This the move for a Labour-LibDem coalitation???

Gordon Brown 'stepping down as Labour leader'

Gordon Brown has been prime minister for nearly three years

Gordon Brown has said he is stepping down as Labour Party leader.

Mr Brown, prime minister since 2007, said he wanted a successor to be in place by the time of the party's conference in September.
Mr Brown announced his intention to quit in a statement in Downing St in which he also said his party was to start formal talks with the Lib Dems.
The Conservatives won the most seats and most votes in the election and have been in talks with the Lib Dems.
Mr Brown said no party had won an overall majority in the UK general election and, as Labour leader, he had to accept his part in that.
He said he had no desire to stay in his position longer than was needed to form a stable government, and that he would ask the Labour Party to set in form the process of a leadership contest.
He said it could be in the interests of the country to form a "progressive" government - possibly in coalition with the Lib Dems - the UK's third largest party.
It emerged earlier that the Lib Dem negotiating team, who have held days of talks with the Conservatives, had also met senior Labour figures in private.
The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson said one of the stumbling blocks to any Lib Dem-Labour deal had been Mr Brown himself.\

@'BBC'

BREAKING: Gordon Brown Resigns

A must read (coming soon)

Reviews

“In this path-breaking book, Polakow-Suransky traces the evolution of the alliance between Israel and apartheid South Africa, from its murky beginning to its inglorious end, following the transition to majority rule. It is based on the most meticulous archival research supplemented by remarkably revealing interviews with decision-makers in several countries. Wise, elegantly written, and strikingly fair-minded, it deserves the widest possible readership.”
—Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World

“Interesting, unique, and telling. Its lesson is very clear: doing the right thing may also be the best political option. It also tells us that sometimes we need others to save us from ourselves.”
—Yossi Beilin, justice minister of Israel, 1999-2001

“A major, long-overdue study of the rise and demise of one of the most intriguing alliances of our time. Polakow-Suransky has written a masterfully researched history that reads like a thriller unraveling the secrets of an alliance between two embattled societies under siege. Woven into the author’s fascinating narrative lies the disturbing debate about the degree of moral end political congruence that might have existed between the two allies—Israel’s political and defense establishment on the one hand and the Afrikaner ‘master race’ on the other.”
—Shlomo Ben-Ami, foreign minister of Israel, 2000-2001

“An intensely observed, eye-opening book.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Product Description

A revealing account of how Israel’s booming arms industry and apartheid South Africa’s international isolation led to a secretive military partnership between two seemingly unlikely allies.

Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left: socialist idealists like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir vocally opposed apartheid and built alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II.

But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, their covert military relationship blossomed: they exchanged billions of dollars’ worth of extremely sensitive material, including nuclear technology, boosting Israel’s sagging economy and strengthening the beleaguered apartheid regime.

By the time the right-wing Likud Party came to power in 1977, Israel had all but abandoned the moralism of its founders in favor of close and lucrative ties with South Africa. For nearly twenty years, Israel denied these ties, claiming that it opposed apartheid on moral and religious grounds even as it secretly supplied the arsenal of a white supremacist government.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky reveals the previously classified details of countless arms deals conducted behind the backs of Israel’s own diplomatic corps and in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and Israel’s estrangement from the left. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Israel’s history and its future.

PREORDER @'Amazon'

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (May 25, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375425462
• ISBN-13: 978-0375425462

Bill Hicks - It's Just A Ride

The BIG Picture - A brief note from the editor

More from Eyjafjallajokull  

over 14,000,000 page-views and counting.

HERE

TED Talk: Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Anger over reality television 'virgin auction'

Justin Sisley was forced to move the auction from the Australian state of Victoria to Nevada in America, after authorities said they would charge him with prostitution if the filming went ahead.  Sisley has gone public with the controversial project, claiming to have at least three willing participants.           

Family First Senator Steve Fielding described the documentary as "absurd, ridiculous and disgusting"  The virgins will be paid $20,000 each to take part in the auction and will also receive 90 per cent of their "sale price", according to a report in the Sydney Daily Telegraph.  The remainder of the money will go to the Nevada brothel which is hosting the event.  Initial bids will be placed online, but bidders will attend the final part of the auction, coming face to face with the people whose virginity they are bidding for.  One 21-year-old woman from Sydney, who used the name Veronica, said she had signed up for the auction to earn money and challenge traditional perceptions about sex.  "Technically I'm selling my virginity for money, technically that would be classified as prostitution, but it's not going to be a regular thing, so in my head I can justify that I'm not going to be a prostitute," she told the paper.  "I don't think I'll regret it."  One of the male virgins, identified only as Alex, said he had applied as a way of meeting someone.  Sisley admitted his plan was unpopular with the parents of the people involved. "They hate me," he said.  An Australian documentary maker has convinced several young people to appear in a reality television programme in which they auction their virginity to the highest bidder.

@'The Telegraph'

We are really civilised here in Victoria, Australia...no really we are!

Madonna and Child - Art or Child Porn?

I must admit that it is the last photo of Madonna and the baby Jesus that offends me the most!

The transcript of tonight's 4Corners documentary on Australia's proposed Internet Censorship

HERE

Paul Chambers found guilty of twitter 'bomb hoax'

"Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

£1,000 fine and a criminal record... 
Full story

@'Jack of Kent'

UPDATE:

Paul was half way through qualifying as an accountant. 

Conviction means he can't qualify. 

His career is ruined! 

Fugn hell!!!

What can I say?

Dispute brews over pornographic images on Wikimedia

Jimmy Wales has revoked some of his Wikipedia founder's privileges

A row over sexually explicit content on the web encyclopaedia Wikipedia and related sites has escalated.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales gave up some of his site privileges following protests by contributors angered that he had deleted images without consultation.
Mr Wales had previously urged the deletion of "pornographic" content, and removed images from the site.
This followed a complaint about "child pornography" to the FBI from another Wikipedia co-founder.
In early April, the estranged co-founder, Larry Sanger, reported Wikimedia Commons to the FBI, alleging that the organisation was "knowingly distributing child pornography".
He later clarified that his concern was not about photographs of children, but "obscene visual representations of the abuse of children", which can include drawings and sculpture.
Sexually explicit content Last week, administrators of Wikimedia Commons, a media file store widely used for Wikipedia articles, deleted hundreds of images.
Some images deemed by the Wikipedia community to have educational merit have since been reinstated.
Mr Wales had earlier posted his support for the removal of "images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests", deleting many pictures himself.
Pressure on the organisation had increased after Fox News reported the story, contacting a number of high-profile corporate donors to the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and related sites.

It asked whether the donors were aware of "the extent of sexually explicit content" on Wikimedia Commons.

It is not clear whether Mr Wales's support for the removal of explicit content was in response to Mr Sanger's concerns, pressure from Fox News, or something else.
But Michael Peel, Chair of Wikimedia UK, told BBC News that a continuous debate over explicit content has recently "come to a head". The central issue at the moment, he says, is "whether the content is educational".
"Anyone can come to Wikimedia Commons and upload media. Illegal stuff is deleted, and copyright stuff is deleted."
Mr Wales has faced criticism from the band of volunteers who help to maintain the site, some of whom argued that the decision to delete was undemocratic and taken too quickly. They also expressed concerns that valid material might be deleted accidentally.
On Sunday, in response, Jimmy Wales voluntarily revoked many of the "permissions" given to him as Wikipedia's founder, to delete and edit "protected" content on Wikimedia Commons.
In a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list he said this was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted".
A more detailed policy statement from the Wikimedia Foundation is expected in the coming days.

@'BBC'

Academic paper for

'busty blondes get more tips' 

[pdf]

RIP Lena Horne

Vatican cardinal attacks fellow cardinal for 'covering up' abuse case

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, 65, who is seen as a possible future Pope, slammed his fellow prince of the Church, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 83, for dismissing the paedophile priest crisis as "petty gossip."

Cardinal Schoenborn said that Cardinal Sodano, who is currently Dean of the Vatican's all powerful College of Cardinals, had attempted to cover up of a high profile Austrian sex abuse case.

 Vienna Cardinal Schoenborn told Austrian Catholic news agency Kauthpress: "The days of cover up are over. For a long while the Church's principle of forgiveness was falsely interpreted and was in favour of those responsible and not the victims."

He added that during the 1990's when Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, the leader of Austria's Catholics was accused of sex abuse a "track of Vatican diplomacy" had muddied the investigation and led to a cover up.

Cardinal Schoenborn said Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had immediately pushed for an investigative commission when abuse allegations against Cardinal Groer emerged.

But Cardinal Schoenborn said that the then Vatican Secretary of State at the time, Cardinal Angelo Sodano indirectly blocked the attempts and Cardinal Groer had simply faded into the background.

The scandal hit Cardinal who was accused of abusing boys, resigned in 1998 without ever admitting his guilt, without any official Church punishment and he died five years later.Cardinal Schoenborn also accused Cardinal Sodano, of causing "massive harm" to victims when he dismissed claims of priest abuse as "petty gossip" during Easter Sunday Mass at St Peter's.Two months ago Cardinal Schoenborn acknowledged church guilt during a service for victims in which he openly addressed attempts to cover up abuse.

There was no official comment from the Vatican and it's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano carried no coverage of Cardinal Schoenborn's attack. 

 Nick Pisa @'The Telegraph'

Harry Chapin - W.O.L.D.

"...grab life by the ears every day and French kiss it to the ground"

Endgame.

Jacqueline du Pre was diagnosed with MS in 1973. She died in 1987. 14 years.

(Snappy opening, eh?)

Richard Pryor was diagnosed with MS in 1986. He died in 2005. 19 years.

Ronnie "Plonk" Lane was diagnosed with MS in 1977. He died in 1997. 20 years.

I had been diagnosed with MS in 1990.

Tick-tock...tick-tock...tick-tock..

(I've just realised that "tick-tock" might mean nothing to anyone under 30. It represents the sound of an old-fashioned, wind-up clock; a metaphorical representation of the inexorable passing of time as it heads towards its inevitable conclusion. Young people might like to think of a Tom Cruise movie.)

I'm just treading water and that's not easy with my legs.

Don't panic. It won't be for some time yet. It's not as if I'm dictating this while trying to plug the chair into the mains. No, everything is lovely at the moment. Indeed, as Ronnie "Plonk" Lane and his Small Faces so eloquently put it, "I feel inclined/to blow my mind/get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun." You can't argue with that kind of searing insight into the human condition.

Actually, I had made my decision on 10^th May 2007, which happened to be the day that Blair announced that he would be standing down. My decision had nothing to do with Tony's decision. Thad ended a long time ago when he went mental in the brainbox and became George's bitch.

I had been running various MS scenarios in my head the night before and they had brought me to a simple truth. I did not want to grimly hang on to a life where success would be measured by how long I could keep going."Wake up, Jim! Good morning! Now, just give us a minute to clear up all this piss and shit, give you a bed bath, change the sheets, feed you breakfast, give you your medication and then you can have a nice little sleep until lunch."

I am slowly withdrawing from the world. As walking became more difficult, I got the walking stick. As walking with a walking stick became more difficult, I got the wheelchair. As my hands weakened, I travelled by car with assistance. When my legs packed up completely, I was chauffeur wheelchaired up the road. As the whole body packed up, I stayed home.

I have been indoors for 2 1/2 years. Now, I watch the world through my TV, which seems to have become a portal into the future. 3D TV?  Apps? Wii? Britain's Got Talent?

I'm back here in the late 90s and you've all moved on.

I am like a fisherman standing in the middle of a fast flowing river, flicking the fly upstream into the water, watching it rush by and reeling it back again hoping to have caught something.

(Having read that last paragraph, I can't decide whether it is: (a) a simile (b) an analogy (c) bollocks.)

I spend all day in my room. It's a lovely room with plenty of space and patio doors that open onto a secluded garden that I have not been to since I don't know when....and I continue to grow weaker.

My immune system had fought bravely but eventually it was overwhelmed, particularly the left hand side of my body. It has behaved like Austria in 1938, i.e. grumbled a bit then put out the bunting, trestle tables and jellies to welcome the conquering hero.

My daily drug regime includes: Baclofen, a muscle relaxant to ease the leg spasms.(at the maximum dose of 120 mg.)Diazepam(sounds like low-fat yoghurt , acts like a full-fat elephant tranquilliser). Tizanidine (rides shotgun with Diazepam at bedtime).

 My District Nurse’s comment when I told her? " My God! How do you stay awake?"

 I did not mention the Pinot Noir and medicinal marijuana – that would have been showing off.

I have my wonderful carers. They hoist me out of bed in the morning, undress and shower me, hoist me back on the bed to dry me and apply the various creams that help control little bedsores, as well as a recent addition to my MS symptoms, eczema. They dress and hoist me into the wheelchair, feed me breakfast, give me my medication, put the MacDictate headphones in place and ride off to another client before returning at lunchtime.

By the time I have brushed my teeth and changed from a daytime T-shirt to a nighttime vest and been safely tucked up in bed, it's 20:45. Give or take the odd five minutes, the routine never changes; 24/365 (366 in a leap year).

The same routine every day; breakfast, lunch, bed, teatime, bed. 7:30/12:30/17:00/20:05.

Mission Impossible...Mission Impossible II...Mission Impossible III...

So, the seatbelt sign will be switched on at some point as I'm coming in to land. But, my hermit lifestyle has given me the time to run through my life with a fine tooth comb, (although my short-term memory is a bit dodgy) and this has meant that I have been able to re-examine events in my life from childhood memories right up to the present day (although my short-term memory is a bit dodgy).

The result of this forensic exploration? I have had a fabulous life. My Catholic infused education was woefully inadequate. It would be a nice to have learned a little about Darwin and his Satanic Verse, "Origin of Species."  But, apart from that it has gone spectacularly well. (I'd love to have a proper session in a pub but my hands are too weak and I'm not drinking Guinness through a straw. I'd end up with a hernia.)

I still enjoy my life, my family, my friends. My beautiful daughter reads, "Cold Comfort Farm", I listen to music old and new, I’m learning a bit about Darwin, confirming my atheism through the consciousness-raising works of Richard Dawkins, and I'm going to be able to get to the garden if it's a good summer which it will be even if it rains! I'm not in any pain, my voice still works and my brain is still ticking over nicely (although my short-term memory is a bit dodgy.)

Regrets? Apart from missing "Brtain's First High Definition Election Night Broadcast" on Sky, I lean towards Edith rather than Frank.

I have no advice on how to live life. Except this; (a) grab life by the ears every day and French kiss it to the ground and (b) don't get to old age clutching a list headed, "I wish I'd......"  I haven't got one. Mind you, I had no plan to begin with. Life just happened and took me along with it. Fabulous fun. 

...and I get by with a little help from my friends.

Jim Sweeney @'My Space'

Sweetest moment of the UK election!

The BP oil spill and American capitalism

The explosion on the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20 off Louisiana’s coast, which took the lives of 11 workers and has resulted in a massive oil slick that threatens economic and environmental ruin for the Gulf Coast, stands as a powerful exposure of American capitalism.

Each day brings new revelations that federal regulators under both the Bush and Obama administrations aided and abetted BP and the oil industry as they disregarded safety and environmental precautions that might have prevented the disaster.

Some of the most recent revelations include:

• In 2000 the Minerals Management Service (MMS) requested industry advice on problems related to the cementing used around deep sea well caps to stop blowouts. The oil industry never produced recommendations, and no regulation was put in place.

• A 2002 study conducted by the MMS revealed that vital equipment on oil rig blowout preventers did not function. In laboratory testing of one manufacturer’s shear rams—devices used to sever pipes after a blowout—half failed. Seven other makers refused to have their shear rams tested.

• In 2002, Pers Holland, a Norwegian researcher commissioned by the MMS, found that two sets of shear rams should be used in blowout preventers, rather than the industry standard of one. Holland reported that using a single cutting device could result in failure to plug leaks in 10 percent of all blowouts. The MMS disregarded Holland’s proposal.

• A study commissioned by the MMS in 2004 raised serious doubts as to whether equipment in blowout protectors could even function under deep sea oceanic pressures. No standards were put in place.

• Deepwater Horizon lacked an “acoustic switch,” a backup mechanism for triggering the blowout preventer in the case of an explosion. The US oil industry found these units’ $500,000 price too expensive and MMS did not require them, although they are mandated by Norway and Brazil.

• The number of drill site inspections carried out by the MMS fell by 41 percent between 2005 and 2009, even as the number of drill rigs operating in US waters increased. The number of penalties issued by MMS for regulatory violations fell from 66 in 2000 to 20 last year.

• In June of 2009, the MMS exempted BP from producing a legally-mandated environmental impact study for the site where Deepwater Horizon would drill. Obama was earlier warned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that MMS studies approving offshore drilling were not reliable.

These decisions led directly to the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. The workers killed in the BP explosion are only the latest casualties. According to data from the International Regulators Forum, from 2004 through 2009 offshore oil workers on US rigs were four times more likely to be killed in industrial accidents and 23 percent more likely to be injured than oil workers in European waters. While there were 5 “loss of well control” disasters on US drill rigs in 2007 and 2008, in five other major offshore drilling nations—the UK, Norway, Australia, and Canada—there were none.

Since 2001 there have been 69 deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires or explosions on oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico alone, according to the International Association of Drilling Contractors.

The incestuous ties between the MMS and the oil industry have not been severed with the election of Obama. Obama was in fact the top recipient of BP “employee donations” in the 2008 election cycle, and the company has mobilized tens of millions in a massive lobbying campaign that has brought on board such powerful Washington insiders as Democratic Party kingmaker John Podesta, former Democratic House majority leader Thomas Daschle and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (a key member of Obama’s bipartisan budget committee). Current CIA director Leon Panetta has also served on BP’s “external advisory council.”

Only weeks before the Gulf disaster, in an open sop to the oil companies, Obama declared his intention to make large regions of the US coastline available for oil drilling.The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the result of decades of “deregulation,” which proclaimed that the “free market” could best regulate itself. Beginning in the late 1970s, the US government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has worked to systematically eliminate all constraints on corporate profit-making.

The result has been disastrous for the population of the US and the world. Corporations controlling vast social resources make decisions affecting millions of people on the basis of profit. Working hand in glove with “regulators,” little more than wholly owned subsidiaries of industry, the corporate elite targets for elimination any outlay that diminishes profit returns to the top executives and shareholders, whether it be environmental protection, product safety, or workers’ safety—as a spate of recent deadly workplace accidents has revealed.

In industry after industry the story is the same—mining, auto production, transportation, telecommunications and, of course, the finance industry. Indeed, the eruption of toxic oil from the bottom of the sea has its parallel in the eruption of toxic assets that set off a financial crisis in 2008. Led by the Obama administraiton, national governments responded to this disaster by bailing out those responsible—the financial elite—and leaving the working class to foot the bill. In this sense, the crisis in the Gulf and the crisis in Greece are connected by a common social and economic system.

The assets of BP, Transocean, Halliburton and their executives—hundreds of billions of dollars—must be appropriated and used to make the people of the Gulf whole and to put in place a massive environmental cleanup program. The executives and regulators whose policies caused the disaster should be criminally prosecuted.

The stranglehold of the corporate and financial elite over society and its resources must be broken. This requires the implementation of a socialist program for energy production. The big energy corporations must be seized and converted into public utilities, democratically run by the working class in the interest of social need.

Tom Eley @'World Socialist Web Site'

The World's strangest bridges

HERE

Foul of the Year!

Francesco Totti presents the Italian idea of playing Football...

brutti, brutti...

For Longy (& HerrB!)

Well you have to admit that Chelsea did it in style...(Bastards!)

As A Working Mother, It's Hard To Find Time To Masturbate

Cats Against Clay

HERE

(Thanx Ana!)

.

Tracey Thorn - 'Love And Its Opposite'

Listen to her new album

HERE

The Dream Machine by Charles Gatewood

william s. burroughs, brion gysin and dream machine
photo © charles gatewood, london 1972

the 'dream machine' is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli.
it was an invention by cult figure brion gysin, writer w. s. burroughs and scientist
ian sommerville in early 1960. rotating at 78 rpm on a phonographic turntable,
the 'dreamachine' emits flashes of light reputedly synchronized with alpha rhythms
of the brain which allows one to enter a hypagogic state.





a tribute for william s. burroughs

in 1972 during an assignment for rolling stone magazine,  charles gatewood flew to
london to meet william s. burroughs and brion gysin. over the next couple of days,
gatewood photographed the two iconic figures, capturing what are widely acknowledged
as the finest images in existence today of the 'dreamachine' and its creators.


dream machine night at whitechapel gallery on 29 June, 2007 

new york based mcgovern design house is an exclusive agent of rare vintage and new
prints of this esteemed photographic series. published many times and recently exhibited
at the irish museum of modern art, the 'dreamachine' prints will be presented in an
upcoming new york city exhibition (to be announced soon).

mcgovern design house is a new york based full service art consulting firm, providing
art advisory services to individuals and companies too busy to navigate the art market
of today. building collections for nascent and established collectors, they facilitate
connections to international artists and art communities. with their knowledge of furnishings
and interiors, they also advise on collectible furniture and emerging design talent on

the international scene. 

@'designboom' 

See also

'Pathway'

HERE

David Cameron faces Tory party anger

HA!

Naked scanner reveals airport screener's tiny penis, sparks steel baton fight with fellow officers

The Human Centipede

The Human Centipede

How crack found a niche in the American ghetto: The historical epidemiology of drug-related harm

£10,000 claim makes Tory the first MP in an expenses row

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP, faces the first expenses complaint of the new parliament after a row about a £10,000 claim she paid to a friend’s company.

Her former Commons researcher, Peter Hand, is writing to John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, questioning whether the claim can be justified.

The complaint will undermine hopes that the expenses controversy can be consigned to the last parliament.

Dorries, who last week retained her mid-Bedfordshire seat, claimed the money for an annual report in 2007 on her performance as an MP, and consultancy services, but Hand said he never saw the report or worked on it. Dorries claimed a total of more than £40,000 in expenses for services provided by Marketing Management (Midlands), owned by her friend Lynn Elson. They live near each other in the Cotswolds.  

Hand, who worked full-time for Dorries in the Commons from 2005 until November 2008, said: “I gave her the benefit of the doubt and waited and waited. But the report never appeared.”

Dorries claimed £9,987.50 for Marketing Management in June 2007 for the design, layout and production of an annual report and for consultancy. She says she spent the money, and posted a copy of the report on her website. However, it does not appear to be professionally produced. The previous year, by contrast, she issued a glossy four-page professionally produced report with more than 25 pictures, news articles, an interview and a breakdown of her typical working day as an MP.

Hand, who now works for the charity Mencap, said: “The 2006 report was posted on her website and I was closely involved in its production.

“I was never aware a report was produced in 2007 and never saw one. Even if there was this leaflet, I don’t understand how the costs could be so high.”

Dorries said: “I’ve done an annual report every year since I’ve been an MP. We did keep a lot of stuff from Peter.”

She would not provide details of the printing firm which had been used for the work or a breakdown of what Elson’s firm charged for.

Dorries claims her modest cottage in the Cotswolds, 55 miles from her constituency, is her main home. This means she can claim a second-home allowance for her constituency home.

Michael Smith and Jon Ungoed-Thomas@'The Times'

Girlz With Gunz Gunguitarz # 100

21C - Apocalypse Noir (The Future Is Here)

HERE

'The Beat Goes On' by Kathy Acker (21C 1997)

Tonight I saw a king. A few of his attendants were mulling about when I entered: a man in white T-shirt, black pants and an Alice-in-Wonderland black and white hat; another man in a sharply designed black suit, black and white shirt, shaved head (except for a fringe of punk-style ebony hair) and sunglasses; a third wearing diapers; a few guys in basic black cut-off T-shirts. The auditorium becomes silent when a man whose gray-white dreds are flowing out from under his African hat-headdress in a robe of pale blue and red squares walks out on stage. Mr George Clinton lifts his right hand in benediction: Reality breaks out into funk. Funk-e-delic. Now women appear: a major thigh babe in black tux and not much underneath, head hidden under a Mad Hatter top and wearing Vivienne Westwood rip-off shoes. Thighs for which to die, oh Ms Tina Turner. Another woman, spectral, in a golden and orange sari, her voice challenges Aretha Franklin’s. Then there’s a gigantic baseball jacket and equally skunky pants over which lies a baseball cap, and out of this strolling assemblage soars the sexiest little-girl voice I think I’ve ever heard. Rapping about an angel. I want to die. More men appear: a tiny guy who teaches us how to sing scat; a horn player in black and white bicycling shorts and nothing else.... Mr George Clinton directs everyone and everything, the gospel and jazz riffs, soul, horn solos à la Motown, rap, poetry, all mixed up, funked up, and when he gets tired, if he ever gets tired, he turns to us and directs us, and we follow him, until soon half the audience is on that stage, dancing as only humans can when space is equivalent to human flesh....

It all goes on for hours....

Lawrence is a small mid-western university town in Kansas. At the 1996 US elections, voters in Kansas returned all the Right-wingers to their governmental seats, then added a few; Lawrence, a Left-wing – or, at least, a liberal – oasis in a desert of conservatism and worse, according to some of its residents, might well be taken over by its increasing numbers of Aryan Nation immigrants.

There’s another king in Lawrence. I just had the pleasure of visiting with him. He’s a thin man who now walks with a stoop, sprightly and surely. According to some, including myself, Mr William Burroughs is the most important living fiction writer in the USA. Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Legs McNeill and I were in town to celebrate with speeches about William’s opus at the opening of a show of Mr Burroughs’ art work that started at the LA County Museum and moved on from there. In just over a week, Phil Glass, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno and Patti Smith will also pay public homage to William in his home-town. It all ends in Lawrence.

I can barely speak to William when I see him: A mixture of awe, respect and fear holds my tongue captive and I suspect that it’s that very mixture that’s making it difficult for me to talk about William here. He’s a good man. Politeness, with him, is not just a matter of surface. When I visited him a few days after the Lawrence Museum’s opening of his show, he was speaking about human integrity, for him deeply tied to politeness. He was sitting in a wheelchair whose back was covered with a green towel and gazing at an over-fat black cat he had just taken to the vet for skin trouble. In true Burroughs-speak, he said that he had to ask himself if for $100,000 he would kill one of his own cats. “Of course not. Not even conceivable.” “Every man,” commented William, “has to ask himself this. What would make him do what he couldn’t possibly do? What would make me kill a cat?” He thought about what might matter enough to him to act in such a manner. “A chance to escape death?”

Death is well-known to be a place on which there’s a lot of Burroughsian pondering. The old man said that he was discussing morality, because if a man is to have any moral standards, he must ask himself if there is anything that would make him turn away from these standards. “I would never kill a cat,” William thought out loud, then turned to considering moral dictates that come from the outside, from the government. As he spoke about the US government’s determined attempts to control the drug trade, he became more and more agitated.... When William hugged me good-bye, to my surprise, I felt not my usual awe as my fear had almost gone away. Rather, I felt something that I want to call ‘sadness’ but is more likely to be tenderness for this human who is happy and seems at peace with himself.

Though Mr Burroughs is not young, he’s showing no evidence that he is in danger of dying. The old man might live forever. Might have discovered space – to use Burroughs-speak. At his Lawrence Museum art opening, after all our presentations, he seemed joyous. Having signed books, he walked through the room and shook hands and talked to whomever was there. Ginsberg was slightly more reserved. He seemed occupied with health (he told me that due to heart trouble he had to cut down his touring) and with meditation practice. For me it was pure pleasure: He talked precisely about William’s use of cut-up. The whys and wherefores, dates and events. As if seeing can be remembering, I saw how intelligent Ginsberg is; while he was speaking, I could watch his mind move from point to point. Could this precision of mental movement, which I call ‘intelligence,’ be related to meditation, to the clearing of the mind of obfuscation?

The Lawrence Museum art opening is happening as I am writing about it now, so I shall say this in the present tense: It is a wonder for me to see these two men together, William and Allen, who make literature more than the fashioning of clever stories, other than the manipulation of language according to other peoples’ rules. These two men have not simply put writing and ‘life’ together, say, Fluxus-style; these men, I’d like to say ‘literally,’ write the imagination into actuality, write reality because they write themselves, because they write by listening, because reality writes them as they write reality. The practice of cosmogony is that of writing. And so all of our worlds, certainly mine, has changed.

Postscript 2010:
By a truly cruel twist of fate, given the musings on mortality above, the author of this piece, the beautiful Kathy Acker, along with her subjects here, Mr Burroughs and Mr Ginsberg, all died the same year this piece was written, 1997.

From the onlive archive of one of the greatest magazines ever - 21C

HERE

WTF???

Chimps mentally map fruit trees

Where next?

Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees.
Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found.
More than that, the chimps also recall how productive each tree is, and decide to travel further to eat from those they know will yield the most fruit.
Acquiring such an ability may have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains.
Emmanuelle Normand and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany teamed up with Simone Ban of the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire to investigate the spatial memory of chimpanzees in the wild.
“We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees. Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place,” says Normand.

We think it’s fair to assume that chimpanzees can remember the exact location of probably thousands of trees Primatologist Emmanuelle Normand

To find out how they do it, Normand’s team first mapped the location of 12,499 individual trees growing within the home range of a group of chimpanzees living in the Tai National Park in the Cote d’Ivoire. They identified each tree and used GPS to map its precise position.
The team also identified 17 species of fruit tree that the chimps regularly fed from, and worked out how often each individual tree belonging to these 17 species would be in fruit each month. From that, the researchers could determine how likely it would be that a chimp randomly walking around the forest might bump into a fruit tree that it could feed from.
The team found that the chimps didn’t visit the most abundant fruit species most frequently, as would be expected if they were navigating without using spatial memory. They also excluded the possibility that the chimpanzees navigated toward the trees by smell.

It’s off to eat we go

Instead, they targeted certain trees and walked directly to them. For example, the apes visited one fruit tree, Pouteria aningueri, more than any other, despite it being one of the rarest trees in their home range, the team report in Animal Cognition.
The chimps also travelled much shorter distances to each fruit tree than would be expected by chance, confirming that they travel directly to the trees.
“We think it is fair to assume that chimpanzees can remember the exact location of probably thousands of trees ,” says Normand.
Of two females closely tracked, one ate from 391 separate trees, averaging 14 trees per day, while the other ate from 506 trees, averaging 18 trees per day. On average, each chimp revisited each tree once every five and a half days.
Remarkably, as well as remembering the location of their favourite trees, the chimps also recalled when each tree would be in season, producing the most fruit. They would then often walk further to reach these more bountiful trees rather than make a shorter journey to a less productive one.
“Across all seasons, it seems that they have preferred tree species,” says Normand.

A male chimp has to make do with eating leaves not fruit

“Like when it is the coula nuts season, chimpanzees crack nuts using tools for hours during a day. Or when it is the Sacoglottis fruits season, then the chimpanzees stay hours digging their fruit wadge in the water to press a maximum of juice from those fruits.”
Intriguingly, female chimpanzees travelled shorter distances to eat than males. The researchers don’t know why, but speculate that it is either because females better remember the locations of trees, or because males simply compete with one another by ranging more widely through their territory.
In one respect, it is not surprising that chimpanzees have developed an outstanding ability to navigate their home range, says Normand.
One idea, known as the ‘ecological hypothesis’ proposes that the need to remember and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.
“That’s because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example,” says Normand.
Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.

@'McBrollocks'

Team Berated for Hooters Sponsorship Deal

An under-16 Australian Rules football team has come under fire for entering a sponsorship deal with a local Hooters franchise, with critics saying the move could give adolescent boys the wrong message.
The Broadbeach Cats team in Australia's Gold Coast were cheered on by two skimpily-dressed staff from the Mermaid Beach franchise of the American restaurant chain during their home game against local side Labrador on the weekend.
"The message these boys are getting -- and bear in mind we're talking 15 and 16-year-old boys -- is that ... as a young footballer you have an entitlement to large-breasted women in skimpy outfits bouncing around at your games," women's advocate Melinda Tankard Reist said on an Australian morning television show.
Restaurant owner Morney Schledusch described the criticism as "ridiculous."
"Our waitresses represent the all-American cheerleader," he told local media. "And no, they don't all have big boobs. "We are all about sport. We had a great opportunity here to show Australia what we are really about."
@'Yahoo News'

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