Thursday, 24 February 2011

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

jonsnowC4 Jon Snow

Beware: When Gaddafi calls rebels 'cockroaches', its the word Hutus used before they massacred Tutsis in Rwanda, and Nazzis used of Jews

Letters From Readers - Reverse

Download 'The Live Sessions' EP

HERE

(GB2011) NHS to lose 50,000 jobs, including doctors and nurses

Jay Landesman died this past week in London, aged 91. Here's James Campbell, writing in The Boston Review about Landesman's seminal (sic) magazine, Neurotica:
The closest there was to a beat magazine (thought it could only be seen that way in retrospect) in the late 1940s and early ’50s was a slim, eccentric journal whose contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism…..Ginsberg’s first contribution to a magazine with a nationwide circulation appeared in Neurotica 6 (Spring 1950), by which time the magazine had adopted a furtive beat identity. Ginsberg’s brief "Song: Fie My Fum" (an early working of “Pull My Daisy”) was not likely to advance by much the editor’s avowed cause of describing "a neurotic society from the inside"; nevertheless, it was the right kind of verse for the venue, with its playful sexual content: "Say my oops, Ope my shell, Roll my bones, Ring my bell ..." The contributor’s note informed readers that "Allen Ginsberg recently recovered from a serious illness." (sic)….The longest and most serious contribution to 6 was "Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient" by Carl Goy, the pseudonym of Ginsberg’s new friend in the Columbia PI, Carl Solomon...
The full article can be read here. Here's Landesman's obituary as it appeared on Monday in the St Louis Beacon. The St Louis Post-Dispatch obit may be read here.
Peter Hale @'The Allen Ginsberg Project'

Escape from Tripoli: Surviving Libya's "Tsunami"

Australian Social security payments for the aged, people with disabilities and carers 1901 to 2010

Navigating Libya's tribal maze

Dennis Montgomery: The Man Who Conned The Pentagon

The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of December 21, 2003, police stood guard in heavy assault gear on the streets of Manhattan. Fighter jets patrolled the skies. When a gift box was left on Fifth Avenue, it was labeled a suspicious package and 5,000 people in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were herded into the cold.
It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. “There’s continued discussion,” he told reporters, “these are from credible sources—about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned “about some unspecified but spectacular attack.”
The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.” The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. “Credible sources,” Ridge said. “Intelligence chatter,” said CNN.
But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers...

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Aram Roston @'Playboy'

John Perry Barlow: Censorship 2000

Petraeus's comments on coalition attack reportedly offend Karzai government

How Obama Lost Karzai

A few weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an exiled Afghan leader I had known for nearly 20 years paid a visit to my home in Lahore. His name was Hamid Karzai, and his problem, he told me, was that he was rapidly losing faith in the West's concern for his country.
Karzai was the scion of a prominent Pashtun family in southern Afghanistan, one with a deep-rooted enmity for the Taliban regime. The Taliban, which had ruled the country since 1996, had gunned down Karzai's father in front of a mosque in the Pakistani city of Quetta two years earlier. Now the younger Karzai was clandestinely sending money and weapons across the Afghan border for an eventual uprising against the ruling regime. But he had just been served notice by Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) that his visa had been revoked -- the Taliban, with its close links to the Pakistani intelligence agency, had urged the ISI to get rid of him. Karzai was making the rounds of Western embassies in Islamabad to ask whether anyone would support him if he went inside the country and raised the standard of rebellion. But nobody offered to help. Several ambassadors refused to see him.
By the time U.S. bombers pounded the last remnants of the Taliban out of Kabul just a few months later, everything had changed. Karzai had gone from pariah to president and, in the eyes of the U.S. government, from combatant in an obscure regional conflict to vital strategic partner. Yet when I met with Karzai not long ago at the presidential palace in Kabul for a lengthy conversation, one of many in the decade since our pre-9/11 meeting in Lahore, it was remarkable how much his relationship with the United States seemed to have come full circle...

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Ahmed Rashid @'FP'

The Fall in Australia 2011 – I Ain’t No Squealer But I Sing Like a Canary!

I wanted to write a story about the Fall’s recent dates in Australia for several reasons. Mostly because the Scrivener General is a Fall freak and was unable to get to see them. Other than that, I thought I could share my experiences with you from within this rarefied, delicate room that the General has carved out of the Magic Box (Internet) better than anywhere else has. I was asked by a music site to write a story. That would have been nice but that room allows a cavalcade of camp followers to trail their private parts – having dipped them in the Indian inkwell – across the bottom of the page in a contest of wit known as the ‘comments’ section. As you know, a person’s brains only reside in the nether regions in quite delirious, unconscious moments. When we are not knowing what we are thinking. Thank fuck. The General runs a tight ship here and the soldiers line up in an orderly fashion and let fly. No return fire is allowed. At ease.I was also asked by an actual physical newsprint from another state to write about the Fall from close proximity but I demurred from that as well. I ain’t no squealer! So, here I am. Unloading. Just for a stir. Under the illusion that something of the following may resonate, within this delicate chamber the General has allowed me to speak into.
The Fall are a band from out of time. That’s a tongue right there.
Forty or more albums. Constant lead face and voice and brain is Mark E Smith. From a certain part of Manchester, the name of which escapes me but is important to him and, thus, to us who are listening. Not the posh part, if there is one. Been going since 1976 or even further back. Their first single, ‘Repetition’, name checks Chairman Mao and Jimmy Carter. I mean, they were still in actual power.
Comedians love the Fall. Frank Skinner, Stewart Lee, Tony Martin. Something unknowable about them. Suspension. Great lines popping out here and there. Unpredictable. They are puzzling, not just a puzzle. Everything else seems to settle after a while. Sometimes it’s time itself that plays tricks. The Beatles were so passé, so out of date, when I was a kid. So badly, laughably antiquated. Then, after a while, they seemed to loom larger and fresher – seemingly more recent, focused and accessible. Those bends in time took decades. Bend Sinister is a Fall album title. The Fall have been through this kind of thing too. Sometimes in and out of focus and vogue. Out in the wilderness, looking sad and irrelevant, then suddenly and rudely back in the centre of all the hot talk. Like now!...