WTF???

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ebertchicago ; And yet again I ask: Are Beck and Palin receiving speakers' fees from the expenses of this nonprofit charity event? 19 minutes ago via SocialOomph Retweeted by you and 62 others  

Company presses your ashes into vinyl when you die

Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones.

A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favourite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles.

The company was founded by Jason Leach, who co-founded the techno group and record label Subhead in the 1990s and has since founded a number of other labels, including House of Fix, Daftwerk and Death to Vinyl.

Leach explained to Wired.co.uk that there were a number of factors that made him launch the service, including thinking that he was “getting a bit old” and “might not be invincible”. His mother also started working at a funeral directors, which brought the whole funeral process closer to home. A third prompt was when he saw a TV programme that showed someone in America putting their ashes into fireworks, which made him think about how he might want to be remembered. And, he says, “It’s a bit more interesting than being in a pot on a shelf.”

How does it work?
The process of setting human ashes into vinyl involves a very understanding pressing plant. Basically the ashes must be sprinkled onto the raw piece of vinyl (known as a “biscuit” or “puck”) before it is pressed by the plates. This means that when the plates exert their pressure on the vinyl in order to create the grooves, the ashes are pressed into the record.

The site has a very irreverent style and operates under the strapline "live on from beyond the groove". One of Leach’s family stories, he tells Wired.co.uk, suggests why he has a practical attitude to people’s ashes.

He explains how he went out on a boat with his family members to sprinkle the ashes of his grandfather into the sea. His uncle “released them on the wrong side of the boat and so the ashes went all over us." Apparently the same thing happened to his father, too!

And Vinyly also offers personalised RIV (Rest In Vinyl) artwork -- the simple version just carries your name and your life span, or you can have your portrait painted by artist James Hague, using your ashes mixed into the paint.

The basic package costs £2,000 and comprises of the standard artwork along with up to 30 ash-flecked discs with whatever sounds you choose, lasting a maximum of 24 minutes.

Extras include "Bespook Music", where artists from The House of Fix and www.daftwerk.com write a song especially for you and global distribution of your record in vinyl stores.

The main challenge is choosing the music. Leach says: “It’s difficult to think of what to put on your record because you want it to be the best album you can imagine.”

What would he have on his own record? “I would definitely have a recording of my own voice as well as some 'sound photos' of places that are important to me and then I would have some of my own music on there. It’s something I’m working on.”

Olivia Solon @'Wired' 

Me want...but just not yet thanx!

Burmese junta leaders 'step down' from military posts

Gen Than Shwe has ruled Burma since 1992

Leaders of Burma's junta are reported to have resigned from their military posts, days before the deadline to register candidates in the country's first general election in two decades.

Some reports said junta leader Gen Than Shwe was among those to have stepped down, but other reports denied this.

Observers believe he may want to become civilian president after the election on 7 November.

Critics say the election is a sham designed to entrench military power.

But the junta has said the election is a crucial step in transferring power in Burma from the military to civilians.

Burmese officials told journalists on Friday that there had been a major reshuffle in the military hierarchy.

News organisations run by Burmese exiles, including the Irrawaddy and Mizzima, reported that Than Shwe had relinquished his military role, but would remain as head of the government until the election.

The Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) quoted sources at the country's Foreign Ministry as saying Than Shwe and his deputy Gen Maung Aye were preparing to step down, but had not yet announced their retirement.

Burma's election

• 25% of seats in parliament reserved for the military
• More than 75% approval required for any constitutional change
• Those with criminal convictions cannot stand for election - ruling out many activists
• Members of religious orders cannot take part - ruling out monks, who led protests in 2007
• Election commission hand-picked by Burma's military government

The DVB said the two men would become president and vice-president of the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).

A junta official also told AFP news agency that Than Shwe and Maung Aye were not among the senior military figures who had stepped aside.

The junta's reshuffle comes after 27 senior officials retired from the military leadership in April. Those officials are widely expected to stand for election in November.

State media reported that the deadline to register candidates was 30 August.

Than Shwe, 77, has ruled Burma since 1992.

The last election, in 1990, was won by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), but the military junta never let the party take power.

The NLD, which had refused to take part in the forthcoming election, was recently disbanded.

Under a recently adopted constitution, Burma's president is due to be chosen through a vote taken in the newly elected parliament, in which a quarter of the seats will be reserved for the military.

The BBC's South East Asia correspondent Rachel Harvey says the latest moves appear to reinforce the view held by many democracy activists and Western governments - that even if the election shifts political rule from military to civilian, real power will lie in the same hands that it does now. 

@'BBC'

Coming soon...

Glenn Speck

(Click to enlarge)

Mona says:

Keep your eye on Fifi's blog for live(ish) coverage of Beck's nazi rally!

supervert "8-13 Hz fluctuations in rectal pressure are an objective marker of clitorally-induced orgasm in women." Now you know. http://bit.ly/8X0edk

For Dave:

Police chiefs misled Birmingham city council over Muslim CCTV, inquiry told

The Ultimate Escape: The Bizarre Libertarian Plan of Uploading Brains into Robots to Escape Society

Led by Futurist Roy Kurzweil, "Transhumanism," promotes the adoption of technologies that will eventually help “humans transcend biology."

Perhaps you've had a good laugh over seasteading, the scheme hatched by rich libertarians to escape the clutches of democracy by living on giant metal platforms in the middle of the ocean. But as it turns out, seasteading is something of a wet dry run for some libertarians’ ultimate escape plan of uploading their brains into robot bodies and blasting off into space.

This is also known as “transhumanism,” which is (very) loosely defined as a movement of people/future androids who are promoting the adoption of technologies that will eventually help “humans transcend biology,” in the words of Ray Kurzweil, who serves as transhumanism’s leading figure. Kurzweil first made a name for himself as a teenager when he invented a computerized music synthesizer and he has spent most of his life as a computer programmer, inventor and engineer.

Kurzweil outlines his grand vision for our transhumanist future in his bestselling tome, The Singularity Is Near, in which he draws a roadmap for reverse engineering the brain that will involving “scanning a human brain…and reinstating the brain’s state in a different – most likely more powerful – substrate.” In other words, a computer program will copy your entire brain and upload it into a Terminator body...

Continue reading
Brad Reed @'Alternet'

Grateful Dead March 29, 1995 The Omni Atlanta, GA 2nd set partial - from Phil Lesh's ear monitor

The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves

Helping people at risk of suicide

Christopher Hitchins: A Test of Tolerance

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the arguments against the construction of the Cordoba Initiative center in lower Manhattan were so stupid and demagogic as to be beneath notice. Things have only gone further south since then, with Newt Gingrich's comparison to a Nazi sign outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or (take your pick from the grab bag of hysteria) a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor. The first of those pseudo-analogies is wrong in every possible way, in that the Holocaust museum already contains one of the most coolly comprehensive guides to the theory and practice of the Nazi regime in existence, including special exhibits on race theory and party ideology and objective studies of the conditions that brought the party to power. As for the second, there has long been a significant Japanese-American population in Hawaii, and I can't see any reason why it should not place a cultural center anywhere on the islands that it chooses.

From the beginning, though, I pointed out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was no great bargain and that his Cordoba Initiative was full of euphemisms about Islamic jihad and Islamic theocracy. I mentioned his sinister belief that the United States was partially responsible for the assault on the World Trade Center and his refusal to take a position on the racist Hamas dictatorship in Gaza. The more one reads through his statements, the more alarming it gets. For example, here is Rauf's editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that:

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution—to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for "outreach" purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, "the will of the people" is a meaningless expression, because "the people" are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results. It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic.

I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy. The letterhead of the statement, incidentally, describes him as the Cordoba Initiative's "Founder and Visionary." Why does that not delight me, either?

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it's easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be "phobic." A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.

From my window, I can see the beautiful minaret of the Washington, D.C., mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. It is situated at the heart of the capital city's diplomatic quarter, and it is where President Bush went immediately after 9/11 to make his gesture toward the "religion of peace." A short while ago, the wife of a new ambassador told me that she had been taking her dog for a walk when a bearded man accosted her and brusquely warned her not to take the animal so close to the sacred precincts. Muslim cabdrivers in other American cities have already refused to take passengers with "unclean" canines.

Another feature of my local mosque that I don't entirely like is the display of flags outside, purportedly showing all those nations that are already Muslim. Some of these flags are of countries like Malaysia, where Islam barely has a majority, or of Turkey, which still has a secular constitution. At the United Nations, the voting bloc of the Organization of the Islamic Conference nations is already proposing a resolution that would circumscribe any criticism of religion in general and of Islam in particular. So, before he is used by our State Department on any more goodwill missions overseas, I would like to see Imam Rauf asked a few searching questions about his support for clerical dictatorship in, just for now, Iran. Let us by all means make the "Ground Zero" debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.

@'Slate'

Tom Waits on The Don Lane Show 1979

Fixing A Hole In The Head

Film Review

A Hole in the Head, Spectacle Films

I have to make a confession.  I have a soft posterior fontanelle.  When I press on that spot, my head indents noticeably — enough that you can actually see it.  Furthermore, I frequently feel a sort of need to do this.  And when I do it, it seems to help me feel less sleepyheaded and more focussed.  If I'm feeling a bit woozy, it helps me feel less so.  And, indeed, sometimes I feel as though I'd like to drill right into it — as though there is some sort of psychic G spot hungering to be stimulated and satisfied.  Naturally, I've been intrigued by trepanning — the practice of intentionally drilling small holes in the skull. 

Of course, trepanners don't necessarily aim for the fontanelle, although the spot is name-checked in A Hole in the Head, this wonderfully amusing award-winning 55 minute documentary on the topic. Indeed, since many of the contemporary enthusiasts for the practice do this DIY... while looking at themselves in the mirror (sort of like shaving!) — the front of the head seems to be favored. 

In fact, a couple of minutes into A Hole in the Head, we are confronted with a clip from a 1970 film — Heartbeat in the Brain — that was made showing Amanda Feilding's self-trepanation.  Feilding — the attractive English doyenne of contemporary trepanning and a leading figure in British '70s psychedelia — freshly trepanned, stares into a mirror, her face patched and speckled with blood, looking as happy and satisfied as Sooky Stackhouse after a long night with Bill Compton and Eric Northman. As she wipes blood from her teeth, there's the faint hint of a smile. 

Fans of grisly medical shows will definitely find satisfaction in this film.  The most disturbing scene, which is also toward the beginning of the film and runs for several minutes, shows an African woman's fully exposed brain matter being drilled by a witch doctor.

But shock is not the point here — or at least it's not the entire point.  The film is also informative. Toward the beginning, A Hole in the Head examines the history of trepanning — including the archeological evidence for the existence of the practice in various "primitive" cultures, as well as at various points in European culture where it was variously used as a "cure" for physiological problems and for "letting the demons out" for patients suffering from mental problems. 

The film primarily focuses on the contemporary trend for self-trepanation, which seems to be centered largely in Great Britain among psychedelic types.  There is even a quote from Paul McCartney from a 1986 interview in Musician in which he talks about how John Lennon seriously considered fixing (to get) a hole in his head and asked McCartney to join him.  The ever wily McCartney replied: "You go first" (or words to that effect.)  

The operant theory here is that the process increases "blood brain volume," leaving the trepanned person smarter, happier and a little bit high... permanently.  Testimonies from the people with the holes in their head are balanced out by interviews with skeptical neuroscientists, who pretty much all agree that the claims made by the advocates are absurd.  (One younger neuroscientist believes that it's vaguely possible that their could be some slight enhancement from increased blood flow, but that it needs to be tested, scientifically.)  The believers sound happy; the skeptics sound amused (and sane), and many who watch this documentary will likely be all of the above.

As for myself, despite my soft fontanelle, I will put my faith, for now, in the neuroscientists and not take a drill to my skull.  

R.U. Sirius @'h+'