Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Huffing and Puffing
Reminiscent of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington is being sued by two political consultants, Peter Daou and James Boyce, who claim a critical role in creating her top-ranked Web site, the Huffington Post. So what exactly happened in the fall of 2004 when Huffington, Daou, Boyce, and such liberal lights as David Geffen, Larry David, and Norman Lear discussed a Democratic answer to the Drudge Report? And why did the two men wait nearly six years to claim credit? The author walks back their she-said-we-said collision.
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William D. Cohan @'Vanity Fair'
Rose Borchovski - The story of Susa Bubble
It seems odd that art censorship should bleed into virtual reality, a mirror existence built on pixels inside the Internet. But this past June, when the video artist Rose Bochovski exhibited her computer-graphic, 3-D film Susa Bubble in a Second Life art gallery, it was promptly removed, with the censors citing Second Life’s rules disallowing nudity beyond spaces with an “adult” rating. The images, viewable below, depict a young girl who is naked but not in any real provocative way and is completely devoid of sexualization, whether in the rendering or in the context. Real 21st-century problems, these, but they illustrate the vast illogic of censorship -- a couple of keystrokes on the Internet and anyone can view anything from real-life corpses to hardcore pornography. And yet in an online gaming system, a woman whose art piece is moderately less naked than Henry Darger’s cherubic hermaphrodites gets the boot? Surreal. Go here to read Bochovski’s response.
6 Artists Who Were Banned, Censored or Arrested by Conservatives
Killing of Governor Deepens Crisis in Pakistan
Police officers in Islamabad, Pakistan, collected evidence at the scene where Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, was shot dead by one of his guards on Tuesday.
Mr. Taseer, 65, a successful businessman and publisher of a liberal English-language daily newspaper, was exceptional, even within the secular-minded Pakistan Peoples Party, for his vocal opposition to the religious parties and the extremism they spread. He was imprisoned in the 1980s under the military dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq for it and was still opposing the religious parties 30 years later.
He recently took up a campaign to repeal Pakistan’s contentious blasphemy laws, which were passed under General Zia as a way to promote Islam and unite the country. The laws have been misused to convict minority Pakistanis as the Islamic forces unleashed by the general have gathered strength. The laws prescribe a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of insulting Islam...
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Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall @'NY Times'
Julian Assange: The downside about being declared the messiah is that they generally come to a sticky end
HE comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions. And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated, but rather the president of the United States Barack Hussein Obama . . . Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus
Oprah Winfrey at a Barack Obama rally on November 11, 2007:
IT'S a question that the entire nation is asking: is he the one? South Carolina, I do believe he's the one.
A query on Yahoo Answers:
IS Oprah the new Messiah?
ABC1's Lateline April 3, 2008:
TONY Jones: Is that a fear in this . . . what would happen if Obama was assassinated?
David Hale: I think Barack Obama is clearly vulnerable to assassination because he's a very unique figure in American history.
Jones: If, God forbid, that happened what would be the impact on America?
Hale: I think it would be catastrophic. Barack Obama has generated tremendous excitement in the last few months. He's had a profound effect on American politics and if we were to lose him to an assassin's bullet, I think America would be very, very demoralised and it would be a very major crisis for us as we contemplate where we're going.
Julian Assange interviewed by John Humphrys on the BBC's Today on Tuesday:
JUST a final thought. Do you see yourself as some sort of messianic figure?
Assange: Everyone would like to be a messianic figure without dying.
MSNBC on December 12:
A LAWYER for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday condemned calls for his assassination as "absolutely outrageous and indeed illegal" and claimed remarks by Sarah Palin may prevent him from getting a fair trial in the United States.
CIA response to Assange assassination FOI on Scribd.com:
This is a final response to your 11 October FOI Act request for all copies of all records current or previous plans to assassinate Julian Assange. The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is protected from disclosure. Therefore your request is denied.
Chris Capps writes on unexplainable.net on December 7:
JULIAN Assange, the Australian native and founder of Wikileaks has been arrested. And it is not lost on many UFO believers that Assange's arrest happens just as information regarding the UFO phenomenon has been announced. Is it possible that Assange stumbled upon something too great even for his site WikiLeaks? Assange said in a media chat interview that for a long time they had been receiving requests for information regarding the UFO phenomenon, and that they would soon be releasing information regarding UFOs referenced directly in diplomatic cables. Of course the incredible news sent shockwaves through the paranormal community. Will we finally learn what the government really thinks about UFOs? And is this the form disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth will take?
The Guardian, December 23, 2010:
IF the US succeeded in removing him from the UK or Sweden, Assange said there was a "high chance" of him being killed "Jack Ruby-style" in the US prison system.
Jack Ruby speaking to journalists before his conviction for the 1963 murder of John Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald:
GENTLEMEN, I want to tell the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me, you have to take me to Washington.
@'The Australian'
WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
James Richardson's Collateral Damage in the Guardian: WikiLeaks & Tsvangirai
FBI Steps Up WikiLeaks-Linked Probe With Texas, Germany Raids
I am a US Air Force Intelligence Veteran of the War in Afghanistan and I support Wikileaks
WikiLeaks, Ideological Legitimacy and the Crisis of Empire
Ennio Morricone Now Composing Ringtones for LG
So in an age where almost everyone’s life is run through their cell phone, it makes almost perfect sense that a great film composer is going to the digital medium. Ennio Morricone, the legendary Italian composer who has written scores for hundreds of films including Cinema Paradiso, The Good The Bad and The Ugly as well as The Untouchables, has signed a deal with LG to not only write brand new music for ringtones on their upcoming smart phones, but allow those phones to exclusively play some of his most famous themes...
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Germain Lussier @'/Film'
BrandDNA Mick Karn and Gerry Rafferty have died. The band up in heaven now has one a helluva bassist, plus the man who wrote my fave song Late Again. Tuesday, 4 January 2011
WikiLeaks: It IS the Bank of America
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
Julian Assange (October 2009) Via @jayrosen_nyu 's link
Carrier Wave Phase
Carrier Wave Phase by ph0n0n
From the last live Ph0n0n show of last year (at Seattle’s Pillow Full of Drone on December 12, 2010), our first publicly available track of the new year, for any who might be interested.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Funnily enough not a fan of scientology myself (religion my arse!)
exilestreet @Dirk57 Hmmm! http://bit.ly/fTCwpp 
Dirk57 Narconon co-opts Martin Luther King. Quite disgusting. RT @exilestreet: @Dirk57 Hmmm! http://bit.ly/fTCwpp 
Nazi Watch: Like Father Like Daughter
For 40 years Jean-Marie Le Pen has ruled one of the most successful and feared ultra-nationalist movements in Europe.
In 2002 he shocked France by winning through to the second round of the presidential election.But now at 82 years of age, the father of the Front National is ready to step aside and he is backing his daughter Marine to succeed him.
"I didn't take to politics readily," Marine told me. "But then as the daughter of Le Pen, it is probably unavoidable that I entered the fray. Politics swallowed me up."
"Now it is my desire to carry on my father's fight," she says. "I want to strive for what he believed in, what the French people really want. And if I don't do it, I don't think anyone else is capable."
Softer image Marine is not lacking in self-confidence. But she is hardly Joan of Arc, the symbol of French sanctity that is the adopted emblem of the FN party.
Invariably she wears jeans and high-heeled shoes. She is a twice-divorced mother of three. She is pro-abortion. She is certainly not the choice of the hard-line Catholics within her party.
But those who meet her agree she is personable and difficult to dislike. Which makes her a formidable politician.
"She is of her generation," said Nonna Mayer, an expert on far-right politics at the Sciences Po University. "She has no nostalgia for World War II. That is the past. She is looking ahead."
"She has the same ideas about immigration as her father," said Ms Mayer. "She thinks there are two kinds of French people: the 'real French' and the others. But she packages this message in a different, softer way. She is very popular and very good with the media."The vote for the party leader will be taken among 75,000 party members. The result is to be announced at a conference in Tours on 16 January...
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Christian Fraser @'BBC'
Reporter behind WMD claims calls Assange ‘bad journalist’ (!!!)
Judith Miller took on the WikiLeaks founder during an appearance on Fox News Watch Saturday, arguing that Assange was a bad journalist "because he didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone."
For many critics of the war in Iraq, that claim is likely to set off irony alarms. Miller has become famous for being the author of a 2002 New York Times article -- now debunked -- suggesting that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program.
"Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war," Miller wrote.
Senior Bush administration officials would soon use the article to argue for an invasion of Iraq.
In an article published last week, Salon.com's Alex Pareene argued that Miller simply parroted what Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi had told her.
Lying exile grifter Ahmad Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong, and for some insane reason, she remained employed at the Times until 2005, when she negotiated her separation from her longtime professional home.As the Crooks and Liars blog points out, Miller once defended her reporting with the argument that it is not a journalist's job to verify -- only to report inform readers of what they had been told.
"[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal," she said.
Miller's career trajectory since leaving the Times in 2005 has had a distinctly rightward bent. She became a contributor for Fox News, before recently joining the conservative magazine Newsmax. Her first article appears in the January, 2011, issue.
Miller made her comment about Assange while arguing that organizations like WikiLeaks are part of the "new journalism" of the digital age.
"This is part of the new journalism," she said. "Everybody's just got to get used to it. If you have that much information, most of which is over-classified -- if the waste basket in the office is classified, someone's going to leak it," she said.
The following video, broadcast on Fox News Jan. 1, 2011, was uploaded to the web by Crooks and Liars.
Daniel Tencer @'Raw Story'
WTF??? At the end of the segment they ask if you have any evidence of media bias to get in touch!!!
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