Thursday 24 February 2011

Inside Libya's first free city: jubilation fails to hide deep wounds

Digital Sampling and Remix Culture: Creativity or Criminality? (w/ Hank Shocklee)

Musicians have always borrowed from others — tunings, vocal styles, distinctive phrasings. But the advent of the sampler in the 80s brought borrowing into the digital age. Today, “sampling,” or lifting a snippet of someone else’s work — anything from a horn hit to a drum beat — is mainstream. But how to credit and pay those earlier artists for their contribution is where things get thorny. How much of someone else’s work should artists be able to use? How much should they pay for it? Is copyright law stuck in the age of analog?
Straight from the archives of NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow, check out Hank Shocklee Discuss Sampling & Remix Culture along with Kembrew McLeod, Associate Professor, University of Iowa & Producer of the Film Copyright Criminals; Flora Lichtman, Multimedia Editor, NPR’s Science Friday; Dean Garfield, President and CEO, Information Technology Industry Council.
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Listen @'Science Friday' 

Israel eyes Street View amid security, privacy fears

Among Libya's Prisoners: Interviews with Mercenaries

Return of the Class Struggle

Nearly half of Australians are anti-Muslim: study

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, falls for phone prank

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Scott Walker is currently embroiled in a dispute over public sector pay Photograph: Pool/REUTERS
The Republican governor at the centre of the union-busting protests in the US has been embarrassed by a prank call that he believed was from one of his billionaire backers.
On the recording of the call, which has been released online, the Republican governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker tells a caller impersonating one of the rightwing Koch brothers that he is looking forward to flying to California to celebrate with them once the battle with the unions was won, and jokes about taking a baseball bat to slug Democratic leaders.
Walker is under siege in his office in the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, in a backlash against his proposed legislation to remove unions' right to collective bargaining and cut public sector workers' pay.
Ian Murphy, who calls in pretending to be David Koch, suggests planting troublemakers among the protesters, who have been peaceful through 11 successive days of demonstrations. Walker says he has thought about doing that but decided against.
The prankster says: "I'll tell you what Scott, once you crush these bastards, I'll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time."
Walker replies: "Alright, that would be outstanding. Thanks for all the support and helping us move the cause forward. We appreciate it and we're doing the just and right thing for the right reasons and it's all about getting our freedoms back."
The Koch brothers have given millions to the Americans for Prosperity campaign group, which has previously campaigned against Barack Obama's healthcare reforms and tightening environmental controls. It is launching a major advertising campaign supporting Walker in Wisconsin.
Records for the state show that the brothers' Koch Industries was one of the largest contributors to Walker's election campaign.
Ewan MacAskill @'The Guardian' 



More on Koch Industries

Robert Fisk: Tripoli: a city in the shadow of death


Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About

Prescribed Amphetamines May Up Risk of Parkinson’s Disease

Emerging research suggests people who have used amphetamines such as benzedrine and dexedrine appear to be at an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. Benzedrine and dexedrine are drugs often prescribed to increase wakefulness and focus for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy, a disorder that can cause excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden attacks of sleep. They are also used to treat traumatic brain injuries.
The study involved 66,348 people in northern California who had participated in the Multiphasic Health Checkup Cohort Exam between 1964 and 1973 and were evaluated again in 1995.
The average age of the participants at the start of the study was 36 years old. Of the participants, 1,154 people had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease by the end of the study.
Exposure to amphetamines was determined by two questions: one on the use of drugs for weight loss and a second question on whether people often used benzedrine or dexedrine.
Amphetamines were among the drugs commonly used for weight loss when this information was collected.
According to the study, those people who reported using benzedrine or dexedrine were nearly 60 percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s than those people who didn’t take the drugs.
There was no increased risk found for those people who used drugs for weight loss.
“If further studies confirm these findings, the potential risk of developing Parkinson’s disease from these types of amphetamines would need to be considered by doctors before prescribing these drugs as well as be incorporated into amphetamine abuse programs, including illicit use,” said study author Stephen K. Van Den Eeden, Ph.D.
Van Den Eeden said amphetamines affect the release and uptake of dopamine, the key neurotransmitter involved in Parkinson’s disease. He explained that more research needs to be completed to confirm the association and learn more about possible mechanisms.
@'PsychCentral'

The Six-Legged Meat of the Future

50 million 'environmental refugees' by 2020, experts say

John Perry Barlow
Obama: "The United States will continue to stand up for freedom." Oh, yeah? With what besides fine words?

Inside LSD


Could LSD be the next drug in your doctor's arsenal? New experiments have a few researchers believing that this trippy drug could become a pharmaceutical of the future.
Outlawed in 1966 in the US, the street drug developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius or a descent into madness.
Now science is taking a fresh look into this psychedelic world, including the first human LSD trials in more than 35 years.
LSD's inventor Albert Hofmann called it medicine for the soul. The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.
Can it possibly enhance our brain power, expand our creativity, or cure diseases?

♪♫ Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer - Chap-Hop History


From the album 'Flattery Not Included' LOL!

Indiana Official: "Use Live Ammunition" Against Wisconsin Protesters

UPDATE:
HA! He's gone...

Franklin De Costa – Process part 250


This mix was originally done for my friends at the Greta Cottage Workshop. They do a regular radio show on Soundart Radio, a local station from the UK. In 1999, I produced a dark ambient album that was never released. They heard it and wanted to release a special limited edition as the first release on their new sublabel, Greta Cottage Woodpile. The album was only given out to my friends. I´m kind of excited that it will finally see the public after all this time. So, the music here is a journey through contemporary electronica with a hint of the stuff I loved in the 90’s. I edited some of the tracks to make them fit better to the mix.
Note: Many of the tracks are edited in arrangement and with additional production.
(Franklin De Costa)
01. John Carpenter & Alan Howarth – Arrival At The Library
02. Darkstar – Ostkreuz
03. Emeralds – The Cycle Of Abuse
04. Cluster – Fotschi Tong
05. Actress – Maze
06. Darkstar – Videotape
07. These New Puritans – Time Xone
08. The Black Dog – Delay 9
09. Autechre – Yuop-Snook
10. Lukid – Child Of The Jago
11. Lone – The Twilight Switch
12. Teebs – Humming Birds
13. Coil – 5-Methoxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine: (5-MeO-DMT)
14. Hauschka – Nadelwald
15. Broken Social Scene – Never Felt Alive
16. Bvdub – The Past Disappears
17. Toro Y Moi – Fax Shadow
18. Memory Tapes – Run Out
19. Phonophani – C
20. Oneohtrix Point Never – Ouroboros
   
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America Under Attack....


...of horrible saucermen!
But with Mattel machine guns you'll be ready to save the earth!

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One Shot Not Remix : Randy Crawford & Joe Sample



Respect Yourself
Streetlife

Muammar Gaddafi: method in his 'madness'

Inside the Business of Selling Human Body Parts

Politics by Other Means

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Jon Snow
Beware: When Gaddafi calls rebels 'cockroaches', its the word Hutus used before they massacred Tutsis in Rwanda, and Nazzis used of Jews

Cleanternet

!!!


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Letters From Readers - Reverse


Download 'The Live Sessions' EP
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(GB2011) NHS to lose 50,000 jobs, including doctors and nurses

Jay Landesman (1920 - 2011)

Jay Landesman
Jay Landesman died this past week in London, aged 91. Here's James Campbell, writing in The Boston Review about Landesman's seminal (sic) magazine, Neurotica:
The closest there was to a beat magazine (thought it could only be seen that way in retrospect) in the late 1940s and early ’50s was a slim, eccentric journal whose contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism…..Ginsberg’s first contribution to a magazine with a nationwide circulation appeared in Neurotica 6 (Spring 1950), by which time the magazine had adopted a furtive beat identity. Ginsberg’s brief "Song: Fie My Fum" (an early working of “Pull My Daisy”) was not likely to advance by much the editor’s avowed cause of describing "a neurotic society from the inside"; nevertheless, it was the right kind of verse for the venue, with its playful sexual content: "Say my oops, Ope my shell, Roll my bones, Ring my bell ..." The contributor’s note informed readers that "Allen Ginsberg recently recovered from a serious illness." (sic)….The longest and most serious contribution to 6 was "Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient" by Carl Goy, the pseudonym of Ginsberg’s new friend in the Columbia PI, Carl Solomon...
The full article can be read here. Here's Landesman's obituary as it appeared on Monday in the St Louis Beacon. The St Louis Post-Dispatch obit may be read here
Peter Hale @'The Allen Ginsberg Project'

Escape from Tripoli: Surviving Libya's "Tsunami"

Australian Social security payments for the aged, people with disabilities and carers 1901 to 2010
Navigating Libya's tribal maze

Dennis Montgomery: The Man Who Conned The Pentagon

The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of December 21, 2003, police stood guard in heavy assault gear on the streets of Manhattan. Fighter jets patrolled the skies. When a gift box was left on Fifth Avenue, it was labeled a suspicious package and 5,000 people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were herded into the cold.
It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. “There’s continued discussion,” he told reporters, “these are from credible sources—about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned “about some unspecified but spectacular attack.”
The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.” The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. “Credible sources,” Ridge said. “Intelligence chatter,” said CNN.
But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers...
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Aram Roston @'Playboy'

Petraeus's comments on coalition attack reportedly offend Karzai government

How Obama Lost Karzai

A few weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an exiled Afghan leader I had known for nearly 20 years paid a visit to my home in Lahore. His name was Hamid Karzai, and his problem, he told me, was that he was rapidly losing faith in the West's concern for his country.
Karzai was the scion of a prominent Pashtun family in southern Afghanistan, one with a deep-rooted enmity for the Taliban regime. The Taliban, which had ruled the country since 1996, had gunned down Karzai's father in front of a mosque in the Pakistani city of Quetta two years earlier. Now the younger Karzai was clandestinely sending money and weapons across the Afghan border for an eventual uprising against the ruling regime. But he had just been served notice by Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) that his visa had been revoked -- the Taliban, with its close links to the Pakistani intelligence agency, had urged the ISI to get rid of him. Karzai was making the rounds of Western embassies in Islamabad to ask whether anyone would support him if he went inside the country and raised the standard of rebellion. But nobody offered to help. Several ambassadors refused to see him.
By the time U.S. bombers pounded the last remnants of the Taliban out of Kabul just a few months later, everything had changed. Karzai had gone from pariah to president and, in the eyes of the U.S. government, from combatant in an obscure regional conflict to vital strategic partner. Yet when I met with Karzai not long ago at the presidential palace in Kabul for a lengthy conversation, one of many in the decade since our pre-9/11 meeting in Lahore, it was remarkable how much his relationship with the United States seemed to have come full circle...
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Ahmed Rashid @'FP'

The Fall in Australia 2011 – I Ain’t No Squealer But I Sing Like a Canary!

I wanted to write a story about the Fall’s recent dates in Australia for several reasons. Mostly because the Scrivener General is a Fall freak and was unable to get to see them. Other than that, I thought I could share my experiences with you from within this rarefied, delicate room that the General has carved out of the Magic Box (Internet) better than anywhere else has. I was asked by a music site to write a story. That would have been nice but that room allows a cavalcade of camp followers to trail their private parts – having dipped them in the Indian inkwell – across the bottom of the page in a contest of wit known as the ‘comments’ section. As you know, a person’s brains only reside in the nether regions in quite delirious, unconscious moments. When we are not knowing what we are thinking. Thank fuck. The General runs a tight ship here and the soldiers line up in an orderly fashion and let fly. No return fire is allowed. At ease.I was also asked by an actual physical newsprint from another state to write about the Fall from close proximity but I demurred from that as well. I ain’t no squealer! So, here I am. Unloading. Just for a stir. Under the illusion that something of the following may resonate, within this delicate chamber the General has allowed me to speak into.
The Fall are a band from out of time. That’s a tongue right there.
Forty or more albums. Constant lead face and voice and brain is Mark E Smith. From a certain part of Manchester, the name of which escapes me but is important to him and, thus, to us who are listening. Not the posh part, if there is one. Been going since 1976 or even further back. Their first single, ‘Repetition’, name checks Chairman Mao and Jimmy Carter. I mean, they were still in actual power.
Comedians love the Fall. Frank Skinner, Stewart Lee, Tony Martin. Something unknowable about them. Suspension. Great lines popping out here and there. Unpredictable. They are puzzling, not just a puzzle. Everything else seems to settle after a while. Sometimes it’s time itself that plays tricks. The Beatles were so passé, so out of date, when I was a kid. So badly, laughably antiquated. Then, after a while, they seemed to loom larger and fresher – seemingly more recent, focused and accessible. Those bends in time took decades. Bend Sinister is a Fall album title. The Fall have been through this kind of thing too. Sometimes in and out of focus and vogue. Out in the wilderness, looking sad and irrelevant, then suddenly and rudely back in the centre of all the hot talk. Like now!...
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Is This The First DMCA Notice Over 3D Printer Plans?




Just a few months ago, we highlighted how an upcoming battle in the copyright world will be coming from the rise in 3D printing, and the ability to simply print out new physical objects based on plans. And, as a few different folks have sent in, a site that collects and aggregates 3D printer plans called Thingiverse recently said that it's received its first ever DMCA takedown notice over a plan for a 3D printer object. To avoid liability, of course, the site complied. The specific DMCA takedown involved this 3D printable design of "the impossible triangle."
Of course many people wondered if the guy claiming copyright on this, Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz, had a valid copyright on this, since the basic design he's talking about is just the famed Penrose triangle, and there are plenty of examples of people making it. On top of that, the DMCA takedown he issued was over people creating similar Penrose triangle 3D printer designs based on a challenge Schwanitz himself put out there, to see if anyone else could figure out how to model a printable Penrose triangle, and the winning results figured it out: Of course, the very fact that they figured it out themselves, without the specific instructions on how Schwanitz did it, lends even more credence to the claim that the takedown was completely bogus. They created these new versions not by copying his work, which was hidden away, but by understanding the basic physics and optics of how to create something that appears like the classic Penrose triangle. In fact, the creator of the 3D printable version above notes that his version was "based solely on the 1934 design painted by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvard," which makes me wonder what sort of copyright claim Dr. Schwanitz actually has over the design.
In the end, Schwanitz decided to back down, rescinding the takedown notice and promising to release his version into the public domain (where it may have really been all along). Still, this definitely is an early warning sign of things to come. I'm sure it won't be long before we hear of more copyright issues related to 3D printers, and they'll be over issues a lot more serious than an optical illusion.
@'techdirt'

Stanley McChrystal: It Takes a Network

Gaddafi raved and cursed, but he faces forces he cannot control

So he will go down fighting. That's what Muammar Gaddafi told us last night, and most Libyans believe him. This will be no smooth flight to Riyadh or a gentle trip to a Red Sea holiday resort. Raddled, cowled in desert gowns, he raved on.
He had not even begun to use bullets against his enemies – a palpable lie – and "any use of force against the authority of the state shall be punished by death", in itself a palpable truth which Libyans knew all too well without the future tense of Gaddafi's threat. On and on and on he ranted. Like everything Gaddafi, it was very impressive – but went on far too long.
He cursed the people of Benghazi who had already liberated their city – "just wait until the police return to restore order", this dessicated man promised without a smile. His enemies were Islamists, the CIA, the British and the "dogs" of the international press. Yes, we are always dogs, aren't we? I was long ago depicted in a Bahraini newspaper cartoon (Crown Prince, please note) as a rabid dog, worthy of liquidation. But like Gaddafi's speeches, that's par for the course. And then came my favourite bit of the whole Gaddafi exegesis last night: HE HADN'T EVEN BEGUN TO USE VIOLENCE YET!
So let's erase all the YouTubes and Facebooks and the shooting and blood and gouged corpses from Benghazi, and pretend it didn't happen. Let's pretend that the refusal to give visas to foreign correspondents has actually prevented us from hearing the truth. Gaddafi's claim that the protesters in Libya – the millions of demonstrators – "want to turn Libya into an Islamic state" is exactly the same nonsense that Mubarak peddled before the end in Egypt, the very same nonsense that Obama and La Clinton have suggested. Indeed, there were times last night when Gaddafi – in his vengefulness, his contempt for Arabs, for his own people – began to sound very like the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu. Was there some contact between these two rogues, one wondered, that we didn't know about?
In many ways, Gaddafi's ravings were those of an old man, his fantasies about his enemies – "rats who have taken tablets" who included "agents of Bin Laden" – were as disorganised as the scribbled notes on the piece of paper he held in his right hand, let alone the green-covered volume of laws from which he kept quoting. It was not about love. It was about the threat of execution. "Damn those" trying to stir unrest against Libya. It was a plot, an international conspiracy. "Your children are dying – but for what?" He would fight "until the last drop of my blood with the Libyan people is behind me". America was the enemy (much talk of Fallujah), Israel was the enemy, Sadat was an enemy, colonial fascist Italy was the enemy. Among the heroes and friends was Gaddafi's grandfather, "who fell a martyr in 1911" against the Italian enemy.
Dressed in brown burnous and cap and gown, Gaddafi's appearance last night raised some odd questions. Having kept the international media – the "dogs" in question – out of Libya, he allowed the world to observe a crazed nation: YouTube and blogs of terrible violence versus state television pictures of an entirely unhinged dictator justifying what he had either not seen on YouTube or hadn't been shown. And there's an interesting question here: dictators and princes who let the international press into their countries – Messrs Ben Ali/Mubarak/Saleh/Prince Salman – are permitting it to film their own humiliation. Their reward is painful indeed. But sultans like Gaddafi who keep the journos out fare little different.
The hand-held immediacy of the mobile phone, the intimacy of sound and the crack of gunfire are in some ways more compelling than the edited, digital film of the networks. Exactly the same happened in Gaza when the Israelis decided, Gaddafi-like, to keep foreign journalists out of their 2009 bloodletting: the bloggers and YouTubers (and Al Jazeera) simply gave us a reality we didn't normally experience from the "professional" satellite boys. Perhaps, in the end, it takes a dictator with his own monopoly on cameras to tell the truth. "I will die as a martyr," Gaddafi said last night. Almost certainly true.
Robert Fisk @'The Independent'