"Best described as sounding like an angry robot gorilla being crushed through a mangle."

Got emailed this and it looks very interesting...

As ever we've lots happening and it can be broken down into 5 parts...

(part 1) Live - Mt. + Dead Maids + Constellations - Fri 6th Mar @ The Cube Cinema.
(part 2) Live - Lakes + bIRdbATh + tbc - Thur 16th Apr @ The Mothers Ruin.
(part 3) New release - Bobbys Beard - Debut album.
(part 4) New release - Cowman - 'Palpating the Rumen'
(part 5) For future release.

(part 1) Ingue Records presents, Live at The Cube Cinema

Mt combine delicate guitar melodies with huge, powerfully pulsating crescendos and take the listener on a refreshingly interesting and intricate musical voyage. Two years on from their last live appearance and Mt. are preparing to grace the stage once again to coincide with the release of the their new E.P "Teach Your Children How To Think, Not What To Think" (ConSouling Sounds)
Dead Maids are Baths finest instrumental Post/Rock band playing paced and thoughtful riffs with a big sound.
Constellations is a soundscape solo artist described in a BBC review as 'awesome polyphony, cinematic, eerie, and melancholic'

Friday 6th March at The Cube Cinema, 4 Princess Row, Bristol, BS2 8NQ. 0117 907 4190.
£4
8pm

http://www.myspace.com/lifeandtimesofmt
http://www.myspace.com/deadmaids
http://www.myspace.com/sherandguitar

(part 2) Ingue Records presents, Live at The Mothers Ruin

Lakes have been around for a while, they've released music through Signature Tune, Scaredy Cat and Unlabel. They're Punk and Rock and in your face if your anywhere near enough to witness.
bIRdbATh are Bristols angular math rockers. 'At once laden with emotion yet as cold and sparse as Arctic tundra. Spiky but strangely comforting, like being attacked by a duvet. It's a hazy, smoky, stoned mash of everything from Mogwai and Shellac to Sonic Youth but rarely anything but itself.' (New-noise)

Thursday 16th of April at The Mothers Ruin 7-9 St Nicholas St, Bristol. BS1 1UE. 0117 925 6969
£3
8pm

http://www.myspace.com/lakeslakeslakes
http://www.myspace.com/birdbath


(part 3) New Ingue Records release - Debut album from Bobbys Beard

We'd describe it as a laid back summer soundtrack and if Brian Wilson was a computer he'd probably sound like this.
Available to buy in 2 weeks time. £4 offline and £5 from www.myspace.com/inguerecords

http://www.myspace.com/bobbysbeard


(part 4) Another New Ingue Records release - Cowman - 'Palpating the Rumen'

Best described as sounding like an angry robot gorilla being crushed through a mangle. Industrial Grindcore, Cowman is not for the faint of heart.
Available to buy in 3 weeks time. £4 offline and £5 from http://www.myspace.com/inguerecords

http://www.myspace.com/cowmanonemanband


(part 5) For future release.......eta summer time

Fringes bring you their long awaited, eagerly anticipated debut ep/mini album. http://www.myspace.com/fringesband

Hreda will be bringing their 2nd ep, this time on 7" vinyl. www.myspace.com/hreda

http://www.inguerecords.com

GoatLab Radio Feb '09

Is now up here; link MP3.

With Anakissed, Anarchist606 and American Paul.

Download: Goatlab Radio February 2009

Tracklistings:

1. Pretty Much Fucked - Mindless Faith
2. Vienna - Ultravox
3. Inside - Adult.
4. Destroy 2000 Years of Culture - Atari Teenage Riot
5. Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue
6. Bruce Springsteen - Ghost of Tom Joad (Live)
7. Baby Please Don’t Go - Bukka White
8. 6th May - Cranes
9. The Rip - Radiohead (cover of Portishead song)
10. Dis Flower - Harry Belafonte (from Carmen Jones)
11. Wallflower - Switchblade Symphony

http://www.thegoatlab.com/



Plus Parasite is on A New Band A Day!

Woo!

The Administration of Climate Denial

Ever noticed how much of climate denial is just cross-posed talking points? For example take this article, 'The Great Barrier Reef and the prophets of doom' posted to Bristol Indymedia on the 7th January, which is just a re-post of an article posted at On Line Opinion on the 8th May 2007. You see it a lot - big reposed articles, repeating the same gumff over and over. What is interesting is that an entire ecosystem of denial is coming to light - a concentrated process of administration to push denialist talking points onto the world. It is these points and names you see recycled time and time again for all the myths of denialism.

At the top of the food-chain is Senator Inhofe. An oil industry funded Republican congressman, who oddly is a Young Earth Creationist, who argues that evolution is a lie and the world was created about 6000 years ago as the Bible says. This is the man denialists trust to champion 'science'.

Now Inhofe employs Marc Morano to 'full time' to deny global warming. Morano is a right-wing attack man. Notable campaigns include the 'Swift Boats' attack on 2004 Democratic hopeful John Kerry. Now Inhofe employs Morano on his pet project, the 'U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works'. This is just a thinly veiled attack tool that aggregates any old shit that can possibly be seen as attacking the consensuses of global warming. You can see it in action here as a denialist uses it as a source to falsely claim that James Hansen, a NASA scientist is under attack.

Other things Morano maintains is the laughable fake list of 650 scientists who deny global warming. Notable because there is not anywhere near 650 scientists on the list, and only a tiny handful who are in a climate related discipline. It also includes people who have asked to be removed and Inhofe's people have refused. In short, its not a credible list but a propaganda tool for denialists.

Now an email list has been obtained that shows how Morano's web interlinks with the mainstay of denailism to create an echo chamber that consistently provides denialists with fake ammo for attack. What is very interesting is that the list of 'scientists' on Morano's email list consists of 19 people (not 650 at all!). Of the 19, 5 are retired - only 14 are still practicing scientists. Of the 19 almost all are linked to right-wing ideological think-tanks that are/have been funded by the oil companies and have a hatred of any form of regulation, especially around pollution.

The denialists claim there is a conspiracy - without ever really explaining how it might work. They are right (sort of) - there is a conspiracy; it's it runs the other way - it is organized by the right and some very powerful vested interests to muddy the waters over global warming to keep profit flowing.

Climate Change Denial: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I am often struck by the amount of basic level gumff that denialists push as 'valid' reasons for denial. What I mean is that they often post 'reasons' why the climate-is-not-warming/it's-the-sun-really/it's-not-all-that-bad/it-a-conspiracy-of-communists-&-tree-huggers-&-anarchists type thinking that are at the GCSE level of science, as if a climatologist with PhDs and decades of research experience who reads all the journals might not realise something that basic.

So here is one for example; computer models need to be related to reality. Well durr, of course. Who would model a natural system and NOT try and test it in reality. So for example;

"Time to get real – not live in a false computer model world."

or

"Models that cannot even predict what has happened when fed hitoric [sic] data!"

So the suggestion here is that they hugely complex models that are built and tested using real-world data and continually tested and refined - are inaccurate because the people who built them don't realise the differemce between a computer model and real data. The suggestion is nonsense. Utter tripe and piffle.

Or (and you see this one time and time again);

"I think the conclusion has to be that at present the climate just isn't living up to predictions, if the models were correct this shouldn't be happening."

and

"The point is that the so called foolproof models that allowed the believers to quote "The scientists have spoken" did not predict the phase we are going through."

Again, the suggestion is that the natural variability that exists within climate and is a mainstay of any climate data would not have been accounted for in the data-sets. Again it's utter piffle and provably wrong - an error committed by people failing Climate 101 by failing to realise the difference between 'weather' and 'climate'.

However it begs the question - why do denailists, who have no expertise in climate science, and I suspect in most cases, no expertise in any scientific discipline - think they are able to pick apart the research of experts with such a simple sucker punch? Well there might be an answer; The Dunning-Kruger Effect;

The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average.

Put basically we tend to overestimate our own skill and underestimate other's abilities and the worse we are at understanding an area, the worse our estimation of how little we know. It explains a lot, I feel. So take this explanation by Tamino as to why the maths in a denialists talking-point is all wrong; It stretches my pretty-rubbish knowledge of maths. I have the ability to see that there is much in this area I am not equipped to deal with. That's why science has the peer-review process - so people who are equipped can critique each other's work. But the denailists would have us believe that they (somehow) have a special (magical?) insight into GSCE-level science that eludes a professional scientist?

Yup, that is what they think - and here are two good summaries about where the evidence is on the issue that I recommend;

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2009/02/global-warming-denial.html
and
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/climate-change-denial-nothing-but-lies-and-frauds/

Iraq: It's Not Over Yet

I know there are those in Neo-Labour that would rather forget the whole Iraq thing ever happened, but as news arrives that a female suicide bomber kills 35, a British solider is killed in Basra and the cost of the whole criminal snafu is going to cost £2bn this year (up half a billion) - it reminds us the war, while a lot better than in 2006, is still very violent and is far from over. Here is a good article on the current situation:

Once the visit was concluded, we headed back for Fallujah and had a late night snack at Sheik Aifan's place before settling in for a night's sleep as his guest. His daughter, a shy girl of perhaps seven years of age, sat beside him as we ate. At one point, he suddenly peeled a crisp U.S. $100 bill off a wad of bills that would have stunned any movie mafia boss, smiled benevolently, and added that she shouldn't let her mother know about the gift.

The sheik, of course, had $100 bills to spare, as millions of dollars for so-called construction projects have been funneled his way. It's how he pays the roughly 900 men that he estimates make up his private militia. For all of this he can thank the U.S. military, which delivers regular installments of money -- shrink-wrapped bricks of those $100 bills -- because post-invasion Iraq remains largely a cash-only economy.

Before our journey to Ramadi, a patrol of U.S. Marines had paid Sheik Aifan a visit. As the soldiers climbed the stairs to his meeting room, they took clips of ammunition away from the sheik's security team, and kept them until they left his compound. It was a gentle reminder of who still has the final say in this part of Iraq and of just how far the trust extends between these partners of necessity.

Iraq: Never forgive and never forget those who took us there.

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