John Carpenter - Late Junction Mixtape
54 minutes ago
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Spaceboy - This one's for you! XXX
David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, about an astronaut whose mission goes horribly wrong, doesn’t sound as good bedtime reading, but that didn’t stop illustrator Andrew Kolb from turning the story into a children’s picture book.
Via
No longer available as a PDF from Andrew's site, but there is a little message:
'Note: This is merely a concept and no physical form of this book will be made until all involved approve of the collaboration.'...with this cover...
...hmmm!
The Catholic Church's Secret Sex-Crime Files
The five co-defendants sit close enough to shake hands in the Philadelphia courtroom, but they never once acknowledge one another. Father James Brennan, a 47-year-old priest accused of raping a 14-year-old boy, looks sad and stooped in a navy sweater, unshaven and sniffling. Edward Avery, a defrocked priest in his sixties, wears an unsettlingly pleasant expression on his face, as though he's mentally very far away. He and two other defendants – the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, also in his sixties, and Bernard Shero, a former Catholic schoolteacher in his forties – are accused of passing around "Billy," a fifth-grade altar boy. According to the charges, the three men raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.
Heinous as the accusations are, the most shocking – and significant – are those against the fifth defendant, Monsignor William Lynn. At 60, Lynn is portly and dignified, his thin lips pressed together and his double chin held high. In a dramatic fashion statement, he alone has chosen to wear his black clerical garb today, a startling reminder that this is a priest on trial, a revered representative of the Catholic Church, not to mention a high-ranking official in Philadelphia's archdiocese. Lynn, who reported directly to the cardinal, was the trusted custodian of a trove of documents known in the church as the "Secret Archives files." The files prove what many have long suspected: that officials in the upper echelons of the church not only tolerated the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests but conspired to hide the crimes and silence the victims. Lynn is accused of having been the archdiocese's sex-abuse fixer, the man who covered up for its priests. Incredibly, after a scandal that has rocked the church for a generation, he is the first Catholic official ever criminally charged for the cover-up.
"All rise," the court crier intones as the judge enters, and Lynn stands, flanked by his high-powered lawyers, whose hefty fees are being paid by the archdiocese. The implications of the trial are staggering for the church as a whole. In sheltering abusive priests, Lynn wasn't some lone wolf with monstrous sexual appetites, as the church has taken to portraying priests who have molested children. According to two scathing grand-jury reports, protocols for protecting rapists in the clergy have been in place in Philadelphia for half a century, under the regimes of three different cardinals. Lynn was simply a company man, a faithful bureaucrat who did his job exceedingly well. His actions were encouraged by his superiors, who in turn received orders from their superiors – an unbroken chain of command stretching all the way to Rome. In bringing conspiracy charges against Lynn, the Philadelphia district attorney is making a bold statement: that the Catholic hierarchy's failure to protect children from sexual abuse isn't the fault of an inept medieval bureaucracy, but rather the deliberate and criminal work of a cold and calculating organization. In a very real sense, it's not just Lynn who is on trial here. It's the Catholic Church itself...
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Sabrina Rubin Erdely @'Rolling Stone'
The Secrets of Self-Control: The Marshmallow Test 40 Years Later
In the late 1960s, researchers submitted hundreds of four-year-olds to an ingenious little test of willpower: the kids were placed in a small room with a marshmallow or other tempting food and told they could either eat the treat now, or, if they could hold out for another 15 minutes until the researcher returned, they could have two.
Most children said they would wait. But some failed to resist the pull of temptation for even a minute. Many others struggled a little longer before eventually giving in. The most successful participants figured out how to distract themselves from the treat's seduction — by turning around, covering their eyes or kicking the desk, for instance — and delayed gratification for the full 15 minutes.
Follow-up studies on these preschoolers found that those who were able to wait the 15 minutes were significantly less likely to have problems with behavior, drug addiction or obesity by the time they were in high school, compared with kids who gobbled the snack in less than a minute. The gratification-delayers also scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT...
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Maia Szalavitz @'TIME'
PJ Harvey wins Mercury Music Prize for second time
PJ Harvey has become the first person to win the Mercury Music Prize twice, with her album Let England Shake.
The record, which was inspired by the horrors of war, was the bookmakers' favourite.Harvey won in 2001, when the ceremony was held on 11 September, but was unable to accept the prize in person because she was on tour in the US.
Accepting the prize the musician said she wanted to make something that was "meaningful" and "would last".
The 41-year-old, who was the first female Mercury winner in September 2001 with Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, said: "It's really good to be here this evening, because when I last won 10 years ago I was in Washington DC watching the Pentagon burning from my hotel window."
Corinne Bailey Rae, who was one of the judges, said the panel all agreed that Harvey should be crowned the winner.
"It was a tough decision, but were all in agreement."
The singer explained it the lyrics made the record stand out because they were "really imaginative, almost cinematic".
@'BBC'
Unraveling Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel
Part 2: The Trafficker and the Psychic
Part 3: Clear Skies and Cocaine
Part 4: Showdown in Sinaloa
The Sinaloa cartel was flooding cocaine across the border. The DEA was listening. A four-part series based on hundreds of pages of transcripts from intercepted calls, court testimony, and investigative reports.
Via
Toryism is dead in Scotland
My proudest political moment remains, aged five, starting a chant against the Tories. Along with 50,000 Scots, my family – then living in Falkirk – had taken to the streets of Glasgow in the spring of 1990 to march against the poll tax. Brandishing a small flyer, I precociously yelled the slogan "Kick the Tories out!" Not that I really knew who the Tories were (other than that they were "very bad people") but the surrounding crowd certainly did – and they repeated the slogan with passion, rage and defiance.
The Scottish people rejected Thatcherism at the polls time and time again, but suffered the imposition of the detested so-called "community charge" a year before the rest of the country. It triggered the most successful campaign of civil disobedience in British history. Millions – including my parents – refused to pay a tax that hit the poor far harder than the rich. Even when the British electorate unexpectedly failed to "kick the Tories out" in 1992, three out of four Scots voted to do exactly that.
Recalling those passionate scenes in 1990, the plans of Murdo Fraser – the frontrunner for Scottish Tory leadership – to relaunch his party under a new name aren't surprising. For most, it is difficult to imagine the Conservatives being anything other than a toxic political brand in Scotland. This is, after all, the country of Red Clydeside; of Willie Gallacher, the former Communist MP for West Fife; and of the hard-left Scottish Socialist party, which until four years ago had six members in the Scottish parliament.
But – despite the country's radical traditions – the strange death of Tory Scotland is more recent than many Scots would like to remember. Nearly half the British electorate voted Tory in 1955; but in Scotland, over half voted for the Unionist party – the then-sister party of the Conservatives. The Tories have the remarkable claim of being the only party to have ever won a majority of the Scottish vote. And yet at the last general election, the near-fringe party status of the Tories was confirmed when less than 17% of Scots voted for them.
It is certainly true that the crisis of Scottish Toryism began before Margaret Thatcher demolished the post-war consensus. In 1965, the national party took direct control of the Scottish Unionists, who were rebranded the "Scottish Conservative and Unionist party". This was a big mistake in a country with such a proud national identity. And as was once the case in Liverpool, working-class Toryism was inextricably linked with Protestantism and anti-Catholic sentiments. Indeed, when Scottish Toryism triumphed in 1955, record numbers of Scots were flocking to the Church of Scotland. But as active Protestantism and the sectarian Orange Order waned in strength after the 1950s, the base of Scottish Toryism was chipped away.
Even so, the death spiral of Scottish Toryism did not begin until Thatcher came to power in 1979. Her governments certainly found ways to affront Scottish national pride. North Sea oil was discovered a few years before the Conservatives came to power, but as Scotland was particularly battered by recession and de-industrialisation in the 1980s, there was growing resentment at the billions of pounds of revenue flowing straight to the treasury in London – no less than £300bn in the past 30 years.
But much of Scotland's passionate – and relatively recent – hatred of Toryism isn't as unique as some might think. It is shared with much of northern England, all of which repeatedly voted against the Tories but suffered from the worst excesses of their rule. Outside Tory England, it was like living under a foreign occupation: my Stockport primary school teachers dressed in black when John Major was returned to Downing Street in 1992.
The destruction of British industry – particularly in the early 1980s – had much to do with this shared resentment. In 1991, the number of manufacturing jobs in Glasgow was just a third of the level two decades earlier. Two years after Thatcher's election victory, Glasgow was 208th down the list of local authorities for economic inactivity; a decade later, it had risen to 10th place.
Northern industrial areas were similarly hammered in the two recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. The trauma of mass unemployment under Conservative governments has made anti-Toryism a kind of folk hatred passed from generation to generation in parts of Britain. No wonder, then, that the north-east rejected the Conservatives almost as decisively as Scotland at the last election: less than 24% voted Tory, while Labour – facing its second worst result since 1918 on a national level – won nearly 44%. The legacy of Thatcherism has left the Tories with a glass ceiling of support – which partly explains why the party failed to win the last election despite a woefully unpopular Labour government and the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
What is unique about Scottish anti-Toryism is that it has fused with a powerful sense of national pride. Because New Labour accepted many of the key pillars of Thatcherism, it was unable to capitalise on it effectively. The SNP, on the other hand, reinvented itself as a social democratic nationalist party that drew on a renewed, anti-Tory patriotism. With a hard-line Thatcherite government back in office in London, the SNP can present itself as the protector of Scotland in a repeat of the 1980s.
The bottom line is that Murdo Fraser can call the Scottish Tories what he likes. The Scottish electorate, however, are neither stupid nor forgetful. Toryism is dead as a mass political force in Scotland, and it is unlikely to ever come back.
Owen Jones @'The Guardian'
The Scottish people rejected Thatcherism at the polls time and time again, but suffered the imposition of the detested so-called "community charge" a year before the rest of the country. It triggered the most successful campaign of civil disobedience in British history. Millions – including my parents – refused to pay a tax that hit the poor far harder than the rich. Even when the British electorate unexpectedly failed to "kick the Tories out" in 1992, three out of four Scots voted to do exactly that.
Recalling those passionate scenes in 1990, the plans of Murdo Fraser – the frontrunner for Scottish Tory leadership – to relaunch his party under a new name aren't surprising. For most, it is difficult to imagine the Conservatives being anything other than a toxic political brand in Scotland. This is, after all, the country of Red Clydeside; of Willie Gallacher, the former Communist MP for West Fife; and of the hard-left Scottish Socialist party, which until four years ago had six members in the Scottish parliament.
But – despite the country's radical traditions – the strange death of Tory Scotland is more recent than many Scots would like to remember. Nearly half the British electorate voted Tory in 1955; but in Scotland, over half voted for the Unionist party – the then-sister party of the Conservatives. The Tories have the remarkable claim of being the only party to have ever won a majority of the Scottish vote. And yet at the last general election, the near-fringe party status of the Tories was confirmed when less than 17% of Scots voted for them.
It is certainly true that the crisis of Scottish Toryism began before Margaret Thatcher demolished the post-war consensus. In 1965, the national party took direct control of the Scottish Unionists, who were rebranded the "Scottish Conservative and Unionist party". This was a big mistake in a country with such a proud national identity. And as was once the case in Liverpool, working-class Toryism was inextricably linked with Protestantism and anti-Catholic sentiments. Indeed, when Scottish Toryism triumphed in 1955, record numbers of Scots were flocking to the Church of Scotland. But as active Protestantism and the sectarian Orange Order waned in strength after the 1950s, the base of Scottish Toryism was chipped away.
Even so, the death spiral of Scottish Toryism did not begin until Thatcher came to power in 1979. Her governments certainly found ways to affront Scottish national pride. North Sea oil was discovered a few years before the Conservatives came to power, but as Scotland was particularly battered by recession and de-industrialisation in the 1980s, there was growing resentment at the billions of pounds of revenue flowing straight to the treasury in London – no less than £300bn in the past 30 years.
But much of Scotland's passionate – and relatively recent – hatred of Toryism isn't as unique as some might think. It is shared with much of northern England, all of which repeatedly voted against the Tories but suffered from the worst excesses of their rule. Outside Tory England, it was like living under a foreign occupation: my Stockport primary school teachers dressed in black when John Major was returned to Downing Street in 1992.
The destruction of British industry – particularly in the early 1980s – had much to do with this shared resentment. In 1991, the number of manufacturing jobs in Glasgow was just a third of the level two decades earlier. Two years after Thatcher's election victory, Glasgow was 208th down the list of local authorities for economic inactivity; a decade later, it had risen to 10th place.
Northern industrial areas were similarly hammered in the two recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. The trauma of mass unemployment under Conservative governments has made anti-Toryism a kind of folk hatred passed from generation to generation in parts of Britain. No wonder, then, that the north-east rejected the Conservatives almost as decisively as Scotland at the last election: less than 24% voted Tory, while Labour – facing its second worst result since 1918 on a national level – won nearly 44%. The legacy of Thatcherism has left the Tories with a glass ceiling of support – which partly explains why the party failed to win the last election despite a woefully unpopular Labour government and the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
What is unique about Scottish anti-Toryism is that it has fused with a powerful sense of national pride. Because New Labour accepted many of the key pillars of Thatcherism, it was unable to capitalise on it effectively. The SNP, on the other hand, reinvented itself as a social democratic nationalist party that drew on a renewed, anti-Tory patriotism. With a hard-line Thatcherite government back in office in London, the SNP can present itself as the protector of Scotland in a repeat of the 1980s.
The bottom line is that Murdo Fraser can call the Scottish Tories what he likes. The Scottish electorate, however, are neither stupid nor forgetful. Toryism is dead as a mass political force in Scotland, and it is unlikely to ever come back.
Owen Jones @'The Guardian'
SLAB - I Saw A Plane Fall From The Sky
A tale of a seer, a visionary, in a hallucinatory haze, regretting his powers for he has seen what should not be seen.....
while guitars and bass reverberate in walls of sound
I SAW A SNAKE WITH A MONKEYS HEAD
I SAW THE PASSING PLACE OF THE DEAD.....
I SAW A PLANE FALL FROM THE SKY
more new SLAB....
Tuesday, 6 September 2011
Iranians hit in email hack attack
Up to 300,000 Iranians may have had their Google email monitored using security certificates stolen from Dutch firm DigiNotar.
The figure came from a report into the breach at DigiNotar which let attackers generate hundreds of fake certificates.The report suggests the certificates were used in Iran to eavesdrop on email accounts.
The list has been passed to Google so it can tell victims they may have come under government scrutiny.
On 30 August, security firm Fox-IT was called in to analyse the sequence of events at DigiNotar that led to the security breach. It published its interim report late on 5 September.
DigiNotar is one of many firms which help to ensure that no-one is eavesdropping on secure communications between users and the sites they visit.
It does this via security certificates which act as a guarantee of identity so people can be sure they are connecting to the site they think they are.
Anyone armed with a rogue certificate for a web firm or service can impersonate that organisation and get at communications that would otherwise be impossible to read because they are encrypted.
DigiNotar first took action to revoke fake security certificates on 19 July when it found that hackers had got access to its internal network.
The Fox-IT report suggests that the hackers were able to access those internal systems for a month before DigiNotar took action.The first exploration by the hackers took place on 6 June, suggests the report, and the first rogue certificates were issued on 10 July.
"The network has been severely breached," said the report. It said security procedures at DigiNotar were clearly lacking because the tools the hackers used and installed on network computers can be detected by standard anti-virus software.
All evidence gathered by Fox-IT suggests that the attacks were carried out to help surveillance of Iranian net users. More than 99% of the 300,000 IP addresses known to have connected to Google's email service with the help of a fake security certificate are in Iran.
Fox-IT noted that the use of the fake certificates would also have given attackers access to small text files known as cookies that Google and many others use to recognise regular visitors.
As a result, Fox-IT said: "It would be wise for all users in Iran to at least logout and login but even better change passwords."
DigiNotar has called on the Dutch government to help it recover following the attack. In its wake Google and many others have issued updates to ensure that the fake certificates are no longer recognised.
DigiNotar is the second security certificate firm to suffer at the hands of hackers. In March 2011, Comodo revealed that it had been hit and pointed the finger at Iran.
Now evidence is emerging that the same hackers were behind both attacks according to a message posted to the pastebin website. In the message, the hacker or hackers claim to have access to four other security certificate firms.
@'BBC'
Download rapport-fox-it-operation-black-tulip-v1-0.pdf
jayrosen_nyu Jay Rosen
m.techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/the… Not good for Techcrunch. Not good for AOL. Not good for Arianna. Not good for Armstrong. Or Arrington. Not good...
Can - Bring Me Coffee Or Tea
This new edition comes packaged in the original UK artwork for the first time since 1971, and includes a bonus CD featuring 50 minutes of unreleased live material from 1972, remastered in 2011.
Tracklisting:
*CD1*
Paperhouse (07:29)
Mushroom (04:04)
Oh Yeah (07:23)
Halleluwah (18:33)
Aumgn (17:37)
Peking O (11:38)
Bring Me Coffee Or Tea (06:47)
*CD2*
Mushroom (Live 1972) (08:42)
Spoon (Live 1972) (29:55)
Halleluwah (Live 1972) (09:12)
To further celebrate this landmark album, Abtart gallery in Stuttgart (16 Sep – 5 Nov) (www.abtart.com) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (24 Nov – 18 Dec) (www.bethanien.de) will host *Halleluwah!*, a visual homage to Can. Artists have been invited to interpret Can’s pioneering role in composition, sound, playing technique, and group dynamics.
Comprising painting, drawing, videos, objects, and sound pieces that relate to the broad spectrum of the band’s manifestations and to the facets of the collective, including critical considerations of its being turned into a myth, some works will respond to the covers of CAN albums, others will be investigations or continuations of sound into the present, while yet others will simply be hallucinatory bows before these great musicians. For further information, and a full list of confirmed artists which includes Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter, Malcolm Mooney, Carsten Nicolai, go to: http://www.spoonrecords.com/
All 14 of Can’s studio albums have been newly cut to vinyl from the remastered tapes for release as a vinyl deluxe box set in early 2012. This will include CDs of all the albums, extensive booklets, an exclusive never released live album (vinyl only) and a newly remastered “Out Of Reach” (previously missed out of the reissue campaign). The vinyl deluxe box set will be available for pre-order at the beginning of October 2011.
In addition, there will be a box set, “The Lost Tapes*, will be released in March 2012. Curated by Irmin Schmidt and Daniel Miller, and edited and compiled by Jono Podmore, this will include unreleased studio, soundtrack and live material.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Michael Karoli’s death on the 17th November 2011, Spoon Records will offer a Best Of Michael Karoli Edit for free download on their site www.spoonrecords.com
Via
Will anyone ever have the conscience to apologise for what happened at Hillsborough?
It is not a tidal wave because what is provoking it happened 22 years ago and, however monstrous an outrage, the business of day-by-day living inevitably dissipates even the hardest of pain and anger.
Yet if all those from Prime Minister-level down who have been seeking to cover up the true cause of disaster all these years, who have bombarded the grieving with evasions and bromides and – as in the case of a letter from the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire to this newspaper yesterday – non sequiturs, haven't known it before, surely they do now.
Hillsborough is not going to go away. It is not destined to subside beneath the weight of government stalling or still another round of police doubletalk.
More than the required 100,000 have now petitioned for a parliamentary debate and who can say it is not the least that is due to the 96 innocent people who died in April 1989?
Probably not Meredydd Hughes, head of the police force in which not one member has been required to atone in any way other than vapid, non-incriminating regret, for the command inexperience and incompetence which turned a football ground into a killing field. He urges us to wait patiently for the outcome of the Hillsborough Independent Panel.
He also explains that his decision two years ago to release police archives containing their version of affairs was provoked by the kind of issues raised by two other items of reader correspondence in The Independent over the last few days.
One was from the father of a victim who was sent from the temporary mortuary, where his dead son lay, on a search of neighbouring hospitals. The other was from someone who, having experienced with his alarmed wife and her friend unruly scenes outside the ground, and some rocking of the bus in which they sat, wondered whether "it is time the mob outside the ground took at least some of the blame for subsequent events."
If you happened to be at Hillsborough that evil day, if you saw how inevitable the tragedy became, if you saw groups of unengaged police officers talking among themselves as behind them a fearful crush built at the gates of the Leppings Lane entrance, if you had been told, as matter of unremarkable fact, that the only safe way to enter the ground was to walk around to the other end, and if you eventually sat down overwhelmed by the powerless conviction that people were certain to die, this last distortion of reality is a freshly revived horror.
This is especially so if you were able to walk on to the field and see the desperate, untutored rescue attempts of those who would later be accused of stealing from and urinating on the dead.
No one has ever said that there wasn't some rough behaviour by some Liverpool fans – but then no one who was there, and had eyes unveiled by vested interest, has ever begun to believe that the tragedy would not have been averted if those entrusted with the care of the people had done their jobs properly.
That, when you get right down to it, is the central conclusion of the Taylor report, which also noted that the end of Hillsborough where the tragedy occurred did not carry a safety certificate for the very good reason that it was so evidently a death trap waiting to be sprung.
One of the phrases you hear most often is that, with the enforcement of safety recommendations made by Lord Taylor, "no useful purpose" would be served by the most probing of inquiries.
A similar argument is advanced for the Cabinet Office appeal against public revelation of reports presented to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, correspondence between her office and that of Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, and the minutes of the meetings she attended.
There is, though, a useful purpose. It is one of a proper accounting of an affair that goes to the very heart of social responsibility. Certainly, it was guaranteed to shatter a belief in decency not only in the relatives and friends of the victims but anyone who was there to witness it and who consequently did not have to rely on the poisonously confected versions that should still shame all those who inspired them and bought them and prosecuted them as if they held any semblance of the truth.
Mrs Thatcher arrived at Hillsborough the following morning, bearing flowers and platitudes and, yes, it is right that we know, the reality that may or not have been the basis of her public pronouncements.
The chief constable also said: "I strongly urge commentators to await the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. Under the leadership of Bishop James of Liverpool, I am confident it will set the documents in a perspective that is helpful to understanding events, and in a manner that respects the victims."
This is not a matter of commentary but witness. If it is evident enough, you do not interpret what is truth and what is a lie. You see it and you know it, in your mind and in your guts, and if the consequences were as grave as they were at Hillsborough it is going to take a lot longer than 22 years to forget.
If you want someone to explain a scripture or an aspect of moral or canon law, no doubt the Bishop of Liverpool is the man. But not on Hillsborough, not if you were there, not if you saw how many people were so carelessly sent to their deaths – and especially not if you still have to wonder if anyone will ever have either the nerve or the conscience to say sorry.
James Lawton @'The Independent'
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