Holy folkpunk, Batman! US DIY punk label Plan-It-X Records is closing up shop. Apparently Chris Johnston “doesn’t want to be a dinosaur” running a label based on selling cheap CDs in an age when “CD sales are dropping like crazy”. Read the full story over at PunkNews, or wherever they picked it up from.
The decision makes sense, but I’m still a bit sad… I don’t have a huge number of Plan-It-X releases as the budget aspect of what they do kind of vanishes after you ship it from the US to the UK, but I respect their DIY ethics and they’ve put out some great bands. I think my first encounters with the label were Against Me!‘s Crime As Forgiven By CDEP (two of my favourite records ever) and a This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb album I downloaded using AudioGalaxy (remember that?).
Fond farewells to all involved with the label and good luck with all future projects.
The body of Dr. George Tiller is removed from the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas
The tense standoff in America between extreme anti-abortion protesters and doctors who provide abortions has been ruptured by a judge’s ruling in Kansas that the executioner of a killer of a doctor will be allowed to argue in court that he believed he was justified in trying to save unmurdered doctors.
Continues page 5…
(Actual news story is here. I’ve put the right link in now. Sorry, I am both an idiot and a devotee of tabbed browsing.)
3. “Political correctness” (get a clue, or at least look it up on Wikipedia).
4. How the British economy is recovering (shut up bankers, you are despicable liars).
5. Faux-controversial puff pieces about waning artists and actors designed to promote their latest attempt to arrest their decline. It is miserably transparent and rarely even offers self-righteous amusement. Quit it.
6. Dan fucking Brown.
7. The Labour Party (if your name is Polly Toynbee).
8. Princess Diana / Jade Goody / anyone else ever described as a people’s princess (stop pandering to the grief athletes you sick fucks).
9. The Wire (yes, it is amazing, but for god’s sake stop using per-episode fansquee as content).
10. The phrase “couldn’t make it up” (opinion pieces and comments, thank you very much).
Further, anyone who uses the phrase “bonkers Britain” will be summarily hung, drawn and quartered without trial.
Feel free to post your own entries in the comments. The mainstream press can be amazingly rubbish and it’s nice to vent, snark, sneer and otherwise hop up on a moral hobbyhorse about it, so do join me.
Possibly the weirdest punk-related news of last week was this:
Toronto’s Fucked Up lead vocalist Pink Eyes – aka Damian Abraham – has been asked to appear more regularly on Fox New‘s Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. Abraham will be playing the role of a general leftist pundit, after declining to be a “gender expert.”
Abraham previously made two appearances on the show after Gutfeld stated on air that The Chemistry of Common Life was his favourite album of 2008. Gutfeld also gained some infamy for mocking the Canadian military but later apologized.
It’s not yet a contractually agreed relationship – more of an informal agreement – but it could become the first compelling reason to watch Fox News. Once or twice a month, for five minutes. More here and here.
Infamous powerhouse of satire The Onion recently put up a video report about a reality TV show in which autoworkers at two Ford plants compete against one another in a variety of challenges. The prize? Keeping their jobs, pensions and healthcare.
Losing your job and being singled out for humiliation on national television? Ouch. My only hope is that a company’s employees finger the boss for the sack – which seems only fair, given that turning to this sort of sick roulette is effectively an admission of professional incompetence.
The quality of the audio is not great, but it will reward your focus and attention.
I’ll let the video speak for itself, but do keep an eye out for the projection on the part of the defensive party in the debate – the accusations of recourse to baseless rhetoric, of ahistorical lack of perspective, and so forth – as well as the attempts to smear by association. Perhaps you could turn it into a sort of drinking game.
This all comes in the responses toward the end of the debate, at about 39:10, though even if you’re only interested in the pugilism you should watch both participants’ speeches in order to ground those verbal blows in the context of their approaches to debate.
The UK is to push for a new multilateral deal to reduce the number of nuclear weapons stockpiled around the world, Gordon Brown said today, as he pledged that Britain was “ready” to reduce its own number of Trident warheads.
In his first speech on nuclear disarmament since May, Brown said that a new deal to reduce world stockpiles of atomic weapons was close.
“Britain has cut the number of its nuclear warheads by 50% since 1997 … If it is possible to reduce the number of UK warheads further, consistent with our national deterrence requirements and with the progress of multilateral discussions, Britain will be ready to do so,” he said.
“We must begin by reducing the number of nuclear weapons still out there in the world … Between them, the US and Russia retain around 95%.”
The 2007 [Trident renewal] vote authorized British participation in a U.S. plan to extend the life of the Trident D5 missiles to 2042, after which they would retire from service. The United States has so far not provided any guarantees of the compatibility of the new missiles to be developed as replacements for the Tridents with the new submarines that the United Kingdom plans to build.
Campaigners responded that Miliband’s good intentions [based on the Foreign Office's new policy paper on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament] are ‘severely undermined‘ by government Trident plans. But, as the Times reports, “Mr Miliband rejected calls that Britain should lead the way by scrapping Trident, its submarine-based nuclear deterrent which is due for renewal at a cost of £20 billion. He wanted talks about multilateral disarmament, he said. ‘If we went down the unilateral road, would Iran say ‘We won’t have ours’? I don’t think the world works like that.’
In essence, Britain’s courageous leadership on nuclear disarmament appears to be “Iran first, we don’t trust them”. This despite Iran not possessing nuclear weapons and the lack of any evidence that it is attempting to develop any. Addressed to a nation that hasn’t invaded another in almost three centuries… by a nation that has invaded and occupied two in the last decade.
Is it really any surprise that politicians and journalists aren’t taken seriously any more when they can’t or won’t acknowledge the army of elephants trampling through the room?
I was, until recently, a regular at a monthly club night before the police suddenly started strictly enforcing ID checks. This wasn’t merely to ensure I was above the required 18 years of age. Not only was everyone required to provide visual identification, but they also had to be logged in a computer database – otherwise none of us could go in. Everyone’s driving licences were scanned through a machine and recorded on a computer, with no indication of how long the police would store the information for.
When I objected, the (white) club promoter was quite frank with me. He said the police had said they were “concerned” that the venue played “black and Asian music” and hence wanted added security. Any sort of trouble is extremely rare at this night. Yet their reasoning was that if any fight broke out, they could track everyone at the event if necessary.
Form 696 explicitly singles out musical styles such as R&B, bashment, garage or styles including MCs/DJs as examples of genres that have to be stated if put on. It also required event producers to state the likely racial profile of people attending. When accusations of racial profiling were inevitably raised by the music industry, the Met changed the wording to ask who it was targeted at.
“In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel],” [Faith Birol] replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view.”
As George Monbiot explains, this is quite a change from the previous official line of “everything will be fine. Here’s American Gladiators. Here’s 58 channels of it.”
Anyhow, have a read of the whole article. As with most of Monbiot’s writings these days, it’s chilling stuff.
"So, what's up America? Forty-three years after Jim Crow (only forty-one in Virginia, which looks like it's gone Democratic for the first time since 1964), and despite a campaign laden with filthy, vicious racism and the incitement of a lynch mob mentality among the Palinites, you demolished the GOP and got yourself your first black president. On a landslide."
Holy folkpunk, Batman! US DIY punk label Plan-It-X Records is closing up shop. Apparently Chris Johnston “doesn’t want to be a dinosaur” running a label based on selling cheap CDs in an age when “CD sales are dropping like crazy”. Read the full story over at PunkNews, or wherever they picked it up from.