So, on Friday I saw Parlane/Jeck/Fennesz perform. It was an interesting listen, some stimulating noises.
Then last night, in the same venue, I saw the Payvar Ensemble from Iran.

Their performance left me full of joy, with a broad smile on my face. Absolutely stunning!

More than that, with their music, their togetherness, honesty and humility they gave me a better understanding of Iranian people, Iranian culture, Iranian spirit, free from political predujices and at a completely human level.
Ostad Mohammadali Esmaeili, who enchants the tombak itself with his playing, has a childlike playfulness in his drumming. It was impossible not to love him. He is possibly the best musician I have ever seen. I wanted to hug him.
The space and time they found for the music to flow into was marvellous.

Apparently, they will record for Radio 3 next week. I recommend it highly. But if have the privilige to get an opportunity to see them perform, see their faces and benefit from their wisdom… do not miss it!

http://www.amc.org.uk/press/

The government no longer serves the people

Bev Conover / Online Journal | October 21 2006

Actually, the government hasn’t served the people for a long time. But now, with a stroke of a pen, George W. Bush wiped out the last vestiges of the US Constitution, nullifying our democratic republic, and has all but declared himself dictator. So what are we going to do about it?

Are we going to sit back and hope that the US Supreme Court will declare the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional? A hard thing to do in the absence of a constitution, i.e., if someone can even bring the case to the court, given that Bush declared “enemy combatants” have no rights.

Are we going to cross our fingers and hope that the military will effect a bloodless coup by marching into the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building, the Pentagon, the State Department and the Department of Justice and removing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales? Doubtful, since today’s so-called patriots, unlike those who risked all in 1776 to declare our independence from Britain, are not apt to risk their careers, much less their lives.

The Declaration of Independence states that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed [that’s us, folks], —

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

From top to bottom, this government has become destructive not only to us, but the world.

The Declaration goes on, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. –”

Have we not arrived at “absolute Despotism” with the Bush administration? Have we not a worthless Congress that has abdicated its constitutional duty to be a check on the executive and reduced itself to nothing more than two worthless houses, which are nothing more than expensive show, by handing over its power to Despot Bush?

How much more abuse will we take; how many have to disappear into Despot Bush’s gulags, how many more of our soldiers will we allow to be turned into war criminal torturers and murderers before we find our spines and say, “Enough!”

Kid yourselves not that you can rid us and the world of these monsters at the ballot box. First, with the easily rigged voting machines, even if the Democrats take back both houses of Congress, you will never know if it was with your vote or the actions of the people behind the curtain who, for whatever reason, want change. Second, even if the Democrats weren’t Republicans Lite, they would need a veto-proof two-thirds majority in both houses to undue all the hideous legislation the despotic Bush administration demanded and got. Third, as long as Despot Bush has the military in his pocket, how likely are the Democrats to undertake impeachment proceedings against Bush and his whole administration?

And don’t count on the Republicans being defeated on Nov. 7, with your vote or the fixing of the vote. Despot Bush’s Rasputin, Karl Rove, may pull an October Surprise. Another 9-11, anyone?

Finally, if Despot Bush & Co. are allowed to remain in office, what makes you think they will leave on Jan. 20, 2009?

We the people have the power to do what the Declaration tells us we must do, if only we would exercise it. We don’t have to resort to armed rebellion, either. We can bring the country to a halt with national strikes. A few of those and the leaders of Congress, be they Democrats or Republicans, will get the message, march into the White House and tell Bush, Cheney et al that it’s over and hand them over to the US marshals to be, as former Ambassador Joe Wilson put it, “frog-marched” to the nearest jail cell to await trial for their crimes.

[…]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1339.shtml

[S]till they keep coming, those hubristic monuments to big government,
the living dead that walk the well-trodden path from Downing Street and
the Treasury to New Labour’s graveyard of initiatives.

The NHS computer: delayed, disorganised, a £20 billion shambles.

Forced police mergers: the direct opposite of the community policing we
need.

And then the perfect example.

ID cards.

When a half-way competent government would be protecting our security by
controlling our borders…

…these Labour ministers are pressing ahead with their vast white
elephant, their plastic poll tax, twenty Millennium Domes rolled into
one giant catastrophe in the making.

They’ve given up trying to find a good reason for it.

Last week Tony Blair said that ID cards would help control immigration,
when new immigrants won’t even have them.

Does he even know what’s going on in his Government?

ID cards are wrong, they’re a waste of money, and we will abolish them. […]

Conservatives

Well, it looks like Tories are the only way to go next time, if only for this single reason; jettisoning the ID card and the NIR. I am sure that many people will not be for the Tories, but will be against the ID card, against the warmongering, against the sweaty, stocky, unctuous, murdering ‘grotesque’ Brown. For whatever reason, the ID card is so central to complete tyrrany, the first and absolutely essential step, the key to lock you and your children up forever – it alone is reason to abandon all your previous loyalties and support the Tories, because if they lose and ID cards and the NIR are introduced, it is THE END of Britain on a level and at a depth that few people can imagine.

You think that shouting CCTV cameras are bad? Imagine a shouting CCTV system that shouts your NAME OUT as it tells you to ‘move along you are not allowed to gather here’…or… ‘stop kissing your secretary JANE, MR. THOMPSON, your wife PEG has been informed’.

Yes, that will happen. They will be able to access the NIR automagically and correlate your CCTV image with your NIR entry, which will pull up your name, address, marital status, workplace, EVERYTHING, all in the name of ‘stopping crime’ or ‘security’.

Of course, if you are not in the NIR, or even better, there is no such thing as ‘the NIR’ then none of this dystopian crap can ever happen to you. You can shag your secretary right there in the street, and no one will ever know.

You know what I mean.

You will be free from a type of insidious, invasive, unnecessary, vile, inhuman, dehumanizing, revolting, voyeuristic and monstrous surveillance, that no decent person would ever have thought was fit to roll out.

Without the NIR as the key to your activities, without that locus, that single identifier, that binding element, Oyster becomes less of a threat, Nectar becomes less of a threat, your cellphone becomes less of a threat – because you can control how you identify yourself to all of these people. They will not be able to DEMAND that you present your NIR linked ID card. The biometric net will be broken, and you will be able to protect yourself as you move freely between services by compartmentalizing your valuable personal information. The service providers will have no choice but to deal with you on your terms, or lose your money.

And they will never do that.

One of the greatest leaders of any country today is His Excellency President Perves Musharaf.

We have just had confirmed what we suspected all along; The Great Satan threatened to obliterate Pakistan if they did not go along with the bogus, illegitimate, murderous and totally insane ‘war on terror’.

What is interesting is the pathetic simpering denial by Murder Drone Richard Armitage; does this demonic minion REALLY think that his phone call to Pakistan WAS NOT RECORDED?! Should he continue his denial, this tape MUST BE RELEASED, to prove once again, as if it needed proving, that these people are the most violent uncivilized bunch of venal lying murderers ever to hold the reigns of a modern nation.

His Excellency President Perves Musharaf is a great strategist and leader. He has kept Pakistan off of the Neocon radar, kept his nuclear weapons, kept his relations with whomever he wants, AND he is finally making peace with India. He has his cake and is eating it.

After this storm, this Terrorstorm is over, and civilization re-asserts itself, Pakistan will have weathered it intact, and they can then forge ahead into the clean future. Iranians I am sure, are looking at this very carefully. The Gardens of Isfahan should not be burned up over a short term dispute over nothing…over ‘honor’. Iran should weather this storm intact….how can they do it?

If you have seen any of the ‘interviews’ with His Excellency President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (like the appalling one that recently appeared on CNN where the human vermin ‘interviewer’ quipped that he worked in a country where there is a ‘free press’ after His Excellency President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked him wether he asked questions that he wanted to ask or wether the questions were given to him by someone else) you will see that despite being 100% in the right, with all moral authority, His Excellency President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ruins the perception of Iran every time with his poor PR skills. His Excellency President Perves Musharaf has these skills and more. That is why Pakistan is in such an enviable position. Not only do they have all of the above, but now, they have TGS on the defensive, and The Times of London on their side; the side of an Islamic nation!

Its astonishing actually.

Stop Motion Studies

David Crawford |

“To translate the stilled image into movement is to see the uncanny nature of the photograph transformed out of one emotional and aesthetic paradigm into another. The uncanny of the indexical inscription of life, as in the photograph, merges with the uncanny of mechanized human movement that belongs to the long line of replicas and automata.”
—Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second

Stop Motion Studies – Tokyo, 2004

I had a ‘heads up’ to watch a re-run of a 2003 episode of ‘Dinner with Portillo‘. This is a discussion programme where Tory Michael Portillo chats around a dinner table with the great and the good and the thick, discussing current events. The episode is entitled ‘Ameria’.

Last nights episode featured Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, George Galloway MP, and Rosemary Righter, chief leader writer The Times.

It was PRICELESS.

All of the idiotic blinkered jackasses, cheifly Rosemary Righter, were ridiculed in the light of the Iraq debacle by their own narrow minded, inexperienced foam mouthed blatherings, all of which proved to be wrong. Georgeous George was TOTALLY VINDICATED, as he predicted absolutely and perfectly, the situation that Iraq is in right now.

Portillo came off looking silly. The Guardian writer displayed that anemic innefective posture that they are so good at. The american displayed every trait that caused the programme to have to be made in the first place. Once again, most revolting and disturbing was Rosemary Righter; venemous, unrepentant, lie barking, slandering monster, the type of which is responsible for all of our troubles and of whom there seem to be an unlimited supply.
When the history of all this is written by an honest person, George Galloway will finally be revealed as the only honest person who understood the whole problem and told the trugh throughout.

From a recent post of Jultra:

“As we face the threat of mass murder, we have to accept that the rights of the individual that we enjoy must, and will be, balanced with the collective right of security and the protection of life and limb that our citizens demand,” he added.

Uh uh. Not so fast. No we don’t, and proclaiming it doesn’t make such sweeping twaddle so. Firstly, I’m not so sure that there is such a thing as a ‘collective right’ outside of the padded cells of the Home for the Communistically Deranged, so it’s not surprising such a deluded fantasy finds a home in John Reid’s filthy communist imagination along with pornographic hallucinations of Stalin, Lenin, and a lap dancing Mao Zedong. […]

“Meanwhile, a YouGov poll out today reveals that more than half of people in the UK questioned wanted a “more aggressive” foreign policy.

Do the respondents actually understand what a foreign policy is, or do they think it means a ‘domestic policy toward foreigners’ ? It really makes you wonder about the integrity of these polls and the ability of those being polled to make anything even approaching an informed rational decision at all as they clearly are not in grasp of the essential issues.

[…]

I’ve said before: if you take the war on terror at face value, then the terrorists have won and you have lost. And your loss is a terrible one; an infinite and ongoing haemorrhage of your very humanity under grotesques like Blair, Brown and Reid, the collapse of society into an appalling political and technological police-state, the end of the rule of law, and inevitably, the total disintegration of the state itself into pockets of anarchy and civil war, that is, if the state can’t maintain sufficient order with politically engineered ‘terror busts’ or if things get bad enough for it: it’s very own Tiananmen Squares (hint: look out for this in Parliament Square soon perhaps in protest to a nuclear attack on Iran, hint2: “the rights of the massacred protesters had to be balanced with the rights of the tanks”)

In a twisted way, people like Blair, Reid and Brown are right when they say the world has changed, as it is they themselves who are making the changes and it should be an enormous warning sign that this ‘plot’, before it has even been established, has been jumped on immediately to ram through radical politically unpalatable policies.

It is simply impossible to maintain that terrorists either homegrown or in a cave are making this nightmare happen and it is time to take a stand and say, enough is enough.

[…]

Now. Repeat in unison:

Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra! Jultra!

All chant the name of Jultra!!

Jultra, whose analysis and words are so perfect, so accurate, so on the ball it beggars belief.

As I read Jultra, my mind replies to the insanity that he is describing, and then the actual words that I am thinking are his next lines!! Specifically, the part where brutish Communist enforcer Reid talks about ‘Collective Rights’. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A COLLECTIVE RIGHT, you imbecile…but that is besides the point. You MUST read Jultra, because like BLOGDIAL, he is telling it completely correctly and seeing it absolutely clearly.

What a great find, and how reassuring it is to know that someone like Jultra is there, awake and writing.

(CNN) — A federal judge on Thursday ruled that the U.S. government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered it ended immediately.

In a 44-page memorandum and order, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, — who is based in Detroit, Michigan –struck down the National Security Agency’s program, which she said violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

Taylor’s ruling stems from a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. According to The Associated Press, Taylor is the first judge to rule the eavesdropping program unconstitutional. (Read the complete ruling — PDF)

The defendants “are permanently enjoined from directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in any way, including, but not limited to, conducting warrantless wiretaps of telephone and Internet communications, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III,” she wrote.

She further declared that the program “violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.”

She went on to say that “The president of the United States … has undisputedly violated the Fourth in failing to procure judicial orders.”

The lawsuit, filed January 17 by civil rights organizations, lawyers, journalists and educators, “challenges the constitutionality of a secret government program to intercept vast quantities of the international telephone and Internet communications of innocent Americans without court approval.”

The judge rejected the government’s argument that the program is within the president’s authority, according to the AP. […]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/17/domesticspying.lawsuit/index.html

The nice guys at Forced Exposure sent us our very own FM3 last hollidays; very cool stuff, that I should have posted ages ago.

The box it comes in is bears little releation to the magic that is inside, except for a 1in x 1.5in bue sticker attached to the back face of the box, that says ‘fm3 buddha machine’ with the numbers one to nine running vertically (the ‘track numbers’).

I was working in a studio in Canada recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, “I’ll use that for a change. How can I use this to do something surprising?” I looked around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my engineer, Danny Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note – just one note – made the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around that frequency and all the harmonics.

This was a case of having a technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It would have stopped there if that sound hadn’t appeared. The avant-garde technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is supposed to be interesting in itself. I don’t go for that. I think if something doesn’t jolt your senses, forget it. It’s got to be seductive.

Of course, when I got that sound, I was back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately suggested a direction I still haven’t resolved. I didn’t find anything more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on covered up parts of the sound.

And a second one:

I walked past an enormous rubber plantation in Malaysia. It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I thought it strange they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at one point could I see that.

(Brian Eno)

I think Blogdial is a place where you can see trees in straight lines, and when you see a straight line you know you can accelerate.

Georgeous George Galloway totally eviscerates and the blood sucking Anna Botting rattling her to such an extent that she reverted to her native accent for a second.

Nothing like a blast of G³…like a cool breeze on an opressively hot day!

I watched a program about this car

It is pure beauty, sorry if any of you guys have heard about alreay….

thxmoo summary

thxmoo is a virtual world based on the story of THX-1138 by George
Lucas. As in the story, characters in thxmoo are born and raised in
a post world war III subterranean shelter. Players can control their
emotional and psychological states by use of state prescribed pills,
sensual stimuli and deity worship. Players may make it their goal to
attempt to escape to the surface where mystery and the unknown dwell.
This requires achieving a chemical balance by experimenting with
various pill prescriptions and other activities. Other players may
choose to become integral parts of the subterranean world.

character role playing

Guests are generated when a player connects as ‘thxmoo’. Regular
players may run ‘thxmoo’ at the SDF shell to generate or load a
character. The MOO then uses sperm and egg from an existing couple to
generate a new player. The player name (AAA-NNNN), sex and race are
generated by the system. Players will start the game as a child, be
trained by mentors and live in the nursery. After a period of regular
game play, a player is then coupled at which sperm and egg will be
extracted to propogate the species. If you can find the REPRODUCTION
CENTER it is possible to deduce your biological parents, if you care.

character development and space

Character features and dwellings are up to players. This is really
the only liberty you have. However, if you deviate you risk arrest.
Matured characters dwellings are in the QUARTERS dormatory and can
be arranged to your taste. Food medication and stimulation are all
provided in your dwelling. The most interesting aspect of all
dwellings is the MEDICINE CHEST. When you open your chest, the system
will ask you ‘Whats wrong?’. You then describe how you are feeling and
the chest will dispense medication. Each player has a designated
chemical balance/inbalance which can be sustained or counter acted
by drug use, misuse and/or abstinence.

Just… WOW.

The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA.

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA’s surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.

Suppose that NSA’s system is more accurate than .40, let’s say, .70, which means that 70% of terrorists in the USA will be found by mass monitoring of phone calls and email messages. Then, by Bayes’ Theorem, the probability that a person is a terrorist if targeted by NSA is still only p=0.0228, which is near zero, far from one, and useless.

Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge. So, why does NSA spy on Americans knowing it’s not possible to find terrorists that way? Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if there is a higher base-rate. Higher base-rates arise from two lines of thought, neither of them very nice:

1. McCarthy-type national paranoia;
2. political espionage.

The whole NSA domestic spying program will seem to work well, will seem logical and possible, if you are paranoid. Instead of presuming there are 1,000 terrorists in the USA, presume there are 1 million terrorists. Americans have gone paranoid before, for example, during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s. Imagining a million terrorists in America puts the base-rate at .00333, and now the probability that a person is a terrorist given that NSA’s system identifies them is p=.99, which is near certainty. But only if you are paranoid. If NSA’s surveillance requires a presumption of a million terrorists, and if in fact there are only 100 or only 10, then a lot of innocent people are going to be misidentified and confidently mislabeled as terrorists. […]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/rudmin1.html 

The other day, whilst listening to CBS, Galaxy 2 Galaxy ‘High Tech Jazz’ burst into my speakers, followed by ‘Video Clash’ by Lil Louis.

Do you know what I am implying?

A woman who refused to pay her council tax in protest at the condition of her neighbourhood has been jailed. Josephine Rooney, 69, who lives in Hartington Street, Derby, has the £800 to pay, but said the city council has failed to clean up her area.

The council has denied Miss Rooney’s claims, saying measures were already in place to improve her district.

Rooney, who described herself as a “conscientious objector”, was jailed for three months by Derby magistrates. […]

A 69-year-old Derby woman facing jail after refusing to pay her council tax has won a national award for looking after her community.

Josephine Rooney owes Derby City Council nearly £800 and refuses to pay because, in her view, the council has failed in its duty of care to her.

Miss Rooney has now won a Taking a Stand award from the Government’s Respect campaign. […]

“I planned this nearly two years ago when I read about that pensioner down in the West Country, and I wanted to find a way of committing civil disobedience – in the way conscientious objectors do so in South American dictatorships and other parts of the world.

“So, that’s what I really am, a conscientious objector,” she said.

[…]

What a beautiful person. And now she is suffering at the hands of those employed to SERVE her, because THEY have failed in their duties.

If only everyone else on her street had stood with her…

Know what I mean?

I got a Nintendo DS lite as a birthday present from my boyfriend, its the best toy I have ever had and I got this amazing game Electroplankton made by Toshio Iwai.

You can make irdial-music with this game, it is absolutely lovely