Thursday 5 May 2011

Sketches from the Book of the Dead is Mick Harvey's first solo album since leaving the Bad Seeds, a group he was part of for 25 years, mostly as the band's musical director. It could just as easily have been titled "Sketches from My Book of the Dead". This collection of all-original songs was written as a memoriam for people, places, and things; it's a look at how the present impacts life as it moves toward its conclusion, and what will be left unsaid, undone; what will be left behind that matters. Harvey plays most of the instruments himself, with help from longtime collaborator J.P. Shilo on violin and accordion, bassist Rosie Westbrook, and backing vocals by Xanthe Waite. This is Harvey the songwriter; these are the most skillfully written, tender, and empathic tomes in his career thus far. "October Boy," the album opener, is obviously for the memory of former Birthday Party bandmate and collaborator Rowland S. Howard, who died in late 2009. Shilo contributes a second guitar played in Howard's signature stun gun style, it offers a direct look at Howard's life, his demons, and his obsessions. Its spaghetti western framework is balanced by a minor-key, two-chord vamp with feedback and tempered noise. "The Ballad of Jay Givens" is a meditation on the suicide of a friend of Harvey's father, in which he directly challenges the Anglican church's edict that suicides are "forbidden to enter heaven." He counters: "But I say, all is forgiven." "Frankie T. & Frankie C." is a modern folk tale of love both beautiful and tragic, revealed in Harvey's signature, subtle yet cinematic style. "Rhymeless" is a haunted, heartbreaking elegy. It's addressed to the bereft parents of deceased children and framed in a signature musical language that is elegant, always direct, and uncluttered. Harvey sums up Sketches from the Book of the Dead with two songs that alternately counter loss with beauty and bravado: "How Would I Leave You" features his lilting piano, which creates a melodic line for a sublime poetic reflection on the questions framing one's taking leave of his beloved and friends. "Famous Last Words" is the bookend: a swaggering rock & roll tune full of razor-blade guitars, fuzzed-out basslines, and tribal percussion, that answers both the Grim Reaper and God himself with wonderfully gaudy panache. Harvey's music has never been more self-assured than it is here, and this album marks the dawn of a new era for him as an artist. (Thom Jurek - allmusic; 4/5)

ALBUMSTREAM

Glinner Graham Linehan

Show some grace and fuck off. RT @SarahPalinUSA: Show photo as warning to others seeking America's destruction.

Robag Wruhme – Thora Vukk (2011 - Albumstream)

A prolific, beloved member of the German techno community, Jena-based producer/DJ Gabor Schablitzki released a wide assortment of EPs throughout the late '90s and 2000s as DJ Robag, Die Dub Rolle, Machiste, Themroc, Rolf Oksen, and, most commonly, Robag Wruhme. While the 2005 Wruhme album Wuzzelbud KK, issued on Musik Krause, was a set of predominantly all-new tracks, it provided something of a gateway into Schablitzki’s work, offering not just streamlined techno that clicked, roiled, and wobbled, but downtempo hip-hop as well. An alliance with Sören Bodner was dubbed the Wighnomy Brothers; the two DJ'd under the name, and Schablitzki used the alias as an outlet for some of his most popular productions -- alternately foreboding and rollicking tracks like “Wurz + Blosse” (Kompakt Extra, 2004), “Wombat” (Kompakt Extra, 2005), and “Moppal Kiff” (Freude Am Tanzen, 2006). Under the Wighnomy name, Schablitzki released Metawuffmischfelge (Freude Am Tanzen, April 2008), an elaborately layered mix of contemporary minimal techno. He followed it with Wuppdeckmishmampflow (Kompakt, January 2011), a relatively subdued set. (Andy Kellman - allmusic)

ALBUMSTREAM

via

Russia's Khimki Forest Threatened by Highway Project

Time is running out for Russian activists hoping to stop the construction of a highway through an old growth forest outside of Moscow. In an eleventh hour campaign, the Movement to Defend Khimki Forest is targeting the French company overseeing the controversial project. Vinci, one of Europe’s largest corporations, signed the contract for the Moscow-St. Petersburg motorway in 2009 and could begin the first phase of development this month. The 43-kilometer section will slice through the heart of an old growth oak forest, an important corridor for large game and home to numerous endangered plant species, as well as a cherished greenbelt on the edge of one of the world’s most polluted cities...

Continue reading

Adam Federman @'The Nation'

Movement to Defend Khimki Forest
Interesting document on private holdings in relation to this "venture"

The ethics and realpolitik of assassination

Osama bin Laden's daughter witnessed his death, says Pakistani official

Osama bin Laden's 12-year-old daughter watched as her father was shot dead by American special forces, a senior Pakistani intelligence official has told the Guardian.

The girl, who was found at the scene of the raid by Pakistani security services, is being cared for at a military hospital having been wounded in the attack. She has been questioned about the sequence of events during the raid on Sunday night.
The official said Pakistani intelligence services, who are holding 11 other survivors of the deadly raid on Bin Laden's Pakistani hiding place, would not allow their interrogation by US officials.
"That would occur only if there was written assent from their country of origin. We are yet to receive any request to my knowledge, but given the [critical] statements coming out of Washington and the fact that [the raid] was not an operation we were involved in, we would not accept," he said.
At least 10 people were left alive at the end of the attack, which saw Bin Laden killed in an upstairs room of the three-storey house where he had been living. Hamza, one of the al-Qaida leader's sons, was killed. His body was removed with that of his father by the assault teams.
The survivors include eight children and two adults, both women. One is Bin Laden's fifth wife, a 29-year-old Yemeni, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, who married the al-Qaida leader about 11 years ago in Afghanistan. The other is understood to be a Yemeni doctor in her 30s whose passport indicates that she arrived by legal means in the region between 2000 and 2006, when the document expired.
The Pakistani official, from the main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), said verification of the exact identity of the woman was continuing.
"We are not sure if she is a doctor, a nurse, a maid or what," he said.
The White House has so far not commented on the survivors or on reports that a second son of Bin Laden was captured during the raid.
Though mobile phones and computers seized in the compound are being examined by American specialists for any leads on forthcoming attacks or information on fugitives, the women and children in Pakistani custody are potential sources of valuable intelligence.
On Tuesday, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying that "the family members of Osama bin Laden [are] all in safe hands ... in the best possible facilities," and that "as per policy" the relatives would be handed over to their countries of origin.
This may not be easy. One problem is their unclear legal status. The Saudi Arabian citizenship of the al-Qaida leader was withdrawn in 1994 after his violent criticism of the kingdom's royal family, leaving the nationality of his children unclear. Two young sons of Bin Laden are believed to be among the survivors held by the Pakistanis.
It is also far from certain that either Yemen or Saudi Arabia would be willing to accept the repatriation of Bin Laden's family members or their friends. Nor is their identification a simple task. Some of the children found at the compound may be those of the two brothers killed in the raid, and may have Pakistani nationality. The youngest child found at the compound wais two.
Local authorities arrived at the scene of the raid as US special forces were leaving. It is believed that the attackers originally planned to evacuate all those in the compound but the breakdown of a helicopter meant there was no space to take them.
Instead, only the bodies of Bin Laden and his son Hamza, who was in his early 20s, were taken to the aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson and buried at sea. Survivors were left with their hands fastened with plastic handcuffs, a second Pakistani official said, adding that initial communication with the survivors had been difficult as the Pakistani police and military arriving at the scene did not speak Arabic.
Four bodies are understood to have been recovered by Pakistani officials from the compound, including those of the two brothers – who have been reported to be behind the construction and management of the house. One is believed to be the crucial courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who inadvertently led the CIA to Bin Laden. A third body was that of one of the brother's wives. The other casualty is believed to be a guard who has yet to be identified or possibly a domestic servant.
Several of the survivors, including Bin Laden's wife, were injured in the 40-minute firefight that preceded the al-Qaida leader's death.
The White House have confirmed that Bin Laden's wife received a bullet wound in the calf during the assault.
Pakistani officials said that Bin Laden's daughter, whom various reports named as Safina, Safia or Ayesha , had been hit in the ankle in the moments before the American assault team reached the room where they found her father, and later passed out. The wound was possibly caused by fragments from a grenade thrown by the assault team as they attacked, one said.
The girl and her mother are believed to be at a high-security military hospital.
American press reports cited a US official as saying that Fatah had told Pakistani authorities Bin Laden had lived in the complex, at least part of the time, since it was built in 2005. Yesterday, other reports from Pakistan contradicted that statement, saying survivors had told officials they had arrived five or six months ago.
White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed earlier this week that she was "in the room with Bin Laden" when injured.
John Brennan, President Barack Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, had initially claimed Fatah was killed while "she was being used as a shield", but the White House later said that account was inaccurate.
US intelligence officials have also said Fatah, rather than Bin Laden's daughter, identified the al-Qaida leader's body.
Jason Burke @'The Guardian'

Surveillance, Not Waterboarding, Led to bin Laden

Cut Copy - Need You Now (Carl Craig Remix)

xenijardin Xeni Jardin

I remember Guatemala & Chile: elite assassination squads, extrajudicial killing, dumping bodies into sea. Feels weird celebrating same here.

Obama’s Bridge Game: One No Trump

Aviation Geeks Scramble to ID bin Laden Raid’s Mystery Copter

Waterboarding 'Worked'?

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Note that it was Euros (Even he didn't bother w/ the worthless $US LOL!)

Osama Bin Laden had cash, was ready to flee

Jose Rodriguez Brags that He Got Terrorists to Deny Things Using Torture

Tapper Zukie - Rush I Some Dub

abumuqawama Andrew Exum

The poll numbers on Afghanistan are interesting. 6/10 say US hasn't finished the job. http://nyti.ms/jvuFfB

Glenn Greenwald: The illogic of the torture debate

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, re-ignited the debate over "brutal interrogations" -- by which it's meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based -- that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation methods" produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden -- are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.
But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been -- as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said -- that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
This highlights what has long been a glaring fallacy in many debates over War on Terror policies: that Information X was obtained after using Policy A does not prove that Policy A was necessary or effective. That's just basic logic. This fallacy asserted itself constantly in the debate over warrantless surveillance. Proponents of the Bush NSA program would point to some piece of intelligence allegedly obtained during warrantless eavesdropping as proof that the illegal program was necessary and effective; obviously, though, that fact said nothing about whether the same information would also have been discovered through legal eavesdropping, i.e., eavesdropping approved in advance by the FISA court (and indeed, legal eavesdropping [like legal interrogation tactics] is typically more effective than the illegal version because, by necessity, it is far more focused on actual suspected Terrorism plots; warrantless eavesdropping entails the unconstrained power to listen in on any communications the Government wants without having to establish its connection to Terrorism). But in all cases, the fact that some piece of intelligence was obtained by some lawless Bush/Cheney War on Terror policy (whether it be torture or warrantless eavesdropping) proves nothing about whether that policy was effective or necessary.
And those causal issues are, of course, entirely independent of the legal and moral questions shunted to the side by this re-ignited "debate." There are many actions that the U.S. could take that would advance its interests that are nonetheless obviously wrong on moral and legal grounds. When Donald Trump recently suggested that we should simply take Libya's oil and that of any other country which we successfully invade and occupy, that suggestion prompted widespread mockery. That was the reaction despite the fact that stealing other countries' oil would in fact produce substantial benefits for the U.S. and advance our interests: it would help to lower gas prices, reduce our dependence on hostile oil-producing nations, and avoid having to degrade our own environment in order to drill domestically. Trump's proposed actions are morally reprehensible and flagrantly lawless despite how many benefits it would produce; therefore, no person of even minimal decency would embrace it no matter how many benefits it produces.
Exactly the same is true for the torture techniques used by the Bush administration and once again being heralded by its followers (and implicitly glorified by media stars who keep suggesting that it enabled bin Laden's detection). It makes no difference whether it extracted usable intelligence. Criminal, morally depraved acts don't become retroactively justified by pointing to the bounty they produced.
* * * * *
It was striking to note in yesterday's New York Times the obituary of Moshe Landau, the Israeli judge who presided over the 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. It's a reminder that when even the most heinous Nazi war criminals were hunted down by the Israelis, they weren't shot in the head and then dumped into the ocean, but rather were apprehended, tried in a court of law, confronted with the evidence against them for all the world to see, and then punished in accordance with due process. The same was done to leading Nazis found by Allied powers and tried at Nuremberg. It's true that those trials took place after the war was over, but whether Al Qaeda should be treated as active warriors or mere criminals was once one of the few ostensible differences between the two parties on the question of Terrorism.
Speaking of which: I know that very few people have even a slight interest in the unexciting, party-pooping question of whether our glorious killing comported with legal principles, but for those who do, both The Guardian and Der Spiegel have good discussions of that issue.
@'Salon'

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

Bradley Manning's detention conditions have improved considerably-exposing the false excuses for his inhumane treatment: http://is.gd/SWB4gt

The Gentle Good - Colled

'Colled' means 'Loss' in Welsh and the words describe the coming of a black swan, symbolic of death. This song was written to imitate the style of an old Welsh poetic meter that is found in many traditional songs called 'Hen Benillion' (Old Verses). Thanks to Twm Morys for giving me a book full of them. Each verse has 4 lines of 7 syllables each and there is a specific rhyming pattern both within and between lines. The harmony is sung by the beautiful Cate le Bon and the harp played expertly by the astouding Harriet Earis. The string arrangements were written by Seb Goldfinch and performed by the Mavron Quartet.

Bin Laden: Pakistan rejects US fear of raid leaks

Second Edition--Vin Diesel vs. Arthur Russell

Fragments of an aborted recording session at Battery Sound NYC in 1986 which brought together fledgling rapper Mark Sinclair--today better known as the actor Vin Diesel--and avant composer/dance music maven Arthur Russell in a project midwifed by Gary Lucas, who discovered Mark Sinclair rapping and break-dancing on the streets of the West Village, and greenlighted by Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records and Barry Feldman of Upside/Logarhythm records.
"I'm the Man of Steel" the teenage Sinclair asserts, foreshadowing his stellar ascent as a worldwide action movie hero ("Triple XXX", "Pitch Dark", and most recently the #1 box office hit "Fast Five")-- but even Diesel is no match for Arthur's crafty diabolical beats, which keep dropping "the one" out from under him, breaking up Sinclair's delivery and eventually rendering the session useless.
"It's the white part of me fucking it up!"
--Mark Sinclair at the recording session
archival tape courtesy of Gary Lucas
HERE

US trawls al-Qaida 'treasure trove' of seized hard drives

blakehounshell Blake Hounshell

Least surprising op-ed ever written: John Yoo claims enhanced interrogation led to bin Laden's death. online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…

Why the truth will out but doesn’t sink in

Bin Laden used a woman as a human shield and fired at the commando team sent to kill him – at least according to the first reports. These have just been corrected to say he was unarmed and standing alone, but the retractions follow a useful pattern – media friendly version first, accurate version later – because the updates make little impact on our beliefs.
In this particular case, I can’t speculate why the corrections came as they did. Maybe it was genuinely the ‘fog of war’ that led to mistaken early reports, but the fact that the media friendly version almost always appears first in accounts of war is likely, at least sometimes, to be a deliberate strategy.
Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account.
Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky has been studying this effect for several years and not just with abstract test material. Here’s a summary of his study study on retracted reports of the Iraq war:

Media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War frequently contained corrections and retractions of earlier information. For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made. Similarly, tentative initial reports about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction were all later disconfirmed.
We investigated the effects of these retractions and disconfirmations on people’s memory for and beliefs about war-related events in two coalition countries (Australia and the United States) and one country that opposed the war (Germany). Participants were queried about (a) true events, (b) events initially presented as fact but subsequently retracted, and (c) fictional events.
Participants in the United States did not show sensitivity to the correction of misinformation, whereas participants in Australia and Germany discounted corrected misinformation. Our results are consistent with previous findings in that the differences between samples reflect greater suspicion about the motives underlying the war among people in Australia and Germany than among people in the United States.

More recent studies have supported the remarkable power of first strike news. The emotional impact of the first version has little influence on its power to persuade after correction, and the misinformation still has an effect even when it is remembered more poorly than the retraction.
Even explicitly warning people that they might be misled doesn’t dispel the lingering impact of misinformation after it has been retracted.
So while the latest reports say Bin Laden was alone and unarmed, the majority of people are likely to believe he was firing from behind a human shield, even when they can remember the corrections.
And if this isn’t being used as a deliberate strategy to manage public opinion, I shall eat my kevlar hat.
Vaughn Bell @'Mind Hacks'

Osama bin Laden: US responds to questions about killing's legality

How to buy 'No Wave' (Mojo June 2011)

Indebted as much to free jazz as punk-rock, and closely related to the mid-'70s East Village avant-garde New Cinema scene which revered director Jean-Luc Godard's dictum that "there are no new waves, only the ocean", no wave music emerged from the dripping lofts and performance art spaces of Lower Manhattan in 1971, offering an abrasive, nihilist rejoinder to perky new wave rock. The scene's gate openers were Suicide, purveyors of heroically confrontational downtown art-noise epiphanies since the early '70s. Like Suicide, no wave musicians were largely autodidacts - their predilection for texture over melody and disavowal of blues-based worthiness matched by lyrics of unabashed psychic torment.

No wave's fire burnt intensely, if briefly, wafted by émigré Brian Eno after he'd witnessed the cavalcade of visceral art screamers and jazz-punk tyros who graced New York, New York, a five-day 'noise festival' staged at SoHo's Artists Space gallery in May 1978. Inspired, Eno convinced Island Records to invest in a vinyl showcase for this latest incarnation of Gotham underground desecration and so the seminal No New York album was born, Eno producing the cream of the acts. Although dismayed by the jarring, clamourous results, Island released the album in 1978, enshrining the no wave 'moment' and catapulting the careers of hitherto obscure scenesters like Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay and James Chance.

No wave's mayfly heyday bequeathed a mere smattering of essential waxings - though subsequent anthologising would turn up a wealth of fiercely uncompromising music - but its influence is conspicuous in everything from Sonic Youth to The Birthday Party,The Pop Group and even Riot Grrrl.

10 VARIOUS N.Y. No Wave

Restricting itself only to tracks recorded for the Ze label, and with an erroneous subtitle, The Ultimate East Village '80s Soundtrack (many of its tracks in fact date from the late '70s), this is still a useful, if by no means definitive, introduction to no wave, proffering key tracks by Mars, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, The Contortions, etc, alongside interesting, if arguably post-no wave cuts, from Lydia Lunch's Queen Of Siam solo debut and Arto Lindsay and cinematographer Seth Tillett's spoken-word project, Arto/Neto. lt also finds room for avant-funk tracks by French chanteuse/guitarist Lizzy Mercier Descloux.

9 GLENN BRANCA Songs '77-'79

String-terrorising composer Branca had worked with Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio project before coming to prominence in two late-'70s bands, Theoretical Girls and The Static, documented here. Omitted from the No New York compilation (DNA's mischievous Arto Lindsay having convinced Eno to overlook his downtown rival), Theoretical Girls were critical no-wave scenesters despite only releasing a solitary single. This anthology exhumes their convulsive, unreleased recordings and live tracks alongside densely strummed essays by The Static, featuring Barbara Ess (of no wavers Y Pants).

8 JAMES WHITE AND THE BLACKS Off White

Lounge-suited, sax-toting James Siegfried (aka White, Chance, etc) was Lydia Lunch's erstwhile paramour and co-founder of the elemental Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, although actually schooled in free jazz and abetted by atypically adroit instrumentalists, The Blacks, AKA The Contortions, whose debut Buy also appeared in 1979. The marginally less frenetic Off White still lurches merrily from the cathartic (art-funk-disco cri de coeur Contort Yourself) to the bizarre (Stained Sheets, essentially a dirty phone call between White and Lunch).

7 GLENN BRANCA Lesson No.1

Lesson No.1 was evidence of the more structured compositional work Branca had commenced while helming Theoretical Girls. Originally issued as a twelve-inch mini-LP featuring two extended instrumental tracks, the aggressive, self-explanatory Dissonance and the more accessible title track (influenced by Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart and featuring one Harry Spitz on sledgehammer), this reissue boasts a third track, the metallically textured Bad Smells, essayed by a larger guitar ensemble whose numbers include a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.

6 SUICIDE Suicide

In the words of Glenn Branca: "If you have to find out who the godfather of no wave was, it was Alan Vega. He was doing no wave years before any of us." Indeed, Suicide's sometime light sculptor frontman, along with keyboardist partner Martin Rev, had been delivering antagonistic yet transcendent aural assaults on downtown New York audiences for several years before no wave struck. While this, their debut album, would influence a legion of subsequent synth duos, Suicide's eerily distorted, shimmering songs, and Vega's uncompromising attitude made them equally crucial no wave progenitors.

5 DNA DNA On DNA

Brazilian-born Arto Lindsay, DNA's gaunt, bespectacled frontman, was, and remains, a downtown prime mover. His first band was arguably no wave's most explosive. Backed by untrained female Japanese drummer lkue Mori and performance-artist-turned-keyboardist Robin Lee Crutchfield (later replaced by Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright), Lindsay's primal scream vocals - partly delivered in fractured Portuguese - were matched by the white-noise detonations he conjured from a randomly detuned Danelectro twelve-string guitar. DNA On DNA collates the band s modest studio repertoire plus grainy live recordings.

4 MARS Complete Studio Recordings NYC 1977-78

Mars were the no wavers who came closest (relatively speaking) to rock orthodoxy - their heavily textured sound an augury of early Sonic Youth and effectively a blueprint for post-punk. Formed in 1975 by vocalist Sumner Crane and guitarist/singer China Burg, the quartet (completed by bassist Mark Cunningham and drummer Nancy Arlen) committed only eleven songs to tape during their three-year existence and played fewer than thirty gigs, none outside New York. This set collects the lot, including the compelling, insectoid Helen Forsdale.

3 JAMES CHANCE & THE CONTORTIONS Buy

Released almost simultaneously with James White And The Blacks' Off White (and featuring ostensibly similar personnel), The Contortions' full debut is an enduring no wave benchmark, its paroxysms of warped funk-rock and yelping free-jazz straddling the chasm between Richard Hell's Voidoids and Albert Ayler. Chance decants his volatile, agitated persona into a dozen squirming, nihilist titles like I Don't Want To Be Happy and Contort Yourself (a veritable no wave standard, also recorded by The Blacks), as the uncredited Contortions squirm on.

2 TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS Shut Up And Bleed

Notorious for ten-minute sets, and creators of a mere handful of EPs during their lifespan, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks were propelled into the spotlight by their feral, needle-sharp contributions to the No New York anthology, securing the iconic status of Medusa-like teenage leaderene Lydia Lunch (plus future Bad Seeds/Grinderman drummer Jim Sclavunos). Shut Up And Bleed corrals the band's entire oeuvre (alongside tracks by the subsequent Beirut Slump), including the malevolent narratives of Baby Doll, Orphans, et al.

1 VARIOUS No New York

Fresh from producing new wave's artier outriders, Devo and Talking Heads, curator Eno whittled down a long list of NYC "research bands" to just four for this seminal compilation, applying an uncharacteristic hands-off approach to the production of primal, art-rock deconstruction from Mars and DNA; self-styled 'aural terror' from Teenage Jesus And The Jerks; and squealing, rudimentarily miked punk-jazz from The Contortions. Released by Island's esoteric Antilles imprint, the lyrics printed, with apposite wilfulness, on the inaccessible inside of the outer sleeve, No New York was the genre's definitive document and remains an ideal entry portal for the no wave ingénue.

AVOID THESE!

No wave was so fleeting that anything produced during its succinct heyday is worthy of investigation. The Manhattan-centric tendency did Produce some questionable responses in the remainder of the US underground, however. Not least was a 1979 No New York retort entitled Yes L.A., released by Californian punk imprint Dangerhouse. A limited edition one-sided LP boasting tracks by X, The Germs and other CA new wave stalwarts, its sleeve bore the petulant disclaimer "Not produced by Brian Eno". Caveat emptor: this now expensive collector's item reveals only that the sound of the '79 West Coast underground was rock'n'roll cheese to New York's art-music chalk.
Via

FBI warns that fake bin Laden video is a virus

he U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned computer users Tuesday that messages claiming to include photos and videos of Osama bin Laden's death actually contain a virus that could steal personal information. The warning comes as security companies said that they've spotted the first samples of malicious software disguised as photos of the dead Al Qaeda leader.
Security vendor F-Secure said Tuesday that criminals are e-mailing a password-stealing Trojan horse program called Banload to victims, and Symantec said it's seen criminals spamming victims with links to fake "Osama dead" news articles that launch Web-based attacks on visitors.
U.S. authorities do have photos of bin Laden, who was shot in the head during an early morning raid Monday in Pakistan. But these photos have not been released publicly.
Scammers have also used a technique called search engine poisoning to try to trick search engines into listing hacked Web pages that are loaded with malware in their search results. "It's unlikely you'll find pictures or videos of Bin Laden's death online -- but searching for one will certainly take you to sites with malware," wrote F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hyponnen in a blog post.
The FBI warned Internet users to watch out for fake messages on social network sites and to never download software in order to view a video. "Read e-mails you receive carefully. Fraudulent messages often feature misspellings, poor grammar, and non-standard English," the FBI warning stated.
As a major international news event, bin Laden's death has shown the amazing way information can spread online. Many learned of the terrorist leader's death through Twitter, where the story first broke, or Facebook. But it also underscores how the unfiltered media can quickly spread bad information worldwide.
In the two days since the early morning raid, the bin Laden story has generated fake photographs, fake quotes, and plenty of scams.
Security experts said that shady marketers and so-called rogue antivirus vendors have also jumped on the bin Laden bandwagon. The rogue antivirus software bombards victims with pop-up messages telling them they have a computer problem. Its aim: to nag them into paying for bogus software.
Shady marketers are spreading messages on Facebook that try to lure victims into spreading the message to friends and visiting marketing Web sites, by claiming they have a censored video.
"Osama is dead, watch this exclusive CNN video which was censored by Obama Administration due to level of violence, a must watch," is a typical lure used in the scam. Users are encouraged to cut and paste malicious JavaScript code into their browser, which then sends the message to all of their Facebook friends. Security experts say never to cut and paste scripts into the browser.
Robert McMillan @'ComputerWorld'

Flairs - Trucker's Delight

Wikileaks: US Told Kiwis “We’ll Fund Piracy Crackdown”

Wikileaks reveals tense relations between Pakistan and US

A Guide to Beck and Scientology

Adam Curtis: For 10 years, Osama bin Laden filled a gap left by the Soviet Union. Who will be the baddie now?

The horrific thing about Osama bin Laden was that he helped to kill thousands of innocent people throughout the world. But he was also in a strange way a godsend to the west. He simplified the world. When communism collapsed in 1989, the big story that had been hardwired into citizens of western countries – that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force – came to an abrupt end. Understanding the world became much more complicated until, amid the confusion of a global economic crisis in 1998 and the hysterical spectacle of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Bin Laden emerged as the mastermind behind the bombings of embassies in east Africa.
President Clinton immediately seized on it. He fired off cruise missiles, they missed, and everyone accused Clinton of using Bin Laden to take the heat off himself. But if you look back at some of the pieces television reporters did that day in Washington, you can see something else too: the murky shape of an old story slowly re-emerging, like a wreck rising up from the sea.
Bin Laden and his ideological mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, talked about "the near enemy" and the "far enemy". But from 2001 onwards they became America's "far enemy". Neoconservative politicians, who had last tasted real power under President Reagan during the cold war, took the few known facts about Bin Laden and Zawahiri and fitted them to the template they knew so well: an evil enemy with sleeper cells and "tentacles" throughout the world, whose sole aim was the destruction of western civilisation. Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.
Journalists, many of whom also yearned for the simplicity of the old days, grabbed at this: from the outset, the reporting of the Islamist terror threat was distorted to reflect this dominant simplified narrative. And Bin Laden grabbed at it too. As the journalists who actually met him report, he was brilliant at publicity. All three – the neoconservatives, the "terror journalists", and Bin Laden himself – effectively worked together to create a dramatically simple story of looming apocalypse. It wasn't in any way a conspiracy. Each of them had stumbled in their different ways on a simplified fantasy that fitted with their own needs.
The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy. It allowed revolutionary Islamism, which throughout the 1990s had been failing dramatically to get the Arab people to rise up and follow its vision, to regain its authority. And it helped to sell a lot of newspapers.
But because we, and our leaders, retreated into a Manichean fantasy, we understood the new complexities of the real world even less. Which meant that we completely ignored what was really going on in the Arab world.
As journalists and Predator drones searched for the different al-Qaida "brands" across the regions, and America propped up dictators who promised to fight the "terror network", a whole new generation emerged in the Middle East who wanted to get rid of the dictators. The revolutions that this led to came as a complete shock to the west. We have no idea, really, who the revolutionaries are or what, if any, ideologies are driving them. But it is becoming abundantly clear that they have nothing to do with "al-Qaida". Yet ironically they are achieving one of Bin Laden's main goals – to get rid of the "near enemy", dictators such as Hosni Mubarak.
One of the main functions of politicians – and journalists – is to simplify the world for us. But there comes a point when – however much they try – the bits of reality, the fragments of events, won't fit into the old frame.
The death of Bin Laden may be that point for the simplified story of goodies versus baddies. It was a story born in the US and Britain at the end of the second world war – the "good war". It then went deep into the western imagination during the cold war, was reawakened and has been held together over the last 10 years by the odd alliance of American and European politicians, journalists, "terror experts" and revolutionary Islamists all seeking to shore up their authority in a disillusioned age.
Barack Obama seems to be rejecting this story already. The Europeans still cling to it, though, with the return of "liberal interventionism" in Libya, but it is anxious and halfhearted.
But it is in Afghanistan that the story is really falling apart. We are beginning to realise that this simplification has led to completely unreal fantasies about who we are really fighting. Fantasies that only persist because they justify our presence there. For the fundamental problem with this simple story of good versus evil is that it does not permit a proper critical framework that allows you to properly judge not only those you are fighting, but also your allies.
America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy that would allow the country to be ruled by good people. But in the ensuing decade they have been tricked, spun round and deceived by the complex web of vested interests there. And their inability to understand and deal with this has led to the rise of a state crippled by corruption in which it is impossible to know who the "good" people might be any longer.
Meanwhile President Harmid Karzai has immediately pointed out that Bin Laden's killing proves that the real terrorist threat is in Pakistan – and the fight against terror in his country is a fantasy. But we also know that much of what Karzai says may also be the fantasies he uses to justify the growing power of the small elite around him. And so Afghanistan becomes a hall of mirrors – except the one thing everyone agreed on was that Bin Laden wasn't there.
With Bin Laden's death maybe the spell is broken. It does feel that we are at the end of a way of looking at the world that makes no real sense any longer. But the big question is where will the next story come from? And who will be the next baddie? The truth is that the stories are always constructed by those who have the power. Maybe the next big story won't come from America. Or possibly the idea that America's power is declining is actually the new simplistic fantasy of our age.
@'The Guardian'