When free speech is criminalised,

only criminals will be free

(Thanx Loki)

Computer says no: Google slams filter

Internet search giant Google has come out in opposition to the Federal Government's push to introduce mandatory ISP filtering.

In a post on Google Australia's official blog, the company said the plan raised concerns about censorship.

"At Google we are concerned by the Government's plans to introduce a mandatory filtering regime for Internet Service Providers (ISP) in Australia, the first of its kind amongst Western democracies," the post said.

"Our primary concern is that the scope of content to be filtered is too wide."

While Google accepted there must be some limits on internet content, it condemned the Government's filtering approach as heavy-handed.

"We have a bias in favour of people's right to free expression," the post said.

"While we recognise that protecting the free exchange of ideas and information cannot be without some limits, we believe that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.

"Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available - and we agree. Google, like many other internet companies, has a global, all-product ban against child sexual abuse material and we filter out this content from our search results.

"But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."

Citing a recent report into filtering, Google said the use of refused classification (RC) as a screening tool would go far beyond restricting illegal content.

"The recent report by Professors Catharine Lumby, Lelia Green and John Hartley - Untangling The Net: The Scope of Content Caught By Mandatory Internet Filtering - has found that a wide scope of content could be prohibited under the proposed filtering regime," the post said.

'Grey realms'

"Refused classification is a broad category of content that includes not just child sexual abuse material but also socially and politically controversial material - for example, educational content on safer drug use - as well as the grey realms of material instructing in any crime, including politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia.

"This type of content may be unpleasant and unpalatable but we believe that government should not have the right to block information which can inform debate of controversial issues."

But the Federal Government maintains the new filter rules are not intended to curtail freedom of speech.

Google said the Government should instead focus on education and providing effective filtering tools for individuals.

"While the discussion on ISP filtering continues, we should all retain focus on making the Internet safer for people of all ages," the post said.

"Our view is that online safety should focus on user education, user empowerment through technology tools, and cooperation between law enforcement and industry partners. The Government has committed important cyber safety education and engagement programs and yesterday announced additional measures that we welcome."

Google also defended weighing into the controversy, saying discussion on contentious issues was needed for effective democracy.

"Exposing politically controversial topics for public debate is vital for democracy," it said.

"Homosexuality was a crime in Australia until 1976 in ACT, NSW in 1984 and 1997 in Tasmania. Political and social norms change over time and benefit from intense public scrutiny and debate.

"The openness of the internet makes this all the more possible and should be protected.

"The Government has requested comments from interested parties on its proposals for filtering and we encourage everyone to make their views known in this important debate."
@'ABC'

DEA recruits Lil' Wayne to use up all Mexico's drugs

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

"That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was," he said.

The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.

British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers' Association spokesman said: "We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks."

@'The Guardian'

Smoking # 40

Fela: King of the Invisible Art

Christopher Hitchins: In defence of foxhole atheists

It’s no secret that conservative Christians dominate the U.S. military, but when higher-ups start talking about conversion missions, it’s time to worry. The author meets a group of soldiers who aren’t having it.

@'Vanity Fair'

One of this year's most overlooked albums

Pop Crimes by Roland S. Howard

Get a recording of the Sydney album launch at Oxford Arts Club on October 22, 2009

Setlist:

Pop Crimes/Dead Radio/Shut Me Down/She Cried/Wayward Man (False Start)/Wayward Man

Avé Maria/Life's What You Make It/The Golden Age of Bloodshed/Sleep Alone

Encores: Exit Everything/Autoluminescent

HERE

He Hongqing's Chinese face mask changing

Nicole Kidman refuses to discuss Scientology

Nicole Kidman iced over when British reporter Andrew Marr brought up "one of the things you haven't talked about before" on his BBC show. That topic was her ex-husband's religion.

"Scientology," said Marr. "A lot of people would say it is a bullying cult."

Kidman stumbled over her response before deciding she wasn't going to give one.

"I just don't . . . This is just so not . . ." she said. Then, "I'm here to publicize 'Nine.' If I was here to do an expose on myself then I'd be like, 'Let's go,' but I have no interest in discussing any of that."

"You don't want to talk about Scientology?" Marr persisted.

"No, I'll talk about 'Nine,'" said Kidman.

The tense exchange was scrapped from the television version of 'The Andrew Marr Show' but released online by the BBC.

Watch video @'HuffPo'

Hmmm!

@'Neatorama' via 'Mogadonia'

More creepy Santas (whose laps we want nothing to do with) @'Mental Floss'

Paraphilia Magazine - The Doppelganger Issue

HERE

Grateful Dead's Betty's Boards

Soundboards recorded by Betty Cantor

HERE

Al Franken calls out John Thune for lying on the Senate floor: “Let’s have an honest debate, for goodness sakes!”

Transcript @'Daily Kos'

"On yer AL!!!"

(Jeez - this man IS good)

Review: Bonny Billy & The Picket Line Funtown Comedown (Drag City)

No one really knows where Funtown is, except that it’s someplace that (allegedly) exists outside of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s not on maps. You won’t find it in your dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet: Kentucky. Hell, Google won’t even help. But Bonny “the artist formerly known as ‘Bonnie Prince’” Billy (née Will Oldham) and a virtually unknown group of musicians called The Picket Line recorded a live album there and called it Funtown Comedown. And theirs is exactly the kind of sound you’d expect to come from a group called Bonny Billy & The Picket Line playing at some unmapped place in the backwoods of Kentucky: nasally folk that vacillates from quiet to wild and sounds even better if everyone sings along.
Verdict: Buy it (because, in the spirit of all things Funtown, it’s only out on vinyl)

@'Vanity Fair'

Hey Yotte! Just around the corner from you eh...?

This crazy fuct up world (part #....)

23-year-old Matthew Freeman is facing a year in jail for violating Michigan’s laws for convicted sex offenders. He was caught by a police officer playing basketball within 400 feet of a school. He also happened to be in front of his own home. Michigan law requires him to remain more than 1,000 feet away from places where children congregate. Freeman’s mother says she checked with Pittsfield Township police before moving to the home to be sure it complied with Freeman’s status. She says they told her it did. They now say it’s Freeman’s responsibility to make sure he doesn’t violate the sex offender law.
Freeman was convicted of fourth-degree sexual assault in 2003 for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. He was 17 at the time. The conviction required him to spend 10 years on the state’s sex offender list. After seeing the girl again and later getting caught stealing a video game, he was sentenced to 90 days in jail, and ordered to remain on the list until 2028. At that point he dropped out of high school, and hasn’t gone back.
But let’s not be too harsh on Michigan’s law. I’m sure that because of the continuing harassment of people like Freeman, 17-year-boys and 15-year-old girls are no longer having sex in Michigan.

@'The Agitator'

http://www.cafepress.com.au/supportdissent

Happy Birthday Fritz!

When we were all younger & thinner!!!
Don't forget that you can grab trax from Fritz's Hashashan project here.

You know it makes (NO) sense

HERE

More on redneck, racist Sherrif Joe Arpaio here and here and his (alleged) links to neo - nazi groups here.

Patti Smith - White Christmas

Studio outtake c. 1978 (?)

HERE

Israel fury at UK attempt to arrest Tzipi Livni

Israel has reacted angrily to the issuing by a British court of an arrest warrant for the former Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.

The warrant, granted by a London court on Saturday, was revoked on Monday when it was found Ms Livni was not visiting the UK.
Ms Livni was foreign minister during Israel's Gaza assault last winter.
It is the first time a UK court has issued a warrant for the arrest of a former Israeli minister.
Ms Livni said the court had been "abused" by the Palestinian plaintiffs who requested the warrant.
"What needs to be put on trial here is the abuse of the British legal system," she told the BBC.
"This is not a suit against Tzipi Livni, this is not a law suit against Israel. This is a lawsuit against any democracy that fights terror."
She stood by her decisions during the three-week assault Gaza offensive which began in December last year, she said.
Israel's foreign ministry summoned the UK's ambassador to Israel to deliver a rebuke over the warrant.

We completely reject this absurdity taking place in Britain Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli Prime Minister

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the situation was "an absurdity".
"We will not accept a situation in which [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, [Defence Minister] Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will be summoned to the defendants' chair," Mr Netanyahu said in a statement.
"We will not agree to have Israel Defence Force soldiers, who defended the citizens of Israel bravely and ethically against a cruel and criminal enemy (!), be recognised as war criminals. We completely reject this absurdity taking place in Britain," he said.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners have tried several times to have Israeli officials arrested under the principle of universal jurisdiction...

@'BBC'

.

David Byrne & Fatboy Slim - Here Lies Love (Feb 2010)

Deluxe package includes a 100-page book,
2 CDs and a DVD

HERE LIES LOVE
David Byrne & Fatboy Slim
To be released 23 February 2010 on Todomundo/Nonesuch Records
“The story I am interested in is about asking what drives a powerful person—what makes them tick? How do they make and then remake themselves? I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if—as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music—one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theater to the disco? Was that possible? If so, wouldn’t that be amazing!” DB

featuring guests-Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine),Allison Moorer,Róisín Murphy,Alice Russell,Santigold ...
more HERE

AAAAAGH!!! What do I see coming next year in my crystal balls...

With the news that ABBA & Genesis (amongst others) will be joining The Stooges in the 2010 Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, I can forsee a 'Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' (with Gabriel) world tour and ABBA selling a shitload of CD's.

Fuck I do wish that I was going to be at Hammersmith....

Fela Kuti's Bitch of a Life by Sam Baldwin

Sexism, sadly, is what comes through most strongly in Carlos Moore's Fela: This Bitch of a Life, the newly rereleased 1982 authorized biography of Africa's greatest musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Well, sexism and police brutality. The book, translated from the French, is essentially a well-organized and very long interview of Fela at his peak. For die-hard fans of the original Black President this may be a enticing read, but the average yuppie with an eclectic taste in music is probably better off checking out the Fela Project.

Fela is an natural topic for Moore, a scholar of race who's led a very interesting life in his own right. Fela's anticolonial message is a powerful one and there's a lot to like about his politics and worldview

This is the Fela who was sold to me as a teenager into Bob Dylan, jam bands, and reggae. The Fela who created his own republic inside of Nigeria as an act of defiance, who relentlessly criticized the corrupt military regimes, who sang a song ("Zombie") that actually triggered riots, who went to court more than 200 times and was unjustly in and out of prison his entire adult life. That's all there, of course—and just how many times Fela and his crew were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned by the Nigerian authorities is a staggering reality that leaps out of Moore's book.

But chances are you know about all that if you're picking up Fela: This Bitch of a Life. What you probably didn't know, but will learn in Chapter 20, is that "the law that says: 'Don't fuck until you're sixteen,' turns men into homosexuals and women into lesbians" or that "pollution, religion, and food... are the causes of homosexuality." When it comes to women, the quotes are laughable: "Men and women are on two different levels," and "Equality between male and female? No! Never! Impossible!" and, the topper, "Do I see man as being naturally superior to women? Naturally."

A 65-page segment in the middle of the book consists of the same short interview conducted with each of the 15 wives, or queens, he had at the time (down from 27 at his mass marriage.) In nearly all the interviews the women admit that Fela had, on multiple occasions, slapped them, but that yes, they liked living with him.

A short paragraph describing the personal history and physical appearance of each wife reads like the plaque in front of an animal at a petting zoo ("Of average height and plumply slender, her broad, round face is studded with large, sensitive eyes and an expression of alert awareness.") Moore isn't doing much to empower the women or critique the hyperpatriarchy, and at one point asks a queen if she likes Fela's penis. In this case, giving a voice to the voiceless doesn't amount to anything and these pages are a bitch of a read.

How Fela became such a profound sexist is actually quite interesting because, unlike most people, he wasn't born that way. Fela's mother was a pioneering feminist activist, an incredible woman who in her capacity as president of the Women's International Democratic Federation traveled the world, met with Mao personally, and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960. Fela's own attitudes towards women emerged later, when, after living as an outsider in the racist London of the early 1960s and befriending Black Power advocates in the United States, he rediscovered his Africanness. Thus began a lifelong and entirely uncritical embrace of traditional African values, among them a very low opinion of women, formal education, and the threat of AIDS, of which he would die in 1997. A Mother Jones interview of Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author Wole Soykinka mentions this specifically:

MJ: You write about your cousin, musician Fela Kuti, and how you think his own politics were kind of naive…
WS: Not think, were! He was a passionate Africanist. But his definition and embrace of Africanism did not discriminate: Anything that was African was positive. You would never hear a word against Idi Amin, against the monsters. He always accused me of being a CIA agent when I was campaigning against Idi Amin. He’d say, “Boss”—he called me “Boss”—“Boss Wole, don’t be influenced by the CIA people.” I said, “Shut up, you don’t know anything about it!”

To his credit, Moore has added a fabulous epilogue chronicling the decline and fall of Fela, contextualizing many of the performer's views within a life that was puntuated by violence, incarceration, and illness. He also sets Fela alongside James Brown and Bob Marley as "the only 20th century musicians to have electrified the world with explicitly anti-establishment and unapologetically ghetto-inspired black music."

Unlike Marley, Fela was an angry political organizer in open conflict with the state. You've got to give Fela props for not selling out. He could have acquiesced to the demands of western record companies, moved to Europe or the US, made millions selling a vague African revolution, and have his poster hanging in every college dorm room in the world, right between Che and Marley. Instead he decided to set up a massive commune in the middle of one of the poorest parts of Lagos, loudly and specifically criticize Nigeria's military regimes, and give away all his money to friends, hangers on, and the poor. He died broke and crazy, of AIDS, and 1 million people filed by his glass casket, where he was laid to rest with a joint in his hand. "No one will force me out of this country," he once said. "If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit."

Ultimately, Fela's story is a tragic one, a fact too easily forgotten while listening to his  often mirthful, raucous albums. Reading Moore's book restores an emotional weight to a music that was forged in protest, under duress, suffering from grief. The mournful ballad "Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am," will leave your soul aching. This is Fela, he of the bitch of a life.

@'Mother Jones'

Bill Laswell on Fela Kuti (1999)

This article was originally published in Mean Magazine (October 1999), with art direction by Camille Rose Garcia, and an overview of Fela’s catalog by Michael Veal; the main article text, and sidebars, were later reprinted in full in the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 book (thank you Douglas Wolk and Peter Guralnick). Main article text is online here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/11/02/fela-king-of-the-invisible-art
BILL LASWELL
by Jay Babcock
Bill Laswell is a bassist, producer and, having worked with countless important musicians from dozens of countries, one of the vortex points around which the musical universe revolves. I spoke with Laswell about his controversial work with Fela…

Q: When did you first get into Fela’s music?
Bill Laswell: When I started listening to Cream and stuff, I started to read interviews with people like Ginger [Baker] about where they were getting their stuff from. Just like [Eric] Clapton was getting ideas from blues guys, I realized that rhythm musicians were getting a lot of information from Africa. I immediately started looking for the records, especially Afrobeat. Just that syncopation, the up feel. You get ideas about putting rhythms together.
Those early bands Fela had were really tight. This African guy told me James Brown had just ‘messed him up’—well, Fela had bands that were almost like that. I don’t think as aggressively tight, but it had a feel, an Afrobeat, African feel, with a modern sound.
How did you end up producing Army Arrangement?
At that time in Paris in ‘84 or ‘85, Celluloid was the label that all African, or West African, everybody, was going to them for some reason. And they got ahold of Fela’s contract and his catalog and they just started calling the shots. Fela was on his way to New York to come and we were going to mix the record when he came.
On the way to New York, getting on the plane in Nigeria, he had something like ten grand in cash in US dollars, I think. He was immediately put in jail, the tapes arrived, and the Celluloid people were like, ‘Well great, let’s go ahead and mix it. Let’s capitalize on the fact that he’s in jail, we’ll get more press.’ But the tapes I received weren’t really musical or necessarily well-recorded. So we felt that if we just mixed it, it wouldn’t bring anything new to what Fela’s legend was. So we added Sly Dunbar, Bernie Worrell and Aiyb Dieng from Senegal.
Did you ever meet Fela?
[When he got out of jail,] Fela did a press tour in the States. He was at the Gramercy Hotel in New York. I went there and he was sitting around his room wearing a shirt and some underwear and sitting in a lotus position on the couch, a bunch of people coming in and out, and we spoke for a few minutes. He was kind of amazed that I would come because he had said that he didn’t like what I had done. There was an African magazine where I was quoted as saying, “It’s much better to mix an artist’s work if they’re in prison.” Some really stupid shit. And that freaked him out. And he was saying that there was a sound that wasn’t African that I put on the album. [But] it was a Senegalese drummer, so of course it’s African.
It’s very interesting because everybody thought I wouldn’t go meet him, so I just went in anyway. By that time he had started to deteriorate, he wasn’t as strong. You could feel he wasn’t the person he was. He just
wasn’t the presence that he was before. And it showed in the music too, because in the ’70s Fela had a really strong band and then he just got kind of more lighter and lighter. And then a lot of weird shit came into that scene… That was a heavy scene. They were around some heavy people. Cuz he was the BIGGEST thing happening in Nigeria, and there’s some heavy stuff in Nigeria—not all positive.
@'Arthur' 

Fela Kuti - Army Arrangement