Dream on, Min Ding
2 hours ago
Monday, 18 July 2011
How Paul Stephenson and PM fell out over hacking scandal
The in-flight entertainment will have to be very good to calm his mood.
Aides in Downing Street contacted the prime minister's Virgin plane en route from Heathrow to South Africa just shortly before Sir Paul Stephenson announced he was stepping down as the UK's most senior police officer.
Downing Street aides, who had at one point considered cancelling the trip altogether at the height of the phone-hacking crisis last week, instead decided to cut it back from the planned four days to two.
Cameron – who flew out with 25 business leaders including Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond – will now just visit South Africa and Nigeriaon Tuesday. Plans to visit Rwanda and Sudan have been scrapped.
Time has been found in the diary to allow No 10 aides – and possibly the prime minister – to watch the appearance by Rupert and James Murdoch tomorrow in front of MPs on a parliamentary select committee.
Cameron may also find time to reflect that his attempt last Friday to get a grip of the situation by announcing a judicial inquiry has clearly failed. The number of dead bodies on the stage is beginning to resemble the final scene of a Shakespearian tragedy.
The "firestorm" he himself described is still raging, and as the body count rises in the form of arrests or resignations, he looks increasingly exposed.
Every day as the crisis continues, his judgment, and that of the chancellor, George Osborne, in appointing the former editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson as his director of communications looks increasingly inexplicable.
It cannot help that the leader of the opposition, previously a politically ponderous flea of no consequence, has suddenly morphed into a fast-moving deadly bee.
Ed Miliband will be back on the attack, framing the crisis in terms of his call for a new responsibility agenda in which the old status quo is over.
The problems Cameron faces come from all directions. First, he appears to be facing the thinly-disguised wrath of a Met commissioner angry that he is being accused of an improperly contractual relationship with Neil Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor, when the prime minister arguably insisted on an even less appropriate relationship with Coulson.
Moreover, Stephenson was implying, possibly for self-serving reasons, that he could not impart operational information to Cameron since he was too compromised with the chief suspects.
Secondly there is no evidence that the Conservative party either in the Home Office or in the London mayoralty of Boris Johnson took seriously the suggestion, repeatedly raised by Labour, that the connections between News International and the Met were unhealthy.
Theresa May, the home secretary and a woman of principle, who is to make a statement to the Commons today about the relationship between the Metropolitan police and Chamy Media, Neil Wallis's PR firm, repeatedly said it was an operational matter for the police to decide whether fresh evidence had emerged, and left it to them to say there was none.
Thirdly, the record of meetings between Cameron and News International executives released on Friday does not reveal a modernising prime minister governing in the national interest, but a victim of a vested interest. His meetings with News International executives in a year exceed those with all other news organisations put together. Not a single figure from the BBC was granted an audience. It is one of those assemblages of small facts that change the way a public figure is viewed.
Finally, he is trying to manage the implosion of a political alliance that brought him to power, including the support of News International. He cannot know what divisions, angry recriminations and betrayals will occur in the next year as the causes of the crisis are examined, and individual personalities, facing jail, seek to save their reputations.
Cameron's visit to the two largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa – to try to highlight the importance of creating a free trade area in Africa - is not the first time that he has chosen to embark on a foreign excursion at an inopportune time.
Labour ridiculed him while, as opposition leader in the summer of 2007, he was in east Africa at the same time as parts of his Oxfordshire constituency and other parts of the UK were under water. In February of this year, as popular uprisings placed a spotlight on the lack of democracy across the Arab world, Cameron was to be found banging the drum for British arm sales at the head of at trade delegation to the Gulf states. Last night, explaining why the African trip was not called off, a Cameron aide said: "This trip is very important. We are improving economic links with South Africa. It's important that we continue to do that."
The prime minister – who will bring a message that an African free trade area could increase GDP across the continent by more than it currently receives in aid – will fly home early to finalise the terms and membership of Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into the media. But that message is likely to be overshadowed by Stephenson and the arrest yesterday of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, who entertained the prime minister at her Oxfordshire home over the Christmas period.
The prime minister will fly home late allow him to finalise the arrangements for Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry in four areas.
Just hours before Stephenson's resignation, Clegg, told the BBC that a growing public perception of police corruption was deeply concerning. "I'm incredibly worried about that … The fact that the public, their cynicism in politicians or the press might have deepened is perhaps not entirely surprising. I think when the public starts losing faith in the police, it's altogether much more serious and you know you really are in some trouble."
Announcing his resignation, Stephenson admitted he was doing so because of the speculation relating to the Met's links with News International, but also "in particular in relation to Neil Wallis".
The Guardian was preparing to publish a story about how Scotland Yard chiefs invited Wallis to apply for a senior communications post with the force, in a decision which Stephenson was aware of.
Stephenson dated his relationship to Wallis back to 2006, a meeting that took place in the context of the latter's work as a journalist. From October 2009 to September 2010, Wallis's part-time work at the Met involved strategic communications, advising the commissioner and assistant commissioner, John Yates, as the force said there was no need to reopen the investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World.
The Guardian understands Wallis was approached to apply for the two-day-a-month contract with the Met after discussions which involved the most senior figures in the force.
Patrick Wintour, Nicholas Watt and Vikram Dodd @'The Guardian'
Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson: resignation statement
Deciphered - the Met commissioner's resignation statement
OwenJones84 Owen Jones
If the Met are susceptible to bribes from News International, why wouldn't they take bribes from others? We need an inquiry into the Met
If the Met are susceptible to bribes from News International, why wouldn't they take bribes from others? We need an inquiry into the Met
WikiLeaks classified as "extremist web site" by National Library of Australia and US Library of Congress
UPDATE (12:30PM):
nlagovau National Library Aus
Categorisation of Wikileaks in our catalogue records has been updated. We thank everyone for their comments.
???
Tables turn on Murdoch as scandal rocks his empire
He may own the ball but I AM NOT picking him for my team...
Nels Cline & Bill Frisell - Live Improvisation @ Henry Miller Memorial Library September 2008
This live improvisation by Nels Cline and Bill Frisell was performed at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California in September 2008. This footage was shot for "The Reach Of Resonance," a feature documentary by Steve Elkins, but none of it was used in the film.
reachofresonance.com
nelscline.com
Annihilate an Entire Species of Fish, and Other Easy Ways to Really Mess Things Up
First we'll take menhaden, then we'll take bluefin. So, there's this company called Omega Protein, and it seems intent on catching as much as it possibly can of an obscure, tiny, practically inedible fish called the Atlantic menhaden.
From Omega Protein's perspective, hoovering up menhaden like they're dust bunnies is a great idea. The company's entire business model hinges on transforming the oily fish into everything from livestock feed to omega-3 pills for people. In fact, it owns a monopoly on Atlantic menhaden fishing and processing—and has been doing just that for years. The stock market values Omega Protein at a cool quarter-billion dollars.
For the health of the ecosystem along the East Coast, though, declaring open season on the menhaden really, really sucks, as Alison Fairbrother and Randy Fertel say in their recent Gilt Taste piece, "The Most Important Fish in the Sea." All along the eastern shore, menhaden have entered a phase of calamitous decline. Stocks have plunged 88 percent in the past quarter century, the authors report. As Omega Protein sucks them out of the ocean, things are getting quite out-of-whack down below. Fairbrother and Fertel explain:
[T]heir nutrient-packed bodies are a staple food for dozens of fish species you have heard of, as well as marine mammals and sea birds. Located near the bottom of the food chain, menhaden are the favored prey for many important predators, including striped bass and bluefish, tuna and dolphin, seatrout and mackerel.And that's not all. "Menhaden are filter feeders, swimming with their mouths open and straining phytoplankton (algae) and other particles with their gills," Fairbrother and Fertel report. The little fish "have been removing damaging particles from our waters since time immemorial."
Thus menhaden have what I call ecological leverage. That is, if you fish them into oblivion, you're not just destroying a single species; you're also threatening to unleash a cascading set of effects that could lead to full-on ecosystem collapse. Other examples of ecological leverage include coral reefs, which act as engines of oceanic biodiversity but are under attack from a variety of forces, and tropical rainforests, which teem with biodiversity, too, and also help stabilize global climate by trapping vast amounts of carbon. We mess with ecological leverage at our peril...
Continue reading
Tom Philpott @'Mother Jones'
Note: The Bush family has majority shares in Omega Protein, initially through Zapata Corporation which became Harbinger Group Inc..
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Sunday, 17 July 2011
Rebekah Brooks arrested over phone-hacking allegations
Here's footage of her in 2003 admitting to paying the police...
alexmassie alexmassie
The Met do Rebekah Brooks one last favour:arresting her today means every answer on Tuesday will be "Sorry, but ongoing police matter...etc"
Breaking: Rebekah Brooks arrested!!!
Rob and Bill On The Cowbells
Rob Brydon sings the classic Elvis song 'Always on my Mind', with some unusual accompaniment from Bill Bailey on alpine cowbells.
From: The Rob Brydon Show 14th July 2011
RePost: Towards Crash (Harley Cokliss 1971)
NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.
J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.
We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.
I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.
NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.
J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.
Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.
I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.
NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.
J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.
I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.
Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?
More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.
J.G. Ballard 1971.
NB: Gabrielle Drake is Nick Drake's sister.
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