Monday, 30 May 2011

Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars

FB blocks anti-women driving Saudi campaign

A group of Saudi women who launched a counter-campaign on Facebook this week to press for maintaining a long-standing ban on female car driving in the Gulf Kingdom accused the social network of blocking their page.
A female activist in the campaign said the page had been partially blocked several times over the past few days before it completely disappeared from Facebook on Saturday, according to local newspapers.
“We all are surprised at Facebook’s decision to cancel our page for no reason…we have not committed any mistake or violated the network’s rules…we just expressed our opinion which is against allowing women to drive cars,” Anbakum newspaper quoted an unnamed activist as saying.
“Our campaign entitled ‘I don’t want to drive….I want my rights’, is intended to press for the development of a public transport system for women and to respond to that campaign which is demanding a removal of the ban on driving….we wonder who will benefit from abolishing these female voices which are only expressing their views and calling for a pioneer national project.”
Newspapers last week said nearly 1,000 Saudi women signed a letter on Facebook, to be presented later to King Abdullah, appealing for him not to lift the ban on female driving in the conservative Moslem country.
The letter branded women pressing for an end to the ban as “weird” and said their campaigns to lift the ban and defiant driving by some women are more serious than protests, the papers said.
Sharq Arabic language daily said the statement was in response to a campaign launched by women on Facebook to defy a ban on female driving.
The campaign has already drawn a backlash from men, who threatened to use their headgears to confront women driving cars.
“The 1,000 women said they intend to present the letter signed by them to the Monarch to express their objection to women driving cars..…they affirmed that the recent demands and flagrant defiant actions by some women represent only a minority of the country’s women and that millions of women are opposed to lifting the ban.”
@'Emirates 24/7'

Tributes paid to Gil Scott-Heron

Musicians and friends have been paying tribute to the poet and hip-hop pioneer Gil Scott-Heron, who has died at the age of 62.

Eminem, Talib Kweli and Snoop Dogg were among the rappers who acknowledged his influence after hearing the news.
Public Enemy member Chuck D said on Twitter: "We do what we do and how we do because of you."
Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah wrote: "Salute Gil Scott-Heron for his wisdom and poetry! May he rest in paradise."
Scott-Heron, often called the Godfather of Rap, died in a New York hospital.
His material spanned soul, jazz, blues and the spoken word. His 1970s work heavily influenced the US hip-hop and rap scenes.
His work had a strong political element, and one of his most famous pieces was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Eminem wrote on Twitter: "RIP Gil Scott-Heron. He influenced all of hip-hop."
Cee Lo Green paid tribute to "the god Gil Scott", while Talib Kweli said he "completely influenced me as an artist".
Politically outspoken rapper Michael Franti said Scott-Heron's talent was his ability to "make us think about the world in a different way".
He would make listeners "laugh hysterically about the ironies of American culture, anger at the hypocrisy of our political system, all to a beat that kept us on the dance floor, with a voice and flow that kept you waiting with anticipation for the next phrase".

Richard Russell, who produced and released Scott-Heron's final album I'm New Here in 2010, described him as "a master lyricist, singer, orator, and keyboard player".
"Gil was not perfect in his own life," Russell wrote. "But neither is anyone else. And he judged no-one.
"He had a fierce intelligence, and a way with words which was untouchable; an incredible sense of humour and a gentleness and humanity that was unique to him.
"Gil shunned all the trappings of fame and success. He could have had all those things. But he was greater than that."

The musician's publisher Jamie Byng remembered him as "a giant of a man, a truly inspirational figure whom I loved like a father and a brother".

Scott-Heron infected people who encountered him with his "singularity of vision, his charismatic personality, his moral beauty and his willingness to take his fellow travellers through the full range of emotions", Byng wrote.
"Throughout a magnificent musical career, he helped people again and again, with his willingness and ability to articulate deep truths, through his eloquent attacks on injustices and by his enormous compassion for people's pain.
"Hundreds of thousands of people saw Gil perform live over the decades, always with remarkable bands, and few came away untouched by his magnetism, humility, biting wit and warmth of spirit."
Lemn Sissay, a friend of Scott-Heron's who produced a documentary on his work, told the BBC he was "a polymath" who "spoke crucially of the issues of his people".
"In the late 60 and early 70s, black poets were the news-givers, because their stories were not covered in truth in the mainstream media," he said.
@'BBC'

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Gil Scott-Heron Tribute Mix By DJ TomE

Tracklist

via

♪♫ Gil Scott-Heron - New York Is Killing Me (Chris Cunningham Audiovisual Remix)

Sunday, 29 May 2011

When We're Cowed by the Crowd

eG8 - interventions of John Perry Barlow and Jérémie Zimmermann - Tuesday, May 24th 2011

"You cannot own free speech" - John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Injecting centres a realistic, compassionate response to drug use

“Where Will We Live?”: Terrence Malick’s Fugitive Edens

In late May of this year Terrence Malick will release his fifth feature film, titled The Tree of Life. The trailer indicates that it has all the hallmarks of Malick’s aesthetic vision and directorial practice—foremost stunning cinematography, meditative voiceovers, and a plot structure perhaps best described as lyrical rather than traditionally dramatic. Moreover, while it’s obviously risky to judge the content of a film from a two-minute trailer The Tree of Life also appears to be of a piece thematically with Malick’s other films.
After all, via a voiceover spoken by Jessica Chastain (as the mother of the young boy who is the film’s protagonist) we are given this claim: “There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace.” This and early press about the film that summarizes it as an account of the “loss of innocence” of a young boy growing up in ‘50s America suggest that the film contemplates an essential divide in human nature between the pragmatic necessity for survival and a kind of original state of wonder.
This will hardly come as a surprise to enthusiasts of Malick’s work. Indeed, I will argue that even though Malick’s films are set in profoundly different times and places—ranging, for example, from early 17th century America to the Pacific theater of the second world war—taken all together they present essentially the same story; or more specifically, they are installments of a career-long fascination with the archetypal narrative of a transformation from a state of innocence to one of experience. For again and again Malick’s films rehearse, in ways both literal and figurative, one of the oldest and most abiding stories in myth and literature: the expulsion of human beings from a kind of paradise, an expulsion that in Malick’s work is emblematic of humanity’s painful estrangement from a state of transcendent union with the larger world and, indeed, with the cosmos.
This is not to say, however, that Malick is simply a wistful dreamer offering gorgeous but plaintive encomia to states of lost perfection. Certainly, some features of Malick’s works can support such a view; it’s no accident that words like “Edenic” and “idyllic” proliferate in commentary on the films, especially in reference to the villages of the Powhatan tribe in The New World or the tropical island of the Melanesian people in The Thin Red Line or the vast farm in the Texas panhandle where the better part ofDays of Heaven is set. Each offers, for a time at least, a vision of relative social harmony and human life integrated, however so precariously, with the natural world rather than at odds with it.
What saves Malick’s films from being artfully crafted exercises in nostalgia for prelapsarian perfection, however, is their willingness to recognize that any such vision is not simply fragile but also in a sense delusional—this for two reasons. First, the relationship between the beauty and purity of certain landscapes and the inward states of the characters who move through or inhabit those landscapes is not one of simple correspondence between personal virtue and beneficent environment. In fact, the desire to escape the mundane world and its demands can coincide with a profoundly disturbed, indeed psychopathic, worldview...

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James A. Williams @'PopMatters'

Let Him Prey: High-Ranking Jesuits Helped Keep Pedophile Priest Hidden

The conservative Catholic family lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in Walnut Creek and took pains to observe the traditions of a church racked by social change. Their lives appeared driven by the famous motivational phrase of Saint Ignatius, "Ad majorem Dei gloriam" — for the greater glory of God. It was the same motto that ostensibly guided the Jesuit priest, Donald McGuire, to whom they turned for spiritual guidance.
Then, in 1993, they learned that McGuire had done unthinkable things with their 16-year-old son, Charles, who traveled with him as his personal assistant. The boy and the priest had allegedly looked at pornographic magazines, masturbated, and taken showers together. The family took this devastating news to an esteemed San Francisco priest, Joseph Fessio, who, like McGuire, had once been a teacher at the University of San Francisco.
Fessio runs the Ignatius Press, a Catholic publishing house based in the Sunset District that is the primary English-language publisher of the pope's writings. He and McGuire shared a reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy. McGuire, for his part, was a cleric of worldwide renown, functioning as adviser and confessor to Mother Teresa. While family members considered reporting the abuse to secular authorities, Fessio urged them to stay quiet until he could confer with Jesuit higher-ups.
Confronted with the allegations, McGuire, a famously manipulative man known both for his charm and periodic rages, denied Charles's accusations or made excuses. His Jesuit bosses in Chicago, where McGuire was technically based, ordered him to undergo a residential treatment program at a psychiatric hospital for priests. In about seven months, McGuire was released and returned to active ministry. He continued to prey on other children for the next nine years.
McGuire, who was officially defrocked by the church in 2008, is serving a federal prison sentence stemming from his acts of child molestation. In 2009, SF Weekly published a story revealing his extensive ties to families and institutions in the Bay Area. But not until last month did newly released court documents in a lawsuit against the Jesuits reveal the full extent to which his colleagues and bosses were aware of his highly questionable relationships with teenage boys.
Despite this knowledge, fellow priests did not report McGuire's behavior outside the Church. In California, that silence may, at times, have amounted to a violation of state law, which requires professionals who work with children to immediately report suspected child abuse to police or child welfare workers...