Thursday, 24 November 2011

David Hockney v Damien Hirst

Pepper Spray! A yummy and delicious form of crowd control

Pizza is a vegeatable. Pepper spray is a vegetable. Megyn Kelly is a vegetable.

Global Drug Survey

GlobalDrugSurvy Adam Winstock
Launched less 24 hours ago and already 2500 surveys completed ! We want to know about your #drug use globaldrugsurvey.com/mixmag2012

The supermarket grog wars are a health hazard

Imprisoned Moroccan Rapper Defied the King

From the early days of the protests in Morocco, rapper al-Haked’s anti-regime songs echoed in the streets, until he was arrested on dubious grounds.
Calling himself “The Spiteful” (al-Haked), an anonymous protester released a rap song on YouTube only a day after the start of the February 20 protest movement in Morocco.
Directly addressing the king in the name of the people, the song broke new ground in political speech, sharply criticizing the regime. Back then, nobody knew who he was.
Yet since September 9, al-Haked has been languishing in Casablanca’s Akasha prison. He was arrested on charges of assault and battery, but many believe that his real crime was political activity, since his lyrics set a new standard for direct criticism of the Moroccan regime.
Al-Haked is 24-year-old Muadh Balghawat, from a poor working-class neighborhood in Casablanca.
During the early days of the protest movement, al-Haked participated in the general assembly of members of the February 20 Youth Movement at the United Communist Party’s headquarters in Casablanca.
Balghawat, a tall, thin young man appeared shy at the assembly, and his political inexperience was immediately apparent. He wasn’t skilled in the pandering or slick talk of refined politicians.
He tried to defend the slogan “the people want…,” which has been echoing through the squares of Arab capitals.
Nobody knew yet that he was al-Haked, singer of “One Day, When the People…,” a song that was already widely circulating among revolutionary youth.
Balghawat released a second song, and then a third and a fourth. From a musical perspective, his works were slightly amateurish, but his critical message is both powerful and sophisticated...

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Muhammad al-Khodayri @'alakhbar'

Men’s strip club confessions

Leonard Cohen's Letterhead (1959)

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The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol ...

Does early exposure to porn turn kids into sex addicts?

Why do Police Officers Use Pepper Spray?

When pepper spray became a mainstream law enforcement tool in the 1990s, it was hailed as a relatively peaceful alternative to harsh physical violence.
But as demonstrated by the routine spraying of Occupy Wall Street activists, culminating in the horrific assault at the University of California, Davis, pepper spray can too easily become a tool of first and excessive resort.
“I can’t get into the head of people using it in New York and Davis and around the country, but it seems that rather than turning to other tactics, they turn to the simple tool,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina. “There’s an overreliance on technology.”
The incident at UC Davis, where campus police officers sprayed Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream directly into the faces and mouths of sitting students, provoked both moral disgust and a renewed attention to the physical dangers of pepper spray. Far from being what one Fox News pundit called a “food product,” pepper is a dangerous and sometimes deadly weapon.
Receiving relatively less attention is the psychology underlying pepper spray use, which hasn’t been studied much but parallels the use of Tasers. Like pepper sprays, Tasers were supposed to be tools of intermediate physical force, an alternative to hitting a resisting suspect with batons or grappling them to the ground. But Tasers also became alternatives to less-violent tactics and were used in situations where suspects had not physically resisted arrest.
Rather than talking, police too often go straight to the electricity — and the same may also happen with pepper spray.
“When you have something that is readily available to you, something that’s on your belt like pepper spray, and you have a confrontation in front of you — the first thing you’re going to do, because you’re human, is use whatever is right there,” said Ana Yáñez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a non-partisan group that has successfully lobbied to make pepper spray less readily available to law enforcement officers in that state’s youth correctional system.
“All of the training that you might use, anything that allows you to use your other skills, goes out the door,” Yáñez-Correa added. “The first thing you do is say, ‘I’m going to pepper-spray that kid.’ That’s a natural response...”

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Brandon Keim @'Wired'

HA!

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DrugPolicyNews Drug Policy Alliance
So much for the first amendment. "Government Worker Fired for Signing Pro-Pot Legalization Petition" bit.ly/rAwMEF @CopsSayLegalize

James Murdoch resigns from Sun and Times boards

James Murdoch has stepped down from the boards of the immediate parent companies of the Sun and the Times, one of which is the business named as a defendant in all the phone-hacking civil lawsuits brought against the News of the World.
It emerged on Wednesday that the 38-year-old resigned in September as director of News Group Newspapers – owners of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World, and Times Newspapers Ltd, home to the Times and Sunday Times – as he relocates from London to New York.
News Group Newspapers is the company subject of a string of lawsuits for alleged breaches of privacy stemming from phone hacking, and it is the business unit that anybody wanting to sue either the Sun or News of the World would have to cite as a defendant in a legal case.
News Corporation, the ultimate parent company, said James Murdoch's departure from the boards was essentially a tidying up exercise. It added that the son of Rupert Murdoch remains as executive chairman of News International, which is the operation that runs the company's three British newspapers.
Insiders said that "nobody should read too much into the changes". They noted that James Murdoch remains on the board of a holding company NI Group Ltd and the Times editorial board whose function it is to approve the appointment of new editors of that newspaper.
James Murdoch took over as executive chairman of News International in late 2007, and has been called to give evidence to parliament twice to explain why the company did not find out that phone hacking at the News of the World was more widespread in the period running up to the arrest of Glenn Mulcaire in 2006. Mulcaire carried out hacking on behalf of the newspaper.
Dan Sabbagh @'The Guardian'