Remember...

...that this time of the year can be a very difficult time for lots of people for a number of reasons...

Sometimes random acts of senseless kindness can make YOU feel a whole lot better too!

If things get too tough, for whatever reason you can always ring Direct Line if you are in Melbourne.

1800 888 236 (24 hours)

OR
Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800
if you are a young person.
Believe me there are people who will listen to you out there.

♪♫ The Priests feat. Shane MacGowan - Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth

Facebook is the suburbs not the global village

In a house lashed by a winter rainstorm, perched above Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, we found one of the most passionate voices about our digital culture. John Perry Barlow is best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, the essential counterculture band whose passionate fans, the Deadheads, were eager early adopters of online communities like the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link).

Throughout our interview, the man who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation kept harking back to his life in a small town in Wyoming, where he spent years as a cattle rancher.
Ever since, he told us, he'd been trying to find the same sense of small-town community in cyberspace. The Well, whose members met in "meatspace" as well as online, had been a great experience. He told how, at Well parties, the members of the community emerged blinking into the real world, and discovered the faces behind the words.
John Perry Barlow seemed disappointed by today's social networks, and in particular the one that has really taken the online experience to the masses. "Facebook is like television, the opposite of what I was looking for," he grumbled. "It's the suburbs, not the global village."
He was a little more enthusiastic about Twitter, which he is using to promote the cause of online freedom. During the Wikileaks saga, one tweet by @jpbarlow echoed across the battlefield:

"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

He remains, however, sceptical about the progress that has been made in building sustainable online communities. Although he does see one personal upside - "a guy gave me his parking space the other day," he laughs. "He said he liked my Tweets."

John Perry Barlow @'BBC'

Drug Surprise: Meth Makes You Feel Almost As Cuddly as Ecstasy

The shifting boundary of childhood amnesia

'It's the twenty-first of December...'

How To Make Gravy (A-Z)

South Korea Conducts Live-Fire Drills Near the North

 

Minsk

Protesters try to storm government HQ in Belarus

Photo reportedly shows provocateur calling for police backup

HERE

♪♫ Swans - A Screw (Holy Money) (live)

(Thanx Michael!)

Buprenorphine During Pregnancy Better than Methadone for Reducing Newborn's Opiate Withdrawal Symptoms

The Anonymous WikiLeaks protests are a mass demo against control

On-U Sound news

Adrian Sherwood announces 12 re-issues and 4 new albums (African Head Charge, Little Axe, Lee Perry and a compilation album with all female vocalists) in 2011, the year that On-U Sound has been in business for 30 years.

(Thanx mARCO!)

Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press Apply to WikiLeaks?

 Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the quarter of a million secret government cables from the State Department had been leaked, not to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, but to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times.
First, let’s state the obvious: The Times would never have returned the confidential files to the Obama administration. Most likely, the newspaper would have attempted to engage with State to try to scrub life- and source- threatening details from the cables — as Assange and his lawyers did.
And if the administration had refused to participate in that effort -- as it did with WikiLeaks? The Times would have done what any serious news organization has the imperative to do: It would have published, at a pacing of its own choosing, any cable it deemed to be in the public interest. In this digital age, it’s likely the Times would have even created a massive searchable database of the cables.
The optics of the information dump would likely have been very different -- overlaid with the Times’ newspaper-of-record gravitas. But the effect would have been identical: Information that the U.S. government finds embarrassing, damning, and even damaging would have seen the light of day.
Now let’s extend the thought experiment:
How would you react if top American conservatives were today baying for Bill Keller’s blood? If Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had called on Keller to be prosecuted as a “high-tech terrorist”? If Sarah Palin were demanding that Keller be hunted down like a member of Al Qaeda? If Newt Gingrich were calling for the Times editor to be assassinated as an “enemy combatant.”
What if Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had successfully pressured the Times’ web hosting company to boot the newspaper off its servers? What if Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal suddenly stopped processing subscriptions for the paper?
Imagine that students at Columbia University’s graduate school of international affairs had been warned not to Tweet about the New York Times if they had any hopes of ever working at the State Department.
Imagine U.S. soldiers abroad being told that they’d be breaking the law if they read even other news outlets’ coverage of the Times’ exclusives.
Imagine that the Library of Congress had simply blocked all access to the New York Times site.
You can’t imagine this actually happening to the New York Times. Yet this has been has been exactly the federal and corporate response to Assange and WikiLeaks.
The behavior is outrageous on its face and totalitarian in its impulse. Indeed, we should all be alarmed at the Orwellian coloring of the Obama administration’s official response to the publishing of the cables:
“President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal.”
Secrecy is openness. What the fuck?!
Listen: You don’t have to approve of Assange or his political views; you can even believe he’s a sex criminal. It doesn’t matter. What’s at stake here isn’t the right of one flouncy Australian expat to embarrass a superpower. It’s freedom of the press. And it’s a dark day for journalists everywhere when the imperatives of government secrecy begin to triumph over our First Amendment.

Tim Dickinson @'Rolling Stone'

The NHS funding grenade has exploded in David Cameron's face