Damn! I want this...

This September, Dead.net will release a limited-edition, individually-numbered, Europe '72: The Complete Recordings boxed set which will feature more than 60 discs and over 70 hours of music - every single note recorded on the legendary 22-show Europe '72 tour. Each disc will be mixed by Jeffery Norman, primary mixer of Dead archival multi-track material, and mastered to HDCD specs by two-time Grammy-winning engineer David Glasser. While many of the recordings heard on Europe ’72 were sweetened in the studio after the tour, those tracks will be included in this collection without overdubs, where possible.
Every show will include its own liner notes by top Dead scholars (including David Gans, Steve Silberman, Blair Jackson and Nicholas Meriwether) and concert-goers, as well as many never-before-seen photos. This magnificent, unprecedented collection will also feature memorabilia and ephemera from the tour, and a coffee table-worthy book with a comprehensive tour essay by Blair Jackson and hundreds of never-before-seen photos - all housed in a groovy replica steamer trunk.
As a special bonus, the first 3,000 boxed sets issued will be personalized editions. This unprecedented release will be limited to orders placed, with a maximum of 7,200 boxes produced.
Additionally, to reward those loyal fans who have to wait until September to receive the final box set, Dead.net will offer several exclusive goodies over the coming months.

GRATEFUL DEAD EUROPE 1972 TOUR DATES
All shows included in their entirety

April 7 Wembley Empire Pool, Wembley
April 8 Wembley Empire Pool, Wembley
April 11 Newcastle City Hall, Newcastle
April 14 Tivolis Koncertsal, Copenhagen
April 16 Aarhus University, Aarhus
April 17 Tivolis Koncertsal, Copenhagen
April 21 Beat Club, Bremen
April 24 Rheinhalle, Dusseldorf
April 26 Jahrhundert Halle, Frankfurt
April 29 Musikhalle, Hamburg
May 3 Olympia Theatre, Paris
May 4 Olympia Theatre, Paris
May 7 Bickershaw Festival, Wigan
May 10 Concertgebouw, Amsterdam
May 11 Rotterdam Civic Hall, Rotterdam
May 13 Lille Fairgrounds, Lille
May 16 Theatre Hall, Luxembourg
May 18 Kongressaal - Deutsches Museum, Munich
May 23 Strand Lyceum, London
May 24 Strand Lyceum, London
May 25 Strand Lyceum, London
May 26 Strand Lyceum, London
Europe 72

Gold v. Water

Last August 7 in his inaugural speech as President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos said: “We are a nation with one of the largest biological diversities in the world, and with a great supply of water. Therefore we are called upon to care for them for our own benefit and that of mankind...We will create the National Agency for Water Resources, in order to guarantee greater protection of our natural resources”. In another segment of his speech President Santos emphasized the need to create jobs in order to reduce the highest unemployment rate in Latin America and he specifically pointed out focus areas which are indispensable if Colombia is to move forward, naming agricultural development, infra-structure construction, build additional housing, mining development and technological innovation.

Based upon President Santos’ speech, the challenges he must meet include protecting bio-diversity, guaranteeing sources of potable water, and creating employment for Colombia’s millions of unemployed, while overseeing an increase in mining operations such as those planned for the Santurban area.

Deep in the eastern mountain range of the Colombian Andes there is a collection of mountains known as Santurban. This is a territory of “paramos”, a Spanish term that in pre-Roman times meant “desolation”. And the lands of the paramos are desolate, because they are found at an altitude of 3,000 to 5,000 meters. Their vegetation and grasses are appropriate for such heights. They are in permanent action, retaining water vapor from the ever-present fog and transforming it into liquid water. The secret of this process is in the nature of their soils, which are of volcanic origin and contain organic material and aluminum. The organic material accumulates, due to the low temperature in the paramos, which slows the activity of microbes. Upon combining with the aluminum, particles are formed which are resistant to decomposition. It is in this way that the soil retains water for long periods of time. Water is freed slowly and continuously. The paramos do not produce water. It comes from rain, fog and snow from higher altitudes, which are above 5,000 meters and are snow-covered mountains. They collect water and regulate it. For this reason the Andean paramos are considered natural “factories” of potable water. In addition, because of the very nature of their soil, the Andean paramos store carbon from the atmosphere and thus help to control global warming. These mountains may be able to offer a response to global warming and to the shortage of water.

In the specific case of Santurban, its ecosystem shelters a high biodiversity, in addition to providing water to rivers and ponds. Santurban has 85 ponds, which give origin to a number of rivers and streams that sustain agricultural production and cattle-raising in the low zones, as well as supplying water for the 2.2 million inhabitants of the cities of Bucaramanga and Cucuta and 20 nearby municipalities...

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Cecilia Zarate-Laun @'Counterpunch'

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Simply because [< 3]

From a comment in The Guardian: Britain in 2015

"Unemployment at record levels

Repossessions at record levels

Inflation at record levels

Interest rates at record levels

Hospital waiting lists at record levels

Crime at record levels

Suicide at record levels

Rioting in the streets

......................and bankers bonuses at record levels.

This is what the Tories do best."

@ 'The Guardian'

The Sultan's Signature

Americans Face Guantanamo-Like Torture Everyday in a Super-Max Prison Near You

Editor's Note: Courageous WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning is reportedly suffering some of the same horrible experiences detailed in the article below, including 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, which has been labeled torture by numerous prison and psychological experts.

“They beat the shit out of you,” Mike James said, hunched near the smeared plexiglass separating us. He was talking about the cell “extractions” he’d endured at the hands of the supermax-unit guards at the Maine State Prison.

“They push you, knee you, poke you,” he said, his voice faint but ardent through the speaker. “They slam your head against the wall and drop you on the floor while you’re cuffed.” He lifted his manacled hands to a scar on his chin. “They split it wide open. They’re yelling ‘Stop resisting! Stop resisting!’ when you’re not even moving.”

When you meet Mike James you notice first his deep-set eyes and the many scars on his shaved head, including a deep, horizontal gash. He got that by scraping his head on the cell door slot, which guards use to pass in food trays.

“They were messing with me,” he explained, referring to the guards who taunted him. “I couldn’t stand it no more.” He added, “I’ve knocked myself out by running full force into the wall.”

James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four years James had been in prison when I met him, he had spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” he said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at Guantánamo. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of American citizens are being held in equivalent or worse conditions in this country’s super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable units of traditional prisons. The Obama administration— somewhat unsteadily—plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to challenge the conditions of their captivity. Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts...

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Lance Tapley @'Alternet'

Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti's Reconstruction Hell

When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn't just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
"We had this rape problem before the earthquake," Yolande Bazelais tells me. She is the president of FAVILEK (the Creole acronym stands for Women Victims Get Up Stand Up), an organization founded by women who were raped (PDF) during the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. We're sitting under a blue tarp in the driveway of another NGO's office, because FAVILEK doesn't have one, with four of the other founders and my translator, Marc. He works with FAVILEK sometimes, running rape-related errands, taking victims like Alina to the hospital or the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), an international lawyers' group, for legal support. "Now," Bazelais says, "we have double problems."
It's a terrifying statement, considering that a survey taken before the earthquake estimated that there were more than 50 rapes a day just in Port-au-Prince, based on just the reported rapes—and more than half of the victims were minors. That's how it's been for as long as anyone can remember, with the perpetrators ranging from neighbors to street thugs to, as the FAVILEK founders can attest, police and paramilitaries who use rape as a tool of intimidation and terror.
But nearly a year after the 7.0 earthquake that shook some 280,000 buildings to the ground and killed or maimed nearly twice that many people, FAVILEK's insufficient resources are stretched thinner than ever. The organization says that displacement camps are hornet's nests of sexual violence.
The French military policemen hanging around my hotel say the same thing. They are soldiers of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, and their faces darken when they talk about the camps. "Every day it is like this: fighting, a lot of violence, murder, a lot of rape," they say, shaking their heads. "A lot of rape." A 43-page report by the IJDH says so, too, with a pile of testimonials like Alina's. And there's Marc, whose phone is always ringing, who's "like an ambulance" because "people are always calling me to say someone got raped"—like the woman calling about her teenage daughter today. Marc, who waves at somebody on the street as we drive around Port-au-Prince and yells, "I used to work with that guy!" then explains that the guy quit immediately because he really didn't want to hear about five-year-olds being raped. FAVILEK gets three or four calls a week about new cases, and that's just from the dozen camps the organization attempts to cover. There are 1,300 camps in all.
The quake's immediate aftermath.It's the first thing you see when you step out of Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport: just across the street, a sea of tarps held together with sticks and strings, white plastic and blue plastic and gray plastic side by side by side under the glaring sun. Maybe there are some clothes drying in the very narrow paths between shelters. Probably there are people bathing in the open. The bigger settlements sport walls of portable toilets. Within Port-au-Prince, every spare patch of land from the airport to anywhere is covered in tent settlements. More than a million people live like that, no lights, no security. The tent cities are hot, hungry, and packed, and tension is the only thing in town being built...

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 Mac McClelland @'MotherJones'

The One-Man Drug Company

S'OK - I'm about 66.6% comfortable about having my kids as my Facebook 'friends'

designtaxi TAXI

About two-thirds of American teenagers are “comfortable” with having their parents as Facebook friends. http://ow.ly/3GrMJ

UK and Australian governments to co-operate on cyber warfare

You're not in Kansas now Toto

A dilemmmah/

Happpy Bifffday to me!!!

X

X
X

Best of Miroslav Klose

Tunisia update

OOPS! Wrong band :)

HA!

Read the comments...

How many asylum seekers have you met?

Kate Bush “Likely” to Release New Music in 2011

It’s about time we got a chance to post Kate Bush news around here: What began as a popular rumor that Bush is preparing a follow-up album to 2005’s Aerial — only her second record in the past 20 years — has now been confirmed… sort of. Her representatives did reveal to NME that the English singer is, in fact, recording new music for a “likely” 2011 release, but they also suggested it might not arrive in a full-length album format.

Either way, given that her 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” is one of my favorite songs ever, I’d be happy with any new material from Ms. Bush — be it a new classic single, LP, EP, or otherwise.

via @24bit

BBC documentary on Kate Bush's only tour in 1979

Todd Edwards - What It Look Like (Dub Remix)

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slim404 Slim Amamou

Je suis secrétaire d'état a la Jeunesse et aux sports :)

Arrested Pirate Party Member Becomes Tunisian Minister

Disclaimer (Revlon)

Kruder and Dorfmeister - Fireside Chat – 2011-01-04

Kruder & Dorfmeister – Definition – G-Stone
Kruder & Dorfmeister – Deep Shit Pt 1 & 2 – G-Stone
Kruder & Dorfmeister – High Noon – G-Stone
Kruder & Dorfmeister – Original Bedroom Rockers – G-Stone
Shantel – Bass And Several Cars – !K7
Kruder & Dorfmeister – Black Baby (DJ Kicks) – !K7
Lamb – Trans Fatty Acid (K&D Session) – !K7
Rockers Hi Fi – Going Under (K&D Session) – !K7
Depeche Mode – Useless (K&D Session) – !K7
Count Basic – Gotta Jazz (K&D Session) – !K7
Count Basic – Speechless (Drum n Bass) – !K7
Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony – 1st Of Tha Month (K&D Session) – !K7
Alex Reece – Jazz Master (K&D Session) – !K7
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@'QRIP' 

Arjen van der Horst interviews Julian Assange (NOS Netherlands)

Free speech can't exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order

anotherlab Chris Miller

Since Facebook will now let apps access your address & number, I have set my no. to 650-543-4800 (FB Customer Service) http://bit.ly/gkJvYD

HERE

It's official. Inflatable dolls are NOT flotation devices

♪♫ Terry Callier - You Goin' Miss Your Candyman

Understanding Politically Motivated Cyberattacks

Can you predict violence in an area just by looking at alcohol sales?

LSD Research

Harvard Psychedelic Club: 1956 Footage Of Housewife's Acid Trip

Undercover police officer says he fears for his life

The former policeman who spent seven years undercover among environmental activists has denied being an agent provocateur, saying that his superiors knew exactly what he was doing at all times and approved his activities.
Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer who infiltrated green and anarchist groups under the alias Mark Stone and fled to America after his cover was blown, said he fears for his safety following threats from activists. The 41-year-old said he believed that his former police superiors were looking for him too.
"I can't sleep. I have lost weight and am constantly on edge. I barricade the door with chairs at night. I am in genuine fear for my life," said Kennedy, who sold his story to the Mail on Sunday. "People like to think of things in terms of black and white. But the world of undercover policing is grey and murky. There is some bad stuff going on. Really bad stuff."
However, Kennedy said that throughout his time spent undercover he was in constant touch with police handlers and never tried to push fellow protesters into taking action: "I had a cover officer whom I spoke to numerous times a day. He was the first person I spoke to in the morning and the last person I spoke to at night. I didn't sneeze without a superior officer knowing about it. My BlackBerry had a tracking device. My cover officer joked that he knew when I went to the loo."
He said he felt he had been "hung out to dry" since being exposed.
Kennedy's activities were at the centre of the decision last week by prosecutors to abandon the trial of six activists accused of conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire.
The former officer said that he made undercover audio recordings of the activists which threw doubt on prosecutors' claims they had conspired to commit aggravated trespass, but that his police superiors chose not to pass these on.
He said: "The truth of the matter is that the tapes clearly show that the six defendants who were due to go on trial had not joined any conspiracy. The tapes I made meant that the police couldn't prove their case. I have no idea why the police withheld these tapes."
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is to investigate the collapsed case. Twenty other environmental activists previously found guilty in connection with the same protest at Ratcliffe-on-Soar plan to challenge their convictions.
There have been calls for a wider investigation into the way police infiltrate such groups. Kennedy said that he knew personally of 15 other officers hidden within green groups during his time undercover from 2003 to 2009. He said: "Some got busted, others left. I was the longest-serving operative. At the time I left in 2009, there were at least four other operatives. I never did anything to jeopardise the work or lives of my fellow officers and I will not start now."
Kennedy, who separated from his wife in 2000, said his children, a girl aged 10 and a boy of 12, have been left devastated by recent events.
One of the most controversial aspects of his story is that he conducted at least two sexual relationships with fellow activists while living as Mark Stone. This, he conceded, should not have happened: "I am the first one to hold up my hands and say, yes, that was wrong. I crossed the line."
The relationships symbolised the impossible position in which he felt he had been placed, Kennedy added, admitting that the longer he spent with the activists the more he began to sympathise with their causes.
He said: "I fell deeply in love with the second woman. I was embedded into a group of people for nearly a decade. They became my friends. They supported me and they loved me. All I can do now is tell the truth. I don't think the police are the good guys and the activists are bad or vice versa. Both sides did good things and bad things. I am speaking out as I hope the police can learn from the mistakes they made."
"I was at the heart of a very sensitive operation. I was told my work was the benchmark for other undercover officers. My superior officer told me on more than one occasion, particularly during the G8 protests in Scotland in 2005, that information I was providing was going directly to Tony Blair's desk."
He continued: "As the years went on, I did get a sort of Stockholm syndrome. But I never lost sight of my work. I texted and informed on a daily basis. But I began to like the people I was with. I formed lasting friendships."
He criticised what he said was a lack of psychological support from his employers, saying he had considered killing himself in recent months: "I was supposed to get psychological counselling every three months. I would go two years without seeing the shrink. Initially meetings were regular. Then it became a farce. The office was so greedy for intelligence that they didn't set up the meetings. They went by the wayside. I'm sure that's the same for other undercover officers too." He said he resigned from the police last year.
Kennedy, who joined the City of London police aged 21 before moving to the Met, said that in 2006 he was beaten up by uniformed fellow police near Drax power station in North Yorkshire after trying to protect a female activist being struck with batons.
"I tried to stand between her and him. I didn't do anything aggressive. That's when I got jumped on by five officers who kicked and beat me. They had batons and pummelled my head. They punched me. One officer repeatedly stamped on my back."
Kennedy also told how he had created a credible identity when infiltrating groups, which included claiming a background in drug smuggling. He had formerly worked in the Met's drug squad.
He said: "I was an avid rock climber and I had been to Pakistan so I created a story about being involved in the importation of drugs. I knew the London drug scene well so I purported to be a courier. That is how I justified having money."
Peter Walker @'The Guardian'

Undercover police officer accused Icelandic police of 'brutality'

ioerror Jacob Appelbaum

Customs in Canada was three minutes in total. They were quite nice and I'm happy to be back in Toronto.

Etta James treated for leukaemia

US blues legend Etta James has been diagnosed with dementia and is undergoing treatment for leukaemia.

The 72-year-old's health problems came to light in court documents filed by her husband, Artis Mills, who is seeking control of her finances.
Mr Mills claims the singer, known for her hit ballad At Last, has become too sick to manage her own money.
A doctor has also stated the star needs help with eating, dressing and cannot sign her own name.
Mr Mills is seeking a court order for control of more than $1 million (£630,000).
He is also challenging the power of attorney James gave to sons Donto James and Sametto James, and Donto's wife Christy, in February 2008.
Donto wrote in his court declaration he does not object to money being released for his mother's medical care.
But he requests it to be overseen by a third party "to avoid present and future family conflict and discrepancies".
James has been out of the public eye since January last year when she was admitted to hospital after suffering from various ailments, including a blood infection.
She became ill while in a detox clinic for treatment to an addiction to painkillers and other medicines.
James is the winner of four Grammy awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
In the 2008 film Cadillac Records she was portrayed on screen by the singer Beyonce Knowles.
@'BBC'

Smoking 'causes damage in minutes', US experts claim

As opium prices soar and allies focus on Taliban, Afghan drug war stumbles

Fine Gael's data 'took just seconds to steal'

MACRO DUBPLATES VOLUME TWO - Jay Z and The Wailers

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via chrismacro

Iain Sinclair: The Raging Peloton

Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, single shareholder in the late lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice. Dripping with froideur, an imperious Mandelson nailed the upstart coalitionists for their absurd sense of entitlement. Hannah Rothschild’s vanity promo, unaccountably offered to the great unwashed by BBC4’s Storyville strand, sold itself on privileged (and clinically controlled) access to the ultimate political voice of the era, the oracle of tie-straightening and pantomimed sincerity. And how fascinating it was, after the fastidious documentation of eyebrow lifting, the heart-rending sighs over the shortcomings of colleagues and patrons, to be granted an unposed snapshot of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television.
Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in East Ham. And, presumably, to find himself caught up in the aggravations of the Thatcher period, the climate of economic belt-tightening and union-bashing. Lord Tebbit’s helpful remarks, delivered to a sea of grey heads, at Blackpool in 1981, in the aftermath of the Handsworth and Brixton riots, will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’...

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 @'London Review of Books'

Stuxnet worm used against Iran was tested in Israel