Saturday 30 January 2010

Iran getting rid of the green on its flag?

Michael Dustdevil & Bendle - Broken Skin (rough mix)

Blake Baxter tenth planet mix - 01-02-2010

The Associates - Club Country

Yes there were lots of stories about their recording sessions...but coffee cups taped to their heads?

Friday 29 January 2010

WTF??? ~~Bliar~~ Blair says sometimes it is important not to ask the March 2003 question, but instead to ask the 2010 question.

Straight outta Berlin

Wax Treatment is a monthly club night in Berlin featuring bass-heavy sounds hosted by the Hard Wax camp.

Wax Treatment Podcast #006 - DJ Pete

25.01.10 - Tracklist:

Wax Treatment Podcast #005 - DJ Pete

14.12.09 - Tracklist:

Wax Treatment Podcast #004 - Mackjiggah

21.11.09 - Tracklist:

Wax Treatment Podcast #003 - Shed

18.10.09 - Tracklist:

Wax Treatment Podcast #002 - DJ Pete

22.09.09 - Tracklist:

Wax Treatment Podcast #001 - DJ Pete

21.08.09 - Tracklist:

For the Love of Culture

Google, copyright, and our future.

By Lawrence Lessig

WTF??? Australian censor board demands large-breasted porn-stars

A reader writes: "Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as 'abhorrent.'"

"The Board has also started to ban depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year. Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint's Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications. "We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size", she said. "It may be an unintended consequence of the Senator's actions but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late".

@'Boing Boing'

FuckingFamousRG118 by Queens of Minimal Techno - 28-01-10

Spank! (For that well known 'prevert' oop north!)

Smoking # 51

Jónsi on WNYC (Interview and Acoustic Set)

aplive on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Charlie Brooker's generic news report

HA!

If you are a devotee of Apple's new product are you a faniPad!!!

HERE

J.D. Salinger RIP

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." -opening lines of The Catcher In The Rye

Author and famous recluse J.D. Salinger has passed away at the age of 91.

@'MetaFilter'

NY Times obituary

Helpmaboab!

@'Zany Pickle' via 'Boing Boing'

Speaking as someone with a few peircings I can only echo the sentiment of a comment left on Boing Boing:

"Nasty! Ok, I have maybe 120 hours of tattooing and at one time or another several extra holes, but I have never eaten with my mouth open in public; and that is what this is ALL THE TIME eating with your mouth open.

P.S. say goodbye to those gums in a few years,(abrasion)."

Interview w/ Robert Hood

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Barbican Centre, London

New commission for The Curve, Barbican, London
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery...

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways.

For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.

27 February 2010 - 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery...Free admission
Times: Open daily 11am-8pm
Open late every Thu until 10pm

@ NME

A filmmaker who was shooting a documentary about The Libertines has been found dead.
The body of Robyn Whitehead, a member of the politically influential Goldsmith dynasty, was discovered at a flat in Hackney in east London.
According to Hackney Gazette, Whitehead died in the early hours of Monday morning (January 25), although details of her death have only just been released.
According to a police spokesperson the death is not being treated as suspicious.
"The woman was 27 and from the Northampton area. Next of kin have been informed," they explained. "We are awaiting formal identification. A post-mortem will be carried out in due course."
It has been reported that the flat belong to Pete Doherty's friend and fellow singer Wolfman.
Whitehead's mother Dido Whitehead is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, while her father is '60s filmmaker Peter Whitehead.
Whitehead's documentary about The Libertines is entitled The Road To Albion. and was nearing completion. It features rare early footage of the band.
It has been suggested that Whitehead was beginning work on a second film about Babyshambles.

Free London gig by Skip McDonald (Friday lunchtime)

January 29:
Skip McDonald (Little Axe),

London Royal Festival Hall (1pm)

Thursday 28 January 2010

Teenage girl rescued after 15 days trapped in Haiti rubble

A 16-year-old girl has been pulled out of the rubble in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, 15 days after the earthquake struck, rescuers say.

Darlene Etienne was said to be happy but dehydrated. Rescuers said she had survived by drinking water from a bath.
Her rescue comes five days after Haitian government officially ended the search and rescue operation.
Meanwhile President Rene Preval has said parliamentary elections due to be held on 28 February will be postponed.
As many as 200,000 people died in the 12 January earthquake. More than 130 people have been pulled alive from the rubble.

Bath water

A rescue worker described the discovery of the teenager, two weeks after the quake destroyed the city, as a "miracle".

HAITI'S REMARKABLE SURVIVORS

Darlene Etienne rests in a French field hospital after being rescued in Port-au-Prince, 27 Jan

Darlene Etienne, 16 - rescued after 15 days

Rico Dibrivell, early 30s - rescued after 12 days

Wismond Exantus, 24, found after 11 days

Emmannuel Buso, 21 - rescued after 10 days

Marie Carida, 84 - saved after 10 days

Mendji Bahina Sanon, 11 - trapped for eight days

Lozama Hotteline, 25 - pulled out after seven days

Elisabeth Joassaint, 15 days - buried for seven days, half her life

Ena Zizi, 69 - rescued after seven days

Haiti quake: Survivors' stories

"I don't know how she happened to resist that long," said rescue worker JP Malaganne.
The 16-year-old was found in the rubble of a house near the College St Gerard, which one of her relatives said she had just started attending.
Neighbours had been searching in the rubble of their homes in the central Carrefour-Feuilles district when they heard a weak voice and called rescue teams to help.
They managed to locate the girl in the wreckage and less than an hour later had dug a hole to pull her out, covered in dust.
Rescuer Claude Fuilla told the Associated Press news agency: "She couldn't really talk to us or say how long she'd been there but I think she'd been there since the earthquake.
"I don't think she could have survived even a few more hours."
Darlene was given water and oxygen before being taken to a French field hospital and medical ship.
"She just said 'Thank you', she's very weak, which suggests that she's been there for 15 days," said Samuel Bernes, head of the rescue team that discovered her.
He described her location within the rubble as "in a pocket, surrounded by concrete".
The BBC's Karen Allen, in the Haitian capital, said that rescue workers had told her the teenager was trapped in the bathroom when the quake struck and was able to survive by drinking water from a bath.
On Tuesday, rescuers discovered a 31-year-old man who had been trapped for 12 days after being caught in one of the numerous aftershocks that rocked the city after the earthquake.
In announcing the election delay, Mr Preval said he would not seek to remain in office beyond the end of his term in February 2011.
He added: "I don't think the time is right to hold elections now given the conditions in which people are living."

@'BBC'

King Kenny!

Kenny Dalgleish named as the top British striker since 1945.

(I once found a couple of day old kittens and named them Kenny & Dalgleish - they turned out to be females!!!

Prompted my eldest son later to ask if I knew that there was a famous footballer named after our cats LOL!)

Bonus Audio:
The Barmy Army - Sharp As A Needle

Arash Rahmanipour & Mohammad Reza Ali-Zamani RIP

I wonder if dogs look at other dogs when they're humping on a human's leg and think...."That's one sick bastard!."

Bill to criminalize bestiality advances in Alaska Legislature

iPad 2006 (HA! Thanx HerrB!!!)

@'Nerdcore'

Abe Duque feat. Blake Baxter - What Happened (Affi Koman Remix)

Oh look - a midget w/ an iPhone!

Radiohead - Lotus Flowers (Radiohead for Haiti Benefit The Fonda Theater)

Full download of show available

@'A Reminder'

Obama is the most reactionary president since Nixon by Nick Cohen (?!?)

A Democrat president does not lose Massachusetts without so dispiriting liberals they can longer be bothered to turn out for him. Inattentive foreigners have been slow to spot the demoralisation because their relief at Obama's inauguration has stopped them realising that his failure to tackle unemployment and his unconscionable delay in punishing the bankers have induced despair among his natural supporters. As has the vacuity of his foreign policy.

I accept that readers may find this a hard sentence to swallow, but when it comes to promoting democracy, the emancipation of women and the liberation of the oppressed, Barack Obama has been the most reactionary American president since Richard Nixon.

Take the undeservedly neglected case of Nyi Nyi Aung. The reason you have never heard of the Burmese-American is that his arrest is an embarrassment to an Obama administration that wants to "engage" with Burma's military regime. The junta is holding the democracy activist in solitary confinement. If he is receiving the same treatment as its previous inmates, the guards will be forcing him to crawl on all fours, bark instead of talk and eat from a dog bowl. American senators wrote to Hillary Clinton demanding that she intervene and received no concrete commitments. Nyi Nyi's disgusted American fiancee says that the message America sends the generals is that they can do what they want.

It is not that Obama has adopted a policy of outright appeasement. He decided not to drop the Bush-era sanctions after a long, slow review. But as Mark Farmaner from the Burma Campaign UK group says, European and Asian countries which don't give a damn about human rights and just want to make money aren't feeling any pressure from Washington to blacklist the regime. The hope that Burmese democracy campaigners felt at Obama's election has long gone.

I don't believe you can understand why he is such a let-down if you hold on to old definitions of liberalism. From Eleanor Roosevelt onwards, the Democrats were meant to believe in universal human rights. Even Jimmy Carter, mocked for his weakness in handling tyrants, tried to make them a part of his foreign policy. The flattering label "realist" – which, like the equally gratifying "sceptic", is not a badge of honour you can award to yourself – was claimed by Republicans, most notably Nixon, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. They maintained they were hard-headed men who could see the world as it is, unlike soppy liberal idealists. They would deal with any regime, however repulsive, that could help advance US interests, and ignore what their allies did to their captive populations.

Obama has stood the distinction on its head. In a forthcoming analysis for the Henry Jackson Society, Lawrence Haas, a former aide to Al Gore, laments the "disappointment" of the Obama presidency with an embarrassment of damning evidence. Obama and Hillary Clinton have explicitly said, for instance, that they will not allow protests about the Chinese Communist party's treatment of dissent to sour discussion about the economic crisis and climate change. In line with the policy of detente, Obama refused to meet the Dalai Lama for fear of offending China just as Ford refused to meet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.

During the aborted Iranian revolution, brave protesters chanted: "Obama, Obama – either you're with them or you're with us" as the cops beat them up. The dithering Obama couldn't make up his mind which side he was on and insultingly called their country the Islamic Republic of Iran, as if it were the ayatollahs' property. True, in his Cairo speech to Muslim countries, he said he believed in "governments that reflect the will of the people" – which was big of him – but did not mention the oppression of women. Ever since, his administration has ignored Arab liberals and done next to nothing to promote a settlement in Palestine.

Haas blames the chaos in Iraq for discrediting democracy and teaching Bush's opponents to sneer at liberal values, but there is more to the conservatism of the Obama administration than that. He comes from an ideological culture which calls itself progressive, but is often reactionary. Many from his political generation use the superficially leftish language of multiculturalism and post-colonialism to imply that human rights are a modern version of imperialism which westerners impose on societies that do not need them. Scratch a relativist and you find a racist and although they do not put it as bluntly as this, their thinking boils down to the truly imperialist belief that universal suffrage or a woman's right to choose are all very well for white-skinned people in rich countries but not brown-skinned people in poor ones.

The unthinking adulation Obama received would have turned the most level-headed man into an egomaniac. In his first year, he acted as if it was enough not to be Bush, as if his charisma and oratorical brilliance could persuade dangerous leaders to change their behaviour. He cannot believe that after a year of failure. He abandoned Bush's missile defence programme in an attempt to charm Putin and received no concessions in return. Similarly, his creeping to Ahmadinejad has not produced any diplomatic rewards. Kissinger and Nixon were terrifying figures, who, in the name of "realism", endorsed regimes that persecuted opponents from East Timor to Chile. Obama, by contrast, doesn't frighten anyone.

I am glad to see that he turned away last week from the advisers who urged him not to reform Wall Street. Perhaps he is preparing a similar U-turn in foreign policy. In the past month, there have been tentative signs of a change of emphasis. In his Nobel peace prize lecture, he was unequivocal in his support for universal rights and departed from his prepared text to assert that, after all, he was on the side of the Iranian revolutionaries. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has finally managed to speak out in plain language against the censorship of the web by China, Egypt and other dictatorships.

Let us hope that these swallows herald a summer, because if they do not we will be stuck with an American president who combines the weakness of Jimmy Carter with the morals of Richard Nixon.

@'The Guardian'

Where is the HOPE?

(For decent journalism!)

5 Ways the Apple iPad Could Change e-Books

Now that we’ve left the hall of mirrors that was the Apple-tablet rumor mill, we can finally take a deep breath and ask: What’s up with the iPad? (Seriously, we’re really all gonna call it that?) Seeing as we’re avid readers, let’s shake our magic eight ball and ask what it might mean for e-books. Our take after the jump.

iBookstore pricing
From screenshots at least, it looks like the iBook store might have variable prices for e- (sorry, i-) books. This is a shot across the bow for Amazon, which has been fighting book publishers over e-book price points. Amazon likes $9.99, but publishers are used to charging upwards of 20 bucks for a hardback. The screenshots seem to indicate the iBookstore could meet somewhere in the middle for new releases. The tiff with Amazon has gotten so bad that certain publishers have started delaying the releases of their ebooks to avoid cannibalizing their hardback sales. (There’s been some speculation that Amazon is fighting back by hitting those same books with dozens of one-star ratings.) Not coincidentally, the publishers who were dragging their heels with cheaper ebooks are some of the same ones lining up early for the iBook store, including Hachette and Simon and Schuster. The way we’ve heard it, this is not just about price. Ebooks are a relatively small section of the book market right now, but they’re growing very fast. And if Amazon ends up as the primary distributor and sets the prices for ebooks — well, that leaves publishers pretty scared they’ll be cut out. On the other hand, everyone who saw what the iPod did to CD sales would caution that the iPad might not be the messiah many in book publishing clearly want it to be. But — for now — it looks like the iBook store may allow publishers more say in setting the prices of ebooks. Which puts Amazon’s marketshare squarely in Apple’s sights.
The iPad uses an open-source format for books
The iBookstore will sell content in the most commonly accepted open ebook format, EPUB. The Kindle store uses a proprietary format called AZW. Sounds like Apple’s coming down on the side of open source, right? Well, not so fast. It’s not yet clear whether you could load up a PDF you “found” into the iBook reader (as you can with the Kindle), or whether you’ll be stuck getting all your content from the iBookstore. It’s also still sketchy whether buying books in an EPUB format from the iBookstore means they’ll be readable on other ereading devices by the likes of Sony, Barnes and Noble, etc, or whether Apple has some sort of DRM of its own. But if Apple is really committing to selling DRM-free ebooks, that could put a lot of pressure on Amazon and everyone else to adopt the standard. That might bring the publishing world a whole lot closer to its own mp3 era.

It’s got a real screen
The iPad features a 9.7” high-res screen, not an e-ink display like many other e-readers. It remains to be seen whether that large display and the accompanying 1GHz processor will make reading books on a screen more palatable to consumers. But it does open the possibility of full-color ebooks.
There’s buy-in from publishers — the big ones, at least
HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group are among the publishers who are on board at this time, and the NY Times speculates that Random House can’t be far behind. This is a good sign that the iBook store will have robust initial content. What else would we like to see? More involvement from indie publishers, too. Sure, the iTunes store is great and all, but for the first few years especially, it leaned heavily on the major labels, spurring the growth of independent distribution sites like emusic. Can we expect the same for ebooks?
It’s 500 bucks
It looks like one of the goals of all those controlled leaks was to set expectations for a thousand-dollar device, only to reveal a base model at about $499 (with 3G). To put that in perspective, a Kindle or a Nook will cost you about $259. Could a more expensive but more full-featured device kickstart ebooks?

@'Boldtype'

Too bad the company is called "Apple" or it could be Mac's iPad.

Ken/
the thought is enough my friend!

Mona

XXX

Eh???

Since when has drawing with fugn Wolves been 'progressing'???

CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA's application of the medieval confession technique.
"It works, is the bottom line," conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou's ABC interview. "Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works."
A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling -- to this day -- the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.
Had Kiriakou left out something the first time?
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

@'FP'