'I didn't see any of my girls, just a pile of bricks'

Israeli air strike kills five daughters from one family as Gaza death toll passes 300 |
World news |
The Guardian

The family house was small: three rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, built of poor-quality concrete bricks with a corrugated asbestos roof, in block four of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There are hundreds of similar homes crammed into the overcrowded streets, filled with some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the Gaza Strip.

But it was this house, where Anwar and Samira Balousha lived with their nine children, that had the misfortune to be built next to what became late on Sunday night another target in Israel's devastating bombing campaign of Gaza.

An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp's Imad Aqil mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it also brought down the Balousha family's house, which yesterday lay in ruins. The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four.

They were the latest in a growing number of civilian casualties in Israel's bombing campaign. At least 335 Palestinians have been killed and as many as 1,400 injured. On the Israeli side, four people have been killed by Palestinian rockets. Israel's military offensive continues and may yet intensify.

Imam, 16, lay in the room with her sisters but by chance survived with only injuries to her legs. She was eventually pulled free and rushed to hospital. "I was asleep. I didn't hear anything of the explosion," she said yesterday as she sat comforting her mother. "I just woke when the bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn't move. No one could see me from above. The neighbours and ambulance men couldn't see us. They were walking on the bricks above us. I started to scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: 'Baba, Mama. Come to help us.'"

Her parents had been sleeping in the room next door with their two youngest children, Muhammad, one, and Bara'a, 12 days.

Their room was damaged and all were hurt, but they survived and were taken straight to hospital even before any of the older girls were found.

Imam eventually recognised her uncle's voice among the rescuers and she shouted again for help. "He found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me," she said. "They started to pull me by my hands, the bricks were still lying on my legs."

Her mother, Samira, 36, had seen the pile of bricks in the girls' bedroom and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. Like all the family, she was asleep when the bomb struck. "I opened my eyes and saw bricks all over my body," she said. "My face was covered with the concrete blocks."

She checked on her two youngest children and then looked in the room next door. "I didn't see any of my daughters, just a pile of bricks and parts of the roof. Everyone told me my daughters were alive, but I knew they were gone."

She sat on a sofa surrounded by other women at a neighbour's house further along the street and struggled to speak, pausing for long moments and still overcome with shock.

"I hope the Palestinian military wings retaliate and take revenge with operations inside Israel. I ask God to take revenge on them," she said.

Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. But like many other patients in Gaza he had been made to leave an overcrowded hospital to make way for the dying. Yesterday his house was a pile of rubble: collapsed walls and the occasional piece of furniture exposed to the sky. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction, I don't support Fatah or Hamas, I'm just a Palestinian. They are punishing us all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?" Like many men in Gaza, Anwar has no job, and like all in the camp he relies on food handouts from the UN and other charity support to survive.

"If the dead here were Israelis, you would see the whole world condemning and responding. But why is no one condemning this action? Aren't we human beings?" he said. "We are living in our land, we didn't take it from the Israelis. We are fighting for our rights. One day we will get them back."

alt facebook status update #1

Matthew glugs a tax collector's fill of shame and belches a stinking burp of redemption.

Bush gets shoes thrown at him in Iraq

sketches of winkle

well she danced like a floozy in a hot tub of guava
eddy ran the sceen you know he's hip to her mantra
he was a meditative fucker all strung out on sinatra
sketching van winkle like there ain't no tomorrow
i saw van winkle show up on the scene
i bled from my elbows when i saw that he was doing all those
sketches of winkle, crying to the heavens in a fit of rage
skethces of winkle, keeping little cupids locked up in a cage
sketches of winkle, i think i love her but she don't love me
skethces of winkle, i thought she loved me dude
well she drained all the fluid from the sink in the kitchen
eddy wanted veggies all he's doing is bitchen
steve and sandy went out and bought a new pair of mittens
mean ween cut me and he said he was kidding
rip van winkle
rip rip rip van winkle

thod speaks

"""There was a time when almost everyone worked the land. Now we produce more food than ever with only a tiny fraction of the people. So we have 1 man producing as much as 100 used to, what are the the other 99 to do now. Well we still have the food, so they have gained 100% leisure time. Of course the one that still has to drive the tractor resents them. But you don't see him offering to cut his work hours and share the labor around. He wants to earn more than everyone else. This is the basic problem, too many people are working too hard. The factories are the same, the robots can do what 10 men used to do, we still get the same amount of product. We are just going to have to stop working so hard and spread the work around more. Make it illegal to work more than 20 hours a week. Those that want to prove they are better than everyone else because they work harder are going to have to find other ways to play their oneupmanship game.

We could start classifying the workaholics as anti social in that they deprive other men of their jobs. Or we could classify it as a mental illness. Still most people are happy to let them be the mugs and put in all the work hours. Just so long as they get their share. All you hear about is complaints from those mugs that they get taxed, thats because they are so dumb they cant see the big picture. They cant see anything but defining themselves in terms of work and money. So we encourage their psychosis. We don't need their labor it can all be made by a few hours a week from each person.

In the future it will all be done by robots. There will still be guys going out trying to play a game that isn't there anymore. """

oh I'm so effing scared of this dude

this is one scary dude,
and he;'s doubly scary coz he's english
like yoo and mee
but now he's deddd blown up by a cosy comfy us missile, I'm so
happy and now i feel so sayf innit?

the fetching scarf

the fetching scarf she wore at weekends was lying across her back and dangling over her breasts, beating time as she hurriedly walked down lake passage.
Glasgow kisses and milkman wronged wives slashed the net curtains – a bitter reflex.
lips curled and the fan humming in the hairdressers.
steeples so tall and the flailing jacobite windows ajar – windy gust
trod treading footfalls again and still making no ground on the Great Western Road
back from the Maryhill dole
back from the gray wet bleak hole

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Peter Schiff was right!!

You may never have heard of this guy,
but I saw a video of him about a year ago and he
described economic collapse coming while the other
experts around him laughed in his face.
He stood calm and stood his ground.
Now he has been vindicated.
Everything he said was right.

I urge you to watch this video and see how time and again,
he gave this warning.

need a piss

need one, but won't leave the
stale sheet bed

need to sleep, but won't switch off the
google chrome black killer box that gives me a skin rash

needs must when the french devil's kick wigan's backside

need a falafel but they shut it down,
no Turkish bar b que for me

need health but the scum between my teeth will keep
the throat infection topped up for the winter

need to de-pornolize,
in fact this is working I'm suck-seeding ha ha

need to stop economy obsessing,
I now have a layman's degree in "the world is going down the tubes"

need to learn some new songs on the guitar,
but I always forget which ones I had earlier elected for this role

needeepinnoneffectivemedicines

nee d een dddd nnn eee eee

glen hoddle's escape hatch

I dreamt I had a new type of camera
you put both eyes in the viewfinder like
a diving mask and everything looked so
vivid and clear and bright,
with this unique machine at once I became an artist
bringing visionary beauty from the mundane light from objects and scenes
we all normally see in shades of tainted dreary modern human vision

I dreamt of a woman swimming in these strange waters,
neither sea nor river and this documentary I was filming/watching
it was the story of a man. she became the narrator,
after being the sex object of his.

I needed those dreams and today's sun and last week's intense
caring stare of my fantastic GP who explained the lot and gave
me what I had forgotten I deserved.

Ian Dury show comes to London: Looks good

Does one want fries with ones big mac?

Alex Jones take on the Obama victory

It is always healthy to think beyond the hysteria
that such events as Diana's death and now Obama's victory create
in the mass public.

I don't really go for conspiracy shock jock Alex Jones,
but he is on form in this show.

http://rss.nfowars.net/20081105_Wed_Alex.mp3

John Cusak - No currency left to buy the big lies

I knew it!!!
At the anti-Iraq war march in London 2003 I was sure I saw John Cusak the cool American film actor marching along near Gower street.
Turns out he's a bit of a lefty.
Check his latest blog. Its long and a bit complex but pretty dang good stuff
he is an angry not so young man...

As I contemplated the real possibility of an Obama victory and listened to right wing pundits revise history still unfolding, I thought of titles for this blog:

"Neocon Logic: This Statement is Untrue"
"The Modern Free Market System is False But a New Revelation Shall Come"
" They Would Feast on Themselves: All the Money's Gone, Nowhere to Go"
I decided on:
"No Currency Left to Buy the Big Lies"

NO CURRENCY LEFT TO BUY THE BIG LIES

In the pre-capitalist reality, James Madison said when he put power in the hands of the business elite, he would be entrusting "enlightened statesmen and benevolent philosophers who would devote themselves to the welfare of all."

Clearly, he believed this statement in the way I guess some modern Republicans do. The only problem was that he eventually realized this didn't work and in 1792, disillusioned and worried about the democratic experiment, condemned what he called "the daring depravity of the times." He went on to denounce the business elites who, given ultimate power, "become tools and tyrants of government...they overwhelm government with their powers and combinations and are bribed by its largesse." That's how he perceived the system he had helped design. In 2008, this is an apt description of the Republican relationship to government and power.

read on...

Barcelona #1 - Cigarette Girls

Cigarette Girls
On two of the occasions that I entered a tobacconists I was confronted by a young woman dressed in what seemed like a beauty contest outfit with a sash across her chest and not many clothes on.
I was asked whether or not I smoked. It was then that I realized that a special offer was on the cards. They were offering cheap John Player Special cigarettes; The smokes that went out of fashion in the UK in about 1982 and are lower on the pecking order than Dunhills. I don’t usually smoke anything, but when on holiday I do get the urge and seeing that there was no cigarette ban in Spain I couldn’t resist the chance to sit in a bar or restaurant and spark one up. But for me it was Gauloise Blondes or nothing.
No, neither green, red, blue or yellow JPS let alone the traditional black would sway me. I didn’t want to disappoint the girls on parade, but together we knew they were just doing a job so it was all smiles.

awesome crystal caves

paranoid commies : James Bond has secret anti-Russia messages from UK and USA

Bond girls often come to a sticky end but Olga Kurylenko will be hoping that the Communists never get hold of her.

Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond's sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding "the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies". Apparently oblivious to Bond's fictional nature, it accused her of assisting "a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR".

In an appeal to the actress on its website, the party said: "The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you and brought you up for free but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal."

It is not the first time the Communists of St Petersburg - or Leningrad, as they would rather it be called - have taken aim at perfidious Western films. Earlier this year they claimed that the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in the Cold War in 1957, was a vehicle for crude anti-Soviet propaganda and lambasted the antics of Harrison Ford and his ruthless Russian nemesis Cate Blanchett, calling them capitalist puppets.


The party declared that Ford had "no future in Russia any more" - a message that apparently failed to reach the country's cinemagoers, who flocked to see the film at a record 808 screens.

The Communists are, however, willing to rehabilitate Kurylenko - if she delivers her co-star, Daniel Craig, into the clutches of Russia's secret services for interrogation. "Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples," it said.

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city party, told The Times: "Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West."

giant lego man on Brighton beach

Mystery surrounds the appearance of a giant Lego man on a beach in Brighton.

The 6ft-tall (1.8m) red, green and yellow figure has the slogan "No Real Than You Are" painted on the front and some words written in Dutch.

Brighton resident Peter McNiven said he had spotted the figure in the water while walking to work this week.

It is not known if the figure washed ashore or was carried to the seafront. A Lego man with the same slogan appeared on a Dutch beach last year.

Mr McNiven, 32, who works for a digital marketing company, said: "I just happened to stumble across him on Wednesday morning.

"I took a couple of pictures because it's not something you see every day.

"There's a lot of talk about him coming over from Holland to here, but there's no tide marks on him."

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said it did not know how or why the Lego man had appeared on the beach.


The Dutch Lego man was pulled out of the sea last year
He added the figure had now been taken away.

In August 2007 a giant Lego toy, bearing a close resemblance to the Brighton figure, mysteriously appeared on Zandvoort beach in Holland.

And Like the Brighton Lego man, there was no official explanation about where the giant plastic toy had appeared from.

The blue and yellow figure was pulled out of the sea and bore the same slogan "No Real Than You Are".

granddaughter shagging

now cameron and brown are wading in on the side of righteousness
in the Ross Brand insult andrew sachs debacle.

I think they must reckon that those people who are most upset
by the shenanigans are the demographic that are swinging between voting Labour and Tory.
No other reason for these two to start commenting.
Its absurd.

Anyway for all we know Brand did shag Sach's granddaughter.
She looks pretty shaggable...

mortgage madness 2003

this amazing documentary explains why the
crazy housing boom that is now crashing happened
in the first place

why we are callous brutes

Psychologically, we can't help but selectively construct our own mental world:

Try to imagine how many events of emotional significance occur in the world in the course of 24 hours:

Countless causes for joy - at 3:05PM a healthy baby was born in Alaska
Countless causes for optimism - at 11:45AM a divorcing couple amicably finalised custody arrangements in Bulgaria
Countless causes for anxiety - at 8:32AM a coughing poultry worker boarded a plane for the UK
Countless causes for anger - at 2:22PM a factory worker in China was unfairly dismissed

Now think of the other 6 billion people in the world. Something joyful, or reassurring, or ominous, or unjust... (etc) has probably happened to each one of us today.

How could a single organism react with genuine emotion to all of these events?

Right or wrong, it is unavoidable that we have to choose which events we invest emotional significance in.

Young Creatives

'young creative' is clearly a term used by people who work in advertising, PR and marketing to try and kid themselves their doing something valid, vital, exciting, original, daring and 'outside the box'.

When what they are actually doing is spending their days slapping lube on the scabby cock of capitalism so as to make it easier for the man to fuck us all up the arse.

kaka tim

The Stark Choice Now Facing America - The Market Ticker

The essence of this article could also apply to the
United Kingdom

The Stark Choice Now Facing America - The Market Ticker
The truth is that our nation, and indeed the world, has too much debt for its ability to earn income and has had since 1968. As this became apparent to the people at The Federal Reserve and Treasury, in the 1980s starting with Alan Greenspan, interest rates were artificially kept low for a long period of time to encourage you and others to go into that debt - debt you and these firms cannot possibly repay.

This is why we had the crash in 1987, why LTCM blew up in the 1990s, why we had an Internet Bubble and now why we had a Housing Bubble.

All of these bubbles were intentionally created by The Fed, Treasury and Wall Street Banks to keep the charade alive that you could take on more and more debt and they could make more and more money.

We are now out of bubbles and ability to support bubbles, and America (and the world, in fact) is out of the ability to support more debt.

I think it could get really nasty -- 'mob' nasty.

This is a post from the House Price Crash forum.
I've been reading this website quite regularly for the past six months.
Its a very interesting place to read about the current financial shenanigans.
There are also outlandish posts like this which are food for thought...


Post by Dissident Junk 13/10/08

Something is not right, there's a presence somewhere, something waiting to be born.

I know I sound utterly nuts (I don't often speak about these things because I know I sound nuts), but I tend to be able to read how things will pan out politically and culturally, what is inevitable and what isn't. I have wondered whether it is a "Blink" thing -- you know that book by Gladwell? -- because I have spent the last ten years of my life utterly submerged in political, cultural and social analysis in both my work and social spheres, so maybe my feelings are a form of subconscious process of analysis that then make me feel something 'instinctually'.

But, nevertheless, I told people in 2000 we would see race riots in the North -- they laughed at me -- and we did. I said we would see a terrorist attack on British soil -- they laughed again -- and we did. I became convinced that the implications of house price rises meant something rotten at the heart of our systems, and that they had to crash and it would be horrific -- everyone laughed at that -- so I found HPC and realised I wasn't alone, and now we see it all panning out.

And at the moment, I just feel this 'presence of an absence', something really strange, bizarre and -- you use this word yourself -- surreal that is about to come to pass. I can't explain what it is or what it will look like. This feels like the calm before a very weird and insane form of storm.

I guess, putting my rational hat on, that there has been too much social, cultural and financial change in the UK in too short a time. There has been a loss of a sense that anything is stable, or works to understood parameters and theories. When things seem so subject to change like this, then people do not know how to 'predict' their best course for the future, they find it hard to make informed decisions, everything becomes uncertain, and with uncertainty comes unease, a sense of vulnerability, a sense of anxiety and then panic. And with panic comes the loss of morality, the loss of civilised behaviour.

I would say that the size of the ultimate reaction relies on two factors: one) to what extent people have repressed their reactive impulse over how long, and two) how much pressure has been placed upon them.

And it is this that bothers me. The last eight years have seen a political environment where dissent or challenges to the existing ideological position have been stifled, quashed or just ignored; modes of reaction to events from both the government and media has felt very muted in proportion to the significance of those events (you can see this in the official responses from situations as disparate as the raft of teenage stabbings, for example, or the response to the Bridgend suicides to the terrorist attack on 7/7 and the blatantly preposterous nature of the housing and credit boom. Even the response to the J-18 or the May day riots, which, when you think about it, were astonishing really as public displays of youth disaffection, seem now to have been dangerously non-existent).

These official responses have served to mute public reaction, but they do not dissolve it. Instead, it is stifled but continues to grow in its smothered state as new events add to the keg of discontent. And more and more things just keep adding to the keg: high migratory patterns (both immigration and emigration: the impact of emigration upon those left behind is never discussed but also has quite significant social and psychological consequences), taxation, financial instability, even things are small as a lap-dancing club opening in a small market town can really unsettle people.

And we seem to have seen a lot of this type of change, and reactions to it have been stifled.

It bothers me. And I know that the way things are going simply cannot continue. Too much change, and too much pressure. I think the keg is going to blow soon. I suspect the outcome will be some form of ideological paradigm shift, but I think it could get really nasty -- 'mob' nasty.

Smoke Mirrors And How A Handful Of Missed Mortgage Payments Started The Global Financial Crisis (from Sunday Herald)

LAST WEEK, something happened which I never expected to see in my lifetime. There was a general run on the entire British banking system, something that hasn't happened before, even in wartime. Ordinary people started moving their money around from bank to bank in fear that they might lose their cash. Millions of pounds were flowing across the Irish sea for the safe haven of the Irish government's recently-announced 100% depositor guarantee. The UK's banks were on the verge of losing public trust, and public trust is the one thing that banks need to survive.

We are witnessing what the commentator Martin Wolf of the Financial Times calls "the disintegration of the financial system". But how did we get here? How did a few dodgy sub-prime mortgages in American inner cities lead to what is beginning to look like the collapse of capitalism?

read on

2012 SHIT logo

I just got round to watching the British part of the Olympic ending ceremony
in China.
What a load of codswallop.
Jimmy Page you old nutter, what were you thinking?
- the whole thing was an embarrassment

Do zebras go neigh?

We are ancient
We like to see ourselves as new

But all that is new are
our things

No no we are so
wonderfully old

Just look at insects
They seem to have just stepped from the
primeval soup

All angles
All geometry

And yes it's a valid perception
We know insects are earlier than us

Yet we do not perceive
our own antiquity

Look at the wrinkles on our hand
like elephant hide

The nails
all horny

Oh walking man
dancing gymnast
tumbling free
how you so perfectly express
your antiquity

I am not asking for a
return to stoneage ways

But to know that grass
with its fruit on top
Makes a bedlike meadow
more precious than any
manicured lawn

teaches us something
don't you think?

breezy breeze

breezy breeze
I hide behind

the smiley smile
you won't know

the easy ease
with which I
fill my eye
with the sleazy sleaze

I like pretzels

the shiny surface
the dry crunch
the salty tongue

Hypocrites in the US news media defending Sarah Palin exposed by The Daily Show

memory of the alps

rainy day library

Islington Central Library, Holloway Road from my window with weeds growing in the foreground.

St Pancras Station Wi Fi censors political websites London UK

Major International Transport Hub Censors Political Websites


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, August 4, 2008

While establishment media outlets in the UK spent most of last week reporting on China’s censorship of political websites in anticipation of the Olympic games, they ignored the fact that London’s St. Pancras International, one of the biggest transport hubs in the west, has already implemented stringent filters that block users of their wi-fi service from accessing even mildly political websites.

Traveling through St. Pancras in order to board the Eurostar on my way to Switzerland, I had an extra couple of hours that I thought I would fill by checking in on some of my favorite alternative news websites.

Upon clicking on my favorites menu and selecting prison planet.com, I was quickly met with a white screen and bold black text informing me that the website in question was blocked and could not be accessed.

Was this some kind of a technical error? No, as I was soon to discover that all websites affiliated with Alex Jones are blocked in St. Pancras.

Not only that, but even far milder left-leaning commentary websites like thinkprogress.org were on the same blacklist. In fact, every non-mainstream news website was inaccessible.

By the way, when I visited Communist China last summer, which filters every website through a government blacklist, prison planet.com was not blocked and neither were any other English language alternative news websites.

Internet censorship of alternative news websites is worse in London than it is in Communist China. The hypocrisy was painfully evident as I sat reading newspaper headlines about how evil China is for censoring anti-government material while London’s biggest transport network, which recently underwent a £300 million regeneration, did exactly the same thing with not so much of a peep out of London’s broadsheets or tabloids.

St. Pancras connects to Kings Cross station and the London Underground. Perhaps it was our exposé of the fraud of the official story behind the 2005 London bombings that irked the censors, yet there is little explanation for also blocking a website like thinkprogress.org, which doesn’t even cover UK-related issues.

This is another precursor to Internet 2, where only government-approved websites that have obtained permission by means of an accepted registration application are allowed to be seen by web users.

It’s also a stark reminder about how our media has diverted all attention concerning Internet censorship towards what is happening in China when the exact same control measures are being put in place right here at home.

anthrax suspicions

If you think the suicide of the man accused of the anthrax plot smells fishy
then read this article

Dr. Bruce Ivins, Ms. Jean Duley, and the FBI’s “Court Document”

and this one

NYT Changes Anthrax Story…As I Was Reading It!

this is rotten mackerel and prawns left in a binliner in the sun kind of fishy...

inevitable climate change

"from guardian comment is free"

Ask yourself what politicians represent in human society. The answer is unmitigated growth in the economy as this feeds their innate lust for power. The EU is a small example of politicians coming together to create an entity which is economically bigger that other states to hence increase their relative power to other states in the world.

To do anything meaningful about climate change would mean cutting back on fossil fuel use. Your economy would suffer due to extra costs and not be competitive with others that don't cut back. Even if 90% of the public want politicians to control climate change nothing will be done. The real clients of politicians are companies not the public and companies will never OK anything that restricts their competitiveness or profits compared with foreign companies. As example the EU will not be passing any regulations any time soon which place EU car manufacturers in a poor position in the world.

The reality is there is no body with any power in society that can offer more that a token of control of climate change. The lack of a mechanism means we will burn all the fossil fuel we can lay our hands on as quickly as we can get it out of the ground, price permitting. Even if this means that long term humans have no future nothing will be done. There is no monetary value that can be placed on balance sheets throughout the planet for the death of the human race. i.e. it's irrelevant whether the human race survives or not.

Fascist Pigs!!

The bloody battle of Genoa

When 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters converged on the Italian city hosting the G8 summit in 2001, all but a handful came to demonstrate peacefully. Instead, many were beaten to a pulp by seemingly out-of-control riot police. But was there something more sinister at play? And will the victims ever see proper justice? Nick Davies reports

Brown's new human rights initiative

alien baby

Lupo Pensuite - The Greatest Free Download Ever!!

This download has blown my mind.
It is a collection of standalone portable freeware apps,
lovingly crafted into a nicely arranged nested menu operated package that runs with one click.
Install this on your usb stick and run it on any xp or vista computer.
Great for work where installation is blocked.

Check out the homepage for more details and a download link.

Ask the PM - You Tube Gordon Brown special

Gordon Brown has called on British users of internet video
channel Youtube to ask him questions. Kind of like Prime Ministers Question Time but for youtubers...

So I've made this response. I can't put it to him as it goes against his rules.
Apologies for the sound - the sound card on this laptop is awful.

The Ultimate Old School Class of 85 Hip Hop Collection

Courtesy of the blog linked to in the title.
This music got me into listening to late night radio
when I was about 14. I listened to Mike Allen on Capital Radio on
Friday nights then I found Dave Pearce on Radio London.
But I still preferred Mike Allen.
Anyway it was listening to these shows that eventually led
to me discovering John Peel show and Andy Kershaw.

The Hip Hop started to make way for a whole world and history of music.
But I still have a soft spot for this sound.
Check it out here.

The Roof Is On Fire - Rock Master Scott And The Dynamic Three
Funkbox 2 - The Masterdon Committee
Rapp Will Never Die - MC Shy-D
King Kut (f. DJ Cheese) - Word Of Mouth
Def Jam - Jazzy Jay
Itchin' For A Scratch - Force M.D.'s
Bite This (Long Version) - Roxanne Shanté
Bite It - UTFO
Brooklyn's In the House - Cutmaster D.C.
Triple Threat (Vocal) - Z-3 MC's
(Nothing Serious) Just Buggin' - Whistle
The Show - Doug E. Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew
Big Mouth - Whodini
Larry's Dance Theme (Tribute To The Electric Boogiers) - Grandmaster Flash
Beat Of The Street (f. Fresh Gordon) - Choice MC's
Rock The Bells - LL Cool J
P.S.K. What Does It Mean? - Schoolly D
King Of Rock - Run DMC
The Home Of Hip Hop - Grandmixer D. ST.
Marley Marl Scratch (f. MC Shan) - Marley Marl
Just Say Stet - Stetsasonic
Breakdown (12" Version) - T La Rock
Needle To The Groove - Mantronix
Fresh Is The Word - Mantronix
Nightmares - Dana Dane
Bust This Rhyme - MC Chill
If I Ruled The World - Kurtis Blow
The Fat Boys Are Back - Fat Boys
You Ain't Fresh (Morning Dew Mix) - Boogie Boys
Batterram - Toddy Tee
Freshest Rhymes In The World (Vocal) - Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde
Dangerous - LL Cool J
I Can't Live Without My Radio - LL Cool J
Take Your Radio - Steady B
Together Forever (Krush Groove 4) (Live At Hollis Park '84) - Run DMC

the eton boys

shards - d jaxes eno

following on from two posts back and the
magic mountain soundtrack here is
mister world peace 2020 jaxing to the same piece of music.
Don't know what jaxing is? neither did I until five minutes ago.
anyway click on this link to hear d jax to eno.

comment on bears credit crunch disaster

GolemXIV

March 16, 2008 11:42 AM
I love this phrase people keep using - crisis of liquidity. It isn't. It's actually a crisis of SOLVENCY. The banks and brokers are largely insolvent.
Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone who trades in this stuff day to day. Below is what they will tell you.
A liquidity crisis is when you have lots of money but unfortunately, in the short term, it's all tied up and you can't lay your hands on it just now. That's liquidity.
If that was the case the US the banks have had plenty of time to sell their assets and get their hands on the liquid money. Why haven't they? Answer - they can't sell these assets because everyone trading day to day knows they are not worth even a fraction of what the banks say they are worth. Even grade A corporate paper is trading at 60 - 70 points on the dollar. When the journalists say 'the banks won't lend to each other' that's at best a half truth. The whole truth is that none of the banks and brokers will accept as payment any of the 'assets' they all hold. What is this stuff they all have and none of them will accept? Debt backed paper. They stuff they have been creating and trading in for the last decade.
The brokers and banks are suffering 'a liquidity crisis' because no one will buy their assets. And worse, the banks are reluctant to even bring these paper assets to market. Why? Because if they did they would have to 'mark them to market' - ie let the market decide what they were really worth. They CANNOT mark to market. Because the whole deal is that their solvency depends on everyone believing the assets are worth what they claim they are worth.
Why are their assets not worth what they say they are?
Banks and brokers used to trade in money - dollars. For a decade they have been creating and trading in their own unofficial and unregulated paper money.
How can you trade mortgagees like money? Simple - a dollar says 'I promise to pay the bearer...' The 'I' in that case is the Federal Government. A mortgage says 'Joe Bloggs promises to pay the bearer', the value of his mortgage. Difference is Joe Bloggs might default and not pay, leaving you with a worthless bit of paper.
And that is the sub prime crisis. Who is holding all this worthless paper money ? The banks and brokers!
And it gets much, much worse. The banks and brokers took this dodgy money and leveraged or geared it. What does that mean?
Banks and brokers are only required to hold a fraction in 'assets' of the amount they lend out or spend. Which means that they can spend 30 to 40 times the value of the actual assets they have in the vault. And remember these assets aren't even worth the value printed on them.
What does this leveraging mean in ordinary terms?
Imagine the bank's vault-- inside are gleaming bars of gold. Their 'assets'. They say, 'there you are. we're solvent. Look at all those solid gold assets'. But what leveraging means is that over the years the banks and brokers have been adding tin to the gold. They won't bring this 'gold' to market to sell because if they did the buyer would scratch the surface and find the gold is wafer thin and underneath its worthless tin. A thin veneer of assets that really are worth their weight in gold wrapped over a brick of worthless promises to pay mortgages made by people who have no ability to ever pay.
It's a solvency crisis. The banks are sitting on mountains of worthless tin 'assets'. So this is why actions taken by the FED and the BoE have not worked. The FED can lend them as many billions of Fed backed bonds as they want. The point is the banks and brokers don't have any 'assets' in their vaults with which to pay back those loans.
In the end either the banks and brokers have to bring out the worthless 'assets' and dump them - revealing the fact they have no money - they're insolvent. OR the Fed, the BoE and the ECB will agree to buy this worthless s***, bailing them out so they can carry on being rich and we, the tax payers will have footed the entire cost of their greed.
Have a nice day.

Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent) - last fm comments

click on this link to listen

when I reached the highest point climbing in the alps I would smoke a cigarette and
listen to this piece of music - amazing - it became my theme for the journey.
at night before sleep overwhelmed my tired body and as strange mountain hallucinations came , I would listen to this music





Thank you Chataya,it is great !

This is immense!

This song is so good, it was even used as the foundation for a track called 'Hear Me Out' by 'Frou Frou'.

When this song plays at the end of Traffic, it's . . . ethereal. & gorgeous.

Music gets no better than this.

Yeah, nobody knows you...

I think its safe to say that birth, life, love, death, and afterlife are all contained here.

Wow! this is nice like a commercial on LAST-TV

wow! this is nice

sometimes, this is the only song left fit for listening

still makes me shiver every time a listen...... an absolute classic

Absolutely gorgeous.

sound of becoming a spirit

...beautiful...

Could last forever

Wow! Perfect track.

but only because you lose your hearing

A great track, one that gets better as you get older

Maybe not. It feel like you are in the space between vacuum and the infinite.

great track and great video too!

flickering eye

I finally changed the photos
link at the top of the page here
to go to my flickr page,
check it out y'all.

Crap Art

Hi!

Crap Art is a new art movement. We're still working out our manifesto, but here are a few of our principles:

1. The practice of art should be primarily explorative, and the creation of art should be discovery rather than invention.

2. Popularly held views about what constitutes art, or what constitutes artistic talent, are elitist and discourage other forms of art and artistic talent from being explored or utilized.

3. The creation of art is more important than its consumption. Therefore, aesthetics (except in the biased eye/ear of the creator) are overrated as a judgment of the worth of art.

4. That which is created rapidly and in high quantities contains more variety and is more likely to be successful/innovative. Applying the 80%/20% "rule": If only 20% of the effort is needed to get 80% of the quality, then spending by spending only 20% of the effort, we can create five times as many artifacts at 80% quality!

---=++++=---

dweller: I can totally relate to this concept.
I am a crap artist myself and have been ever since a
wee child. Spontaneous instant creation. Hard and fast.
Thats how we likes it.

Street Sounds

I hear those drunk boymen
whistle their bath stains
along by the taxi arcade
crew mouth and the Cabbage Hall
at red light ticking over.
I lie awake as left to right
traffic passes
Drunk boys help me sleep
Heavy goods and bus brakes
Keep me up.

Human expression no matter how
wild is a comfort to me
up here safe on high.
The moving of traffic is like a
threat, a commentary, a judgement.
They stake their noisy claim that this
is a place for movement, not for rest,
not even drunken shouting at the kebab shop.
Not for church bells on wednesday night.
Not for Islington in Bloom.
The relentless filthy draughts that sweep over the
carefully laid hanging baskets of flowers
soon leave them dead and sooted.

No the traffic is telling me I am
in the wrong place. It doesn't want me
to lie in my bed feeling the magical
stillness of the night that all my
ancestors did.
No the traffic has greater rights than
me in this location.
If one of my flatmate's push-up bra
inserts blew out of the window and landed
on a windshield causing a car to
knock down a pedestrian.
Then that would be a gift.
For the police tape would halt those beasts
for a while.

I long for peaceful nights.
They are sacred now to me.
I once took them for granted.
Now a holiday means rest from
noise as well as work.
This can't go on.

the climax (more triplets)

Again we tread the boreds.
fellow ship of the wholly toast.
Cram merry juice and swallow it down.

The deep black hollow
my anchor and chain
don't feel the pull from above

glass is opaque
major flaws
never never land

gangrene elbow
youngsters old stony
beeblebrox smile

hermit's chancer
gets fed and the dog
lucky devil

my neck up to it in again
dirty turd pipe cleaners
lemon zest rubber gloves

gunk tallow lit
oven ship ahoy
slab murder toad

ghostie laddie
crispy nightie
flithy drinkie

plates and scones
zebra kojak
armpit lane

deirdre's divorce
ken's makeup secret
ginger cat sleeps

bye hallo
forced to by beatles
onion breath in work van

skin diseases
nurse's hand squeezes
tramp's delight

perfume seller
gorgeous frog
I'm one of you too

goodnight matrix
bourne again
mornings of the lord

dew drops
scally slippers
donkey dipper

fudge it up
nag it dead
right old state

you need glassed
hemlock got her in
raised profiles

skibbly dibbly dob
the mouse is chop chop chop
all the way home....