Totentanz AKA The Dance of Death (Circa 1465 - 1470 Germany)

Block books are slim volumes, typically comprising 20 to 50 pages, produced by cutting text and images into wooden blocks (a process known as xylography). The production of block books reached its peak at a time when printing with metal letters (moveable type) was already established, around the 1460s–1470s. Worldwide only about 600 block book copies have survived, and they are among the rarest and most precious products of the printing press. The Bavarian State Library holds 40 of these books and eight fragments. Totentanz (The dance of death) covers a similar topic to the Ars moriendi (The art of dying): the sudden death that anybody can suffer, irrespective of worldly rank. On each of the 24 images a personification of Death dances with a person from a different social position, leading the individual out of life. The series of victims starts with a pope and an emperor, continues with an abbot, a nobleman and a farmer, and finishes with a helpless child and his mother. Only two copies of the block book version of the Totentanz are known: this one at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, and a volume in the library of the University of Heidelberg. The two copies represent different editions, and the images have many differences. The copy shown here has some unique features. The text, which was originally placed below the illustrations, was trimmed, the images were cut out and glued onto larger sheets, and the text was reproduced by hand. Based on codicological evidence, this was done in the third quarter of the 15th century, shortly after the production of the book.
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Wikileaks: Italian firm sold Syria secure radios as crackdown raged

As the US and Europe leveled increasingly severe sanctions on Syria, Western tech companies were still working eagerly with the Assad regime and Syrian government-owned entities. This is according to e-mails obtained by Wikileaks, dating from 2006 up until March of 2012. The e-mails are now being published in waves by Wikileaks, both through its own website and through a collection of news organizations.
The first wave of released documents—25 out of more than two million e-mails obtained by Wikileaks—focuses on Italian networking and systems integration vendor SELEX (a subsidiary of Finmeccanica—which, coincidentally, also owns Agusta, the helicopter manufacturer tied to the development of the Chinese Z-10 attack helicopter) and Greek network integrator Intracom. E-mails between representatives of the two companies published by Wikileaks show how they worked around the ever-tightening political noose of trade sanctions to bring a joint project in Syria to completion. That project? A secure software-defined radio network for the Syrian government based on SELEX’s TETRA trunked radio network hardware.
The VS-3000 and AS-3000 mobile TETRA transceivers, delivered under the contract—for what was advertised as a “public safety” network for emergency and disaster response—provide mobile voice and data for ground vehicles, coastal patrol craft, and aircraft. They link to a nationwide grid of ground stations connected by a fiber-optic network. But starting in May of last year, the project was expanded from its original 40 million euro price tag by more than 25 percent. A February invoice for the project totaled over 66 million euros. Those expansions came as the Syrian government requested TEA3 encryption for the radio system and started rolling it out to police.
Work by the two companies continued throughout the violent suppression of dissidents in Syria through February of this year. This included a trip to Damascus by SELEX engineers to assist in the installation of radios and accessories (some of which were delivered personally by the engineers). And throughout the project, SELEX continued to come up with alternative ways to source the components for the project as successive sanctions began to create problems with the company’s supply chain.
SELEX’s gear fell into the grey area of the September 2011 restrictions set by the EU—the sanctions allowed for telecommunications services, but banned the export of hardware and software that had specific military applications. But the contract, officially issued by the Syrian Wireless Organization, was signed by Imad Abdul-Ghani Sabbouni (Syria’s Minister of Communications). Sabbouni was individually named in EU sanctions in February 2012 for being involved in the censorship and monitoring of Syrian citizens’ Internet access. While not technically in violation of EU sanctions (at least up until February), there were some problems getting the gear exported.
The company also had to work around US bans on technology shipments to Syria, since many of the connectors for the fiber-optic gear Syria ordered from SELEX were manufactured in the US. In an e-mail thread from October 2011, SELEX Program Manager Simone Bonechi and Intracom Syria TETRA Project Manager Mohammad Shoorbajee discussed a delay in delivery of fiber-optic backbone gear because of those prohibitions—specifically, coupling cables for optical “choppers” used to modulate light being transmitted over a fiber-optic backbone. Shoorbajee wrote, “The customer is becoming very suspicious of us for not sending the cable. Do you recommend I say anything to them?”
Bonechi responded that there had been a delay because “we have to manage an unexpected problem with some connectors, part of the goods under shipment, which are manufactured in USA.” SELEX scrambled to find an alternative supplier for the connectors, as Shoorbajee reported that SWO’s representatives were “getting worried each day” that embargoes would block completion of the project.
In a statement accompanying the documents, Wikileaks said that the files "reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.” Additional files will be released in batches over the next two months.
Sean Gallagher @'ars technica'

10 Sexual Words (Terms) You Don't Know

#6

 

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Jim Marshall’s Intimate Images of Legendary Musicians

♪♫ Primal Scream - Circumcision

From State Of Affairs comp (1984, Pleasantly Surprised 003)
"Caesar remembers Primal Scream's live debut as being at Glasgow's Henry Wood Hall, but this appears to be at odds with Gillespie's recollections. "The first-ever Primal Scream gig was at the Bungalow Bar in Paisley", Bobby later claimed. "We supported the Laughing Apple. Only one song in the set was ours, and I remember it was just total noise. That wasn't a real gig, it was a joke. There wasn't any shape to it."
The same can be said for Primal Scream's first recorded evidence. Two cuts can be heard on a 1984 cassette issued by Scars' Robert King as part of the fascinating 'Pleasantly Surprised' series specialising in obscure, exclusive material by cutting edge indie acts. The 24-track "State Of Alfairs" was sandwiched by a short, monotonous industrial-sounding dirge simply entitled "Intro", and a more lengthy, PiL/Throbbing Gristlelike experimental piece, "Circumcision", which ends with some Eastern-style yelling. The music may have been in keeping with their name, but this wasn't the direction Primal Scream were fated to take.
"I just want to be a superstar." (Bobby Gillespie, 1990)
* Primal Scream could have been on the NWW list.
(Thanx Alan!)

Sweden: Cis man cleared of rape charges because his woman victim had no vagina

Trigger warning: Discussion of rape, transphobic violence, vaw.

Via The Guerilla Angel Report by Lexie Cannes comes a news report which is disturbing on several levels:

Örebro (Sweden) District Court Judge Dan Sjöstedt acquitted the rapist because the transwoman had no vagina, the planned rape would have been impossible to carry out.

The attacker brutally beat the victim and ripped off her pants in an attempt to rape her. A witness rushed to the scene and intervened. The police came and arrested the attacker.

While the Örebro District Court is convinced the man was trying to rape the woman, they ruled that it was in fact a woman the man wanted to rape, not a 'physical man' and although the fact that the victim had undergone hormone therapy to change gender was considered, the court ruled there was no completed rape.

There are at least two problems I can see with the actions and decisions described in the report.

First, rape is still, under many jurisdictions, defined as a form of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, carried out by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. Although this definition is framed in terms which do not require either the rapist or the victim to be one or other of a binary gender construct, the fact remains that many jurisdictions interpret rape as being something which men do to women. To my mind, this is a hopelessly outdated idea which overlooks that rape is primarily about power, control and coercion. I do not believe that a penis is needed to be able to rape, any more than the rapist's victim needs a vagina to be raped. From that perspective it's entirely possible for a trans woman to be raped, regardless of her genital configuration or surgical status.

Which brings me to my second concern: the ciscentric and fundamentally transphobic subtext manifested in the Court's ruling that the victim could not be raped because she was not a "real" woman as she had, presumably, not undergone surgery. The trope that TS/TG people are not "real" women or men is a pervasive and iniquitous one; its practical outcome is that, no matter how we perceive ourselves - or indeed, how society at large perceives us in our daily lives - no matter what gender is shown on our birth certificates or passports or other legal documentation, we are always and forever the gender we were assigned following a visual inspection of our genitalia at birth by a medical professional in accordance with a reductive binary model.

Consequently, time and again, our lived experiences are denied and we are refused agency over our bodies. You are a woman because you say you are. So am I, so are other trans women - as was the victim in this case. Yet the court decided that this was not so. From a comment on the original post, it seems that the rapist was eventually sentenced for battery, not sexual abuse - and this, in turn, makes me wonder if the infamous "trans panic" defence was used: the rapist was so traumatised to discover his victim was trans that his "natural" reaction was to physically attack her.

Until our cissupremacist society evolves to a point where the majority of its members accept that those variations of genital configuration, gender identity and presentation which exist outside the constructed binary "norms" are not inherently threatening to the status quo, and therefore do not deserve to be met with extreme violence in any form - then, sadly, cases like this with blatantly unjust legal outcomes will continue to happen all too often.

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The image Walking in the Rain is from ChrisGoldNY's Flickr photostream and is used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

[Cross-posted from The F-Word]

Syria files: Wikileaks releases 2m 'embarrassing' emails

The whistle-blowing website Wikileaks says it is releasing more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and corporations.

"Ground-breaking" news stories derived from the "Syria files" will be published over the next two months, Wikileaks said.
Its founder Julian Assange was quoted as saying the material was embarrassing - not only to Syria but its opponents.
The emails are said to date from August 2006 to March 2012.
Syrian authorities have been fighting an internal rebellion for some 16 months. Some 15,800 people have died, activists say.
'Intimate correspondence'
 Emails from the Syrian ministries of presidential affairs, foreign affairs, finance, information, transport and culture are all represented among the data to be released, Sarah Harrison from Wikileaks told reporters in London.
"The range of information extends from the intimate correspondence of the most senior [governing] Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations," she said.
Mr Assange remains in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over accusations of rape and sexual assault.
But Ms Harrison quoted him as saying that this material "helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it."
Some of the 2,434,899 emails would reveal, Wikileaks promises, "how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another".
News stories based on the emails will be published by news providers including US news agency Associated Press, Spain's Publico.es and Egypt's al-Masry al-Youm.
Some stories which have already appeared seem to concern communications between Syrian representatives and Western suppliers of equipment that could be used for military purposes.
@'BBC'

Are children fighting on Syria's rebel front lines?

Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into The Mind of Watts (NY Times June 12, 1966)

The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angeles policemen, Caucasians, succeeded in halting a car driven by Leonard Deadwyler, a Negro. With him were his pregnant wife and a friend. The younger cop (who'd once had a complaint brought against him for rousing some Negro kids around in a more than usually abusive way) went over and stuck his head and gun in the car window to talk to Deadwyler. A moment later there was a shot; the young Negro fell sideways in the seat, and died. The last thing he said, according to the other cop, was, "She's going to have a baby."
The coroner's inquest went on for the better part of two weeks, the cop claiming the car had lurched suddenly, causing his service revolver to go off by accident; Deadwyler's widow claiming that it was cold-blooded murder and that the car had never moved. The verdict, to no one's surprise, cleared the cop of all criminal responsibility. It had been an accident. The D.A. announced immediately that he thought so, too, and that as far as he was concerned the case was closed.
But as far as Watts is concerned, it's still very much open. Preachers in the community are urging calm--or, as others are putting it: "Make any big trouble, baby, The Man just going to come back in and shoot you, like last time." Snipers are sniping but so far not hitting much of anything. Occasional fire bombs are being lobbed at cars with white faces inside, or into empty sports models that look as if they might be white property. There have been a few fires of mysterious origin. A Negro Teen Post--part of the L.A. poverty war's keep-them-out-of-the- streets effort--has had all its windows busted, the young lady in charge expressing the wish next morning that she could talk with the malefactors, involve them, see if they couldn't work out the problem together. In the back of everybody's head, of course, is the same question: Will there be a repeat of last August's riot?
An even more interesting question is: Why is everybody worrying about another riot--haven't things in Watts improved any since the last one? A lot of white folks are wondering. Unhappily, the answer is no. The neighborhood may be seething with social workers, data collectors, VISTA volunteers and other assorted members of the humanitarian establishment, all of whose intentions are the purest in the world. But somehow nothing much has changed. There are still the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the desperate, all hanging in there with what must seem a terrible vitality.
The killing of Leonard Deadwyler has once again brought it all into sharp focus; brought back longstanding pain, reminded everybody of how very often the cop does approach you with his revolver ready, so that nothing he does with it can then really be accidental; of how, especially, at night, everything can suddenly reduce to a matter of reflexes: your life trembling in the crook of a cop's finger because it is dark, and Watts, and the history of this place and these times makes it impossible for the cop to come on any different, or for you to hate him any less. Both of you are caught in something neither of you wants, and yet night after night, with casualities or without, these traditional scenes continue to be played out all over the south-central part of this city.
Whatever else may be wrong in a political way--like the inadequacy of the Great Depression techniques applied to a scene that has long outgrown them; like old-fashioned grafter's glee among the city fathers over the vast amounts of poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to them--lying much closer to the heart of L.A.'s racial sickness is the co-existence of two very different cultures: one white and one black...
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Miles Cleret - Dancing Time With Soundway Mix

Julian Babinga - Mbongui Percussions (Safari Ambiance)
Sygaire / Eric Cosaque - Deux Mille Deux (Sonat Kollective)
Harry & Storm - Get Together (H&S dub edit)
Lord Nelson - Shango (Charlies / Soundway forthcoming)
Osunlade / Curramberos De Gamero - La Prena (Yoruba Soul Mix) (Soul Jazz Records)
Mohjah - Zion Gates (H&S Edit)
Daniel Haaksman featuring Suguindo Sonhos - Hands Up (Man Recordings)
Debruit - Nigeria What? (Civil Music)
The Gatanga Boys Band - Tiga Kundega (H&S edit)
Bulimundo - Santo Antoni La Belem (H&S Edit)
Batida - Alegria (Soundway)
Mbiri Young Stars - Ndiri Ndanoo Niwe (Kiru Brothers Sound / Soundway forthcoming)
Smahila & the SBs - Plan with God (H&S edit)

♪♫ The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Purple Haze (1967)