The 'evil goblin king' LOL!
Baxter Dury at the Sage
11 minutes ago
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Monday, 4 January 2010
Meanwhile over @ Brainwashed
Well Sunn O))) hit the #1 album in the readers poll.
No arguement from me on that one, in my top ten of the year too and a lot of other good stuff in their charts but what the fug is it with Current 93 at #2?
I don't get this band at all. Never did.
Actually what I don't get is Dave (David) Tibet (Michael).
His fugn nonsensical Noddy songs warbled in that fugn awful voice with pretensious lyrics (Coptic anyone) of the highest (OTO?) order!
I want instrumental albums!
The music is great (Matt Sweeney, James Blackshaw, Sasha Grey (I will let her... sing) *sigh* amongst others, even had Bill Fay on stage with the group last year, but then he also had Sebastian fugn Horsley in the line up that night too!)
(Thinks to myself...if someone hadn't forced *ahem* heroin into my veins that night back in (81/82?) when 23 Skidoo blew up the stage at The Venue, I could have kidnapped Tibet in the smoke and kept him in a dungeon for the rest of his life, saving us all from the resulting dross.
Problem is I suspect he probably would have enjoyed it.)
Congrats also to TG for the lifetime achievement award.
Who would have thought it back then?
Michael Shields: Left with a lingering sense of injustice
If Michael Shields thought that the authorities were going to help smooth his return back into normal life, he was sorely mistaken. The combined shortcomings of the British and Bulgarian legal and political systems had already condemned the young Liverpool football fan to serve four-and-a-half years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
So when it came to his release, after a prolonged and impassioned campaign by his family and the people of his home city against his wrongful conviction for the attempted murder of a Bulgarian waiter, he was inured to the prospect of being let down again.
"If someone commits a crime and they get out of prison I know it's not much help but you do get a probation officer and they keep an eye on you. But no one has ever contacted me. I've never had anything from them, no offer of counselling or an offer of a reason why it happened," he says.
It is four months since the quietly spoken 23-year-old became the first Briton to be granted a royal pardon for a wrongful conviction overseas, and in that time he has begun to rebuild his life.
Shortly before Christmas, the young engineer found himself a job working on-site for a property management company. Still fit-looking from his time pumping iron at the prison gym, his hair longer now than in the pictures which publicised his campaign, work has provided a welcome change. In the immediate aftermath of his release, he spent long restless days in front of the television at his family home, trying not to mull over the sense of injustice burning away inside him. Life after jail poses considerable challenges for any former inmate. For those wrongly convicted those pressures can be immense.
Yet in many ways, admits Mr Shields, he has been lucky. He has a large and protective family and the support of a strong community of neighbours and fellow Liverpool FC fans. The club itself was pivotal in keeping up the pressure over his wrongful conviction, and he celebrated his first match back in the luxury of the directors' box at Anfield. His parents, Michael and Maria, who devoted all their energies to campaigning for his release, are having to adapt too. "They are fine. You can see them getting better. They are smiling more. It affected them more than anyone," Mr Shields acknowledges. "Through my family, I have had time to find my feet," he says.
Sitting in the front room of the smart terraced house in the Wavertree area of the city, with its vivid red colour scheme in tribute to Liverpool Football Club, he says he has found it easy to rekindle friendships that were put on ice when he was sentenced to 15 years by the court in Sofia in 2005 (though he declines to discuss whether he is now in a relationship). "The first two months everything happened too fast. I just couldn't take it in ... I couldn't relax. I couldn't sit down and watch the telly. I had to keep myself occupied. The last four weeks have been better." he says.
It was on the last day of his first-ever trip overseas, to see Liverpool win the Champions League, that normality was suspended for the young engineer, aged just 18 at the time. He was arrested by Bulgarian police investigating a brutal late-night attack on the waiter, Martin Georgiev, who had been punched to the ground and hit on the head with a heavy stone, leaving him severely injured. Failures in the inquiry, notably a flawed identity parade, meant Mr Shields was wrongly picked out. Another Liverpool fan, Graham Sankey, confessed to the assault, although he later withdrew his statement...
Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War by Prof Peter Dale Scott
The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, "changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction."[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired.
Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]
As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election:
It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But... the 1970s were a period in which a major "intellectual counterrevolution" was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money... By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).[3]
I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent.[4]
The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan
It is as if Washington had emerged with only one objective from America’s failure in Vietnam: the urge to do it again and get it right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable government to defend. The importance of this similarity has been stressed by Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable phrase, "the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template:"
It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection with Afghanistan. Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. They should not—the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.[5]
Many of the common features of an unpopular corrupted government have been well summarized by Johnson and Mason. In their words, quoting Jeffrey Record, "the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime." Substitute the word "Afghanistan" for the words "South Vietnam" in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today’s government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpower pool or his will to fight, and simply could not be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest was the order of the day.[6]
If Johnson had written a little later, he might have added that a major CIA asset in Afghanistan was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai; and that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a major drug trafficker who used his private force to help arrange a flagrantly falsified election result.[7] This is a fairly exact description of Ngo dinh Nhu in Vietnam, President Ngo dinh Diem’s brother, an organizer of the Vietnamese drug traffic whose dreaded Can Lao secret police helped, among other things, to organize a falsified election result there.[8]
This pattern of a corrupt near relative, often involved in drugs, is a recurring feature of regimes installed or supported by U.S. influence. There were similar allegations about Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law T.V. Soong, Mexican President Echevarría’s brother-in-law Rubén Zuno Arce, and the Shah of Iran’s sister. In the case of Ngo dinh Nhu, it was the absence of a popular base for his externally installed presidential brother that led to drug involvement, "to provide the necessary funding" for political repression.[9] This analogy to the Karzais is pertinent.
An additional similarity, not noted by Johnson, is that America initially engaged in Vietnam in support of an embattled and unpopular minority, the Roman Catholics who had thrived under the French. America has twice made the same mistake in Afghanistan. Initially, after the Russian invasion of 1980, the bulk of American aid went to Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, a leader both insignificant in and unpopular with the mujahedin resistance; the CIA is said to have supported Hekmatyar, who became a drug trafficker to compensate for his lack of a popular base, because he was the preferred client of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which distributed American and Saudi aid.
When America re-engaged in 2001, it was to support the Northern Alliance, a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition hateful to the Pashtun majority south of the Hindu Kush. Just as America’s initial commitment to the Catholic Diem family fatally alienated the Vietnamese countryside, so the American presence in Afghanistan is weakened by its initial dependence on the Tajiks of the minority Northern Alliance. (The Roman Catholic minority in Vietnam at least shared a language with the Buddhists in the countryside. The Tajiks speak Dari, a version of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority.)...
Continue reading
U.S. Intensifies Screening for Travelers From 14 Nations
Citizens of 14 nations including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through these nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full-range of intensified security that had been imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, official said.
For American travelers, the change represents an easing of the response to the attempting bombing of the Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. But it further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking immediate protests from civil rights groups Sunday.
Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, which are considered “state sponsors of terrorism” as well as citizens from “countries of interest” that consist of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen, will also face the special scrutiny, officials said.
For people holding passports from these nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of these countries, they will be required to undergo a full-body pat down and have special attention to their carry on bags before they can board a plane to the United States.
In certain countries that have more advanced equipment, they also will be required to pass through so-called whole body scanners that can look underneath clothing for hidden explosives or weapons, or checked with a device that can find tiny traces of explosives.
All other passengers coming to the United States may face similar measures, but it will be on a more random basis, or if there is some reason to believe that a particular passenger might present a threat, officials said.
The changes should speed up boarding of international flights bound for the United States, while still increasing security beyond the standard x-ray of carry on bags and a metal detector check of all passengers.
The changes will mean any citizen of Pakistani or Saudi Arabia, for the first time, will automatically be patted down before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Great Britain for decades—and there are thousands of them—they would now be subject to these extra security checks.
Nawar Shora, legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the rule wrongly implies that all citizens of certain nations are suspect.
“I understand there needs to be additional security in light of what was attempted on Christmas Day,” Mr. Shora said, adding that he intended to file a formal protest Monday. “But this is extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people labeled as related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”
In the United States, requirement for so-called “second screening” has already been in effect for a dozen countries, a fact that is not widely known, including by civil rights activists like Mr. Shora.
But it often does not have much of an impact, as most passengers traveling domestically in the United States use driver’s licenses -- not passports -- when approaching checkpoints, so officials do not know what their nationality is, meaning they would likely pass without getting extra attention.
Also, with the new rule, for the first time citizens of Nigeria and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are being added to this “country of interest” list that will be subject to automatic additional screening for flights to the United States.
Nigerian-born American Charles Oy, 28, of Chicago, said he detected heightened security this weekend -- not in Nigeria, but upon his arrival Sunday at O’Hare Airport. He was one of a few passengers taken aside for an individual interview, where his bags and passport were examined.
Even though suspected terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was Nigerian, the added scrutiny did not leave him discouraged. “I feel it is very isolated, and is something not characteristic of Nigeria,” he said. “I had no particular feelings of unpleasantness. I understand it is part of the world we live in. I factor all that into my traveling. If it happens, I roll with it.”
One Homeland Security official said the Obama administration did not consider this move a step in the direction of racial profiling, which the Transportation Security Administration has said it has long attempted to avoid.
“Out of abundance of caution and based on the latest intelligence in this evolving threat environment, additional screening measures are necessary to keep transportation safe,” the official said, asking that she not be identified by name, as she was not authorized to address the question on the record.
@'NY Times'
Hmmm, THIS article from 'The New Yorker' back in October 2001 is perhaps worth a re-read!.
Treating everyone as suspect is absurd
Treating everyone as suspect is absurd
Not a Leeds fan but...
...I love seeing ManU getting beaten!
Can anyone tell me what Ferguson whinged about after the game?
Been told that he complained that not enough extra time was given LOL!
Been told that he complained that not enough extra time was given LOL!
Massive Attack - Paradise Circus (NSFW)
Massive Attack recently released their new video for “Paradise Circus” (ft. Hope Sandoval) off Heligoland. In what runs more like a documentary than a music video, the Toby Dye directed piece features former porn star, Georgina Spelvin, and her candid look on filming the infamous adult film, 'The Devil in Miss Jones'. Original shots of the ‘73 hit are interlaced with Spelvin’s honest take on her physical and emotional state during the production of the film nearly forty years ago. An interesting and entertaining concept, but definitely (NSFW)
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