Disincorporated

Reform Fucking Champions!

2010-03-24T02:21:00.006-05:00

Chase Utley is possibly my favorite non-Cardinal because of that moment. Biden (who maybe could've had a successful career as a stand-up comic), apparently, just couldn't help himself at a historic moment either.

I think we will be giggling about this one for a while. Probably ranks up there with George Bush blurting out "need some wood?" in the 04 town hall debate against Kerry.

Personally, I am proud of Joe Fucking Biden standing up for the rights of long-suffering Profane-Americans. It is a lonely fucking fight. Won't someone think of the goddamn children?!?

* * * * *

I guess, as long as I felt compelled to log in to this neglected blog to comment on Joe Biden being a little excited, I should try to say something worthwhile about the actual HCR thing that hasn't already been said better elsewhere.

Um, well, er, I think Obama/Pelosi/Reid deserve lots of credit. I've given Reid in particular a lot of guff over the past few years for being overly polite & gentle with frauds and liars (and he has one more vote still to not screw up)....but overall I'm just astonished that this is happening in the first place. It's not hyperbole when the media folks say everybody since Truman has failed to get this done.

Plus, I also think that the Republicans are really setting themselves up to be hoist on their own petard when it turns out that those famous death panels are nonexistent. The Republican Party bluffed, threatening the Democrats with the worst rhetoric in the arsenal--Mike Steele is running around telling people this is the end of representative democracy, etc. They went all-in on this, and they fucking failed. Big time. They bet the grocery money that no one would get to find out that they were lying their ass off about the bill, cause they thought they could stampede the nervous Ds away from their own cause, and nobody cares about fact-checking the contents of a bill that was defeated. And why shouldn't the Rs try that? It's a tactic they've employed repeatedly and to great effect over the last 15 years.

Perhaps this is a sign that the Ds have figured out how to counter that tactic: by, you know, fighting back. By risking something. By not being apologetic about telling the honest truth.

And when the sky doesn't fall in tomorrow because of TEH SOCIALISM!!!, I suspect the voters are going to notice. The Party of No kept up too much intensity for too long for everybody to just magically forget in the fall that the Republicans explicitly said HCR = Armageddon.

CW still says the Ds lose seats this fall--and it could still be a lot, because of jobs, & the economy not having recovered for everybody that's not a bank, & the President's party usually loses seats in a midterm--but they probably just cut those losses in half.

Still a long time between now and November, though....

trying to do anything to keep my mind off the Cardinals

2009-10-09T18:04:00.004-05:00

Here's two DK diaries that are worth a look.

30 Reasons why Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

But he hasn't accomplished anything! Waah!

Personally, I suspect the award was as much for Obama's accomplishments as it was a middle finger from the rest of the world to Bush, Rush, & the Republican Mob. In Chris Rock's immortal words, "George Bush fucked up so bad he made it hard for a white man to run for President."

[EDIT: Best line I've read in response to the Nobel award comes from the State Dept: "Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum -- when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes." That's some grade-A sarcasm right there; coming from a gov't mouthpiece who would (under most circumstances) never say something nearly so snarky makes it even that much more impressive.]

The other item I wanted to link to is a priceless stemwinder from Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) about health care. The link has the Youtube clip of him speaking from the floor of Congress. It's only about 4 minutes long and is totally worth watching the whole thing, but I'll go ahead and give away how he ends it because it's just so goddamn good:

"[Americans] understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation. They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry. In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwhich tommorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon."

EPIC WIN!

Seriously, this is exactly how the Ds need to be dealing with the Party of No. If they won't cooperate, stop compromising. It's tit-for-tat. If they are stubborn contrarians, stop asking their opinion. If they negotiate in bad faith, stop negotiating. If they are obstructionist, use the huge majorities the voters have handed you and shut them out of the process.

Case in point: during the early days of the Obama Administration, there was much discussion of Obama's overtures to Congressional Republican leadership. He was inviting them up to the White House for drinks after hours. Every other word out of his mouth was bipartisan this, bipartisan that. He bent over backwards to include the GOP's input on the stimulus bill.

How did they reward him? Every single Republican House member voted against the bill, even after winning concessions from Democrats.

Lesson: the Democrats are in a historic moment of strength. They do not need to play nice with the Republicans, who are "negotiating" from weakness. They are not interested in compromise; they are only interested in fending off the hate radio mob.

*****

Speaking of which, kudos to Bryan Burwell of the STL Post-Dispatch for writing a no-bullshit column about the possibility of Limbaugh acquiring a minority stake in the Rams. Here's an excerpt:

Remember the seething anger and pained expression on the face of ESPN analyst Tom Jackson when he tried to express his feelings about what Limbaugh had said in the aftermath of the notorious Donovan McNabb disaster?

Remember the uncomfortable backtracking that had to be done when Limbaugh spouted off on his predictable anti-affirmative action screed and took McNabb down into the cesspool with him?

That's why I keep scratching my head and wondering why so many people foolishly believe that at some point Limbaugh's mouth won't cause another embarrassing situation for the Rams and the league. This isn't about conservative politics. If that's all you could say about him, it certainly doesn't disqualify him to be a potential NFL owner. In fact, that makes him highly qualified to join the club. He would fit right in with the rest of the exclusive boys club of ultra-wealthy, ultra-conservative white men who rule the ownership suites of most professional sports leagues.

But even if he fit in with his politics, let's hope he doesn't fit in with his polarizing, racist demagoguery. And yes, that is exactly what it is, no matter how many of his blindly loyal supporters want to put the "politically incorrect" party dress on it.

Rush Limbaugh getting a stake in the Rams is about the one thing that could make me stop being a Rams fan. And shame on Dave Checketts for allowing his name to get linked in the media with such an extremist. As much as I like Checketts for his work with the Blues, as long as Limbaugh is on board I hope his bid is passed over. I'd much rather see the team pull up stakes and go some place else than see it stay in St. Louis with such an asshole being associated with it.

It's heartening to see that many NFL players have also spoken out against Limbaugh, saying they would not play for St. Louis should he be involved in the sale of the team. People are not going to forget the McNabb controversy any time soon.

I just can't fathom how a guy like this could own part of a team that plays in heavily Democratic St. Louis, and not cause a huge PR problem for the team and the NFL with every lie-packed radio broadcast.

Youtube blogging

2009-10-09T02:46:00.002-05:00

Is it electronic music? Is it rock? Is it jazz? Who knows, all I know is holy shit that's fast.

I couldn't pass this up

2009-09-02T03:15:00.002-05:00

Muhammad Ali apparently had an Irish great-grandfather. He visits; the Irish, of course, love it.

the flip side of American History

2009-08-09T12:46:00.002-05:00

Andrew Sullivan gets letters. (via)

A political and demographic re-alignment is happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and we love you for it. But you didn't grow up around these folks, and you don't realize what a permanent and potent part of the American political landscape they are.

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party[sic--see also], who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

You have to read the whole thing to get the full flavor. Sullivan, of course, is a unique character; a Brit living in the States, a gay man who's right of center, Orwell fanatic, etc. So I wonder what was going thru Sully's head as he was reading this.

Anyway, we always knew a certain swath of society was going to be really pissed if Obama actually made it to the White House. The birthers & teabaggers are going to make a bunch of terrible noise for a while, but I don't think they're going to do a hell of a lot to improve their position on this map.

Bonus birther madness:

OK

2009-07-15T01:28:00.003-05:00

No one had ever photographed Barack Obama and Albert Pujols in the same room together. I am now able to accept, finally, at this late date, that they are not in fact one and the same person.

poetry + new scanner = blogging

2009-07-03T02:44:00.002-05:00

I KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON'T KNOW


 to grasp at the edges of an idea
 to strip away
 to fumble
  flounder
 to guess

     struggle

 frantic insight timeline
 fundamental nature of (pronoun)

 to eliminate the superfluous
 to reduce
 to shine light
 to discover connections
 to reveal structure
 to destroy
 to reveal changed horizons

burntblack hillscapes
 devastated countryside
  flattened peaks/risen valleys

   GIVES WAY TO

verdant fields 
 panorama quite
  lush and hopeful
   lens flare
    sunlit expanse

thru it all
the sly smile
the eye glint
the hand over mouth
 inhibiting spoilers
deep breaths
the reliving

TO WAIT PATIENTLY ON THE MOUNTAINTOP_____________________________________________________

what it looks like when elections are stolen outside of Florida

2009-06-14T17:29:00.005-05:00

Check out this BBC report from Tehran during public riots/general strike/madness. A government minder of some sort starts to arrest the BBC crew. But the crowd intervenes, beats the apparatchik, and hustles the reporters out of there.

Been doing some crash reading about Iran's recent political history, and man is it ever complicated. But things are falling apart, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. I think most of the world is watching, on pins and needles.

With the clumsy theft of the election, another group of psychotic fundamentalist reactionaries (the Ahmadinejad supporters and the hardline ayatollahs; which latter group may actually be in the process of infighting) is teetering on the edge of being swallowed by a spontaneous popular uprising.

Of course, no government anywhere likes it when the population suddenly starts loudly reconsidering the social contract while gathering in the streets and squares en masse. But the Middle Eastern theocracies tend to be prone to not just boiling over with widespread populist outrage, but unfortunately also the harsh repression by government fanatics, sycophants, and brownshirts that fuels that outrage to begin with.

Anyway, this is the exact situation the following song refers to and was the first thing I thought of when I heard of the censorship and riots in the wake of the Ahmadinejad "landslide"....perhaps it will end peacefully, but from the looks of things (cutting electricity, closing newspapers, arresting opposition leaders, shutting down the phone system, unofficial martial law, etc) it won't. Good luck to the dissenters, you'll need it.

Chaos A.D.
tanks on the streets
confronting police
bleeding the plebs
raging crowd
burning cars
bloodshed starts
who'll be alive?

Chaos A.D.
army in siege
total alarm
I'm sick of this
inside this state
war is created
no man's land
what is this shit?

REFUSE
RESIST
REFUSE

Chaos A.D.
disorder unleashed
starting to burn
starting to lynch
silence means death
stand on your feet
inner fear
your worst enemy

REFUSE
RESIST
REFUSE
RESIST

new tortoise video

2009-05-28T04:28:00.002-05:00

This is fucking cool. Instant classic.

I also found this (an mp3) via this website, which I must have bookmarked ages ago and forgot about. Anyway, that song is even further out there than the one in the video. (I got confused about where there were going with it a couple minutes in; as usual, with patience, badassery is revealed....)

It occurs to me I should read mp3 blogs more often....

youtube blogging

2009-04-07T02:43:00.003-05:00

Bartok/Music for strings, percussion, & celesta

And here's a Youtube clip (no embed link, sorry) of Portishead playing about 2/3 of the new album. I was surprised that they could play this stuff straight off the album like this. I had always assumed their music was built more like most electronic music: nobody plays it first and it gets sort of assembled rather than composed and rehearsed. But I guess I was wrong. At least as far as this album goes, the music is much less dependent on control room tricks than it is on good old fashioned in-the-room noise-making.

Seems to me they created this stuff specifically to be played by musicians live. (Which approach I suspect bears some similarities to Radiohead's approach to In Rainbows.)

They really are a band, which is interesting because I never thought of them as having this rock band-like constitution, with drums, percussion, bass, guitar, keys. (Some instrument switching, but mostly fixed roles.) I wonder if this is how they were in the 90s heyday, although I never saw them live (apart from the PNYC video, but even that had a DJ and a full orchestra), so maybe this is how their stuff was always created and I just didn't realize it. Wouldn't surprise me....

Regardless, the video kicks major ass and the music is a total mindfuck. I got a lot out of watching exactly how they made this or that weird sound.

heist

2009-03-21T14:23:00.004-05:00

Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone on AIG and the American plutocracy. Go read. Now. I'll wait. (via)

* * * * *

Two months into his term, this will probably be the single thing that determines Obama's legacy. Seems to me that he needs to fire Geithner immediately, and bring in some sort of Wall St. outsider. [EDIT 3/22: OK, after calming down and thinking and reading about Geithner some more, and watching Obama emphatically back Geithner on Leno, it's pretty clear that Obama probably can't fire Geithner, for obvious political reasons. Firing a Cabinet member this early into the Admin's term would be a huge media feeding frenzy and wouldn't necessarily make anything better. You have to go to war with the Treasury Secretary you have, and not the Treasury Secretary you might wish to have, etc etc.]

We are looking down the barrel of a French Revolution style economic and political clusterfuck, and Geithner doesn't seem to see the problem correctly. Obama needs to yank the administration of the bailout funds away from DoT and hand it to DoJ.

You rob a 7-11, you go to jail. You steal from every single American taxpayer? You're granted Too Big To Fail status and your buddies at DoT on your speed-dial will go to bat for you.

I'm not posting this to brag that I'm going to be the first one out with the barricades, rather to say that (like pretty much every American) I'm basically OK with other people making shit-tons of money as long as I can live my life undisturbed. And the French Revolution would definitely count as a disturbance. I mean, everybody who isn't already growing their own food is going to suffer in the event of some sort of national breakdown of order. Especially Richie Rich and his credit card. Can't eat plastic. That scenario would not be much fun to live through. I'd rather see the country able to emerge from the crisis more or less intact.

It's not the accumulation of wealth that's problematic per se, it's the concomitant accumulation of power (and its attendant privileges) that's the big problem. I don't hate people for being wealthy, but I certainly do hate the stupid self-righteous arrogant strutting-peacock fucks that have brought the mightiest country on earth to its knees. They have unbalanced the system and are throwing an epic temper tantrum over the country's natural desire to re-balance that system.

I think a lot of people could agree that if the situation gets much more 1930s-ish, the risk of things getting all 1790s-ish in a hurry becomes frightfully high. We are not terribly well equipped to deal with 1930s-style problems at the moment, thanks to the insane Bush-era tax-cuts-plus-two-wars policies that doubled the national debt in eight years, plus they kept cutting interest rates until they approached zero (which helped inflate the real estate bubble) and leaves Obama very little room to maneuver.

* * * * *

Speaking of the 1930s....keep an eye on that unemployment number. Americans, I think, can be kept more or less in line as long as we have something to do. But if unemployment shoots up, in a society that's still built on endless consumerism, eating regularly becomes concern #1 for a lot of people, and hungry people are angry people.

Here's the government's official estimate of the employment situation (warning: PDF). Look at the bottom chart on page 20. U-3 is what is usually reported in the press as "the" unemployment number, but U-6 may actually be closer to reality. (The seasonally adjusted U-3 number is what was recently reported in the press.) For an explanation of these terms, here is the relevant section of the Wikipedia article on unemployment.

Notice how much higher the U-6 number is relative to U-3. 14.8% is a hell of a lot scarier than 8.1%, which is already terrifying.

For comparison's sake (via Wikipedia), here is a nice graph that shows very clearly the sustained unemployment spike in the 30s. On the right side of the graph, we are just barely past the knee in the curve. Any bets on what level the current spike tops out at? Any bets on how long it lasts? (Not me, I don't gamble....)

It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you, my dear
That it can't happen here
Because I been checkin' it out, baby
I checked it out a couple a times, hmmmmmmmm

And I'm telling you
It can't happen here
Oh darling, it's important that you believe me
(bop bop bop bop)
That it can't happen here

ladies and gentlemen, i give you the end of a movement

2009-03-10T18:26:00.001-05:00

Limbaugh vs. Gingrich.

No points awarded for sumo wrestling metaphors. (Besides, circular firing squad references are so much funnier....)

David Foster Wallace

2009-03-04T01:38:00.002-06:00

Harper's sent DFW to first the Illinois State Fair and second a Caribbean cruise. The cruise piece is the title article in the collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and it's fucking hilarious, if kind of demanding....

re: AIG

2009-02-28T21:20:00.005-06:00

This NYT article (via Atrios) runs down the huge AIG debacle. The first paragraph mentions that losses at AIG are dwarfing pretty much every other company on Wall St., and it's because AIG was an insurance company and not a bank.

As a huge multinational insurance company, with a storied history and a reputation for being extremely well run, A.I.G. had one of the most precious prizes in all of business: an AAA rating, held by no more than a dozen or so companies in the United States. That meant ratings agencies believed its chance of defaulting was just about zero. It also meant it could borrow more cheaply than other companies with lower ratings.

To be sure, most of A.I.G. operated the way it always had, like a normal, regulated insurance company. (Its insurance divisions remain profitable today.) But one division, its “financial practices” unit in London, was filled with go-go financial wizards who devised new and clever ways of taking advantage of Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities. Unlike many of the Wall Street investment banks, A.I.G. didn’t specialize in pooling subprime mortgages into securities. Instead, it sold credit-default swaps.

These exotic instruments acted as a form of insurance for the securities. In effect, A.I.G. was saying if, by some remote chance (ha!) those mortgage-backed securities suffered losses, the company would be on the hook for the losses. And because A.I.G. had that AAA rating, when it sprinkled its holy water over those mortgage-backed securities, suddenly they had AAA ratings too. That was the ratings arbitrage. “It was a way to exploit the triple A rating,” said Robert J. Arvanitis, a former A.I.G. executive who has since become a leading A.I.G. critic.

Why would Wall Street and the banks go for this? Because it shifted the risk of default from themselves to A.I.G., and the AAA rating made the securities much easier to market. What was in it for A.I.G.? Lucrative fees, naturally. But it also saw the fees as risk-free money; surely it would never have to actually pay up. Like everyone else on Wall Street, A.I.G. operated on the belief that the underlying assets — housing — could only go up in price.

That foolhardy belief, in turn, led A.I.G. to commit several other stupid mistakes. When a company insures against, say, floods or earthquakes, it has to put money in reserve in case a flood happens. That’s why, as a rule, insurance companies are usually overcapitalized, with low debt ratios. But because credit-default swaps were not regulated, and were not even categorized as a traditional insurance product, A.I.G. didn’t have to put anything aside for losses. And it didn’t. Its leverage was more akin to an investment bank than an insurance company. So when housing prices started falling, and losses started piling up, it had no way to pay them off. Not understanding the real risk, the company grievously mispriced it.

It gets worse. Hopefuly, some of these people end up in doing blue-collar jail sentences, but since we never seem to learn from our mistakes, we're apparently doomed to keep repeating them....

liars and thieves

2009-02-26T19:08:00.003-06:00

Chris Matthews rebuking Darrell Issa for the childish "Democrat Party" thing is not the most impressive thing about this video. (Although it is impressive. And I will be chuckling over "Republicanistical Party" for a while....)

Issa is best known is the guy who initiated the recall of Gray Davis and installed Arnold as Gov of CA. Issa, of course, wanted the gig for himself.

When Issa says the Bush-era deficits, "even including the war [singular instead of plural sic], " the annual deficit was below $400B, he is narrowly correct (except for 2004 and 2008, which were above $400B). However, the costs of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were never once budgeted for, as Congressman Issa is surely aware; they were paid for off-budget in supplemental appropriations bills, specifically for the purpose of making the reported budget numbers look better. Nothing more, nothing less. Everybody in D.C. knows this. Issa was in Congress when this was going on, and he certainly knows the difference between the annual budget and an appropriations (= spending) bill.

It should not surprise anyone that Barack Obama immediately ended this dishonest practice, and thus his annual budget numbers will be appalling by comparison to Bush's. But every single one of Bush's budgets contained vastly more spending than he claimed, so the comparison is not valid. This, also unsurprisingly, will not stop Obama & Congressional Democrats from being villified by the Know-Nothings on talk radio for one second.

Eventually, America will grow sick of being lied to all the time by people looking after their self-interest, and will hold these people accountable.

addenda

2009-02-21T20:59:00.004-06:00

A few more musings to add to the long post below. (Cause it clearly wasn't long enough!)

Money, of course, is an abstraction. (Gold standard nutters can be quiet in advance, thanks.) Credit is an abstraction of something that was already abstract. Securities and derivatives and all that goobledygook, then, resemble abstraction cubed, or something. The CDO/CDS market was like a couple of parallel funhouse mirrors: distorted and warped, but superficially infinite. As soon as a strong breeze came along, the house of cards collapsed under its own weight, since it was not founded on concrete stuff that actually existed in the real world, or on the work of human hands.

It's sickening, of course, to think that some really abstract, esoteric problem could cause very real, very widespread suffering of such magnitude. Personally, after the events of the last eight years, but especially the last six months, I will never look at the finanical trades (and the people that work in them) the same way again. I have become reinforced in my belief in capitalism, but the operative definition of capitalism has had layers of bullshit scraped away from it.

Labor and capital need each other very badly. When wealth is transferred from the poor to the wealthy, everyone becomes a supplier and nobody is a demander. I didn't take Econ 101, but I assume that means deflation. If you've got a small group of wealthy folks, a shrinking group of people that make stuff, and a vast underclass of workers with no work, you get pretty much where we are now. And since the middle class is increasingly mailing the keys to their house to the bank, it's obvious that wealthy folks are blind to the problems of getting everything you wish for. Just like predators can overhunt the food that sustains them, so can capital take so much from its employees that no one can afford to buy their stuff any longer.

The opposite problem (when labor dominates capital) is why genuinely communist countries never seem to be very stable. (FWIW the collapse of the Soviet Union was not due to this, it was due to many things, but I think chief among them was its unsustainably corrupt system of government rather than its economic structure per se.) So the recognition of labor and capital as yin and yang seems to me to be a crucial part of any economic philosophy.

So, to me, this post-2008 capitalism is going to have to be re-founded on the idea that markets are the best way to distribute wealth, up to a point, and the government has to be willing to step in and referee when needed. Proper, rational regulation is the only thing that separates functioning capitalism from anarchy. (Madison famously said, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary.")

Paramount to this is keeping nakedly corrupt assholes away from the government.

the shape of things to come

2009-02-21T19:02:00.004-06:00

Up to 120,000 protest in recession-hit Ireland

DUBLIN (AFP)--Up to 120,000 protesters brought Dublin city centre to a standstill on Saturday over government austerity measures aimed at stabilising the once high-flying economy now wracked by recession.

(...)

Organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and featuring teachers, police, civil servants and others, the Irish protest was the "first step in a rolling campaign of action," ICTU general secretary David Begg said.

Police put the number of protesters at up to 120,000.

Marchers are particularly opposed to a pension levy on some 350,000 public servants which is designed to save about 1.4 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) this year.

Some perspective on the numbers in that piece....

Dublin metro is about 1.6M people, a little smaller than Kansas City (~1.9M). Imagine ~150K (police estimate!) in the streets of downtown KC.

I don't have an informed opinion about the particular tax that sparked the protest, but dividing $1.8B by 850,000 gives you a figure of just over $2,100 per person.

I like the guy's sign in the picture: TAX THE GREEDY, NOT THE NEEDY.

France offers funds to Guadeloupe

Strike leaders in Guadeloupe and Martinique have agreed to resume talks after an offer from the French president aimed at ending weeks of protests.

The French Caribbean territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe, promote an image of tropical peace and luxury - but in the past few weeks that image of the French Antilles has been tarnished by strikes and violence that have left one person dead and the economy in tatters.

Guadeloupe may be a tourist destination, but it suffers from the highest unemployment rates and most expensive living costs in France.

Latvia in turmoil as premier resigns

Pressure has mounted on Mr Godmanis to resign after demonstrators rioted against the government in Riga last month. The centre-right coalition was already under fire for corruption and arrogance and lost any remaining credibility last year after the once-booming economy plunged into recession.

Euro Reaches Three-Month Low on Eastern Europe Banking Concern

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The euro reached the lowest level against the dollar in three months on speculation financial turmoil in eastern Europe may deepen the recession in the 16 nations that use the currency.

The yen fell for a fourth week against the dollar and dropped versus the euro as the biggest contraction in Japan’s economy since the 1974 oil shock eroded demand for the currency as a haven from the global recession. Mexico’s peso tumbled to a record low versus the dollar after the central bank cut the target lending rate less than economists forecast.

"We are now moving very specifically to euro concerns," said Simon Derrick, chief currency strategist in London at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., in an interview on Bloomberg Television. "The idea that we could see another 10 percent drop in the euro makes perfect sense to me."

Iceland's center-left party to lead new government

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP)--Iceland's center-left Social Democratic Alliance Party was chosen Tuesday to form a new government with the Left-Green movement following the collapse of the conservative government amid deep economic troubles.

President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson made the decision after Prime Minister Geir Haarde, who had led the island nation since 2006, was toppled [1/26/09] by angry protests over the country's slide into economic ruin.

Europe Getting Hit On All Sides

European stocks tumbled sharply on Friday, as announcements from miner Anglo American, car maker Saab and two French building firms reinforced the sense of gloom pervading the markets. Adding to the pressure were fears about the state of Eastern European economies continued, as the entire government of Latvia resigned and the country tumbled into a sharp recession.

I had a hard time excerpting things from the following article. It just kept getting crazier and there is plenty I did not include here:

Bank bail-out 'could send national debt soaring by £1.5 trillion'

The government's rescue of some of Britain's biggest banks will more than double the national debt at a stroke after government statisticians decided to classify Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland as public corporations. Their liabilities--up to £1.5tn--will be added to the taxpayer's balance sheet.

That could push the country's debt levels up to 150% of national income, from a three-decade high of 48% now. The public sector net debt has already been swollen by £90bn of Northern Rock liabilities and, as of yesterday, £50bn of Bradford & Bingley's liabilities. But the two latest additions, which the ONS estimates could total between £1tn and £1.5tn, would dwarf those.

It was already widely expected that RBS's liabilities would come onto the public balance sheet since it is now 70% owned by the taxpayer but it is a surprise that Lloyds, which recently swallowed Halifax Bank of Scotland, has been classified as a public corporation given that it is only 43% owned by the state.

(...)

The other piece of bad news was that tumbling income tax, corporation tax and VAT revenues in January caused the public deficit for the first 10 months of the fiscal year 2008/09 to blow out to £67bn from £23bn a year ago.

The IFS said that meant the public deficit for this year to April could run up to £87bn. Just over two months ago, in the pre-budget report, the chancellor, Alistair Darling, estimated a shortfall of £78bn for this year.

Public net debt has already hit a record 47.8% of GDP, today's figures showed. The ONS also reported that the government finances worsened dramatically in January--the biggest tax-raising month of the year.

Germany, France May Face Bailout of Nations, Not Just Banks

Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Germany and France may be forced to contemplate the bailout of entire nations rather than just individual banks as European government budgets buckle under the weight of recession.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck became the first senior policy maker to broach the topic this week, saying some of the 16 euro nations are "getting into difficulties" and may need help. French officials are also concerned about market tensions as the cost of insuring Irish, Greek and Spanish debt against default rises to records and bond spreads widen.

The nightmare for Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy is that widening deficits will prompt investors to shun the debt of some countries, sparking a region-wide crisis. While few investors are yet forecasting any defaults, the mere risk of it may prompt the bloc’s two richest economies to ignore the European Central Bank and announce their willingness to come to the rescue.

"When push comes to shove Germany, France, the larger players will bail out those smaller peripheral players," said Alex Allen, chief investment officer of Eddington Capital Management. "You can’t let one part of the system fail because it leads to failure of the whole system.'

Not much to say after that but ZOMG

Roubini Says Europe Bank Risks Becoming ‘More Severe’

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Europe’s banking system faces growing risks because of losses in the region’s emerging markets, and the crisis may require a region-wide rescue effort, said New York University economist Nouriel Roubini.

"The banking problem in Europe is becoming more severe," Roubini said in a Bloomberg Television interview. "You have a series of countries that are really in trouble," Roubini said, citing Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Belarus and Ukraine.

German and French officials this week expressed concern about a slide in investor confidence in smaller European economies. The cost of insuring Irish, Greek and Spanish debt against default has climbed to records, and mounting losses in eastern Europe among Austrian banks sent that nation’s bond-yield premiums to an unprecedented level.

Re: Roubini--the guy earned the name "Dr. Doom" because he made negative predictions about the current crisis several years ago that were derided at the time but--whoops!--are now coming true.

B-b-b-but Nobody Could Have Foreseen....

* * * * *

So what's the upshot of all this?

The economic situation in Europe is not looking any prettier than it is in the States at the moment. In some of the smaller nations that were still in the middle of decades-long economic reforms (in particular, former Soviet bloc countries converting to capitalism--some system, eh?), we are seeing political realignment and/or civil unrest.

Some other Western European nations are either at risk of defaulting (Ireland) or already have defaulted (Iceland) after having had booming economies.

If anybody in the US is thinking It Can't Happen Here, think again*. It's looking that nationalization of banks is a foregone conclusion, and we just haven't done it yet. Roubini has pointed out that bank nationalization is probably only feasible if it all happens at once, rather than piecemeal, bank by bank. (Let that sink in for a minute.)

Vanishingly few people from left to right in America (certainly no one at all in a position of power) are actually advocating permanent government control of the banking industry. In fact I think you'd find very few takers indeed who would say that gov't control of banks is a good thing at all. But events seem to be outrunning everybody's ideologies (again from left to right); thus the emerging consensus (once again pointed out very early on by Roubini) seems to be that the only pragmatic thing to do is to follow the precedent the Swedish gov't set in the 90s when faced with a similar, if much smaller-scale, set of crises that the entire global financial system is now staring at.

Essentially, the solution was to nationalize the banks; fire the greedy goddamn geniuses running the places; sell off worthless assets at their current market value (i.e. pennies on the dollar, since they were purchased at the top of a way over-inflated market); restore the balance sheets to something resembling stability; and then (this is obviously the key): sell the banks back to the private sector.

Obviously, what Team Obama is wrestling with is substantially greater in scope than the Swedish crisis. Could it work? Who knows. But it's reasonable to think that it actually could. There's a historical precedent for it, and it recognizes insolvency rather than illiquidity is the problem. In English, that means the banks aren't merely short of cash, they're fucking broke. And, in capitalism, what happens when businesses go broke? They get bought up by other businesses, or their assets go to the bank. But what happens when the banks are broke?

Whatever the correct answer to that question is, government intervention clearly has to be mentioned in it somewhere--delicate right-wing sensibilities about what is and is not capitalism or socialism be damned. Welcome to the 21st Century. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

* Come to think of it, we just had a major political realignment here already. Here's hoping we can skip the riots part.

(P.S. Some of these links courtesy of here.)

new board

2009-02-02T17:18:00.002-06:00

The ol Mackie 1604, alas, is not as reliable as it once was. I saw a 24 channel Allen & Heath System 8 put up on the local Craigslist for....well, not quite peanuts exactly, but it was a pretty good deal. The guy said a friend of his who worked for FedEx managed to get it from some place, and thru his job was able to transport it from whereever it came from to KC. Then that guy passed away, and the guy I bought it from (a friend of the deceased) said the last owner's family had given it to him to more or less get rid of. Serial # = 4144, which makes it a MkIII, probably built 1987-1988 or so.

Pretty much everything seems to work. Some of the knobs and fader caps are busted off, and it's missing some case screws, but that's strictly cosmetic; I get some noise when I adjust some of the input trim pots, but it's not too overwhelming; the VUs don't light up and some of them (although not 1/2 and the master L/R) don't seem to work at all; and some of the more arcane jacks on the rear panel don't seem to want to function either. (I'd love it if I could get the cue/monitor outs to work, for example....)

But all in all, it sounds fairly clean and well-taken care of, even if it is a little beat-up looking. Here it is....

So I went out to Olathe to look at it....I didn't have the full amount at the time anyway, so I figured I could pay half and take the power supply. Instead, he told me to take the board and come back for the PSU! Luckily my neighbor was home, and he helped me drag this heavy sonofabitch into the basement. I reckon the board weighs north of 80 lbs, maybe 100.

So I finally got the power supply about a week ago. The seller said he had gone to the trouble of ordering the PSU directly from A&H before he sold it, which would indeed make the damn thing a lot easier to sell. The literature refers to a different model # than this one, so the seller was definitely telling the truth about getting a brand new PSU.

What sold me were 1) the direct outs on every input channel....

....and 2) the weird group output/tape return section.

(These jacks correspond to the fader section on the far right hand side on the front of the mixer.)

For some reason, the group routing buttons on each input channel (left side of mixer) and the returns (outputs) from tape go to the same faders, and you switch between the two functions with a button. The bus outputs are male XLR, which I find bizarre, but was probably really useful for anybody using an 8-track tape deck, which is what this was obviously designed for. Since this thing has only three (mono!) auxes, and my headphone amp is eating up two of them, I really need to get those bus outs working.

What has me excited is that since I record to a Delta 1010LT, I can connect all 8 outputs to my 8 tape returns, which is after all what they're for. When I had the Mackie hooked up, I had to either run the outputs from the Delta to the patchbay or not use them at all. I mostly didn't use them. I don't really have much outboard gear to speak of, so I guess it's not that big a deal. But I'll still be able to create different headphone mixes just by adjusting the aux 1-2 sends on the tape returns (instead of having to mute things on the computer).

And if (when, really) I get a 2nd Delta, I'll still be able to route all 8 of that card's outputs to tape returns 9-16, giving me even more flexibility. This will save me a lot of repatching. And if for whatever strange reason I need to do something drastic with Delta outputs 13-14, I can just stroll to the back of the A&H and move the cable over to a leftover input channel (cause I'll always have several spare input channels, which is a good thing), push one button to send it to a group fader, and then I can zip it anywhere in the room from the patchbay.

Or I could just get insert cables and wire all of those to the patchbay.

Today's lesson: jacks are a good thing.

presented without comment

2009-02-02T15:15:00.001-06:00

sometimes the jokes write themselves

2009-01-30T11:40:00.002-06:00

The Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at Bush in Baghdad has become a folk hero in the Arab world. Turns out a sculptor was inspired to build a giant copper shoe monument at an orphanage in Tikrit (Saddam's hometown), with the assistance of the orphans. The statue was unveiled Thursday.

By Friday, Iraqi authorities made them take it down.

(Maximum Irony bonus: Bush said at the time, "Here I am, getting ready to answer questions from a free press [sic] in a democratic [sic] Iraq [sic], and a guy stands up and throws his shoe. And it was bizarre, and it was an interesting way for a person to express himself [sic].")

PIVOT

2009-01-20T13:57:00.002-06:00

long valley of history stretches out behind,
long vista of humanity stretches out before,
from the Capitol Steps to the Washington Monument.
quite a view from this Mountaintop, isn't it?

colonization,
Middle Passage,
servitude,
Revolution,
Manifest Destiny,
Civil War,
domestic terrorism and oppression,
World War,
Depression and the bowl,
World War again,
Vietnam,
Selma Birmingham Philadelphia Chicago,
assassinations,
the Wall,
the Towers,
Afghanistan,
Iraq,
Katrina,
Depression again,
and here we are,
a bend in the road,
a switchback as it goes down on the far side of the mountain.

quite a ride.
never thought i'd live to see the day.
but here we are.

roll up them sleeves
we've got a lot of work to do.

Regime Change

2009-01-20T12:49:00.002-06:00

Yes We Did.

Not much else to say, really. Bush has finally taken the Last Helicopter Ride, and we have somebody at the very top who might actually be somebody worth believing in. I was born during the Carter Administration and I'd never thought I'd see the day when I would actually give a shit about the President, but here's that day, and here I am, and here we are.

Yes We Will.

1 week to go

2009-01-13T14:16:00.002-06:00

in the Age of Bush. Can't wait. Can't really believe it's been 8 years, either.

On a tangentially related note, here's another billmon column.

This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier -- skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.

Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole: banished fairly quickly from public discussion and corporate media coverage -- in much the way the Iran-Contra scandal (go ahead, Wiki it) was almost immediately forgotten or ignored once it became clear that the fix was in. America apparently had its big experiment with truthtelling and reform in the post-Watergate era, and the experience was so unpleasant that nobody (or nobody who counts) is willing to go there again. That would be like expecting the Baby Boomers to start dropping acid again.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing....

too big to fail

2009-01-11T14:34:00.002-06:00

Worthwhile op-ed on the possibility of the USA defaulting on its debt (gulp).

The phrase "too big to fail" is tossed around lightly these days. It gets applied to businesses in a capitalist system (where you'd think the Invisible Hand would occasionally dictate the failure of this or that business); thus does the speaker imply that the government must intervene and guarantee the debts of that private business. If the government overextends itself, could it likewise fail to meet its obligations?

And when you get right down to it, ain't the government the only thing that's genuinely Too Big To Fail?

Uncle Sam is not at all likely to default any time soon. But really, there is untold danger lurking in the path of unrestrained guarantees to companies that were 1) allowed to become Too Big To Fail (and thus just too goddamn big) in the first place and 2) engaging in pie-in-the-sky magical thinking that was not only detrimental to their bottom line, but ultimately to the government's bottom line as well.

Those people, in my humble opinion, should be prosecuted for fraud. We can spend billions per year prosecuting people for victimless crimes; how about let's spend some money busting white collar criminals too?

Now, if we can just figure out how to call it a War On somethingorother....

more hilarity

2009-01-08T17:29:00.002-06:00

According to this blurb, everybody's favorite pinata Sarah Palin has given an interview to ~~a talking asshole~~ conservative pundit John Ziegler (more on him in a second) wherein she criticizes Tina Fey & Katie Couric for....being mean to her, or something. I don't really care. Palin has seemingly not learned (perhaps because her time in the Presidential fishbowl was so brief--merely two months or so) when to cut her losses.

But like an open-mouthed motorist both fascinated and repulsed by a particularly gruesome accident, I feel like I can't ignore some of this absolutely pure, undiluted stupidity on display.

"I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen," Palin said in the interview. "I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration--that’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society."

Katie Couric was already the CBS anchorwoman before Palin sashayed on to the scene. There is no way Couric or CBS "exploited" Palin. They didn't make her look dumb; Palin did that on her own. And as for Fey, well....did Sarah Palin actually watch any SNL before McCain decided to pluck her from obscurity? And you can hardly fault Fey for milking the impersonation, since it was 1) hilarious 2) deadly accurate (half of her dialogue was direct quotes!) and 3) Tina Fey had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on your perspective) of being Palin's spitting image to begin with.

And it doesn't say anything at all about "our society." You had several pratfalls in front of the entire world, and Couric and Fey had nothing to do with it. If they hadn't been on the scene, you'd have tripped over your tongue in front of somebody else. Like Charlie Gibson.

The Alaska governor was particularly upset with an SNL skit during which Fey's version of Palin said, "I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers."

The line was a clear reference to Palin's 18-year-old daughter Bristol and her fiancé Levi Johnston. The two announced shortly before the GOP convention that they were expecting a baby and had plans to marry.

"The mama grizzly rises up in me, hearing things like that," she said of a skit. "Here again, cool, fine come attack me. But when you make a suggestion like that that attacks a kid, it kills me."

1) Only a Republican would miss the joke in that line.
2) "Mama grizzly"? Didn't we have enough animal metaphors for Palin in the campaign?
3) By publicly complaining about being the butt of jokes (you're a politician, not royalty) you are ensuring your place as a permanent fixture on late night TV.

In the wide-ranging interview, Palin also faulted the McCain campaign for agreeing to a series of sit-downs with Couric after the first one appeared to go so poorly.

"I knew it didn’t go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that," she said. "And my question to the campaign was, after it didn’t go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more...going back for more was not a wise decision either."

During one of those follow-up interviews, Palin took heat for appearing to be unable to name the newspapers or magazines she reads: "Um of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years," was the Alaska governor's response.

In the interview with Ziegler, Palin called that answer "too flippant" and suggested the question itself offended her.

"To me the question was more along the lines of, ‘Do you read, what do you guys do up there, what is it that you read?’"

"...Katie, you’re not the center of everybody’s universe," Palin added off-handedly.

More finger-pointing and blame-dodging from the party of personal responsibility.

The "what do you read?" question was as soft a ball as you will ever find in an interview two months before a Presidential election without an incumbent running. Sarah, honey, baby, sweetheart, nobody knew who the fuck you were or what you thought about anything and we needed to learn very quickly. The question was designed to give you a chance to hint at your relative conservatism and/or centrism. If you came out and said "Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall St. Journal, and FOX News," that would have told us one thing. If you'd instead mentioned the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and CNN, that would have told us something else.

Instead you froze up like spit on Christmas in Anchorage and nervously stammered that you'd read all newspapers and magazines, at which point millions of people winced simultaneously. The question was not intended to put down Alaskans; the question was intended to reveal something about yourself. Which you certainly did.

Blaming Team McCain....well, they were dumb or desperate enough to shove you out there in front of the cameras, so I guess they can be faulted for that. But once you were on the air, Palin, nobody put your foot in your own mouth for you. You did that. You will have to live with that for the rest of your life, and I'd feel bad for you if you weren't, you know, such a sanctimonious fool.

And in case we haven't had enough chutzpah yet, we get the following:

Palin, who has long criticized media coverage of her campaign performance, also said she is interested to see if reporters are equally tough on Caroline Kennedy as she pursues the appointment to the likely-vacant Senate seat in New York.

"I’ve been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled, and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope," she said.

"It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here, also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be," she also said.

Uh-huh. Caroline Kennedy is trying to get appointed to the Senate. You tried to get elected to the Vice Presidency. Kennedy will indeed face less intense national scrutiny, and it won't be because of some mystical liberal media bias, it's because the election's fucking over and she's not trying to be Vice fucking President. Jeez.

And in any event, after an initial honeymoon, Kennedy no longer appears to be the smart money favorite (that would be Cuomo). So maybe she did get some scrutiny after all, eh?

* * * * *

As for this clown Ziegler....where to begin.

In 2005 Ziegler was the subject of a David Foster Wallace piece on right-wing talk radio. Ziegler seems like he's about par for the course as far as conservo radio shouters go, but he was very unhappy with his portrayal by Wallace. As I read it, and from the other horseshit that Ziegler has spewed over the years, I thought DFW was quite a bit more charitable than he might have been. And in any event, Wallace's writing has a tendency to focus on the flaws and warts as a way of illuminating the entire subject, no matter how uncomfortable. (Actually, if Wallace's writing does not make you at least a little uncomfortable you're probably too distracted with the footnotes.)

Ziegler's blog post noting Wallace's suicide in September was characteristically repugnant, petty, and ego-centric. It begins like this:

On Friday, acclaimed writer David Foster Wallace hanged himself. The literary world was rocked by the news. I was neither as surprised, nor as upset by this tragedy as the many in the elite realm of reputable literature seemed to be.

and gets worse from there (including bold proclamations of Ziegler's own ignorance, and a pronouncement that Wallace was a hack, which is an opinion shared by basically nobody).

As if picking a fight with one genius wasn't bad enough, Ziegler managed to start a very public feud with stats wizard Nate Silver, who was already famous for inventing PECOTA, an eerily accurate numerical simulation used for predicting the future performances of baseball players. Silver applied that expertise to the world of politics and came up with the renowned 538, which provided very good and very timely statistical analysis of opinion polls and did a solid job forecasting the election returns.

Ziegler has decided to leave talk radio (whew) and become a documentarian. (I think the righties are still feeling stung by both the accuracy and the financial success of Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, because the conservative documentary genre has exploded in the last few years. Good luck with that.) In pursuit of that aim, Ziegler commissioned a push poll in the wake of the election that was criticized by Silver.

Silver followed this up with a heated interview of Ziegler that justly became well-known in the blogosphere for revealing even more of Ziegler's over-the-top douchebaggery.

(The general flavor of the interview can be summed up well by how it ends:

NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.

)

Anyway, I say all this to note that Ziegler has done well to rise above being yet another grumpy right wing radio zombie wallowing in mediocrity; he has managed to humiliate himself with two completely different intellectual heavyweights while at the same time kissing up to someone who makes GW Bush look comsopolitan, well-informed, and in full command of the English language. Quite an acheivement, I'd say.

OK, that's enough of that for now. Feeling a bit under the weather today. Perhaps there will be some more music blogging later....

hilarity

2009-01-08T12:44:00.002-06:00

Larry Flynt asks Congress to bail out Big Porno.

L.F. is not exactly going to make anybody's list of favorite people, but he sure has a knack for embarassing the Establishment.

Happy Fail Year

2009-01-05T02:45:00.002-06:00

Because I can....

This is just hilarious....this is totally something I would do....

and then there's this....

One of my New Years resolutions is to post more YouTube.

1930s watch

2008-12-06T16:23:00.002-06:00

Idled workers occupy factory in Chicago

By RUPA SHENOY, Associated Press Writer Rupa Shenoy, Associated Press Writer – Sat Dec 6, 1:46 pm ET

CHICAGO – Workers laid off from their jobs at a factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.

About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began their sit-in Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant's operation.

Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days' notice required by law before shutting down.

Workers also were angered when company officials didn't show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, she said.

During the peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.

"We're doing something we haven't since the 1930s, so we're trying to make it work," Fried said.

Union officials said another meeting with the company is scheduled for Monday.

Representatives of Republic Windows did not immediately respond Saturday to calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said authorities were aware of the situation and officers were patrolling the area.

Crain's Chicago Business reported that the company's monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million from $4 million during the past month. In a memo to the union, obtained by the business journal, Republic CEO Rich Gillman said the company had "no choice but to shut our doors."

via.

P.S.
Deep Thought--when the economy went into recession at the beginning of George W Bush's 1st term, it was Bill Clinton's fault. When the economy went into recession at the end of George W Bush's 2nd term, it was Barack Obama's fault.

Saturday night links

2008-11-08T19:33:00.003-06:00

On 1/17/2001 the Onion gave us this classic. Damn, was that prescient.

Today, we get this, every sentence of which is priceless. Reading it makes me as hopeful as the 2001 article made me despair.

On a related note, this WaPo article talking about various Bush decisions that Team Obama is already planning to overturn. The 1st 100 Days are going to be something to behold, it looks like. The article specifcally refers to the federal ban on embryonic stem cell research, the ban on family planning groups from mentioning abortion, and the asinine prevention of California from regulating C02 emissions from cars.

The next four years are going to be rough in some ways, but at least the ship of state is no longer being piloted by Mr. 20% any longer....

And, for the hell of it, here's a fantastic video of Tool ripping it the fuck up in a little bitty club in '92, in front of what sounds like a couple dozen people who are definitely getting their money's worth.

There's a whole bunch of these videos from the same set, and they're all amazing. For being taken on a VHS camcorder, the sound is pretty awesome.

ouch

2008-11-08T01:44:00.001-06:00

"People were worried about the Bradley effect. Apparently, it was not nearly as strong as the Bush effect."
---Jay Leno

unbelievable

2008-11-06T02:48:00.002-06:00

Do not adjust your TV set. That really was on Fox.

There will be more of these bizarre Palin stories. We know there is footage from the Couric interviews that hasn't seen the light of day yet....

PRESIDENT OBAMA

2008-11-05T11:14:00.003-06:00

WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

ahem.

I am too fucking hungover to type. But let me just say FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....I mean, let me just say that I thought McCain's concession speech was possibly the classiest, most dignified thing he did all year. He was truly gracious, and I thank him for that.

And Obama's speech was absolute fucking dynamite. As soon as I get done absorbing the rest of what happened, I'm going to watch that shit on YouTube again, cause that was the damnedest speech I've ever seen.

We've got a D governor of Missouri now (bye bye baby Blunt!), and it seems that every MO ballot measure passed.

In fact, Amendment 1 (English as official language) passed 86-14, Nixon beat Hulshof 58-40, and the Presidential race is currently at McCain 49.4-Obama 49.2. I would like to know more about all those ticket splitters, but I'm sure we'll hear more about it in the next couple weeks.

By the way, we just elected the black guy. Never thought I'd live to see it. HOT DAMN.

riffing off of my last post

2008-10-31T01:26:00.004-05:00

The fat lady clears her throat....

Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama's ad blitz during the campaign's final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists.

....

The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

"The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans. "The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel."

It's looking like the weather will hold up, FWIW.

-----

Bonus link: Handy list of poll closing times.

people keep asking me

2008-10-30T01:21:00.004-05:00

why I'm so confident that Barack Obama's going to win.

First, 538 says so, and Nate Silver knows his statistics.

Second, I give you the dramatically intensifying pre-election Republican circular firing squad.

****

The thought of being both, at this point, pretty much a straight-ticket Democratic voter and simultaneously believing that our guy is going to win the Presidency is unusual. Surreal, even. So I don't post this lightly, or out of a sense of hubris.

But Obama is leading every single Kerry state by double digits. Those states (the West Coast, the Upper Midwest [MN/MI/WI/IL], and New England) = 252 electoral votes. 270 is the magic number. Add to those states IA, NM, and CO, where he is leading comfortably, and he's already at 273.

That's before even considering FL, OH, NC, VA, WV, MO, IN, NV, ND, MT, GA, or AZ (!), some fraction of which will go to Obama. That fraction will equal Obama's mandate. NV and VA are pretty much already in Obama's column; FL, OH, NC, MO, IN are all toss-ups. If Obama can flip any one of ND, MT, GA, and AZ, the rout will be on.

Honestly appraising the aggregated polling data, Obama looks likely to be the first Democrat to crack 50% of the popular vote since LBJ in 1964. He would have a Senate majority of roughly 14-15 seats (give or take) and an imposing House majority somewhere north of 50 seats.

That reminds me, I need to go get some champagne....

P.S. For what it's worth, the Obama folks are definitely not taking anything for granted....

SUSA: Obama 51, McCain 43 in Missouri!

2008-10-13T13:11:00.002-05:00

+8. Hot damn! Looks like Obama has made huge gains in the suburbs of KC and St. Louis in the past few weeks.

Starting to look like McCain is
!

euphemism alert/thoughts on the RED MENACE

2008-10-12T20:25:00.006-05:00

European nations back banks
Euro-zone leaders held an emergency session Sunday. Measures include injections of capital.

Last Updated: October 12, 2008: 4:14 PM ET

PARIS (AP) -- Nations in Europe's single-currency zone agreed Sunday to temporarily guarantee bank refinancing as part of a raft of emergency measures to ease the credit crisis.

The head of the region's central bank welcomed the unity -- but warned there is more work to do.

"The force of unity that we showed today is a fundamental element of confidence," said European Central Bank Chief Jean-Claude Trichet. But, he added: "there are still many things to do," both by governments and central bankers.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the measures -- which range from help with liquidity and injections of capital to new accounting rules for banks -- will be enacted "without delay" in the 15 countries using the euro -- with simultaneous Cabinet meetings being held Monday in Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere.

OK. The term "injection of capital" is being tossed around pretty frequently, and as far as I can tell, all that means is "nationalization". Which of course = socialism. Cue scary music.

Why are the media using a gobbledygook phrase to avoid calling it what it really is (the government taking over a bank)? Beats the hell out of me. I think part of it is that the Reagan-era mantra of "government isn't the solution, government is the problem" has become such a deep-seated part of our political discourse over the last three decades that we don't seem to know how to talk about governmental solutions to problems any more. Every disaster is further proof that the government can't solve problems. And there have been a whole bunch of disasters over the last eight years.

So we have no way of having an effective national discourse about what really smart folks are saying is probably the ony way to address with the problem. Just mentioning the word "socialism" in most corners in America will draw instant hisses and bared teeth. We don't have any words to describe nationalization--state takeover of private business by fiat--because, duh, we're Americans and we believe in the free market, d-duh.I mean, didn't the Cold War prove to everybody that capitalism is superior?

But the American government has always intervened in the markets! We've never been a truly, 100% purely free market, because such a thing implies no regulation at all....clearly ridiculous. Anarchy is worse than any form of government--Madison famously said "if men were angels, they would have no need of government." So it seems to me that the art of statecraft is in guiding the nation on the sliding scale between 100% nationalization of the means of production (communism) and 0% government intervention in markets (pure laissez-faire capitalism).

On one extreme is abolition of private property, and on the other is plutocracy (which is pretty much where we're at now).

In fact, you may have been quickly laughed out of the room for suggesting such a thing, but maybe it's possible that the disintegration of global Reaganist economic policy is analogous (imperfectly) to the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 80s/early 90s. Their economic philosophy had ceased bearing any relationship to reality, and it eventually caught up to them. While I don't think the US is going to break into dozens of different mini-republics any time soon, we've definitely been knocked down several pegs in the global King-of-the-Hill game, for what ultimately is the same reason: our economic philosophy ceased bearing any relationship to reality, and it eventually caught up to us.

George "Fucking" Bush (who has done nothing more useful than screaming REMAIN CALM!!!!! ALL IS WELL!!!!! like Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House throughout this debacle) ran the national debt from $5T to $10T. He managed to do that by giving huge tax breaks to rich folks*, and by playing political games with the budgetary process to keep the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq from counting in the official budget. And then, there's this....

Although not included in the figures reported by the government, the U.S. government has moved to more explicitly support the soundness of obligations of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, starting in July via the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, and the September 7, 2008 Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) conservatorship of both government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). The on- or off-balance sheet obligations of those two independent GSEs is just over $5 trillion.[27] The government accounts for these corporations as if they are unconnected to its balance sheet. The U.S. Treasury contracted at the inception of the conservatorship to receive US$ 1 billion dollars in senior preferred shares, and a warrant for 79.9% of the common shares from each GSE, as a fee to fund, as needed, up to US$ 100 billion total for each GSE (in exchange for more senior preferred stock), in order to maintain solvency and adequate capital ratios at the GSEs, thereby supporting all senior (normal) liabilities, subordinated indebtedness, and guarantees of the two firms. Some observers see this as an effective nationalization of the companies that ultimately places taxpayers at risk for all their liabilities[28] The net exposure to taxpayers is difficult to determine at the time of the takeover and depends on several factors, such as declines in housing prices and losses on mortgage assets in the future.[29] Over 98 percent of Fannie's loans were paying timely during 2008.[30] Both Fannie and Freddie had positive net worth as of the date of the takeover, meaning the value of their assets exceeded their liabilities.[31][32] The Congressional Budget Office has recommended incorporating the assets and liabilities of the two companies into the federal budget due to the degree of government control over the entities.[33] The 5-year credit default swap spread for U.S. treasuries had risen to 18 basis points per annum as of 9 September 2008 as a result of market perception regarding the increased debt load of the government.[33]

Ugh. Just thinking about this shit makes me want to reach for the ~~vodka~~ Budweiser.

And then, on top of that, we have the collapse of the housing bubble, which triggered the problems with banks, which is liable to trigger problems in the ~$60T credit default swap market. (60 trillion. That is not a typo. Do not adjust your TV set.)

So perhaps there's a parallel here to the way the USSR fell apart; the US, by contrast, is in much better shape and is not headed for anything like the total political meltdown of the Soviets. But there's a similarity in the blind adherence to ideology and browbeating or ignoring Ph.D.s that knew better, the stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality until the roof comes caving in, and the self-inflicted nature of many of the wounds. (And there's also the parallel endless occupations of Afghanistan..........)

So I guess, in light of all that, which is surely rattling around in a great many national reporters' brains, if not in so many words, maybe it's no surprise that we can't talk very well about moving somewhat to the left on the economic intervention/freedom scale.

Again, as far as I can tell, when a bank is insolvent, the government has to step in and clean up after them. That means the bank doesn't get to keep operating as a private business, which is what Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted in the original bailout package. But....I think we're finally beginning to see Paulson change his mind and start mulling over bank takeovers, which is what Europe is already doing. (Note that the linked Seattle Times article manages to use both the "inject capital" euphemism and the phrase "partial nationalization".)

Will it work? No idea. Maybe. I hope so. I don't think we have any other realistic options.

Which means the FREE MARKET UBER ALLES crowd is just going to have to get over this. The more they bitch and moan about "socialism," as if they have any idea what they're talking about, just makes them sound more and more disconnected from the world the rest of us are living in.

* Remember the Clinton surplus? Bush claimed we needed tax cuts because we were running a surplus. By 2004, when he'd managed to blow thru the surplus and get us back into good ol' Republican deficit spending, he claimed we clearly needed more tax cuts, because we were running a deficit. YEEEEEEEEAARRRRGHHHH

EDIT: Devilstower muses on very similar territory here. He's better at articulating this stuff.

pix from the show

2008-10-09T17:23:00.002-05:00

Sorry this took so long....

loading up....

By the time I got there, Jeff had been working for hours already....

Jeff up on the ladder....

Those are cool looking....

"Beauty Fades"....

cue the Jaws theme....

the space....

The full set. I didn't pick these up until the day before the event....

Jeff surprised me with a very nice print of the four CD covers joined together....

all set up....

people....

playback....

L-R: Kevin, my guitar player; Bryan, my roommate; Chris, my neighbor; and Sara, Jeff's wife....

the plot thickens

2008-09-30T21:14:00.003-05:00

OK, so I've been procrastinating on putting up pictures of the event. I had a bunch uploaded to a hosting web site, but couldn't get blogger to load them; I think I have to lower the resolution of the images. Which sucks cause I was going to slap 20 or 30 pix up here.

Anyway, so I hear the news has gotten pretty dramatic lately (Sep 08 has been genuinely nuts, hasn't it? I'm glad it's over).

To recap, here's September in a nutshell:

McCain picks ~~Dan Quayle~~ somebody named Sarah Palin to be VP

They have a debate which was basically a draw....

....which is remarkable cause it was unremarkable when Sen. Black Guy proved he could hold his own in a debate with Senator POW

McCain blurted out that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong"

Then a bunch of banks exploded....

....which made the whole economy explode....

....which made McCain declare that the economy was in so much danger he had to suspend his campaign (which he didn't) to work on a bailout bill....

....which promptly failed in the House....

....causing a huge drop in the stock market.

And then today the Dow made up most of that. I dunno about anybody else but I plain don't understand why anybody would ever fuck with the stock market.

Q: What's the difference between a casino and the stock market?
A: The casino is regulated! (rimshot)

* * * * *

And then Biden and Palin are going to debate on Thursday. The entire world (especially Tina Fey) is waiting with breathless anticipation to see what pearls of wisdom and nuggets of reg'lar folksy charm she'll bring to the debate.

Biden is facing a major Florida State vs. Div III One-Stoplight Tech dilemma....there's no upside at all in winning, but if you lose, oh brother....

* * * * *

OK....so the real reason I wanted to post was because I saw this article on Kit Bond being linked to the firing of Todd Graves.

If you remember, there has been no shortage of controversy over the firings of several US Attorneys. It is undisputed that the President has the authority to fire US Attorneys, but which Attorneys got fired apparently was due to political influence. This is one of several different Bush-era scandals that will be an indelible part of the man's lasting legacy; and like many of those, this one hasn't had anything like a full accounting of just what the hell happened. This week however, lost in the hubbub over the presidential campaign and the Wall St. Circus there was a report from the DOJ Inspector General's office, and it apparently is quite a doozy.

Graves was the last U.S. attorney to be counted among those fired through the work of Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales and Michael Battle, director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney. His case differed from the others in many ways -- he was fired in January 2006, almost 11 months earlier than the other removed attorneys, and the circumstances around his dismissal were unclear.

But according to the report, Graves' removal was a result of multiple calls and emails from Bonds' legal counsel Jack Bartling, to members of White House Counsel -- who "kicked over" the complaints to the Justice Department.

Bond's problems with Graves' began in late fall of 2004. Bond's office had been having problems with another Missouri Congressman -- Rep. Sam Graves (R), U.S. Attorney Graves' brother. Between October and December 2004, a staffer from Bond's office reportedly called former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves to ask for his help in convincing his brother to fire his chief of staff. When Graves refused to intervene, the staffer told him "they could no longer protect [his] job," and hung up, according to the report.

Shortly after, in February 2005, Bartling began placing calls to the White House Counsel's office about Graves, pushing for a replacement. By the fall of 2005, the complaints had been passed to the Justice Department. In December, Bartling reached out again to Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, who had interviewed Bartling when he had been applying for a position in that department.

In a call shortly before Graves' firing, Bartling asked Elston to, "'keep his ear to the ground' to ensure that the Senator's role in requesting White House action on
Graves was not being disseminated within the Department," and make sure that Bonds name was never linked to Graves' ouster, the report states.

I don't think there's any appropriate response to this except what the fuck?!?

What's bizarre is that Bond is relatively moderate issues-wise compared to most of his Republican colleagues, and Sam Graves is definitely a conservative. Makes you wonder just what the hell it was that caused a problem between Bond's staff and Sam Graves' staff. (I downloaded the PDF of the IG's report to see if there's more information in there, but it's ~400 pages long, so I haven't exactly dove right in....)

If this gets any attention at all, it'll be blockbuster news in Missouri. Thought it was too interesting not to share, especially since the entire economy is being sucked into a huge black hole and nobody's paying attention to anything else.

that's Pat frigging Buchanan

2008-08-29T00:04:00.001-05:00

I am so looking forward to the debates....

re: South Ossetia

2008-08-18T18:41:00.003-05:00

The mighty billmon's latest essay. As usual, it's both illuminating and depressing.

There is more insight there in just one paragraph than in 24 hours of CNN.

as promised....

2008-08-14T21:31:00.004-05:00

....previews.

#2 corrosion dub 4.24
#40-41 tectonic/l'etat c'est moi 4.46
#59-60 city on a hill/manifest destiny 4.37
#67 abandoned malls 4.30

You may have noticed that some of these are very quiet. Don't hesitate to adjust your volume level; you will hear additional detail.

coming attractions

2008-08-08T21:31:00.003-05:00

You'll notice a new link on the roll to your right. Jeff is an asskicking photographer and there are plenty of strange/beautiful things to look at on his site. Jeff and I are collaborating on an upcoming show called CORROSION, which will premiere @ 1617 Main St., KCMO (2nd floor, above Nara), Friday September 5th, 6 pm.

I attended one of Jeff's shows a while back at a loft at 18th & Troost. A friend of his contributed some very interesting ambient music as a backdrop, which I thought complemented his artwork very well. That gave me an idea: why not try to create a single piece of music that would not repeat at all during the entire time the gallery was open? I bounced the idea off of Jeff, who loved it. We started talking about this in fall of 07 sometime, so this has been in the works for a long time. It's evolved considerably since then; the amount of stuff we've decided not to do is pretty huge....

The audio and images will have some themes in common (in particular processes of decay and urban blight), but the material in each will be independent. However, due to an effect called pareidolia, since the work is very abstract, each and every viewer/listener will interpret what they experience uniquely. If you are looking at the picture of the semi-destroyed pianos while the music is chaotic and percussive, you will make sense of it one way; if you are looking at the same picture while the music is tranquil and drony, you will understand it in another way.

The very abstract/experimental nature of both the music and photography will encourage this effect, and hopefully the extreme length and open form of the music will make it impossible for anyone to experience the same combination of music and art. Also, the speakers being scattered around the room means that the "sound" of the room will fluctuate unpredictably depending on where you are in the room and how many other people there are, whether they're talking, etc. Since there will be no one "correct" way of experiencing the show, one is left only with their five senses as guide.

I am getting very close to completing the work; running time is going to be just slightly over four hours (looks like it'll be about 4:03, but I'm not quite done yet....), which has presented some interesting technical challenges in creating, storing, manipulating, and compiling the whole thing. Most of it is texture and drones; one sound drifts into another, usually without clearly delineated boundaries (although there are several abrupt transitions and surprises scattered throughout).

You can view what Jeff will be displaying in the "glassworks" gallery on his page. I'll have some mp3 previews up shortly (once I can figure out what the hell to excerpt!).

"If you have a well-maintained car.....

2008-08-05T15:51:00.003-05:00

THEN THE TERRISTS HAVE ALREADY WON!!!!!!!!!!!"

A few thoughts....

1. He's clearly dead right, and I don't see how anybody can argue otherwise with a straight face.

2. When was the last time you remember a Democratic presidential candidate actually using the word "lie"?

3. Somewhere Jimmy Carter is putting on a sweater and having a pretty good laugh.

4. McCain cannot be excited about facing Obama in the debates.

5. I'm confused as to what the point of the tire gauge stunt was in the first place....do Republicans genuinely think that "conserving gas is for dirty fucking hippies" is a winning message this year? They've gotten some good polling on the proposals for increased offshore drilling. Which means absolutely fuck-all in terms of what is sound policy, but I guess they feel it gives them license to throw feces at the people who correctly point out that drilling isn't going to do a damn thing to fix the problem.

The problem, of course, is that the economy depends on a finite resource which will gradually become more and more expensive due to the highly esoteric and obscure laws of supply and demand. And here I was thinking that the people who lift up the free market as a panacea for everything would be familiar with supply and demand....

Even if increased American drilling could improve the situation right this minute (which it can't), it would still only provide a temporary solution. Eventually, the economy must be weaned off of oil. It is nowhere written that an oil-based economy must be permanent.

(Anyway, this post is for Sara who was giving me shit about not updating the blog since ~~the end of March~~ a jillion years ago.)

Pre-Edison recordings discovered

2008-03-27T15:55:00.002-05:00

Whoa.

Apparently a Frenchman figured out how to record sound well before Edison did. But it took 150 years and lasers to actually play back the sound. Edison's place in history is safe because his system could play audio as well as record. Still, it's hard for me not to find something called a "phonautogram" cool.

If I read the article correctly, they had to take the paper (yes, paper) and scan it optically, and then reconstruct the waveforms for playback. The gadget was hand-cranked, so the playback rate would have been erratic and would have to be corrected for. That sounds like it was really the hard/time-consuming part....historians have been carefully scanning really old documents of various sorts for a while now, but converting those images to sound (while accounting for the wobbly speed of the machine, and any other idiosyncracies it had) is new.

5 Years

2008-03-19T11:34:00.002-05:00

US deaths: ~4,000
US wounded: ~29,000
Iraqi deaths: unknown (minimum six figures)
Total cost to American taxpayers: $474B (and rising)

Dear George, Dick, Tony, Colin, and all the rest: hang your fucking heads today, you red-handed criminals.

Samplitude 10

2008-03-07T13:54:00.002-06:00

arrived yesterday. I am one happy geek.

Just because I can, here's a picture of the gigantic flag hanging on the only wall in the house big enough to hold it:

Super Fat Tuesday

2008-02-05T19:28:00.000-06:00

WV Republicans actually have a convention (not a caucus or election). Today McCain threw his support to Huckabee to prevent Romney from claiming the delegates. That alone will make Limbaugh apoplectic tomorrow.

Here's what's going to send him into orbit: so did Ron Paul!

Paul and McCain teamed up to hand WV to Huckabee in order to screw Romney. Yowza.

for what it's worth....

2008-01-31T22:42:00.000-06:00

In Missouri, Obama has been endorsed by Sen. Claire McCaskill, and Clinton has been endorsed by Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (former mayor of KC--they named 47th St. after him, is all you need to know).

This means that Obama has been endorsed by the state's highest profile white female Democrat and Clinton has been endorsed by the state's highest profile black male Democrat.

MO: the ultimate border state.

*****

While I'm at it....

HRC will probably win MO, but as of maybe a few days ago, it's looking like (if we can believe the polling) Super Fat Tuesday will be indecisive....this has become a delegate race (for the first time in decades) and we will probably have meaningful conventions on both sides. I was convinced that either Obama or HRC would be pulling away by now, but it just hasn't happened.

I have no idea when this thing will end. If either Obama or Clinton can score some sort of surprise GOTV coup on 2/5 and knock the other out, then the nomination will be decided. But it's looking likely that we'll have to keep going, into the post-Super Duper Tuesday primary season. And the stakes get higher....

Personally, I was hoping we could have had this figured out by now....especially since McCain is very close to being the presumptive nominee on the other side.

*****

I'm surprised Edwards dropped out so soon. He could have plausibly had ~10% of delegates at the convention, which if Obama and Clinton were nearly at parity (45-45), could have made him the kingmaker. For whatever reason, he decided to end the campaign. Perhaps this will make the brokered convention less likely.

Here's hoping....

surprise!

2008-01-22T19:43:00.000-06:00

Some good news for once: Matt Blunt took everybody by surprise today by announcing he wasn't going to run for re-election this November.

And there was much rejoicing....

MO Republicans seem to be caught off-guard; Blunt re-election campaign ads were already on the air (!), possible replacement candidates had to get back to reporters about whether they were running or not. Suddenly the shadow of a multi-candidate free-for-all is looming over the Republican primary.

Obviously the immediate question is: what changed? Blunt's tenure has been scandal-ridden....it's possible a really big scandal is going to break in the next few days, or something.

Whatever....the sound you hear is champagne being popped at Nixon for Guv 08 HQ....

Primaries

2008-01-19T18:28:00.000-06:00

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Romney won Michigan and stays alive, Clinton wins NV but apparently Obama takes more NV delegates (?!), Mike Bloomberg is talking to Perotistas, Giuliani uses images of the Towers falling....

And then there's Ron Paul, the Little Engine That Could.

This has been goddamn entertaining, if nothing else.

the frustrating art of sampling

2008-01-16T13:12:00.000-06:00

OK. So you're not likely to have to read much at all about somebody like Tom Cruise on this blog. And rest assured, this post isn't really about Tom.

I came across this earlier and it's driving me crazy. No, it's not the rambling pseudo-religious cant, the insane jargon, the zeal, the free-association, or the general nuttiness of the whole thing. Nope. That's what makes it perfect for recasting it in a new context to make a point about how dopey Scientology is.

No, the thing that's bugging the shit out of me is that there's music running throughout the whole thing, and TC speaks slowly and just above a whisper for most of it. Aargh. Cutting out the music isn't impossible but it would damage the ~~intelligibility~~ er, audibility of the speech. The side effects would be too severe to make it useful.

At first I thought the video was just a standard-issue ET interview or something, but at the end it becomes obvious that it's some kind of propaganda flick put together by the Scientologists themselves. (The end of the video is one of those things that has to be experienced rather than described FWIW. If you can't sit through the whole thing skip to the last 30 seconds or so.)

The electronic stuff that I've been working on recently is going to have some of these kinds of speakers (gibberish from people who really convinced by it) and this would have been perfect, except for what sounds suspiciously like the Mission Impossible theme going in the background for all eight minutes.

Anyway, this is typical....a lot of times something that is perfect for sampling (whether it's a beat or a bassline or anything else) has some other additional component that's too difficult to pare away from the original while still keeping the sound of the original intact. Very aggravating sometimes. Nearly anything is technically possible in digital audio, but that doesn't mean that everything is actually doable.

P.S. There's a building being rented by the Scientologists just down the street from me, @ 39th & Main, above an H&R Block storefront. One time there were protesters holding signs outside on the sidewalk. I honked. =D

Things I'm Pretty Sure I Think I Kinda Know (Maybe) After Iowa (But Don't Quote Me)

2008-01-04T00:07:00.000-06:00

Ron Paul's gonna run third party. Write it down. Can you say "Ross Perot"? Jeez, even the initials are the same....

Somebody who was against the Iraq War from the beginning has now won a Presidential primary. That's almost as cool as the fact that a black man is now (for the moment) really the frontrunner for the nomination. Whether he gets elected or not, America's ready (in more senses than one)....

The Republicans might very well have a brokered convention. The possibility has been raised before, but it might really happen after all. I dunno about you but when I say I'm ROFLMAO I'm almost not kidding for once....

Mike Huckabee's a crazy motherfucker, but he might just pull it off. I still think Romney will whoop him plenty on 2/5, but I guess stranger things have happened. For the time being though, he's in the driver's seat.

Obama is the ABH (Anybody But Hillary) candidate. Edwards needed IA pretty bad. It's not over but he must win in SC later this month to have a prayer.

The Republicans might have a brokered convention. Did I mention that already? I might have because ~~it's fucking hilarious~~ it is a wildly entertaining possibility.

Pakistan might be THE foreign policy issue-of-the-moment over the summer. Iraq/Afghanistan will still be important, of course (how could they not?) but those are Old News and Pakistan (for better or worse) is New News.

Wait til The Fat Lady sings this year....this will be quite a wild ride. Expect Bush and his OVPuppeteers to try something sneaky over the summer to put Hillary and Obama in some sort of totally unnecessary double-bind, like they did to Kerry in 04 ("I voted for it before I voted against it" etc).

Speaking of The Thief-in-Chief, his last minute pardons are going to be an incredible list of the early 21st Century's worst con men, common criminals, corporate raiders, neoconservatives, backstabbers, fixers, military-industrial complexers, and all-around shitheads. I'm not looking forward to it, myself. But that's not really on-topic tonight, I guess....

Happy '08!

2007-12-31T19:08:00.000-06:00

Happy New Years (to the two or three people that might read this)!

I'm having people over tonight but I wanted to dash off a few bullets before I get ready....

** We got the huge American flag up in the staircase. Turns out it's 9 1/2' x 5'. Pictures to come....
** ....speaking of which, I got a digital camera for Xmas....it kicks ass =)
** Sometime (August?) next year, I will be doing the "music" for a Jeff Dory gallery show. This really deserves its own post, but that'll have to wait til next year....

And, since the IA caucus is this week (!).....

I'm going to go out on a limb and make predictions for the hell of it....

1) Edwards 2) Clinton 3) Obama 4) Richardson 5) Dodd 6) Biden 7) Kucinich

The Donkular side is a three-way statistical tie. The reason I think Edwards will pull it out is primarily because his 2nd choice numbers are strong. Plus, he has had a much more distinctly populist message than either HRC or BHO which I think is going to be a recurring theme in 08. I mean, gas can only be $3/gal for so long before people get riled up....

Anyway, betting against a Clinton in IA is always risky, but I think Hillary is going to bounce back and slaughter the field in NH and will still win the nom. As to who I'll actually be voting for on Super Tuesday, I think I'm going to vote for Obama, but in the last few weeks he seems to be trying to talk me out of it--engaging in a war of words against should-be ally Paul Krugman, etc. The race is going to boil down to Hillary and the not-Hillary candidate; whether the ABH candidate becomes Edwards or Obama, who knows.

Hillary has to finish first or a close second in IA, and then has to win NH. If she does that, she's going to coast to the nom, I think. If she manages to finish third, or fails to win either IA or NH, she might lose just enough delegates on Super Tuesday....

Don't count on it, though. HRC, for better or worse, will probably be the nominee.

1) Romney 2) Huckabee 3) McCain 4) Giuliani 5) Paul 6) Thompson

On the Elephantine side, who the hell knows. The Democrats are bad enough, but Edwards, Obama, and Hillary are all fairly similar policy wise (except on Iraq). The Republican party coalition of corpocrats, theocrats, libertarians, and neoconservatives is not going to come out of this primary season intact. The question is which faction wins.

Romney is clearly the money candidate on that side of the aisle this year, and given that, it's hard to not pick him. If he doesn't win IA, he must win NH convincingly, or else it will be a bloodbath on Super Tuesday. Huckabee has managed to piss off a lot of the fundraisers, media hacks, and kingmakers in the party (including His Highness Rush Limbaugh). But he's got a lot of the pro-life/creationist hardcore activists in his camp (who are horrified by both Giuliani and Romney). Huck and Paul are the two guys really stirring up the grassroots (such as they are) on that side. Huck finishing second or first keeps him in the top tier, but finishing below that is OK (since nobody expected him to do anything in IA before Thanksgiving), as long as he picks up the pace in NH. Huckabee will lose some states on Super Tuesday guaranteed, since he doesn't have the pockets of Romney, McCain, or Giuliani.

McCain could actually steal this thing, because compared to the rest of these clowns, he's George Washington. Line up his resume against any of the rest of the field, and McCain blows them all away. His support has been undermined by two things: one, a poorly run campaign, two (more importantly), he actually dared to defy the Party Line on Gimto/torture/Abu Ghraib/tribunals in the debates (and was actually booed, if you can believe that). So the neocons hate McCain. Here's hoping he finishes dead last, actually, because he is honestly the only one out of the entire Republican field that will have a reasonable chance to beat either Edwards, Hillary, or Obama in the general.

Giuliani may as well drop out. The former frontrunner will be a non-factor. If he finishes lower than Paul or Thompson, I'm pretty sure he will drop out after NH. Thompson may as well be walking around with "also ran" scrawled on his forehead. Paul "wins" if he finishes with more than 5%. I'm rooting for him and his supporters to stir shit up at the Convention. I'd say it's 50-50 whether he runs on a 3rd party ticket.

Actually, I'm hoping for a brokered Republican convention. That would be fun. I don't think that's happened in my lifetime, on either side. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen the Republicans not circling the wagons behind The Guy that has been declared The Front Runner from On High. The Democratic primary is enough of a tossup as it is, but the Republican side is a goddamn mess. I love the idea of IA or NH not deciding the nominee on either side, actually; I'd love to see Super Tuesday actually be relevant for once. (And for 2012 we have got to go to a genuine national primary; enough of this silly shit with IA and NH.)

Ultimately I think the nomination is between Romney, Huckabee, and McCain. Romney is the one with the buck$$$, and I think it'll be a Hillary v. Romney general election, and Hillary will probably win 40 states.

And if you, dear reader, are navigating back to this post about 11 months from now and are giggling hysterically at my faulty reasoning, or are amused by my inability to have seen X coming, well, hey, this is why I'm a drummer....

Anyway, fuck all that....there is champagne to be drunk....

the big radio

2007-12-15T22:16:00.000-06:00

upstairs turns out to be a Coronado. The serial plate is mostly destroyed, unfortunately, which complicates trying to identify it. The only place I've been able to find that has a picture of this is here (scroll down, or search for Coronado in the page). So it's from the late 40s then. Given the shape that it's in it's probably worthless, but it looks cool and the speaker sounds really good (10" cone). The turntable doesn't work but the radio works fine (it sounds less staticky than the Zenith).

What did I do before Google? Vol. 176851243969

2007-12-15T01:12:00.001-06:00

I've had one of these in the basement for quite some time. I got it from my folks, who picked it up at a garage sale (?) someplace. I had wondered exactly how old it is, but until now it'd never occurred to me to look up the model # on Google. Duh.

According to this, it's from 1937 and was worth $30 brand new. I don't know how much this one would be worth--it's not exactly in tiptop shape, although it does work.

I have another radio upstairs, although that one is different (it's much larger and even has a pullout turntable! ZOMG). I got that from a girl two blocks down the street who was moving to Barcelona and selling everything. I'll have to look that one up too.

FEMA presser

2007-10-26T12:11:00.000-05:00

Tom Tomorrow frequently notes that the Bushies are exceedingly bad for the satire business: it's impossible to parody them because they continually outdo themselves.

Case in point....according to the
Washington Post, FEMA held a press conference on the SoCal wildfires on Tuesday. Only, there weren't any actual reporters there, and FEMA staff were the ones asking the questions.

I'd like to think this would mean everyone involved would lose their jobs immediately, but I'm not holding my breath.

(via here.)

holy shit!

2007-10-01T18:46:00.000-05:00

Yet another nail in the coffin of the record industry.

How will it do? Who knows....but I suspect it's going to be watched very closely. Simply for that reason alone, I'll send 'em ten bucks. Maybe I'll tack on a few more just for being brave enough to try it. It will be interesting, when it's all said and done, to see who contributed, average per customer, etc.

I love being given the choice: kind of an unamiliar feeling for an audience member, isn't it?

As for the music itself, I'm pretty confident it'll be amazing, and well worth the wait.

By koinkydink, I just listened again to this album closely a few nights ago. That was also released with almost nothing at all in the way of promotion, publicity, fanfare, no touring....

Feel safer yet?

2007-09-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

And here we were thinking all this time that this country was founded in opposition to such things.

When did "security" become a catchall excuse for unreasoning, pointless tyranny? Was it on 9/11 itself, or was it in the period between 9/11 and February 2003, when we couldn't find our voices?

today is not a holiday

2007-09-11T19:17:00.000-05:00

I hope we don't ever make the 11th of September into a national holiday. Kind of like Memorial Day, or Labor Day, or MLK's birthday--we don't even remember what we're celebrating, but we'll take the day off all the same.

9/11 was and is a monument to American failure. Osama bin Laden--still a free man--murdered 3,000 Americans, on American soil, and no one lost their jobs, or was reprimanded, for failing. The only thing that happened as a consequence was some bureaucratic handwaving, and the Bushies were handed an ironclad excuse to do anything they pleased, up to and including launching a bullshit war with a country that hadn't attacked us. As Rumsfeld said, there aren't any targets in Afghanistan.

I'm feeling very cynical watching newscasters revel in the misery. Lots of pretend-serious chinstroking and navelgazing. Plenty of masturbatory fake solemnity, but very little honesty, very little clarity. The only people who seem to have a clue are the military families I saw interviewed reacting to Petraeus' "testimony", and the 9/11 survivors & victims' families.*

Why the fuck do we have a half-trillion dollar military if we can't stop 19 guys with knives from destroying our landmarks? Does anybody seriously think the situation has improved since then?

Rather than stuff this post with links (it's depressing enough), how about I just leave you with a Bush press conf. transcript (from whitehouse.gov) which says all that needs to be said about the state America finds itself in--that it can't deal with this petty tyrant properly.

Q Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? Also, can you tell the American people if you have any more information, if you know if he is dead or alive? Final part -- deep in your heart, don't you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive, you won't really eliminate the threat of --

THE PRESIDENT: Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

Terror is bigger than one person. And he's just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network, his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I mentioned in my speech, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he, himself, tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong; that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Shahikot Mountains, that the military has all the support it needs to go in and do the job, which they did.

And there will be other battles in Afghanistan. There's going to be other struggles like Shahikot, and I'm just as confident about the outcome of those future battles as I was about Shahikot, where our soldiers are performing brilliantly. We're tough, we're strong, they're well-equipped. We have a good strategy. We are showing the world we know how to fight a guerrilla war with conventional means.

Q But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became -- we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore. And if we -- excuse me for a minute -- and if we find a training camp, we'll take care of it. Either we will or our friends will. That's one of the things -- part of the new phase that's becoming apparent to the American people is that we're working closely with other governments to deny sanctuary, or training, or a place to hide, or a place to raise money.

And we've got more work to do. See, that's the thing the American people have got to understand, that we've only been at this six months. This is going to be a long struggle. I keep saying that; I don't know whether you all believe me or not. But time will show you that it's going to take a long time to achieve this objective. And I can assure you, I am not going to blink. And I'm not going to get tired. Because I know what is at stake. And history has called us to action, and I am going to seize this moment for the good of the world, for peace in the world and for freedom.

That press conference is dated March 13, 2002.

*The one bright spot has been that non-New Yorkers are getting some New Yorkers' unvarnished opinion of Giuliani, which if you don't know the source of the bad blood between the NY firefighters and Giuliani, see here. The man will never be President because of his feud with the IAFF. The reason that's been getting airtime is because RG will not be speaking at the memorial service this year for the first time, and that's why.

Petraeus/Crocker/Lantos/NYT poll/jackasses

2007-09-10T14:46:00.000-05:00

I caught a little of the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on NPR today....Petraeus and Crocker are both completely full of shit. I can only have my intelligence insulted so many times by somebody before I tune them out.

But I did get to hear a snippet from Tom Lantos which I thought was pretty sharp. I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been--I knew there was something unique about Lantos but couldn't recall what it was, and I'm not talking about his very unusual accent. The thing that he said that got my attention was in response to a question about military success in Iraq. Lantos challenged the question--something Democrats never seem to do, but Republicans jump at it every chance they get--by saying the political success is what matters. I can't remember his exact quote, I'll look for a transcript later.

When I sat down to write this post, I was thinking I should look Lantos up on Wikipedia so I could remember what his story is, where he's from with that accent. Turns out he's Hungarian. Also turns out he's the only Holocaust survivor to ever get elected to the House of Reps.

Oh yeah (slaps forehead). That's what it was.....

In the meantime....

CBS News/New York Times Poll. Sept. 4-8, 2007. N=1,035 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults).

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"
  Approve  Disapprove  Unsure      

ALL adults 26   71   3      
  Republicans 52   44   4      
  Democrats 4   96   0      
  Independents 23   72   5      

8/8-12/07 26   69   5      
7/20-22/07 25   69   6      
7/9-17/07 25   70   5      
6/26-28/07 23   70   7      
5/18-23/07 23   72   5      
"Do you think removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?"
  Worth It  Not Worth It  Unsure   

9/4-8/07 35   59   6   
"Do you think the United States made a mistake getting involved in the current war with Iraq, or not?"
      
  A Mistake  Not a Mistake  Unsure   

9/4-8/07 62   34   4   
5/04  50   46   4   
"Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?"
      
  Right Thing  Stayed Out  Unsure   

9/4-8/07 41   54   5   
8/8-12/07 43   51   6   
7/20-22/07 42   51   7   
5/18-23/07 35   61   4   
       
"How would you say things are going for the U.S. in its efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq? Would you say things are going very well, somewhat well, somewhat badly, or very badly?"
  VW      SW      SB      Badly   Unsure

9/4-8/07 4  29  32  32  3
8/8-12/07 3  26  29  38  4
7/20-22/07 3  29  31  35  2
7/9-17/07 2  23  29  45  1
      
"Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party is more likely to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq?"
  Repub   Dem Both (vol.) Neither (vol.) Unsure
9/4-8/07 32  42  1  9  16
      
"From what you have seen or heard about the situation in Iraq, what should the United States do now? Should the U.S. increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, keep the same number of U.S. troops in Iraq as there are now, decrease the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, or remove all its troops from Iraq?"
      
  Increase Same  DecreaseRemove All Unsure
9/4-8/07 11  19  35  30  5

8/8-12/07 13  17  31  30  9
7/20-22/07  12  15  30  36  7
7/9-17/07  12  18  29  34  7
      
"As you may know, the U.S. has sent more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. From what you have heard or read, would you say this troop increase is making the situation in Iraq better, making it worse, or is it having no impact on the situation in Iraq so far?"
  Better  Worse  No Impact  Unsure  
9/4-8/07 35  12  45  8  
8/8-12/07 29  15  46  10  
7/20-22/07  19  20  53  8  
7/9-17/07  20  22  51  7  
      
"If you had to choose, who do you think is most likely to make the right decisions about the war in Iraq: the Bush Administration, Congress, or U.S. military commanders in Iraq?"
  Admin.  Congress Commanders None (vol.) Unsure

9/4-8/07 5  21  68  3  3
"In making its case for the war with Iraq, do you think members of the Bush Administration intentionally misled the public or not?"
      
  Misled  Did Not Mislead Unsure   

9/4-8/07 60  36   4   
12/05  52  44   4   
      
"Right now, is the U.S. involvement in Iraq creating more terrorists who are planning to attack the U.S., eliminating terrorists who were planning to attack the U.S., or is the U.S. involvement in Iraq not affecting the number of terrorists planning to attack the U.S.?"
      
  Creating  Eliminating  Not Affecting  Unsure  

9/4-8/07 40  23  27  10  
8/8-12/07 46  18  27  9  
7/20-22/07  44  18  27  11  
6/26-28/07  51  17  24  8  
      
"Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?"
      
  Yes  No  Unsure      
ALL adults 33  58  9      
  Republicans 40 51  9      
  Democrats 27  63  10      
  Independents 32  60  8      

33% of Americans still persist in believing that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. 26% of Americans persist in approving Bush's Iraq policy. The Pollkatz Bush Index is 30.8; RCP has him at 32.7.

When Petraeus and Crocker, or whatever else crawls out from under the rocks to lie and obfuscate on behalf of their masters, say idiotic things about progress this and security that, they are speaking only to that fraction that still upholds the Bush "plan" for the Middle East. They are speaking to roughly a third of America--if the electorate is somewhere around 120M voters, they're speaking to 40M of them. That's it. In their world, the Green Zone is safe, John McCain didn't look like a fucking moron strolling around a Baghdad open air market with a flak jacket, a helmet, 50 Marines, helicopters....In their world, George Bush making surprise visits to Iraq is no big deal (after all, it's how he does it here in the States....).

So we're going to have this silly song and dance out of Petraeus and Crocker, who aren't going to deviate from The Party Line one bit. They're going to keep asking for more Friedman Units and they're going to keep getting them. Nothing changes. The stalemate continues.

Which brings me to another subject that really deserves its own post, but I'm on a roll so here goes....

The Congressional Democrats have been failures so far. It's one thing for them to point to Blue Dog defections to explain losing the spring battle over defunding, but the collapse on the FISA bill right before the August recess was both pathetic and unnecessary. The Blue Dogs didn't monkeywrench that--you guys got outmanuevered by Bush the incompetent. You should have seen it coming, or somebody should figured out how to prevent the fucking vote from happening. You're not in the minority anymore. Stuff you don't want to come up for a vote doesn't get voted on, period, full stop. The fact that it came up at all was a failure of leadership. And then when it passed? That was just a fucking whopping failure.

And that kind of thing is why I've never registered as a Democrat. I'll work for em, but I'll be damned if I'm going to call myself a Democrat until they can actually get their shit together, or find somebody who will.

It gets better.

The traditional Sept/Oct annual budget war between the executive and the legislature is going to be used as a cudgel by Bush against the squeamish Democrats: fund my war or I'll blame you for losing it! Which is perfect nonsense, of course, but it's been awfully effective nonsense....

I'm expecting the Democrats to, as the saying goes, fold with aces. It's the same shit....can't look weak, yadda yadda. Even though the polls are clearly, overwhelmingly on their side. Even though this occupation is hated by 99% of the planet, even though it's bankrupting us, even though it's killing a hundred people a day, they keep falling for the same fucking tricks.

So let's have some more hearings! Strike up the band! Let's have some red white and blue bunting! Order another crate of magnetic ribbon stickers! SUPPORT THOSE TROOPS!!

WASHINGTON -

Sapped by nearly six years of war, the Army has nearly exhausted its fighting force and its options if the Bush administration decides to extend the Iraq buildup beyond next spring.

The Army's 38 available combat units are deployed, just returning home or already tapped to go to Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, leaving no fresh troops to replace five extra brigades that President Bush sent to Baghdad this year, according to interviews and military documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

That presents the Pentagon with several painful choices if the U.S. wants to maintain higher troop levels beyond the spring of 2008:

_Using National Guard units on an accelerated schedule. [that wasn't a problem during Hurricane Katrina, nope, no sir, uh-uh--nb]

_Breaking the military's pledge to keep soldiers in Iraq for no longer than 15 months.

_Breaching a commitment to give soldiers a full year at home before sending them back to war.

But Harry Reid wants to compromise.

Fuck Harry Reid.

That sound you hear is another IED going off, taking with it some 20 year old from some place like Boise, or the Bronx. That sound you hear is the siphon Halliburton hooked up to the Treasury. That sound you hear is a car bomb blowing up yet another mosque, killing dozens, receiving no more attention in the U.S. than page 24B.

It will continue until the followers in Washington start to lead, or are replaced by leaders.

high wind

2007-09-07T21:43:00.000-05:00

A pretty nasty storm went through last night....

There was a wind gust at the leading edge of that damn thing that had to have been 60+ mph.

At about 1:15 am Chris and I were doing some mix tinkering when the back door blew open with a bang. At the same time I could hear the rain firing up on the driveway outside....I knew it was going to rain but I wasn't aware of a storm coming....I had seen a Severe TS watch up, but that was further west in Kansas. I started thinking I should check the radar, and no sooner had I started reaching for Mozilla than the power failed. The breaker box made a humming sound for about four seconds and then gave up. I ran to shut the back door and it looked like a movie. I ended up bumping around in the dark for a few minutes before I remembered where the flashlights were, then we spent another five minutes moving all the gear away from where the water sometimes comes in the SE corner of the basement.

Chris, Tyree, and I ended up hanging out on the front porch for a while. Chris waited til the worst of the storm abated and then split, since there wasn't anything else to accomplish in the meantime.

A tree from one of the houses on Campbell blew over and knocked out power to the east side of Campbell and the west side of Harrison. Another tree got ripped in half two doors south of me, blocking the road. At around 4 am myself and three neighbors ended up dragging the debris to one side of the street using the straps off my refrigerator dolly.

Power finally came back at about 2:15 pm, so it was out for ~13 hours. As far as I know, nothing was damaged here, although I want to take a peek at the west side of my garage. It has gotten quite overgrown back there, and I had called KCP&L about clearing the lines before, but now I guess something finally got their attention....

Ebay auction of the week

2007-09-04T02:56:00.000-05:00

You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Just go look.

So far, no bids....

re: posting

2007-08-27T17:35:00.001-05:00

Haven't had much to say here recently, but I want to be doing this more often, even if I just do one-liner posts or collections of links.

I'll post some more .mp3s in the next couple of days. Right now the server isn't letting me connect. I was working on a post about a couple different versions of the same piece of music (antares), which became excruciatingly long (even for me) and I just deleted it. (The occasion was that I've finally finished the transcription for the lead part--whoopeee!!) Got a couple other things to post up here, as soon as we're done recording them (and as soon as the server comes unstuck.)

S.S. Bush listing to starboard; more rats flee

2007-08-27T16:28:00.000-05:00

The Bushies are coming apart at the seams.

Just since November '06, one crook after another has fallen.

Rumsfeld. Miers. The insufferable Bolton. Bartlett.

Libby was convicted, at long last, in March.

Then an unceasing parade of no-name apparatchiks from DOJ (still in progress, we think). By my count, I think there have been at least 8, including Schlozmann, who was the U.S. Atty for Western MO for a relatively brief period.

Then a big piece fell: Rove. That obnoxious little fuck is still around though, bet on it. His duties always were more unofficial and behind-the-scenes than anything else, so leaving his "official" post was mostly symbolic.

But now, today, out of the blue (although his resignation had to have been planned at the same time as Rove's), Alberto Fucking Gonzales quits.

Why now? No idea. Same as Rove; beats the hell outta me. It's not like Congress was going to impeach the lying bastard. As long as Gonzo was AG, Bush/Cheney had DOJ (and by extension, Congress and the courts as well!) under their thumb.

Now, the lid is off.

Before, when the Democrats in Congress were investigating the countless bad acts of the various arms of the Bush/Cheney mafia, the process worked like this:

horrible breaking news of Bushie bad act
Cmte chairman asks Bushie to testify at hearing
Bushie either refuses altogether, like Miers, or shows up and refuses to remember what color the sky is, like Gonzales
Followup reporting on initial news reveals even worse actions by Bushie
Cmte has to vote on authorizing subpoenas
Cmte authorizes subpoenas
Cmte threatens to subpoena various Bushies
Cmte is told to fuck itself
Cmte finally subpoenas Bushies
Bushie still hasn't looked up at the sky once since the last time he was there, but makes vague promises to do so at some future date
Rinse, repeat.

At this point, Congress' options are limited. 1) They can hold the witness in contempt, which has to be referred to the D.C. U.S. Atty, who of course reports to....the A.G. 2) They can use the "inherent contempt" procedure, which is arcane, if powerful. The Sgt-at-Arms of the Senate or House actually arrests the witness themselves, and the Capitol Police detain him. Probably, they have to exhaust option number 1 first. 3) They can impeach the motherfuckers.

That's about it.

If there is one thing I will forever hold against the 110th Congress, it's that all of those people didn't recognize the Bushies for what they were years ago. There has never, ever been a situation where a Bushie didn't act in the best interests of Bush, Cheney, or their superiors, if those interests conflicted with those of the country.

When Congress finally screwed up the courage to demand this or that, the Bushies simply told them to piss up a rope. In almost every case, after initially rattling sabers, Congress has meekly backed down to somebody whose popularity falls roughly between Richard Nixon and Osama bin Laden. The roll-over-and-rub-my-tummy manuever they pulled on the war funding bill earlier this year was outrageous enough. But the FISA capitulation as they attempted to go home for the August recess was simply needless.

Chairman Leahy and the others on the Senate Judiciary Cmte verbally slapped around halfwits like Gonzo, but so far have taken no really concrete steps. The Bushies have dared them to do something, and they haven't. (I'm gonna get back to Schumer here in a second....)

Now that Gonzo isn't there anymore, the entire dynamic in D.C. will change. Congress has to do one simple thing, and the Bush crony bottleneck won't exist at DOJ any longer. The subpoena/contempt threats wielded by the Cmte chairs will have that much more teeth, since they might actually be enforceable. Other officials will probably leave. Etc.

The one simple thing they have to do is not cave on the replacement Atty General.

I saw Schumer saying the following....

New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also suggested that a Chertoff confirmation hearing would be contentious.

"I would say there are a lot of questions about Michael Chertoff that will have to be answered." Schumer said. "I wouldn't say yes; I wouldn't say no. It's an open book. It's possible, but its hardly a slam dunk. There are some names who could be a slam dunk."

Schumer, one of Gonzales' chief critics, appealed to the administration "to work with us to nominate someone whom Democrats can support and America can be proud of."

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck....there's nothing that says you have to play pattycake with these people. Just go ahead and say no to Chertoff. It's not like he's going to be nominated anyway.

Congress has a chance to make significant amends if they would just simply refuse to confirm anybody who is a Bush loyalist.

Go ahead and let em know, Chuck. Or are you going to cave again, with Arlen nodding in agreement next to you, satisfied with your reasonableness?

There is no reason why Congress should just accept whatever cretin the Bushies finally do nominate. I'd like to see Congress push the White House around a bit, for once, instead of the other way around. How about presenting the WH with a list of acceptable nominees, Chuck? Force the fucking issue, don't just sit back and react. Then if Bush insists on nominating somebody not on the list, then it's Bush who's being unreasonable, right?

I'm just a drummer in a rock and roll band, you'd think somebody smart like Schumer could figure this out.

So if Congress can find their balls, America might have a functional DOJ again soon. And that, my friends, would undoubtedly be a good thing.

Rove

2007-08-15T15:22:00.001-05:00

Karl Rove has resigned as Bush's chief fixer.

Speculation is running rampant as to why....the timing seems a little odd. If I had to bet, it'd be tough, because he had his fingers in so many different pies....

One thing it may be related to is how hard Rove leaned on the Dept. of Justice. Don Siegelman, Democratic Gov. of Alabama 1999-2003, has been charged with eighteen zillion different things, and they finally got a conviction. There has been evidence of jury tampering, and also allegations that Rove was personally involved in directing the prosecution. Google Siegelman's name for more information. (Cf. also Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin official whose corruption conviction was later thrown out by a visibly angry Appeals Court.)

Politicization of the DOJ is a major issue IMHO and the Democrats should make it a major issue in 2008. The scandal that ensued after nine US Attorneys were fired for partisan reasons has essentially destroyed Alberto Gonzales; any reasonable President would have fired him long ago. (A reasonable President wouldn't have hired that useless moron in the first place, but I digress....)

Obviously there's way more to all of this; I'm just trying to give the nutshell version.

Now, before anybody gets their hopes up for justice, recall that as long as Bush is President, Gonzales is AG; as long as Gonzales is AG, there will be no effective prosecutions of people like Rove. Scooter Libby is a perfect example. He was sentenced to thirty months, fined $250K, and given two years' probation. Bush immediately--as in the same day the judge denied bail--commuted the prison term, saying Libby had still been punished. When asked directly whether Libby would receive a full pardon before the end of Bush's term in office, Bush dodged the question. Anyone who thinks Libby will not be pardoned, raise your hand.

Honestly, with the effective corruption of the entire Dept. of Justice, George Bush could eat a baby on live TV with salt and ketchup and he would suffer no consequences. His craven apologists would continue to cast aspersions on those asking questions about their President, and the media would continue the post-9/11 paralysis, unable to actually speak out with any credibility or integrity, continuing to place lies on an equal footing with the truth. If anybody wants to know how Karl Rove was able to pull off his schemes, it's because of that: America's Very Respectable People on TV in their nice suits and stage makeup are too chickenshit to take a side, even at this late date.

And the band played on....

ladies and gentlemen

2007-08-10T00:32:00.001-05:00

I give you Rick Ankiel.

one more

2007-08-08T16:48:00.001-05:00

When I published the post below, I was thinking this one would require a lot more work than it needed. This one's called ~~Paper Airlines~~. Chris laid down drums, bass, and guitar on Saturday, and I laid down a synth track last night....I think this is the best drum sound I've ever recorded, it's just awesome. You can hear the cymbals ring forever, yet the cymbals don't sound overly bright; the kick and the snare hit plenty hard, the toms are present without a close mic....and I had two channels to spare!

We haven't tried to play this one with Kevin yet, although I suspect we will....

[EDIT 1/30/08 mp3s taken down per Chris' request....]

update

2007-08-08T15:41:00.000-05:00

OK.....buncha news to talk about....

Chris, Kevin, and I are continuing to slog away....we've been focusing on playing as a group the last week or two, which is terrific. The music feels very natural to play, although it is tough to remember some of the very fine details....I've been playing on the new Premier drumset, except with Chris' 24" kick....the bruise on the top of my right foot has convinced me that maybe I ought to get the 22" back out. In fact, I feel like I'm getting a better drum sound now with the new mic setup, so maybe I ought to set the Pearl kit back up anyway.

We've updated ~~Snowball Effect~~, which was kind of serendipitous ~~the first time around~~ (when it was just drums and bass, no guitar, no keys). We had tracked the drums and bass at the same time, and then overdubbed four or five more bass tracks. We were thinking it was a marginal take and then I started futzing around with the sound, applying some distortion to the main bass track (which of course has drum bleed in it) and applying a completely different distortion to the drums (which has bass bleed). That, and the reverse echo applied to the bass harmonics, sounded really cool.

But we thought we could play it better, especially after we'd rocked it a few times with Kevin. We did overdub Chris' harmonics, but we didn't use the reverse echo. That might still happen, but I wanted to hold off and give Kevin as much space as possible. We laid down Kevin's part last night.

So I'm not sure we really recaptured the magic or whatever, but it's a pretty damn good piece of music and Kevin really adds a lot....

~~Here's a super spacy, super jammy thing~~ we did based on a loop laid down by Chris back in May. Kevin did two takes over what was at the time a pretty unorganized loop. It had no beginning and no end....Chris had just kind of filled out a rhythm line, and Kevin just kind of went with the flow. The 2nd take is the one we ended up using, essentially without any modification at all. (Did I mention he has some really top-notch pedals?)

The guitar and bass parts kind of peter out after a while, and the drums kept going. I'd hacked the drums up a bit more (the drums weren't done to a click originally so editing these has been rough, and there are some definite tempo slips, but we're leaving them in deliberately) by this time, and then we decided we needed an ending. So I sat down in front of the synth and gradually snuck into the song, gradually getting more prominent. As the guitar eventually falls apart after this long, pleasant jam, I come in with a smeared line more or less repeating the bass line at the beginning. As the gtr and bass droppped out, I just kept going and eventually brought it down and out.

Listen for yourself but it's definitely kind of a surprise ending. We ended up putting guitar and bass on the very end, and I think the guitar part in particular could be spun off into a totally new song. We'll see....

I've got one more that I want to post, but it needs some significant editing, so it'll have to wait.

****

Some other stuff that's happening....

....Kevin wants to start a hip-hop oriented band, separate from the math rock stuff we've been working on with Chris. He's got a bass player and a percussionist from another band he's in coming over tonight. Chris will be there too, so it should be interesting. Kevin's been getting inspired by some of the instrumental Beastie Boys material (from Ill Communication for example), which I've always thought was pretty cool. This seems like it will be much less serious than the other project (no we don't have a name yet), so maybe it won't go anywhere.

....It looks like Adam's sound guy Bryan is going to get into that building at Antioch & Winn after all. They've been trying to sell the place for months now, and evidently haven't had much interest. When myself, Adam, and Bryan went to look at the place about a month and a half ago, the realtor said it would cost 9 grand to get the keys. Then, a few weeks later, it was 8. Now they're telling Bryan they'll let him rent-to-own, so he'll get in for one month's rent ($1,000).

Hot damn!

Bryan (who's picked up a day job in the meantime) hasn't signed the papers yet, but it looks like that's going to happen. Then we're going to have a shitload of work to do to turn the first floor into a studio, but we could feasibly have the place up and running by October.

....I broke a tine on the Rhodes a couple days ago....the one that's already busted is B flat below middle C....the A right below that was getting out of tune, so I spent some time fiddling with it, and got it there. Almost immediately after, I go to hit that A and hear a boink! And I knew right away what happened. Bummer. I have got to find somebody that can work on these things....

[EDIT 1/30/08 mp3s taken down per Chris' request....]

the rabbit hole

2007-08-08T15:34:00.000-05:00

Here's a pleasant, light piece from the New Yorker for your perusal. Here's how it starts.

In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of eight United States Attorneys had just been exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the Justice Department was about to announce some good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had confessed to killing her husband. (Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic militants.) The Administration planned to release a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then President Bush’s national-security adviser, informing her of the same news. But Rice’s revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. “It’s not enough for officials to call me and say they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

There's a Radiohead song that goes "your alarm bells, your alarm bells, they should be ringing, they should be ringing...."

The rest of the article is about the gulag being run in our name (secretly of course) by the CIA.

bullet post

2007-08-01T16:55:00.000-05:00

** Chris Koster (Republican MO State Senator from Harrisonville, near KC) is switching parties and will run for state AG in 2008. He is also stepping down as head of the Senate Republican Caucus, so he is not an anonymous backbencher.

This continues part of a larger trend that appears to have begun in Kansas. I keep thinking Sebelius could make an attractive running mate for the Democratic nominee for President in 08, because she can point to being an overwhelmingly popular governor of a state the CW says ought to be a Republican stronghold, and because of the number of high-profile party switches in KS in the last few years.

** Speaking of Republicans in Kansas, the fact that this guy has seen his star fall as far as it has is not only great news, but is also great for illustrating the abov point: we've known the Republican party was in trouble in the Mountain West for some time now, but maybe that trouble is beginning to spill over to the Midwest.

** Back in 2004, then-White House Counsel (now Atty Genl) Alberto Gonzales visited then-Atty Genl John Ashcroft when Ashcroft was laid up in the hospital. Ashcroft (when did he become the reasonable one? oh lordy) was getting a gallstone removed, was under sedation, and had temporarily yielded the powers of his office to Acting AG James Comey. (In fact, it was thru Comey's testimony inre: the nine fired U.S. Attys that any of this is even public knowledge.)

The reason for the visit remains cloudy. Comey and others (including FBI director Mueller) have testified that Gonzales and WH Chief of Staff Andy Card wanted Ashcroft to sign off on a still-murky "terrorist surveillance program" of some sort that Comey was objecting to. This program was set to expire and DOJ needed to sign off on it in order for it continue. Comey was unwilling without changes to the program. (The changes were supposedly implemented eventually.) Ashcroft apparently (even under sedation) reiterated that Comey was Acting AG and that they needed to speak to him, whereupon they left.

Gonzales, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Cmte last week, claimed a number of things, including that the Terrorist Surveillance Program (suddenly now with capital letters, as if it were a formal name and not a whopping lie) was not the subject under discussion, and that "other intelligence activities" were the reason for the visit. In addition, Gonzales stated that when the gang of eight (which at the time was Daschle, Frist, Hastert, Gephardt, Roberts, Rockefeller, Goss, and Harman) was briefed on whatever the fuck this program is, there was no dissent registered.

The Democratic members of that list have all begged to differ.

I'm just scratching the surface. In an ordinary political environment (ie without a shithead like Bush in charge) Gonzales would have been summarily fired months ago. As it is, Gonzo is one of the very last bulwarks the Bush/Cheney junta has against a series of Watergate-scale scandals and investigations. As it is, Gonzales may very well be impeached. He has clearly perjured himself with contradictory testimony, he has clearly obstructed justice, and he has clearly been an unwilling witness. (Seriously--watch this video, it's incredible.)

Personally, I think if Abu Gonzales (so nicknamed because of his cavalier, enabling attitude toward the Abu Ghraib atrocities) says "I don't recall" one more time, he ought to be relieved of duty strictly on medical grounds....

** Speaking of the Ashcroft hospital visit, questions remain over just who sent Gonzo and Card. Here's Dick Cheney not-answering that exact question from Larry King (!) of all people. Not exactly a Walter Cronkite moment, but you go to war with the blow-dried pundits you have, not the blow-dried pundits you might wish to have....

STL

2007-07-26T09:11:00.001-05:00

Going to St. Louis for a couple days....I'll be seeing the Cubs game while I'm there. I'd like to put a brave face on, but just looking at the starting pitchers is making me a little sick to my stomach.....

weightless

2007-07-24T20:03:00.000-05:00

Chris and I spent a night back in May laying down several different drum loops. The one I did is very weird sounding....snares off, playing on the bell of the Bronze Scim hihats, some unusual miking, and Chris' 24" kick. Then all that is compressed pretty heavily.

I made the loop (24 bars) and then wrote a series of chords on the Rhodes....after several demos I still wasn't exactly sure where to go with the basic idea...I think on the third attempt I managed to get through the chord sequence twice, and threw in a couple curveballs, so I decided to keep it, chart out what I did, and try adding bass.

Now I'm not a bass player, but with relatively simple, slow-moving stuff, if I spend a few hours learning it I can kinda-sorta fake my way through it. The new amp helped a lot....I barely had to touch the strings at all and still got an enormously loud sound.

After that, I recorded a heavily smeared, semi-improvised synth track over the top. Sort of halfway between a lead and and a pad (ambience).

The chords (nearly all of them are 13ths) keep going up and up....typically I have a tendency to write chords that go down, down, down. The bass keeps going up too....I tuned the lowest string as far down as I thought I could get away with (B-flat!)....the bass moves from that low B-flat all the way up to near the top of the neck on the highest string. Between the extended harmonies (most of the chords are voiced root/5th/9th/#11th/13th), the parallel voice leading, and the fact that the roots keep resolving up by step (C G D F# A resolves to D A E G# B, etc), hopefully the effect is like being weightless.

This is my favorite track out of all the stuff I've done in the last year that doesn't have anybody else playing anything on it (along with Antares).

Don Cab/band incest/mics/demo next week

2007-07-22T18:39:00.000-05:00

Going to see Don Caballero at the Record Bar tonight....opening are two local bands, This Alibi and Sentient, both of whom I've seen before and both of whom rock the fuck out.

Interestingly, Sentient features a guy named James playing guitar....he used to play in a band called Lafayette with Chris and Kevin, the two guys I've been playing with recently, so this should be an interesting evening....a little band incest never hurt anybody.

I feel confident in saying there will be a truly significant amount of ass kicked tonight.

*****

Just picked up some new mics at Big Dude's yesterday....they were having a big sale, so I figured better to strike while the iron is hot. Got a Superlux omni/figure-8 at 100 bucks off and a couple Audio Technica 2020 condensers....these should help with the "live in studio"-type demo I'm doing on Wednesday for a unique jazz band (that's traps, bass gtr, gtr, trumpet, sax, and a manic West African-style hand drummer).

I think these are going to become my room mics, and the mics I already have can be my close mics. I have to spend some time with them and do some A/B comparisons before I can use them properly though....

Speaking of band incest, former I guitarist Adam, swell guy that he is, will be lending me some additional mics and gear, including his sound card (!). I have 8 channels of in/out, and Adam's card will make that 16....with 6 players and multiple room mics, I'm going to need the extra channels. Hooray Adam!

*****

OK, I was going to post a new track from the end of June, but I have a lot to say about it and this has turned into a longer post than I wanted it to be, so I'll save it for later. Check back tomorrow.

Saturday night!

2007-07-21T19:27:00.000-05:00

I want to make this an everyday thing, but it's hard to get to every single day....anyway, it's been crazy last couple of days. ~~Last night we re-recorded the keyboard-only demo from a couple days ago~~. Chris played drums and bass and I redid the Rhodes part. The drums are mostly the new Premier set I just got, with the exception of the kick, which is "Thumper"--Chris' converted 24x14 marching bass drum. The Premier kick has a very good sound, but Thumper is pretty unique sounding and I thought that drum would fit better with the song.

So the rough mix sounds pretty good....kick drum sound needs some work, there's a couple timing issues in the third section (where it goes to 3/4), and it still needs guitar....the Rhodes had a lot of amp hiss in it; I denoised it but I'm thinking I may just re-re-record it instead....the denoising killed some of the brightness that I was enjoying so much from the new amp....been trying to write some countermelodies but haven't come up with anything solid. I might just leave that part to Kevin, we'll see.

P.S. Jerry-who-is-providing-my-hosting-gratis-therefore-he-is-asskickin' requested that I post the following links to his YouTube and MySpace pages.

[EDIT 1/30/08 mp3s taken down per Chris' request....]

today's recording

2007-07-18T04:56:00.001-05:00

This is the first time I get to try this....here's what I spent the night working on.

Chris & Kevin showed up around 10 pm....we arranged and recorded several of Kevin's guitar parts to a piece Chris (bass) and I (drums) worked up months ago. Chris & I re-recorded our parts with a different arrangement and a much tougher sound last week sometime, and so tonight Kevin got to lay his parts down. This is the first time I've recorded Kevin, which was a blast....he knows his shit.

~~So here is a rough mix of the thing in 23~~. The mp3 sounds a little washy towards the end when the cymbals get real heavy....

Yesterday (which for me would be Monday....) I brainstormed a very minimal piece on the Rhodes and spent a good part of the afternoon and evening trying to map it out....this has some really tricky rhythms in it....After Kevin left at about 2 or 3 am, Chris and I worked out a rough arrangement for keys and drums, and I guess Kevin will play either bass or guitar. Here's the keyboard-only super-rough demo I did about 6 pm. I realized I couldn't get the amp I usually use to be loud enough, so I used the new TubeWorks bass amp because it's stupid loud....the advantage of the other setup is I have a distortion knob on the other amp, and I was annoyed at not having any fuzz, but I was pleasantly surprised by how clear it sounded through the bass amp so I went with that instead. I'll add fuzz later.

Comments not only welcome but encouraged....

[EDIT 1/30/08 mp3s taken down per Chris' request....]

foreigners and Iraq

2007-07-17T17:17:00.000-05:00

We invaded Iraq in March 2003. It's now July of 2007 and we're still in the dark as to who we're supposed to be fighting.

Bush and his apologists continue to assert that we are fighting ~~Emmanuel Goldstein~~ al Qaeda in Iraq. They claim, presumably with a straight face, that the insurgency is the result of foreign fighters, and that we are not actually fighting against the Iraqi people, whose interests Bush allegedly had foremost in mind when he ordered the invasion.

The LA Times recently published an article detailing the nationalities of insurgents.

BAGHDAD — Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.

About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency.

I can't find a primary citation right this second, but I think the total number of prisoners being held by coalition forces in Iraq is in the 15K-20K range. Of these, the LAT says 135 are foreign-born. No mention is made of Iranians, but roughly half are Saudi.

Recall that 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. For some reason none of the neoconservative warmongers are beating the drum for bombing Riyadh back to the Stone Age, yet Cheney and Lieberman and the rest are practically drooling at the thought of air strikes in Iran.

If that hasn't unsettled you too much, make sure you're sitting down and relaxed before reading Part 1 and Part 2 of this McClatchy report on an ambush in Karbala that killed several soldiers and officers inside the city HQ. Clearly an inside job. A complex, clever attack involving obviously detailed intelligence as to who would be where and what the defenses were like. Strangers to Iraq almost certainly could not have pulled this off.

Yet the Administration is eager to point the finger at Iranians or Syrians. Why?

[cribbing liberally from Hubris Sonic and Prof. Cole]

Snoopy

2007-07-17T01:04:00.000-05:00

Here's a picture of my cat, because I now have a blog and I feel compelled to let the world see just how goddamn cute he is.

I think I'm going to have get a camera now, because he does something hilarious about every 15-20 minutes or so.

P.S. Jerry Fowler was kind enough to give me hosting. Wicked.

ahem

2007-07-16T23:42:00.000-05:00

DISCLAIMER: the following is bound to piss people off. It's not meant to cover every conceivable base, and I've probably left a zillion things out that I shouldn't have. I do not necessarily think that everything that has happened in the music biz in the last ten years is a great thing.

I think the art of recording--a young one by art standards--is changing radically. The entire recording industry* is built on assumptions that may or may not have been true decades ago, but history and technology do not stand still, and neither does music. Digital audio, the Internet, the ubiquity of computers in the home, advances in recording gear, as well as the advent of more affordable budget gear, and the proliferation of home studios are all driving the tumult in recording. And then there's label consolidation in parallel with media consolidation, in addition to exponentially increasing costs to both musicians and fans, leading to a stagnant monoculture where a handful of people shape the environment (radio, TV, chain record stores, ticket sales) that the bulk of all music is consumed in.

And maybe, somewhere, down deep in that word "consumed" is the dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about.

But everybody seems to see the symptoms of the disease just fine. 500 channels of TV and there's nothing on. All the radio stations with a reliable signal sound exactly the same. Britney Spears is on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and I heard a Ramones song in a bank recently, and Jimi Hendrix is selling Cadillacs. Ticketmaster has a monopoly. There's only four music labels left.

Somebody is making money, but it isn't (most) musicians.

I think people (both in and out of the industry) are slowly starting to remember: hey, waitaminnit, music doesn't work very well as a commodity. And, point of fact, up until the advent of recorded music, wasn't a commodity.

1) anybody can play it
2) there is no shortage of really talented people out there
3) it doesn't have a tangible form; can't be put in a box, etc
4) it's something essentially everybody enjoys, and is a basic part of being human

Very few people get paid for actually playing music. For years now, artists have been getting paid for selling stuff. You can't really sell music. If you're close enough to hear it, you're consuming it, whether there's been a financial transaction involved. But, artists have this irritating tic about eating and paying bills, so we have to figure out some sort of scheme where they provide something and everybody else gives them money. Thus, the artist becomes a trinket salesman. T-shirts, lighters, keychains, stickers, whatever you can convince people is worth money. And then there are CDs.

If you enjoy my music, the idea is you're supposed to hand me $15 and in return I give you a piece of plastic that has been decreed by fiat to be $15 worth of music. Except I cannot hand you music. How could I do such a thing? Music consists of vibrations in the air, nothing more, nothing less. Music does not live on that little piece of plastic. I can't hand you music any more than I can hand you silence. It's nonsense. But it's been the foundation of the recording industry as long as there's been a recording industry.

Let's jump back a bit further in the story here.

From the dawn of human history up until Edison started futzing around with it, the only way to hear music was for a living human being to play it. Then, in the scope of three or four generations, music was transformed into something that came out of a box. I think there are a lot of people in the industrialized world that don't understand that music is something that's meant to be shared (as opposed to sold), and it's my contention that the recording industry's separation of musician from audience is artificial, unnecessary, alienating, and constricting. And since it's not terribly profitable anymore, it's going to undergo unpredictable changes.

After Edison had shown it was possible, recording existed as something that only a few people in the world really understood all the details of. It required enormous amounts of technical skill just to make it sound half-ass. At the same time they were getting the kinks worked out of wire, wax, and early shellac recording, the mass media industry was getting off the ground. Like recording, radio was still in its infancy. There were only a few corporations with the vast amounts of capital required to get a studio going. In order to broadcast to as many people as possible, you needed a whole raft of things: the bulky, balky equipment, the space to put it, and the geeks to run it.

With all these obstacles, it's no wonder the only people who could afford to produce anything were huge corporations. All this required significant overhead to stay afloat. Now, they were getting money from the radio manufacturers (and later the turntable makers and the TV makers), so that helped. Selling advertising on radio made it all profitable.

So you had essentially one company that 1) signed the artist, 2) recorded and produced the artist, 3) broadcast the artist to the audience, and 4) put the artist's records in stores. Back then, there was simply no other option available.

Fast forward to today.

I can't for the life of me understand why anyone needs three years and a seven figure budget to make fifty minutes worth of music, when any schmoe can walk into Guitar Center, drop about five grand, jam the fuck out that night, and wake up in the morning and mix it all down and have a completed album by dinner the following day.

It's crazy.

There is no need for rockstars. No need for ten million dollar studios (although they sure are nice and I'd love to have one!). No need for major labels, no need for record stores, and no need for radio stations. All of these things are business ventures, and like any business venture they should go out of business when they are no longer meeting the needs of the market. Their continued existence is not guaranteed--something that has always been true for bands. Why should it be any different for companies that can't or won't change a dysfunctional business model?

Think of the law of supply and demand.

The gadget manufacturers have flooded the market with gear that's cheap but effective (if not necessarily of the highest quality). Add in the development of the mp3, the introduction of cheap broadband, drastically faster and roomier computers at the same price point, and the open source movement (thanks Bill Gates!) giving us p2p software. All this has served to undermine the idea that One Big Company is the only way to get music from point A (musician) to point B (audience).

That right there IS music. Not the fucking piece of plastic, it's the exchange between performer and audience. Sender and receiver.

And as a result of these technological changes, the supply has increased exponentially. And with CDs and mp3s and DVDs, it never degrades with age like vinyl, tape, or older formats. Once it's recorded, it's going to last forever and a day. But the demand hasn't nearly kept pace with supply. We are saturated in music. Every time we're in a store, there is music playing, because Everybody Knows People Buy More Shit When They're Listening To Music. A lot of people turn on the TV as a matter of course when they're at home. Some people never turn the damn thing off; it's just a big static device. (I think all of that's a bad thing, but I think that may have to be a subject for another post.)

As the supply has skyrocketed, and demand has remained flat**, the value of recorded music--the piece of plastic--has fallen dramatically. But we have non-market forces at work here, although they speak the language of business and markets very well. Vinyl used to be relatively cheap compared to CDs; cassettes were expensive because they were expensive to produce. CDs, initially, were going to be expensive for a while and then the industry would lower prices once their investment in the infrastructure paid off, or something. The promised price reduction never came, and CD prices have actually increased. Remember how shocked you were the first time you saw a $18 sticker on a single CD?

But the value is close to nil now, at this late date. What's happening? The market isn't clearing because the sellers are selling at too high a price for the buyers. In fact, buyers are leaving the market, because the sellers aren't serving them anymore.

It's serving a lot of suits, lawyers, bean counters, and middlemen trying to save their jobs, is what's happening. They lean on, are supported by, feed off of, that intercouse (pun intended) between musician and audience. They are adding less and less to what is necessary and demanding more and more. Consequently, they're going to be increasingly cut out of the picture as we move away from the 1900s.

Which brings me, at long last, to the point of this blog....personally I believe that the future for musicians and fans is pretty bright: but if you're a player and you want to make a career out of it, you're fucked unless you're touring.

I've been having difficulty with that; can't seem to keep a band together lately. And, paradoxically, I've been trying to teach myself the art of recording in the meantime. So, perhaps, with a bit of luck, I can build a bit of an audience for my studio music here on this blog, and hopefully that will be a springboard back to the road.

This is the same computer that I do the recording on, which is cool, because I can simply bounce the day's work down to mp3 and make it freely available. I'm going to setup a Paypal link so individuals so motivated may donate a bit to the cause, but that won't ever be required. I will also at some point make some CDs available to order, if there's any demand.

Well, this certainly turned into quite the ~~screed~~ manifesto, so I guess I should wrap it up here....

* (as distinct from the music industry, which is larger than just recording)
** During this time, demand has actually increased--the population has increased and enjoyment of music is near-universal. But the supply increase has been orders of magnitude greater.

sound check

2007-07-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

Would it be wrong to post "FIRST!" in the body of the first post on my own blog?

Maybe not wrong, but in poor taste....and this blog can't afford to have bad taste. So instead I'll post some mp3s of tunes cooked up here in my basement.

In addition to music, I have a number of opinions, philosophies, and pet theories about music (and other topics, naturally) that I've been wanting to kind of spray out into the Interwebs for a long time. And now's my chance.

So, in celebration, let's get started....

Here are the four mp3s that are currently up at my Myspace page. I'll get some more recent material up very soon, like later tonight or tomorrow.

All mp3s are 128k. I think I will end up marketing higher-res mp3s files thru Snocap or something in the future, but for now these at least get the idea across....

> corona 4:08/3.8MB
> lapis lazuli 6:18/5.8MB
> lost weekend 3:22/3.1 MB
> lower algiers 9:02/8.3 MB

All four of those tracks are very different, but they're all me (except for the samples....).