Friday 18 March 2011
Thursday 17 March 2011
Ruling Sunni minority slaughtering Shiite civilians in our client #Bahrain /w #Saudi help: http://aje.me/eBluM4
Sound - John Cage and Roland Kirk (1966)
Koch Industries accused of polluting Arkansas waterway
The complaint alleges that a Georgia-Pacific paper mill on the Coffee Creek in Arkansas - owned by the billionaire Koch Brothers -emits 45 million gallons of paper mill waste including hazardous materials like ammonia, chloride, and mercury each day
Coffee Creek then flows into Louisiana's Ouachita River where the pollutants have left the formerly pristine water speckled with odorous foam, slime and black pockets of water, said Jerry Johnson, who has been visiting the Ouachita River for 35 years.
"People used to swim in it," said Johnson, who now lives along the river. "In the summertime, it was the place to go."
But Johnson said the number of visitors has dwindled as the river conditions continued to grow worse, preventing the area from reaching its full economic potential as a vacation destination. The pollution is so bad it has kept Johnson from fishing in the river.
"If I did fish out of it, I don't know if I would eat it," Johnson said.
Barry Sulkin, a field office director for PEER, said Georgia-Pacific is blatantly breaking a provision of the Arkansas state permit that prohibits the discharge of "distinctly visible solids, scum or foam of a persistent nature."
Though the pollution problem with Coffee Creek started years ago, the issue was compounded by the state's refusal to correct water quality standards in 2010, said Sulkin, a former chief of environmental enforcement for the Tennessee Division of Water Pollution Control.
Environmental groups lobbied for stronger environmental standards but in September, the state issued the Georgia-Pacific mill a permit.
"It's obvious to me that the state is allowing this to continue for apparent economic reasons," Sulkin said.
Georgia-Pacific said in a statement that the water has been repeatedly analyzed by the EPA and the Arkansas and Louisiana regulatory agencies.
"We are in compliance with all water permits issued by these agencies, most recently, our updated water discharge permit, which was issued in 2010," Georgia-Pacific said in the statement.
"For decades, Georgia-Pacific has been a very active environmental steward in Ashley County and surrounding areas in Arkansas and Louisiana," the statement added. "Our employees live in this community and we are committed to operating a facility that is environmentally sound. We have a long-term interest in the Ouachita River's quality and habitat."
An EPA spokesperson for the South Central Regional Office said he could not comment on this specific complaint but said "we will review them and respond as appropriate."
Regardless of the outcome with the EPA, Cheryl Slavant, the designated Riverkeeper for the Ouachita River, said she knows the damage to the waterway can still be easily repaired.
"All the corporation has to do is spend some money-a lot of money-but they can clean this up," she said.
Chris Zawistowski @'CBS'
No non-violent political action please, we're Australian
'Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights... it's all wrong. Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild. God damn it! First one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom.'
Gil Scott-Heron -'B Movie'
Over the long weekend just past, there were several breakouts from the Christmas Island detention centre. Also, a 300 strong protest that officials said was a riot and quelled with beanbag rounds. Labor’s Immigration Minister Chris Bowen accused some of the asylum seekers of waging an “orchestrated campaign.”Christmas Island Shire President Gordon Thompson, speaking on ABC radio, agreed. He said the detainees on Christmas Island had set out “to make a peaceful protest,” going “into the community to be seen and to be heard”. Their purpose? To “draw media attention to their plight.” A plight that, according to refugee advocates, includes severe overcrowding at the facility (built for 500 people, it now houses more than 2,500) and extended delays in visas, including those already deemed refugees.
The Shire President went on to say that having met with the asylum seekers, his impression was that “a fairly strategic approach was taken to protests.” He continued. “These people have come here with the purpose of getting a visa… They’re forging a path for their families to follow… The primary motivation of the protests is to get attention to their plight and to have their situation resolved one way or another.”
Like many Australians, I have been following the national debate about asylum–seekers arriving by boat since it became a partisan issue during the Howard years. I remember well the dead-fish tones of then Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock insinuating that all attempts by refugees to achieve a “desired migration outcome” were – and should rightly be viewed by the community - as manipulative of our emotions, Australian law, or both.
We saw this back in 2000 when senior government ministers including Ruddock and Prime Minister John Howard said that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard, claims that would later be shown to be false – and to have been known to be false by those making them...
Continue reading
Leslie Cannold @'ABC'
Evacuation Zone around Nuclear Plant
The American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of “approximately 50 miles” from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The advice represents a graver assessment of the risk in the immediate vicinity than the warnings made by the Japanese, who have told everyone within 12 miles to evacuate and those between 12 and 19 miles to take shelter.
jonsnowC4 Jon Snow
The Saudis knew a good week to bury bad news: send army into Bahrain to assist beating up of protesters whilst worlds's attention on Japan.
Heads Bowed in Grateful Memory
You see, my father, a strait-laced middle-class Jewish kid from Los Angeles, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964.
That same year, in that same town, a brilliant renegade named Augustus Owsley Stanley III spent three weeks in the university library’s organic chemistry stacks learning the secrets of synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. Before long, Owsley was creating mass quantities of the purest acid the world had ever known, just in time for the seismic cultural and generational transformation of the era. By the time my father graduated from Berkeley in 1969 with degrees in sociology and economics, the world had changed and my dad along with it.
My very existence is a direct product of that moment, when old cultural systems gave way, for better or for worse. I was born just a few years later after my father, by then a politically active hippie, moved to New York and married a young working-class black woman from Bridgeport, Conn.
It should almost go without saying that such a story would have been quite literally unthinkable before the social upheaval of that time engulfed America. And Owsley connected some of the dots.
Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon. And certainly not least, it was Owsley who originally financed, inspired, amplified and dosed the great American rock band, the Grateful Dead (more about that in a bit).
On Tuesday evening my father, Jonathan, sent me an e-mail about Owsley and what it was like to be present at the epicenter of a cultural revolution.
“Owsley Stanley,” my dad wrote. “Didn’t know his first name was Owsley. Just knew that the first few hits of acid were called Owsley. Went with friends to the Fillmore West to see Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, or so I was told. They laughed when I told them that I didn’t know who she was. Had just started U.C. Berkeley and had taken an Alternative Course in creative writing and another course on Gandhi. Dropped the Acid and well what is time and space anyway. The second hit of Owsley was back in Santa Monica where I walked a stairway to the clouds above, or was in the process of doing that when gentle hands pulled me back from the cliff. Rainbow Bubbles streaming across the room from the sounds of the Grateful Dead.”
There was certainly a dark side to the 1960s drug culture. But many people, including my father, considered LSD positively transforming.
“Before Acid, my neck was so strong from carrying the concrete and bars that made up my skull and with the drug coursing through me the concrete chipped off and WOW, I could see and hear and feel so much. Just a reflection of pre-acid American culture chipping off; one chip for repression, another chip for anxiety, another chip for ignorance, another chip floating away carrying my image of short hair, plaid shorts, tennis shoes and high ankle socks. What remains is the sculpture revealed, the New Age of liberation and caring so deeply that it was impossible to remain hidden in classrooms of agonizing dogma. Take to the streets. Let Love be heard. Let Love be seen. Let Love be felt.”
Given the family history, it may seem a surprise that I actually didn’t learn about Owsley, LSD and the Grateful Dead from my father, or even while I was growing up in Woodstock, N.Y., the renowned hippie town.
For that I had to wait until I met the other kids at one of the nation’s most exclusive elite boarding schools, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
By the time I showed up as a 14-year-old in 1987, Andover, as the school is known, had been a Grateful Dead hotbed for at least a decade. Not coincidentally, LSD was readily available on campus.
When I got there I was a serious Led Zeppelin fan, but of course by then you couldn’t actually go see Led Zeppelin anymore. The Grateful Dead, on the other hand, was this mythic creature that was actually alive and more popular than ever. (In 1987 the Dead released the popular album “In The Dark” and the band’s biggest hit single, “Touch of Grey.”)
That fall one of my 10th-grade classmates, Liza Ryan, received a new teddy bear from her father. She named it Owsley. (Owsley’s nickname, known wide and far, was Bear.) Before long she and I and many of our schoolmates were on our way to becoming the last, final generation of true Deadheads.
Soon I learned about how Owsley designed some of the first modern rock amplification systems for the Grateful Dead, culminating in the over-the-top (literally) “Wall of Sound” in 1974. As I started collecting tapes of Dead performances, I learned about how Owsley was probably the first sound engineer in the world regularly to record and archive every performance by a band straight from the soundboard. (Rolling Stones fans wish they had had one of those in the early days.) Naturally, the first Dead album I ever bought is known as “Bear’s Choice.”
“I think growing up in the early 1980s it was kind of a dark time, and it felt like minds were contracting rather than expanding,” Liza said on the phone from the Bay Area on Tuesday, speaking eloquently for our cohort. “Everyone was worried about nuclear war and the arms race and the Cold War and that movie ‘The Day After’ about a nuclear holocaust. It was a scary time. And it seemed like the ’60s were a time when people were embracing civil rights and crossing social boundaries and of course the music was great. So I guess I was trying to connect with aspects of the ’60s that seemed to have been lost.
“I called my teddy bear Owsley because he always seemed to be this fascinating character, this magician in the corner making everything happen, not just with the acid and the sound systems but in pushing the band out to different audiences.”
I attended my second Grateful Dead concert, on July 9, 1989, at Giants Stadium, in the company of a famous New York City acid dealer named Mountain. I was 16. Mountain, who was probably in his 50s, told me that he had known Owsley back in the day, and that he was one of the most extraordinary people on the planet. I believed him.
By the end of that show I was on the bus, as they say. And by the time Jerry Garcia died in 1995, when I was 22, I had seen the Dead more than 90 times.
So there is a bit of Owsley in me. And if modern popular music means anything to you, there is a bit of Owsley in you too.
Seth Schiesel @'NY Times'
REpost:: Boris - graphics
These graphics are affectionate pastiches of the Virgin Records logo (circa the mid seventies) designed by Roger Dean and of Nick Drake's classic 1970 album 'Bryter Layter' for the cover of 'Akuma no Uta'.The original inspirations:
Kraftwerk Kling Klang Machine No1 (app)
"It’s a novel system that creates music and sound based on realtime data depending on your location that are continuously feeded into the app, meaning the KLING KLANG MACHINE No1 can’t be compared with other generative music apps which mostly utilize pre-programmed algorithms. There are some nice ways to manipulate sound and store personal preferences. For now the functionality is still kind of basic but the original concept will be more and more implemented in future updates and releases."
(Norman Fairbanks)
http://www.kraftwerk.com
http://www.normanfairbanks.com / nf@normanfairbanks.com
Download: http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/kraftwerk-kling-klang-machine/id423962784?mt=8
via
SXSW 2011 - 200 Free Songs
From March 16-20, thousands will gather for the South by Southwest Music and Film Interactive in Austin, Texas, where music, film and technology meet to promote creative and professional growth. Antendees will engage in panel discussions, networking opportunities, film screenings and live musical performances on over 80 stages. This year, the SXSW Music and Media Conference celebrates its 25th anniversary, but if you can't make it to the main event (final registration deadline is Feb. 11) you can sample the music of some of this year's acts here.
Download free MP3s from over 200 of this year's SXSW musical performers
HERE
Edit:
There's also a torrent
See our post here
The AIDES sex park poster is fucking wonderful
(Click to enlarge)
"The safer you play, the longer you stay." AIDES, the French safe sex non-profit, has done it again. In 2008, the organization produced these superb trippy Bronze Lion winning posters. I think this one is equally as good. Click and smile at the attractions: the Money Shot game (eww); the Clit Coaster; the Heavy Petting Zoo; the Bear Cave; the Muff Dive; the Mustache Ride(!).This is how to do safe sex advertising, world. Illustration: London's Rod Hunt (nice porn name!). Ad agency: TBWA Paris (update: No, it's Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco). Related: The AIDES animated graffiti penis.
@'copyranter'
White House Copyright Law Crackdown Push
The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making "illegal streaming" of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.
@cnet.com
@cnet.com
Four N.Y. Times journalists missing in Libya
Four New York Times journalists are now missing in Libya, the newspaper confirmed Wednesday.
"We have talked with officials of the Libyan government in Tripoli, and they tell us they are attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of our journalists," said executive editor Bill Keller said in a statement. "We are grateful to the Libyan government for their assurance that if our journalists were captured they would be released promptly and unharmed."
The Times said the missing reporting team—including two reporters (Anthony Shadid, Stephen Farrell) and two photographers (Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario)—were last in contact with the paper on Tuesday morning. The reporting team, according to a second-hand report, may have been detained by Libyan forces near Ajdabiya.
The Gadhafi regime has been engaged in a two-pronged media strategy in recent weeks. One the hand, government officials are closely monitoring and feeding misinformation to journalists invited to Tripoli; and on the other hand, they are detaining and attacking others who stray from the government-approved spots.
Three BBC reporters were recently beaten trying to cover the Libyan government's siege of Zawiya, while Guardian correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was captured by Gadhafi's forces on the outskirts of the western city 30 miles from Tripoli. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tweeted Wednesday that Abdul-Ahad has now been freed and is out of Libya.
Journalists covering recent unrest in the Middle East and North Africa have faced harsh attacks at the hands of authoritarian governments and their supporters—whether Egypt, Yemen, or Bahrain. Just today, Bahrain's government warned journalists about covering its brutal crackdown on protesters and put at least one reporter under detention.
Michael Calderone @'Yahoo'
"We have talked with officials of the Libyan government in Tripoli, and they tell us they are attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of our journalists," said executive editor Bill Keller said in a statement. "We are grateful to the Libyan government for their assurance that if our journalists were captured they would be released promptly and unharmed."
The Times said the missing reporting team—including two reporters (Anthony Shadid, Stephen Farrell) and two photographers (Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario)—were last in contact with the paper on Tuesday morning. The reporting team, according to a second-hand report, may have been detained by Libyan forces near Ajdabiya.
The Gadhafi regime has been engaged in a two-pronged media strategy in recent weeks. One the hand, government officials are closely monitoring and feeding misinformation to journalists invited to Tripoli; and on the other hand, they are detaining and attacking others who stray from the government-approved spots.
Three BBC reporters were recently beaten trying to cover the Libyan government's siege of Zawiya, while Guardian correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was captured by Gadhafi's forces on the outskirts of the western city 30 miles from Tripoli. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger tweeted Wednesday that Abdul-Ahad has now been freed and is out of Libya.
Journalists covering recent unrest in the Middle East and North Africa have faced harsh attacks at the hands of authoritarian governments and their supporters—whether Egypt, Yemen, or Bahrain. Just today, Bahrain's government warned journalists about covering its brutal crackdown on protesters and put at least one reporter under detention.
Michael Calderone @'Yahoo'
estheraddley esther addley
This is awful RT @fieldproducer One of the NYT journalists missing in #Libya is Stephen Farrell who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009
Wednesday 16 March 2011
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