Australia

Folk Bitch Trio: Music that holds beautiful secrets

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By Dale Maplethorpe

How do you even begin to describe a band as perfectly lined up as Folk Bitch Trio? Listening to their music isn’t like listening to any other album available; instead, it’s like stumbling across some kind of secret, a small cave on a walk that holds beautiful secrets. Everything from their harmonies, to musicianship, to songwriting is so perfectly aligned that their music feels as though it could help even the most stone of hearts beat to its rhythm. 

Their debut album, Now Would Be a Good Time, is a masterclass in the shimmering beauty that folk music has to offer. It’s not the kind of album where you listen to individual songs, rather, it’s the kind of music that you put on and allow yourself to get fully submerged in.

Source: Far Out Magazine

Blood Lust and Demigods: Behind an Australian Force’s Slaughter of Helpless Afghans

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The findings of a four-year military inquiry paint a brutal picture of a special forces culture of rewarding the killing of innocents and prisoners and methodically covering it up.

MELBOURNE, Australia — They were the elite of the elite among Australian soldiers, with a record of daring raids in Afghanistan. But a twisted and extreme warrior culture was being instilled, driving the commandos to glorify atrocity as they waged a methodical campaign to kill helpless Afghans and cover it up.

Commanders ordered junior soldiers to execute prisoners so they could record their first “kill.” Adolescents, farmers and other noncombatants were shot dead in circumstances clearly outside the heat of battle. Superior officers created such a godlike aura around themselves that troops dared not question them, even as 39 Afghans were unlawfully killed.

These are among the findings of battlefield misconduct, released on Thursday in a public accounting by the Australian military — a rare admission of abuses that often remain hidden during war.

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