V.A Reggae Collection Part 729
1 hour ago
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Rock Photographer Jim Marshall RIP
Music photographer Jim Marshall, who spent more than a half-century capturing rock-and-roll royalty ranging from the Beatles to Ben Harper at work and in repose, has died. He was 74.
Aaron Zych, a manager at the Morrison Hotel Galleries in New York City, said Wednesday that Marshall apparently died alone in a New York City hotel room.
Zych says the San Francisco resident was scheduled to appear at another gallery Wednesday night to promote his new book with celebrity photographer Timothy White.
According to his professional Web site, Marshall had more than 500 record album covers to his credit.
@'AP'
Official site
Another problem solved by global warming
New Moore Island [also known as South Talpatti] in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.
"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.
Joshua Keating @'FP'
(Tip o'the hat to son #1!)
Stephen Conroy Defends The Filter On The 7PM Project
Stephen Conroy was on The 7PM project last night defending his mandatory internet filter. Seriously, if that guy says child pornography one more time, I’m gonna go crazy.
As good a job as the hosts did of bringing up the main issues involved with the filter, watching this really makes me long for a proper debate between Conroy and someone who actually knows the intricacies of the technical aspects related to filtering. Because it’s so easy for Conroy to get away with saying “Mark Newton from Internode was wrong” in an eight-minute segment without getting challenged as to HOW he’s wrong (which, incidentally, I don’t believe he is. Somehow I trust an engineer’s knowledge of the internet over a politician’s…)
Still, it’s good that this is starting to get some mainstream coverage, even if it didn’t really challenge Conroy too much.
As robbie swan points out in the comments:
When Conroy first flagged the filter, he was going to ban all material that was currently being put on the ACMA blacklist. That included federally classified X rated material then, and despite Conroy’s assertions that X rated material will not be filtered under the new proposals, X rated content is still being added to the ACMA blacklist today. Even if he keeps his word on this, he knows full well that 80% of adult material that is imported into Australia on DVDs has to be modified to make the strict guidelines of the Australian X category. So to say that X rated content will be legal under the filter, still means that 80% of the sexually explicit content on the web will be filtered, Adult content that does not make the Australian X rated category includes material where there is ‘assaultative language’. This means you can say ‘fuck me’ on an X rated film but ‘fuck you’ is often enough to push an X rated film into the dreaded Refused Classification (RC) rating. As for consenting B and D, foot fetish, small breasts, female ejaculation, tickling, mild spanking etc etc these will all be filtered under the new regime even though they are legal acts in themselves. He should just say that all legal acts will not be filtered.
Telstra's final report on the filter
And as someone pointed out in the comments.
The man in charge of the government internet policy here in Australia actually says during the interview that P2P bypasses the internet!!!
The man in charge of the government internet policy here in Australia actually says during the interview that P2P bypasses the internet!!!
WTF? (Thanx Fifi!)
Sarah Palin is targeting -- yes, with gun sights -- House Democrats facing tough reelection fights who voted for health care reform.
Palin's Facebook page now carries a map featuring 20 gun sights, one for each of the Democrats targeted this year by her political action committee SarahPAC. Three of the gun sights, those where incumbent Democrats have already announced their retirement, are colored red.
Likewise, Palin's rhetoric is decidedly militant. "We'll aim for these races and many others," she wrote on her Facebook page. "This is just the first salvo in a fight to elect people across the nation who will bring common sense to Washington. Please go to sarahpac.com and join me in the fight."
Bacteria On Your Fingertips Could Identify You
Most of the time, the DNA used for legal evidence is human DNA. But scientists in Colorado think DNA evidence from bacteria may someday finds its way into the courtroom.
Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, studies the bacteria that live on skin.
"Our bodies are covered in bacteria," says Fierer, "but most of these are harmless, and some of them may actually be beneficial. So it's nothing to be paranoid about." In fact, there are about a hundred different kinds of bacteria that typically grow on human skin.
And that gave Fierer an idea. "We leave this trail of bacteria everywhere we go, and the idea was could we use this trail to identify who had touched a given object or surface," he says.
The reason this bacterial trail could be used to identify someone is that we differ in the kinds of bacteria we carry around. Each of us has bacterial communities that are unique to us. And bacterial communities don't change very much over time.
So these communities could be used to identify someone.
Microbial 'CSI'
Let's say you wanted to find who has been using a particular office computer. Here's how it would work: "We could swab a keyboard key, for example, pull the bacterial DNA off that swab, and then identify all or nearly all of the bacteria that make up that community," says Fierer.
So that's what he did. He and his colleagues swabbed the individual keys from three personal computer keyboards, "and then matched those keys to the bacteria on the fingertips of the owners of the keyboard. And we showed that we could basically identify whose keyboard it was pretty well."
Fierer then tried a similar experiment with people's computer mice, and he could match a mouse to its owner. The findings appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In one final experiment, Fierer and his colleagues found that they could still perform an analysis of bacterial DNA two weeks after it had been left on a surface.
Fierer says he's already had some informal discussions with law-enforcement agencies about his bacterial ID techniques, and there's been interest in this approach. But Fierer's the first to say it's not ready for the courtroom. At least not yet.
"There's a lot of work we need to do to figure out how accurate it is and what are the limitations and so forth, but, yeah, it's encouraging. It does seem like we can actually take advantage of that uniqueness of our bacterial communities," he says.
Joe Palca @'NPR'
GOP Amendment: No Viagra for Sex Offenders
One part of that strategy is to offer amendments on which Democrats would be hard-pressed to cast a "no" vote. If the Senate makes any amendments to the legislation, it has to go back to the House -- a possibility that Democrats are hoping to avoid.
GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (pictured) today released a list of the nine amendments he has filed, and right at the top is a clear illustration of the strategy -- an amendment entitled "No Erectile Dysfunction Drugs To Sex Offenders." Here's how it's described:
"This amendment would enact recommendations from the Government Accountability Office to stop fraudulent payments for prescription drugs prescribed by dead providers or, to dead patients. This amendment also prohibits coverage of Viagra and other ED medications to convicted child molesters, rapists, and sex offenders, and prohibits coverage of abortion drugs."By opposing that amendment, Democrats are, at least in theory, opening themselves up to charges that they support using government money to provide sex offenders with Viagra -- surely an unpopular position if ever there was one.
Other amendments on Coburn's list are designed to undercut Democrats' claims about what the bill will do - see amendment #5, "If You Like the Health Plan You Have, You Can Keep It." Coburn's third amendment says simply, "Congress Should Not Lecture Americans About Fiscal Responsibility."
Senate Democratic leaders are pressing their members not to break ranks and support Republican amendments (or introduce amendments of their own) in order to get the bill passed as soon as possible. In a statement, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka made that same argument.
"Any amendment offered during this process is nothing more than a poison pill," he said. "A 'NO' on amendments is a 'YES' on health care.
Brian Montopoli @'CBS'
What economics teaches us about drugs
In all the coverage in the papers about mephedrone – the new as-yet-legal drug also known as meow meow and connected with the death of a number of unfortunate young people recently – there has been little focus on the economics. Which probably ought not to be a surprise, since this is an emotive issue. But economics helps explain why drugs like mephedrone have gained popularity in the past year or so: quite simply – because they are so cheap.
The average cost of a gram of cocaine in the UK, according to DrugScope, the independent experts on these things, was £39. The price for a gram of mephedrone is closer to a tenner. A gram of ketamine costs half as much as the cocaine, and when you bear in mind that, according to analysis by the Forensic Science Service the average purity of cocaine these days is 26.4pc, compared with 45pc only five years ago (and 63pc in 1984), the value comparison is pretty stark.
Even in the illicit world of drugs (or not so illicit, yet, in the case of mephedrone), price still matters. We know from statistics that the proportion of 16-24 year olds who indulge in these kind of things has been pretty steady (at around 10pc) for some years. So let’s not panic about that. What’s changed is the kind of things they tend to consume: consumption of cheaper drugs like ketamine and mephedrone has leapt in the past couple of years.
Another often-unremarked dynamic is availability: mephedrone has similar effects to ecstasy tablets. So it is probably no coincidence that mephedrone’s rise in popularity has coincided with an a sudden and unprecedented shortage in ecstasy in the UK, something which is linked to the seizure of 33 tonnes of sassafras oil (one of the main ingredients of ecstasy) in Cambodia in June 2008.
With youth unemployment running at the highest level for over a decade, and Britain still stuck in the jaws of recession, I would be shocked if youngsters hadn’t become more price conscious – including about drugs. Now, a separate issue is that mephedrone is clearly too easy to get hold of – something which will not be the case after its almost inevitable ban. But, as I say above, this isn’t the obstacle many people assume it is. The evidence suggests that there is a certain small proportion of people who will want to take drugs even if they are illegal, and whether something is or isn’t illicit won’t change this. Over time we can and should try to reduce this through rehabilitation and education (drugs are anti-social and psychologically and physically degrading at best, potentially fatal at worst), but experience shows that simply making things illegal is not the silver bullet so many seem to think. On the contrary. Price dynamics, on the other hand, do seem to change peoples’ behaviour.
And here the evidence for mephadrone is not encouraging. Since Ketamine was made a class C drug in 2006, its price has actually fallen from £28 a gram to £20. This almost certainly suggests that drug dealers are cutting costs by mixing it with God knows what else. The same will almost certainly happen with mephadrone if it is outlawed: it will become more difficult to get hold of (but that won’t matter for the vast, vast majority of those who want to try it), the price will fall, and so will the purity, making it more dangerous.
Finally, distressing and upsetting as it is to hear of young people dying on what are supposed to be nights of celebration and fun, let’s not forget that alcohol is a far more dangerous drug, killing far more people. What makes mephedrone different is that many of the kids taking it do not know the dangers. The lesson surely ought to be to warn people of these risks and make it more difficult to get hold of, rather than shoving it blindly into the criminal world, where it will become far more dangerous?
Edmund Conway @'The Telegraph'
Another sort of related point here with all of the tabloid crap about the deaths caused by Mephedrone over the last couple of weeks in the UK, can I just point out that the toxicology reports are not finished yet.
We do not actually know what killed those people yet...
A Flock Grows Right at Home for a Priest in Ukraine
The many feet scampering around the Volovetskiy home are testament to that.
The family’s six children range from Pavlina, 21, to Taras, 9. In the middle is Roman, 16, who wants to be a Catholic priest when he grows up. Just like his father.
Dad is the Rev. Yuriy Volovetskiy, who leads a small parish here and whose wife, Vera, teaches religious school. The Volovetskiys serve in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which believes that celibate priests are not necessarily better priests.
Ukrainian Greek Catholics represent a branch of Catholicism that is distinct from the far more prevalent Roman Catholic one. The Ukrainian church is loyal to the pope in Rome, and its leader is a cardinal and major archbishop.
But it conducts services that resemble those in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In religious terms, it follows the Eastern Rite, not the Latin one that is customary in Roman Catholicism.
Historically, the Vatican appears to have tolerated the traditions and attitude toward celibacy of the so-called Eastern Rite Catholics in order to retain a foothold in regions where Orthodox Christianity has dominated. But this exception suggests that the Vatican view on celibacy is not as rigid or monolithic as it might otherwise appear.
And so home life with the Volovetskiys offers this portrait: a father who is a Father, wearing a Catholic clerical collar, doting on his children like any other parent, even organizing an impromptu family musical recital. (“I will sing for you!” said Irena, 13, while she plucked the strings of the bandura, the Ukrainian national instrument).
Ukrainian priests, while reluctant to criticize Pope Benedict XVI over his unyielding stance on the celibacy requirement, said permitting them to raise families enriched their ability to tend to parishioners’ needs.
“It is important when a priest has an understanding of not only himself,” said Father Volovetskiy, 45, who entered a seminary when he was in his 20s. “Having a family gives a priest a deeper understanding of how to relate to other people and help other people. It is more natural, it makes more sense, for a priest to have a wife and children.”
The Rev. Roman Kravchyk, 50, a senior Ukrainian Greek Catholic official, said he was often asked by seminary students whether they should try to have a family or remain celibate (sexual relations outside marriage are not an option). He said he did not strongly encourage either, though he pointed out the advantages of marriage.
“It seems to me that when a priest is not married, it is difficult for him to explain things to parishioners,” Father Kravchyk said. “Because he has not lived through them.”
He added that celibacy would seem to go against human nature.
“Having a sexual life, no one can escape that,” he said. “We are all living people. We are not stones. Though there have to be limits.”
Father Kravchyk and Father Volovetskiy, who were interviewed here in western Ukraine before the scandal broke out in Germany this month, declined to address the issue of whether sexual abuse by priests was connected to celibacy.
The Vatican has rejected such a link. Senior church officials have said that if celibacy was the cause of these scandals, then there would not be problems of child sex abuse outside the priesthood. Still, whether or not a link exists, publicity about the German cases has touched off a renewed debate over the issue.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has roughly five million adherents in Ukraine, is one of a small number of Eastern Rite Catholic churches. Others also recognize the pope’s leadership and permit married priests. These churches account for only about 1 or 2 percent of all Catholics.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic leader, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, is celibate, as is typical among the leadership of Eastern Rite Catholic churches. The cardinal has not spoken out in recent days on the issue of celibacy, though he has said that he does not think that ending the requirement would help the Vatican confront the declining number of men who want to become priests.
But Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vienna, suggested this month that in response to the German abuse scandal, the Vatican should question its policies, including celibacy. His spokesman later clarified that Cardinal Schönborn was not calling for abolishing the requirement.
Here in Rudno, a suburb of Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, Father Volovetskiy has a small church, St. Volodymyr the Great, that hints at a melding of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Inside, there are depictions of Jesus Christ similar to those seen on Russian icons, as well as photos of Pope John Paul II.
At his home the other day, it was clear how Father Volovetskiy’s life diverged from that of a Roman Catholic priest. Mrs. Volovetskiy, 44, was teaching religious school on the first floor to 20 or so young children, including their youngest, Taras.
Upstairs, Pavlina, their eldest, who is studying to be an archivist and a religious school teacher, was making lunch. The others, including Yuriy, 18, and Khrystyna, 10, showed off the house. On one wall was an old wedding photo — Father Volovetskiy carrying his bride, Mrs. Volovetskiy.
The children said they were proud that their father was a priest, though they acknowledged that it was a challenge always having to set an example.
“People may not know you well, but they know who your father is, and they are watching you in the street and in the school,” said Roman, the 16-year-old. “It’s a little like being a target.”
Father Volovetskiy said having children changed how he approached his calling.
“It helps me to view the world through the eyes of others,” he said. “And it helps people trust me more. They see that there is a priest who has a family, and they see how we live. We are part of society.
Clifford J Levy @'New York Times'
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