My brother has been here all week, so I tried to show him an interesting time. Photos within.
LA Beatdown
July 11th, 2010
The Velaslavsky Panorama
July 11th, 2010
The New ‘Pentagon Papers’
June 23rd, 2010The First Amendment?
What’s that?
So I figured I’d put up this story on the day when a stupid commander who doesn’t know we lost the war in Afghanistan in 2003 goes to (one assumes) tend his resignation today to an (apparently) stupid commander-in-chief that doesn’t know we lost the war in Afghanistan in 2003. What will it take to get us out of this Bush/Obama quagmire?
The public to say “Enough, Pull out”?
This is where the whole saga of Assange comes into the picture.
Anyone that recalls what Ellsberg did ought to be feeling a whole lotta deja vu all over again.
(from The Guardian)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange breaks cover but will avoid America
US desperate to ask hacker what he knows of classified messages about Iraq and Afghanistan wars
The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert.
Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers’ platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested.
The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.
The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt.
“[US] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable,” Assange told the Guardian in Brussels. “Politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe … but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period.”
Assange appeared in public in Brussels for the first time in almost a month to speak at a seminar on freedom of information at the European parliament.
He said: “We need support and protection. We have that. More is always helpful. But we believe that the situation is stable and under control. There’s no need to be worried. There’s a need always to be on the alert.”
Manning is being held incommunicado by the US military in Kuwait after “confessing” to a Californian hacker on a chatline, declaring he wanted “people to see the truth”.
He said he had collected 260,000 top secret US cables in Baghdad and sent them to WikiLeaks, whose server operates out of Sweden. Adrian Lamo, the California hacker he spoke to, handed the transcripts of the exchanges to the FBI.
Manning was promptly arrested in Baghdad at the end of last month and transferred to a US military detention unit in Kuwait. He has been held for more than three weeks without charge.
Assange said WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had been granted no access to him. Manning has instead been assigned US military counsel.
While WikiLeaks declined to confirm receipt of the material from Manning, it has already released a film of a US Apache helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad.
It has also posted a confidential state department cable on negotiations in Reykjavik over Iceland’s financial collapse and is preparing to disclose much more material, including film of a US attack that left scores of civilians dead in Afghanistan.
The material is believed to derive from Manning, although WikiLeaks does not reveal its sources and its operations are designed to mask the source of the files it receives.
Prominent US whistleblowers and lawyers have advised Assange to stay out of the US and to be ultra-careful about his travel and public appearances. “Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of [Assange] for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified state department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security,” US web paper the Daily Beast reported 10 days ago.
“We’d like to know where he is – we’d like his co-operation in this,” a US official was quoted as saying.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers – a top secret study about the Vietnam war – in 1973, spoke to the Daily Beast.
He said: “I would think that [Assange] is in some danger. Granted, I would think that his notoriety now would provide him some degree of protection.”
Assange said: “Some fear for my life. I’m not one of them. We have to avoid some countries, avoid travel, until we know where the political arrow is pointing.”
He added that WikiLeaks had been trying, “unsuccessfully so far”, to contact Manning in Kuwait.
“Clearly, a young man is detained in very difficult circumstances with the allegation he is the whistleblower. We must do our best to obtain freedom for him.”
Regarding his own predicament, Assange said the US state department had signalled it was not seeking any WikiLeaks people because the Pentagon’s criminal investigations command had assumed the lead role in the case.
Apart from preparing much more material for release, WikiLeaks is planning to publicise a secret US military video of one of its deadliest air strikes in Afghanistan in which scores of children are believed to have been killed in May last year.
The Afghan government said about 140 civilians were killed in Garani, including 92 children. The US military initially said that up to 95 died, of whom about 65 were insurgents.
US officials have since wavered on that claim. A subsequent investigation admitted mistakes were made.
In April WikiLeaks released the Baghdad video, prompting considerable criticism of the Pentagon.
The film was edited and produced in Iceland where Assange spends a lot of his time and which last week prepared the most radical and liberal freedom of information legislation anywhere in the world.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Iceland MP and anti-war activist who led the drive for the new laws, co-produced the WikiLeaks version of the Baghdad video.
“I worked on it 18 hours a day through the Easter holidays,” she said.
Jonsdottir, a close associate of Assange, said the WikiLeaks founder “went into hiding when the story of Manning’s arrest was published”.
Jack Herding Sheep (north of Malibu)
June 20th, 2010For his enjoyment, we are letting our Aussie Sheepdog “Jack” get back in touch with his instinctual tendencies to herd (high in the hills of Ventura county).
The great things about these photos are that prior to their being taken, he had never seen a sheep before. Thus, you are watching in real time a dog’s instincts kick in (without them even being aware of it) and he starts herding.
Bell Boy
June 20th, 2010Courtesy of Last Remaining Seats (LA Conservancy), we got to grab a peak into the famed Los Angeles Theatre which is usually not open to the public. In my opinion, it is the grandest of all the movie palaces in LA (but yet to be restored). However, in it’s desuetude, it gains a certain beauty.
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(photos taken at the shuttered Los Angeles Theatre, built ca. 1931)
Sign Of The Times
June 20th, 2010
Aural Pleasures (vol. 33)
June 20th, 2010
First up are Swedish popsters Sambassadeur doing a song from their new cd European. Following that are The Mantles from their debut and a song I should have posted last year but I have a real backlog of material now and end up posting things months after I actually get them. So much for appearing “cutting edge”! Next comes a song from the classic LA band The Dream Syndicate (from their seminal album Days Of Wine And Roses) switching gears we move towars more electronic sounds with Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft from the early 80′s and the lead track off their album Für Immer. And finishing up today’s playlist is a song from the new upcoming Los Angeles “experimental hip-hop” (whatever you want to call it) artist Lorn.
Enjoy.
Politically Incorrect Advertising
June 20th, 2010
Aural Pleasures (vol. 32)
June 13th, 2010
This week, we start out with the Idle Race’s sixth single “Days Of The Broken Arrows“. This was Jeff Lynne’s band prior to The Move and E.L.O. and this song has a bridge which clearly rips off a Beatles song but I can’t remember which one. Still some great late-sixties Brit rock.
After that is a song from Rikk Agnew’s solo record “All By Myself”. His sound is all over the first Adolescents‘ album as well as the only good Christian Death record “Only Theatre Of Pain“…and again totally almost solely because of his rad sound.
Moving to more contemporary stuff (that sounds retro anyway) The new Beach Fossils album (on the phenomenal Sacred Bones record label) and then on to a song from LA’s superstar Flying Lotus from his new album called “Cosmogramma”.
Wrapping it all up is a very strange cautionary tale from 1971. Enjoy.
With Cats And Horses
June 6th, 2010
Aural Pleasures (vol. 31)
June 6th, 2010
Outside of the 2010 re-releases of Exile On Main Street and Raw Power, one of the most welcome re-issues has been a compilation from Athens, GA’s legendary Method Actors called This Is Still It. I haven’t been crazy about the recent Black Keys music but this lead off track from their latest Brothers sounds really good. Then there’s the case of Bruce Haack who composed children’s songs but in the late 60′s discovered psychedelic music which warped him in a wonderfully weird way. This song is from his Electric Lucifer lp (1969). Slowing it down a bit is Caethua which is basically sombre folk with somewhat playful vocal arrangements. Indian Jewelry wraps things up on this edition with a song from their new one called Totaled.
I kinda feel these weekly forays into my personal jukebox are successful only if what I am putting up is largely unknown to most readers. I hope it serves as a weekly class in musical appreciation.
