Caribou – Boiler Room: Belfast 2024-10-31
36 minutes ago
Sunday 17 January 2010
Afghan MPs reject many new Karzai cabinet nominees
The Afghan parliament has rejected 10 of 17 new cabinet nominees suggested by President Hamid Karzai.
The vote comes two weeks after MPs turned down most of Mr Karzai's first choices, dealing him a serious blow. Two key posts were approved - Mr Karzai's former security adviser Zalmay Rasul as foreign minister and Habibullah Ghalib as justice minister.
However, MPs backed only one of the three women nominees, Amina Afzali, as work and social affairs minister.
The two women put forward for the posts of public health and women's affairs were rejected.
The BBC's Mark Dummett, in Kabul, says Mr Karzai had hoped to have his new cabinet in place before a crucial donor conference in London on 28 January, but that now appears impossible.
However despite the setback, the president now has 14 of 24 ministers confirmed including the most powerful ones in charge of foreign, defence and interior ministries, our correspondent adds.
It is not yet clear when the president will propose names to fill the vacant positions and when Parliament will vote for these candidates.
After the first vote on 2 January, Mr Karzai ordered MPs to cancel their winter break to speed up progress towards getting a functioning government in place.
The rejection of 17 of Mr Karzai's 24 original choices was seen as a blow to his authority, already damaged after an election marred by fraud in August.
The new list included none of the previously rejected nominees.
MPs spent the last week questioning the new candidates ahead of Saturday's vote, which was carried out by secret ballot.
Some had complained that candidates were not suitably qualified or that others were too closely aligned to warlords.
Mr Karzai faces strong international pressure to create a government that can oversee reforms.
The UN has said international funding for Afghanistan's parliamentary elections this year will depend on reform of the country's election institutions.
Mr Karzai is also under pressure to form a government before a crucial donor conference in London on 28 January.
Afghanistan “Hearts and Minds” Special: Take a Photo, Win a Camera!
The NATO Joint Forces Command in Afghanistan announces a photo contest: “Why Afghanistan Matters”. From the website:
Here’s your chance to let the world see “Why Afghanistan Matters” through your lens!
Send us your original photos and compete for the chance to win one of FIVE digital cameras! The public will be asked to choose a winner in one of the following four categories, with a panel of judges selecting an overall winner from the top three in all categories.
Here are some examples, in NATO’s eyes, of photos you might want to submit.
Here, EA suggests, are photos that might not get you that “brand new Nikon D90 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera plus a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VRII Telephoto Zoom Lens”:
HA! (True story)
A floor collapsed beneath a group of about 20 members of Weight Watchers as they gathered to compare how many pounds they had shed over Christmas.
Members of the weight-loss club were lining up to compare readings on the scales when they heard a bang as the floor came away from the walls of their meeting room in Växjö in southern Sweden.
“We suddenly heard a huge thud – we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air. The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls,” one of the those present told the Smålandsposten newspaper.
They abandoned the room as the floor started to give way in other areas.
"We are going to have to find a replacement premises," Therese Levin, a consultant for Weight Watchers told the newspaper.
No one was injured in the incident, the cause of which is being investigated. The scales were not damaged and the weigh-in continued in a nearby corridor.
(Thanx Stan!)
Why France is still in love with Serge
To older Britons, Serge Gainsbourg will always be the ugly, unshaven Frenchman who sang a filthy pop duet with a sweet English rose.
In France, he is remembered either as one of the great masters of chanson française or a drunken, pretentious, unpatriotic bore. Both sides of Serge Gainsbourg's career – and his little-known early years as a terrified Jewish child in wartime France – are explored in a bio-pic opening in France next week. The movie, Gainsbourg, une vie héroique (Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life) is, in its way, as poignant and painful as the singer's own life. One of its principal roles, that of Gainsbourg's British muse and third wife, Jane Birkin, is played, brilliantly, by a young British actress, Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide soon after the film was completed last year. The director, Joann Sfar, previously a writer of comic-strip books, has dedicated his movie to Ms Gordon, who was 29 when she died. "The film owes a great deal to the warmth, the sweetness and the immense talent of Lucy Gordon," Mr Sfar said. "Her personality was so luminous, so light, so funny." French film critics who saw a gala première in Paris on Thursday night also gave high praise to Ms Gordon's portrayal of Jane Birkin. They were equally impressed by the performance of the French theatre actor, Eric Elmosnino, as Gainsbourg at the height of his career. They were less convinced by the model and actress Laetitia Casta's portrayal of the French sex symbol and queen of pout, Brigitte Bardot, one of the singer's many other conquests. A curiosity of the film is Mr Sfar's insistence that the actors must sing for themselves and not mime to original recordings. The recreation by Ms Gordon and Mr Elmosnino of the 1969 classic of heavy breathing and orgasmic noises, "Je t'aime, Moi non plus" – Gainsbourg's only global hit – is reasonably convincing. Other actors' efforts range from the effective to the courageous to the karaoke borderline. Mr Sfar admits that he has simplified and exaggerated the life of a man who, in any case, loved to caricature himself. By doing so he has angered Ms Birkin, now a 62-year-old English rose and the most popular Briton living in France. As the chief guardian of the temple of Gainsbourg's memory, she insisted that the film's title must be followed by a disclaimer describing it as not a biography but a "conte" or "folk-tale" by the director. Another curiosity of the movie is the fact that Mr Sfar originally tried to cast the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father. Ms Gainsbourg considered this startling offer but then refused. Mr Elmosnino, 45, looks, in fact, much more like the seductively unlovely Gainsbourg than the singer's beautiful daughter does. When asked once to explain his serial success with women despite what he described as his "cabbage-head" looks, Gainsbourg said: "Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer." A further curiosity in the film is that Gainsbourg is portrayed as constantly battling with an alter-ego – humorous and creative but also self-destructive – which assumes a physical form, played by the American actor, Doug Jones. The director, Mr Sfar, said that he wanted to tell the story of a man who had a "love- hate relationship with his country and the women he loved ... a man who was terrified of being alone and had a desperate desire to be liked but muddled the love of his loved ones and the love of the public." The story of Gainsbourg's often destructive relationships with women will also be examined in a documentary which will be shown on French TV next week. Gainsbourg was born in Paris as Lucien Ginsburg, the son of a poor Russian-Jewish immigrant family in 1928. As a 12-year-old child in Vichy France, he was forced to wear a yellow star and was lucky to escape deportation to the death camps. After the war, he attempted unsuccessfully to become a painter before finding work as a songwriter and a crooner in bars. Edith Piaf asked him to write songs for her but he declined. His early career as a pop singer and pop writer, after his first album in 1958, was a mixture of rebellion, originality and cynical mimicry of commercial pop. He wrote songs for, among others, Juliette Greco, Petula Clarke and Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Karina and Nana Mouskouri. He even composed a Eurovision Song Contest winner – "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son" – for France Gall in 1965. He wrote an album of songs for the actress Catherine Deneuve and sang duets – and had a year-long love affair – with Brigitte Bardot. The infamous "Je t'aime. Moi non Plus" ("I love you. Me neither") was originally written for and recorded with Bardot but she banned its release (a judgement seconded by the BBC and the Vatican when the celebrated Jane Birkin version emerged in 1969). In the last decade, Gainsbourg has become a cult hero and inspiration to British bands from Portishead to Franz Ferdinand. He has also been rediscovered by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock. He is now seen as a precursor of Queen or David Bowie – as someone who successfully spliced rock and jazz and classical music and a writer who produced poetic rather than crass pop lyrics (although he also wrote plenty of those in his time). The first half of the 130-minute movie follows Gainsbourg's life when he was still Ginsburg, a shy, poetic boy and teenager, ashamed of what he calls his "ugly Jewish face". The second half – less effective according to French critics – shows his emergence as "Gainsbourg", the provocative womaniser and singer-songwriter. It ends with his descent into alcoholism as the man that the French press nicknamed "Gainsbarre". But the film steers clear of one of his most disturbing aspects: his obsession in song with the sexual attraction of under-age girls.
In France, he is remembered either as one of the great masters of chanson française or a drunken, pretentious, unpatriotic bore. Both sides of Serge Gainsbourg's career – and his little-known early years as a terrified Jewish child in wartime France – are explored in a bio-pic opening in France next week. The movie, Gainsbourg, une vie héroique (Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life) is, in its way, as poignant and painful as the singer's own life. One of its principal roles, that of Gainsbourg's British muse and third wife, Jane Birkin, is played, brilliantly, by a young British actress, Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide soon after the film was completed last year. The director, Joann Sfar, previously a writer of comic-strip books, has dedicated his movie to Ms Gordon, who was 29 when she died. "The film owes a great deal to the warmth, the sweetness and the immense talent of Lucy Gordon," Mr Sfar said. "Her personality was so luminous, so light, so funny." French film critics who saw a gala première in Paris on Thursday night also gave high praise to Ms Gordon's portrayal of Jane Birkin. They were equally impressed by the performance of the French theatre actor, Eric Elmosnino, as Gainsbourg at the height of his career. They were less convinced by the model and actress Laetitia Casta's portrayal of the French sex symbol and queen of pout, Brigitte Bardot, one of the singer's many other conquests. A curiosity of the film is Mr Sfar's insistence that the actors must sing for themselves and not mime to original recordings. The recreation by Ms Gordon and Mr Elmosnino of the 1969 classic of heavy breathing and orgasmic noises, "Je t'aime, Moi non plus" – Gainsbourg's only global hit – is reasonably convincing. Other actors' efforts range from the effective to the courageous to the karaoke borderline. Mr Sfar admits that he has simplified and exaggerated the life of a man who, in any case, loved to caricature himself. By doing so he has angered Ms Birkin, now a 62-year-old English rose and the most popular Briton living in France. As the chief guardian of the temple of Gainsbourg's memory, she insisted that the film's title must be followed by a disclaimer describing it as not a biography but a "conte" or "folk-tale" by the director. Another curiosity of the movie is the fact that Mr Sfar originally tried to cast the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father. Ms Gainsbourg considered this startling offer but then refused. Mr Elmosnino, 45, looks, in fact, much more like the seductively unlovely Gainsbourg than the singer's beautiful daughter does. When asked once to explain his serial success with women despite what he described as his "cabbage-head" looks, Gainsbourg said: "Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer." A further curiosity in the film is that Gainsbourg is portrayed as constantly battling with an alter-ego – humorous and creative but also self-destructive – which assumes a physical form, played by the American actor, Doug Jones. The director, Mr Sfar, said that he wanted to tell the story of a man who had a "love- hate relationship with his country and the women he loved ... a man who was terrified of being alone and had a desperate desire to be liked but muddled the love of his loved ones and the love of the public." The story of Gainsbourg's often destructive relationships with women will also be examined in a documentary which will be shown on French TV next week. Gainsbourg was born in Paris as Lucien Ginsburg, the son of a poor Russian-Jewish immigrant family in 1928. As a 12-year-old child in Vichy France, he was forced to wear a yellow star and was lucky to escape deportation to the death camps. After the war, he attempted unsuccessfully to become a painter before finding work as a songwriter and a crooner in bars. Edith Piaf asked him to write songs for her but he declined. His early career as a pop singer and pop writer, after his first album in 1958, was a mixture of rebellion, originality and cynical mimicry of commercial pop. He wrote songs for, among others, Juliette Greco, Petula Clarke and Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Karina and Nana Mouskouri. He even composed a Eurovision Song Contest winner – "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son" – for France Gall in 1965. He wrote an album of songs for the actress Catherine Deneuve and sang duets – and had a year-long love affair – with Brigitte Bardot. The infamous "Je t'aime. Moi non Plus" ("I love you. Me neither") was originally written for and recorded with Bardot but she banned its release (a judgement seconded by the BBC and the Vatican when the celebrated Jane Birkin version emerged in 1969). In the last decade, Gainsbourg has become a cult hero and inspiration to British bands from Portishead to Franz Ferdinand. He has also been rediscovered by young people in his home country as one of the few truly original musicians that France produced in the classic years of pop and rock. He is now seen as a precursor of Queen or David Bowie – as someone who successfully spliced rock and jazz and classical music and a writer who produced poetic rather than crass pop lyrics (although he also wrote plenty of those in his time). The first half of the 130-minute movie follows Gainsbourg's life when he was still Ginsburg, a shy, poetic boy and teenager, ashamed of what he calls his "ugly Jewish face". The second half – less effective according to French critics – shows his emergence as "Gainsbourg", the provocative womaniser and singer-songwriter. It ends with his descent into alcoholism as the man that the French press nicknamed "Gainsbarre". But the film steers clear of one of his most disturbing aspects: his obsession in song with the sexual attraction of under-age girls.
(Thanx Nick!)
Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal by Glenn Greenwald
Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." Sunstein's 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story's Daniel Tencer.
There's no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein's position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked. Regardless, Sunstein's closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote. This isn't an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein's close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class. All of that makes Sunstein's paper worth examining in greater detail...
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Saturday 16 January 2010
Duck hunters spark nuclear weapons plant lockdown in Texas
A pair of duck hunters have trigged a security alert at a nuclear weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Officials locked the plant after getting reports of individuals in camouflage gear stalking across the road from the factory. They turned out to be two plant employees who had decided to spend their day off hunting fowl.
The plant was briefly shut as a "precautionary measure," a plant official said.
"They were just doing what people do around here," said Carson County Sheriff Tam Terry.
"They just had a lot more company than they were planning on."
The pair, who sparked the alert when spotted early in the morning carrying arms and dressed in camouflage gear, were later found in a nearby field setting up goose decoys.
No charges will be filed against the men who both had permission to hunt from the local landowner.
(Thanx Carolyn!)
WTF???
Was just reading in the 'Guardian Weekly' from a couple of weeks ago that in certain parts of the UK, kids at school are being forced to wear goggles when playing conkers!!!
We are producing an entire generation of children with absolutely no sense of resilience and coping skills...
Thinking of the children? Hmmm!
(And the school that enforces that kids have to wear goggles when using blue-tac... JeebusHfugnchrist!!!)
(And the school that enforces that kids have to wear goggles when using blue-tac... JeebusHfugnchrist!!!)
OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free
Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.
After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court.
Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.
“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.
It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”
It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.
Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”
University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.
“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.
For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.
“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.
The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”
Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.
“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.
“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.
At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.
The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.
Scaling the Digital Wall in China
The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable.
Just as Mongol invaders could not be stopped by the Great Wall, Chinese citizens have found ways to circumvent the sophisticated Internet censorship systems designed to restrict them.
They are using a variety of tools to evade government filters and to reach the wide-open Web that the Chinese government deems dangerous — sites like YouTube, Facebook and, if Google makes good on its threat to withdraw from China, Google.cn.
It’s difficult to say precisely how many people in China engage in acts of digital disobedience. But college students in China and activists around the world say the number has been growing ever since the government stepped up efforts to “cleanse” the Web during the Beijing Olympics and the Communist regime’s 60th anniversary last year.
As part of that purge, the Chinese government shut down access to pornography sites, blogs, online video sites, Facebook, Twitter and more.
While only a small percentage of Chinese use these tools to sidestep government filters, the ease with which they can do it illustrates the difficulty any government faces in enforcing the type of strict censorship that was possible only a few years ago.
Jason Ng, a Chinese engineering school graduate who will say only that he works in the media business, wakes every day at 8:30 a.m., and then begins his virtual travels through an open, global network by fanqiang, or “scaling the wall.” He connects to an overseas computer with a link, called a proxy server, that he set up himself. It costs 15 renminbi, or around $2, a month to share with about two dozen other friends.
Mr. Ng then works on his blog and checks the news on Google Reader and Twitter to “officially start my day of information.” Chinese citizens engaged in such practices say the government rarely cracks down on them individually, preferring instead to go after prominent dissidents who publish information about forbidden topics online.
As a result, college students, human rights activists, bloggers, journalists and even multinational corporations in China are rushing to use tools that go over or around barriers set up by Chinese regulators, in part because they feel it is the only way to participate in a global online community.
Isaac Mao, a well-known blogger and activist in China, says the number of people seeking access to blocked sites has grown as more and more popular Web sites have been shut down by Beijing.
These digital dissidents have begun to organize small conferences and networks to share information and tricks about how to get access to banned material. “People start to hold a grudge against the government for depriving them of access to the Web sites they regularly visit,” Mr. Mao says.
But as the government has expanded its control over Internet, it has also intensified efforts to close some of the channels being used to evade the online blockade. The result has been a technological game of cat and mouse between the Chinese government and a global contingent fighting for online freedoms...
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WARNING!!! Update re: Ultrareach
Internet anti-censorship technology was thought of as "mission impossible" two years ago. We started thorough R&D on other existing technologies as well as from end users' perspective. While other existing technologies were developed for user's privacy and anonymity on Internet, we solved the connection and reconnection problem, which is the key issue for user to access web site without being blocked. Built on solid theoretical analysis and professional quality, UltraReach has successfully invented the technology platform called the GIFT system, which offers guaranteed connection and reconnection service to users inside these censor countries and capability of serving very large number of users with affordable resource. More than one year live service performance has proved that the GIFT technology has successfully broken through the so-called "Great Firewall" which is built with state-of-art firewall equipments and softwares with virtually unlimited resource from government.
Powered by GIFT technology, UltraReach.Net portal is the first home page for users to visit when they are connected to our service. Through the web portal users inside the censored zones can surf any public web sites in the free world. It naturally becomes a precious window for users inside China to look out for world news and other web contents that are blocked. The UltraReach.Net attracts thousands of users in China with daily news stories, featured articles and links from world media, governmental and non-governmental organizations, different groups and individual sites.
The outstanding performance of our service has made UltraReach Internet well known among the users who seek the Internet freedom in the censored country, and at the meantime attracted heavy attacks from Chinese Internet police. The GIFT system has survived various assaults including DNS hijacking, IP blocking, DOS attacking etc. We've taken the threats from the censor as opportunities to continuously improve the performance and reliability of our technology. In fact, the GIFT system has been mature enough for reliable service and it depends on the financial resource to expand its user base.
The next-level solution from UltraReach Internet as well as the real time performance has proved that our system and service is by far superior to other existing technologies. The main differentiators consist of anti-blocking power, connection and re-connection capability and the ability to serve and maintain a very large number of users from inside China. As the clear leader among the Internet anti-jamming technology and service providers, we are currently the only one that can offer reliable service to deliver web contents to the massive number of users in China.
My son did a bit of research into 'Ultrareach' and warning bells started to ring!
Face of the day
He Pingping of China holds the hand of Sultan Kosen of Turkey as they attend the Guinness World Records Roadshow, on January 14, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey. He, standing at 73 cm (2 feet 5 inch), and Kosen, at 246.5 cm (8 feet 1 inch), are both in the Guinness World Records for their statures. By Burak Kara/Getty Images.
Dopplereffekt @ Arena Club, Berlin [28.11.09]
Dopplereffekt @ Arena Club, Berlin
28 Nov 2009
Dopplereffekt: Gerald Donald, Kim Karli, Michaela To-Nhan Bertel, Rudolf Klorzeiger, William Scott
Download @'New Technoid'
Friday 15 January 2010
Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Nations Step Up Aid Pledges to Haiti
“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students.
Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, crouching deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to wear away the metal that had his son’s leg pinned down inside. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.
By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital struggling to prevent those numbers from rising. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.
With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised $100 million in aid, as the first wave of a projected 5,000 American troops began arriving to provide security and the infrastructure for the expected flood of aid from around the world.
“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”
Help was only beginning to arrive Thursday as the United States military took over the wrecked air traffic control system to land cargo planes with food and water, though the airport was clogged and chaotic with little or no fuel for planes to return. Doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials in hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.
“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived earlier in the day to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”
United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.
“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”
The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.
The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping troops around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country...
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The Catastrophist - Christopher Hitchins on J.G. Ballard
n the spring of 2006, at the Hay-on-Wye book festival, I was introduced at dinner to Sir Martin Rees, who is the professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University and also holds the pleasingly archaic title of Astronomer Royal. He was to give a lecture that was later reprinted with the title “Dark Materials,” in honor of the late professor Joseph Rotblat. In the course of this astonishing talk, he voiced the following thought:
“Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”
Among the several questions that jostled for the uppermost in my mind was this: Where is the fiction that can rise to the level of this stupefying reality? (Only one novelist, Julian Barnes, was sufficiently struck to include Rees’s passage in a book, but that was in his extended nonfiction memoir about death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.) I quite soon came to realize that there was indeed a writer who could have heard or read those words with equanimity, even satisfaction, and that this was J. G. Ballard. For him, the possibility of any mutation or metamorphosis was to be taken for granted, if not indeed welcomed, as was the contingency that, dead sun or no dead sun, the terrestrial globe could very readily be imagined after we’re gone.
As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H. G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons: the interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did. Hearing me drone on in this vein about 30 years ago, Amis fils (who contributes a highly lucid introduction to this collection) wordlessly handed me The Drowned World, The Day of Forever, and, for a shift in pace and rhythm, Crash. Any one of these would have done the trick.
For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively “straight” novel, Empire of the Sun, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being 13 years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It’s not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don’t forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati. Included in this collection is a very strong 1977 story, “The Dead Time,” a sort of curtain-raiser to Empire—Ballard’s own preferred name for his book—in which a young man released from Japanese captivity drives a truckload of cadavers across a stricken landscape and ends up feeding a scrap of his own torn flesh to a ravenous child.
Readers of Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life (a book with a slightly but not entirely misleading title) will soon enough discern that he built on his wartime Shanghai traumas in three related ways. As a teenager in post-war England he came across first Freud, and second the surrealists. He describes the two encounters as devastating in that they taught him what he already knew: religion is abject nonsense, human beings positively enjoy inflicting cruelty, and our species is prone to, and can coexist with, the most grotesque absurdities. What could have been more natural, then, than that Ballard the student should devote himself to classes in anatomy, spending quality time with corpses, some of whom, in life, had been dedicated professors in the department. An astonishing number of his shorter works follow the inspiration of Crash, also filmed, this time by David Cronenberg, in morbid and almost loving accounts of “wound profiles,” gashes, fractures, and other inflictions on the flesh and bones. Fascinated by the possibility of death in traffic, and rather riveted by the murder of John Kennedy, Ballard produced a themed series titled The Atrocity Exhibition, here partially collected, where collisions and ejaculations and celebrities are brought together in a vigorously stirred mix of Eros and Thanatos. His antic use of this never-failing formula got him briefly disowned by his American publisher and was claimed by Ballard as “pornographic science fiction,” but if you can read “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race” or “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.
Another early story (though not represented here: the claim of this volume to be “complete” is somewhat deceptive) in something of the same style, “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” ignited a ridiculous fuss in the very news rags whose ghoulish coverage of her life Ballard was intending to satirize. Randolph Churchill led the charge, demanding punishment for the tiny magazine that printed it. This “modest proposal” furnishes one of many clues to a spring of Ballard’s inspiration, which is fairly obviously the work of Jonathan Swift. In 1964 he even wrote an ultra-macabre story, “The Drowned Giant,” which tells of what happens when the corpse of a beautiful but gigantic man washes ashore on a beach “five miles to the north-west of the city.” The local Lilliputians find cheap but inventive ways of desecrating and disfiguring the body before cutting it up for souvenirs and finally rendering it down in big vats. One might characterize this as the microcosmically ideal Ballard fantasy, in that it partakes of the surreal—the “Gulliver” being represented as a huge flesh statue based on the work of Praxiteles—as well as of the Freudian: “as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite.” In the pattern of many other stories, the narrator adopts the tone of a pathologist dictating a detached report of gross anatomy. A single phrase, colossal wreck, is a borrowing from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which may be the closest that Ballard ever came to a concession to the Romantic school.
Another and nearer literary source is provided by the name—Traven—of the solitary character in “The Terminal Beach.” This is one of two tales—the other being “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”—in which Ballard makes an imaginarium out of the ruined scapes of World War II. Like his modern but vacant cities full of ghostly tower blocks (he is obsessed with towers of all sorts) and abandoned swimming pools, the Pacific and Atlantic beaches, still covered by concrete blocks and bunkers, furnish the ideal setting for a Ballardian wasteland. The beach in the first story has the additional advantage of having been the site of an annihilating nuclear test. The revenant shapes of long-dead Japanese and Germans are allowed a pitiless flicker before their extinction.
Ballard is not the most quotable of authors, because he takes quite a long time to set a scene and because his use of dialogue is more efficient than it is anything else. But he can produce arresting phrases and images. He is especially observant about eyes. On succeeding pages of “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” we find that “memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out eyes” and that the dwarf, Petit Manuel, regards this same woman “with eyes like crushed flowers.” This entire story is infused with an eerie beauty, as the wings of gliders carve marvels out of the cumulus, and one aesthetic pilot “soared around the cloud, cutting away its tissues. The soft fleece fell toward us in a cool rain.” The cruel capricious beauty who becomes the wealthy patron of this art is careless of the human cost it may entail: “In her face the diagram of bones formed a geometry of murder.”
Ballard wrote his heart out, especially after the random death of his beloved wife left him to raise three children, so I don’t especially like to say that he wrote too much. (This book has almost 1,200 pages.) But some of the stories are in want of polish and finish. In “The Last World of Mr. Goddard,” a department-store supervisor keeps a microcosm of his town, complete with live-action human figures, in a box in his safe at home. Each evening, he can watch what everybody is doing and use the knowledge the next day. At first I was surprised that he never exploited this advantage to observe anybody having sex, and then I noticed that Ballard had oddly deprived his minutely supervised miniatures of the power to be overheard, so that Mr. Goddard actually had no idea what was going on. Like a movie that is only part talkie, this scenario is leached of its initial power. In compensation, several of the stories are pure jeu d’esprit, where the charm of the conceit hardly requires any suggestion of the sinister or the doomed. Despite the menacing title of “Prima Belladonna,” the first of the collection, one is immediately bewitched by the very idea of a flower shop where the gorgeously different blooms are all live stand-ins for musicians and opera singers (such as a “delicate soprano mimosa”) and where the owner of this hard-to-manage “chloro florist” establishment eventually confronts “an audio-vegetative armageddon.”
If this innocuous environment could not deflect Ballard from his insistence on apocalypse in familiar surroundings, it is hardly startling to find that his penultimate tale is titled “The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.” For most of his life, our great specialist in catastrophe made his home in the almost laughably tranquil London suburb of Shepperton, the sheltered home of the British movie studios. He obviously relished the idea of waking one day to find himself the only human being on the planet, to explore a deserted London and cross a traffic-free Thames, to pillage gas stations and supermarkets and then to drive contentedly home. “B was ready to begin his true work.”
FBI issues digital mug shot of an aged Osama bin Laden
Digitally enhanced photo of Osama bin-Laden released by the US Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] which shows an age-progression image of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden.
The FBI has published fresh photographs of Osama bin Laden to try to track down the al-Qaida leader.
In a first "aged progressed" mugshot, he is portrayed in western clothes with wavy grey and black hair and a trimmed beard; a second shows the terrorist leader in his traditional outfit, with a white turban and a flowing, but greyer, beard.
Forensic artists used digital enhancement to modify Bin Laden's features in an attempt to show what he might now look like.
The FBI also published "aged progressed" mug shots of another 17 terrorists wanted by the US, which can be seen on the state department website.
CourtneyLoveUK im at the studio singing one last song, its called everyone i love ( i just destroy) no its not called that its called something else
'Doomsday Clock' moves a minute back
The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) now stands at six minutes to the hour.
The group said it made the decision to move the clock back because of a more "hopeful state of world affairs".
The clock was first featured by the magazine in 1947, shortly after the US dropped its A-bombs on Japan.
The clock had been adjusted 18 times before today since its initial start at seven minutes to midnight.
Most recently, in January 2007, the clock moved to five minutes to midnight, when climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind.
The concerns then included Iran's nuclear ambitions and the inability to halt the international trafficking of nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium.
Two years later, however, the board of the BAS says that there is now a "growing political will" to tackle both the "terror of nuclear weapons" and "runaway climate change".
At a news conference in New York, the BAS board said: "By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization."
But Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the BAS board of sponsors, warned scientists that there was still much to be done.
"We urge leaders to fulfill the promise of a nuclear weapon-free world and to act now to slow the pace of climate change," he said.
"We are mindful of the fact that the clock is ticking," he added.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by former Manhattan Project physicists, has campaigned for nuclear disarmament since 1947.
Its board periodically reviews issues of global security and challenges to humanity, not solely those posed by nuclear technology, although most have had a technological component.
Bathtub IV
Project info @ vimeo.com/channels/keithloutitssydney
This is a personal project that would not have been possible without the support of the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service. Thanks to the entire team for their generous access during training exercises and patrols this Summer. Since the Service began in 1973, it has carried out more than 21,000 missions ranging from urgent patient transfers to dangerous search and rescue missions.
Jay Reatard's Death Investigated as Homicide by Memphis Police
In a new development in the story of Jay Reatard's tragic death, the local Memphis Fox affiliate reports that Memphis police are investigating Reatard's death as a homicide. Police were called to Reatard's house at 3:30 a.m. yesterday morning, where they found the garage rocker dead.
According to Fox, police are now searching for a possible suspect and asking the public to come forward with any information. Tips can be submitted via phone at (901) 528-2247 or at 528cash.org. They're offering a reward of up to $1000 for any information that results in an arrest.
@'Pitchfork'
Meanwhile a couple of days before he died he had a run in w/ a band called 'Liquor Store'
"He tried to attack us with a chainsaw after throwin around wads of money and burnin 20s and askin us if we thought he was a sellout but he was so fd on coke he couldnt even turn it on then he hit me in the face with a disco ball full of sand and cracked my nose open and kicked us out of his house after he invited us there to stay there and i was all bloody and my friends slashed his tires it sucked He was smokin coke out of a skull bong and freebasin and had 50 grand in his closet"
http://twitter.com/Jayreatard
Meanwhile a couple of days before he died he had a run in w/ a band called 'Liquor Store'
"He tried to attack us with a chainsaw after throwin around wads of money and burnin 20s and askin us if we thought he was a sellout but he was so fd on coke he couldnt even turn it on then he hit me in the face with a disco ball full of sand and cracked my nose open and kicked us out of his house after he invited us there to stay there and i was all bloody and my friends slashed his tires it sucked He was smokin coke out of a skull bong and freebasin and had 50 grand in his closet"
http://twitter.com/Jayreatard
Degaje
"There's a Creole word for when you have to rig something to make do - degaje. In my opinion the ability to degaje is in part what gives this culture the spirit of resiliency that I so admire." - Gwenn Goodale Mangine, Jacmel, Haiti
Thursday 14 January 2010
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