Saturday, 13 March 2010
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Thursday, 25 February 2010
RePost: Talisker - Land of Stone
Ken Hyder: drums
Marcio Mattos and John Lawrence: basses
Davie Webster: alto saxophone
John Rangecroft: tenor saxophone, clarinet
Ricardo Mattos: soprano and tenor saxophones, flute
Maggie Nicols, Frankie Armstrong, Brian Eley, and Phil Minton: vocals
Ken Hyder has two web sites here and here.
There you will find tracks from the past and the present to download.
Here is an interview with Ken from 'The Wire'.
The vocalists, substituting Julie Tippetts (nee Driscoll) for Frankie Armstrong had worked together as
'Voice'.
Enjoy/
Davie Webster: alto saxophone
John Rangecroft: tenor saxophone, clarinet
Ricardo Mattos: soprano and tenor saxophones, flute
Maggie Nicols, Frankie Armstrong, Brian Eley, and Phil Minton: vocals
Ken Hyder has two web sites here and here.
There you will find tracks from the past and the present to download.
Here is an interview with Ken from 'The Wire'.
The vocalists, substituting Julie Tippetts (nee Driscoll) for Frankie Armstrong had worked together as
'Voice'.
Phil Minton sang in my band, but that is only because I asked him to...
WHY...?
Because...
"...it sounds for all the world like an Albert Ayler album released post-New Grass when the tenor alchemist was experimenting with a woodwind contraption called the chanter—the blown portion of Scottish highland bagpipes. The twin sax / twin bass lineup of Hyder's quintet creates a droning, cantatorial spiritsound one can imagine as the sound of Ayler's dreams."
(From a review of the first Talisker album)This is my 'desert island disc' and it has never been reissued on CD!
Finally for those of you who were in the Feral Choir when Phil Minton came out here to Melbourne, you can watch (and hear) yourself here and you may recognise one of the vocal motifs from the above album.Enjoy/
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
There is NO truth to the rumours...
...that the editorial team here at 'Exile' are off to Switzerland to get our blood changed!
However we may be popping in for a quick bop at the
Death Disco
Death Disco
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
"Ooer Missus"
How green was my 'cwm'?
(It is amazing what you can learn from someone else playing Scrabble...now straight to the Doctors!)
(It is amazing what you can learn from someone else playing Scrabble...now straight to the Doctors!)
The 10p cocaine byproduct turning Argentina's slum children into the living dead
Paco addicts in the slums of Buenos Aires
Monday, 22 February 2010
Australian internet users support education over mandatory Internet filtering
Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today welcomed the results of a recent survey that found Australian Internet users do not support the idea of mandatory Internet filtering.
The preliminary results of the Australian Broadband Survey 2009, conducted by Whirlpool (whirlpool.net.au), found that 91.8% respondents did not support the idea of mandatory Internet filtering.
The survey also found 83.4% of respondents said that the introduction of mandatory Internet filtering might affect their vote at the next Federal election.
“The results highlight widespread community disagreement with the Government’s plan,” said Peter Black, EFA’s campaign manager. “These results also show that Australians believe the Government would be better off focusing on increased education and law enforcement, instead of an impractical and costly policy of Government censorship.”
When asked what the Government should focus on in terms of internet safety, 81.8% supported educating parents, 63.9% said educating children, 43.7% said law enforcement, 42.1% said subsidising desktop filter software, and 33.5% said subsidising ISP-level opt-in filters, with only 3.2% supporting mandatory Internet filtering.
These preliminary results from the Australian Broadband Survey 2009 only include respondents aged 18 years of age or older. The survey was successfully completed and verified 21,775 times by respondents aged 18 years of age or older. The full results of the Survey are expected to be published soon.
“These results confirm that people who understand the issue overwhelming oppose the Government’s policy,” Black said. “The big challenge now is to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Australians, who perhaps aren’t particularly computer or Internet savvy.”
That is why last week EFA launched the Open Internet campaign, centred around a new website, OpenInternet.com.au, blog and Facebook fan page, to, to, that together will act as campaign hub for all the different individuals and organisations that are campaigning against the Governmentb s mandatory Internet filtering policy.
The Open Internet campaign marks an escalation of opposition to the Government’s policy, which will continue throughout the year. “Our goal is to ensure the Australian public know what they’re in for,” said Black. “It’s important that such a major and expensive policy gets the public scrutiny it deserves. And we believe that Open Internet portrays a positive and understandable message that will resonate with Australians who are yet to form a strong opinion on the Government’s policy.”
American Takfiris
[A. Serwer]The theological justification for al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, "The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.
The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.
The torture memos--indeed, all of the pro-torture arguments rest on a similar intellectual themes to the takfiris. Suspected terrorists are "illegal enemy combatants", outside the framework of laws that would otherwise guide us. Just as the takfiris justify the killing of even self-identified Muslims by excommunicating them as "infidels", torture apologists argue that even American citizens like Jose Padilla who are accused of being terrorists become legal "apostates" without any rights the president is bound to respect. These are extraordinary circumstances, this is an extraordinary war--and so, the Bush administration turned to Yoo, a man who believes the president is bound by no laws during wartime: he can murder a village of innocent civilian non-combatants just as surely as he can crush the testicles of a child or deploy the military against residents of the United States. The architects of torture are the intellectual mirror image of their declared enemies, depending on the perceived inhumanity of their foes to justify monstrous actions. It's worth noting however, that the Bush administration did not take full advantage of the wrongs that the lawyers in their Office of Legal Counsel would have enabled. My point is not to equate the deeds of AQ with the deeds of the Bush administration--merely to point out justification for acts that are on their face unjustifiable take a similar intellectual path.
From his cell in an Egyptian prison, al-Sharif denounced his former colleagues in al Qaeda, declaring that the killing of innocents was wrong. He essentially renounced his earlier work providing the theological basis for politically motivated murder and destruction, declaring, "There is no such thing in Islam as ends justifying the means," now arguing that the murder of innocents, Muslim or otherwise, was sinful. Whatever theological cover al-Sharif's original arguments provided were meaningless against the body count of mostly Muslim innocents amassed by al-Qaeda in their war against the "West", which by the numbers has been a war against fellow Muslims. In combination with the furious efforts of moderate Muslims and even committed Islamists like al-Sharif, al Qaeda and its methods have been largely discredited, to the point where, as Fareed Zakaria writes, we don't fear "a broad political movement but a handful of fanatics scattered across the globe."
I confess to being bothered that we haven't seen a similarly backlash against the architects of torture here--part of the reason we haven't, is because even though innocents were tortured, we still see them as fundamentally alien. Few Americans directly suffered as a result of what Yoo and Bybee did--although I think we have yet to understand that damage that's been done to our society as a whole. Bolstered by ideological partisans and powerful figures looking to avoid accountability for their actions, men like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have yet to be held responsible for the crimes they enabled--and I'm not sure they ever will be--although I'm less concerned with their punishment than with the permanent American rejection of torture. The Justice Department's David Margolis overruled the original conclusions of the Department's ethics lawyers that Yoo and Bybee had, in ignoring legal precedents and sanctioning behavior that was likely illegal, had committed "professional misconduct". That would have triggered professional sanctions for Yoo, a tenured professor at Berkeley, and Bybee, a sitting federal judge, but Margolis' memo instead concludes that they had excercised "flawed legal reasoning" that could be forgiven in part because of the context in which the memos were written, months after the 9/11 attacks. Margolis though, does not endorse their reasoning, and as for Yoo, he writes that whether or not he deliberately gave bad legal advice is a "close question." Al-Sharif will never be able to wash the blood from his hands, but while this founding father of al Qaeda has recoiled from the fruits of his labor, the American architects of torture continue to argue that their reasoning is legally sound.
The American conscience, when it decides to act, is mighty--but it is also sluggish and vain. Americans are crushed by the weight of not fulfilling their own high expectations--so the shameful acts of one generation are often rectified by a subsequent generation unencumbered by their own complicity in such acts. So the compromise the Founding Fathers reached on the issue of slavery, in defiance of the spirit of the documents they authored, was eventually righted by the Civil War. The slavery by another name of reconstruction was ignored by a nation weary of conflict after nearly being rent in two--but eventually gave birth to the civil rights movement. The suffragettes were forced to accept a compromise on the 14th Amendment that denied them the vote--but they would ultimately prevail. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans, Reagan gave them reparations. The American conscience is often slow to action, but not because it cannot recognize evil--but because our view of ourselves as a people guided by justice is so important to who we are that when confronted with proof of our own shortcomings, we recoil in shame and precious vanity. Eventually, with the big stuff, we usually find our way--we see this with our slow, staggering, but inevitable march towards full personhood for gays and lesbians. And while those who stained America's honor with war crimes have escaped accountability for now, these American takfiris will eventually be judged by history with a clarity we cannot muster today.
The arc of the universe is long...you know, all that stuff.
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