredibly, the Dongria's courage and tenacity, allied with the support of many people in India, and Survival's supporters around the world, have triumphed."
This is the second time Ecological Internet’s Earth Action Network has recently achieved major conservation successes in India. Last year, also working with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, Ecological Internet was able to single-handedly achieve major Asian elephant migration corridor protections [3].
### ENDS ###
[1] Earth Action Network’s current alerts are found at http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/alerts and you can subscribe to new alert notifications at: http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/subscribe/ and on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet
[2] Action Alert: UPDATE: India's Dongria Kondh Tribal Way of Life Threatened by British/International Vedanta Mining - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_mine
[3] Action Alert: Critical Elephant Corridor in India to be Severed - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_elephants
This release uses information provided by the Guardian:
Vedanta mine plan halted by Indian government
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/24/vedanta-mine-plan-halted-indian-government
DISCUSS RELEASE:
http://forests.org/blog/ | http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet | http://www.twitter.com/ecointernet

(Thanx HerrB!)

Kodak 1922 Kodachrome Film Test


Time for The Conet Project Vol 2?

Mysterious Russian 'Buzzer' radio broadcast changes
The output of a mysterious radio station in Russia, which has been broadcasting the same monotonous signal almost continuously for 20 years, has suddenly changed.  Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations that broadcast computer-generated voices reading numbers, words, letters or Morse code. Their purpose has never been uncovered, but evidence from spy cases suggests that they're used to broadcast coded information to secret agents.
Over the past week or so, the output of one particular station that broadcasts from near Povarovo, Russia, increased dramatically. The station has a callsign of UVB-76, but is known as "The Buzzer" by its listeners because of the short, monotonous buzz tone that it normally plays 21 to 34 times per minute. It's only deviated from that signal three times previously -- briefly in 1997, 2002 and 2006.
In early August, a garbled recording of a voice speaking Russian was heard by listeners. A few days later, on 23 August at 13:35UTC, a clearer voice read out the following message twice: "UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4", before returning to its normal broadcasting.
Since then, a number of other distorted voices have appeared over the normal buzzing transmission, as well as knocks and shuffles, as if someone were moving things around inside the broadcasting room. It's believed that the transmission site has an open microphone, which occasionally picks up sounds from technicians working within the broadcast site.
Various fans of the station have begun the process of trying to decode the signal. Interpreting the numbers as co-ordinates gives a location in the middle of the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, where there's large scale oil and gas production, and where the Russian army plans to test anti-aircraft missiles in the near future.
Others suspect that it might be a transmission that signals the availability of another system -- like a dead man's switch, possibly even for Russia's Cold War-era Dead Hand fail-deadly system, which was to trigger ICBM launches if a nuclear strike from the United States was detected. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it may have been repurposed.
The transmissions continue, and are being documented on the Wikipedia page for the station. If you'd like to help, it's possible to listen in yourself, as one fan has rigged up a web stream of the signal. It's currently very busy, however, so if you have difficulty tuning in, then try again later.
What are your theories for what the signal might be?
Duncan Geere @'Wired'

An exciting new Muslim country to drone attack

Hipster Hitler


Hipster Hitler

The disinherited


What happened to the 130,000 Syrian citizens living in the Golan Heights in June 1967? According to the Israeli narrative, they all fled to Syria, but official documents and testimonies tell a different story 
The aroma of ripe figs fills your nostrils as soon as you enter the village of Ramataniya. At the height of summer, they're overripe and the smell of fermentation is oppressive. With no one to pick it, the fruit rots on the trees. With no one to trim them, the roots and branches grow wild, cracking the black basalt walls of the nearby houses, reaching through empty window frames, and destroying stone walls in the yards.
Neglect and ruin are everywhere. The red tiles have vanished from the roofs. The floor tiles have been removed. Any belongings were confiscated or plundered decades ago. Bars still cover some windows, but the doors are gone. The occasional snake pokes out from beneath a heap of stones that were once part of a wall; birds peck at the rotting figs, and an enormous wild boar wanders skittishly down the path. Suddenly it stops and takes a look back, as if debating whether to stake a claim or run for its life. In the end, it flees.
Of the dozens of Syrian villages that were abandoned in the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War, Ramataniya is thought to be the best preserved. Apparently thanks to the brief period of Jewish settlement here in the late 19th century - and not because of its Byzantine history - it was declared an archaeological site right after the 1967 war and thereby saved from the bulldozers. But the fate of the rest of the Syrian localities in the Golan Heights was completely different: Apart from the four Druze villages at the foot of Mount Hermon, they were all destroyed, in most cases down to their very foundations.
However, the fires in recent weeks that wiped out the shrubs and weeds exposed their remains, which attest that more than 200 villages, towns and farms flourished in the Syrian-ruled Heights before the war. Many of the houses crumbled over the years due to the ravages of weather and time. Others were blasted by Israel Defense Forces troops during live-fire training exercises there. But most were wiped off the face of the earth in a systematic process of destruction that began right after Israel's occupation of the Golan.
Only the Syrian outposts and army camps there have remained largely untouched, their concrete-and-steel fortifications searing reminders of the terror waged in the Golan against Israelis, who suppress memories of the civilian life that flourished in the alleyways and homes of Ramataniya and the other villages.
The 1960 Syrian census in the Golan Heights listed Ramataniya as having 541 inhabitants; on the eve of the Six-Day War, there were 700. According to most estimates, in 1967, the population of the entire area conquered by Israel there ranged from 130,000-145,000. The data are based on the census and a calculation of natural growth.
In the first Israeli census of the Golan, conducted exactly three months after the end of the fighting, there were just 6,011 civilians living in the entire Golan region. For the most part, they lived in the four Druze villages that remain populated to this day. A minority lived in the city of Quneitra, which was returned to Syria following the Yom Kippur War. So, in less than three months, more than 120,000 people either left of their own accord - or were expelled...
Continue reading
Shay Fogelman @'Haaretz'
Many thanks to Jonathon Cook for providing this link

Röyksopp - This Space (2010)

  

Wednesday 25 August 2010

Not just junkies: the stigmatising of drug addicts

Smoking Heroin
 
A report has found that drug users will face problems integrating into society due to the attached stigma. Photograph: Alain Le Garsmeur/Corbis

Drug addicts have a lot in common with other marginalised groups, such as sex workers, people with disabilities and asylum seekers in that many people have never met them and know very little about the realities of their lives. Where there is a void of factual information, stigma and prejudice often rush in to fill the space. This week's report from the UK drugs policy commission, Sinning and Sinned Against: the Stigmatisation of Problem Drug Users, confirms this. The report finds that many people don't like drug users and that this dislike hinders the prospects of social integration and future employment for this group.
This stigma is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of drug users and the nature of drug use. Problematic drug use often develops as a result of many and complex issues such as childhood abuse, dysfunctional family life, social exclusion and various emotional traumas. Class A drugs such as heroin and cocaine can provide a convenient form of chemical oblivion for those who want to blot out pain. Many who become addicted to these drugs are self-medicating to deal with this emotional and sometimes physical pain.
It is easy for those who have never experienced these problems to apportion the "undeserving" tag to drug users, but a failure to understand the starting point for addiction means that policies that spoon-feed attractive soundbites to Middle England about getting all addicts off drugs are unlikely to translate into successful outcomes for users.
Some people who use drugs problematically may stop using them by engaging with a variety of different treatments, such as methadone maintenance or residential rehab, while others stop without any conventional treatment because circumstances in their lives, such as the promise of getting back children previously removed by social services or a relationship with a new partner who encourages them to become drug-free, motivates them to change.
There is a huge emphasis on treatment but those who stop using drugs without treatment are not recorded in the official statistics. The statistics also don't comprehensively record those who relapse months or years after treatment – a common problem because addiction is a chronic, relapsing condition.
It's important to recognise that addiction, once it takes hold, is not logical. I used to edit a magazine for an HIV charity that did outreach work with drug users, providing clean needles and other paraphernalia. I'll never forget the woman who limped into the outreach van with a horrific abcess on her leg from repeatedly injecting into it. Drugs workers warned her that she needed to get down to A&E immediately otherwise she was in danger of losing her leg. She declined the offer of a staff member to drive her to the nearest hospital, said that her priority was not her leg but her next fix and limped away.
Many drug users are able human beings who, with the right support, can make a contribution to society. This means emotional, as well as practical, support, including housing and employment opportunities, rather than a three-line whip to "get clean or else". Treatment can help problematic drug users but without kindness, support, empathy and an absence of judgmentalism it will fail many.
People often stop using class A drugs because something or someone better comes into their lives. But for those who are leading truly wretched lives they may feel that there isn't anything better than crack and smack. The government needs to address this uncomfortable reality for which there is no quick, cheap fix and beware of coercing people into a vacuum. If they really want to help drug users, they need to look beyond drug use.
Diane Taylor @'The Guardian'

Teens Hooked on Porn

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As some of you reading this might recall, in the old Disinformation TV series, I devoted the next to last episode entirely to the topic of the potential for harm that easily available Internet porn, in particular the extreme variant called “gonzo porn,” might have in store for an entire generation of (mostly) young males. The piece left the question open ended, but it was clear that neither I, nor most of the people I interviewed (including porn actresses and producers) had any hope that much good would come of adolescent males spending their free time having images of violent sex seared onto their eyeballs at the point of orgasm. And besides that, what were they learning about human sexuality at the hands of twisted psychopaths like Max Hardcore and Rob Black? That their girlfriends would like them to invite 10 of their friends over for a session of tender love-making or perhaps that shoving a girl’s head in the toilet during sex was a suave move?
Well, the verdict is starting to come in that we’re—literally—raising a generation of… wankers. An entire generation has had their sexual fantasies hijacked by this stuff. This quite good 2007 BBC documentary Teens Hooked on Porn, is a disturbing look at what’s happening to Internet porn addicted kids. The pimple-faced young men portrayed in this documentary, sad to say, are going to have no idea what to do with a real girl when they have the chance. And frankly, what girl would want anything to do with them?As you watch this, imagine their lives at 25, 40 and well beyond. It ain’t a pretty thought…

Thank you Paul Gallagher!

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