Friday, 7 October 2011

Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet

Naomi Klein - Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

Drug Monkey
RT : So grateful Steve Jobs was ADOPTED instead of aborted.

#OccupyOregon

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HA!
Sage Francis
Religion is for people who are trying to stay out of hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

Wayne Rooney's father arrested over alleged football betting scam

Wayne Rooney Sr was arrested as part of an investigation into suspicious betting activity relating to a game between Motherwell and Hearts in December. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA
Police have arrested Wayne Rooney's father, his uncle Richie and seven other people, including a Scottish Premier League player, over allegations of a football betting scam.
The arrests, carried out across Merseyside and Glasgow, relate to a game between Motherwell and Hearts in December last year, which Hearts won 2-1 following a second half penalty.
The Motherwell midfielder Steve Jennings was arrested after allegedly getting himself sent off deliberately during the match.
It is believed that there was a pattern of irregular betting, with stakes being put on a red card being given. One was allegedly from a new account opened in Liverpool, from where £500 was staked at odds of 10/1.
Rooney's 48-year-old father, also called Wayne, is thought to have been arrested at his home in the West Derby district of Liverpool.
Wayne Rooney, Richie Rooney and two other men were later bailed pending further enquiries. Jennings remained in custody along with four others.
Thursday's arrests follow a nine-month investigation into the sending off of 26-year-old Jennings, who previously played for Tranmere Rovers.
Jennings, who was born in Kirkby, was arrested at his home in Glasgow on behalf of the Gambling Commission.
After being booked for a foul early in the game, he was given a red card for putting his hand on referee Stevie O'Reilly and arguing when a penalty appeal was turned down in the 83rd minute of the game.
He is alleged to have asked O'Reilly when he was going to stop "cheating" Motherwell.
Bookmakers raised concerns when it emerged that several bets had been made on a player being sent off, including the £500 staked in Liverpool.
Two members of the Association of British Bookmakers, including the online betting company Blue Square, expressed concerns the day after the match.
A Merseyside police statement said: "Detectives have today executed warrants at 10 addresses across Merseyside and Glasgow and arrested nine men as part of an investigation into suspicious betting activity.
"The arrests are the culmination of a joint operation with the Gambling Commission, and the nine who have been arrested for conspiracy to defraud are being interviewed by detectives.
"The investigation relates to a match between Motherwell and Hearts on 14 December 2010."
In a statement, the Scottish FA's chief executive, Stewart Regan, said: "While the investigation involves several other individuals outside Scotland, it is important to stress that the evidence gathered throughout this thorough period of investigation has involved only one Scottish match.
"Motherwell FC are aware of the situation and will issue a response in due course. The Scottish FA will make no further comment at this stage."
Helen Carter @'The Guardian'
MelbJazzFest 
Congratulations to the Sun Ra Arkestra and Faust - both nominated for Best Tour in the 2011 EG Awards! Vote for...

Caught them both...:)

Using 'Terror' to Squash Dissent

Word is going around Minneapolis that the FBI is looking for a few good spies to break up the dangerous world of vegan potlucks. That's right — the nation's newest terrorist threat is not from explosives or Al Qaeda — you should be worrying about the imminent threat of soy dogs and tasteless, overly dry chocolate cake.
The FBI is actually looking for moles to infiltrate the not-so-shady world of bicycle enthusiasts and vegetarians to learn more about protests planned for the 2008 Republican National Convention. The problem with this infiltration is that they aren't just seeking to disrupt crime, they are trying to stop the protests altogether. At the 2004 RNC convention in New York, the police cracked down on political speech, protest, and dissent. The NYCLU has tons of great documents that chronicle how the NYPD went about using fear over "terrorism" to justify squashing free speech. This summer's conventions, in Minneapolis and Denver, are shaping up to be a redux of the 2004 debacle — anyone else remember the "free speech zone" cages? —where the FBI used the guise of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to suppress speech.
@'ACLU'

The seven most dubious Nobel Peace Prize winners

Wall Street protests spread across US


50 cities!!!

Method Of Defiance returns with “Dub Arcanium Arcandrum”


Remix and dub style versions of tracks culled from the Method Of Defiance albums “Jahbulon” & “Incunabula” featuring remixes from Scientist, Prefuse 73, Mad Professor, SubCode, Dr. Israel, MRC Riddims (the production/DJ team of Oktopus (dalek) & MRC (from Ifwhen & All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors), Perdurabo 6 and Bill Laswell
Method Of Defiance
“Dub Arcanium Arcandrum”
October 11, 2011
MOD Technologies
On October 11, Bill Laswell’s MOD Technologies presents the brand new Method Of Defiance release, “Dub Arcanium Arcandrum.” This new album offers remix and dub style versions of tracks that originally appeared on the 2010 Method Of Defiance albums “Jahbulon” & “Incunabula” and features remixes from Scientist, Prefuse 73, Mad Professor, SubCode, Dr. Israel, MRC Riddims (the production/DJ team of Oktopus (dalek) & MRC (from Ifwhen & All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors), Perdurabo 6 and Bill Laswell.
In October 2010, Bill Laswell launched his brand new M.O.D. Technologies label with “Jahbulon” the first in a series of three releases from the group Methods Of Defiance - the collaborative project featuring vocalists Dr. Israel and Hawkman, legendary bassist/producer, Bill Laswell, keyboardist / Funkadelic - icon, Bernie Worrell, post-modern / futurist drummer Guy Licata, Toshinori Kondo and DJ Krush. The music is a blend of Rock, Dub, Roots, Reggae, Dancehall, Drum and Bass, Electronica and reflects the eclectic words from which each Methods Of Defiance artist floats in.
The second of three releases came in the way of “Incunabula” (instrumental versions of “Jahbulon”) while the series closes out with radical new interpretations of the tracks on “Dub Arcanium Arcandrum.” Scientist starts it off with a retouching of the single “One World” and later reenters with a ganja smoked up “Herb is Burnin”(dub style, of course), & he tosses a disordered ordered mix at the end to make it all fair. Prefuse 73 pushes his space-age hip hop way in, via the future, with his take on a piece from “Incunabula” (and you thought the original was out). Mad professor stumbles in dubbin’ his ass off. SubCode, a Moroccan remixer we have been chasing for a while, remixes as if his life depended on it, the Hawk track “Do or Die”.
Dr Israel remixes two tracks, one of his and one of Hawk’s and this is something we wish he would do more of, the man can remix, damn it. MRC Riddims, the production/DJ team of Oktopus (dalek) & MRC (from Ifwhen & All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors) join in with a reshaping of “Elijah’s Lament” done all Krooklyn style. Bill Laswell not to be upstaged, contributes two mixes from Incunabula, a dub out and an ambient version of “Quantum Echo”. Perdurabo 6, via the Basque speaking part of Spain, gives his almost 6 minute take on “One World” quite pleasant, really.
Tracklisting
01 One World Dub - Scientist
02 Encode Armour Feed Version 1 - Prefuse 73
03 Elijah's Lament Mad Professor Mix - Mad Professor
04 Do or Die Remix - SubCode
05 Elijah's Lament Remix - MRC Riddims
06 Taykeovah Version - Dr Israel
07 Herb 4 - Scientist
08 Quantum Echo Apparition - Bill Laswell
09 No Salvation Version - Dr Israel
10 Quantum Echo Entombment Dub - Bill Laswell
11 One World First Claim Version - Perdurabo 6
12 One World Disorder Dub - Scientist

Sleepwalking into Dangerous Territory


The DIY-Drone of the Future Is … a Flying Pogo Stick

Cambodian Funk Yodeler - Unknown Title

Cambodian Funk Yodeler - Unknown Title
Found in a cheap record store bin back around 1993. For all we know it's a story of a true cross-cultural love, Cambodian boy meets Swiss girl in ski resort. Legitimate music.
- Stephen Downs
TT-4:17 / 5.88MB / 192kbps 44.1khz
from Cassette

Stephen writes back on March 15th:
I just found out from a Cambodian woman that the singing on "Cambodian Funk Yodeler" is actually Laotian!
John Davison writes:
I'm sitting here with my friend Tohny, a U.S. citizen who speaks Thai, Khmer, and English. He's telling me a little bit about this song. The singer is singing in Thai, but with a distinctly Khmer/Lao accent. (This is not at all uncommon. Tohny claims that there is a disproportionate number of ethnic Khmer personalities on the Thai pop music scene. There's a huge cultural overlap among the Thai, Khmer, and Lao.) The song is essentially an ode to the Kuntai Isan (northern Thailand), north of Surin. ...they love to eat "bla" (fish)... Another sentiment expressed in the lyrics is that "It doesn't matter what part of the country they live in...they're still Thai..." It's _not_ a love story. It's mainly a song describing how nice the people of the Isan are. "All of them belong to one country, and they love each other..." Tohny does recognize the singer -- he's an "old guy...famous from the 1960s..." He has this singer on an LP at home, but he doesn't remember the man's name. If he finds out who it is, he'll let me know.
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Australian boy, 14, held on Bali drugs charge

Australia is trying to secure the return of a 14-year-old boy arrested in Indonesia for alleged marijuana possession, the Australian foreign minister has said.
The boy has been held at Denpasar police headquarters in Bali since he was arrested on Tuesday accused of buying a small quantity of marijuana from a man on Kuta beach.
His lawyer, Muhammad Rifan, said he faced a maximum sentence of six years in an adult prison if convicted of possessing 7g of marijuana, which under Indonesian law is treated the same as heroin or cocaine.
Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister, said he had sent Australia's ambassador to Denpasar. "I've indicated to him that his number one priority in the immediate period ahead is how we support this young boy and his family and do everything we can to obtain his early return to Australia," Rudd told reporters in Sydney.
The boy, from Morrisset Park north of Sydney, was on holiday with his parents when he was arrested.
Rifan said Julian McMahon, an Australian lawyer representing two Australians on death row in Bali for smuggling heroin in 2005, said the boy might only get a few months' jail or avoid prison if he could prove he had a drug problem for which he had received counselling. Australian media have reported the boy is the youngest Australian to be arrested under Indonesia's tough drug laws.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the boy told police he bought the marijuana because he felt sorry for the alleged dealer who said he had not eaten for a day.
McMahon said most foreigners were arrested in these circumstances when they bought drugs from police informants.
Indonesia has some of the world's strictest drug laws and people convicted of smuggling or possessing drugs can be executed by firing squad. More than 140 prisoners are on death row in Indonesia, including more than 50 foreigners.
@'The Guardian'

What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don’t

Josh? It’s Steve Jobs. We have a really big problem

Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?

It's a Wonderful Machine (1998)

99%

'My little nightstick's going to get a workout tonight'

Supreme Court orders Google Australia to release details of creators of website

#OccupyWallStreet (Livestream)

Participating in a Lynching: No Longer a "Serious" Crime in California

Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition


"Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?"
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
An excerpt from Outpost 13's adaptation of JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. Uploaded with permission from the filmmakers. More information at ballardian.com/​outpost-13-atrocity-exhibition.
Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.
Narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn. Images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others.
Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass
"The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area."
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
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The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet

Hypereconomics

Glenn Greenwald
WikiLeaks cable shows Anwar Awlaki responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people in Yemen -- oh, wait:

This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street protests spreading

Obama, Clinton & Fred Shuttlesworth (Selma 2007)

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WTF???

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Judge Refuses to Sanction CIA for Destroying Waterboarding Videos

A federal judge won’t hold the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of detainee interrogations that included the use of a torture technique known as waterboarding, ruling instead Wednesday that the spy agency merely committed “transgressions” for its failure to abide by his court order. Punishing the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of New York ruled, “would serve no beneficial purpose.” (.pdf)
Hellerstein wrote that CIA officials responsible for producing the tapes in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit might “not have been aware of the videotapes’ existence before they were destroyed.” The judge also said officials who ordered the tapes’ destruction in 2005 might not have been “aware of court orders requiring identification or production of the videotapes.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the long-running FOIA case and asked for a contempt finding, had requested that Judge Hellerstein order depositions and discovery to ascertain if CIA officials destroyed the 92 videotapes of post 9/11 interrogations of terrorism suspects after they had notice of court orders to produce them.
The judge declined.
“I will not allow additional discovery,” the judge said. He added that the CIA has admitted that some of the videos showed the CIA using waterboarding torture techniques. Footage on one tape, he said, had shown an interrogator who “continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.” The Obama administration has declined to prosecute CIA officials for torture, citing legal memos that authorized the techniques.
Hellerstein said because of the tapes’ destruction, the CIA “improved protocols for the retention of records potentially relevant to an investigation or a judicial, congressional, or administrative proceeding.”
The judge said the tapes’ destruction “exposed serious flaws” in the CIA’s document-retention procedures, and he noted that the CIA in August “adopted new document preservation and destruction protocols to insure against similar transgressions in the future.”
Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney, blasted Hellerstein’s ruling.
“While today’s decision recognizes that the CIA violated a court order when it destroyed the torture tapes, we are profoundly disappointed by the court’s unwillingness to label as contempt what it describes as the CIA’s ‘dereliction.’ We also strongly disagree with the court’s finding that the CIA has ‘remedied’ the destruction,” Abdo said in a statement. “The truth is that the CIA destroyed evidence of torture, and the destruction of this evidence has made it harder to hold high-level officials accountable for the abuse that they authorized.”
The CIA in 2007 admitted to destroying the tapes of interrogations of alleged al-Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A special prosecutor last year found that CIA officials should not be charged for the tapes’ destruction.
A year before the tapes were destroyed, Hellerstein ordered the CIA “to produce or identify all responsive documents” in response to the ACLU’s request for “records concerning the treatment of individuals apprehended after September 11, 2001, and held by the United States at military bases or detention facilities outside the United States.”
Hellerstein ordered the CIA to pay the ACLU’s legal expenses.
David Kravets @'Wired'

:)

David Johnson
That's a fucking big balaclava. RT : Pedestrian struck by car in Balaclava

John Pilger: The smearing of a revolution

The high court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.
However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a temporary surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor-in-chief
of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".
This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on his extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted black people by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.
Under the US constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama said that "whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". His embrace of George W Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange is that military in­vestigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice-President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist".

Petty and perfidious

Should Assange win his high court appeal, he could face extradition directly to the US. In the past, US officials have synchronised extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like their predatory military, US jurisdiction recognises few boundaries. As Manning's suffering demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt.
In a letter addressed to the Australian government, Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who now acts for Assange, wrote:
Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions . . . it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and . . . his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.
These facts, and the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, have been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, perfidious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime, yet held isolated and under house arrest - conditions not even meted out to a defendant who is facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife...
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Danny Baker 
David Cameron wants everyone to pay up their credit cards. Well can't the banks do that for us? I mean, we bailed them out...

Bianca Chang - Recent Works, June 2011

Stop-motion builds and photos of recent works created for Sydney's A4 Paper Festival 31st May - 5th June presented by the Paper Convention. All photos by Jacob Ring.
Griffin Boyce 
Sealed court dockets concerning Birgitta Jonsdottir in the Grand Jury

HA!

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(Thanx HerrB!)

The World's Best Subway Maps

London
Washington DC
Montreal
Moscow

Massachusetts Echoes Wisconsin as Budget Curbs Union Power

Steve Schapiro: Taxi Driver

As analogue lovers, there’s no telling in how much we adore film photographs. Seeing one’s shots on actual prints and compiled in a book brings visual elation and self-gratification. ‘Photos on Pages’ is a new series that features photo-books by great photographers. In this first volume, the spotlight is on Steve Schapiro and his exclusive photography for Taxi Driver...
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White Supremacist Ex-Con Arrested in Double Murder

A 31-year-old white supremacist once associated with a neo-Nazi gang known as the “Aryan Death Squad” and his female companion are in custody in northern California as suspects in two murders and the disappearance of a disabled veteran.
David Joseph Pedersen, convicted of threatening to murder federal Judge Edward Lodge of Idaho in 2001, was arrested Wednesday near Marysville, Calif., in a stolen car with his companion, 24-year-old Holly Ann Grigsby, of Portland.
They both have been identified by authorities in Washington state as suspects in the brutal Sept. 28 slaying in Everett, Wash., of Pedersen’s stepmother, 69-year-old Leslie Mae Pederson.
A bloody pillow covered her head and her hands were tied with duct tape, according to police who found a sword near the victim. A medical examiner determined she died from “incised wounds of the neck” and ruled her death a homicide.
Her husband, David Jones “Red” Pedersen, a 56-year-old disabled veteran, remains missing from the home, according to authorities who say in court documents they aren’t sure if he is a suspect or another victim. Family friends say he had difficulty traveling in a car because of his medical problems.
David “Joey” Pedersen and Grigsby had been visiting his father and stepmother just prior to the killing and disappearance. Grigsby’s father, Fred Grigsby, of Portland, Ore., told The Associated Press that his daughter has a history of drug addiction and has associated with white supremacists...
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Bill Mortin @'SPLC'