Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno

(Thanx Stan!)

Tape Generations

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Bank Of America To Cut 30,000 Jobs

Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State

As the Obama Administration continues its efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, this report looks beyond the issues of the day and focuses on what an international peacekeeping force to defend a two-state solution might look like. Though no individual case study can replicate the challenges of the Middle East, the authors extract lessons learned from other peacekeeping operations - including military and political lessons - that could be applicable.

Editor and contributing author Andrew Exum writes, “There should be no doubt that peacekeeping in a future Palestinian state would be fraught with difficulties, not simply because of the unique history and circumstances of the region but also because the international record of such operations is mixed. As this project makes clear, policymakers should tread cautiously when considering such an option. Any initiative to broker peace in the Middle East carries risk, but the more risks policymakers and leaders understand beforehand, the better prepared they will be to mitigate and manage them.”

Security for Peace takes an “end-around” approach to the problems of the Levant, imagining the goal – the establishment of a future Palestinian state – and asking what kind of security arrangement would be necessary to serve as a facilitator for such a state. Chapters in the edited volume include:

• Case studies on Southern Lebanon by CNAS Fellow Andrew Exum and Research Assistant Kyle Flynn, East Timor by Scott Brady, and Kosovo by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weitz;
• Military Lessons, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), who draws on experience planning peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Haiti, to illuminate key lessons learned in the field of peace operations since 1945;
• Political Lessons, by Ambassador James Dobbins, who draws on personal experience overseeing U.S. post conflict reconstruction operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and research on peacekeeping since the Second World War; and
• An examination of four scenarios, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Marc Lynch, that could precede a possible peacekeeping force.

Authors: Dr. Andrew M. Exum, Scott Brady, Dr. Richard Weitz, Kyle Flynn, Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), James Dobbins, Dr. Marc Lynch
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Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words

Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit. He has been rather famously an aggressive critic of God and his followers, after cutting his sacrilegious teeth on Mother Teresa. He wrote a deadpan argument for trying Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, then was branded an apostate by former friends on the left for vigorously supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He memorably — a lot of what Hitchens has written merits the adverb — shot back that his antiwar critics were “the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”) And he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb.
This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.
Let’s begin with the obvious. He is unfathomably prolific. “Arguably” is a great ingot of a book, more than 780 pages containing 107 essays. Some of them entailed extensive travel in inconvenient places like Afghanistan and Uganda and Iran; those that are more in the way of armchair punditry come from an armchair within reach of a very well-used library. They appeared in various publications during a period in which he also published his best-selling exegesis against religion, “God Is Not Great”; a short and well-reviewed biography of Thomas Jefferson; a memoir, “Hitch-22”; as well as various debates, reading guides, letters and rebuttals — all done while consuming daily quantities of alcoholic drink that would cripple most people. As Ian Parker noted in his definitive 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens, the man writes as fast as some people read.
The second notable thing about Hitchens is his erudition. He doesn’t always wear it lightly — more than once he remarks, upon pulling out a classic for reconsideration, that he first read the work in question when he was 12 — but it is not just a parlor trick. In the book reviews that make up much of this collection, the most ambitious of them written for The Atlantic, he takes the assigned volume — a new literary biography of Stephen Spender or Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, or a new collection of letters by Philip Larkin or Jessica Mitford — and uses it as pretext to review, with opinionated insights, the entire life and work of the writer in question, often supplementing his prodigious memory by rereading several books. He is a master of the essay that not only spares you the trouble of reading the book under review, but leaves you feeling you have just completed an invigorating graduate seminar...

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Bill Keller @'NY Times'

Christopher Hitchens: from 9/11 to the Arab spring

Illicit Drug Use among Older Adults

Chunky Mark on George Osborne

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Inside Shakespeare and Company

Inside Shakespeare and Co.

♪♫ Aissa 'AJ' Lee - Hickory Wind

http://www.TheTuttlesWithAJLee.com

Could This Kid Be the Next Alison Krauss?

13 years old!!!

Monday, 12 September 2011

September 11th 1973

Ken Loach
(Thanks tefidancer!)

Ken Loach: ‘Watching young people riot, I felt sad for their alienation’

We refuse to live in fear!

Teach our kids to code

Shortwave Pirate Radio

Shortwave pirate radio broadcasts are some of the most original & entertaining programming one can hear. These stations bring the reality that radio can be spontaneous, creative & unrestrained along with a direct connection to the listener, even if they're across the ocean!
The recordings from the 90's were made with a Grundig Satellit 500/random longwire (94'-96') & a Drake R8A/50ft. sloper (96'-00') on both reel to reel & cassette. Unless noted, the rest of these (2000 & up) were recorded using a Ten Tec RX-340 receiver and various antenna configurations along the way (T2FD/phased Wellbrook loops/EWE & finally a DX Engineering 4 Sq.) by minidisc & currently hardrive media using Audacity recording software through an M-Audio Delta 66 interface via the Ten Tec's DC-Coupled audio tap for SSB or Sherwood Engineering's SE-3 for AM. Also, the majority of these stations were recorded from North East Florida. Some of these I do not have exact dates/times/frequencies, but will add the info later if found.
I record pirates often, and have a large collection which I will continue to add here. Keep in mind the nature of shortwave as conditions can change to varying degrees and some of the recordings are better than others, but always entertaining!
Enjoy! : )
Sealord
sealord40m at gmail dot com
VBR ZIP (11.5GB)
Or individual trax
@'The Archive'