Maxim unveils Art Exhibition

DUBTechformation I ·When HE-MAN Smoked a Joint!

Live in Mi casa, Recorded con Pioner Vinyl of 1981 And Laptop.
Buenos Aires Argentina

Cowboy Junkies - Sing In My Meadow (Free Download)

Sonic Youth - Old Greek Theatre, Melbourne (20th January 1989)

Photo
Info
Date:
Friday, January 20th, 1989
City:
Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
Old Greek Theatre
Setlist:
Brother James
The Wonder
Hyperstation
Teenage Riot
Hey Joni
The Sprawl
'Cross the Breeze
Eric's Trip
Candle
Kissability
I Love Her All The Time
Eliminator Jr
Silver Rocket

I have a few cassettes I recorded of Sonic Youth live dating as far back as Am*dam in 1985. Most of them have been in storage for quite a while and will probably be there a while longer...it's a very long story *yawn*

However, while searching tonight for some other things I found this tape I recorded back on my birthday in 1989.

Bearing in mind that it was recorded on a Walkman that was very much on its last legs and the fact that I was probably on my last legs of the night too, what you hear is what you get!

40 minutes of a rather enjoyable night (from what I can remember *ahem*)

An interesting little side note is that Spaceboy's mum was selling rather tasty home made SY tee shirts from a stall at the back of one of the greatest venues that Melbourne ever had that night with her then partner...I remember speaking to her back then but it would be another 18 years before we met up in a different time and place...

PS: Where the fuck have ALL those years gone?
FLAC
mp3

Leonard Cohen - 4 New Songs

Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09

(Photo by TimN)

Feels So Good

The Darkness

Born In Chains

Lullaby

Via

Michele Bachmann HPV row prompts fears for vaccine programme in US

Fears that America's already weak HPV vaccine programme will be critically undermined by a political row increased on Wednesday, as campaigners, academics and doctors lined up to condemn the politicising of a public health issue.
The controversy was ignited by Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, who claimed that the vaccine against human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, was a "very dangerous drug" that could lead to "mental retardation".
That claim immediately drew a barrage of criticism from the medical profession and even from Bachmann sympathisers on the right, forcing her to backtrack slightly. She told a conservative talkshow: "I have no idea. I am not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a physician. All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me at the debate."
But doctors and scientists say that her remarks risk further reducing the already low take-up rates for the vaccine, as more parents will be convinced to reject the vaccine for their daughters.
Professor Gregory Zimet, co-leader of the cancer control programme at Indiana University, said of Bachmann's comments: "People will say there's no evidence for it and that is true, there is no evidence. But I would go further: Bachmann is absolutely wrong."
He added: "Part of the issue will be how long the discussion is prominent in the news. If this is brought up every time the Republican candidates have a debate, if misinformation is repeatedly expressed and covered nationally, it can have a negative effect."
The uptake of the vaccine has already suffered a major backlash in the US in response to what some critics viewed as an overly aggressive marketing strategy and anxiety from the religious right that the vaccine would promote sexual promiscuity among young girls.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that girls receive the HPV vaccine at the of age 11 or 12, before they begin having sex.
According to the CDC, around 49% of girls aged 13 to 17 received one dose of the vaccine in 2010, but only 32% received all three doses.
"From the public health point of view that is inadequate," said Zimet. "When you have a vaccine that likely prevents around 70% of cervical cancers, but fewer than half of girls are receiving all three doses, the ultimate effect is dampened."
In the US, around 6m people a year become infected with HPV, and some 4000 women die of cervical cancer each year.
Bachmann had focused on the HPV virus to attack her rival in the Republican nomination race, Texas governor Rick Perry, over his decision to issue an executive order requiring girls in the state to have HPV vaccines. She also suggested that he may have made the order in return for political donations from Merck, the manufacturer of the Gardasil, the vaccine used in the US.
Both allegations drew political blood, and Perry found himself on the back foot before the otherwise largely supportive Tea Party audience suspicious of "big government" intrusion on individual liberties.
But Bachmann appears to have badly overplayed her hand by then telling NBC television: "I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter," said Bachmann. "It can have very dangerous side effects."
Ed Rollins, Bachmann's former campaign manager, criticised her comments: "She made a mistake. The quicker she admits she made a mistake and moves on, the better she is," he said in an interview on MSNBC.
"Ms Bachmann's an emotional person who basically has great feeling for people. I think that's what she was trying to project. Obviously it would have been better if she had stayed on the issue," he said.
"I think the bottom line here is she has made what was a very positive debate and made the issue about Perry to where it's now an issue about her, and she needs to move on.''
Although offering the vaccine at such an early age is sometimes controversial, its effectiveness and safety have not been a political issue in the US.
Dr Marion Burton, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, hit back at Bachmann.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made in the Republican presidential campaign that HPV vaccine is dangerous and can cause mental retardation. There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement. Since the vaccine has been introduced, more than 35m doses have been administered, and it has an excellent safety record," Burton said.
The Institute of Medicine, which advises the government, last month found the HPV vaccine to be safe.
But while there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the vaccine is dangerous, there are some questions over the efficacy of Gardasil, the version of the vaccine used in the US.
Clinical trials show that Gardasil is highly effective against two strains of the HPV virus that together account for around 70% of cervical cancers. The vaccine works best in young people who have never had an HPV infection.
In countries with popular cervical cancer screening programmes, vaccination with Gardasil can reduce the number of abnormal smear test results by around 20%.
"That means sparing women from the psychological trauma and gynaecological procedures that arise from an abnormal result," said Anne Szarewski, a cervical cancer expert at the medical charity Cancer Research UK.
But questions remain over the value of Gardasil in preventing cases of actual cervical cancer where cervical screening programmes are widely subscribed to, said Diane Harper, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who led the clinical trials of Gardasil and its main competitor, Cevarix, manufactured by GSK.
Smear test programmes that look for precancerous changes to cells in the cervix caused by the virus have reduced the incidence of cervical cancer in the US to around eight in 100,000 women.
"The very best you could achieve with Gardasil alone would be 14 cases per 100,000 women. So in an overall population, Gardasil is never going to prevent more cervical cancers than you are already preventing with a screening programme," Harper told the Guardian.
Another concern centres on how long the vaccine lasts. If a woman who received the jab was protected for only five years, any infection and resulting cancer would only be delayed until the immunity wore off.
Gardasil targets two strains of the HPV vaccine, while Cevarix is designed to protect against five strains. Mathematical models of Cevarix suggest the vaccine should protect against the virus for 30 years.
Bachmann's claims also drew criticism on the right.
Yuval Levin, a former domestic policy advisor to George Bush's administration and former chief of staff of the President's Council on Bioethics, called Bachmann's assertions "preposterously ill-informed" and "profoundly irresponsible".
"Baseless assertions to the contrary about various vaccines have for years been piling needless guilt upon the parents of children with autism and other disorders, and driving other parents away from vaccinating their children against diseases that could do them great harm. A presidential candidate should not be engaging in such harmful nonsense," he said in the conservative National Review Online.
Even the popular rightwing radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, said that Bachmann "may have jumped the shark" – an idiom generally used to mean having gone too far – by linking the HPV vaccine to mental retardation.
Limbaugh said that Bachmann appeared undercut her initial success in wounding Perry over the HPV issue by shifting the focus to her own credibility with her claims about the vaccine's safety.
"She scored the points and should have left it there," said Limbaugh.
Chris McGreal and Ian Sample @'The Guardian'

CNN/Tea Party Debate Fact Check

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guardian_world Guardian World

Breaking: Suicide bomber kills 15 in attack on Pakistan funeral - AP. More details soon...

Enter the grinderman

The one and only Warracknabeal poet, he of the red right hand and near-pornographic moustache, is headed for Red Hot Shorts in just over a week. Hosted by Gusto Films, the monthly showcase of all things concise and cinematic returns next Friday with a session devoted to the reigning king of Australian rock; the wilful, the brooding, the brilliant Nick Cave.
Cave emerged in 1973 with The Boys Next Door, later known as The Birthday Party, a hugely influential goth rock collective from Melbourne that disbanded in 1983. In 1984, he founded the even more profoundly influential group, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, with whom he released the seminal albums Henry's Dream, Murder Ballads and The Boatman's Call. The Bad Seeds toured and recorded continuously until 2006, before entering the chrysalis to re-emerge as the mangy, snarling critical darlings, Grinderman.
Over the years, Cave has stretched his dark fingers into all manner of art forms, from writing (The Death of Bunny Munro), to screenwriting (The Proposition), acting (Ghosts...of the Civil Dead) to soundtrack composition (The Road). Along the way, various pieces of short film have been created in his name or with his involvement, from music clips to documentaries to narrative fiction.
Join us for a trawl through Nick Cave's shorts, including the 1979 clip for 'Shiver' by The Boys Next Door and a host of others, footage of Cave reading from The Death of Bunny Munro and a documentary piece in which Cave's friends discuss 'Do You Love Me' and 'Red Right Hand'. Should be a grim and dramatic evening.
Red Hot Shorts' Nick Cave spotlight is on Friday 23 September at 7.30pm.
@'acmi'

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FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.”
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.
“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”
The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.
Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny...

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Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'

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The Whole World Is Watching

Early in 2010, The Guardian reported plans by the British Police and Home Office for a remarkable new venture in domestic surveillance. Unmanned aerial drones, now used for tracking insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are to be adapted (unarmed, one hopes) to monitor Britain’s civil population. An initial aim of the project is crowd control during the 2012 London Olympics. Thereafter, these high-tech surveillance engines are to become a permanent feature of state security and law enforcement—much to the distress of civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who immediately objected to the plans. But no one can say this is especially new. With an estimated 1.7 million video cameras deployed on the ground, George Orwell’s homeland can probably already claim world leadership in state-sponsored monitoring of its population. And the intensification of all forms of institutional tracking of individuals isn’t restricted to Britain—it is occurring the world over. All told, the United States has probably contributed more to these trends than any other country as both the creator and exporter of different means of government and corporate surveillance. The sheer variety of forms implicated in this monitoring is striking. They include real-time recording of consumers’ buying habits and finances; tracking of travelers’ movements by air, train, and road; monitoring of private citizens’ telecommunications; and the mass harvesting of tidbits of personal data from social sites like Facebook.
The seemingly relentless pace of innovation in surveillance cannot be ascribed to any one interest, policy, organizational purpose, or political mood. Instead, it suffuses all manner of relations between institutions and individuals, from the allocation of welfare-state benefits to the pursuit of suspected terrorists.
The result has been change in the very texture of everyday life. Being “alone” is not what it used to be. Our whereabouts, our financial transactions, our uses of the World Wide Web, and countless other data routinely register in the automated consciousness of corporate and state bureaucracies. More importantly, the results of such monitoring in turn shape the treatment we receive from these organizations—sometimes in ways that we know, and often in ways we hardly imagine...