Tuesday, 11 January 2011

What I believe

"What I believe is that we will kill each other, that we will hurt each other. We will destroy our neighbours and we will exile them. We will sell our children as whores. We will murder and rape and punish one another. We will keep warring and we will keep hating and we will believe we are just and righteous and faithful. We will keep killing and selling one another and we will believe that we are just and fair and good. We will pursue pleasures and destroy one another in these pursuits. We will abandon our children. We will do all this in the name of God and in the name of our nature. We will create poverty and illness and we will create obscene wealth and the depravities that arise from it. We will think ourselves just and righteous, faithful and sane. We will hate and kill and piss and shit on one another. We will continue to do so. We will create Armageddon. In the name of God or in the name of justice or, simply, because we can. This is what I believe."

(Christos Tsiolkas from 'Dead Europe')

Colorized Photo of the burning Monk Thích Quảng Đức

@'nerdcore'

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On (DJ Friction Extended Disco Mix 2011)

Black Keys @ Saturday Night Live

“Howlin’ For You”

“Tighten Up”

Keith Allen Vs Westboro Baptist Church

ThatKevinSmith KevinSmith

Via @DearShirley "CongresswomanGifford lived in adultery" 5 mins in, your glass house is showing:

Music Sharing Service SoundCloud Raises $10 Million From Index, Union Square

"Music start-ups have been a money incinerator for a long time, but that doesn’t stop investors from trying again. Here’s the latest example, which I first wrote about back in October: SoundCloud, a German-based file-sharing service, has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures.
While lots of music services are still trying to figure out how to make money by distributing copyrighted music you’ve heard of, SoundCloud is taking a different tack. As I wrote last fall:

It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.
Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.
The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud for less enlightened purposes, like sharing music you don’t own. But the company has recently implemented an audible “fingerprinting” service, like the ones Google’s YouTube uses, which allows copyright owners to take down files they don’t want on the Web. And that should give the company legal cover, unless the YouTube/Viacom case takes a very different turn.
In a blog post announcing the funding, SoundCloud says it will use the money to scale faster and “be more present in the US.” It also posts short clips, using its service, from its new investors–Index’s Mike Volpi and Union Square’s Fred Wilson."
(media memo)

Comment by techdirt:
" As we’ve discussed before, copyright law is effectively broken when it sets up fair use as a defense, rather than a proactive right. Fair use should be seen as the default until proven otherwise, if fair use is really (as is claimed) designed to be a pressure valve on copyright law to allow free speech.
Unfortunately, the industry has pushed back on this notion to a huge level. The very crux of the YouTube-Viacom legal fight is really over this issue. As many have noted, in the specifics of the lawsuit, Viacom basically notes that it has no problem with YouTube starting with the exact date that it implemented its ContentID program. In Viacom’s (and much of the entertainment industry’s) interpretation, the DMCA requires such filters. The likely reason that smaller companies like SoundCloud are now implementing filters as well is that they know there’s a half decent chance that the eventual outcome of lawsuits like the Viacom/YouTube fight will mean that a company is required by law to have such things in place."

via neumusik

BYEBYE SOUNDCLOUD?

King Henry's Tweet

Hmmm! (2004)

HERE

Iran says it has arrested spy ring linked to Israel

Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix)

Monday, 10 January 2011

Did PC Mark “Flash” Kennedy ensure my arrest as one of the Ratcliffe 114?

Policeman Undercover by Daria Hlazatova.
One day a few years ago I agreed to go on an intrepid action to highlight the causes of climate change. I didn’t know where or what it would be, but as a climate activist I trust the many people that I know who are willing to invest a huge amount of time, effort and (often their own) money in taking action for climate justice. So it was that I came to be in the Iona School in Nottingham on Easter Monday, 13th April 2009. In a hall packed full of committed climate activists I discovered the sheer scale of the unbelievably audacious covert operation and as I looked around I tried to imagine how we could possibly pull it off: we all suspect that undercover cops must operate within our networks. We were fed, given instructions concerning our target and duly sent to bed in one of various rooms in the school which had been hired out for the weekend. Having made sure that my day pack was ready (warm clothes, a book, some high energy food) I rolled out my sleeping mat, got into my pyjamas, stuffed ear plugs into my ears and settled down for a short night’s sleep before we headed down to Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal fired power station in the early hours of the morning.
Ratcliffe_Disaster_Victoria_Archer

Ratcliffe Disaster by Victoria Archer.
Ratcliffe has been the focus of quite a few climate change demonstrations, not least the Great Climate Swoop, a publicly advertised assault that took place on this huge coal powered station later in 2009. Ratcliffe-on-Soar was chosen because it is one of the biggest coal fired power stations in the UK and it’s owned by E.ON, who were the energy company behind plans to build a new coal fired power station at Kingsnorth (now shelved) and who were the focus of Climate Camp actions throughout 2008 and 2009. In the event of a successful shut down electricity for the surrounding area could easily be obtained from other sources.

Ratcliffe by Farzeen Jabbar.
As I went to bed there was an the air of the calm before the storm, especially after we received conflicting reports about a growing police presence near the power station. It just seemed so incredibly unlikely that out of the several hundred people involved in the planning of the action (including drivers, hosts, etc) no one could have let slip our plans. Nonetheless I was tired and soon fell asleep...