Sunday, 28 August 2011
Kevin Isaacs & Tallawah Live in Haarlem Patronaat June 2011
Kevin Isaacs (son of Gregory Isaacs) Live in Holland June 2011 with his backing band Tallawah, June 2011
Lead vocal: Kevin Isaacs
Backing vocals: Joany Ramdat & Benji Dankerlui
Guitar: Bas Claassen aka Biteman
Keyboards: Aniel Bihari
Bass: Olivia Ramdat
Drums: Earl Ramdat
Percussions: Mikey Tremor
Soundengineer: Patrick Ramdat
Bookinginfo:bassculture42@hotmail.com
One hour 4 minutes
The Hurricane Irene News Coverage Cycle: CNN vs Fox News
On CNN:
Field reporter stands in a windy swirl of debris and rain and reports that conditions are too dangerous for people to be in.
Network weather person reports on current state of the storm: its wind speed, track, etc. and repeatedly insists it’s a coming apocalypse, even though the storm is weakening.
Sound bites from the National Hurricane Center followed by video footage from their hurricane hunter airplane.
Government official pleads with his/her constituency to follow evacuation orders in a timely and calm manner followed by interview with some idiot who chooses to “ride it out.”
REPEAT...
On Fox News:
Field reporter stands in a windy swirl of debris and rain and reports that conditions are too dangerous for people to be in followed by Mike Huckabee PAC attack ad calling for the repeal of “Obamacare.”
Network weather person reports on current state of the storm: its wind speed, track, etc. and repeatedly insists it’s a coming apocalypse, even though the storm is weakening.
Fox news reporter interviews representative from the Property Casualty Insurers group who assures us the insurance companies have an “army” of claims adjusters at hand, ready to help their customers get their lives back together.
Sound bites from the National Hurricane Center and video footage from their hurricane hunter airplane followed up by Fox News reporter expressing concern that this government function will likely have to fall victim to necessary government budget cuts.
Fox News babe in NYC reports there are still New Yorkers in the city citing the large group of New Yorkers standing behind her camera who she says have no rain gear. She has the camera turn around and there are seven people standing there, five of them have umbrellas.
Government official pleads with his/her constituency to follow evacuation orders in a timely and calm manner followed by interview with some idiot who chooses to “ride it out.” At the same time, the news ticker reads, “Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nv) says a business leader (unnamed) told him Obama’s economic policies are a wet blanket on our economy.”
REPEAT...
Fox News babe in NYC reports there are still New Yorkers in the city citing the large group of New Yorkers standing behind her camera who she says have no rain gear. She has the camera turn around and there are seven people standing there, five of them have umbrellas.
Government official pleads with his/her constituency to follow evacuation orders in a timely and calm manner followed by interview with some idiot who chooses to “ride it out.” At the same time, the news ticker reads, “Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nv) says a business leader (unnamed) told him Obama’s economic policies are a wet blanket on our economy.”
REPEAT...
Rikers Island Prisoners Left Behind to Face Irene
"We are not evacuating Rikers Island," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference Friday. Bloomberg annouced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter's question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city's evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
According to the New York City Department of Correction's website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island's 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its 10 jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness—not to mention pretrial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime. There are also hundreds of corrections officers at work on the island.
We were not able to reach anyone at the DOC for comment, but the New York Times's City Room blog reported: "According to the city's Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another."
Irene is forecast to weaken considerably by the time it hits New York. But for a warning of what can happen to prisoners during a hurricane, we need only look back at Katrina and the horrific conditions endured by inmates at Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans. According to a report produced by the ACLU:
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city's evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
According to the New York City Department of Correction's website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island's 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its 10 jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness—not to mention pretrial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime. There are also hundreds of corrections officers at work on the island.
We were not able to reach anyone at the DOC for comment, but the New York Times's City Room blog reported: "According to the city's Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another."
Irene is forecast to weaken considerably by the time it hits New York. But for a warning of what can happen to prisoners during a hurricane, we need only look back at Katrina and the horrific conditions endured by inmates at Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans. According to a report produced by the ACLU:
[A] culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain "where they belong," despite the mayor's decision to declare the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.James Ridgeway @'Mother Jones'
As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests …
Prisoners went days without food, water and ventilation, and deputies admit that they received no emergency training and were entirely unaware of any evacuation plan. Even some prison guards were left locked in at their posts to fend for themselves, unable to provide assistance to prisoners in need.
Saturday, 27 August 2011
bvdub presents Deep Space Mix 21
No tracklist, which kills me, but that seems to be the ongoing bvdub style… lull you into a heightened sensory experience only to leave you questioning what the hell just happened. Fine by me.
Download, or see the original post on the Auxiliary site.
You can find links to all of ASC’s previous Deep Space mixes on the ASIP mixes page
Via
(Thanx Martin!)
For My East Coast Friends XXX
Bob Dylan's live-performance of his legendary 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' at The Great Music Experience', Nara (Japan) in May 1994. Dylan plays with the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra - the first time ever he played with an classic orchestra.
"Where's that obituary for Steve Jobs?"
Journalist: "But he's not dead!"
Editor: "Oh, well where's the obituary for Apple?"
Editor: "Oh, well where's the obituary for Apple?"
AlexiMostrous Alexi Mostrous
Man who incited riot on Facebook gets 4 years. Man who "caused or allowed" death of Baby P is free after just 2. Something wrong here?
'I do not believe in math and I don't think we should encourage it!'
FUXAKE!!!
Watch this and weep (while dying with laughter!)
Watch this and weep (while dying with laughter!)
How Israel takes its revenge on boys who throw stones
The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. "I wish you'd let me go," the boy whimpers, "just so I can get some sleep."
During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.
This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.
Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story.
"The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.
Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room.
Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the officer looked "shocked" when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's father, Saher. "I said, 'He's too young; why do you want him?' 'I don't know,' he said". Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be afraid. "We cried, all of us," his father says. "I know my sons; they don't throw stones."
In the hours before his interrogation, Sameer was kept blindfolded and handcuffed, and prevented from sleeping. Eventually taken for interrogation without a lawyer or parent present, a man accused him of being in a demonstration, and showed him footage of a boy throwing stones, claiming it was him.
"He said, 'This is you', and I said it wasn't me. Then he asked me, 'Who are they?' And I said that I didn't know," Sameer says. "At one point, the man started shouting at me, and grabbed me by the collar, and said, 'I'll throw you out of the window and beat you with a stick if you don't confess'."
Sameer, who protested his innocence, was fortunate; he was released a few hours later. But most children are frightened into signing a confession, cowed by threats of physical violence, or threats against their families, such as the withdrawal of work permits.
When a confession is signed, lawyers usually advise children to accept a plea bargain and serve a fixed jail sentence even if not guilty. Pleading innocent is to invite lengthy court proceedings, during which the child is almost always remanded in prison. Acquittals are rare. "In a military court, you have to know that you're not looking for justice," says Gabi Lasky, an Israeli lawyer who has represented many children.
There are many Palestinian children in the West Bank villages in the shadow of Israel's separation wall and Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Where largely non-violent protests have sprung up as a form of resistance, there are children who throw stones, and raids by Israel are common. But lawyers and human rights groups have decried Israel's arrest policy of targeting children in villages that resist the occupation.
In most cases, children as young as 12 are hauled from their beds at night, handcuffed and blindfolded, deprived of sleep and food, subjected to lengthy interrogations, then forced to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language few of them read.
Israeli rights group B'Tselem concluded that, "the rights of minors are severely violated, that the law almost completely fails to protect their rights, and that the few rights granted by the law are not implemented".
Israel claims to treat Palestinian minors in the spirit of its own law for juveniles but, in practice, it is rarely the case. For instance, children should not be arrested at night, lawyers and parents should be present during interrogations, and the children must be read their rights. But these are treated as guidelines, rather than a legal requirement, and are frequently flouted. And Israel regards Israeli youngsters as children until 18, while Palestinians are viewed as adults from 16...
During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.
This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.
Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story.
"The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.
Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room.
Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the officer looked "shocked" when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's father, Saher. "I said, 'He's too young; why do you want him?' 'I don't know,' he said". Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be afraid. "We cried, all of us," his father says. "I know my sons; they don't throw stones."
In the hours before his interrogation, Sameer was kept blindfolded and handcuffed, and prevented from sleeping. Eventually taken for interrogation without a lawyer or parent present, a man accused him of being in a demonstration, and showed him footage of a boy throwing stones, claiming it was him.
"He said, 'This is you', and I said it wasn't me. Then he asked me, 'Who are they?' And I said that I didn't know," Sameer says. "At one point, the man started shouting at me, and grabbed me by the collar, and said, 'I'll throw you out of the window and beat you with a stick if you don't confess'."
Sameer, who protested his innocence, was fortunate; he was released a few hours later. But most children are frightened into signing a confession, cowed by threats of physical violence, or threats against their families, such as the withdrawal of work permits.
When a confession is signed, lawyers usually advise children to accept a plea bargain and serve a fixed jail sentence even if not guilty. Pleading innocent is to invite lengthy court proceedings, during which the child is almost always remanded in prison. Acquittals are rare. "In a military court, you have to know that you're not looking for justice," says Gabi Lasky, an Israeli lawyer who has represented many children.
There are many Palestinian children in the West Bank villages in the shadow of Israel's separation wall and Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Where largely non-violent protests have sprung up as a form of resistance, there are children who throw stones, and raids by Israel are common. But lawyers and human rights groups have decried Israel's arrest policy of targeting children in villages that resist the occupation.
In most cases, children as young as 12 are hauled from their beds at night, handcuffed and blindfolded, deprived of sleep and food, subjected to lengthy interrogations, then forced to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language few of them read.
Israeli rights group B'Tselem concluded that, "the rights of minors are severely violated, that the law almost completely fails to protect their rights, and that the few rights granted by the law are not implemented".
Israel claims to treat Palestinian minors in the spirit of its own law for juveniles but, in practice, it is rarely the case. For instance, children should not be arrested at night, lawyers and parents should be present during interrogations, and the children must be read their rights. But these are treated as guidelines, rather than a legal requirement, and are frequently flouted. And Israel regards Israeli youngsters as children until 18, while Palestinians are viewed as adults from 16...
Continue reading
Catrina Stewart @'The Independent'
Pacing - A Short-Film by Aidan Moffat
Recently, on the final touring weekend of three with Malcolm Middleton, I started to relieve the boredom by messing about with the video camera on my phone. I’d forgotten it was there; I’m still getting used to the idea of having a multi-functional device in my pocket. I made a little film that was intended to be part of a longer (short) movie about how boring the backstage areas at gigs are these days. There was a time when the dressing room was a consummate den of debauchery, but these days I’m happy with a cup of tea, some nuts, a few ciders and a good Wi-Fi connection. The plan was to continue to make little films like this and then compile them, but I got bored with that pretty quickly and never got round to making another. It turns out making a movie about being bored was pretty boring – who could have guessed?
Anyway, as you’ll see, I’m a pacer.
Via
Ready for Day One (Meet the Libyan postwar planners who put the Bush administration's Iraq team to shame)
Allow me, in what I'm sure is a spirit of a priori hopefulness, to offer some tiny grounds for optimism. For the last several months, I have been following the deliberations of the Tripoli Task Force. This body was established in April by the National Transitional Council (NTC), the rebel government based in Benghazi, in order to plan for the post-Qaddafi transition. One of the peculiar advantages of the military stalemate that lasted until this past weekend is that it gave the task force ample time to plan for Day One of the new government.
Over time, the group's core members moved from Benghazi to Dubai. By the time the Qaddafi regime fell, about 70 people were engaged fulltime in the task of planning. This group oversaw a network of hundreds of Libyans, mostly professionals, divided into 17 teams responsible for policing, water supply, fuel, schools, and the like. They made a point of studying precedent. According to Sohail Nakhoody, who served as chief of staff to Aref Ali Nayed, a Libyan businessman who headed the task force (and now serves as the new government's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates), "We had in front of us the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Somalia." Iraq served as a kind of anti-template, especially on questions like how to treat regime elements -- i.e., no "de-Baathification."
Let me pause for a moment to recall the absurdity of the George W. Bush administration's own planning process for Day One of a post-Saddam Iraq. Back in the summer of 2002, the U.S. State Department established the Future of Iraq Project, a study exercise that brought Iraqi exiles together with American academic experts and government officials. But once Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to transfer control of postwar Iraq to the Defense Department, the entire effort was scrapped. In The Assassins' Gate, journalist George Packer describes meeting an Iraqi-American lawyer in Baghdad desperately trying to interest the new authorities in the State Department's 250-page report on transitional justice, and finding no takers. The planning process was transferred to a group of retired military officers heading something called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), whose very name denoted the strict limits of its mandate. Security was outside ORHA's mandate; so were politics and governance. Those things were supposed to take care of themselves. As we know now, they didn't...
Continue reading
James Traub @'FP'
Friday, 26 August 2011
Gadhafi’s Loose Weapons Could Number a ‘Thousand Times’ Saddam’s
It’s a concern familiar to those who watched Iraq’s insurgency evolve. Saddam Hussein, like Gadhafi, amassed a vast array of conventional weaponry for defense against enemies both foreign and domestic. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, looters made off with tons of explosives from unprotected military arsenals, making arms available to a brewing insurgency. With the end of Gadhafi’s rule seeming nigh, arms control and human rights experts are paying close attention to the security of the country’s weapons stockpiles, fearing they could end up in the hands of a pro-regime insurgency or other militants outside the country.
Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, has spent time on the ground in Libya during the uprising. He tells Danger Room that “weapon proliferation out of Libya is potentially one of the largest we have ever documented — 2003 Iraq pales in comparison — and so the risks are equally much more significant.”
Many in the West worry about the remnants of Gadhafi’s chemical-weapons program and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. However, Bouckaert says it’s Libya’s vast arsenals of low-tech gear like artillery shells and Grad missiles that are most likely to be fashioned into insurgent weapons, such as improvised explosive devices. The Libyan military certainly has plenty of them. Only a few months into the war, thousands of 122-mm Grad rockets were found stashed in abandoned bunkers in eastern Libya. “If Gadhafi loyalists decide to mount an Iraqi-style insurgency, they have access to a thousand times the explosives that the insurgents in Iraq had,” says Bouckaert.
Libya’s mines are also useful as weapons in a possible post-Gadhafi insurgency. Precise estimates of just how many mines Gadhafi’s forces have accumulated over the years are hard to come by. For their part, rebels estimate that pro-Gadhafi forces have already laid tens of thousands of the device to halt rebel movement...
Continue reading
Adam Rawnsley @'Wired'
Depleted Uranium Weapon Use Persists, Despite Deadly Side Effects
War and the Tragedy of the Commons, Part 5
By 2003, reports were surfacing of cancer clusters and birth disorders in conflict areas of the Balkans and Iraq, raising fears about human exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and its fate and transport in war environments. Gulf War Syndrome, a catchall for mysterious and disabling symptoms and conditions suffered by nearly 40 percent of 540,000 veterans of the three-week ground war (which killed fewer than 200 US soldiers), remained an unyielding conundrum. A colleague and I prepared a fact sheet on depleted uranium, given its first use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and growing use by the United States and Britain in subsequent wars. We labored in a meager research environment and detected an unsettling complacency around the question of environmental health impacts of DU munitions.
Little governmental research on Gulf War veterans was being conducted other than a small study on 29 veterans with DU metal shrapnel fragments in their bodies, cancer cluster reports were dismissed as anecdotal and alarmist, and DU was pigeonholed as "weak" and "feeble" radiation with no predictable risk. Thus, the US decision to use DU in weapons was made in an environment of uncertainty and intentional ignorance about the health risks to those exposed in conflict and post-conflict situations. Accustomed to policing and polluting everyone's backyard, the Department of Defense (DoD) still maintains a shroud of secrecy around depleted uranium, as it has with abandoned hazardous waste contaminating military bases and countries in which our government has waged war...
Continue reading
H. Patricia Hynes @'truthout'
Barbarian Flashmob Converts 'Marcus Bachmann' in Glitter Baptism at Clinic
Join the Horde! http://www.twitter.com/CGoHome
http://www.facebook.com/ColumbusGoHome
Stop taxpayer funds to Bachmann's anti-gay clinic: http://bit.ly/rkViU8
Producer: Sarah Webster Norton
Choreographer: John Agurkis
Edited by Dan Feidt & Gus Ganley
Earlier today in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, an army of gay barbarians marched on Michele and Marcus Bachmann's "clinic", condemning the couple's attempt to "pray away" their discredited gay conversion therapy.
The flashmob protest — inspired by Marcus's assertion that gays are "barbarians who need to be disciplined" — comes in the wake of the unlicensed therapist's peculiar reversal, now denying he or his "therapists" ever practiced the harmful therapy.
In an attempt to clear up the confusion, the group of "gay barbarians" approached the clinic earlier this morning in hopes to speak to Marcus. When the staff saw a horde of over 100 barbarians approaching, they locked the clinic doors.
Undaunted, the barbarians at the gates demanded to see Marcus. Significant medical evidence suggests the "therapy" is a farce.
The barbarians were locked out of the office, but remained undaunted and fabulous at the gates, along with newly converted "Marcus."
The barbarians then began chanting "you can't pray away the gay, baby I was born this way!". Finally, a visibly frustrated "Marcus" emerged in front of the clinic and confronted the horde yelling "you barbarians need discipline!" as he reprimanded the dancing barbarians with a black leather whip. They responded by showering him with glitter, and after the sparkling baptism "Marcus" gave in to his barbaric urges, joining the horde in their infectious flashmob dance.
The Marcus impersonator was a local actor.
"Let's be clear: Marcus Bachmann is the practitioner of an unhealthy, unscientific and dangerous practice," explained Nick Espinosa, one of the event organizers. "It seems all too convenient that the minute Michele Bachamann becomes a candidate for President Marcus starts making a desperate attempt to walk back his previous statements."
Marcus's inexplicable change of orientation on the use of "ex-gay" therapy comes a month after an interview in which he claimed to only use the therapy "at the patient's discretion." This statement also contradicts video evidence from an undercover investigation that shows employees of the clinic clearly encouraging the widely-discredited therapy.
"The American people have a right to know: does the Bachmann family profit from bogus "gay reparative therapy" or not," continued Espinosa. "The medical evidence against the practice aside, the Bachmann's subversive marginalization of the LGBT community is despicable."
Today's action was organized by the same young man who previously glittered Newt Gingrich, inspiring a national trend in political protest of anti-LGBT sentiments from political candidates and campaigns.
"It's clear that the Bachmanns are the real barbarians here, and their archaic views on LGBT equality will no longer be tolerated," Espinosa said.
BACKGROUND:
Michele Bachmann has a long history of controversial anti-gay politics, and has compared the gay lifestyle to "bondage and slavery."
Her anti-gay views have been a focal point of her career as a politician, but lately she has shied away from reporters' questions about her controversial comments and taxpayer-funded "reparative therapy" clinic. While Michele Bachmann has long railed against federal safety net programs like Medicaid, the Bachmann & Associates clinic has received over $137,000 in Medicaid funds and over $27,000 in other state and federal funds.
For years, the scientific and medical communities — including groups like the American Psychology Association — have dismissed "reparative therapy" (also known as "conversion therapy" or "ex-gay therapy") as dangerous and unethical.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
