Passions
59 minutes ago
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Three strikes and THEY are out!
Author and activist Cory Doctorow argues that the Internet is too central to our lives to be taken away for three accusations of copyright infringement. Along the way he proposes that turnabout is fair play, and thus Universal (for example) ought to have its access to the Net taken away if it issues three false accusations of infringement.
@'netzpolitik.org'
@'netzpolitik.org'
Obama on terror trials: KSM will die
Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel better about it when he’s put to death, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.
During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.
“I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.
“What I said was, people will not be offended if that's the outcome. I'm not pre-judging, I'm not going to be in that courtroom, that's the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.”
In another interview, Obama said he had not tried to tell Attorney General Eric Holder whether the case involving KSM and four other alleged 9/11 plotters should be heard in federal court or before a military tribunal.
“I said to the attorney general, make a decision based on the law,” the president told CNN’s Ed Henry. “We have set up now a military commission system that is greatly reformed and so we can try terrorists in the forum. But I also have great confidence in our Article 3 courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorist suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States.”
Obama also suggested that critics of the decision are unwisely building the alleged Al Qaeda operatives into larger-than-life figures who require the U.S. to abandon its usual legal processes.
“I think this notion that somehow we have to be fearful, that these terrorists are –possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up and, you know, exacting swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake,” the president declared.
Coming soon...?
It's been quite some time since we've heard any news about the Neuromancer, but director Joseph Kahn is apparently still working on it. He tweeted about it over the weekend — and William Gibson tweeted back. Kahn wrote on his Twitter feed:
Epiphany. I finally figured out how to end the movie.
To which Gibson responded:
Scroll, or voiceover?
Kahn responded:
LOL. Freeze frame.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Three early 7" from George Clinton's The Parliaments
Liberated from the now defunkt blog
'Found Sound'
(RIP)
'Found Sound'
(RIP)
Poor Willie c/w Party Boys(1958)
Lonely Island c/w (You Make Me Wanna) Cry(1959)
Heart Trouble c/w That Was My Girl(1965)
A small offering in return for my friend Yotte
X
X
X
X
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Neuromancer... with Porn Star Sasha Grey as Molly
It's a play... no it's a reading... no it's... hard to tell. But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly: "An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux 'virtual reality' scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara." Full post here
According to the io9 posting that first hipped me to the event: "Creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, 'The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece.'
The performance or reading or whatever it is also boasts Sasha Grey as Molly. Besides acting in various adult films, Grey crossed over to act in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and she is part of the music group ATelicine.
@'h+'
Derrick May @ Paradiso 24-10-2009 Amsterdam
Boy, do I miss that place!
The best place for bands and the list that I saw between 1883 & 86 there would just make you jealous...so I won't!
The best place for bands and the list that I saw between 1883 & 86 there would just make you jealous...so I won't!
How Hitler and the Nazis tried to steal Christmas
Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans. The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.
The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.
“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”
The Nazi version, which removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields, remains in some song books and is sung in many households.
The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus.
The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler led the way in de-Christing Christmas.
Their plan was to remove the emotional ties of the Church and merge Christmas into a Julfest, a celebration of winter and light which drew on pagan traditions.
“The most important celebration in the calendar did not match their racist credo so they had to push out the Christian elements,” said Judith Breuer, who helped her mother, Rita, pull together the exhibition.
Rita started trawling flea markets in the 1970s in search of her childhood Christmas and turned up boxes of Nazi-era Christmas decorations complete with swastikas and grenades.
“After the Nazis had gone you could still find textbooks on Christmas that use exactly the same phrasing,” she told The Times.
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