Kwick – 1981 – To The Point
41 minutes ago
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Nixon Grand Jury Records
All Format & Metadata Files ZIP file
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Richard Nixon’s testimony shows “testy” duel with prosecutors
Public Enemy Look Back at 20 Years of 'By the Time I Get to Arizona'
The video for "By the Time I Get to Arizona" aired on MTV only one time in 1991. But its vision of violent retribution in the face of government callousness kicked over the coffee table of America's polite conversations about race. On November 6, 1990, the people of Arizona voted down a proposal to create a state holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by a margin of 17,000 votes. The vote came two years after then-Governor Evan Mecham cancelled MLK Day, saying, "I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don't think he deserves a national holiday."
Public Enemy's response, "By the Time I Get to Arizona," bubbled over with frustration, contempt, and wit, as legendary firebrand Chuck D took aim at the citizens of Arizona and, Mecham in particular: "The cracker over there/He try to keep it yesteryear/The good ol' days/The same ol' ways/That kept us dyin'." Says Chuck, "I'm a firm believer that hip-hop can change the world and make statements like Bob Marley."
He recorded it with producer Gary G-Wiz for fourth album Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Black. After the platinum success of 1990's Fear of a Black Planet and the "Fight the Power" single, PE's legendary production crew the Bomb Squab went on hiatus. Public Enemy was looking for a new direction when current events and the more stripped-down beats of G-Wiz and the Imperial Grand Ministers of Funk stepped in to provide it. Built around a slowed-down Mandrill bassline, the beat to "Arizona" was both world-weary and slick — at least until broken by an apocalyptic 45-second bridge featuring a Jackson 5 organ sample and background screams that evoke civil rights protesters calling from the grave.
The video stepped up the rhetoric, recreating '60s-era visions of civil rights protestors being beaten and Dr. King being humiliated — culminating in Chuck D detonating a car bomb that assassinates Mecham. For their depiction of blowing up the Governor, P.E. was reviled throughout the mainstream media, including being scrutinized on an episode of Nightline, where columnist Clarence Page said the video was "the exact opposite of the message that Martin Luther King died for." However, Chuck's message spread: The NFL pulled the 1993 Super Bowl from Tempe, Arizona, and thousands of conventions and tourists followed suit. It's estimated the state lost $350 million in revenue before voters reconsidered the referendum in a 1993 vote, re-instating the King holiday...
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Evan Serpick @'SPIN'
Santacon 2011
Here is the current list of cities that have been targeted for a Santarchy invasion this Christmas season. If you are organizing a Santacon, let us know and we will add your link to the list.
Please Note: We only list Santacon events that have information online for us to link to and we only list actual Santacon events, not general Santa themed events, fundraisers, etc.
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Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs
Temporary hitch.. My Old Lady [the man’s 73-year-old mother] read the Life article and has thrown off her shop keeper weeds and revealed her hideous rank in Matriarch, Inc.: “I Queen Bee Laura of Worth Avenue.. Stay out of my territory, punk..” She has, in fact, forbidden me to set foot in Palm Beach on pain of Orpheus.. And won’t send me money to come home.
Almost forty-six years old, William Burroughs still had to write home for money.
Laura Lee Burroughs ran a high-toned ‘gift shop’ in Palm Beach after she and her husband moved from St. Louis in spring 1952, with their five-year-old grandson, William S., Jr. – whom they were raising because his mother was accidentally shot and killed by their son, William, in Mexico six months before. That scandal made the newspapers all over the USA, and the Burroughses’ social standing in St. Louis County suburban ‘high society’ had become too awkward for them to remain.
The ‘Life article’ mentioned is Paul O’Neil’s ‘Sad but Noisy Rebels,’ in the 30 November 1959 issue. Better known today by its slug title (‘The Only Rebellion Around; But the Shabby Beats Bungle the Job in Arguing, Sulking and Bad Poetry’), the lengthy, photo-illustrated article mocked and dismissed Ginsberg, Kerouac, McClure, and others – including Burroughs:
For sheer horror no member of the Beat Generation has achieved effects to compare with William S. Burroughs, who is regarded by many seekers after coolness as the ‘the greatest writer in the world.’ [ . . . ] a pale, cadaverous and bespectacled being who has devoted most of his adult life to a lonely pursuit of drugs and debauchery [and] has rubbed shoulders with the dregs of a half-dozen races.
All of this (which was not even the half of it, if the full truth could not have been published in writing then), came as a complete and total shock to Laura Burroughs. Billy (William) was always her favourite, her precocious paragon of scientific learning; he later remembered her saying once, ‘I worship the ground you walk on.’
Of course, Life’s sudden blush of Beat scandal in 1959 was – as Laura would live long enough to know, until her death in 1970 – only the beginning of her son’s garish, worldwide notoriety.
William S. Burroughs [Paris] to Laura Lee Burroughs [Palm Beach, FL]
ca. December 1959
Dear Mother,
I counted to ten before answering your letter and I hope you have done the same since nothing could be more unworthy than a quarrel between us at this point.. Yes I have read the article in Life and after all.. a bit silly perhaps.. but it is a mass medium.. and sensational factors must be played up at the expense often of fact.. In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me.. four pots a day and heavy sugar.. Did nurse make tea all the time? Its an English practice that seems to come natural to me.. I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley – who by In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me.. four pots a day and heavy sugarthe way could have had his pick of Palm Beach invitations in a much more straight laced era despite publicity a great deal more extreme.. And remember the others who have held the title before.. Byron Baudelaire Poe people are very glad to claim kinship now..But really anyone in the public eye that is anyone who enjoys any measure of success in his field is open to sensational publicity.. If I visit a waterfront bar in Tangier – half a block from my house – I am ‘rubbing shoulders with the riff raff of the world’.. You can do that in any neighborhood bar USA and not least in Palm Beach.. A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks.. Personally I would prefer to avoid publicity but it is the only way to sell books.. A writer who keeps his name out of the papers doesn't publish and doesn't make money if he does manage to publish..
As regard my return to the family hearth perhaps we had best both shelve any decision for the present.. Please keep me informed as to Dad's condition and give him my heart felt wish for his recovery..
Love
Bill Burroughs
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Birgitta Jónsdóttir: How the US Justice Department legally hacked my Twitter account
Birgitta Jónsdóttir's Twitter account: a US court has ruled that Twitter must comply with a Department of Justice demand to release private data held by the social media company, which it seeks as part of its investigation into WikiLeaks. Photograph: guardiannews.com
Before my Twitter case, in which the US Department of Justice has demanded that the social media site hands over personal information about my account which it deems necessary to its investigation of WikiLeaks, I didn't think much about what rights I would be signing off when accepting user agreement in my computer. The text is usually lengthy, in a legal language that most people don't understand. Very few people read the user agreements, and very few understand their legal implications if someone in the real world would try to use one against them.
Many of us who use the internet – be it to write emails, work or browse its growing landscape: mining for information, connecting with others or using it to organise ourselves in various groups of the like-minded – are not aware of that our behavior online is being monitored. Profiling has become a default with companies such as Google and Facebook. These companies have huge databases recording our every move within their environment, in order to groom advertising to our interests. For them, we are only consumers to push goods at, in order to sell ads through an increasingly sophisticated business model. For them, we are not regarded as citizens with civic rights.
This notion needs to change. No one really knew where we were heading a few years ago: neither we the users, nor the companies harvesting our personal information for profit. Very few of us imagined that governments that claim to be democratic would invade our online privacy with no regard to the fundamental rights we are supposed to have in the real world. We might look to China and other stereotypical totalitarian states and expect them to violate the free flow of information and our digital privacy, but not – surely? – our very own democratically elected governments.
What I have learned about my lack of rights in the last few months is of concern for everyone who uses the internet and calls for actions to raise people's awareness about their legal rights and ways to improve legal guidelines about digital media, be it locally or globally. The problem – and the dilemma we are facing – is that there are no proper standards, no basic laws in place that deal with the fundamental question: are we to be treated as consumers or citizens online? There is no international charter that says we should have the same civic rights as we have in the offline world.
Our legal systems are slow compared to the speed of online development. With the social media explosion, many people have put into databases very sensitive information about themselves and others without knowing that they have no rights to defend themselves against attempts by governments to obtain that personal data – whether their own local authorities or, as in my case, a foreign government acting internationally. According to the ruling of the US federal judge in my Twitter case, we have fortified those rights of government agencies when we agreed to the terms and conditions set by the company hosting our data. Even if that information is not held on servers in the US, the company would only need to have an office in the US for authorities to be able to demand its release to them.
So, we have to rely on, for example, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter to look out for our interests. But it might not always be in their interests to look out for us.
The reason we make international treaties and declarations about human rights is because, somewhere along the line, we agreed that certain rights are sacred and universal. We need to make the same principles applicable to our human rights online, as they are offline. These two worlds have fused together, and there is no way to define them as separate anymore.
If is too easy for governments to access the information stored online, it is too easy for that access to be abused. If someone wanted to go through all my regular mail, they would have to obtain a search warrant in advance. No such thing happened in the Twitter case. I am, according to the US Justice Department, not under a criminal investigation, yet its officials demanded Twitter surrender my personal messages and IP numbers without my knowledge. It has never been so easy for Big Brother to pry on all our most sacred information without us ever even knowing.
@'The Guardian'
Many of us who use the internet – be it to write emails, work or browse its growing landscape: mining for information, connecting with others or using it to organise ourselves in various groups of the like-minded – are not aware of that our behavior online is being monitored. Profiling has become a default with companies such as Google and Facebook. These companies have huge databases recording our every move within their environment, in order to groom advertising to our interests. For them, we are only consumers to push goods at, in order to sell ads through an increasingly sophisticated business model. For them, we are not regarded as citizens with civic rights.
This notion needs to change. No one really knew where we were heading a few years ago: neither we the users, nor the companies harvesting our personal information for profit. Very few of us imagined that governments that claim to be democratic would invade our online privacy with no regard to the fundamental rights we are supposed to have in the real world. We might look to China and other stereotypical totalitarian states and expect them to violate the free flow of information and our digital privacy, but not – surely? – our very own democratically elected governments.
What I have learned about my lack of rights in the last few months is of concern for everyone who uses the internet and calls for actions to raise people's awareness about their legal rights and ways to improve legal guidelines about digital media, be it locally or globally. The problem – and the dilemma we are facing – is that there are no proper standards, no basic laws in place that deal with the fundamental question: are we to be treated as consumers or citizens online? There is no international charter that says we should have the same civic rights as we have in the offline world.
Our legal systems are slow compared to the speed of online development. With the social media explosion, many people have put into databases very sensitive information about themselves and others without knowing that they have no rights to defend themselves against attempts by governments to obtain that personal data – whether their own local authorities or, as in my case, a foreign government acting internationally. According to the ruling of the US federal judge in my Twitter case, we have fortified those rights of government agencies when we agreed to the terms and conditions set by the company hosting our data. Even if that information is not held on servers in the US, the company would only need to have an office in the US for authorities to be able to demand its release to them.
So, we have to rely on, for example, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter to look out for our interests. But it might not always be in their interests to look out for us.
The reason we make international treaties and declarations about human rights is because, somewhere along the line, we agreed that certain rights are sacred and universal. We need to make the same principles applicable to our human rights online, as they are offline. These two worlds have fused together, and there is no way to define them as separate anymore.
If is too easy for governments to access the information stored online, it is too easy for that access to be abused. If someone wanted to go through all my regular mail, they would have to obtain a search warrant in advance. No such thing happened in the Twitter case. I am, according to the US Justice Department, not under a criminal investigation, yet its officials demanded Twitter surrender my personal messages and IP numbers without my knowledge. It has never been so easy for Big Brother to pry on all our most sacred information without us ever even knowing.
@'The Guardian'
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