You say you will be "rooting for the tories"...how DO you feel about this?
Kraftwerk - Ebbets Field, Denver, CO, 5-22-1975
2 hours ago
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
The music industry is sucking the blood of its main assets: the musicians. Gang Of Four does something about this.
They'll let you, the potential listener, do it instead. Or whatever sick perverted thing you'd feel like doing with your favorite band's blood!
Gang Of Four are set to give away bottles of their own blood in exchange for money contributions to aid the recording of their new album 'Content'.
The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.
The post-punk veterans are funding the album through Pledgemusic.com - where users can contribute cash to the process and be rewarded with album-related products, including the vials of blood, in return.
Nas Jumps on Gil Scott-Heron Remix
In February, spoken word poet and rap ancestor Gil Scott-Heron released the grizzled return-to-form lament "New York Is Killing Me", off of his Best New Music album I'm New Here.
Now Nas, one of Scott-Heron's greatest descendants, has jumped on the track to add some of his own dizzy, apocalyptic imagery. All in all, Nas uses the track to make a pretty good case for not living in New York.
U.N. Secretary General calls Aral Sea 'shocking disaster'
Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.
"On the pier, I wasn't seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships," Ban told reporters after arriving in Nukus, the nearest sizable city and capital of the autonomous Karakalpak region.
"It is clearly one of the worst disasters, environmental disasters of the world. I was so shocked," he said.
The Aral Sea catastrophe is one of Ban's top concerns on his six-day trip through the region and he is calling on the countries' leaders to set aside rivalries to cooperate on repairing some of the damage.
"I urge all the leaders ... to sit down together and try to find the solutions," he said, promising United Nations support.
However, cooperation is hampered by disagreements over who has rights to scarce water and how it should be used.
@'Yahoo News'
Iraq: Reactions to the “Collateral Murder” Video
James Fallows of The Atlantic, who has covered Iraq extensively over the last decade, reacts:
I can’t pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.Bill Roggio of The Weekly Standard has a different view:
There is nothing in that video that is inconsistent with the military’s report. What you see is the air weapons team engaging armed men.Glenn Greenwald of Salon challenges this by putting the video in the context of the Pentagon’s fight against Wikileaks and other cover-ups of civilian deaths:
Second, note how empty the streets are in the video. The only people visible on the streets are the armed men and the accompanying Reuters cameramen. This is a very good indicator that there was a battle going on in the vicinity. Civilians smartly clear the streets during a gunfight.
Third, several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG. Wikileaks purposely chooses not to identify them, but instead focuses on the Reuters cameraman. Why?
WikiLeaks released a video of the U.S. military, from an Apache helicopter, slaughtering civilians in Iraq in 2007 — including a Reuters photojournalist and his driver — and then killing and wounding several Iraqis who, minutes later, showed up at the scene to carry away the dead and wounded (including two of their children). The video (posted below) is truly gruesome and difficult even for the most hardened person to watch, but it should be viewed by everyone with responsibility for what the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e., every American citizen).
Reuters has been attempting for two years to obtain this video through a FOIA request, but has been met with stonewalling by the U.S. military. As Dan Froomkin documents, the videotape demonstrates that military officials made outright false statements about what happened here and were clearly engaged in a cover-up: exactly as is true for the Afghanistan incident I wrote about earlier today, which should be read in conjunction with this post.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
REpost: Meanwhile not so long ago...
The Tories were today forced to deny that a video clip purporting to show a long-haired party-goer at a 1988 outdoor rave was the party leader David Cameron.The purple-tinted video, set to a hypnotic acid house rave track, shows a man bearing a striking similarity to Cameron with shoulder-length hair and wearing dungarees. The video, called 'Acid House Sunrise 1988 Part 4', has surfaced on YouTube and has been picked up by political blogger Guido Fawkes.Held during the so-called second Summer of Love in 1988, the long-haired man appears to be joining in the fun at the outdoor event. Tory blogger Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, was Head of PR for the 1988-89 rave party planners, Sunrise. It was Fawkes who received the emails sent by Brown's special advisor Damian McBride about slurs on top Tories which led to McBride's sacking. Posting on his blog, Guido asks his readers to decide for themselves whether the man in the clip really is the Tory leader and Old Etonian. Alongside stills from the video, he says: 'This has been building up for a few weeks and now Guido is getting calls from Dead Tree Press diarists, it is probably time to bring it out into the open. 'Is this a picture of a long-haired 22 year-old David Cameron? 'The pictures are taken from a video of a Sunrise Party held in the summer of 1988. You decide… ' However a Tory press spokesperson 'categorically' denied that the man in the clip was Cameron. Raves, fuelled by dance music, boomed during the late 1980s and were infamous for the widespread use Ecstasy. The all-night parties, frequently illegal, were held at secret locations in warehouses or in fields. In 2007, it was revealed that Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton after being named by a fellow pupil as a cannabis user. Cameron repeatedly refused to answer questions during his successful Tory leadership campaign on whether or not he had taken drugs. And he has stuck by his insistence that all politicians are entitled to a 'private past' and should not be required to reveal everything of their lives before they enter politics.
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