Friday, 4 June 2010

♪♫ Julee Cruise - Rockin' Back Inside My Heart

From David Lynch's Industrial Symphony 1: Dream of the Brokenhearted

Corner V1 Workstation

(Photo: Born Rich)

The Vision One (V1) workstation is intended to improve music, gaming, home theater, and working experience. The feet and elbow supports pivot. This adjustable workstation comes in a variety of colors and other upgrades. The most popular upgrade is to a Porsche seat that can have up to 12 functions including power lumbar controls and heat.

More geeky wetdreams

@'Web Urbanist'

Under U.S. pressure, Netanyahu may ease Gaza blockade

Suddenly, sound bombs and tear gas exploded

Your 'Awwww!' for today

Roy Hodgson tops Liverpool's list after Rafael Benítez agrees exit

Unfortunately whoever we get is going to face a lot of the same problems until we get rid of the asshat yanks!

Wilco - Poor Places (Walls Remix)

David Lynch's Interview Project

Watch all the interviews on the Interview Project website, become a fan on Facebook, check out the Twitter feed, read the Interview Project blog, and visit David Lynch’s own official site.

Juno Mixes

Juno Dubstep 25

Juno Minimal 36

Monckton takes scientist to brink of madness at climate change talk

Leo blog: The 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley aka Christopher Monckton is seen by his home at Carie, Loch Rannoch, Scotland. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

It takes a lot to make a scientist mad – even today, when it seems that science and scientists are under siege, particularly over the topic of climate change.

But everyone has a breaking point, one straw too many that inspires them to act.

For me, that time came last October when I learned about a British import we have had the displeasure of experiencing here in the United States.

That import, Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.

His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn't be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.

I know a thing or two about global warming. I have worked in the field of heat transfer and fluid mechanics and I have published more than 80 papers on these topics.

I am a university professor and also an active consultant in the energy and environment industry. What I heard in his talk surprised me.

Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work "disproved" global warming.

He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.

If true, these conclusions would be welcome. But there is a problem with this kind of truth – it is not made by wishing.

So I began a journey of investigation (the full results of which you can view here).

I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.

For instance, Monckton's claims that "Arctic sea ice is fine, steady for a decade" made reference to Alaskan research group (IARC).

I wrote to members of IARC and asked whether this was true. Both their chief scientist and director confirmed that Monckton was mistaken.

They also pointed me to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) for a second opinion.

A scientist there confirmed Monckton's error, as did Dr Ola Johannessen, whose work has shown ice loss in Greenland (Monckton reported that Johannessen's work showed that Greenland "was just fine".)

Next, I investigated Monckton's claim that the medieval period was warmer than today. Monckton showed a slide featuring nine researchers' works which, he claimed, proved that today's warming is not unusual – it was hotter in the past.

I wrote to these authors and I read their papers. It turned out that none of the authors or papers made the claims that Monckton attributed to them. This pattern of misinterpretation was becoming chronic.

Next, I checked on Monckton's claim that the ocean has not been heating for 50 years. To quote him directly, there has been "no ocean heat buildup for 50 years".

On this slide, he referenced a well-known researcher named Dr Catia Domingues. It turns out Domingues said no such thing. What would she know? She only works for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

In one last, and particularly glaring example, Monckton referred to a 2004 statement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which stated that solar activity has caused today's warming and that global warming will end soon.

The president of the IAU division on the sun and heliosphere told me that there is no such position of the IAU and that I should pass this information on to whomever "might have used the IAU name to claim otherwise".

After learning all of this, and much more than can be written about in this limited space, I felt like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole and emerged in an alternate reality.

How can such misrepresentations be made without public recourse? I cannot answer that. I can say that scientists are listening and though our voices are small, we will use them to hold people like Monckton and others to account for their public claims.

The science community is slowly learning that if we don't perform this service, no one will.

Tough decisions are going to have to be made and the public deserves accurate information about the science so they can help make those decisions.

John Abraham @'The Guardian'

Truth in advertising shock!

The Parable of Prohibition

Four Tet - Angel Echoes (Caribou remix)

Gone...

Rafael Benitez told the club's official website: "It is very sad for me to announce that I will no longer be manager of Liverpool FC. I would like to thank all of the staff and players for their efforts.

"I'll always keep in my heart the good times I've had here, the strong and loyal support of the fans in the tough times and the love from Liverpool. I have no words to thank you enough for all these years and I am very proud to say that I was your manager.

"Thank you so much once more and always remember: You'll never walk alone."

"Mr. Dogan had one bullet in the chest and four bullets fired into his head from close range"

Fatalities on Gaza Flotilla Said to Include U.S. Citizen

Meet Leroy Stick, The Man Behind @BPGlobalPR

Phew

Feeling grumpy 'is good for you'

Canadian DMCA Introduced; Digital Lock Provision Trumps Any And All User Rights

As was widely expected, Canadian politicians have introduced their version of the DMCA, dubbed the "Copyright Modernization Act" (or Bill C-32 if you want to get technical). Michael Geist runs down the good and the bad at the link above, but it appears there's a lot more that's bad than good. While the plan tries to add "balance" by extending fair dealing provisions just slightly wider than before (though, still pretty limited), it undermines that very concept with a heavy anti-circumvention clause. This is the worst aspect of the DMCA exported north to Canada. Basically, as long as a rights holder puts some form of DRM/copy protection on their work, all those exceptions go out the window. You can't circumvent, even for non-infringing reasons.

What this does is change the basic contours of copyright law. It gives the rights holders the ability to define the exceptions, and take away the right of users. It's this very aspect of the DMCA that needs to be fixed, not expanded to other countries. It goes against the core principles of copyright law, which include exceptions for the sake of important modes of expression. By letting the rights holder determine what is and what is not allowed as an exception, simply by letting the rights holder put any kind of digital lock (no matter how weak) is a travesty of copyright law. It's not copyright law at all, at that point. It's really a law to lockdown content away from the public, and to have the government declare a particular business model as supreme and protected by the government.

Mike Masnick @'techdirt'

Thursday, 3 June 2010

Wilco beer

HERE

One world, many places

@'Real Clear World'

Full report (PDF)

HERE

Immigration: A Question of Patriotism

Kenny Dalglish To Take Over as Liverpool FC's Caretaker Manager?

Papers Please

Governor Jan Brewer defends the new law as necessary for Arizona's immigration woes. She also says that when pulled over by police that a driver's license isn't enough to prove US citizenship. Does this mean all people driving in that state will have to carry birth certificates just in case the police don't think you look American?
MORE

Hello John, gotta new motor?

HERE

Spank!!! # 20

"First, do not attempt to discipline your wife without first going to the Lord in prayer. No man alone is wise enough, and we must seek the Lord when faced with discipline issues..."

Gun control and ownership laws in the UK

loulou picasso, juini 2010

Rafa Benítez conquered Europe with Liverpool but is now victim of owners' reign

Hmmmmm!

(Thanx HerrB!)

Philip Selway to release solo album on Bella Union

Radiohead’s Philip Selway has announced plans to release his debut solo album on Bella Union records. To be called Familial, it’ll be released on 30th August and see’s Selway craft a singer-songwriter album rather than just a “drummer” side-project.

The idea of a solo album was apparently seeded when Selway played on Neil Finn’s solo project 7 Worlds Collide back in 2001. During the sessions for Familial, Selway invited Germano, Steinberg, Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Sansone to come and make the record with him. All who were also involved in 7 Worlds.
@'The Line Of Best Fit'

"it's a beaut! a delightful surprise of a record."

Simon Raymonde

Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea

FOR 2,000 years, the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to our own backs. For several decades now, we have been able to wield force ourselves — and this power has, again and again, intoxicated us.

In the period before Israel was founded, a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine, especially members of the extremely nationalist Irgun group, thought that military force could be used to achieve any goal, to drive the British out of the country, and to repel the Arabs who opposed the creation of our state.

Luckily, during Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.

Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.

But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.

Thus, the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has to sign a peace agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank — and by doing so, reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict, in turn, can be resolved only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Fatah with Hamas.

Even if Israel seizes 100 more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip 100 more times, no matter how often Israel deploys its military, police and covert power, force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until Israelis and Palestinians recognize the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege — Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.

I do not discount the importance of force. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. Without it Israel would not be able to survive a single day. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative — to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters, just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, opposite Gaza’s shores.

Amos Oz @'NY Times'

WikiLeaks' Sketchy Origins

The New Yorker has a fascinating new profile of Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks. Raffi Khatchadourian's piece is full of revelations about the enigmatic hacker-turned-"open-government activist", from details of his peripatetic childhood to an exclusive glimpse of Assange at work on the "Collateral Murder" video of an American Army helicopter shooting journalists and civilians in Baghdad.

Check it out—but also check out MoJo's controversial profile of Assange by David Kushner, which has just been updated and expanded. Like Kushner, Khatchadourian concludes that Assange's attempts to shine light on evildoers while lurking in the shadows is deeply contradictory: "The thing that he seems to detest most—power with accountability—is encoded in the site's DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution."

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in the New Yorker story is its discussion of how WikiLeaks got its start. When WikiLeaks was in the planning stages in 2006, Assange said that he had more than 1 million documents; a claim that convinced Cryptome founder Jon Young that Assange was either exaggerating or up to no good. But now it seems that Assange did have his hands on a large, questionably obtained, cache of material. Khatchadourian reports that one WikiLeaks activist had access to a "tranche" of secret government documents obtained by Chinese hackers. The documents had been pulled off of Tor, the anonymizing network that WikiLeaks now encourages its leakers to use to stymie "internet spies." According to the New Yorker, WikiLeaks posted only a few of those swiped documents. If it's accurate, this anecdote raises some serious ethical and technical questions about how WikiLeaks operates. Does WikiLeaks condone this kind of online snooping? Has it relied upon it since its launch? Just how many of the senstive documents it's posted were genuinely leaked and how many were hacked?

From Assange's response, the only thing that's clear is that (yet again) questioning WikiLeaks' M.O. makes him tetchy. He seemed to approve of the New Yorker piece, re-tweeting its assertion that "Some WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off of Chinese hackers' activities"—a detail that helps its noble-hacker mystique. However, after Wired looked into the Tor issue, Assange tweeted that its "beatup on WL&Tor" had "no new info": "Don't be fooled." The Register found this micro-denial "sketchy"; in a comment to the site, Assange implied that Wired and the New Yorker had gotten the Tor story wrong, but didn't elaborate on whether WikiLeaks had in fact gotten its start with documents taken from the privacy network.

Perhaps the New Yorker misinterpreted the geekery behind WikiLeaks; perhaps Khatchadourian got stuck in Assange's web of plausible deniablility. Either way, a more detailed response from Assange would go a long way toward clearing the air. As Ryan Sholin writes, "Is it OK to hack Tor in the name of the public good?...I have a hard time trusting Tor or WikiLeaks right now."

Dave Gilson @'Mother Jones'

However this comment is also at the page above:

First off, please take a little time to read my comment here:
http://ryansholin.com/2010/05/31/wikileaks-and-tor-moral-use-of-an-amora...

If you read that, I explain that Tor does not ensure (and has never promised to ensure) the security of the contents of data from point a to point b online. Tor obscures the origin from the destination.

The system is structured so that the exit nodes don't have to be trusted. If you read any of the Tor documentation, they tell you that. They tell you that anything you send over the wire unencrypted will come out for that last jump from exit-node to destination unencrypted, and anyone trying to intercept traffic at the exit node (the person running the node or an attacker) or the destination (the person running that service or an attacker) can read your stuff.

This is not news. On the other hand, your private information, including usernames/passwords, are probably in more danger on an open cafe wireless, where the kid next to you may be monitoring the unencrypted traffic on the wireless.

Mostly, we pay no attention to these things. But gosh, you'd expect Chinese hackers might have more incentive to take care? :)

Second, Assange says that something between a few and none of the materials published on Wikileaks came from the Chinese hacker monitoring. However the materials they did publish concerned documents outlining persecution of Tibetan activist NGOs and such. These organizations were warned.

This is a classic whistleblower scenario -- one I'd expect MoJo to understand. Any time there's a whistleblower, information is essentially stolen, violating some institution's security. This is true if it's Deep Throat spilling secrets to journalists he's sworn to keep. It's true if a chemical plant employee walks off with a manila folder with test results not meant for the public. It's true if someone takes information on a thumbdrive or laptop to present to the press or law enforcement. And it's true if someone intercepts a cell phone or internet data (whether or not from Tor).

All of these whistleblowers broke some form of security or confidentiality. I'm generally sorry when I hear that people are sniffing traffic from the Tor Network, but we know it happens, just as surely as we know somewhere right now, a sysadmin is reading someone's work email on an office server.

As we speak, there are activists, journalists, bloggers all over the world whose identity is being preserved by using Tor, writing in danger zones. Global Voices Online and Reporters without Borders are only two of the groups who train their people to use Tor to obscure the origin of their communications. They also teach people to use encrypted services (like https://gmail.com) rather than unencrypted services (http://gmail.com) so that end-to-end encryption will obscure the *contents* of their communication. Tor doesn't do that.

I'm former Tor staff, and a current volunteer. I spoke as executive director of Tor for a worldwide conference at Amnesty International (http://politics.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977022186), and was proud to be working with organizations including Human Rights Watch and many others during my tenure there. We focus on educating these people -- journalists, human rights activists, citizen journalists in countries where speech is not free, ...

We also document proper use of Tor to protect the user. However, my experience is that ignorant people will use Tor without protecting themselves or their data, and in the case of crackers, this can actually help law enforcement catch them. Although really *smart* criminals will use botnets and other more secure options than Tor, Tor remains the best solution for internet anonymity that doesn't involve stealing or exploiting someone else's computer or resources, and that is why it is in such widespread use among people who want to engage in civil disobedience, whistleblowing, or dissent.

You can learn more about who uses Tor, and why, here:
http://www.torproject.org/torusers.html.en

Assange stated pretty clearly that only a few whistleblower documents were published from Tor-sniffed hacking. Regardless of what you think of Wikileaks, dragging Tor through the mud just scares people away from a good resource, including people whose safety might eventually depend on their anonymity -- some successors of the Iranian election activists who used Tor to get media out of Iran, wherever that next need arises.

I'm no longer working on project staff, but I still do volunteer work for them. The way the media has engaged in scare tactics around something that isn't news (that exit nodes pass unencrypted content unencrypted) in a way that might scare someone into an insecure situation online, or drive them to use criminal means to protect themselves, makes me furious.

The Tor Project tried to make this into a teachable moment here:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/plaintext-over-tor-still-plaintext

I hope MoJo folks will learn more about Tor, and perhaps even support the project in the future. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Shava Nerad
Tor volunteer (not speaking *for* Tor)
shava@efn.org

DooneyStudio

RT @ThePunkRockShop Why do advertising creatives have way too much DJ Shadow in their iTunes libraries? Seems a universal trait. [LOL True!]

Teenagers cannot concentrate because their brains are undeveloped

James Blake "The Bells Sketch"

From The Bells Sketch EP

BRILLIANT!!! 长安街牛姐停车完整视频版 How to find parking all the time

Cocaine Can Rot Your Flesh

Photo: Efimero (CC)

Fox News reporting on a Time.com story:

Besides making you edgy and skittish, with a propensity toward emotional highs and lows, cocaine can also rot your skin, according to a study reported Monday by Time.com.
Researchers found that the illegal drug can contain agents that contribute to low white cell count or dying skin tissue, giving people the appearance of wearing rotting flesh.
The findings were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine after a discovery by doctors at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. It was found that women who had a history of cocaine use also tended to have discolorations on various body parts like their cheeks, buttocks, thighs and earlobes.
Those symptoms are consistent with use of the medication levamisole, which is used by veterinarians for de-worming farm animals. “Almost 80 percent of the cocaine coming into this country has levamisole mixed in,” said Dr. Ghinwa Dumyati, a University of Rochester medical professor.
He noted that the medication can cause an inflammation inside the small blood vessels. “The result can be the death of the epidermis or outer layer of skin,” he said.

♪♫ MC5 - Kick Out The Jams

HA!

Speed Bump

???

Liverpool sack Rafa Benitez

This hasn't officially been confirmed yet but hearing that the board may have leaked the details...

(Thanx Ana!)

Good on you Glenn

I was just on MSNBC talking about Israel, the Gaza blockade and the flotilla attack with Eliot Spitzer, who was guest-hosting for Dylan Ratigan. It was a rather contentious discussion, though quite illustrative of how Israel is (and is not) typically discussed on American television, so I'm posting the whole 8-minute segment. Two points: (1) before I was on, Spitzer had on an Israel-defending law professor, followed by Netanyahu's former Chief of Staff, and both of them (along with Spitzer) were spewing pure Israeli propaganda in uninterrupted and unchallenged fashion; at the end of Spitzer's discussions with them, he asked them to "stick around just in case," and once I was left, he brought at least one of them back on to respond to what I said without challenge; (2) literally 90 seconds before my segment was about to begin, the new cam and sound system I just acquired stopped working, forcing me to unplug everything and use only my laptop cam and mic, which caused the technical aspects to be less than ideal (though still perfectly workable); to watch in full screen, click play, then click in the lower right hand corner of the picture and select "option":

UPDATE: Just to give the context, this was the five-minute, propaganda-suffused segment with former Netanyhau Chief of Staff George Birnbaum to which I listened before my segment began.

UPDATE II: A few worthwhile related items: (1) for an excellent discussion of the illegality of the Israeli raid, see this analysis from former British Ambassador and maritime law expert Craig Murray, and this one from International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller (the Post has a decent article on this topic today as well); (2) Amos Oz, the Israeli writer who supported the Israeli attacks on both Lebanon and Gaza (though he changed his mind about the former), has a very good Op-Ed in the NYT today on what Israel has become; and (3) the Post's Ann Telnaes has an incisive cartoon about this situation (and note the towels).

UPDATE III: Barney Frank -- unlike Anthony Weiner, Jerry Nadler, Spitzer, and a whole slew of other Jewish progressives vehemently defending Israel -- demanded an independent inquiry and had some rather harsh words for Israel today: "as a Jew, Israeli treatment of Arabs around some of the West Bank settlements makes me ashamed that there would be Jews that would engage in that kind of victimization of a minority."

Glenn Greenwald @'Salon'