Thursday, 22 April 2010
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
yakawow Have you considered a PhD in Yaka-Wow studies? You appear to be a nuanced appreciator of #yakawow RT @exilestreet: Yaka-Wow just IS!
Security Brief: Radical Islamic Web site takes on 'South Park'
"South Park" showed the Prophet Mohammed
disguised in a bear suit.The radical Islamic Web site Revolutionmuslim.com is going after the creators of the TV cartoon series "South Park" after an episode last week included an image of the Prophet Mohammed in disguise.
Revolutionmuslim.com, based in New York, was the subject of a CNN investigation last year for its radical rhetoric supporting “jihad” against the West and praising al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Its organizers insist they act within the law and seek to protect Islam.
On Sunday, Revolutionmuslim.com posted an entry that included a warning to South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that they risk violent retribution – after the 200th episode last week included a satirical discussion about whether an image of the prophet could be shown. In the end, he is portrayed disguised in a bear suit.
The posting on Revolutionmuslim.com says: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”
Theo van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who was murdered by an Islamic extremist in 2004 after making a short documentary on violence against women in some Islamic societies. The posting on Revolutionmuslim.com features a graphic photograph of Van Gogh with his throat cut and a dagger in his chest.
The entry on Revolutionmuslim.com goes on to advise readers:
“You can contact them [the makers of South Park], or pay Comedy Central or their own company a visit at these addresses …” before listing Comedy Central’s New York address, and the Los Angeles, California, address of Parker and Sloane’s production company.
Contacted by CNN, the author of the post, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, said that providing the addresses was not intended as a threat to the creators of South Park but to give people the opportunity to protest.
Over still photographs of Parker, Stone, van Gogh and others, the Web site runs audio of a sermon by the radical U.S.-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who is now in hiding in Yemen. The sermon, recorded some time ago, talks about assassinating those who have “defamed” the Prophet Mohammed – citing one religious authority as saying “Harming Allah and his messenger is a reason to encourage Muslims to kill whoever does that.” U.S. officials say al-Awlaki is on a list of al Qaeda leaders targeted for capture or assassination.
The clip ends with a warning on a graphic directed at Parker and Stone, saying “The Dust Will Never Settle Down.”
Al Amrikee said the purpose of including the al-Awlaki sermon in his posting was to remind Muslims that insulting the prophet is a severe offense for which the punishment in Islam is death. He said RevolutionMuslim may hold protests about the show.
Calls to Comedy Central were not returned.
The Case of the Cursed Bread
A funeral cortege for the village's victims passes in front of a local bakery.
A 60-year-old French medical mystery concerning hallucinogenic bread and mass hysteria has now been blamed on undercover operations by the CIA. According to American investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the agency spiked French baguettes with LSD in secret experiments just after World War II. Citing anonymous US Army and CIA sources, Albarelli claims that members of the US Army’s Special Operations Division contaminated “local food products” with diethylamine – the D in LSD – to gauge the effect of the newly synthesised drug on French civilians.
The CIA connection is the latest in a number of possible explanations for a series of tragic events that unfurled at Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small town on the banks of the River Rhône in southern France, in August 1951. After an outbreak of food poisoning, upset stomachs, vomiting and diarrhœa soon gave way to mass folly and collective hallucinations. Victims imagined themselves to have copper heads, stomachs full of writhing snakes or bodies engulfed by flames. One girl thought she was being attacked by tigers. A patient undergoing treatment thought he could fly and threw himself from the second floor of a hospital, breaking both legs. In a fit of madness, a young boy tried to strangle his mother.
Within days, almost 300 people had reported poisoning symptoms, more than 30 had been hospitalised and at least five had died. Many of the victims were found to have shopped at the same bakery and suspicion soon fell on Roch Briand’s baguettes. The tragedy became known as the affair of the pain maudit (‘cursed bread’).
One of the first to come up with a possible explanation for the tragedy was local physician Dr Gabbaï, who had treated some of the victims. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he suggested that the symptoms indicated an outbreak of ergotism, caused by the parasitic mould ergot affecting grain. The disease was thought to have died out in France during the 18th century, but could it have resurfaced again in the Rhône Valley in 1951? Not all were convinced by the ergot diagnosis. The judge responsible for the enquiry suggested a possible criminal connection and referred to contamination by a very toxic form of synthetic ergot.
The Case of the Cursed Bread drew the attention of foreign experts as well. Dr Albert Hofmann, who first synthesised LSD-25 from ergot in 1938, travelled to Pont-Saint-Esprit and confirmed the hypothesis of ergot poisoning. But once back in Basle, the Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked and which had introduced LSD as a drug for various psychiatric uses four years earlier, rejected the connection. Experiments with ergot-infected bread in the US also suggested that the effects seen in Pont-Saint-Esprit were unlikely to be due to ergotism.
The possible causes of the affair were taken up again by American historian Steven Kaplan more than 50 years later. Kaplan, a professor at Cornell University and expert on the history of bread, examined all the possible explanations for the cursed bread: ergotism, infected water or contamination by fungicides or other toxins. None, he concluded in his 1,000-page tome Le Pain Maudit, published in 2008, could adequately explain the events of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the summer of 1951.
Then, at the end of 2009, came Hank Alberelli’s CIA allegations published in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIAs Secret Cold War Experiments. “The most shocking thing to me was the CIA experiment in France,” he told the American Geek Entertainment TV after the publication of the book. “I didn’t want to believe that my government could do that.” But he is adamant he has proof that the CIA is behind the horrifying events at Pont-Saint-Esprit, and that these were part of a wider secret experimental programme. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, he claims, the CIA tested LSD and other drugs on foreign civilians in Germany and Russia, as well as in France, and on 5,000 US servicemen.
Alberelli asserts that there was a lot of excitement in the CIA at the time about the possible uses of LSD in warfare. It was hoped that the drug could eliminate violence; the idea was that enemies could be bombarded with LSD, which would engender mass hallucinations and acts of madness. The US army would then be free to march into enemy territory with little opposition.
The latest ‘revelations’ have been received with a mixture of disbelief, amusement and shoulder-shrugging by the French media and the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Albarelli’s evidence appears flimsy at the very least. And some, including Kaplan, have dismissed the idea on clinical grounds. It’s highly unlikely, they say, that an LSD-like substance would have affected the villagers in the way the pain maudit did. And why, after all, should the CIA have targeted this quiet corner of southern France?
The CIA connection is the latest in a number of possible explanations for a series of tragic events that unfurled at Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small town on the banks of the River Rhône in southern France, in August 1951. After an outbreak of food poisoning, upset stomachs, vomiting and diarrhœa soon gave way to mass folly and collective hallucinations. Victims imagined themselves to have copper heads, stomachs full of writhing snakes or bodies engulfed by flames. One girl thought she was being attacked by tigers. A patient undergoing treatment thought he could fly and threw himself from the second floor of a hospital, breaking both legs. In a fit of madness, a young boy tried to strangle his mother.
Within days, almost 300 people had reported poisoning symptoms, more than 30 had been hospitalised and at least five had died. Many of the victims were found to have shopped at the same bakery and suspicion soon fell on Roch Briand’s baguettes. The tragedy became known as the affair of the pain maudit (‘cursed bread’).
One of the first to come up with a possible explanation for the tragedy was local physician Dr Gabbaï, who had treated some of the victims. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he suggested that the symptoms indicated an outbreak of ergotism, caused by the parasitic mould ergot affecting grain. The disease was thought to have died out in France during the 18th century, but could it have resurfaced again in the Rhône Valley in 1951? Not all were convinced by the ergot diagnosis. The judge responsible for the enquiry suggested a possible criminal connection and referred to contamination by a very toxic form of synthetic ergot.
The Case of the Cursed Bread drew the attention of foreign experts as well. Dr Albert Hofmann, who first synthesised LSD-25 from ergot in 1938, travelled to Pont-Saint-Esprit and confirmed the hypothesis of ergot poisoning. But once back in Basle, the Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked and which had introduced LSD as a drug for various psychiatric uses four years earlier, rejected the connection. Experiments with ergot-infected bread in the US also suggested that the effects seen in Pont-Saint-Esprit were unlikely to be due to ergotism.
The possible causes of the affair were taken up again by American historian Steven Kaplan more than 50 years later. Kaplan, a professor at Cornell University and expert on the history of bread, examined all the possible explanations for the cursed bread: ergotism, infected water or contamination by fungicides or other toxins. None, he concluded in his 1,000-page tome Le Pain Maudit, published in 2008, could adequately explain the events of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the summer of 1951.
Then, at the end of 2009, came Hank Alberelli’s CIA allegations published in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIAs Secret Cold War Experiments. “The most shocking thing to me was the CIA experiment in France,” he told the American Geek Entertainment TV after the publication of the book. “I didn’t want to believe that my government could do that.” But he is adamant he has proof that the CIA is behind the horrifying events at Pont-Saint-Esprit, and that these were part of a wider secret experimental programme. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, he claims, the CIA tested LSD and other drugs on foreign civilians in Germany and Russia, as well as in France, and on 5,000 US servicemen.
Alberelli asserts that there was a lot of excitement in the CIA at the time about the possible uses of LSD in warfare. It was hoped that the drug could eliminate violence; the idea was that enemies could be bombarded with LSD, which would engender mass hallucinations and acts of madness. The US army would then be free to march into enemy territory with little opposition.
The latest ‘revelations’ have been received with a mixture of disbelief, amusement and shoulder-shrugging by the French media and the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Albarelli’s evidence appears flimsy at the very least. And some, including Kaplan, have dismissed the idea on clinical grounds. It’s highly unlikely, they say, that an LSD-like substance would have affected the villagers in the way the pain maudit did. And why, after all, should the CIA have targeted this quiet corner of southern France?
Chris Hellier @'Fortean Times'
Jahtari unreleased tracks (Smoking # 64)
Download exclusive unreleased tracks from the Jahtari stable
- Listen to 'Rub-A-Dub Market: Fever Demo (Japanese Version)' (Download)?
- Listen to 'Solo Banton: Kung Fu Master (unreleased)' (Download)? @'The Wire'
King Sunny Adé cancels US tour due to deaths
In late March two percussionists in Mr. Adé’s 17-piece touring band, Gabriel Ayanniyi and Omo Olope, died in a car accident in Nigeria on the way to a music video shoot. With just a few weeks before the tour was to start, attempts to get American visas for replacement members of the band proved unsuccessful.
Andy Frankel, the band’s Philadelphia-based manager, said that the band had applied for visas but that American officials in Lagos “just flat-out failed to respond.” For help Mr. Frankel turned to his Congressional representative, Chaka Fattah, Democrat of Pennsylvania, but there was no luck there, either. “We got a response a week later,” Mr. Frankel said, “saying that unless it is a matter of medical emergency or business emergency they will not respond to any issues out of the normal time frame. I don’t know how this doesn’t constitute a business emergency.”
Finding replacement players in the United States was next to impossible, Mr. Frankel said, for financial, logistical and, especially, musical reasons, given Mr. Ayanniyi’s key role: lead talking-drum player. In Mr. Adé’s juju music — a Nigerian pop style rooted in Yoruba traditions — the talking drum is, Mr. Frankel added, “equivalent to the lead guitar in a rock band.” “After King Sunny, it does everything,” he said.
Ben Sisario @'NY Times'
Cannot believe...
...that I went past the 5,000th post without realising it!
Sorry Audiozobe
(but as you say here's to the 10,000th!)
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