EARLY WORD: For Those Not Rapturing On Saturday

South Jersey music fans are ecstatic about the one time reunion of two local supergroups Love Sandwich and Stupidhead. Both were pioneers who provided the broom that swept the era of New Jersey Nerf Metal out of existence and restored the Dirty Jerz’s musical prominence that has given the world icons such as Springsteen, Yo La Tengo and Sinatra. Throughout the early 90’s, both performed countless sold out shows in the Delaware Valley and in tandem supported such acts as Bad Brains, The Roots, Rage against the Machine and for some reason Savatage. They are performing this one time only […]

CONTEST: Win Damon & Naomi Tix

Damon & Naomi play First Unitarian on Saturday May 21st in support of their new album, False Beats And True Hearts, which comes out May 21st. We have a pair of tickets to give away to the first reader to email us at FEED@PHAWKER.COM with the name of the band Damon & Naomi played in with Dean Wareham back in the 80s. Put DAMON & NAOMI in the subject line and please include a day time phone number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed! Damon & Naomi with Chris Marker – And You Are There from The Wire Magazine on […]

LIBIDINAL HUBRIS: Bolaris Drugged And His Bank Account Date Raped By Russian Harpies

DAILY NEWS: The FBI picked up the case, and asked Bolaris to testify before a grand jury. Last month, the feds busted 17 members of the Eastern European ring, which relied on “bar girls” from overseas who targeted wealthy out-of-towners at South Beach bars. The FBI said the women hunted late at night for men who wore expensive watches and shoes, and typically lured their prey to private clubs run by other members of the ring. The clubs – including the Caviar Bar – were just fronts, and were not open to the public. The men were often drugged or […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Goldman Sachs Of Sh*t

  [Illustration by thadkellstadt] BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Has there ever been a more contemptible crew of con artists in the history of mankind?! Clearly Goldman Sachs has molded financial flimflam into an art form even John Myatt couldn’t envision. From deceptive foreign debt transactions to spurious mortgage-backed securities sales, this unprincipled pack of predators has left a trail of half-eaten carcasses stretching from the pillars of the Parthenon to the cul-de-sacs of suburban California — all the while reaping reprehensible profits for themselves and more than earning the dubious distinction of being Wall Street’s most cunning capitalistic carnivores. In the case of Greece, as […]

Osama Bin Laden’s Greatest Crime Was Not Bringing Down WTC, It Was Murdering The Fourth Amendment

NEW YORKER: While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed. Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of […]

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Study Calls Bullshit On The Private Prison Industrial Complex

NEW YORK TIMES: The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates. The state’s experience has particular relevance now, as many politicians have promised to ease budget problems by trimming state agencies. Florida and Ohio are planning major shifts toward private prisons, and Arizona is expected to sign deals doubling its private-inmate population. […]

ARTSY: The Great Depression In Full Color

DAILY MAIL: It was an era that defined a generation. The Great Depression marked the bitter and abrupt end to the post-World War 1 bubble that left America giddy with promise in the 1920s. Near the end of the 1930s the country was beginning to recover from the crash, but many in small towns and rural areas were still poverty-stricken. These rare photographs are some of the few documenting those iconic years in colour. The photographs and captions are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color. The […]

With Enemies Like Gingrich, Who Needs Friends?

THE GUARDIAN: Newt Gingrich has just launched his campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 – only for Gingrich’s train to be derailed as soon as it left the station. So far Gingrich has been revealed to have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to upmarket jeweler Tiffany, rashly attacked the Republican party’s signature policy before making an abject apology, been humbled by a conservative icon and humiliated by an ordinary voter in the crucial state of Iowa. Oh, Gingrich also had a box of glitter tipped over his head at a book signing. And it’s only Wednesday. […]

SHOCKING: Book Claims Roswell UFO Crash Was Actually Saucer Sent By Stalin, Piloted By Nazi Mutants

BLOOMBERG: Citing interviews with a single unnamed former engineer from government contractor EG&G — now part of URS Corp. (URS) — Jacobsen purports to lift the veil on what really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and what happened to the wreckage when it got to Nevada. The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of […]

EARLY WORD: The New Stone Age

RELATED: PhillyNORML’s volunteers have been instrumental in recent efforts to reform local marijuana laws. Pennsylvanians for Medical Marijuana (PA4MMJ) is supporting the Governor Raymond P. Shafer Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act. State Representative Mark B. Cohen introduced the bill in the Pennsylvania General Assembly during 2009. State Senator Daylin Leach re-introduced it as SB 1003 for the 2011 session. This bill would create legal protections for citizens with serious medical conditions to safely access or grow cannabis for therapeutic use. It also creates a statewide system if Compassion Centers for patient access. April 2010 saw the news break about PhillyNORML’s efforts working with city officials to […]

SAD BUT TRUE: 30,000-Plus Voted For Milton Street

INQUIRER: In unofficial returns with 96 percent of the precincts reporting, Nutter captured 76 percent of the vote to Street’s 24 percent. MORE RELATED: Former state legislator T. Milton Street lost his primary-election challenge to Mayor Nutter, shifting the focus to former Mayor John Street, who switched his voter registration from Democrat to independent just in time to make a run in the fall. Street has said that he is “keeping a variety of options available as a matter of good politics.” That could mean another run for mayor or for one of the two City Council at-large seats set […]