Saturday, 31 July 2010
DJ Dex - Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix
undergroundres UR061's (DJ Dex aka Nomadico) Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix is now available for direct download at www.ur061.com !!!
Original visual by David Lynch
Directed by Eno
Produced by Jean-Luca Della Montagna
Editing by Philippe Gariépy
Effects by Antonin Brault Guilleaume
via kfmw
Fans hit out at increased kit changes by clubs
Fans groups have hit out at the increased number of Premier League clubs who are launching a new home shirt every season.
In 2000, the Premier League charter pledged that replica strips would be released every two seasons to save fans digging into their pockets too often. But 18 clubs issued a new home shirt last season and all 20 Premier League clubs are doing the same this term.
Tottenham have launched three new kits every year for six seasons in a row.
The north London club have also decided that a different sponsor will adorn their home, second and third kits for Cup games this season, meaning there will be six shirts on offer, costing £45 each on the club's website.
Arsenal and Liverpool are the only teams who are releasing a new kit this season, who did not do so last term.
While Premier League clubs are within their rights to release a new home kit every season, the extent of the current situation is in stark contrast to recommendations made by the Football Task Force, chaired by former MP David Mellor, which were included in the 2000 Premier League charter to give fans a fairer deal.
The group's suggestions, which also included issues around ticket pricing, encouraged clubs to ensure a two-year gap between new replica shirts, which led to clubs releasing home and away shirts in alternate years.
"This gives the shirt more longevity in comparison to releasing one every season and our fans better value for money," a Liverpool spokesman told BBC Sport.
According to Premier League rules clubs must "allow for market research to be undertaken with regard to the frequency of strip changes and to its design".
They must also "identify the intervals at which strip changes are intended to take place and the date of the next intended change" and each club's customer charter must be available to the public, outlining its policy with regard to ticketing and merchandise.
But Tottenham Supporters Trust chairman Bernie Kingsley said his group had not been consulted, while Football Supporters Federation chairman Malcolm Clarke labelled the club's decision to offer six new shirts as "frankly ridiculous".
Kingsley told BBC Sport: "The club do talk to us but any decisions that might affect their income revenue they don't generally consult us.
"Last season we said that we didn't like the yellow stripe on the home shirt and asked if it could be changed, but the club said if they changed it based on what the fans said they would be considered a laughing stock."
Kingsley said the request had been based on a similar discussion between fans of the Dutch club Feyenoord where supporters' requests were granted.
Birmingham City have also just launched a new kit for the coming season where fans chose the design from four on offer.
A Tottenham spokesman denied Kingsley's claims and told BBC Sport: "Our aim going forward was to continue to meet demand for greater variety and choice in all of the merchandise ranges that we offer, including replica kit.
 Birmingham's Cameron Jerome (left) in a kit chosen by fans |
Clarke said: "I think Spurs' actions are frankly ridiculous. Given the price of watching football in London you have to be very rich to be a Spurs fan already. If you're paying for six shirts that would be about £250."
Kingsley added: "It is down to the individual whether to buy them or not but in the current financial climate I think the club should be more sensitive.
"The club will argue that by issuing new kits it provides more revenue streams in which to buy new players and some supporters will go along with that, but it's just another example of football ceasing to be a sport and more a business."
Manchester United and Manchester City are another two clubs who have both released new home and away shirts for the coming season having done the same thing last term.
Allan Galley, chairman of the Manchester City Supporters Club said: "People do want to wear them as a way of relating to the club, but I think it's unfair to bring them out every season at £45 each.
"It's not a popular policy. Young children like to wear them too, but it's not as if they are particularly cheap for them either."
But Mark Longden of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association said: "If you are daft enough to buy a new football shirt every season then that is up to you.
"You don't have to buy them, the only thing that concerns me is the ticket prices and the club have not put them up this season, so it doesn't directly affect me."
Former sports minister Kate Hoey, who was in government when the Football Task Force was active, said the issue was more relevant for people who could not afford to go to football matches but added that parents had to take a firm stand against persuasive children.
"The Premier League clubs are a law unto themselves and if people keep buying them then they will keep selling them," she told BBC Sport.
"I don't take the line where children come home and say, 'everybody else has got a shirt why can't I have one?' I was brought up in an era where I was told by my parents, 'we can't afford it, sorry'."
Alistair Magowan @'BBC'
Friday, 30 July 2010
Fuck Ronald Reagan!
Bonus Audio:
Gorillaz Live In Damascus
.
What you are about to hear is the sound of a band coming full circle while embarking on a new beginning.
When Damon Albarn decided to extend his Gorillaz project for a third album, he looked to Syria for inspiration. It was March 2009, and the Britpop icon was obsessed with Arabic orchestral music, so he took his demos to Damascus and recorded with the National Orchestra for Arabic Music.
While in Syria, Albarn worked with conductor Issam Rafea, who composed a gorgeous piece full of strings, woodwinds and hand percussion for Gorillaz’s third album, Plastic Beach. The sessions only resulted in the intro and outro of “White Flag,” the album’s not-so-ambiguous plea for peace in the Middle East, but those two minutes helped cement the relationship Rafea and his musicians had with Albarn.
Just look at what happened on Sunday night.
Gorillaz returned to the desert with Plastic Beach‘s cast of all-stars in tow for a special performance at the Damascus Citadel, a 1,000-year-old walled palace in the northwest corner of the city. Under a full moon, the cartoon crew — stripped of its members’ animated alter egos — shared the stage with Syria’s National Orchestra and marked what we can only hope is a new era of music in the Middle East.
“The pinnacle of our exploit,” Gorillaz bassist Murdoc Niccals tells NPR Music in a rambling introduction to the concert. “It shows that it is possible to perform there. This shouldn’t be a one-off gig — it should be the start of many, many bands going over there.”
This wasn’t the first time Rafea’s orchestra played live with Gorillaz — the band brought it along to festival performances in Spain, Denmark and Glastonbury, England — but it meant so much more this time around. Rafea got to showcase his composition from the podium in an extended intro to “White Flag,” complete with
British MCs Bashy and Kano
The lineup included:
- Bobby Womack
- De La Soul
- Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde
- Paul Simonon and Mick Jones of The Clash
- Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays
- Bashy
- Kano
The most important guest, however, might have been Eslam Jawaad, the Syrian rapper whom Albarn met in London and worked with in The Good, The Bad and The Queen. Murdoc Niccals credits Jawaad with bringing Gorillaz to Damascus, and the rapper is billed as an inspiration in Plastic Beach‘s liner notes under his given name, Wissam Khodur. When he launched into Arabic in the show-stopping “Clint Eastwood,” the thousands of screaming fans reacted as if they’d been waiting all their lives to hear it. It’s a truly magical moment.
May there be many more like it to come.
Listen @'npr'
Endgame in Afghanistan: 'It's taken a year to move 20km'
As the war in Afghanistan enters its final chapter, Sean Smith's brutal, uncompromising film from the Helmand frontline shows the horrific chaos of a stalemate that is taking its toll in blood
• Read Sean Smith's extraordinary diary of his time on the Afghanistan frontline
• Read Sean Smith's extraordinary diary of his time on the Afghanistan frontline
Jazzcats Crossing The Hudson
Click to enlarge
The classic painting “Jazzcats Crossing the Hudson” will appear on the next edition of Madlib Medicine Show, the 8th in the series, a jazz mixtape titled “Advanced Jazz”.
from Wikipedia:
“Jazzcats Crossing the Hudson is an 1851 oil-on-canvas painting by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. It pre-emptively commemorates the arrival in New York City of jazz greats Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Steve Kuhn and others. The painting is remarkable for the fact that it was created decades before the birth of any of these jazz artists.”
Coca-Cola Moves into Mezcal
Little Earl, who maintains a certain interest in our local drink, took a twenty-peso tour of the new mezcal distillery located on the road to Tlacolula de Matamoros, on the Cristobal Colón highway, about half an hour from Oaxaca City. Tlacolula lures tourists to its huge weekly market where you can buy live turkeys, oxen yokes, seasonal vegetables, rice drinks, enamel pots, and artisan work ranging from carved fantastic animals to embroidered blouses. Occasional musicians entertain while shoppers stroll areas dedicated to fresh produce, shoes, socks, and plastic buckets. Along the main street, small shops sell mezcal. It’s artisan mezcal: an artisan liquor cooked in clay containers, from home-grown agave.
When Little Earl entered the Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto (Casa AGP) distillery, whose security little Earl describes as “tough as any airport”, they waived their metal detecting wand over him and discovered his digital camera. “No sir,” the security guard said. “It is the policy of Coca-Cola to not allow photographs.” Coca- Cola? Who knew? His cell phone in the other pocket suffered the same temporary confiscation.
S.A. de C.V. stands for “Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable”. It describes a company whose capital partners are anonymous and of variable investment. Most foreign investments in Mexico are designated S.A. de C.V. CIMSA S.A. de C.V.-Coca Cola, a consortium of businesses “100% Mexican” produces Casa AGP mezcal. I also saw it written in inverse order, as Coca-Cola-CIMSA.
CIMSA was founded in 1925 and currently operates through three self-described “Strategic Business Units”: Soft drinks; BEDLA (Bebidas de los Angeles) which sells purified water; and Casa AGP, the newest unit, oriented toward commercialization of mezcal, to sell inside Mexico about 20% of product, with 80% destined for foreign consumption. To put the enterprise in perspective, the same Group that bottles Coke in Cuernavaca built the mezcal plant in Oaxaca. It also built the international airport in Cuernavaca.
Casa AGP inaugurated its Oaxaca distillery in August, 2008 in a village named Lanacci. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Senator Adolfo Toledo Infanzón, Secretary of Tourism Beatriz Rodríguez Casasnovas, and Secretary of Economy Enrique Sada Fernández among other officials, all carefully pre-selected, attended. Head honcho Colombo Álvarez asserted then, that in five years Oaxaca mezcal would be positioned in the international European and Asian markets. In the first year the product would arrive in Spain, the USA, China, Korea and Thailand. Subsequently, they would sell in Germany, Russia and Italy. He was right on.
Director General José Luis Magaña stated that more than US$ 48,000,000 was invested in plant construction. Purita Guillermo Prieto Rivera, an owner of CIMSA-Coca Cola in sites such as Toluca, Cuernavaca and Ciudad Altamirano, (her surnames “Guillermo Prieto” indicate her Casa AGP connection) and Antonio Gómezlince, also of Grupo CIMSA, stated Casa AGP’s goal: immediate production of 15,000 liters daily, at one-third of full capacity. Casa AGP presently (February, 2010) bottles about 20,000 liters daily.
CIMSA is sister to GEMSA, another corporation listed along with Coca-Cola; the precise relationships of the players remains hidden. CIMSA Group, according to their own advertising, is expansionary, bringing into production new products and brands. The fancy gold label on its mezcal bottles displays its brand-name: Zignum, Made in Mexico. “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto,” it reads, “brings to your palate a mystic drink made with art, quality, technology and the warmth of its people.” Umm.
And an output of 45,000 liters daily for the global market? That’s not art, it’s agro-industry. Casa AGP, in partnership with Coca-Cola and with an investment minimum of 60 million dollars, manufactures mezcal inside an industrial complex. AGP Wine & Spirits Group, the international trade name, distills its product with technical standards, very different from artisan mezcal; the average artisan palenque bottles 2– 3,000 liters per month, cooking agave plants over wood burning fires. Each bottle off the AGP line, in contrast, precisely mirrors the others; following a chemical test for each vat, slight artificial adjustments are added as necessary, to produce consistent “flavor, pain, color, and aroma.” By vat, I mean stainless steel drums. Despite the photo prohibition, Coca-Cola doesn’t keep the gleaming, vast manufacturing process a secret: on the Zignum website flash the bright stainless-steel drums, the rows of assembly-line bottles. Intermixed in Zignum’s on-site film runs the art and warmth part: scenes from other mezcal localities. You can also check YouTube...
Continue reading
Nancy Davies @'NarcoNews'
Apologies that this information is from some months ago, but with all the news on the web and the business practices that maintain secrecy of involvement, is little wonder I took so long to find, with the recent resolution by the UN declaring Water and Sanitation Basic Human Rights, http://www.truth-out.org/un-declares-water-and-sanitation-basic-human-rights61817 , the disappearance of valuable water supplies in areas of multinational exploitation takes on new meaning. Can the people in these regions ever be truly compensated by business for the destruction of such life-sustaining water supplies?
 Zignum Mezcal label D.R. 2010 Zignum Me |
S.A. de C.V. stands for “Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable”. It describes a company whose capital partners are anonymous and of variable investment. Most foreign investments in Mexico are designated S.A. de C.V. CIMSA S.A. de C.V.-Coca Cola, a consortium of businesses “100% Mexican” produces Casa AGP mezcal. I also saw it written in inverse order, as Coca-Cola-CIMSA.
CIMSA was founded in 1925 and currently operates through three self-described “Strategic Business Units”: Soft drinks; BEDLA (Bebidas de los Angeles) which sells purified water; and Casa AGP, the newest unit, oriented toward commercialization of mezcal, to sell inside Mexico about 20% of product, with 80% destined for foreign consumption. To put the enterprise in perspective, the same Group that bottles Coke in Cuernavaca built the mezcal plant in Oaxaca. It also built the international airport in Cuernavaca.
Casa AGP inaugurated its Oaxaca distillery in August, 2008 in a village named Lanacci. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Senator Adolfo Toledo Infanzón, Secretary of Tourism Beatriz Rodríguez Casasnovas, and Secretary of Economy Enrique Sada Fernández among other officials, all carefully pre-selected, attended. Head honcho Colombo Álvarez asserted then, that in five years Oaxaca mezcal would be positioned in the international European and Asian markets. In the first year the product would arrive in Spain, the USA, China, Korea and Thailand. Subsequently, they would sell in Germany, Russia and Italy. He was right on.
 Ulises Ruiz inaugurates mezcal plant “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto” D.R. Photo 2008 El Piñero |
CIMSA is sister to GEMSA, another corporation listed along with Coca-Cola; the precise relationships of the players remains hidden. CIMSA Group, according to their own advertising, is expansionary, bringing into production new products and brands. The fancy gold label on its mezcal bottles displays its brand-name: Zignum, Made in Mexico. “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto,” it reads, “brings to your palate a mystic drink made with art, quality, technology and the warmth of its people.” Umm.
And an output of 45,000 liters daily for the global market? That’s not art, it’s agro-industry. Casa AGP, in partnership with Coca-Cola and with an investment minimum of 60 million dollars, manufactures mezcal inside an industrial complex. AGP Wine & Spirits Group, the international trade name, distills its product with technical standards, very different from artisan mezcal; the average artisan palenque bottles 2– 3,000 liters per month, cooking agave plants over wood burning fires. Each bottle off the AGP line, in contrast, precisely mirrors the others; following a chemical test for each vat, slight artificial adjustments are added as necessary, to produce consistent “flavor, pain, color, and aroma.” By vat, I mean stainless steel drums. Despite the photo prohibition, Coca-Cola doesn’t keep the gleaming, vast manufacturing process a secret: on the Zignum website flash the bright stainless-steel drums, the rows of assembly-line bottles. Intermixed in Zignum’s on-site film runs the art and warmth part: scenes from other mezcal localities. You can also check YouTube...
Continue reading
Nancy Davies @'NarcoNews'
Apologies that this information is from some months ago, but with all the news on the web and the business practices that maintain secrecy of involvement, is little wonder I took so long to find, with the recent resolution by the UN declaring Water and Sanitation Basic Human Rights, http://www.truth-out.org/un-declares-water-and-sanitation-basic-human-rights61817 , the disappearance of valuable water supplies in areas of multinational exploitation takes on new meaning. Can the people in these regions ever be truly compensated by business for the destruction of such life-sustaining water supplies?
Proto-fascism
Is the Tea Party racist? Democrats who play liberals on TV say it isn't. Vice President Joe Biden says that "at least elements that were involved with some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views."
Certainly a sizeable minority of tea partiers' "take America back" rhetoric is motivated by resentment that a black guy is president. "Take America back" from whom? You know whom. It ain't white CEOs.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass
When life expectancy is short, it makes sense to have babies early (Image: Paula Bronstein/Getty)
From feckless fathers and teenaged mothers to so-called feral kids, the media seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in documenting the lives of the "underclass". Whether they are inclined to condemn or sympathise, commentators regularly ask how society got to be this way. There is seldom agreement, but one explanation you are unlikely to hear is that this kind of "delinquent" behaviour is a sensible response to the circumstances of a life constrained by poverty. Yet that is exactly what some evolutionary biologists are now proposing.
There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the best of the hand life has dealt us. If we understand this, it won't just change the way we view the lives of the poorest in society, it will also show how misguided many current efforts to tackle society's problems are - and it will suggest better solutions.
Evolutionary theory predicts that if you are a mammal growing up in a harsh, unpredictable environment where you are susceptible to disease and might die young, then you should follow a "fast" reproductive strategy - grow up quickly, and have offspring early and close together so you can ensure leaving some viable progeny before you become ill or die. For a range of animal species there is evidence that this does happen. Now research suggests that humans are no exception.
Certainly the theory holds up in comparisons between people in rich and poor countries. Bobbi Low and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor compared information from nations across the world to see if the age at which women have children changes according to their life expectancy (Cross-Cultural Research, vol 42, p 201). "We found that the human data fit the general mammalian pattern," says Low. "The shorter life expectancy was, the earlier women had their first child."
But can the same biological principles explain the difference in behaviour between rich and poor within a developed, post-industrialised country? Nettle, for one, believes it can. In a study of over 8000 families, he found that in the most deprived parts of England people can barely expect 50 years of healthy life, nearly two decades less than in affluent areas. And sure enough, women from poor neighbourhoods are likely to have their babies at an early age and in quick succession. They have smaller babies and they breastfeed less, both of which make it easier to get pregnant again sooner (Behavioral Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arp202).
"If you've only got two-thirds as much time in your life as someone in a different neighbourhood, then all of your decisions about when to start having babies, when to become a grandparent and so on have to be foreshortened by a third," says Nettle. "So it shouldn't really surprise us that women in the poorest areas are having their babies at around 20 compared to 30 in the richest ones. That's exactly what you would expect."...
Continue reading
Mairi Macleod @'New Scientist'
Neil Young readies Volume 2 of his Archives series
On top of the recent Twisted Road tour, helping with the Elton John, Leon Russell, and T Bone Burnett collaboration, and working with Daniel Lanois on a brand new studio album, Young has announced the release of Volume 2 of his Archives series, reports NoDepression.com.
Archives, which has been in the works since the late ’80s, is essentially Young clearing attic space, doling out previously unreleased tracks and rarities taken from both the studio and his live performances.
Volume 1, which was released in June 2009, covered Young’s work between 1963 and 1972. For Volume 2, according his NY Times site, the legendary singer/songwriter is “rebuilding” three unreleased albums – Chrome Dreams, Homegrown, and Oceanside-Countryside — and one live recording, Odeon-Budokan, that were made between 1972 and 1982.
A release date for the package has not yet been set, but NY Times confirms it will initially be “released in vinyl from analog masters as they originally were created for that format.” Translation: dust off your record player (if you haven’t already).
In other news, AmericanSongwriter.com reports Young and Lanois will perform four songs from his other upcoming release — aka that aforementioned new studio album — at the October 2nd Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto. Explained Lanois in a recent interview with the Toronto Star, “At the strike of midnight, we will premiere four tracks from the Neil Young record, visually and sonically.” Neat-o.
Chris Coplon @'CoS'
The Opposites Game - All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)...
Continue reading
Tom Engelhardt @'TomDispatch'
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)...
Continue reading
Tom Engelhardt @'TomDispatch'
Best Leak Ever!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Best Leak Ever | ||||
Not sure about the goatee tho...
The best goals ever scored?
Do check out Longy's new football related blog:
He's not a bad bloke for a Chelsea fan despite his slander of Liverpool at the top of the page!
Two words my friend: Joe and Cole!!!
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Girlz With Gunz # 120
Karen Handel
Running for governor of Georgia!!!
Running for governor of Georgia!!!
As Georgia’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2010, Karen Handel passed the Help America Vote Act, requiring that individuals provide documentation proving citizenship when they register to vote (a law opposed by the A.C.L.U. and the Hispanic community). Arizona governor Jan Brewer—a fierce advocate of the controversial Arizona immigration law—has endorsed Handel, stating that she “will fight to pass similar illegal immigration laws in Georgia.” Palin, for her part, called Handel “a pro-life, pro-Constitutionalist with a can-do attitude.”
Dubblestandart meets David Lynch & Lee Scratch Perry - “Chrome Optimism” 12″ vinyl (plus 1 FREE DOWNLOAD)
In the new release, Dubblestandart brings together two eccentric geniuses–David Lynch, the iconic American filmmaker, and Lee Scratch Perry, Jamaican dub inventor on a new 12″ vinyl entitled “Chrome Optimism.” The release also features excerpts of French electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene part 4.”
The 12″ includes dubstep and dub remixes from NYC’s Subatomic Sound System, a Dubblestandart dub, and a remix of another Dubblestandart/Lee Perry tune by Bristol’s RSD (Rob Smith from Smith & Mighty).
via dub.com
The 12″ includes dubstep and dub remixes from NYC’s Subatomic Sound System, a Dubblestandart dub, and a remix of another Dubblestandart/Lee Perry tune by Bristol’s RSD (Rob Smith from Smith & Mighty).
via dub.com
Trent Reznor: What to do as a new / unsigned artist
In September 2009 Trent Reznor writing on the NIN forums outlined his thoughts on what unsigned bands should do if they're hankering after success in the internet age. We're using this to inform the different avenues and outlets we'll be looking into in the coming weeks. We'll also take a look at the different distribution methods and guerilla marketing techniques.
Here's what he had to say:
I posted a message on Twitter yesterday stating I thought The Beastie Boys and TopSpin Media "got it right" regarding how to sell music in this day and age. Here's a link to their store: [illcommunication.beastieboys.com]
Shortly thereafter, I got some responses from people stating the usual "yeah, if you're an established artist - what if you're just trying to get heard?" argument. In an interview I did recently this topic came up and I'll reiterate what I said here.
If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:
* Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.
If you're forging your own path, read on.
* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
To clarify:
Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever.
Don't have a TopSpin as a partner? Use Amazon for your transactions and fulfillment. [http://www.amazon.com/]
Use TuneCore to get your music everywhere. [www.tunecore.com]
Have a realistic idea of what you can expect to make from these and budget your recording appropriately.
The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).
The Beastie Boys' site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in - available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging - they are established and you are not. Think this through.
The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on - like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it's dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don't autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.
If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig - good luck, you're going to be waiting a while.
Hope this helps, and I'll scour responses for intelligent comments I can respond to.
TR
TopSpin Media info:
[topspinmedia.com]
Regardless of what you think of Trent Reznor or Nine Inch Nails' music you can't really deny his ideas. As he points out:
"nobody knows what to do right now, me included. The music business model is broken right now. That means every single job position in the music industry has to re-educate itself and learn / discover / adapt a new way. Change can be painful and hard and scary. If any of these entities we're discussing are interested in you, ask them about their strategies IN DETAIL. None of them know for sure what to do. Some of them have an idea of how to negotiate these waters. Most of them don't. If you are young and use the internet, you know more about your audience than they do - for sure. This is a revolution and you can be a part of it. The old guard is dying, if you have good ideas - try them."
More...
@'We ARE the music industry'
NB:
Keep an eye on this new blog as one to watch...
The author has also contributed one of the remixes to Billie Ray Martin's 'Crackdown' project.
NB:
Keep an eye on this new blog as one to watch...
The author has also contributed one of the remixes to Billie Ray Martin's 'Crackdown' project.
A Shot That Saves the Lives of Addicts Is Now in Their Hands
In a haunted world of heroin and hurt and heartless hustles, located between a dusty brickyard and rusty railroad tracks along the border of Chicago and blue-collar Cicero, Steve Kamenicky is the go-to guy. Mr. Kamenicky, 52, is not a dealer. His own heroin addiction is much too strong. He shoots every $10 bag of heroin he can.
But his fellow addicts consider Mr. Kamenicky a savior.
“I’ve saved more people than the paramedics,” he boasted the other evening as he sat in a Cicero parking lot, his long, salt-and-pepper ponytail snaking down his back.
The drug he administers to fellow heroin users is called Naloxone or Narcan, its brand name. Mr. Kamenicky estimated that in the last few years he had brought back from the deadly depths of heroin overdose at least 35 addicts — in abandoned buildings, crack houses and around kitchen tables.
Naloxone, which is injected, reverses the effects of an opiate overdose. A drug that was a few years ago given by doctors and paramedics, Naloxone is now directly dispensed to drug users like Mr. Kamenicky, who are trained by the Chicago Recovery Alliance and receive Naloxone through a doctor-supervised program. The effort is part of an up-from-the bottom movement in the struggle to rescue those addicted to heroin and other opiates.
“It saves lives,” said Dr. Virgilio Arenas, who leads the addiction division at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “Naloxone is an effective antidote. It works within minutes once administered.”
Mr. Kamenicky receives Naloxone free, as do drug users across the city, from the alliance, a nonprofit needle-exchange and H.I.V.-prevention program. The alliance also dispenses fresh syringes, condoms and other paraphernalia to users in the hope that they will stay alive long enough to make “any positive change,” the group’s mantra.
Dr. Arenas said there were similar “harm-reduction” projects in Milwaukee, New York and other cities where needles and Naloxone were distributed.
Not everyone endorses the effort. “Some people in the addiction field feel it might foster more drug use,” Dr. Arenas said, adding, “but I don’t think people will use more because they have the antidote. I favor the harm-reduction approach.”...
Continue reading
Don Terry @'NY Times'
My thought is that it is commom sense to make Narcan available 24 hours for immediate use for people who have overdosed.
Know that when I was using there was a bottle handy. 
How much could $8.7 billion help at home?
The GOP (the so called party of fiscal responsibility) held up unemployment benefits because they said it had to be funded, yet they support no time line to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan where the US is literally pouring tons of money into a hole. Right now, $8.7 billion is unaccounted for in the Iraq reconstruction and the total cost of just the Iraq campaign alone tops $3 trillion. If the mission is to bankrupt the US with ass backwards priorities, I'd say great job!
Read more on the missing $8.7 billion
@'BBC'
Read more on the missing $8.7 billion
@'BBC'
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