(Thanx Ron!)
Lankum atThe Boiler Shop
30 minutes ago
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Psychic TV - Hurry On Sundown (Hawkwind cover) @ Toff In Town, Melbourne (6th Mar 2012)
We have lots of wonderful footage of my face being peeled off, getting cheek implants, and my chest being split open to put in breasts. We can maybe make an art film out of it—for more limited audiences. We want to put the cost of each surgery in ticker tape on the bottom of the screen!PHOTO SET by Carbie Warbie
'There are no Homeless in Aceh, there are only Punks'
In early December 2011 64 music fans at a punk charity concert in Banda Aceh’s Tamen Budaya park were violently arrested by the Shari’ah police. The were not (and cannot) be charged with any crime but were forced to undergo religious education which included their heads being shaven and forced into the lake to bathe.
"The presence of the punk community is disturbing, and disrupts the life of the Banda Aceh public. This is a new social disease affecting Banda Aceh. If it is allowed to continue, the government will have to spend more money to handle them. Their morals are wrong. Men and women gather together, and that is against Islamic Shariah. We will keep conducting raids until they're all caught, then we'll bring them for re-education here. Aceh is a Shariah region. Everyone should obey it and the punk community is clearly against Shariah. This training will be an example in Indonesia of the re-education of the punks."
The religious police have threatened a continuation of arrests and re-education against the punks “until they are better.” When questioned about the targeting of punks due to their cleanliness the Police Chief justified the actions by drawing a distinction between them and “the clean punks that exist in different classes.” Asked why the police aren’t then targeting the homeless he stated “there are no homeless in Aceh, there are only punks.”
The Governor of Aceh has denied that the punks were even arrested saying, “the truth is that police are helping them develop (their skills).”
Human Rights Watch have pointed out the multitude of ways the authorities have abused the rights fo the detainees including the violation of freedom or expression and not receiving proper legal treatment. They are understandably concerned that this treatment will continue unless the case is processed legally.
"What did we do to deserve arresting? We didn't steal and we didn't bother anyone. The punk community in Banda Aceh is not involved with criminality. So what's the crime that justifies us being brought to this camp? This country hasn't yet made it illegal to express yourself, right?"
James Ball on the WikiLeaks/Stratfor cache
A cache of more than 5m emails taken from an attack on the company's servers in December 2011 is currently being published by WikiLeaks, but the indictment documents reveal that straight after the attack, Sabu offered an FBI-owned server to store the cache – which was quickly accepted.
"btw I started unpacking on [CW-1]'s new server," an online identity alleged to be Hammond notes.
This not only gave the FBI access to review or even potentially amend the cache, but also an inside track on Anonymous' discussions on how to use the documents, and potentially – though not revealed within the files unsealed to date – conversations between Anonymous and WikiLeaks.
The US department of justice has convened a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks, based in Virginia. If through Sabu or information he had gleaned from other Anons the US could glean any evidence to tie Julian Assange to hacking attacks on US soil, such as Stratfor, the case for extradition would be substantially strengthened.
The extent of communication between WikiLeaks and Anonymous regarding the Stratfor leak is currently unknown.
Throughout the logs detailed in the indictments published to date, the informer talks to other hackers in the room, at one stage even proposing publishing private password details: "Wanna release that list of 92% cracked stratfor hashes?" he asks. "Hrm, your call..." the defendent replies. "I'd err on the side of no, so that way we can more fully exploit."
MORE
LulzSec Hacking Suspects Are Arrested
LulzSec Leader Was Snitch Who Helped Snag Fellow Hackers
So that would explain why he disappeared from Twitter for a while...and I do wonder how much info the WikiLeaks/Anon fanboys and girls passed on about themselves trying to impress! I also wish that self promoting asshat Barrett Brown would just STFU!!!Mona's handy internet tip o'the day: NOT everyone is who they say they are on this here intertoob thingy!!!
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Sir Viv Richards at 60
The 60th anniversary of the master blaster's birth is a reminder how his strut alone could turn bowlers to quivering wrecks...MORE
Dear Mr Gove: Letter from a curious parent
I wonder if I can tell you about some rumours that are doing the rounds?
First, we've all seen that you're going to perform that miracle much beloved by those who like measuring human beings: changing the pass level of exams.
I come from an era when this was standard practice in the 11-plus exam. The pass level in any area wasn't a statement about how good or bad that cohort of children were. It was simply tied to how many grammar school places that particular local authority had created. The collective memory of this sort of thing makes people wonder, you know.
I mean, there couldn't be a tiny possibility, could there, that the reason why you're fiddling around with exam pass levels is so that you can regulate the numbers of school students applying for university? After all, it has become quite embarrassing that thousands of young people we all thought were qualified to benefit from three years more education are now deemed not to be so, with the only visible reason for this shift in view being that you agree with the bankers that we can't "afford" that level of university provision. Handy for you, I suppose, if you can dampen a bit of the young people's ardour for more education by labelling more of them as failures.
Talking of labelling people as failures, I see it's full steam ahead with June's phonics test. The results for your pilot tests are in and they make interesting reading. The pass level was put at 34 correct readings of the 40 single words. (I'm not sure why reading single words, not in sentences nor in passages of writing counts as "reading". Wouldn't it have been more honest to have called it a "decode test"?) Sad to say, only 32% of the children reached the pass score. Now, one rumour I heard was that even the "outstanding schools" that did the pilot scored at this sort of a level. If so, will your new head of Ofsted have to change the word "outstanding" to "crap"? He's rather good at that sort of thing, isn't he?
Moving on, I gather that you say, parents of children who fail will, by law, have to be told they failed (which, in my experience, is the same as telling the children). Perhaps you could prepare the speech that a headteacher could give to the year 1 children: "Hello children, all of you, sitting over there are failures. It's about two thirds of you." What a good way to encourage them to become eager learners!
Now here's the next rumour bit – people are saying that this is all a cunning plan so that you can run a big press conference in the summer announcing that we have a nation of illiterates and the present one-hour a day synthetic phonics lessons should be upped to two hours. There are even some cynical people (tush — who would have thought there could be such people!), who are saying that you'll run the pass level at 34 out of 40 for the time being, and then after a year or so of SP, you'll lower it a bit, more children will pass, and, hey presto, you've improved reading! How can people think such things of you? Shocking.
And then, as if all this wasn't enough, you'll never guess what I heard this week? Someone told me that when you ran a press conference to tell the group of lucky journalists assembled there that the free school experiment in Sweden was a success, one journalist asked you if you were aware of the evidence emerging from Sweden that things weren't going quite as swimmingly as you suggested. Whereupon, you asked him if he was aware of the counter-evidence: a master-stroke of repartee, sir, if I may say so. But I cannot find the counter-evidence you mention anywhere, and dare I say I am a bit worried about that.
It slightly reminds me of your party conference speech that time when you compared the questions on science exam papers in the US and Britain, while failing to point out that the paper in the US was a chemistry exam for students aged 16 to 19 and the UK one was for GSCE biology. In a test on use of evidence, that would have had me telling your parents you were a failure, you know.
But these are all rumours and we really need to dump them in the bin marked "false" as soon as possible, don't we?
Via
First, we've all seen that you're going to perform that miracle much beloved by those who like measuring human beings: changing the pass level of exams.
I come from an era when this was standard practice in the 11-plus exam. The pass level in any area wasn't a statement about how good or bad that cohort of children were. It was simply tied to how many grammar school places that particular local authority had created. The collective memory of this sort of thing makes people wonder, you know.
I mean, there couldn't be a tiny possibility, could there, that the reason why you're fiddling around with exam pass levels is so that you can regulate the numbers of school students applying for university? After all, it has become quite embarrassing that thousands of young people we all thought were qualified to benefit from three years more education are now deemed not to be so, with the only visible reason for this shift in view being that you agree with the bankers that we can't "afford" that level of university provision. Handy for you, I suppose, if you can dampen a bit of the young people's ardour for more education by labelling more of them as failures.
Talking of labelling people as failures, I see it's full steam ahead with June's phonics test. The results for your pilot tests are in and they make interesting reading. The pass level was put at 34 correct readings of the 40 single words. (I'm not sure why reading single words, not in sentences nor in passages of writing counts as "reading". Wouldn't it have been more honest to have called it a "decode test"?) Sad to say, only 32% of the children reached the pass score. Now, one rumour I heard was that even the "outstanding schools" that did the pilot scored at this sort of a level. If so, will your new head of Ofsted have to change the word "outstanding" to "crap"? He's rather good at that sort of thing, isn't he?
Moving on, I gather that you say, parents of children who fail will, by law, have to be told they failed (which, in my experience, is the same as telling the children). Perhaps you could prepare the speech that a headteacher could give to the year 1 children: "Hello children, all of you, sitting over there are failures. It's about two thirds of you." What a good way to encourage them to become eager learners!
Now here's the next rumour bit – people are saying that this is all a cunning plan so that you can run a big press conference in the summer announcing that we have a nation of illiterates and the present one-hour a day synthetic phonics lessons should be upped to two hours. There are even some cynical people (tush — who would have thought there could be such people!), who are saying that you'll run the pass level at 34 out of 40 for the time being, and then after a year or so of SP, you'll lower it a bit, more children will pass, and, hey presto, you've improved reading! How can people think such things of you? Shocking.
And then, as if all this wasn't enough, you'll never guess what I heard this week? Someone told me that when you ran a press conference to tell the group of lucky journalists assembled there that the free school experiment in Sweden was a success, one journalist asked you if you were aware of the evidence emerging from Sweden that things weren't going quite as swimmingly as you suggested. Whereupon, you asked him if he was aware of the counter-evidence: a master-stroke of repartee, sir, if I may say so. But I cannot find the counter-evidence you mention anywhere, and dare I say I am a bit worried about that.
It slightly reminds me of your party conference speech that time when you compared the questions on science exam papers in the US and Britain, while failing to point out that the paper in the US was a chemistry exam for students aged 16 to 19 and the UK one was for GSCE biology. In a test on use of evidence, that would have had me telling your parents you were a failure, you know.
But these are all rumours and we really need to dump them in the bin marked "false" as soon as possible, don't we?
Via
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