Monday, 2 August 2010

Breast milk assault deemed "biohazard" by law enforcement officer

On March 4, 31-year-old Toni Tramel was arrested for public drunkenness and taken to the Daviess County Detention Center in Owensboro. Officer Lula Brown reports that she instructed Tramel to change into a jail uniform, but that Tramel was "too intoxicated to complete the task on her own."
Brown instructed Tramel that she "needed to take her shirt and bra off," at which point, according to the police officer, Tramel "took off her bra, grabbed her breast and squirted breast milk, hitting me in the face and neck region."
The officer then forced Tramel against the wall and requested a smock from other jail personnel.
"Inmate Toni Tramel attempted to squirt breast milk again but was unsuccessful," Brown reported.
Brown's report and a police department press release both note that after the incident, Brown was able to "clean the bio-hazard off her."
In addition to public drunkenness, a misdemeanor, Tramel was then charged with third-degree assault, a felony, and is being held on $10,000 bond.
The police use of the term "biohazard" to describe breast milk has sparked a furor, with bloggers and commentators questioning whether the severity of the assault charges truly corresponds to the alleged offense. Other commentators have questioned the police account that Tramel squirted Brown deliberately, noting that it is not uncommon for milk to squirt from lactating women's breasts by accident, sometimes reaching across long distances.
"While lactating I have had breast milk 'squirt' out of my breast in a stream that hit clothes hanging in my closet while trying to find something to wear," one anonymous Web poster said. "It could have been an accident."
David Gutierrez @'Natural News'

Sunday, 1 August 2010

Kiss This War Goodbye

Selling Music Through Packaging


A short piece on how the limited edition art pieces for the new Matthew Dear album Black City were made by artisan sculptors. Designed by Boym Partners, the MDBC Totem were cast in bonded aluminum with a hand-finished gun metal patina.
Each totem is inscribed with a short code that allows the owner to access/download the album from matthewdear.com. You get the album and the you get the art without the media getting in the way.
The song is "Monkey" taken from the upcoming album Black City.
(P.S. Sesame Street deserves some credit for the video inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=8bzq81Und4M )

Targeted Killing Is New U.S. Focus in Afghanistan

Spiritualized @ Radio City Music Hall New York

WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”
The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site.
WikiLeaks, on Sunday, posted several files containing the 77,000 Afghan war documents in a single “dump” file and in several other files containing versions of the documents in various searchable formats.
Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the new file added days later may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.
It’s not known what the file contains but it could include the balance of data that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning claimed to have leaked to Assange before he was arrested in May.

In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning disclosed that he had provided Assange with a different war log cache than the one that WikiLeaks already published. This one was said to contain 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. WikiLeaks has never commented on whether it received that cache.
Additionally, Manning said he sent Assange video showing a deadly 2009 U.S. firefight near the Garani village in Afghanistan that local authorities say killed 100 civilians, most of them children, as well as 260,000 U.S. State Department cables.
Manning never mentioned leaking the Afghan War log to WikiLeaks in his chats with Lamo, but Defense Department officials told The Wall Street Journal that investigators had found evidence on Manning’s Army computer that tied him to that leak.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen strongly condemned WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan War log at a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.
Gates said the leak was “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners” and said that “tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries” as a result.
Mullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan informant who aided the United States.
Several media outlets have found the names of Afghan informants in the documents WikiLeaks published, as well as information identifying their location in some instances. A Taliban spokesman told Britain’s Channel 4 news that the group was sifting through the WikiLeaks documents to get the names of suspected informants and would punish anyone found to have collaborated with the United States and its allies.
Wired.com has sent a message to WikiLeaks inquiring about the file.
Kim Zetter @'Wired'

Let Them Eat Cake

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”
Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
Paul Craig Roberts @'Counterpunch'

BibliOdyssey presents...

Booker-longlisted novel The Slap is 'most divisive in years'

christos tsiolkas novelist
Christos Tsiolkas's Man Booker-longlisted novel The Slap opens with a bang when a man at a suburban barbecue hits another parent's child.
But while some readers including, evidently, the Booker judges speak excitedly of the Australian author's bravery in tackling uncomfortable truths, others criticise the word-of-mouth hit as "offensive" and say it is full of "unbelievable misogyny". The Slap is turning out to be the most divisive Booker novel in years.
Although reviews from newspaper critics have been positive – "riveting from beginning to end," said the Guardian ; "Tom Wolfe meets Philip Roth," said the Los Angeles Times – readers posting reviews online have far more mixed opinions.
"Dull, boring and offensive," wrote one Amazon reviewer. Another criticised its "constant obsession with bodily functions, sex, and the f-word"; another wrote that "it had no heart, such terrible cynicism … I feel soiled after reading it".
The writer India Knight said she hated the book. "The whole novel has this ludicrous, comedy-macho sensibility – you get the feeling that if he'd been forced to read 'literary' fiction, Raoul Moat would have gulped it down in one sitting," said Knight.
"It's also unbelievably misogynistic, and I say that as someone who loves Flashman and Philip Roth ... There is no joy, no love, no hope, no beauty, just these hideous people beating each other up, either physically or emotionally."
The Slap is a bestseller in Australia, and UK sales are already rumoured to be colossal.
A publishing insider said the novel had sold 23,000 copies even before the Booker announcement, an almost unheard-of figure for new literary fiction from a relatively unknown author. The novel also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, said that there "hasn't been a divisive book on taste grounds" in the Booker lineup for years.
The last time readers were really split over titles selected by judges was in 2003, when Martin Amis's Yellow Dog and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were both longlisted for the award and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little went on to win it.
The former poet laureate Andrew Motion, who is chairing this year's Booker panel, defended The Slap, saying "quite unusually for a Booker book, the copy I read already had international bestseller written across it, which means that not everyone thinks it's a hateful misogynistic book".
He also took issue with Knight's comment that the novel was loveless, suggesting instead that "it's curdled love ... It's more complicated than being hate-filled. It's full of love that's gone wrong".
However, he admitted that he could "see why people might think it is misogynistic, in that the whole story is triggered by an act of male violence".
Alison Flood @'The Guardian'

Don't forget...

THE POP GROUP - SUMMER 2010

MARK STEWART – VOCALS
GARETH SAGER – GUITAR / PIANO / SAXOPHONE
BRUCE SMITH – DRUMS
DAN CASTIS – BASS

9TH SEPTEMBER
ITALY. BOLOGNA, LOCOMOTIV CLUB
10TH SEPTEMBER
ITALY, TURIN. SPAZIO 211 CLUB
11TH SEPTEMBER
UK, LONDON, THE GARAGE
12TH SEPTEMBER
UK, LONDON, THE GARAGE


Tanya Davis - How To Be Alone


Simply beautiful... 
Tanya Davis
 "Gorgeous Morning"
(Right click/save as)

Ten tips for enjoyable orgasms