Wednesday 23 February 2011
Jay Landesman (1920 - 2011)
The closest there was to a beat magazine (thought it could only be seen that way in retrospect) in the late 1940s and early ’50s was a slim, eccentric journal whose contributors moved among the bases of art, sex, and neuroticism…..Ginsberg’s first contribution to a magazine with a nationwide circulation appeared in Neurotica 6 (Spring 1950), by which time the magazine had adopted a furtive beat identity. Ginsberg’s brief "Song: Fie My Fum" (an early working of “Pull My Daisy”) was not likely to advance by much the editor’s avowed cause of describing "a neurotic society from the inside"; nevertheless, it was the right kind of verse for the venue, with its playful sexual content: "Say my oops, Ope my shell, Roll my bones, Ring my bell ..." The contributor’s note informed readers that "Allen Ginsberg recently recovered from a serious illness." (sic)….The longest and most serious contribution to 6 was "Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient" by Carl Goy, the pseudonym of Ginsberg’s new friend in the Columbia PI, Carl Solomon...
The full article can be read here. Here's Landesman's obituary as it appeared on Monday in the St Louis Beacon. The St Louis Post-Dispatch obit may be read here.
Peter Hale @'The Allen Ginsberg Project'
Dennis Montgomery: The Man Who Conned The Pentagon
It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. “There’s continued discussion,” he told reporters, “these are from credible sources—about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11.” The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned “about some unspecified but spectacular attack.”
The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in Alaska.” The feds forced the cancellation of dozens of French, British and Mexican commercial “flights of interest” and pushed foreign governments to put armed air marshals on certain flights. Air France flight 68 was canceled, as was Air France flight 70. By Christmas the headline in the Los Angeles Times was "Six Flights Canceled as Signs of Terror Plot Point to L.A." Journalists speculated over the basis for these terror alerts. “Credible sources,” Ridge said. “Intelligence chatter,” said CNN.
But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers...
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Aram Roston @'Playboy'
How Obama Lost Karzai
Karzai was the scion of a prominent Pashtun family in southern Afghanistan, one with a deep-rooted enmity for the Taliban regime. The Taliban, which had ruled the country since 1996, had gunned down Karzai's father in front of a mosque in the Pakistani city of Quetta two years earlier. Now the younger Karzai was clandestinely sending money and weapons across the Afghan border for an eventual uprising against the ruling regime. But he had just been served notice by Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) that his visa had been revoked -- the Taliban, with its close links to the Pakistani intelligence agency, had urged the ISI to get rid of him. Karzai was making the rounds of Western embassies in Islamabad to ask whether anyone would support him if he went inside the country and raised the standard of rebellion. But nobody offered to help. Several ambassadors refused to see him.
By the time U.S. bombers pounded the last remnants of the Taliban out of Kabul just a few months later, everything had changed. Karzai had gone from pariah to president and, in the eyes of the U.S. government, from combatant in an obscure regional conflict to vital strategic partner. Yet when I met with Karzai not long ago at the presidential palace in Kabul for a lengthy conversation, one of many in the decade since our pre-9/11 meeting in Lahore, it was remarkable how much his relationship with the United States seemed to have come full circle...
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Ahmed Rashid @'FP'
The Fall in Australia 2011 – I Ain’t No Squealer But I Sing Like a Canary!
I wanted to write a story about the Fall’s recent dates in Australia for several reasons. Mostly because the Scrivener General is a Fall freak and was unable to get to see them. Other than that, I thought I could share my experiences with you from within this rarefied, delicate room that the General has carved out of the Magic Box (Internet) better than anywhere else has. I was asked by a music site to write a story. That would have been nice but that room allows a cavalcade of camp followers to trail their private parts – having dipped them in the Indian inkwell – across the bottom of the page in a contest of wit known as the ‘comments’ section. As you know, a person’s brains only reside in the nether regions in quite delirious, unconscious moments. When we are not knowing what we are thinking. Thank fuck. The General runs a tight ship here and the soldiers line up in an orderly fashion and let fly. No return fire is allowed. At ease.I was also asked by an actual physical newsprint from another state to write about the Fall from close proximity but I demurred from that as well. I ain’t no squealer! So, here I am. Unloading. Just for a stir. Under the illusion that something of the following may resonate, within this delicate chamber the General has allowed me to speak into.
The Fall are a band from out of time. That’s a tongue right there.
Forty or more albums. Constant lead face and voice and brain is Mark E Smith. From a certain part of Manchester, the name of which escapes me but is important to him and, thus, to us who are listening. Not the posh part, if there is one. Been going since 1976 or even further back. Their first single, ‘Repetition’, name checks Chairman Mao and Jimmy Carter. I mean, they were still in actual power.
Comedians love the Fall. Frank Skinner, Stewart Lee, Tony Martin. Something unknowable about them. Suspension. Great lines popping out here and there. Unpredictable. They are puzzling, not just a puzzle. Everything else seems to settle after a while. Sometimes it’s time itself that plays tricks. The Beatles were so passé, so out of date, when I was a kid. So badly, laughably antiquated. Then, after a while, they seemed to loom larger and fresher – seemingly more recent, focused and accessible. Those bends in time took decades. Bend Sinister is a Fall album title. The Fall have been through this kind of thing too. Sometimes in and out of focus and vogue. Out in the wilderness, looking sad and irrelevant, then suddenly and rudely back in the centre of all the hot talk. Like now!...
The Fall are a band from out of time. That’s a tongue right there.
Forty or more albums. Constant lead face and voice and brain is Mark E Smith. From a certain part of Manchester, the name of which escapes me but is important to him and, thus, to us who are listening. Not the posh part, if there is one. Been going since 1976 or even further back. Their first single, ‘Repetition’, name checks Chairman Mao and Jimmy Carter. I mean, they were still in actual power.
Comedians love the Fall. Frank Skinner, Stewart Lee, Tony Martin. Something unknowable about them. Suspension. Great lines popping out here and there. Unpredictable. They are puzzling, not just a puzzle. Everything else seems to settle after a while. Sometimes it’s time itself that plays tricks. The Beatles were so passé, so out of date, when I was a kid. So badly, laughably antiquated. Then, after a while, they seemed to loom larger and fresher – seemingly more recent, focused and accessible. Those bends in time took decades. Bend Sinister is a Fall album title. The Fall have been through this kind of thing too. Sometimes in and out of focus and vogue. Out in the wilderness, looking sad and irrelevant, then suddenly and rudely back in the centre of all the hot talk. Like now!...
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Dave Graney @'The Scrivener's Fancy'
Is This The First DMCA Notice Over 3D Printer Plans?
Just a few months ago, we highlighted how an upcoming battle in the copyright world will be coming from the rise in 3D printing, and the ability to simply print out new physical objects based on plans. And, as a few different folks have sent in, a site that collects and aggregates 3D printer plans called Thingiverse recently said that it's received its first ever DMCA takedown notice over a plan for a 3D printer object. To avoid liability, of course, the site complied. The specific DMCA takedown involved this 3D printable design of "the impossible triangle."
Of course many people wondered if the guy claiming copyright on this, Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz, had a valid copyright on this, since the basic design he's talking about is just the famed Penrose triangle, and there are plenty of examples of people making it. On top of that, the DMCA takedown he issued was over people creating similar Penrose triangle 3D printer designs based on a challenge Schwanitz himself put out there, to see if anyone else could figure out how to model a printable Penrose triangle, and the winning results figured it out: Of course, the very fact that they figured it out themselves, without the specific instructions on how Schwanitz did it, lends even more credence to the claim that the takedown was completely bogus. They created these new versions not by copying his work, which was hidden away, but by understanding the basic physics and optics of how to create something that appears like the classic Penrose triangle. In fact, the creator of the 3D printable version above notes that his version was "based solely on the 1934 design painted by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvard," which makes me wonder what sort of copyright claim Dr. Schwanitz actually has over the design.
In the end, Schwanitz decided to back down, rescinding the takedown notice and promising to release his version into the public domain (where it may have really been all along). Still, this definitely is an early warning sign of things to come. I'm sure it won't be long before we hear of more copyright issues related to 3D printers, and they'll be over issues a lot more serious than an optical illusion.
@'techdirt'
Gaddafi raved and cursed, but he faces forces he cannot control
So he will go down fighting. That's what Muammar Gaddafi told us last night, and most Libyans believe him. This will be no smooth flight to Riyadh or a gentle trip to a Red Sea holiday resort. Raddled, cowled in desert gowns, he raved on.
He had not even begun to use bullets against his enemies – a palpable lie – and "any use of force against the authority of the state shall be punished by death", in itself a palpable truth which Libyans knew all too well without the future tense of Gaddafi's threat. On and on and on he ranted. Like everything Gaddafi, it was very impressive – but went on far too long.
He cursed the people of Benghazi who had already liberated their city – "just wait until the police return to restore order", this dessicated man promised without a smile. His enemies were Islamists, the CIA, the British and the "dogs" of the international press. Yes, we are always dogs, aren't we? I was long ago depicted in a Bahraini newspaper cartoon (Crown Prince, please note) as a rabid dog, worthy of liquidation. But like Gaddafi's speeches, that's par for the course. And then came my favourite bit of the whole Gaddafi exegesis last night: HE HADN'T EVEN BEGUN TO USE VIOLENCE YET!
So let's erase all the YouTubes and Facebooks and the shooting and blood and gouged corpses from Benghazi, and pretend it didn't happen. Let's pretend that the refusal to give visas to foreign correspondents has actually prevented us from hearing the truth. Gaddafi's claim that the protesters in Libya – the millions of demonstrators – "want to turn Libya into an Islamic state" is exactly the same nonsense that Mubarak peddled before the end in Egypt, the very same nonsense that Obama and La Clinton have suggested. Indeed, there were times last night when Gaddafi – in his vengefulness, his contempt for Arabs, for his own people – began to sound very like the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu. Was there some contact between these two rogues, one wondered, that we didn't know about?
In many ways, Gaddafi's ravings were those of an old man, his fantasies about his enemies – "rats who have taken tablets" who included "agents of Bin Laden" – were as disorganised as the scribbled notes on the piece of paper he held in his right hand, let alone the green-covered volume of laws from which he kept quoting. It was not about love. It was about the threat of execution. "Damn those" trying to stir unrest against Libya. It was a plot, an international conspiracy. "Your children are dying – but for what?" He would fight "until the last drop of my blood with the Libyan people is behind me". America was the enemy (much talk of Fallujah), Israel was the enemy, Sadat was an enemy, colonial fascist Italy was the enemy. Among the heroes and friends was Gaddafi's grandfather, "who fell a martyr in 1911" against the Italian enemy.
Dressed in brown burnous and cap and gown, Gaddafi's appearance last night raised some odd questions. Having kept the international media – the "dogs" in question – out of Libya, he allowed the world to observe a crazed nation: YouTube and blogs of terrible violence versus state television pictures of an entirely unhinged dictator justifying what he had either not seen on YouTube or hadn't been shown. And there's an interesting question here: dictators and princes who let the international press into their countries – Messrs Ben Ali/Mubarak/Saleh/Prince Salman – are permitting it to film their own humiliation. Their reward is painful indeed. But sultans like Gaddafi who keep the journos out fare little different.
The hand-held immediacy of the mobile phone, the intimacy of sound and the crack of gunfire are in some ways more compelling than the edited, digital film of the networks. Exactly the same happened in Gaza when the Israelis decided, Gaddafi-like, to keep foreign journalists out of their 2009 bloodletting: the bloggers and YouTubers (and Al Jazeera) simply gave us a reality we didn't normally experience from the "professional" satellite boys. Perhaps, in the end, it takes a dictator with his own monopoly on cameras to tell the truth. "I will die as a martyr," Gaddafi said last night. Almost certainly true.
Robert Fisk @'The Independent'
No 'civilised' country treats refugee children this way
Shamefully in Australia over 1027 children are currently being held in detention- we now have more children in detention then we did under the Howard Government.
We will present this petition to the Immigration Minister on Thursday. We have 24 hours to make sure we have the biggest impact possible. Can you add your name to the petition below? Together we'll end the shameful practice of keeping children in detention.
We will present this petition to the Immigration Minister on Thursday. We have 24 hours to make sure we have the biggest impact possible. Can you add your name to the petition below? Together we'll end the shameful practice of keeping children in detention.
Sign the online petition @'Getup!'
HEREPaul Kelly - I Guess I Get A Little Emotional Sometimes
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Paul Krassner's 50 Years of Misadventures in Satire and Counterculture
Last month, Paul Krassner released a new and expanded edition of his acclaimed memoir, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. Given the author's iconic status in the annals of self-publishing, it is only appropriate that the paperback is available solely at Paul Krassner's personal site. (But Krassner is no Luddite; the Kindle version is available via Amazon.)
Now 78, Krassner is decades from his busiest days as the Zelig of the American counterculture. But unlike many of his former comrades in America's postwar cultural revolution, Krassner is both alive and kicking. He never gave up his passions or jumped the political fence. An original collaborator of Lenny Bruce, he still performs stand-up, heavy on social satire; a co-founder of the Yippies, he still attends noisy protests; a participant-historian of the last half-century of American publishing, journalism and activism, he still lectures and writes.
Along with the new edition of Unconfined Nut, Krassner has just finished editing a 500-page collection, The Best of Paul Krassner: 50 Years of Investigative Satire, and is waist-deep in the process of writing his first novel -- working title, Court Jester -- about a modern-day Lenny Bruce-type character. (All of which suggests that the Oakland branch of the writers' organization PEN might have jumped the gun in December when it presented Krassner with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Not that the recipient is complaining. "I was happy to receive it, but even happier that it wasn't a posthumous honor," says Krassner.).
When it appeared in the early '90s, the first edition of Raving, Unconfined Nut was arguably the most raucous insider's account yet of the 1960s. The new edition only adds ballast to the argument. The memoir takes its name from an angry letter the FBI sent to the editor of Time after the magazine ran a friendly profile of Krassner. "To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute," wrote the agency. "He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut."
Krassner began his career as an unconfined nut at the age of six, just as he became the youngest concert artist ever to perform on Carnegie Hall. He was playing Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in A Minor while wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit when he felt an itch. The young Krassner titled on one leg to scratch the itch with his other leg without missing a beat. The hall erupted in delighted laughter. This was the moment, Krassner writes, when he was first "zapped by the god of Absurdity."
What followed was a career as "investigative satirist" that would place him at the center of every major event and current in the postwar history of the alternative press and the counterculture. Krassner made his name as the publisher of the Realist, which appeared intermittently between 1958 and 2001 and peaked with 100,000 subscribers. But the influence of the Realist was always greater than its circulation, and it ranks in importance alongside other storied self-published journals of the last century such as I.F. Stone's Weekly...
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Alexander Zaitchik @'AlterNet'
(GB2011) NHS turmoil is just the start of Tory ideology run wild
David Cameron delivers a speech on the 'big society' to social entrepreneurs at Somerset House in London. Photograph: Wpa Pool/Getty Images
This is it, the last veil ripped away. In the Daily Telegraph today, David Cameron penned his preview of the long-delayed white paper on public services. The paper's editorial saw the light: "For the first time he explains the full scope of his ambition to roll back the boundaries of an overweening state." This is indeed the eureka moment for the country. Nothing like this was ever breathed before the election.
Every single public service will be put out to tender. Everything. Well, not MI5 or the judiciary – but everything else, including schools and the NHS. Forget the camouflage of localism and choice: however much local people like local services that work well, they will have no choice in the matter. A private company – or in theory a very large charity – can challenge any service they would like to run and bid to take it over. If Serco or Capita think they can turn a reasonable profit from cherry-picking anything the council or the government runs, they will have the right to demand it is put out to tender. If they bid below the current cost and claim that quality will not fall, it's theirs for the asking. Not the people, not their elected representatives, nor the users of those services will be able to refuse. It will be taken out of their hands because competition law will decide. If local people want their council to hold on to a much-loved service, a company can take the council to court – at huge and wasteful expense – and almost certainly win the right to tender and win the contract.
The NHS bill now marching through parliament is the model. Behind the eyecatching GP commissioning, the real radicalism is in making any part of the NHS open to contract by "any willing provider". Any company can claim the right to provide any part of the NHS – even if the local GP consortium is very happy with the NHS surgeons providing operations. Neither patients nor GPs will choose once competition law enforces tendering out. Cameron reveals his white paper on public services will lever open everything in the same way. EU competition law doesn't currently apply to public services or the NHS, unless commissioners choose to put a service out to contract, in which case it must be opened up fairly across the EU. Now everything is open for business.
Democracy will scarcely get a look in. People can't choose if services are contracted out. Once contracts are signed, nothing can change. You can throw out rascally councillors or governments, but the contracts will go on regardless. Like PFIs, they will be traded as financial instruments, sliced and diced according to risk and sold on. This sets a nuclear bomb under all public services, because there can never be any going back. If you don't like the sound of this, Cameron's government can be voted out but it will be virtually impossible to return services to a public realm that no longer exists. Ownership of the contracts and companies moves on, and the public sector loses any capacity to take them back.
Is contracting out necessarily value for money? An extensive trawl of the literature was done for John Hutton at the DTI by the pro-market economist DeAnne Julius only three years ago, but even she failed to find any decent evidence that contracting out works as a general proposition.
It's not a perfect match, but thehistory of the PFI calamity is well-documented, on the left by Allyson Pollock and on the right in the Telegraph by Andrew Gilligan, and in Tory MP Jesse Norman's campaign to reclaim some of the billions skimmed off these lucrative contracts. At the campaign site you can find plentiful cases of a PFI school charged £302 to fix one electric socket or how the M25 PFI cost an extra £1bn. Public servants negotiating big, inflexible and unchangeable contracts up against companies employing the sharpest lawyers and accountants will always be at a disadvantage. Gordon Brown and Baroness Shriti Vadera's pig-headed determination, against expert advice, to put the London tube into a web of PPP contracts stands as the worst exemplar: it fell over and cost a fortune.
When I spoke to Norman, he said he'd warned his leader that "many PFI contracts provide an object lesson". He says the danger is that contracts can be "very expensive, very inflexible and opaque". The solemnly staid Chartered Institute for Public Finance and Accountancy expresses its concern: "Where is political accountability when the contracts are not aligned with the political cycle?" And, they wonder, if everything is broken up into small outsourced pieces, "how are authorities to pursue the shared services and efficiencies of scale urged on them?"
Cameron says his reforms will bring "openness, creativity and innovation", but in fact these contracts are the closest you can get to a Stalinist five-year plan – opaque, undemocratic and unresponsive to change. Democratic politicians adapt public service priorities all the time – not always for the best, but fettered only by responsiveness to voters, not to badly drawn fixed contracts.
Cameron is taking an ideological blowtorch to anything branded "public". He says this is the "decisive end of the old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you're given model of public services". His mission is to "dismantle big government and build the 'big society' in its place". But it may look more like big Serco than big society.
Labour is in a quandary, afraid Cameron is laying a trap. Opposing the plan risks wearing the cap of "old-fashioned, top-down" anti-reformers defending the unions' self-interest. Besides, Tony Blair began all this – and public services will always need eternal effort to invigorate and renew. But these are changed times, and it's not Labour who need to be afraid. All around people are starting to see the destruction of public services they had forgotten to appreciate. Libraries, Sure Starts, charities, after-school clubs, youth clubs, parks and gardens, old people's care, hospitals, clinics, midwife visits, meals on wheels and a thousand other things once taken for granted are shrinking before their eyes. If ever there was a bad political time to privatise the lot, this must be it.
Cameron is setting his runaway ideology, speeding down the tracks on collision course with public sentiment. This only confirms that tell-tale moment of glee when the Tory benches shouted "More! More!" as Osborne ended his budget listing the deepest public cuts since the war. Political wisdom would advise them to engage in a little more hand-wringing anguish, but they just can't resist following their animal instincts. Labour has nothing to fear in standing up for the public good.
Polly Toynbee @'The Guardian'
!!!
Do NOT get me started on privatisation...
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Free dial-up ISP for Libyans
XS4ALL, a fantastic, hacker-friendly ISP in the Netherlands, has thrown open all its modem lines for free use by people in Libya when and if their network access gets blocked by the government. DPCosta sez, "It's expensive (international call), but can be very handy in an emergency. The number is +31205350535 and the username/password are xs4all."
Cory Doctorow @'boing boing'
Cory Doctorow @'boing boing'
Swedish Court Fines File Sharer About $300 For Sharing 44 Songs
While US courts have been awarding tens of thousands of dollars per song for the few people found guilty of unauthorized file sharing, many people have noted how utterly ridiculous those awards are, in comparison to any actual harm. It appears that a court over in Sweden appears to agree. A man who was charged with sharing 44 songs has been fined a much smaller amount, specifically, 2,000 kronor, or about $300. It actually comes out to just about $7 per song.
It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this one. After all, they've been going around praising the IPRED anti-piracy law in Sweden for the last two years now. Will we suddenly start hearing about how Sweden "doesn't take piracy seriously" and then there will be a new push for even stricter laws?
@'techdirt'
It will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to this one. After all, they've been going around praising the IPRED anti-piracy law in Sweden for the last two years now. Will we suddenly start hearing about how Sweden "doesn't take piracy seriously" and then there will be a new push for even stricter laws?
@'techdirt'
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