SATURDAY NIGHT ANOUK, WIRE.

Dutch singer/songwriter Anouk opens up with Girl.




From the 2004 album Hotel New York.



Back to 1979 with Wire's Outdoor Miner. From the 1979 album Chairs Missing.




Postpunk band which formed in London in OCT 76. Political loons but fairly good music. A not uncommon - make that very common - occurrence.


And what do you say to Uncle Outlaw huh? Providing you (almost) every WE with good music for free?



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN ON OBAMA'S WAR ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

A very frightening evolution in America, and the following is an illustration of just how badly things are speeding up under the radar: Steyn on the US government's intrusion plans in radio and TV newsrooms - just to make sure that the 'correct' topics are covered.

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Government of the United States is increasingly corrupt. Its revenue agency is corrupt and its justice department is corrupt, so it's hardly surprising, in a hyper-regulatory regime where bureaucrats write their own rules and enforce them with their personal SWAT teams, that more peripheral government bodies find the temptation too much to resist. On Fox News today, Shannon Bream has been reporting on the Federal Communications Commission's plans to put government monitors in TV and radio newsrooms to assess their coverage of eight "critical information needs", and "underserved populations".

The FCC, like much of the alphabet soup in Washington, is an FDR creation that, as with many others, used the cover of "interstate commerce" to turn a federal government into a central government: Radio stations' signals often crossed state lines, and so they supposedly fell within the feds' jurisdiction. In the usual boundlessly expansive way of Washington, that's somehow evolved into a regulatory authority over how local stations serve local communities. Now it's evolving again, into micro-regulation of the news.


I was interested to see what the eight "critical information needs" - or CINs, in the regulatory jargon - actually are. You can find them listed in this report, from something called "Social Solutions International" of Silver Spring, Maryland:

Social Solutions has been tasked with the development of a research design that can be used to identify and understand the critical information needs (CINs) of the American public (with special emphasis on vulnerable/disadvantaged populations).

The litigious Fake Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann will be heartened to discover that "the environment" has been identified as a Critical Information Need. So the government monitor in your local newsroom will be tracking how the station covers "the environment", what resources it devotes, the prominence it gives to stories, etc. But what if you're a news editor and you happen to disagree that "the environment" is one of the eight most Critical Information Needs. What if you happen to think that "runaway public debt" or "the vulnerability of US diplomatic facilities in Libya" is a more Critical Information Need than "the environment"? What government bureaucrat do you go to to see about getting the federally-mandated Critical Information Needs changed? Or does it require a constitutional amendment?

The state has no business determining which news stories have priorities over others, and certainly no business sending monitors into newsrooms to ensure compliance - because the essence of a functioning press is not what the state decrees the citizen has a "critical need" to know but what it doesn't think he needs to know. Why should "Social Solutions International" get to determine "the critical information needs of the American public"? And why should the government get to enforce them?..."

We should thank God on our bare knees for having Steyn. Come to think of him, I REALLY ought to put up a donation button up for him to do my bit re financing his legal battle with UeberFraud Mann.

Leftists. They are NOT interested in debating with you.

They are only interested in shutting you up.




MFBB.

SCIENTIFIC STUDY ESTABLISHES ONCE AND FOR ALL THAT MEN LIKE LOOKING AT BREASTS.

DowneastBlog usually is on top of all things scientific, and it's no different this time. Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has the goods:

"The eyes don't lie: Men really do look at women's bodies more than their faces, according to a new study that used eye-tracking technology to prove what many women have long observed.

But it's not just men who do it -- the study found that women look at other women's bodies, too.

"We live in a culture in which we constantly see women objectified in interactions on television and in the media. When you turn your own lens on everyday, ordinary women, we focus on those parts, too," says lead author and social psychologist Sarah Gervais of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"Until now, we didn't have evidence people were actually doing that to women's bodies," she says. "We have women's self-reports, but this is some of the first work to document that people actually engage in this."





The participants – 29 women and 36 men – were outfitted with the eye-tracking system, which measures in milliseconds how long the eyes are fixed on certain spots. Their gazes reacted to photographs of the same 10 women, each with three different digitally manipulated body shapes – curvaceous, much less curvaceous and in-between. (Only women's bodies were viewed by study participants.) Both sexes fixed their gaze more on women's chests and waists and less on faces. Those bodies with larger breasts, narrower waists and bigger hips often prompted longer looks.

The explanation may be partly evolutionary, Gervais says, since men may be drawn to more shapely women for childbearing -- while women may be checking out their competition, she suggests.





And the study, published today in the journal Sex Roles, also finds that even when men are told to focus more on evaluating a woman's expressions and personality, women with more curves get more positive personality ratings.

Researcher Kun Guo, who also uses eye tracking in his studies at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, says the technology provides "more objective measurements" than do questionnaires, which are subjective.

"The beauty of eye movements is that it is more difficult to inhibit," he says.

Jamie Lynn Goldenberg, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa, says there's been a lot of research on self-objectification, but only recently has attention turned to perceptions by others. She hasn't used eye-tracking in her studies but says it's "an interesting way" to look at objectification, which amounts to viewing women as objects.






"We have new methodologies for studying these things -- getting into the eyes of the perceiver," she says. "It doesn't explain why they're looking, but they're looking longer."

.................


Uh...

... did you just say something, Prof Gervais?



MFBB.