Wednesday 9 March 2011


NATO Places Unblinking Eyes Over Libya, 24-7

HA?


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A 'tradgedy' indeed!


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Realism, Idealism and Social Media

The Middle East feminist revolution


Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?
In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype: they were front and centre, in news clips and on Facebook forums, and even in the leadership. In Egypt's Tahrir Square, women volunteers, some accompanied by children, worked steadily to support the protests – helping with security, communications, and shelter. Many commentators credited the great numbers of women and children with the remarkable overall peacefulness of the protesters in the face of grave provocations.
Other citizen reporters in Tahrir Square – and virtually anyone with a cell phone could become one – noted that the masses of women involved in the protests were demographically inclusive. Many wore headscarves and other signs of religious conservatism, while others reveled in the freedom to kiss a friend or smoke a cigarette in public.
Supporters, leaders
But women were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
The role of women in the great upheaval in the Middle East has been woefully under-analysed. Women in Egypt did not just "join" the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural evolution that made the protests inevitable. And what is true for Egypt is true, to a greater and lesser extent, throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes - and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.
The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.
Indeed, a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments, and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It is far easier to tyrannise a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as Westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.
The nature of social media, too, has helped turn women into protest leaders. Having taught leadership skills to women for more than a decade, I know how difficult it is to get them to stand up and speak out in a hierarchical organisational structure. Likewise, women tend to avoid the figurehead status that traditional protest has in the past imposed on certain activists – almost invariably a hotheaded young man with a megaphone.
Projection of power
In such contexts – with a stage, a spotlight, and a spokesperson – women often shy away from leadership roles. But social media, through the very nature of the technology, have changed what leadership looks and feels like today. Facebook mimics the way many women choose to experience social reality, with connections between people just as important as individual dominance or control, if not more so.
You can be a powerful leader on Facebook just by creating a really big "us". Or you can stay the same size, conceptually, as everyone else on your page – you don't have to assert your dominance or authority. The structure of Facebook's interface creates what brick-and-mortar institutions - despite 30 years of feminist pressure - have failed to provide: a context in which women's ability to forge a powerful "us" and engage in a leadership of service can advance the cause of freedom and justice worldwide.
Of course, Facebook cannot reduce the risks of protest. But, however violent the immediate future in the Middle East may be, the historical record of what happens when educated women participate in freedom movements suggests that those in the region who would like to maintain iron-fisted rule are finished.
Just when France began its rebellion in 1789, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been caught up in witnessing it, wrote her manifesto for women's liberation. After educated women in America helped fight for the abolition of slavery, they put female suffrage on the agenda. After they were told in the 1960s that "the position of women in the movement is prone", they generated "second wave" feminism – a movement born of women's new skills and old frustrations.
Time and again, once women have fought the other battles for the freedom of their day, they have moved on to advocate for their own rights. And, since feminism is simply a logical extension of democracy, the Middle East's despots are facing a situation in which it will be almost impossible to force these awakened women to stop their fight for freedom – their own and that of their communities.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
This article was first published by Project Syndicate.
Naomi Wolf  @'Al Jazeera'

LOL!

Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

Mick Farren - 'The Titanic Sails At Dawn' (NME 1976)

"As you can all quite well-imagine, the letters that get themselves printed in Gasbag (or Dogbag or Ratbag or Scumbag or whatever jiveass name we've dredged out of our collective misery that particular week) are only the tip of an iceberg.
The iceberg in this case seems to be one of a particularly threatening nature. In fact it is an iceberg that is drifting uncomfortably close to the dazzlingly lit, wonderfully appointed Titanic that is big-time, rock-pop, tax exile, jet-set show business.
Unless someone aboard is prepared to leave the party and go up on the bridge and do something about, at least a slight change of course, the whole chromium, metalflake Leviathan could go down with all hands.
Currently about the only figure who seems to have the least interest in the social progress of rock and roll is the skinny, crypto Ubermensch figure of David Bowie. Everyone else is waltzing around the grand ballroom, or playing musical chairs at the captain's table.
(WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT?)
I guess it's the absorption of rock and roll into the turgid masterstream of traditional establishment show biz. For Zsa Zsa Gabor read Mick Jagger, for Lew Grade read Harvey Goldsmith. Only the names have been changed, blah, blah.
If that's the way of the world then keep your head down, make like William Hickey and drink yourself to death.
(OH GOD DIDN'T HE GO THROUGH ALL THIS BACK IN JANUARY?)
That's right, he did. And short of picking up some change by doing it all over again and hoping no one will notice, it would be something of a redundant exercise.
Except that something seems to be happening that wasn't happening back in January. The aforementioned iceberg cometh. And that iceberg, dear reader is you.
Dig? I'm talkin' 'bout you.
Where once the letters that were dumped in the tray marked Gasbag contained smart-ass one liners, demands for album tokens, obscene ideas for the uses of Max Bell, or diatribes against Smith, Springsteen or Salewicz, now the tone has changed.
Stewart Tray of Manchester wouldn't go down and see the Stones if he was pulled there by Keith Richard.
Mart of Oldham doesn't want to see five middle aged millionaires poncing around to pseudo soul funk/rock.
Letter after letter repeats the same thing. You all seem to have had it with the Who, and Liz Taylor, Rod Stewart and the Queen, Jagger and Princess Margaret, paying three quid to be bent, mutilated, crushed or seated behind a pillar or a PA stack, all in the name of modern seventies style super rock.
The roar from the stage of "I shout, I scream, I kill the king, I rail at all his servants" has ben muted, mutated and diluted "I smile, I fawn, I kiss ass and get my photo took".
It was all too easy to to accept that change until you out there pulled the whole thing up short.
"We're not going to take it" wasn't coming from the stage with any conviction. Instead it was coming from the audience. Could it be that once more there's music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air?
It's hard to tell. Like it or not, NME is a part of the rock industry and, to an extent, suffers from the same isolation that is endemic to the whole business.
Certainly the massive rock gala of the last month has produced some kind of backlash. People have become tired of the godawful conditions at places like Charlton. They're sick of having their booze confiscated and being ordered to stop dancing.
Maybe they're also sick of seeing the vibrant, iconoclastic music whose changes did, at least, shake the walls of the city a little, being turned round, sold out, castrated and co-opted.
Did we ever expect to see the Rolling Stones on News at Ten just like they were at the Badminton Horse Trials or the Chelsea Flower Show?
It's not clear just how deep this resistance goes. There's no way of knowing whether the mail we've getting is simply another version of "Dear Esther Rantzen, I just found sewer rat in my Diet Pepsi".
The only thing I know for sure is the effect the whole thing had on me. I woke up guilty and angry. Has rock and roll become another mindless consumer product that plays footsie with jet set and royalty and while the kids who make up its roots and energy queue uo in the rain to watch it from two hundred yards away?
The Who, the Stones, Bowie, are, after all, my own generation. We all grew up togehter. Isaw them in small sweaty clubs, cinemas and finally giant rock festivals. At the same time as everyone else they embraced politics, mysticism, acid. Together we ran through the trends, fads, psychoses and few precious moments of clear honesty that made up the tangle of the sixties.
(ISN'T THIS GETTING A LITTLE...UH...SUBJECTIVE FOR NME? IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL, AFTER ALL?)
Yeah, maybe so. There does, however, come a point when a cynical sold-out front has to drop for long enough to shout "Hold it!" Did we really come through the fantasy, fear and psychic mess of the last decade to make rock and roll safe for the Queen, Princes Margaret or Liz Taylor? Was the bold rhetoric and even the deaths and imprisonments simply to enable the heroes and idols of the period to retreat into a gaudy, vulgar jet set that differs from the Taylor/Burton menace or the Sinatra rat pack only in small variations of style.
It's not so much the lifestyle of stars that is important . They can guzzle champagne till it runs from their ears, and become facile to the point of dumbness. They will only undermine their own credibility.
The real danger lies in what seems sometimes to be a determined effort on the part of some artists, promoters and sections of the media to turn rock into a safe, establishment form of entertainment.
It's okay if some stars want to make the switch from punk to Liberace so long as they don't take rock and roll with them.
If rock becomes safe, it's all over. It's a vibrant, vital music that from its very roots has always been a burst of colour and excitement against a background of dullness, hardship or frustration. From the blues onwards, the essential core of the music has been the rough side of humanity. It's a core of rebellion, sexuality, assertion and even violence. All the things thta have always been unacceptable to a ruling establishment.
Once that vigorous, horny-handed core is extracted from rock and roll, you're left with little more than muzak. No matter how tastefully played or artfully constructed, if the soul's gone then it still, in the end comes down to muzak.
( OKAY, OKAY, WE'VE HEARD THE "MUSIC IS THE LIFE FORCE" MESSAGE PLENTY OF TIMES BEFORE. WHAT ABOUT A FEW SOLUTIONS FOR A CHANGE?)
"Well," he said, avoiding everyone's eyes, "solutions aren't quite so easy."
The one thing that isn't a solution is to look back at the sixties and reproduce something from the past. This is, in fact, one of the problems we're suffering from today. The methods of presenting the biggest of today's superstars were conceived in the sixties when the crowds were smaller and logistics a whole lot easier.
When the Stones play at Earl's Court, or Bowie at Wembley Pool, we're seeing the old Bill Graham Fillmore. The difference is that the crowd is five or ten times the size and the problems of controlling it are multiplied by the same extent.
The promoter's solution is to remove the dancing, freaking about, and general looseness of the old Fillmore days. Instead the audience is expected to sit still in their numbered, regimented seats, under the watchful ear of the security muscle.
The same situation exists when the Who play at Charlton or any other football ground. The stadium rock show is basically the open air festival penned up inside the walls of a sports arena. Again, from the promoter's point of view, it makes everything very much easier. There's no more trouble with ticket takin or the collection of money. Security is simplified, and all the problems of overnight camping are avoided. Unfortunately it's the audience that now tales all the chances. They're the ones who take the risk of being crushed,cramped, bottled, soaked, stuck behind a pillar or a PA Stack, manhandled by security, ripped off by hot dog men or generally dumped on.
It's got to the point where the only celebration at today's superstar concert is taking place on stage. The only role for the audience is that of uncomfortable observers.
There are more ways of taking the soul out of rock and roll than just changing the music.
We're six years into the nineteen seventies, and already the sixties are beginning to sound like some golden age.
(OH NO, NOT THAT AGAIN.)
Of course they weren't. If we could be miraculously transported back there, we'd probably be appalled at some of the dumbness and naivete that went down.
There were wrong moves, screw-ups, disasters and even straight forward robberies. The two things that did exist that don't seem to be prominent today were, first, a phenomenal burst of creativity that wasn't merely confined to the stage but extended into the presentation, the audience and even right through to the press and poster art.
The second thing was that from musicians to managers to promoters to audience, the whole rock scene was in the hands of one generation. It was by no means perfect, but at least the energy levels were higher, and the gap between star and fan wasn't the yawning chasm that it has become today.
From sweaty, shoestring cellar clubs through the multi media extravaganzas like the Avalon in San Francisco, the Grande Ballroom in Detroit or the Technicolour Dream and UFO in London, clear through Glastonbury Fayre and even Woodstock, it was one generation taking care of its own music.
The scene was sufficiently solid to ease out the old farts from the fifties who thought promoting rock was a matter of giving the "kids" the kind of safe product, the kind of thing that was good for them.
(AH-HA! NOW WE GET DOWN TO IT. FARREN'S TRYING TO TURN THE CLOCK BACK TO THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND SCENE.)
No such thing. Even if I wanted to, that simply wouldn't be possible. The whole of the sixties underground , the free concerts and festivals, Oz, IT the crazed fringe bands and street theatre would be largely impossible today. They survived financially in a tiny margin of a still affluent society that doesn't exist today.
The seventies are without doubt an era of compromise. Even to get this piece into print it is necessary to use the resources of a giant corporation, and adapt ones approach accordingly.
The real question of this decade is not whether to compromise or not, but how much and in what way.
One major lesson can be learned from the sixties, however, and that is that the best, most healthy kind of rock and roll is produced by and for the same generation.
There can be no question that a lot of today's rock is isolated from the broad mass of its audience. From the superstars with champagne and coke parties all the way down to your humble servant spending more time with his friends, his writing and his cat than he does cruising the street, all are cut off.
If rock is not being currently presented in an acceptable manner, and from the letters we've been getting at NME, this would seem to be the case, it is time for the seventies generation to start producing their own ideas, and ease out the old farts who are still pushing tired ideas left over from the sixties.
The time seems to be right for original thinking and new inventive concepts, not only in the music but in the way that it is staged and promoted.
It may be difficult in the current economic climate, and it may be a question of taking rock back to street level and starting all over again.
This is the only way out, if we are not going to look forward to an endless series of Charlton and Earl's Court style gigs, and constant reruns of things from the past, be they Glenn Miller revivals or Bowie's stabs at neo-fascism.
Putting the Beatles back together isn't going to be the salvation of rock and roll. Four kids playing to their contemporaries in a dirty cellar club might.
And that, gentle reader, is where you come in."

Mona says: As someone who started living and breathing pop music and its associated 'kulchur' from about 1972 onwards (I was 12 then) and who was much more of a Slade than Bowie/Bolan fan...(it was something to do with the footstomps and growing up in Glasgow I suspect,) I just knew that something was...well terribly wrong. 
I tried to fit in with the Gong crowd - 'Camembert Electrique' best album evar? Well certainly the second best album for 49 pence (after 'The Faust Tapes' my friend.)
Yes? Genesis? Gnidrolog? None of them really hit the mark and yeah sure by 75/76 some of us had read about Hell/TV/Patti Smith in the missives sent back from across the Atlantic by Charles ('Alive To The Jive In 75' from memory) Shaar Murray (NME) and Steve Lake (Melody Maker) but that was...well from across a fugn big ocean!
Then the article above appeared. 
Yes (no pun intended) of course Farren could hardly have been unaware of the groundroots revolution that was taking place in London: Eddie and The Hot Rods, The Feelgoods, 101'ers, Pistols, London SS, Nick Kent's Subterraneans et al...but IT WAS a rallying call to all the (social) deviants who were out there in the suburbs and sticks of the UK at the time.
For which my eternal thanx my friend!

Tuesday 8 March 2011

One Shot Not : Stephan Eicher


I Cry At Commercials
Eldorado


Stephan Eicher (born August 17, 1960) is a European sensation. This Swiss native had a monumental career throughout the '80s and '90s, exploring his vocal strengths with electronic music. But as a teenager in Western Europe, he was fond of the punk rock spirit popular in the late '70s. At age 17, he and younger brother Martin founded a punk-techno act called Grauzone. The single "Eisbar" went on to sell nearly 500,000 copies across Germany and Switzerland. During this time, he also befriended the girl group Liliput and had a chance meeting with future manager Martin Hess. Eicher's solo career was born.
His first album, Chansons Bleues, was issued in late 1983 and was obviously influenced by New Order. A year later, he put his musical palate to the test by singing in German, French, and English on his second album, I Tell This Night. Countless shows around Europe pushed Eicher into the limelight. He changed up his signature electronic sound for a third album, 1986's Silence. With this particular record, Eicher played with other musicians for a more abrasive sound. My Place took things further. Eicher's fascination and respect for novelist Philippe Djian was now a part of his work and would continue to be a part of his musical direction for the rest of his career.
By the '90s, Eicher had four albums behind him and was an international success. Engelberg, named for a Swiss ski resort, appeared in 1991, and singles "Hemmige" and "Dejeuner en Paix" pushed the album to sell nearly two million copies worldwide. 1993 saw the release of another album, Carcassonne. Named in honor of a city in southern France, Carcassonne again included songs referring to the works of Djian. In 1994, he played over 100 shows across Europe and Africa, and recorded his first live album, Non Ci Badar, Guarda E Passa, later that year. Two years following, 1000 Vies was released. Louanges was issued in 1999. (MacKenzie Wilson - allmusic)

007 for International Women's Day

JAMES BOND SUPPORTS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2011
www.weareequals.org / www.weareequals.org/blog
The two-minute short, specially commissioned for International Women's Day, sees 007 star Daniel Craig undergo a dramatic makeover as he puts himself, quite literally, in a woman's shoes.
Directed by acclaimed 'Nowhere Boy' director/conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood, scripted by Jane Goldman ('Kick Ass') and featuring the voice of Dame Judi Dench reprising her role as 'M', the film will be screened in cinemas and streamed online in a bid to highlight the levels of inequality that persist between men and women in the UK and worldwide. It is the first film featuring Bond to be directed by a woman.
Director: Sam Taylor-Wood. Producer: Barbara Broccoli. Scriptwriter: Jane Goldman. Director of photography: Seamus McGarvey. Featuring the voice of Dame Judi Dench.
Editor: Mel Agace
Post production: Michael Sollinger
Post production coordinator: Harriet Dale
With thanks to all the team at Ascent, including Patrick Malone, Dean Harding,
Grading: Robin Pizzey
Deluxe grade production: Rob Farris
Effects fix: Emily Greenwood
Sound producer: Hannah Mills
Sound: Simon Diggins and Peter Gleaves at Goldcrest
The EQUALS partnership and Annie Lennox would like to thank all the production team, cast and crew that donated their time, vision and energy in the hope of a more equal world for women and girls.
(Thanx Fifi - Jane Bond?)
The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday

Rule of Law, the Killer App that Keeps Crashing in China

♪♫ The Social Deviants Live- Hyde Park 1969 (Uncle Harry’s Last Freakout)



Mick Farren remembers

Home taping is skill in music!

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Kassette via

Transvestite Knights in the Thirteenth Century

Facebook & Twitter opt to not sign a free speech pact

Fear Mongering and Delusional Piracy Report Upsets Aussies

A new study commissioned by several entertainment industry outfits made the rounds in the Australian news yesterday. It claims that illicit movie, music and games downloads cost the industry $900 million a year as well as 8,000 jobs and that an increase in broadband adoption could propel the losses to a staggering $5.2 billion in the next five years. However, it looks like the public isn’t buying it, figuratively speaking.
Over the years anti-piracy and pro-copyright organizations have published dozens of reports on the billions of dollars they claim to lose because of piracy. Many of these reports have been scrutinized, such as the infamous LEK study, but despite the criticism they are still an influential tool for fear-mongering and political lobbying efforts.
Yesterday yet another study was announced, this time by the Australian Content Industry Group, an umbrella organization of pro-copyright groups that conveniently doesn’t have a web presence. According to a news item the report claims that of the 22 million Australians, nearly 5 million are pirates.
Together, these downloaders were responsible for $900 million in losses the games, movies, films, music and software companies suffered in 2010, and that’s just the start. According to the report Australia’s National Broadband Network will cause the losses to rise to $5.2 billion by 2016.
As is often the case, the study itself is not available online, neither are the publishers responding to any requests to get a review copy. This makes it impossible to point out where the flaws are, but anyone with a calculator and some sense of economic reality will realize that the numbers are bogus.
If we believe the researchers, 6.5 million pirating Australians will be responsible for $5.2 billion in losses by 2016. This means that without piracy those people – including children and the unemployed – would spend an extra $800 per year, on average. Right.
Even if we assume that this would be even remotely possible, why would it go to $800 per head from the $187 they estimate now?
We suspect of course that the report makes some wild claims, such as arguing that every download is a lost sale. So with more and better broadband connections people will download more, and so cause more losses. Of course, this type of reasoning lies far from reality.
Insane, yes, but we’ve seen it before. A similar report published last year had a trend line where the ‘lost’ revenue because of piracy would actually exceed the actual revenue. Not impossible by definition, but highly unlikely. We expect that the Aussie report is based on a similar faulty trend.
Although the above suggests that even without seeing the full report, it’s not that hard to cast doubt on the validity of the claims, journalists simply pass it on without a critical note. This resulted in a fair bit of criticism in the comment section of the SMH article.
SMH wasn’t too happy with the critical readers and instead of addressing the concerns and valid commentary, they decided to close the comments section. How convenient.
Luckily there are still independent journalists who are rather more skeptical, and favor some analysis over a scoop, but they are in the minority. Most news outlets simply republished the industry-fed numbers without a critical comment.
This makes it easy for the entertainment industry outfits to influence public opinion with their fear-mongering propaganda. But even more importantly, these flawed and delusional reports are used as leverage to convince politicians to put the industry’s revenues before the rights of citizens and implement harsher anti-piracy legislation.
This time it will not be different. If only the industry representatives would get their heads out of the sand and address the gap between consumer demands in the digital age, and their offerings. That would really make a lasting impact.
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'

Youth and Young Manhood: The Strange And Frightening World Of Odd Future

♪♫ Emanuele Errante - Dorian's Mirror

Bunny Kill


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See also:
http://art.iareconscious.com/
http://iareconscious.com/site/
Adham X
French News (France2) says Libyan Freedom Fighters in Ras Lanuf have received SA-7 shoulder fired SAMs for use against air force

#egypt لحظة هجوم الجيش على المنظاهرين

أخطر فيديو توثيقي لمقر أمن الدولة بأكتوبر#egypt


20 lies (and counting) told by Gov. Walker

Tectonic – A Free Album Of Music Generated By Earthquakes


Sound artist Micah Frank has released Tectonic – a free album of music generated by earthquakes.
The video, above, documents the Tectonic sound sculpture, which creates sound in real time, triggered by earthquakes as they occur across the globe.
A integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into synthesis and sample playback parameters. When an earthquake occurs, seismic data is relayed to the system, sound is produced and Google Earth immediately flies to the coordinates of the latest earthquake.
For the album Tektonic, embedded above, Frank compiled and mastered 57 minutes of earthquake sonifications that can be listened to as a full length album.
You can also download the sonifications as a free Live Pack.
Details on the sound sculpture are available at Frank’s site
ALBUM DOWNLOAD (lossless)
via synthopia

The Devil Within

“What is a man?” asks Peter J Madden, preacher, former sex addict, and heir apparent to the Christian Democratic Party (CDP), led by Reverend Fred Nile, member of the New South Wales Upper House. “That is the great question. Our masculinity is often clouded by what society tells us a man is, what the movies say a man is, what the media says a man is, what the Church says a man is. But the only definition that makes any sense is … that you have a penis. That’s it. You’re a man because you’re a man.” It’s interesting that the man who’ll be challenging Clover Moore for the seat of Sydney in the NSW state election assumes this particular definition.
Born in 1961, Madden was raised in the outer-Sydney town of Windsor. When he was six, he was run over by a car, God seeing fit to hitch a caravan on the back to collect whatever the car missed. The boy emerged from a coma three weeks later with severe brain trauma that “altered my personality radically”. Three years later, by his own account, he was molested by an older female, an experience that resonated into his teens and “set very destructive patterns of anger and lust in my life”. At the age of 20, he was “born again”, but the birth didn’t destroy the Devil in Peter J Madden, who, while travelling the world as a married preacher, indulged a private “sex addiction” that sought satisfaction in the bosoms of prostitutes and lasted until his mid thirties, when he came to see that it was “not I, but Christ who lives in me”.
Last year, his fire-and-brimstone ministry (he travels the country preaching from a truck converted to incorporate a stage and sound system) brought him to the attention of Nile, and Madden has again been reborn – as a political force on the CDP ticket. His impassioned videos raging against the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras have gone viral, along with his personal message of the sinner having been saved...
 Continue reading
Jack Marx @'The Monthly'

Mikkel Metal - Electronic Beats Mix (03/2011)


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Lots of people going to be moving at the sound of speed soon...

Sydney theft: $43m worth of drugs stolen

The brains behind the Australian anti-carbon tax rallies

Mixed on Wikileaks

Abe says:

"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany) 

On Role Models and their Bongs

Spank!!! #22

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Jonny Greenwood on film scores and Radiohead's future plans

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Björk readies collaboration with Ömar Souleyman

The Evolution of Androgyny in Music Videos

There’s something very compelling about androgyny, as we all know. But the theme resonates particularly, it seems, for those fashion-forward expressionists known as popular musicians. Architecture in Helsinki’s new video, featuring an ambiguous protagonist being groped by body-less limbs, got us thinking about the trajectory of androgyny in music videos — we tend to associate the trope with the ’80s, but in truth, the look seems to cycle in and out of fashion and it never quite loses its grip on our imagination. Though, let’s not lie, 1983 was a really big year for androgyny. We’ve also noticed that something about androgyny works especially well for redheads. Click through for a brief and incomplete look at the evolution of androgyny in music videos, and let us know what we’ve missed!

Continue reading
Emily Temple @'Flavorwire'

His name is Bradley Manning


(Click to enlarge)

♪♫ CCM Steel Band - Alberto Balsalm


"Alberto Balsalm" by Aphex Twin
Arranged by Ben Wallace for the CCM (College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati) Steel Band directed by Rusty Burge
June 2010
(Thanx Luke!)
Interestingly enough my (extreme) right wing dad had a set of steel drums in the garage! He had been regularly to the West Indies when he was in the Merchant Navy and had an amazing collection of calypso 78's and he also took a bit of a shine to the reggae and dub stuff that I was playing outta my bedroom as a teenager...not the usual reaction that my music got LOL!
(RIP you old bast'rd XXX)

Mossad Kidnaps Gazan Engineer in Ukraine, Now Held Incommunicado in Israeli Prison

*UPDATE*

China Deputizes Smart Phones to Spy on Beijing Residents’ Real-Time Location

The Chinese government has announced plans to track the real-time location of all cell phones in the city of Beijing, purportedly to ease traffic problems that have plagued the city. Human rights activists have expressed concerns that this plan may well be the newest attempt by the Chinese government to surveil its citizenry against any attempted uprising. As Wang Songlian of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network told the Guardian:
For ordinary people, the government is worried about social unrest. Often there's a spark somewhere and everyone gathers and puts out information. By registering people and tracking them, it enables them to find out about particular protests and punish individuals.
Location privacy is an endangered concept. As technology evolves, many networked devices are becoming increasingly more portable and affordable — and increasingly sharing one’s real-time location data without a users’ explicit knowledge or consent. The threats to location privacy in the era of the smart phone are multifarious, including applications that leak private data and obsolete laws that fail to protect civil liberties. As the situation in China demonstrates, modern smart phones may also act as a mechanism for governments to vacuum up data on citizens who might protest authoritarian regimes. While EFF continues to champion cell phone location privacy in U.S. courts and on the Hill, the fundamental privacy conundrum posed by modern cell phones is that they cannot function properly without simultaneously exposing locational information.
This means that Beijing citizens have few choices when it comes to protecting their location privacy from the government, an especially problematic scenario considering China passed a law last year mandating that people register their cell phones in their real names. Currently, the only solution for true location privacy, whether in China or anywhere else, is turning off the mobile phone and removing the battery. Unfortunately, there’s no feasible and easily achievable consumer-facing software or hardware anywhere that can effectively circumvent location tracking while leaving modern smart phones functional.
There are, however, some hacktivists and academics beginning to explore creative solutions to this problem. Among the ideas being circulated is the possibility of a “mobile mesh network” connectivity – having cell phones connect directly to one another, rather than routing signals through cell phone towers. While there may be other security concerns around mesh networking, such communication methods hold promise for maintaining communications in "Internet blackout" scenarios such as those seen recently in Egypt and Libya. We look forward to future developments in this arena.
Rainey Reitman @'EFF'

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60 Minutes: Christopher Hitchens

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