Smart Hate

As a college educator I hear it from my friends outside of the academy, especially those of my friends who lean to the right. Intellectuals are suspect. Somehow in America, being smart is a bad thing according to the political right. I will never forget a good friend, who is a staunch conservative sent me an article that smears President Obama by comparing him to a college president. The article is

HERE
He was interested in what I thought. My response was, "how is having a smart president a bad thing?" I never received an answer, which is too bad since that discussion has so much potential.
Now, in America, that discussion has risen to the top again with Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
HERE
Then there's the history teacher's room being vandalized by Tea Partiers:
HERE

Gonjasufi - Duet

Scuba / Ramadanman [ABUCS007]

    

HA!

Goodnight Keith Moon

http://www.goodnightkeithmoon.com/

 

(Thanx Yotte!)

For George!

Jung Confronts His Demons

Modern men in the throes of a midlife crisis have been known to overhaul their careers, their relationships—even their bodies. Few, though, intentionally induce hallucinations in order to commune with demons and deities and end up creating a text transforming—at least indirectly—the entire field of psychology.

Carl Gustav Jung was 37 when by most accounts he lost his soul. As psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani explained, "Jung had reached a point in 1912 when he'd achieved all of his youthful ambitions but felt that he'd lost meaning in his life, an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth."

In fact, the dilemma was so profound it eventually caused the father of analytical psychology to undergo a series of waking fantasies. Traveling from Zurich to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in October 1913, Jung was roused by a troubling vision of "European-wide destruction." In place of the normally serene fields and trees, one of the era's pre-eminent thinkers saw the landscape submerged by a river of blood carrying forth not only detritus but also dead bodies. When that vision resurfaced a few weeks later—on the same journey—added to the mix was a voice telling him to "look clearly; all this would become real." World War I broke out the following summer.

These experiences prompted Jung to question his own sanity. But they also motivated him to embark on what turned out to be a 16-year self-seeking journey documented in a red leather journal titled "Liber Novus" (Latin for "New Book"). It features ethereal, often unsavory passages and shocking yet vibrant images expressing what Jung himself termed a "confrontation with the unconscious."

Mr. Shamdasani, who got hold of a copy in 1996, took five years to understand it and three years to convince the Jung family to allow the journal's publication, which was ultimately funded by the Philemon Foundation, a California-based organization dedicated to bringing Jung's work into print. Over 13 years, Mr. Shamdasani translated Jung's words into English and added a detailed introduction and extensive footnotes.

The result was W.W. Norton's "The Red Book: Liber Novus." Scanned with a 10,200-pixel scanner, the 11½-by-14¼-inch volume was first published in October 2009 and is now in its sixth printing—no small feat, given the $195 price tag.

The journal is also the featured attraction of "The Red Book of C.G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology" at UCLA's Hammer Museum. The show, which also includes a series of sketches and various oil, chalk and tempera paintings, affords visitors a close (behind glass, of course) encounter with one of psychology's most significant texts—one devoid of any of the theories or jargon of the field itself.

No question it's the field's most beautiful—illuminated (in the style of a medieval manuscript) by Jung's own hand. Beyond the carefully scribed, often gothic-like calligraphy are hundreds of blazingly colored, strikingly detailed paintings depicting Jung's self-imposed hallucinations. (Mr. Shamdasani says Jung was able to do this by using writing to connect with his soul and then visualizing a scene until characters emerged.)

One of the more stunning works on display (image 125) depicts one of Jung's childhood daydreams "in which," writes Mr. Shamdasani, "Alsace is submerged by water, [and] Basle is turned into a port" in the bottom third of the picture. Hovering above is a human figure—legs in lotus position, arms reaching above to support a jug that is connected to a huge mandala with pointillist-like flourishes of red, orange, pink, white, purple and blue.

But don't expect the book's editor to provide his analysis.

"I approach these as a historian," says Mr. Shamdasani, a professor at University College London, "so I refrain from speculation or interpretation of the images. It's not 100% clear—it's clear that Jung thought about each element of these images, and sometimes said it would take him many years to figure out what they actually meant."

No doubt, Jung was captivated by mandalas, not merely because of his attraction to Eastern philosophy, but also because he saw the circular images as, according to Mr. Shamdasani, "representing the self or totality of the personality." Included in the show is Jung's first-known mandala-inspired work, "Systema mundi totius" (image 105), which he illustrated in 1916. The brightly hued circular graphic forms, Mr. Shamdasani says, "represent a pictorial cosmology of the work he was engaged in at that time, which he called 'The Seven Servants to the Dead.' He had a striking parapsychological event in the winter of that year, in which the dead, whom he'd encountered in his fantasies about two years earlier, end up at his door."

Jung also came across divinities, exemplified by a tempera and gold bronze-on-cardboard piece he painted in 1917. Though it isn't part of "The Red Book," its back contains a passage from the text that Jung inscribed referencing the Cabiri, a group of Greek gods thought to promote fertility. "He who wishes to conquer new land brings down the bridges behind him," Jung writes. "Let us not exist anymore. We are the thousand canals in which everything also flows back again into its origin . . . " While the text seems only tangentially related to multiplying fruitfully, it does suggest Jung's broader message of deconstructing and reconstructing one's soul.

As for the original book itself, open to pages 54 and 55, one might think those two pages had special significance. But Mr. Shamdasani says (while laughing) that the choice was made "simply by taking a look at what [the Hammer Museum] liked."

One footnote: The volume—which resided in a locked cupboard in Jung's Kusnacht house in the Zurich suburbs after his death in 1961 and was transferred to a bank in 1984—was never finished. "My acquaintance with alchemy took me away from it," Jung wrote in the book's epilogue in 1959, when he finally returned to the work. But he stopped in midsentence, as he had done with the original text.

As Jung explained on the final page: "to the superficial observer, it will appear like madness." Yet Mr. Shamdasani says Jung was engaged in a clearly controlled experiment. "There wasn't anything like a psychosis," he insists. In fact, what emerged during what many describe as a crippling depression were Jung's groundbreaking theories on archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—the interior work one must engage in to become a person or individual.

Arnie Cooper @'Wall Street Journal'

The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. 

- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

ANOTHER 5 YEARS? I DON'T BLOODY THINK SO... 

(Thanx Teifidancer!)

Society Is Eating Itself Alive: Gonjasufi Interviewed

Gonjasufi’s birth name is Sumach - after the flowering plant used to flavour Middle Eastern cooking and so beloved of his jazz fanatic father - and he’s “his present age”. He lives in Mojave Desert, on the outskirts of Las Vegas, but claims he has visited the Strip only a handful of times. He’s a recovering addict, though he says that his love for yoga, his children and his music has a stronger pull than any drug ever could, bringing him closer to himself and closer to God.
He’s also the man behind the Gaslamp Killer, Flying Lotus and Mainframe-produced A Sufi And A Killer, an inherently spiritual record that binds together mystical, whispered musings with the ragged fabrics of psychedelia, haunting desert laments and hypnotic Hindi chants.
It doesn’t take long to register the album's strong religious undercurrent, but to see it as specifically Islamic in origin is to underestimate the scope of Sumach's spiritual reach. Born into a family of Coptic Christians in San Diego, Sumach first studied Islam at college; he was turned off by the fundamentalists and attracted to the pursuit of divine unity pioneered by Sufi mystics. On top of that he has studied the Rastafari movement and the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.
 Sumach says here that he’d be “a dangerous man” without music; that writing is for him “a vehicle to channel all this frustration and pain”. As such the album serves as a window into the two contrasting personalities fighting for possession of Sumach's soul: the Killer on the one hand, the Sufi on the other.

There’s currently very little information about you as an artist. How would you describe the history of your musical career?
Gonjasufi: I grew up in a San Diego jazz family; my old man played a lot of jazz records. My mom was into things like the Gap Band and Marvin Gaye. The first song I really felt was some Benny King. Then at high school I got into the 90s hip hop movement, started collecting records and started out as a DJ. So I would say my first music movement was 90s rap, and from there I got into reggae and rock. The way I kind of described it – I don’t want to get boxed in and some shit – but I called it Hindi rock, the shit I was doin’. The first record I put together was a lot of Hindi samples with some rock shit.
The temptation for a journalist is to read things about your personality into the album. How much of you is in this record?
G: I would say that as far as the feeling and the conviction and the words go, I put all of me into it. It’s very personal exposing myself like that; going from singing very gently to screaming on the same song. I had to really spend a lot of time alone.
Did the production process lend itself well to you spending time alone?
G: Yeah, it did. Gaslamp Killer would just chop up shit. He’s in LA, so he’d send it to me out here in the desert and I could just be alone. Nobody knows where I’m at. I kind of stayed out of the scene, but he’s like my link to the scene.
You have a real live performance sound, like you’re fronting a band. Is that part of your history, or part of your future?
G: That’s what I’m looking for. This album is a way of calling out for a band. I need to record with a couple of cats that I can lock myself in a recording room with for a couple of months. It’s my call out, like I’m saying, ‘Who’s down to rock a stage with me?’
In your own words you like to avoid overly-computerised approaches to making music...
G: I’m not really into the sound wave; the filtering effect of computers. When I go to shows I need to see a show. I need to see cats sweating with their instruments. When I see cats with just a computer up there, I feel like going up and snatching the computer off the stage and being like, ‘Now what? If all the power went off in the world, can you still rock a stage?’ That’s where I’m at with music. The sound wave itself has become so thin that the new generation’s ears are tuned into this softer, more accessible sound. With this record I wanted to almost hurt the eardrums; shock people with the sound of something raw, something hard. And then, after a minute, it’s cut into the eardrum enough that it’s scratched off the resin of that microchip filth.
The album works very well as a platform for your voice, but it sounds like there are a lot of voices on there – on a track like ‘Sheep’, for example. Do you think this is a representation of internal conflict?
G: I would say so. It’s me reasoning and talking to myself. Different colours have got to come out. I want to take the whole rainbow of emotion.
Does the record bear any relation to Sufiism as a religious form? The dance, the trance?
G: Yes, definitely. In college, I was studying Islam a lot and rolling with Muslims. I got turned off by the fundamentalist side and turned on by the mystic side. I started studying the way of the Sufi, reading Hazrat Inayat Khan. I went from reggae and word sound power to sufiism. I saw the similarity in all. I was born a Coptic in a Christian family, and then I studied Islam. Then I studied Hindi. And for me it took the study of Krishna and Geeta and practising yoga to bring all of that into one space for me; to come full circle.
You mention misconceptions about Islam on the record. Is this something you feel needs addressing?
G: Oh yeah. I’m out here in America, where the truth can be very franchised – it gets watered down. People have no idea what Islam is – they think these cats that are blowing up buildings and car bombs are Muslims. To me, they’re as much Muslims as these Catholic priests that are molesting kids are Christians. A true Muslim and a true Christian is the same: they worship one god. The Western world depends on so much media, and people are afraid of Islam out here. They don’t really know what Islam is about. Christ being a Muslin...they don’t know about that. If I was to open that up, I’d be labelled a terrorist out here. The crazy thing about this record is that I have to get to the US audiences via London. America doesn’t want to hear. I’ve been here for 30 something years, and it took the London ears to pick me up. I have to come back to where I’m at from the other side of the planet for them to accept this.
True artists work for something other than fame or financial success...
G: If John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley were alive, would they hold a concert at the Gaza Strip to see if they could stop a fight? Would they go to the Middle East and hold peace concerts? There’s nobody on the planet that I know of that’s willing to do that. If I had a band and had enough people listening at one time I would do that shit, you know? For me it’s like the collective mass. The power of thought and everybody focused on one thing is the most important thing in life on this planet. If everybody’s so tuned in to a television that’s dumbing down the frequency and telling them that Doomsday or Armageddon is coming, then that’s what’s going to happen. So when I made these songs, it was a prayer to the most high and a call out to the people. I wasn’t thinking about money, or a record deal, or fame or any of that shit. That was the furthest thing from my mind.
Sometimes it feels like the only way to make sense of your own life is to make music.
G: It is for me. If I didn’t have music I’d be dangerous man. It’s a vehicle for me to channel all this frustration and pain and shit.
A Sufi And A Killer a record of contrasts – of dark and light moments – but you talk overall about hope; you want people in certain situations to take hope. Is that true?
G: Yeah, I want people who are going through the same emotions to find a way to deal with it. Energy is energy. A lot of this record is about me taking all the negative emotions that I have as a result of the world’s ignorance and hatred and racism, and dealing with it by turning it into something good. If people are going to follow me, I want to lead them back to their true selves. People sometimes don’t believe in themselves; they have to find someone to believe in. It’s that person’s job to bring them back to believing in themselves. For me it’s like, ‘Look, I’m going through all this crazy shit just like you. This is how I feel – does anybody feel the same?’ If there are people who are getting ready to jump off the bridge, or they’re halfway out the window, then I like to imagine that my song might come on and they’ll say: wait a minute, turn that shit up for a minute. And they pull back. I want to get these cats that are blowing shit up to chill out, and I want to get these cats that are going overseas to kill my brothers to chill out. If this music can reach enough people to give me an opportunity to speak, then it’s got to be about serious stuff that’s going on.
What goes through your mind when you turn on the TV and see the state of music today?
G: Bullshit, man. It’s frustrating because I got kids. Luckily enough, they get to hear the real stuff, but it’s a disease man. You see a lot of these rappers and all they’re talking about is their money. And they have talent, no doubt. But when all I hear is, ‘I got more money than you,’ it makes you want to reach through the TV and snatch them out of it. These cats get to a point when they’ve made enough money to actually make a change in the world. You find out there’s no running water on 75 per cent of the planet, and then you switch over and there’s cats in America...I won’t name names because I don’t want cats coming after me, but these guys that are almost billionaires and what are they doing? This should be a rule: if you make a certain amount of money, then a percentage of that has to go to getting running water and shit to the rest of the world. I’m not going to support artists that are multi millionaires when there are millions of people that don’t have any running water.
The saddest part is that hip-hop is a movement that came from political expression. For it to now be a part of the mainstream must be frustrating.
G: Yeah, it’s pretty sickening man. We go from Public Enemy to where we’re at right now.
Your record is so far removed from the MTV brand of hip hop. Do you think that’s largely a result of the movement that’s going on at the moment in LA with Flying Lotus and so on?
G: Oh, definitely. What Flying Lotus has done is step out of the box and create a whole other box. He started a whole movement as far as I’m concerned. If you can’t learn to draw, you trace for a bit, but where he’s going with his sound now . . . I hear so many people trying to sound like him. He’s taken it to a different angle. And he’s opened up doors for me. He introduced me to Warp. What he’s doing I support 100 per cent.
You talk about the desert a lot. Does the landscape play a large part in developing your personality or sound as an artist?
G: I think so. I’m from San Diego, which is next to the ocean. Tracks like ‘Holidays’, ‘Candylanes’, ‘Duet’ . . . those were all recorded in San Diego. All those other songs were recorded out here in the desert, and you can tell – the feel is completely different. Even the altitude and the weather, all that is captured. That’s why I want to use analog mics and tapes. I feel that the way a sound is captured is just as important as the sound itself. On tape it resonates, and over time it sinks deeper into the tape, and more of the air and the environment is captured in that recording. You listen to Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and you can hear the cigarette smoke. When I hear Billie Holiday I can feel like I’m in that room – the cigarette smoke, the slavery even. And I want that to come across in my own recordings: where I was on the planet, what I was feeling, how much I was sweating.
You also mention ancestors on the record. Is there a sense that you can pick up things on mics that you don’t expect? Do you think you’re communing on a spirit level in the desert?
G: Definitely, man. This is all sacred burial ground out here. It’s all Mexico really, and all the slaughter that went down of the so-called Indians is still present. Most people don’t give a fuck – they don’t give a shit about any of that – but this is all ancient burial ground. People are driving their cars over it and maddogging each other and it's sad to see, because they’re ignorant of what’s underneath. And the crazy thing is that it’s all going to become burial ground again in a minute. These cats are gonna get buried in their cars. Their cars are gonna become caskets and shit.
Do you feel a commitment to revealing the apocalypse? A sense of despair at society?
G: I think this is a society that’s eating itself alive. What I’m understanding about time is that it’s speeding up - the days, the months. You can’t escape it: time is bringing us closer to the moment of now. And when you get closer to the moment of now, you’re dealing with yourself. You realise self. If you’re not ready to realise self, you’re gonna dissipate. In that alignment, when it takes place and we become 100 per cent fully realised, we reach godhead. If we’re all in the right state of mind. Then we can manifest the living god we’ve been looking for. That’s what I think it’s all about. That’s what I’m channelling when I’m making music. To realise self in the highest potential, and in doing so bringing others to their hightest potential. There’s no difference between me and my neighbour. Maybe we’re in different vibratory rates, but sometimes you need a more powerful battery to charge up the other. I need somebody to come around waken me up; resurrect me.

Cyrus Shahrad @'The Quietus'

The album is brilliant and do check out

THIS

Little Axe - Bought For A Dollar, Sold For A Dime

fucksolar.com

Interesting...
Hard to sell yr house when you are in a coma...

(Click to enlarge)
More
HERE
let alone send emails 

(Click to enlarge) 

The Hacked Emails That Expose Former Guru Partner Solar As the Most Evil Man In Hip-Hop

HA!

Alladin's Story

Titled 'So Divine' on the new 'Exile' set

HERE
(Two versions just one fades out earlier. I am not sure what this has to do with 'Exile On Main Street' as I think this is from 1969!)

'Good Time Woman'

(An earlier version of 'Tumbling Dice'
HERE  

(NB: 
That these are NOT from the new 'Exile' release!)

Anagrams of David Cameron: 

Carved Domain, Random Advice, Romanced Diva

Sorry but...

...I don't fugn believe you!

Police remove David Cameron 'wanker' poster

David Hoffman describes being handcuffed by police for displaying a poster deemed offensive by a neighbour WARNING: contains explicit language Link to this video A man who placed a poster of David Cameron containing the word "wanker" in his window has described how police handcuffed him in his home on election day, threatened him with arrest, and forcibly removed what they said was offensive campaign literature.
David Hoffman, 63, said police went "completely over the top" when they visited his home in Bow, east London, and demanded he take down the poster, which had been fixed to his window for weeks.
After he expressed concern at his treatment, Hoffman says, a local inspector told him over the phone that "any reasonable person" would find his poster "alarming, harassing or distressful". The visit from police followed a complaint from a neighbour, who told Hoffman she found the poster offensive. The word "wanker" was printed beneath a photograph of a smiling Cameron.

 Hoffman said four officers knocked on his door on polling day. When asked by them for identification, he said he tried to momentarily close the door. The officers then forced the door open, he said.

"They burst into my house, pushed me back and handcuffed me. They said I had committed an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act, I was being detained, and I might be arrested."
Coincidentally, Hoffman has become one of Britain's most respected photojournalists after three decades chronicling alleged police brutality. He said that after the officers looked up his identity, they "calmed down". But the poster, one of several images of party leaders produced by the veteran anarchist group Class War, was removed.
In a statement, the Metropolitan police denied officers forced their way into Hoffman's home and claimed he was "restrained with handcuffs to prevent a breach of the peace" after becoming agitated. It said that "words of advice were given to the resident … who removed the material".
Hoffman said he would lodge a formal complaint. He has since returned the poster to his window, but replaced the word "wanker" with "onanist", derived from a biblical character in Genesis 38:9 whose seed was "spilled on the ground".

Paul Lewis @'The Guardian'

paul__lewis Officially, I think Cleggmania just ground to a halt 2 minutes ago via web

4.00pm: Laura Kuenssberg has just said on BBC News that she has seen bags being loaded into cars at the back of Downing Street. "Large hold-alls", she said. She is implying that the Browns are getting ready to leave.

3.55pm: Labour has given up talking to the Lib Dems, according to the BBC. This is what Laura Kuenssberg has put out on Twitter.

No 10 sources recognise talks with the libs and labour are over and working out how to declare their side of the negotiation is at an end

@'The Guardian'

Pete Wylie - The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies!

HIT!!!

Steel Justice (1992) & other 'lost' TV shows...

A little boy idolizes his policeman father and likes to secretly tail him when he goes out on drug busts and stakeouts at night. One night, the kid gets killed. Dad is distraught… until he meets his new crime-fighting partner-a fire-breathing, 100-foot-tall robot dinosaur that’s possessed by the spirit of his dead son.

More 'lost' TV pilots

HERE  
Including:
Heil, Honey I’m Home! (1990)

A parody of 1950s sitcoms like Leave It To Beaver, this British show was about Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun living peacefully in a suburban neighborhood until their lives are turned upside down by their new Jewish neighbors.
(!!!)

(Thanx Anne!)

Swans To Play Brooklyn Masonic Temple (& elsewhere in N America)

In January I posted about Swans’ plans to reform, record, and tour. At the time, I had no idea I’d be helping to organize their biggest ever show in New York City. It’s an honor — Swans’ music/thought exerted a huge influence on me at a crucial time and the band’s remained one of my all-time favorites. I put together an acoustic M. Gira show at Housing Works a couple of years ago, but this is a different monster: Haunting The Chapel’s teamed up with the Blackened Music Series (we did Alcest at the Studio) and Issue Project Room to present Swans’ first show in NYC in more than a decade. It takes place 10/8 at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (317 Clermont Ave). It will be very loud. Michael Gira handpicked Baby Dee to open. Her performance will be keyboards accompanied by a cello. Tickets go on sale Friday (5/14) at 10AM EST. We have info on that and the rest of the tour dates.

09/28 – Philadelphia,  PA @ Trocadero Theater
09/29 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat
09/30 – Boston, MA @ Middle East downstairs
10/01 – Montreal, QC @ Le National (Pop Montreal Fest)
10/02 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
10/04 – Detroit, MI @ Crofoot Ballroom
10/05 – Chicago, IL @ Bottom Lounge
10/08 – Brooklyn, NY @ Masonic Temple
10/09 – New York, NY @ Bowery  Ballroom
10/22-24 – Birmingham, UK @ Supersonic Festival

Tickets go on sale Friday. You’ll be able to grab tickets for the Masonic Temple show at TicketWeb (I’ll post the link on Fri). Also, keep in mind:

THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that. I’ll be using what I learned in the last several years to inform the way this new material develops, while carrying forward from where Swans left off with its final album Soundtracks For The Blind, and in particular, Swans Are Dead. If you have expectations about how Swans should be, that’s your business, but it would be a disservice to both of us if I were to make music with your needs in mind, and the music would certainly suffer as a result. In any event, I certainly never thought this day would arrive, but it’s inevitable, it’s here, it’s fate, so I’m succumbing to it. 

Helping me in this quest are the fantastic musicians and friends listed below. I’ll enter the studio with the songs, we’ll hash them out together, someone will come up with something unexpected, then that will lead to new ideas, the song will take a different trajectory and  the material will grow on its’ own. This is what I’m hoping, anyway.

As far as that album, Gira told me in January that the approach will be “basically where Soundtracks For The Blind/Swans Are Dead left off, with influence of Angels of Light in there too. Probably pretty severe tho, according to my present mood…”

Excellent.

Brandon @'Stereogum'

I once recorded Swans playing live at The Paradiso in Am*dam and it was SO loud that the result was nothing more than thick aural sludge!

Now all we need is some enterprising young hipster to bring them down to Australia...

Anyone?

Hitting Home (BBC One Scotland at 2235 BST Tonight)

Domestic abuse victims 'turned away' over lack of space

There are fears about the impact of cuts on refuges like this Glasgow one

About 3,000 women fleeing domestic abuse are turned away from Scottish refuges every year because of a lack of space, a BBC investigation has found.

A Scottish Women's Aid census last year revealed 49 women and 25 children had asked for help in a one-day period, but more than half had to be turned away.
Experts have said there has been a "huge improvement" in domestic abuse services since devolution.
But it is claimed cuts are now putting refuges in a difficult position.
The women and children were turned away for a number of reasons - because the refuge was not suitable, because of their immigration status and because there was no space.

You worry about what happens to them and you wonder where the kids have ended up Lily Greenan Scottish Women's Aid Abuse court 'makes a difference' 'I could have killed my partner' 'He hit her with a fire extinguisher' Police 'proactively hunt abusers'

Across Britain, it is thought that 235 women every day are refused access to refuges because there is no space, equating to up to 58,000 a year.
Although many of these women may get help elsewhere, or from another refuge, experts have raised concerns about the situation.
Lily Greenan, director of Scottish Women's Aid, said: "We're not at what we need in terms of refuge provision. We turn away women and children every day.
"The prospect of further cuts, it just feels like we're going back. We've achieved so much and we don't want to lose that ground."
She added: "You worry about what happens to them and you wonder where the kids have ended up.
"You wonder if they found a friend's floor to sleep on. You wonder if they went back."
'Turned away'
Dr Mairead Tagg, a psychologist who works with Glasgow East Women's Aid, said: "To be fair we have seen a huge improvement in the services for domestic abuse since the Scottish government came into being."
But she said she was concerned about the impact of economic hardship and cuts.
"Women will then come forward depending and relying on a service that may be truncated or cut or fractured or, God forbid, not there at all," she said.

Dr Tagg said services highlighted by advertising drives may not be available

It is thought one-in-four women and one-in-six men will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.
Among those not entitled to help in a refuge are those women who have come to Britain to marry from abroad.
Many of these women find that, although living in Britain legally, they are not entitled to help from public funds. This means that refuges have no money to help them.
A survey of Women's Aid refuges in Scotland found that 139 such women had to be refused help by refuges over the course of a year.
However, John Watson, Amnesty International's programme director in Scotland, said there was no accurate way of measuring how many women were being affected by this and that the real total could amount to many hundreds.
He said: "In the great majority of those cases they have to be turned away, either to go back to the abuser, or to be forced onto the charity of friends or forced onto the streets.
"We've heard of cases where people have ended up in prostitution."
Since the BBC investigation was carried out, a pilot scheme which offers some limited help to domestic abuse victims who have no recourse to public funds, has been extended until the end of August.

@'BBC'

GOP seeks to block Obama nominee to El Salvador post over Cuban romance

Senate Republicans are determined to block a Democratic Party activist's nomination as ambassador to El Salvador because of questions about a long-ago boyfriend who had contacts with Cuban diplomats, congressional staffers say.
The FBI cleared Mari Carmen Aponte when the issue of the boyfriend, Cuban-born businessman Roberto Tamayo, first became public after President Bill Clinton nominated her as ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 1998.
Aponte withdrew from that nomination after Senate Republicans vowed to ask tough questions about Tamayo. They had dated from 1982 to 1994 and attended social functions with Cuban diplomats in Washington, D.C.
Her Obama administration nomination to the El Salvador job was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations committee April 27, with 10 Democrats endorsing her -- including Cuban-American Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey -- and eight Republicans voting no.
But the Republicans will put a hold on her nomination when it comes up in the full Senate, meaning it will need 60 votes for confirmation unless they lift the hold, said congressional staffers who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the topic.
``This is clearly a controversial nomination. It was controversial the last time she was nominated, in a different administration,'' the committee's top Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, said during last month's vote.
The panel's Republicans, led by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC., had asked to look at Aponte's full FBI file and a reputed confidential memo on Tamayo's Cuban connections written during her 1998 nomination. Democrats countered that no such memo exists, and that by tradition only one member from each party is allowed to read the full files of nominees.
Menendez strongly defended Aponte during the April 27 vote, according to The Cable, a Washington-based foreign policy website.
``If I thought that, after having reviewed the file, that Miss Aponte would be a security risk to the United States in any context, but particularly in the context of the Castro regime . . . I would oppose her. But that is simply not the case,'' he was quoted as saying.
Cuban intelligence defector Florentino Aspillaga alleged in a 1993 newspaper article that Havana's spies were trying to recruit Aponte through Tamayo, but gave no details. FBI agents later revealed that Tamayo was in fact passing them information on his contacts with the Cuban diplomats in Washington.
The Puerto Rico-born Aponte, 63, has acknowledged that she and Tamayo attended some social functions with Cuban diplomats but insisted that she never became aware of any attempt to recruit her.
Aponte has been a longtime Hispanic community activist in Washington, working in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Jimmy Carter, volunteering in the Clinton White House in 1993 and later raising campaign funds for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate.
She has served on the board of directors of the National Council of La Raza and as president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, and was executive director 2001-2004 of the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration in Washington, a liaison between the island's government and U.S. federal and state agencies.

Execution and Intimidation are condemned: Statement of Tehran Bus Transportation Syndicate in condemning Farzad Kamangar’s execution

فارسی

We are mourning the death of a teacher whose teaching tool was chalk and pen, who taught children that many of them would go to bed with an empty stomach every night. Execution and intimidation is condemned. His crime was defending human rights. Crime that in the past 100 year has taken lives of many and made lots of families to mourn. In the past 4 years many national and international organizations had condemned the imprisonment of Farzad Kamanger and more importantly demanded for an impartial and legal review of his case. International organizations had asked for direct meeting with Farzad several times, which never got approved.

Unfortunately his family did not have the right or opportunity to see their beloved son for the last time. These executions take place in our society while our people have always negated any type of violence. Iranian and international worker movement have lost a teacher who did not stop learning and teaching even in prison. Our condolences goes to Farzad Kamangar family and everyone around the world.

As we have repeatedly announced through out these years, we want an end to death penalty, we reject verdicts of illegal courts and ask for the freedom of all social right prisoners; including Mr. Madadi and Osanloo.

With hope for peace and justice all around the world

Union Workers

Bus Transportation of Tehran and Suburbs

In Memorium

The fire at Valley Parade took 56 lives and left more than 200 people injured 
Bradford marks Valley Parade stadium fire 25 years on

Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?

Forget "Downfall", here's Bayern München 's Dutch coach Louis Van Gaal!

In case you have just tuned in...

Gordon Brown plays last card – proffering his resignation

Brown's announcement outside No 10 Downing Street 

 

School ban on gay anthology challenged by US free speech organisations

Oh look! it's that a**hat again Mommy!

A campaign by the local chapter of Glenn Beck's 9.12 project led to Rancocas Valley Regional High School's decision to ban Revolutionary Voices. Photograph: Soul Brother/FilmMagic

American free speech organisations are fighting a decision by a New Jersey school to remove a critically acclaimed anthology of writing about teenage homosexuality from library shelves after parents described it as vulgar and obscene.

Revolutionary Voices, a collection of stories, poems and artwork by young homosexuals, was banned at Rancocas Valley Regional High School last week following a campaign by the local chapter of Glenn Beck's conservative 9.12 project. Local grandmother and 9.12 member Beverly Marinelli told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the book was "pervasively vulgar, obscene, and inappropriate", while insisting that she is "not a homophobe".

But a coalition of free speech groups has jumped to the book's defence, saying that residents "have no right to impose their views on others or to demand that the contents of the library reflect their personal, religious, or moral values".

"There are undoubtedly GLBTQ [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning] students at Rancocas Valley High School, regardless of whether they are openly recognised. Removing any of these titles would send a clear message to those students that they are the objects of social disapproval – different, vulnerable, and marginal – whose needs for information of particular relevance to their lives are not respected," wrote the directors of a collection of organisations to the school's board. The letter, the signatories to which include the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers and PEN America, added that there was "no question that these books are not obscene".

"No one has to read something just because it's on the library shelf," the letter continued. "No book is right for everyone, and the role of the library is to allow students to make choices according to their own interests, experiences, and family values ... Even if the books are too mature for some students, they will be meaningful to others."

Lambda Legal, a US civil rights group representing gays, lesbians, and people with HIV/Aids, has also written to the school board saying that removing the book "undermines the school's obligation and ability to protect students regardless of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity".

The book's editor, Amy Sonnie, pointed to a letter from a 15-year-old boy, who said that on reading the volume he was relieved to discover "that there were other people out there who shared elements of my identity".

"Queer students may not feel safe speaking up when LGBTQ books are challenged," said Sonnie. "But, they certainly deserve a chance to discover the 'diversity of voices' that make balanced library collections so crucial for the health of our communities and democracy."

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the local 9.12 group is now looking to get the same book removed from the Lenape regional high school district, the county's largest school district. But the paper said that students were "shrugging off" the controversy. "Just because these books are in the library isn't going to cause us to be gay," they said. "We have so much access to information, if we want to read something we'll read it."

Alison Flood @'The Guardian'

Conservatives can't be funny.

a)They don't like irreverence 

because their beliefs are based on sacred things that mustn't be questioned.

b)They don't like irony  

because it involves nuance acknowledges that our assumptions about reality don't always match up.

That basically leaves them with humor based on puns and cruelty.

e.g.

West Midlands (UK) Ambulance Service defend 'Hitler' survey

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication. 

- Aristotle

Sex Madness

Vaughn Bell just reminded me of this film, which I haven't seen since an all nighter at The Scala in London sometime in the early eighties. 

I also learnt this rather astonishing bit of information from his post over at 'Mind Hacks': 

"...Before then, the most effective treatment was to be infected by malaria which would give you a fever so strong that the syphilis bacteria would die in your body due to the high temperature. The hope was that the malaria could be treated by quinine before you died from that. The discovery won Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel prize in 1927."

.@DMiliband says Cabinet has agreed no one will put their name forward for leader until talks are over 2 minutes ago via TweetDeck

(Nice to see that he knows the secret of the .@!) 

RIP Frank Frazetta

@'The Beat'

Back at school in Glasgow in the mid 70's the art department was full of boys ripping off Roger Dean.

Frank Frazetta got ripped off a lot too!

‘Never book me in Memphis the day Elvis dies again.’ - Willie Nelson

JoeBot - "Disaster Tourist" - Photo by Andrew Edman

Beneath the Surface – Nashville’s Flood of 2010