Gogol Would Be Proud: Russian Bureaucracy Hasn't Changed

Techdirt writes:

Reader Wesha sends in the news that the band Deep Purple has been fined for performing its own songs in Russia without first getting a license from the Russian Authors' Society (NGO). And it wasn't a small fine either, approximately $1,000 per song. Oh, but wait, it gets better. According to one news organization, the money will be passed along to the victim, a band called... Deep Purple. Yes, that's right. Apparently, the band needs to pay a fine for performing the songs without properly licensing them from itself... so now it'll pay the fine and the fine will be given to the band (minus a commission to the Russian Authors' Society, of course.) Common sense just died.

link: From Russia, With Stupidity: Band Must Pay Fines To Itself | Techdirt

The Chimp Child: Human Brains and "Humanzees"

Charles Siebert writes:

We humans, in other words, are not merely 99 percent the same as chimps. We may well owe our very existence to primeval intercourse with them, something we've been reenacting, in both mythology and reality, ever since. The Dionysian chimp-human satyrs of ancient lore are, it seems, not so much a willful conceit as a deep cellular memory. Actual sex with apes, meanwhile, while not generally a matter of public record, has gone on for ages, from palm oil plantation workers currently raping orangutans in the jungles of Borneo and Malaysia, to long-ago and elaborately staged acts of public bestiality featured in Roman games and circuses, "events" involving a range of creatures from leopards and wild boars to jackasses, dogs, and finally apes. Typically mandrills or baboons, they would be made drunk with wine and then loosed upon groups of young girls, most often virgins, whose genitals had been soaked with the female urine of either a mandrill or a baboon.

As for the possibility of a human impregnating a chimpanzee (or vice versa) and producing a viable offspring, the chances are greatly complicated by the discrepancy in the number of chromosomes between the two species, chimps possessing 24 pairs and humans 23. Still, a chimp-human hybrid, though likely to be sterile, is biologically feasible, and there has been all manner of speculation and lurid lore over the ages about the existence of actual "humanzees" or "chumans" or "manpanzees."

link: I'm tired of just being a man | Salon

Legacy of Bush: "Massive Illegal Surveillance"

A congressionally-mandated report by Inspectors General of five separate intelligence agencies confirms that the Bush administration carried out “unprecedented,” massive surveillance activities beyond the warrantless wirteapping program that had previously been revealed. The Bush administration authorized the program without fully notifying Congress:

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

“He looked me in the eye and said ‘no,’” she said Friday.

link: Think Progress » Home Page

Terry Eagleton and God

Laurie Taylor interviews Terry Eagleton:

"It was a time when the Church was going through a massive renewal. It was called the new theology and it gave me good reasons to stay in the church when most right, decent people would have left in disgust. I was challenged head-on by a number of Dominican clergy who would say, 'Okay, so you're joining the International Socialists. Okay, so we quite agree with that revolutionary project. But it's just that Christianity from within its own revolutionary perspective can see that that project has certain limits to it.' For the first time I was not only hearing an intellectually persuasive interpretation of Christianity but also one that made sense politically to me."

Memories like this constantly inform Eagleton's passionate criticism of the "New Atheists". Whereas he has spent months and even years of his life debating theology with clever believers, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens suddenly arrive on the scene and sweep away the entire philosophical content of religion with a derisory wave of the hand. Eagleton might now be ready to talk of religion as an allegory and to question along with Dawkins and Hitchens the literal truth of the Bible. But what he can never overlook in his opponents is their failure to ever engage in intellectual debate with the likes of the Dominicans who changed the course of his own life at Cambridge. It is because they never exposed themselves to this type of theological debate that they can now be indicted for having "bought their atheism on the cheap". They are, in the equally scathing words of other Eagleton enthusiasts, nothing more than "discount store atheists" or even "schoolyard atheists".

link: Tragic hero: Laurie Taylor interviews Terry Eagleton | New Humanist

More Trouble in Pakistan

TURBAT, Pakistan — Three local political leaders were seized from a small legal office here in April, handcuffed, blindfolded and hustled into a waiting pickup truck in front of their lawyer and neighboring shopkeepers. Their bodies, riddled with bullets and badly decomposed in the scorching heat, were found in a date palm grove five days later.

Local residents are convinced that the killings were the work of the Pakistani intelligence agencies, and the deaths have provided a new spark for revolt across Baluchistan, a vast and restless province in Pakistan’s southwest where the government faces yet another insurgency.

Although not on the same scale as the Taliban insurgency in the northwest, the conflict in Baluchistan is steadily gaining ground. Politicians and analysts warn that it presents a distracting second front for the authorities, drawing off resources, like helicopters, that the United States provided Pakistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

link: Another Insurgency Gains in Pakistan, Stirred Up by Local Killings - NYTimes.com

Fragile Fence: Photography from Africa by Jessica Hilltout

Jessica Hilltout | Photography

Photojournalism: Timothy Allen

Timothy Allen. Photographer, Human Planet

Photojournalism: Brent Stirton

Brent Stirton » Photojournalist

Abhors a Vacuum: Awful Library Books

Awful Library Books writes:

Look at that vacuum! No wonder Judith was worried about her posture. These days we have upright machines that are lighter weight. Heck, buy the woman a Roomba! And, by the way, who vaccuums their house dressed to the nines like Judith?

link: Not Your Mama’s Pregnancy « Awful Library Books

Andrzej Kramarz: Things

Rzeczy (Things)

photographs by Andrzej Kramarz text by Dariusz Czaja

The displays are arranged on the ground, on newspapers, cartons, strips of foil, and sheets of various colours. The objects are densely packed into the displays, lying one on top of the other, as if following the trends of horror vacui seen in folk art.

The items are for the most part old, obsolete, sometimes defunct, tacky, and of little worth, if any. Just some used and worn-out trash, desolate objects which look as if they've been pulled out of a dumpster and displayed only in pieces. In a word: that, which is left of a previous life; that, which used to live, now leads a life after life, sometimes an imagined existence. The lens of the photographer dives into this trivial space dimension with a definite fascination, and records with sensitivity these fragile remainders of daily life, searching for traces of their (non)existence.

link: lens culture: Andrzej Kramarz

O Arizona: $500 For Transportation to a Clinic!? Sheriff Joe In Court Again

The ACLU filed a motion in Maricopa Superior Court last week to stop the sheriff from requiring inmates who ask for abortions to pay up front for transportation costs to the procedure.

“He can't ask people to pre-pay to receive these medical services,” ACLU Executive Director Alessandra Solar Meetze said.

The ACLU’s action stems from a December 2008 incident.

According to court documents, an inmate known as “Sarah Poe” requested an abortion.

A “Lieutenant informed her she would have to prepay for transportation costs," the documents said.

Poe was charged $500 before obtaining a ride to a doctor’s office where an abortion was performed.

Meetze said the prepayment requirement violates a woman’s constitutional right to have timely access to an abortion.

link: ACLU Targets Arpaio Over Abortion - Phoenix News Story - KPHO Phoenix

Parisian Gang Sentenced

The leader of a Paris gang has been jailed for life for the kidnap, torture and murder of a young French Jew.

Youssouf Fofana, 28, was sentenced to a minimum of 22 years behind bars before he can be considered for parole after he was found guilty by a Paris court of abducting and killing 23-year-old Ilan Halimi in 2006.

Twenty-four others, including eight women, received jail terms ranging from six months to 18 years after being found guilty of charges relating to the crime.

The gang abducted 23-year-old Halimi and tortured him for more than three weeks as they attempted, unsuccessfully, to extort a $600,000 ransom from his family.

He died on his way to hospital shortly after he was found naked, severely burned and handcuffed to a tree by a railway in the Essonne region south of Paris.

link: Al Jazeera English - Europe - Life term for French Jew's murderer

Old New Orleans

Circa 1910. "French Market, New Orleans." Our second look at the market at N. Peters and Decatur streets. Detroit Publishing Co. glass negative.

link: French Market: 1910 | Shorpy Photo Archive

Mormons to Gays: No Kissing

Elizabeth White writes:

A gay couple say they were detained by security guards on a plaza owned by the Mormon church and later cited by police, claiming it stemmed from a kiss on the cheek.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said that the men became argumentative and refused to leave after being asked to stop their "inappropriate behavior." The men say they were targeted because they are gay.

link: Gay Couple Detained After Kissing Near Mormon Church

Thinkabout: This Is Your Brain on Wander

When our minds wander, we lose touch with the outside world. We don’t actually black out, of course, but we are more likely to make mistakes, fail to encode memories, or miss a connection. Zoning out makes us particularly prone to these errors. Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments succeeded.

These results are shocking when you stop to think about them. Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head, joined to each other by trillions of connections. The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.

link: The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine

How You Spend Your Money

Boing Boing writes:

Here's a nice dataviz of US consumer spending as of April 2009. How depressing is that minuscule slice labelled "reading"?

link: Visualization of US consumer spending - Boing Boing

Running Bare: Ow, Ow, Ow

Before the Nikes, before the breathable, antimicrobial running shorts, before the personal fitness coaches, heart rate monitors, wrist-mounted GPS and subscriptions to Runner’s World, you were a runner.

And, like all children, you ran barefoot.

Now, a small but growing body of research suggests that barefoot is the way adults should run, too. So, many runners have been shucking off the high-tech trainers in favor of naked feet — or minimalist footwear like Nike Free, the Newton All-Weather Trainer and the glove-like Vibram FiveFingers.

“People have been running barefoot for millions of years and it has only been since 1972 that people have been wearing shoes with thick, synthetic heels,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

link: To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes | Wired Science | Wired.com

Book Review: The Problem of Pakistan

Taking office in January, Barack Obama promised a radically different vision of foreign policy from that of his predecessor. But on perhaps the most critical issue, the new king looks a lot like the old one. In Pakistan, President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s targeted drone missile attacks against suspected militants and may quietly be expanding the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert battle against jihadis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

As Nicholas Schmidle, a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Slate, reveals in a richly reported book based on his two years traveling across Pakistan, United States policy does not change because Pakistan, sadly, does not change.

link: Book Review - 'To Live or to Perish Forever - Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan,' by Nicholas Schmidle - Review - NYTimes.com

Book Review: Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

David Orr writes:

All poets, if they are any good,” Charles Simic has said, “tend to stand apart from their literary age.” The key phrase here, of course, is “if they are any good”; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if ­poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?

Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn, whose new Selected ­Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14) is edited by August Kleinzahler. Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers . . . serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career. He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch . . . well, Allen Ginsberg). This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd ­background.

link: On Poetry - Thom Gunn’s ‘Selected Poems’ - NYTimes.com

Book Review: Alternative Rock History

If you’re looking to be convinced that the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, then strangely enough, “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll” is not for you. The title is a come-on: the Beatles are among the many subjects Elijah Wald addresses in this cheerfully iconoclastic book, but they are not what it is about.

On the other hand, if you’re looking, as Wald’s subtitle has it, for “an alternative history of American popular music” — specifically from the turn of the 20th century to roughly the mid-1970s — you’ve found it. And if you’re up for some good arguments, you’ve found those too.

“How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll” contains some arguments that will have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming “Of course!” and some that will have you scratching your head and saying “Huh?” The one that gives the book its name may have you doing both.

link: Book Review - 'How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll - An Alternative History of American Popular Music,' by Elijah Wald - Review - NYTimes.com

Full Speed Ahead to the Past: Empty Summer for Overachievers

School’s out for summer 2009, and instead of getting a jump on the boundless futures that parents and colleges always promised them, students this year are receiving a reality check.

The well-paying summer jobs that in previous years seemed like a birthright have grown scarce, and pre-professional internships are disappearing as companies cut back across the board. Recession-strapped parents don’t always have the means or will to bankroll starter apartments or art tours of Tuscany.

So many college students and recent graduates are heading to where they least expected: back home, and facing an unfamiliar prospect: downtime, maybe too much of it. To a high-achieving generation whose schedules were once crammed with extracurricular activities meant to propel them into college, it feels like an empty summer — eerie, and a bit scary.

“Things have changed drastically,” said Ron Alsop, author of “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace,” a book that only last year portrayed young workers as entitled and in a hurry. “It has to be a huge wake-up call for this generation.”

link: Getting Through the Summer Job Blues - NYTimes.com

Louis Jordan: Architect of Rock and Roll

From 1942 to 1951, Jordan scored an astonishing 57 R&B chart hits (all on Decca), beginning with the humorous blues "I'm Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town" and finishing with "Weak Minded Blues." In between, he drew up what amounted to an easily followed blueprint for the development of R&B (and for that matter, rock & roll -- the accessibly swinging shuffles of Bill Haley & the Comets were directly descended from Jordan; Haley often pointed to his Decca labelmate as profoundly influencing his approach).

link: ON THIS DAY IN JAZZ AGE MUSIC!: JULY 8TH...

Happy Birthday Ivie Anderson

1905
Ivie Anderson, Vocal
b. Gilroy, CA, USA.
d. Dec. 28, 1949, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Best recalled for her work with Duke Ellington's band. Considered one of the finest singers of the golden age of jazz, Ivie Anderson was a fluent vocalist who impressed many with her blues and scat phrasings. Most impressed was Duke Ellington, who kept her on as vocalist for eleven years and would have kept on for more had she not retired due to health problems.

link: ON THIS DAY IN JAZZ AGE MUSIC!

Hell Is For Naked People

batikk // een blog over vanalles en nog wat

Gay Pride in Spain

More than 1 million people participated in the Gay Pride march in Madrid on a festive, music-filled day during which the participants demanded more education as a basic means for doing away with homophobia.

The marchers, who came from all over Spain, jammed the capital’s main streets on Saturday and exceeded the participation estimates of organizers, who said that more than a million people turned out.

link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Madrid Gay Pride Parade Draws Over 1 Million People

Singer Shot Dead in Lima, Peru

LIMA – Singer Julio Barreto, who had a huge hit in the 1980s with “Quiereme,” was gunned down in Lima, Peruvian media reported Sunday.

The lead singer of salsa band La Sociedad de Barranco died Saturday night while being transported to a hospital in the capital, Radio Programas del Peru, or RPP, reported.

The motive for the shooting has not been determined, but police are not ruling out a robbery attempt, RPP said.

Barreto’s killing has rocked this Andean nation’s entertainment world, which was still trying to recover from the murder of singer Alicia Delgado in an apparent crime of passion.

link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Peruvian Singer Julio Barreto Murdered in Lima

Venezuela's Talent Drain

From the Editors of VenEconomy

The public’s attention generally focuses on the circumstantial, while analysis of the transcendental or structural is avoided or postponed.

One of those transcendental problems is the gradual destruction of human capital in Venezuela. In Newsweek Web this week, Mac Margolis analyzes the exodus of Venezuelans during the decade of the Chávez administration.

This analyst tells of the tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have gone to live abroad owing to the policies of a government that believes that the country is its own private property and has radically polarized the population, commenting that this mass of emigrants is made up particularly of artists, lawyers, doctors, managers, and engineers.

He maintains that this exodus has not only split up families, but that it will also affect the country’s future. He points out that, in Chávez’s Venezuela, talent is one of the main exports and warns that this goes against the tide of the repatriation policies being implemented by many developing countries today to recover their economies and consolidate their democracies

link: Latin American Herald Tribune - VenEconomy: Groundswell – or the Exodus of Venezuelans

Migrants in Mexico Freed from Gunmen

Authorities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas rescued 51 undocumented Central American migrants who were being held captive by eight gunmen, the state Attorney General’s Office said Friday.

The captors were taken into custody during Thursday’s raid on a ranch outside the town of Palenque, which straddles the boundary with neighboring Tabasco state, the AG office said in a statement.

Police and army troops went to the La Victoria ranch after several dozen other migrants reported that heavily armed men boarded a freight train in the wee hours of Wednesday and kidnapped 51 people from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

It is common for U.S.-bound Central American migrants to stowaway on freight trains for part of their long journey across Mexico.

link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Mexican Authorities Rescue 51 Migrants from Gunmen

Economic Troubles for Book Trade in Spain

The economic crisis has reached the world of culture and is severely affecting the Spanish publishing industry, whose sales fell in the first half of the year by 6 percent relative to the same period of 2008.

The decline was even sharper in terms of book exports, which dropped by 10 percent.

“The situation is serious and is forcing us to reconsider tactics and strategies,” Antonio Maria Avila, executive director of the FGEE publishers federation, said Friday in presenting a report on the domestic and foreign book trade and book-reading and book-buying habits in Spain for 2008.

link: Latin American Herald Tribune - Crisis Provokes Sharp Drop in Book Sales in Spain