How Does Stoning Work in Iran?

“Kenneth, what IS the frequency?”

Proposition 8 Struck Down

YES! Bigoted conservatives to begin whining about activist judges in 3...2...1...
@'LA Times'

Hakan Lidbo - Clockwise (2004)

Rhythm & Sound feat. Tikiman: "What a Mistry" (youANDme EDIT)

1 Anthony shake shakir - here there and nowhere (RH110)
2 Room_10 - maxell (horacio remix) (mltd027)
3 Chez damier and chris carrier and jeff k feat nouha matlouni - gathering funky take dub (ga01)
4 Geheimes Vocal ;)
5 Boo williams - mortal trance (RH-BW1)
6 Souki - monkey sun (Einmaleins053)
7 Kellerkind - Basement Funk (Flash0226)
8 spencer parker - never stop the action (12 C2 166)
9 Radioslave K-Maze (youANDme Secret Vocal Remix)
10 Reference - the best day in detroit (ple65320-1)
11 Thabo - The_Machines (ORN016)
12 Skudge - Convolution (Skudge001)
13 Redshape - mucky bones (Present0607)
14 Jamie Lidell - I Wanna Be Your Telephone (Tiga Party Like it's 19909 remix) (wap302)
15 Moodymann - ITS 2 LATE 4 U AND ME (youANDme_EDIT)
16 Mary St. Mary (Scared Rhythm Mix)(msm48)
17 Venedikt reyf - i'm losing you final (BOOTY)
18 youANDme - A-Range (unreleased)
19 moody vocal - (cut`z002)
20 Jeff Mills - IF (youANDme EDIT)

Liverpool As England

From the perspective of someone who’s barely been paying attention, one of the more intriguing stories of the offseason has been the weird swerving of the Liverpool crisis-drama, which is still producing twists well into its 24th act. Just when you think the action is about to go stale (with trembling hand, Martin Broughton places a phone call to the Royal Bank of Scotland), they go and follow up the not-one-hundred-percent-intuitive Roy Hodgson hiring by signing Joe Cole, thereby forcing you to realize that, waltzing Elizabeth, the dominant cultural influence in the Anfield locker room next season is going to be…English.
English! And just when it felt like 1983 was gone forever. I’m trying to remember the last time a top English football club was actually, you know, an English football club. Arsenal’s a philosophical cosmopolis, Chelsea’s a pirate hub. Manchester United is bigger than the concept of the nation-state. You can’t be an English club any more, not if you want to win anything; modern economics, or something, makes it impossible. From their tendency to break into (admittedly equivocal) chants like “We’re not English, we are scouse; / You can stick the royal family up your arse,” you could even question whether Liverpool fans really,
More burning of the English fleet in the deep, secret reaches of their hearts, want their club to be English.
And yet, here’s Liverpool, with their English manager, their iconic English captain, their stolid English vice-captain, their glammy new English midfielder, their whatever Glen Johnson is, and for God’s sake, Jonjo Shelvey. Tea is being served and a walrus would like to route redcoats into Guernsey. It’s even possible to make fine individual distinctions about relative degrees of Englishness and appreciate the way the new formation exploits those degrees to maximize its Englishness as a whole. Against Borussia Mönchengladbach, Joe Cole—England’s little Spaniard—played in a withdrawn position behind the striker, moving the hyper-English Steven Gerrard back to a more traditionally English, less insidiously Argentine role in the center of midfield. Yes, a straight 4-4-2 would have been more English still, but this is the world your Roberto Baggio posters have made. …although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, ‘Not English!’ when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away. —Dickens On the whole, Mr. Podsnap is content.
What’s interesting about this state of things is that, as Liverpool is obviously a club in a neurotic state of decline, and as England as a football nation is not exactly calmly ascending new heights, it’s possible to sketch out a tentative dual equation in which Liverpool’s fall can be measured by its resort to English talents, and England’s fall can be measured by the fact that its players are forced to play for Liverpool. That is, Liverpool can’t possibly be an elite club, because an elite club wouldn’t pair Joe Cole with Roy Hodgson and pretend that they were superstars. By the same token, Hodgson and Cole can’t be superstars, because if they were, they’d work for a better club than Liverpool. The two precepts, impossibly, prove each other, like division and multiplication, or the twinned halves of Gervinho’s haircut.
Now, as you know, I’ve been on vacation, so I could be completely misreading this. But at a highly abstract and emotional level at which I can’t possibly be called on to prove anything or display any concrete knowledge, doesn’t it seem like the major dramas at Liverpool at the moment are 1) whether Fernando Torres will manage to free himself (looks like he won’t), and 2) whether Kenny Huang or someone else will buy the club and reinvigorate it with prestigious foreign millions? I mean, yes, everyone complains about foreign millions, but we’re talking about steely possibilities and actual success or failure. What shows the England team in a better light at the moment, Gerrard/Cole/Johnson being tolerated by a debt-squatting British bank, or the same players being actively coveted by a predatory Chinese wealth fund? Can 1983 live in 2010 if it isn’t endorsed by a sheik?
Brian Philips - The Run Of Play

Beyond decibels: Planning the new sounds of the city

Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

With at least 25,000 people slaughtered in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle, three questions remain unanswered: Who is being killed, who is doing the killing and why are people being killed? This is apparently considered a small matter to US leaders in the discussions about failed states, narco-states and the false claim that violence is spilling across the border.

President Calderón has stated repeatedly that 90 percent of the dead are connected to drug organizations. The United States has silently endorsed this statement and is bankrolling it with $1.4 billion through Plan Mérida, the three-year assistance plan passed by the Bush administration in 2008. Yet the daily torrent of local press accounts from Ciudad Juárez makes it clear that most of the murder victims are ordinary Mexicans who magically morph into drug cartel members before their blood dries on the streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, pool halls and barrooms where they fall dead, riddled with bullets. Juárez is ground zero in this war: more than one-fourth of the 25,000 dead that the Mexican government admits to since December 2006 have occurred in this one border city of slightly over 1.5 million people, nearly 6,300 as of July 21, 2010. When three people attached to the US Consulate in Ciudad Juárez were killed in March this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the murders "the latest horrible reminder of how much work we have to do together."

Just what is this work?

No one seems to know, but on the ground it is death. Calderón's war, assisted by the United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been declining on the US side of the border for years).

We are told of a War on Drugs that has no observable effect on drug distribution, price or sales in the United States. We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible, when the Mexican government’s own human rights office has collected thousands of complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army.

Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices...

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Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy @'The Nation'