California's AG finds 'NO violation of criminal law' in severly edited ACORN 'pimp'videos. Also releases raw footage for the first time

Echoing the recent report of the Kings County, NY, District Attorney who completed a five-month probe finding "no criminality" seen in video tapes secretly taken of low-level ACORN and ACORN Housing workers last year in New York, California's Attorney General has now reached a similar conclusion regarding videos recorded in three different cities in the Golden State last Summer, according to a report released today which finds the workers "committed no violation of criminal law."

Read the full report and see the raw footage

 @'The Brad Blog'

Australia alert over oil leak on Great Barrier Reef

Eugene Terreblanche beaten to death in South Africa

South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche has been killed on his farm in the country's north-west.
Mr Terreblanche, 69, was beaten to death after a dispute over unpaid wages, local media reports said. Two people are said to have been arrested.
President Jacob Zuma has appealed for calm, saying the killing should not incite racial hatred.
Mr Terreblanche, who campaigned for a separate white homeland, came to prominence in the early 1980s.

TERREBLANCHE: KEY DATES 1941: Born on a farm in conservative Transvaal town of Ventersdorp 1973: Co-founds right-wing AWB to protect rights of Boers' descendants 1993: AWB vehicle smashes into World Trade Centre in Johannesburg during negotiations to end apartheid 1994: AWB invades tribal homeland of Bophuthatswana and is defeated, with three AWB members killed 1998: Accepts moral responsibility for 1994 bombing campaign that killed 21 people 2001: Jailed for assaulting security guard 2004: Released from prison Obituary: Eugene Terreblanche Life in pictures

He became the champion of a tiny minority determined to stop the process that was bringing apartheid to an end.
"Mr Terreblanche's body was found on the bed with facial and head injuries," AFP news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying.
The report said he had been killed after a payment dispute with two workers, aged 21 and 15, who have been arrested in connection with his murder.
"He was hacked to death while he was taking a nap," a family friend in the town of Ventersdorp was quoted as telling Reuters news agency.
Mr Zuma condemned the killing as a "terrible deed".
"The president appeals for calm... and asks South Africans not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fuelling racial hatred," his office said in a statement reported by South Africa's SAPA news agency.
"The murder of Terreblanche must be condemned, irrespective of how his killers think they may have been justified. They had no right to take his life."

Prison sentence

The murder comes amid growing anxiety about crime in South Africa and what opposition politicians say are irresponsible and racially inflammatory sentiments from a minority of the ruling ANC party, says the BBC's Karen Allen in Johannesburg.

ANALYSIS Martin Plaut, Africa editor For most South Africans, Eugene Terreblanche was a throwback to another era. But his death is a blow to the country's image of racial tolerance, fostered so carefully by Nelson Mandela. Some are likely to believe that the fact that his alleged attackers were arrested so rapidly smacks of a cover-up. Others, on the minority far-right fringe, will see his death as a vindication of their assertion that whites cannot live under black rule. It is a tragic fact that more than 3,000 white farmers have been murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994. And it is possible that some people may seek retribution. Mr Terreblanche's funeral could become a rallying point for such sentiment.

Farming organisations in the Ventersdorp area have called for calm as they are worried that rising tensions may escalate out of control.
Our correspondent says it is too soon to say whether Saturday's killing was politically motivated.
However, a spokesman for Mr Terreblanche's Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement - AWB) linked the killing to the recent singing of an apartheid-era song by the head of the ANC's youth league.
"That's what this is all about," Andre Visagie told Reuters news agency. "They used pangas and pipes to murder him as he slept."
A spokeswoman for the opposition Democratic Alliance party pointed to racial tension.
Juanita Terblanche, who is no relation, said: "This happened in a province where racial tension in the rural farming community is increasingly being fuelled by irresponsible racist utterances."
Mr Terreblanche was released from prison in 2004 after serving three years of a five-year term for attempted murder.
He had founded the white supremacist AWB in 1973, to oppose what he regarded as the liberal policies of the then-South African leader, John Vorster.

Terreblanche rides away after being released from prison in 2004

His party tried terrorist tactics and threatened civil war in the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections.
In the 1980s, the government of PW Botha considered a constitutional plan allowing South Africa's Asian and coloured (mixed-race) minorities to vote for racially segregated parliamentary chambers.
For the likes of Mr Terreblanche, this was the start of the slippery slope towards democracy, communism, black rule and the destruction of the Afrikaner nation, analysts say.
Claiming on occasion to be a cultural organisation - albeit one with sidearms and paramilitary uniforms - Mr Terreblanche and his men promised to fight for the survival of the white tribe of Africa.
An ill-fated military intervention into the Bophuthatswana homeland in 1994 ended with three AWB men being killed in front of TV cameras in a PR disaster that diminished further the seriousness with which Mr Terreblanche's movement was taken.
Mr Terreblance continued to campaign to preserve the apartheid system but lived in relative obscurity since it collapsed.
The AWB was revived two years ago and there had been recent efforts to form a united front among white far-right groups.

@'BBC'

Peter Hook to play Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures' live in its entirety on the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis's death

Peter Hook has announced plans to perform Joy Division's debut album live in its entirety to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of late singer Ian Curtis.
The ex-New Order bassist will be joined by a host of guests at the newly refurbished former Factory Records site FAC51 in Manchester on May 18, the same day Curtis hung himself in the kitchen of his home in Macclesfield.
Before that, Hook will showcase previously-unseen Joy Division and New Order footage as part of a new show set to tour the UK in April.
Billed 'An Evening Of Unknown Pleasures', the nights will see Hook give talks on his past bands and Factory Records along with the footage, plus live music. Fans will be able to quiz the bassist as part of the evening.
Peter Hook's 'An Evening Of Unknown Pleasures' will call at:

Birmingham Glee Club (April 11)
Bolton Albert Hall (12)
Worcester Huntingdon Hall (13)
Milton Keynes Stables (15)
Middlesbrough Town Hall (18)
Gateshead Sage (20)
Durham Gala (21)
Burnley Mechanics (22)
Cardiff Glee Club (25)
Oxford Academy (26)
Wakefield Theatre Royal (27)
Gloucester Guildhall (28)
Derby Assembly Rooms (29)
Norwich UEA (30)
Salford Lowry (May 1)
Hull Truck Theatre (2)

@'NME'

Women: Know Your Limits!

Evergreen Review # 119

HERE

Seize The Time! (For Kami!)

Bobby Seale

Sparklehorse - Wish You Were Here (featuring Thom Yorke)

Paul Krassner: Who's To Say What's Obscene?

Tehran 1953

Shirin Neshat's first feature film Women without Men award Silver Lion at 66th (2009) Venice Film Festival in Italy. Women without Men chronicles the lives of four women from different walks of life against the backdrop of Irans foreign-backed CIA coup in 1953.....Copyright © Coprod Uction Office

The Secrets of History: 

The CIA in Iran

Commerce Dept. Supports RIAA Bailout Radio Tax | Techdirt

This probably isn’t a huge surprise, but the Commerce Department has now come out in favor of the performance rights tax on radio stations, which will force radio stations to pay up to promote music. Basically, as it stands right now, when a radio station plays music, it pays the songwriters/composers, but not the performers. That’s because the performers are getting free promotion by getting their songs heard on the radio. As we’ve pointed out, this is really something of a “bailout” for the RIAA, which will get a new stream of cash for something that makes absolutely no sense in an open market. Historically, record labels have always been known to (often illegally) pay the radio stations to play music. That’s because they knew, quite explicitly, that there’s value in having their music played. 

But, then, when they started pushing for this new tax, suddenly they amusingly started to claim that radio is “a kind of piracy.” Seriously. However, they then immediately contradicted themselves by then accusing one radio station of illegally not playing their music. Basically, the recording industry is willing to make any argument, no matter how contradictory to get this free money, which they claim they’re entitled to. They say that they need to get paid for music played on the radio at the same time that they’re pushing money the other direction just to get on the air (since they know it’s really a promotion). They say that radio is “pirating” from them, but when a radio station stops playing RIAA music (which should make them happy if it’s really “piracy,”) they accuse them of abusing the airwaves, and demand an FCC investigation. This has been nothing but a blatant attempt by the recording industry to get free money through legislative fiat, and it’s ridiculous that the Commerce Department would support such an effort.

@'Mudwerks'

Herman Brood & His Wild Romance - Saturday Night

One of the many Sunday night gigs at The Lyceum...this was 1979!

The Church's Long History of Pedophilia

The Catholic Church’s present scandals may seem horrifyingly new, a development of the late 20th-century. In fact, a pedophilia epidemic was going on during the first decades of Christianity. If only the Catholic hierarchy would address pedophilia with the courage and passion of the Apostle Paul, whom we can probably credit with spreading through Greco-Roman society the idea that this behavior was always evil and should never be tolerated.

There doesn’t seem to be any uncertainty about this crime to be found within the Christian tradition or the mandates of scripture. The hierarchy must take full responsibility for all of the enabling it has done.

In my recent book, Paul Among the People, I explore in detail the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. This passage, in which the great evangelist excoriates practitioners of “these things” as unnatural, cruel, rebellious against God and humanity, and deserving death, is widely thought to be about homosexuality in general. But a reading in the context of Paul’s time reveals that his targets were pederasts, as pederasty and its variations were quite common and accepted. It is these acts, not homosexual interest or flirtation or even making out among adults, that Paul is clearly writing of, and his clear concern is the aggressors’ exploitation of the young and vulnerable. Not only was sexual penetration of juveniles painful and humiliating (as it always is), but in this society it placed a gristly stigma on the passive male partner. You wouldn’t do this to someone you cared about—only to a strange youngster with no one to protect him.

A seduced boy risked losing his civic rights, and his loss of reputation would be life-long. He would remain a “faggot,” though no one would dare profess a nonviolent sexual interest in him. Boys alone were worth courting. The active sexual partner got off scot-free to flaunt his aggressive “manliness.”

In poetry, scores of such men boasted, under their own names, of infiltrating schools, bribing boys, and throwing away their conquests once these grew body hair. Where citizen-class boys with protective parents were concerned, these tales are not believable, and are probably about as factual as the average letter to the Penthouse Forum. Slave boys, in contrast, must have found themselves on the wrong end of a turkey shoot. They had no rights and no escape; effective compassion for them was unheard of. One pedophile insouciantly published the following:

If you were still uninitiated in what I’m trying to persuade you to do, you’d be right to be afraid, perhaps expecting something terrible. But since your master’s bed has made you an expert, why do you begrudge someone else what you’ve got? Your lord calls you in when he needs you, then he goes to sleep and lets you go—he doesn’t even share a word with you. But here I can spoil you. You can play as an equal, chatter in confidence, and do other things because you’re asked, not because you’re ordered.

Against this background, Paul’s fury in Romans 1 seems commonsensical. He repeatedly uses the word “injustice” to describe these sex acts. (“Wickedness” is a common mistranslation.) He pours onto the offenders his fiercest insults ever, including the accusation that they “hate God.” The apostle is aflame with the revolutionary notion that everyone matters, that pederasts are not exempt from judgment because they have power and position and customary immunity and think they can impose (because they always have) the entire cost of their acts on the victims: “You have no excuse,” Paul writes, “whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” Paul was a true follower of Jesus, who had boldly addressed a characteristic abuse of his homeland when he faced the woman caught in adultery: the least powerful person was going to suffer alone for a forbidden act. He made it known that this couldn’t happen; the entire society must re-examine itself.

As modern forensic experience confirms, Paul showed particular insight in directing his most irate moral condemnation at pedophiles. Pedophilia is an addiction feeding not on inanimate things but on the most vulnerable human bodies and personalities. Unlike a drug user or alcoholic, this kind of addict doesn’t destroy himself but is sturdy and ready for more into old age. Pedophilia challenges any belief in salvation through human agency alone, because not even the most expert therapy seems to prevent recidivism. As Paul no doubt recognized, God alone understands pedophilia. We are far out of line in thinking that we can usefully tinker with or rationalize such an evil thing, or that we can in any other way deny hard and humble responsibilities to the weak that God has given us in allowing such an evil thing to exist.

The Catholic hierarchy has denied these responsibilities, and quite clownishly. It has not only sent confessed pedophiles on brief retreats, as if in the conviction that lazy good intentions are enough. It has also, in the realm of homosexuality, directed its most energetic policy enforcement against a class of people Paul had nothing to say about because he could not have imagined their existence: men in committed, exclusive sexual relationships who are trying to set up homes together with public recognition. What makes them a priority for censure?

I don’t want to suggest that homosexuality is a straightforward issue for any church to deal with; presumptions about how doctrine and practice should turn out are not religious; they are simply political, and not worth much. But is it not absurd for bishops, cardinals, and popes to strengthen the barricades against gay couples (whose wrongdoing is in much dispute) while leaving the victims of a plainly abominable crime to fend for themselves—if not bullying them, shaming them, and manipulating them?

There doesn’t seem to be any uncertainty about this crime to be found within the Christian tradition or the mandates of scripture. The hierarchy must take full responsibility for all of the enabling it has done. If not, perhaps it’s time for an object lesson. The Western rule of law rose primarily out of a Christian distaste for the rule of human self-interest and whim, as opposed to transcendent and enduring principle. Clergy who pressured molestation victims into signing secrecy agreements may need to go to jail for obstruction of justice, like anyone else.

Sarah Ruden @'Daily Beast'

Ballet Mécanique (1924)

Directed by Fernand Léger

Music by George Antheil