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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Tubemeke New Year's Special

Happy New Year - nga mihi o te tau hou.Featuring (in order):
  • Elemental
  • David Frost intro. Duke Ellington et al.
  • Carol Burnett intro. Jackson 5
  • Louis Armstrong & Danny Kaye
  • Mr Wayne Anderson
  • Disco Godfather (movie trailer)
  • Elvis
  • Jay Kay & Jools Holland
  • Curtis Mayfield & Soul Train gang
  • Ed Sullivan intro. Count Basie
  • Jimmi Hendrix (in band)
  • James Brown on Hollywood-a-go-go
  • Elvis
  • Cab Calloway & the Harlemaniacs
  • Jose Feliciano with Johnny Cash
  • Nana Mouskouri
  • Wilson Pickett at San Remo
  • Les Cappuccino
  • Nina Simone
  • Henry Mancini & his orchestra
  • Random Japanese street funk
  • Bossa nova Baby: Dutch/Indonesia
  • Bossa nova Baby: Germany
  • Marva Whitney & the JBs
  • Super Fly (movie trailer)
  • Stevie Wonder
  • Stevie Wonder & Mick Jagger
  • Big Band del Conservatorio Superior de Córdoba
  • The Jones Cartel - Stairway to Wainui
  • African dancing
  • Yaron Herman trio covers Britney Spears
  • Ladi6 (Karoline Tamati)
  • Dean Martin & Frank Sinatra New Year's special.

    • posted by Tim Selwyn @ 9:39 pm   5 comments

    5 Comments:

    At 2/1/10 5:01 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Iran and the reality Ahmadinejad is popular


    Very good article from the Guardian on the reality that Ahmadinejad is popular. I think that change is inevitable in Iran, no matter where you are in the world, people yearn for freedom. Communist, Theocracy, Monarchy, Dictatorship, Democracy - it doesn't matter the regime, people want freedom and the necessary social friction being caused by the protestors in Iran is a positive thing, but those protestors need to win over their fellow countrymen the way Democrats had to win over Republicans after Bush.

    These are the birth pangs of Obama's new regional order
    The turmoil in Tehran reflects a refusal to accept Ahmadinejad is popular and confusion about how to respond to the US
    Seumas Milne
    'They have elected a Labour government," a Savoy diner famously declared on the night of Britain's election landslide in 1945. "The country will never stand for it." From the evidence so far coming out of Iran, something similar seems to be happening on the streets of Tehran – and in the western capitals just as desperate to see the back of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    Of course the movement behind opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi spreads far beyond the capital's elite, as did the supporters of Winston Churchill against Clement Attlee. In Iran, it includes large sections of the middle class, students and the secular. But a similar misreading of their own social circles for the country at large appears to have convinced the opposition's supporters that it can only have lost last Friday's election through fraud.

    That is also reflected in the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad.

    While Mousavi promised market reforms and privatisation, more personal freedom and better relations with the west, the president increased pensions and public sector wages and handed out cheap loans. So it's hardly surprising that Ahmadinejad should have a solid base among the working class, the religious, small town and rural poor – or that he might have achieved a similar majority to that of his first election in 2005. That's what one of the few genuinely independent polls (the US-based Ballen-Doherty survey) predicted last month, when the Times reported Ahmadinejad was "expected to win".

    But such details have got lost as the pressure has built in Tehran for a "green revolution" amid unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. The strongest evidence appears to be some surprising regional results and the speed of the official announcement, triggered by Mousavi's declaration that he was the winner before the polls closed. But most official figures don't look so implausible – Mousavi won Tehran, for instance, by 2.2m votes to 1.8m – and it's hard to believe that rigging alone could account for the 11 million-vote gap between the main contenders.

    If Ahmadinejad was in fact the winner, then there is an attempted coup going on in Tehran right now, and it is being led by Mousavi and his western-backed supporters. But for the demonstrators facing repression in Tehran, the conviction that they have been cheated has created its own momentum in what is now a highly polarised society. That is given more force by the fact that the protests are underpinned by a split in the theocratic regime, of which Mousavi and his allies are a powerful component.

     
    At 2/1/10 5:02 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Part of that is about a perceived threat to their own economic interests. But the division also reflects differences within the establishment about how to respond to Barack Obama and the overtures from Washington. All factions uphold Iran's right to continue nuclear reprocessing, but Mousavi's campaign was critical of the level of support given to Hezbollah and Hamas, while Ahmadinejad's supporters argue that only toughness can win western acceptance of Iran's status as a new regional power.

    Iran is of course at the centre of an arc of crisis across the greater Middle East, from Palestine to Pakistan: the legacy of the Bush administration's catastrophic failure in Iraq and the wider war on terror. And as the US attempts to reconstitute its hegemony in the region on a new basis – for which Obama's speech to the Muslim world in Cairo was supposed to set the tone – there's reason to believe that the birth pangs of the new order may yet turn out to be as painful as the death throes of the old.

    Last Friday, even before the polls had closed in Iran, the US president ­commented that people were "looking at new possibilities" in Iran, just as they had in Lebanon's elections the previous weekend. In fact, the unexpected defeat of Hezbollah's opposition coalition (which nevertheless won the largest number of votes) seems to have had more to do with local Lebanese sectarian issues and large-scale vote buying than the Obama effect. But the implications of his remarks were not lost in Iran, where the US is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars in covert destabilisation programmes.

    Obama's public engagement over the Israel-Palestine conflict has so far elicited a commitment by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to the paper ­principle of a Palestinian state – backed by both his predecessors and George Bush and hedged around with so many restrictions it would barely merit Ruritanian status – but no climbdown over illegal settlement expansion. The chances of a negotiated deal in such conditions seem minimal, particularly in the absence of Hamas, and the prospects that a US plan for a settlement might then fail and plunge the region back into conflict relatively high.

    Meanwhile, resistance and wider violence have been growing again in Iraq, as US occupation troops pull back from the cities. And in Afghanistan, far from winding down the occupation, Obama is escalating the conflict as promised, with another 21,000 US troops being sent this ­summer to fight the unwinnable war, as attacks on Nato forces have reached an all-time peak. At the same time, the spread of the Afghan war into neighbouring Pakistan has left thousands of civilians dead, created more than two million refugees and led to a civilian carnage from US drone attacks across the northwest of the country.

    In case anyone imagined such wars of western occupation would become a thing of the past in the wake of the discredited Bush administration, General Dannatt, head of the British army, recently set out to disabuse them. Echoing US defence secretary Robert Gates, he insisted: "Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations – they are signposts for the future".

    In such a context, the neutralisation of Iran as an independent regional power would be a huge prize for the US – defanging recalcitrants from Baghdad to Beirut – and a route out of the strategic impasse created by the invasion of Iraq. But so far, the signs from Tehran are still that that's unlikely to be achieved by a colour-coded revolution.

     
    At 2/1/10 5:13 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

    They are still supporting the wrong kind of people.They lock up the stirring of al qaeda.Also hamas and hezbollah.Islamic jihad and al aqsa martyrs brigade.

    In todays world they lock these heros of people of the middle east
    up in jail.18,000 in Egypt alone!

    The police jailed journalists and beat civil rights advocates.They beat protestors.Those who spoke out too loudly for democratic reform.The elections were rigged.The state of emergency powers are all they need to do the job.

    This is what they wanted at the end of the cold war.They try to limit access to the internet and free speech.Ensuing attempts by the government to restrict communication with censorship online.

    Real dissent is not allowed in the virtual reality of blogging.They try to curb the real protests and shut it down.Social networking is not mobilising civil unrest in the streets.They are being picked off.Chewing up valuable time.

    Real and online politics don't mix.They are not being beaten or killed.The youth-elite are safe at home out of harms way.The mothers are doing their job for them so they won't get hurt.

    Domestic protests do not spill over internationally on the net or web.We need a new era of protest and action informed by real dialogue.Praxis is critical reflection.This is also one form of action.This can have an effect on the internal politics of another nation.

    Obama supports these people.He wants them out of jail as soon as possible.He doesn't want to merely change the surroundings of their detention.They need to be safe in the long term.Freedom.

    In Russia this involves muslim resistance to regional hegemony.Sharia.

    In this wider region war is a daily unreality.The so-called civil wars are merely sites of superpowers clashing on anothers soil.They are in the bad habit of throwing their weight around the place.

    This brings us on to the subject of terror or what the war is all about.Extreme measures for extreme crimes.Once this is codified and modified it becomes the norm.That is the big problem of gitmo it mocks the law.The federal prison system is already home to 2 million inmates.

    America has been conspicuous by its absence in the war of terror worldwide.Lebanon and Gaza.The 2 separate Palestinian homelands.Not the West Bank.They are the real political hothouse of the settlements.

    For over half a century now they have been pursuing a grand imperial strategy taking us to the brink.Instead of using diplomacy first and foremost and force only as a last resort.They choose to use tanks and missiles.They must choose between the perogatives of power and the earth.They are jeopardising the future of the species.

     
    At 2/1/10 5:16 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

    In every city, the biggest presence at the protests was the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political organization, active in many countries throughout the Middle East, that seeks to govern according to Islamic law. Other, smaller demonstrations were put together, sometimes spontaneously, by leftist groups and student organizations.

    But in Egypt, this time, the protests were different: some of the anger was aimed directly at the government of President Hosni Mubarak. In defiance of threats from the police, and in contravention of a national taboo, some demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak, condemning his government for maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel, for exporting natural gas to the country and for restricting movement through Egypt’s border with Gaza.

    As the street protests went on, young Egyptians also were mobilizing and venting their anger over Gaza on what would, until recently, have seemed an unlikely venue: Facebook, the social-networking site. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members. This month, hundreds of Egyptian Facebook members, in private homes and at Internet cafes, have set up Gaza-related “groups.” Most expressed hatred for Israel and the United States, but each one had its own focus. Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas. When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to “destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists.” Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.

    Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party under a permanent state-of-emergency law. An estimated 18,000 Egyptians are imprisoned under the law, which allows the police to arrest people without charges, allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. Newspapers are monitored by the Ministry of Information and generally refrain from directly criticizing Mubarak. And so for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent.

    Although there are countless political Facebook groups in Egypt, many of which flare up and fall into disuse in a matter of days, the one with the most dynamic debates is that of the April 6 Youth Movement, a group of 70,000 mostly young and educated Egyptians, most of whom had never been involved with politics before joining the group. The movement is less than a year old; it formed more or less spontaneously on Facebook last spring around an effort to stage a general nationwide strike. Members coalesce around a few issues — free speech, economic stagnation and government

     
    At 2/1/10 10:06 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

    RAHESABZ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     

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