To The Gallows!

As money is that which Americans worship most fervently, why are crimes against it not eligible for the death penalty?

Failing that sort of radical, outsize (and dubious) remedy, here is Michael Lewis with a pair of fine articles detailing where the failure points are, and how to repair them:

THERE are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm assumed to be “too big to fail” comes knocking, asking for free money. Here’s one: Let it fail.
Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm is deemed “too big” for that honor, then it should be explicitly nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to the highest bidders — perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and, for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely subside.
This is more plausible than it may sound. Sweden, of all places, did it successfully in 1992. And remember, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have already accepted, on behalf of the taxpayer, just about all of the downside risk of owning the bigger financial firms. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve would both no doubt argue that if you don’t prop up these banks you risk an enormous credit contraction — if they aren’t in business who will be left to lend money? But something like the reverse seems more true: propping up failed banks and extending them huge amounts of credit has made business more difficult for the people and companies that had nothing to do with creating the mess. Perfectly solvent companies are being squeezed out of business by their creditors precisely because they are not in the Treasury’s fold. With so much lending effectively federally guaranteed, lenders are fleeing anything that is not.
Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.”

The entire thing is worth reading, and part two can be reached from the end of part one.

Coherence

A very coherent point lost in all the drama about the choice of Rick Warren to perform the invocation at the inauguration.

Barack Obama has always claimed his religious faith is one of the most important things in his life, and essential to his identity. It's therefore all the more disappointing that his choice of Rick Warren reflects a particularly American brand of incoherence and hypocrisy when it comes to public displays of supposed religious belief.

The incoherence is reflected by behavior -- such as choosing Warren to give the invocation -- that seems to affirm two propositions:

(1) Religious beliefs are enormously important.

(2) The actual content of those beliefs is irrelevant.

Read the entire post - well worth it.

Concussion

Concussion.

I had recently thought of it as being beaten about the head and shoulders with a wad of conservative talking points.

Or what happens if you are actually brave enough to watch an entire hour of Bill O'Reilly's hate fest on Faux Newz.

No longer.

Yesterday while crushing down a bunch of left over cardboard boxes in our garage, I stepped on one that has that lovely waxy sheen over pretty colors advertising some product crucial to everyday life (in this case a mat that goes under a desk chair) and personally redefined concussion to something akin to its medical meaning.

That slick, shiny box flew out from under my feet and I went momentarily airborne, levitating horizontally above the hard concrete floor of the garage for what seemed like a full second to my time-dilated senses. I could envision in that long interregnum exactly what took place next: my butt, then my back, then neck and finally my head hit the floor with a truly sickening *thwock* noise, the kind of sound that makes the stomach churn just to hear it.

I lost just a hint of time after impact, until I became aware that my seizure response dog, Rufus, was frantically licking my face and covering my body with his. When later asked by the doctor if I had lost consciousness, I tentatively said yes, then measured the period missing by the amount of dog slobber I was covered in, which, fortunately, was not much. Perhaps a minute, likely even less time passed before I was aware that my head really fucking hurt, got the dog off me, and tried to regain my feet. I was horribly dizzy and my vision blurred. My head was completely numb and a large knot was already forming on the top part of the back of the skull. I was nauseous for a few minutes.

I had a phone with me (habit when outside or in the garage for any length of time) so called Rachel. I'd be hard pressed to recall what exactly I said to her, but she lit out from work right away. The fact I was able to stand and talk seemed reason enough not to call 911 and all that entails.

We went to St. John's Urgent Care which is associated with my doctor in the same complex. I was the only person there, so they got me in quickly. Medical history, poking and prodding, lots of questions, Darvocet and Flexeril, a neck brace plus X-rays followed, along with a lot of waiting around. Thanks to the brief period of unconsciousness I not only had to have the X-rays but also a CT scan. Though they had a machine there, it was not operated after 5pm so I was out of luck. Off we went to St. Francis Hospital emergency center.

The ER in any hospital is always a somewhat alarming place. I've been in a couple for my own medical problems and to take others for theirs. The worst was probably the night my friend Chris R. drove his 1970's era Lincoln ocean liner into a telephone pole in Virginia, breaking his nose and collar bone (annihilating both car and pole - the latter only stayed standing thanks to the heavy. demolished car still holding it upright). Marty and I were there for many an hour as Chris slept, passed out despite the pain of his nose and collar bone, as the ER doctors ran tests and also dealt with a more lethal car crash that came bursting through the doors after we arrived. That night also included the delicious irony of Chris being essentially let off the hook for a certain DUI by the improbably named Officer Bacon of the Fairfax police, something I've laughed about over the years whenever this particular incident comes up.

St. Francis wasn't terribly busy, though there was a decent crowd in the waiting room. I got checked in for the CT, waited, and was called in under 5 minutes. We were taken to a trauma room, seen by a nurse (where my blood pressure and temperature were taken for the second, though not last time for the night), had to recount the details of the fall yet again, then were made to wait. Rachel and I listened to the flow of chatter around us as nurses and the ER doctor attended to other patients. Judging by discussions amongst staff about visitors coming and going, there seemed to be either a lot of new people on rotation or a recent policy change concerning who could or should accompany a patient into the ER area.

Eventually the doctor stopped by, looked over my chart, assured me the wait for the CT would not be long but the time before it could be read might be, thanks to a shift change in progress. A little while later a nurse stuck her head in, asked if I was there for the CT. An affirmative response prompted her to ask us if we could wait at the end of the hall in the small seating area there. I said yes, then, as she walked away, I saw a woman who had previously been vomiting noisily in another room collapse into the hallway and onto the floor. The nurse didn't see her, so I said "excuse me" loud enough to be heard, and pointed to the prone body "That woman has collapsed". She called for help and went to attend to her. We moved to the end of the hall, where I was called shortly for the CT.

Being an epileptic I am more than familiar with the joys of CT and MRI machines. The latter are a particular favorite of mine. Trapped head first in a cool plastic and metal cocoon, head caged in place, with barely enough room for my shoulders and arms to lie in a relaxed state, I am bombarded by the weird post-techno beat of the machine as it produces high resolution slices of my broken brain. It is an entrancing, ever changing symphony of differently pitched knocks, hums, and repetitive low frequency tones and warbles most likely recreated in the outside world by a spastic child and an old ARP 2600 synthesizer. The earplugs prevent hearing damage, but nothing can drown out the sheer volume of the bone jarring trance generator that performs as a side effect of the near-magical workings of the MRI. Every time I'm in one of these monstrosities I totally zone out to the unique bursts of machine music.

Of course, I wasn't scheduled for an MRI. :)

The CT took about five minutes. A full MRI of the brain lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to a full hour, so I was pleased and relieved. It was also cool to be able to see the imaging elements spinning rapidly over head. More visually entertaining than the spare white plastic tube of the MRI.

It all came up clean, of course. The doctor at urgent care was pretty certain it would turn out that way, as was I, after the initial shock and pain of the fall had subsided. The short span of unconsciousness, the nausea, and the blurred vision combined to force the doctor, as a cautionary procedure, to order the extra tests. The necessity of it all doesn't in any way blunt the mind numbing waiting that accompanies any trip to the ER, unless you are mortally injured or in some other way in danger of immediate death or permanent harm. That waiting is punctuated by the blood pressure machine puffing up on my arm and restricting the flow of blood to my hand every ten minutes, by the bodiless pronouncements coming from the PA (including a recorded voice issuing a prayer for the hospital, its visitors, staff and patients as visiting hours came to a close), and the sporadic visits from nurses, hospital staff or the doctor.

That waiting time left me to wonder about the disposable nature of so many things in the hospital chain - even fingertip pulse takers have been made disposable, with the electronics embedded in flexible plastic, fitted over the finger, and plugged into a monitor. I understand about issues of sterility, but that seemed especially wasteful. The amount of trash generated by any given hospital in a single day must be enormous. And each time will appear in a full accounting of my little trip through the belly of the medical beast.

I can't wait for the bills for my portion to arrive.

Today my neck is stiff as the cardboard that tried to kill me, and my back, a chronic source of pain and trouble, is protesting most loudly about my garage escapade. The minor cognitive oddities that dogged me last night have passed completely, so all that is left is to heal the muscles of my neck and back, and I am honestly thankful I got away without a major injury.

The sound of my skull bouncing off the concrete will stay with me for the rest of my life.

So I'm whole, but concussed.

Talk About Torture

The notion that there will be so much love and reconciliation in Washington (as evidenced by the Lieberman vote recently, and other nauseating trends) that nothing will be done to address the criminal activities of the Bush administration makes me ill.

Glenn Greenwald cuts through the bullshit:

All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

* * * * *

All of that is what has created the warped Beltway consensus that Bush officials who broke the law, committed war crimes and other felonies, should be absolutely immunized from the consequences of their crimes. That's because when government officials commit "crimes," they're not actually crimes -- they're mere "policy disputes among people in good faith." Only "incendiary" liberals believe that government officials who break the law should be subject to accusations as shrill and extreme as: "they committed crimes."

A further interesting point is this one, made by Jonathan Turley on the Rachel Maddow show. Turley points out that the Bush administrations murmurs that pardons are unnecessary because the Justice Department torture memos sufficiently cover anyone who then participated in such actions from legal liability in fact calls the Democrats bluff on this issue:

TURLEY: What the administration is doing is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, “Look, there’s really nothing we could do.”
Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments.

I think this is about accurate. Those in power are predisposed to aid one another when it comes to questions of legality and liability. In this case, it is pathetic that the alleged beacon of democracy is less inclined then a third world country recently out from under the boot of brutal dictatorship to prosecute its own leaders for actions that are clearly, without question, war crimes.

Intelligible

It is mind blowing that I find it such an enormous relief that the new president is intelligent, articulate, curious and answers questions directly. The fact that he understands the questions asked instead of responding to an unasked query with a non sequitur talking point is also noted.

Pretty sad commentary on the current resident that these qualities come across as extraordinary in the leader of our country, rather than a prerequisite for the job.

Watch the Obama 60 Minutes interview:


Watch CBS Videos Online

Creative Destruction?

Whiskey.

Tango.

Foxtrot.

Read this now.

The guy writing it makes some of the players out to be more heroic than they really are. Shorting a market you find reprehensible is full participation in reprehensible activity.

Still, a fascinating peek into what happened. This also explains some of what these financial instruments actually are. Which is a terrifying realization.

Regulation cannot come too soon, but I suspect nothing will actually happen.

How Soon They Forget

Epic fail on the part of CNN last night. Threatening us all with the "one party rule" cudgel, they fail to name the last president who had control of both house of Congress.

Campbell Brown: For those people who have been worried about the possibility of one party controlling Congress and the White House, the last president to do that, of course, was....?

John King: Ah, that was Bill Clinton, and...

Brown: Jimmy Carter! Jimmy Carter had... Bill Clinton had Democrats in the House and in the Senate?

King: Very briefly.

Brown: Very briefly. [Crinkles her nose] Didn't go so well.

King: No it didn't.

Hint: he is still in office for a few more weeks.

Fucking idiots. Watch them run as hard as they can from an eight year legacy of sucking up to the Bush administration. Gotta coddle your only source of fucking news...

Keeping Track

Cool widget that will allow you to follow the results as they come in.

Fired up, Ready To Go!

Great video of Barack Obama speaking in Manasass, VA last night.

Back

Just got back.

Mostly old folks at our polling place. About a ten minute wait - no biggie at all. Rachel waited for almost 30 minutes early this morning.

Heard lots of people saying that it was busier than they could remember ever seeing it - and the election volunteers, some of whom have been doing this a long time said they had more turnout already today at this polling place than in all of 2004. When you consider there was a gay marriage ban amendment on the ballot then, plus the fact that it is just after 2pm here, that is pretty amazing.

Off To Vote

It is a beautiful day here in Green Country - 74 degrees, sunny, with a good 25mph wind. My polling place is a church at the end of my street (about 5 blocks away), and since Rachel voted early this morning and has late meetings tonight, Rufus and I will be walking through the sunshine and drifts of leaves to cast my vote. Despite the fact this is some of the reddest territory in the US and my votes will have little to no impact at all on outcomes, I'm happy to cast them anyway. My way of making sure the door hits those bastards in the behind on the way out.

And, while Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate in purely political terms, he is closer than anything we have had at the national level in a very long time. Add in an ability to think clearly and make rational arguments (even for policies I may ultimately disagree with) and an obvious curiosity about the world around him, and you have the makings of what hopefully will be a very good president. Unlike 2004, I cast this vote as an affirmative act, not a purely defensive one.

Y'all have a great day.

Polling addendum

A lot of seizures lately, so my brain is mostly mush. The post below reads like mush. No apologies from me - seizures are part of my milieu, and the brain bruising they cause (and the short circuiting of my already minimal English language skills) is part of this life of mine.

I also forgot to mention that I am shit eating grin happy to vote tomorrow, because the end is nigh for the thugs and criminals who looted the national treasury on behalf of their friends, set environmental policy back 20 years, started two wars on a foundation of intentional lies while ratcheting up the powers of the national security state. So even though my vote will not count but for the local issues questions on my ballot, I am casting it joyfully as my way of saying "fuck you assholes" and seeing them out the door.

Though too far short of impeachment and war crimes trials, I'll take it.

Polling

According to the National Weather Service it is 79 degrees here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hardly a fall day despite the leaves blanketing lawns up and down my street, which means it doesn't feel much like voting season to me. Yet tomorrow I go to the polls to register my votes for president, senator, congressperson and a few local races and issues. Though I live in the heart of red country (it still makes me chuckle, in this season where Barack Obama is routinely, and wrongly labeled a socialist that the color most often associated with that political persuasion is identical to that color used to code the most conservative states) and my vote will not in any way affect the outcome of the presidential race, I am still very much looking forward to casting my vote tomorrow anyway. Oklahoma may well turn out to have the widest margin of victory for John McCain, but in my own head I am adding my voice to millions of others in saying "enough" to those who have run this country into banana republic territory.

Similarly, the Senate race here is rather pathetic. This is the home of James Inhofe, one of the more rabid right wingnuts to ever occupy a seat in the US Senate. The last polls I could find indicate he is leading Andrew Rice anywhere from 16-22 points, so my vote there will also make no difference, but I'll happily cast it anyway. As for the 1st district, it seems John Sullivan will win re-election rather easily. Again, I'll happily cast a vote against him, even if it seems futile.

I've only been surprised by two things this election season. The first is one I am happy to have been wrong about. Very early on, in conversations with friends, I was asked if Obama could win the Democratic nomination, and if so, the presidency. I said "no", and emphatically on both counts. My reasoning is simple, and now utterly discredited. I felt Clinton had the money, the name recognition, and the organization to handily take the nomination. I also felt that there are plenty of very conservative democrats out there who would find voting for a black man difficult, if impossible to do. I presumed, wrongly, that people would get into the polling booth and say "hell, no, I'm not voting for a black man".

And I am deliriously happy to have been proved a dunderhead about this. Nevertheless, that same reasoning was part of my calculation should Obama manage to swing the nomination. In a general election against McCain, a man many Democrats have come to admire and consider a middle of the road, bipartisan kind of guy (which he certainly is not), those same conservative democrats would be peeled away to vote Republican, and it could comfortably not be about race at all, but rather a better fit with an alleged Republican reformer. Those who did find race to be a show stopper could talk themselves into McCain by buying into the centrist talk.

Again, it would seem, I am going to be wrong as all hell. and again, I am overjoyed that is the case. I am still not sure what any of this proves when it comes to politics and race, given the incredible blunders of the McCain campaign since the general election got underway, but it has altered the extent and depth of my cynicism about America.

The second surprise relates to the rather nasty campaign McCain has run. I fully expected there to be plenty of surrogates to bring back the ghosts of Ayers and Wright, and the inevitable "surrender to terrorists" meme that was so popular in 2004. And those things all materialized, right on cue. The distinction this time that turns this sort of standard issue Republican ugliness into something extraordinary was the extent to which these attacks came directly from the mouths of the Republican candidates for president and vice president. I admit to a bit of shock at how easily McCain and Palin both fell into a comfortable groove with the "palling around with terrorists" charge, the casual pronouncements about the lack of patriotism on the part of Obama, the rabid zeal with which they both attempted to paint the Democratic nominee as not only unfit for office but potentially treasonous. It was pretty revolting and I really was surprised that so much of it originated with the candidates themselves, and not the usual semi-anonymous surrogates, which would at least allow the pretense of disassociation.

So I've been completely wrong about how this campaign would turn out, and I am content to be so. I still have very serious problems with the Democratic party and its behavior in the Bush years. And to those lefties who feel Obama is going to be some sort of hard charging progressive liberal, all I can say is, get right with what he really is, politically, or those of you who remember 1992 will experience all over again that sense of betrayal when it turned out Clinton was not a real friend of the left, but a corporatist centrist. Obama, who is intelligent, thoughtful, and quick on his feet is the far better choice in this election, and I cast my vote for him unequivocally. I do so, however, in recognition that he is very much a Democratic centrist, and not a committed progressive liberal.

Some Sensible Words

Colin Powell is, in my view, a war criminal. His dishonest performance in front of the United Nations was the final push that a lot of fence sitters needed to agree to invade Iraq. The fact that he knew he was telling a very Big Lie constructed of hundreds of small ones annihilated any credibility he had, in government, and in public life.

On Meet The Press Powell endorsed Obama, a move that had been predicted for months. Turns out his comments just outside the studio were more interesting than those spoken in front of a national TV audience. His comments about taxation are particularly useful, and bear repeating amidst the constant insanity of tax-cutting-because-we-can mania. Too bad he didn't choose to say those on the air.

"Liberal" Is Equivlaent To "Traitor"

This Representative from Minnesota is quite special.



The money quote:

What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or Anti-America? I think the American people would love to see an expose like that.

Joe would be so proud!

Hooray For Backwards Stereotypes!

We aren't racist fucktards.

Really, we aren't!

Maverickism

I'm confused.

If John McCain is truly the maverick we are bludgeoned into believing he is, why was it left to Bill Kristol the choice of Sarah Palin as running mate?

Much has been said and written about how McCain failed the very first executive test as a presidential wannabe: the choice of vice presidential candidate. Palin was a truly odd, and now obviously reckless choice, but at least we believed McCain himself had made the pick.

Curiouser and curiouser.

The Anti-Government Industry

I am nearly finished with a great little book by Garry Wills, entitled "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government". It is a concise treatment of the origins of modern anti-government thinking, and it is a delightful eye opening read. The most important thing I carry away from it (among many many useful things) is the practical streak that those who founded this country almost all shared. They had their beliefs and ideologies, but more than anything, a practical way of adapting their viewpoints to match reality, and thus create the best master governing document extant in the western world.

The book was published before W. took office, so it doesn't examine in any way the last frontier of anti-government sentiment in our country - the neo-conservatives who have been running it for the last eight years, and for longer at the congressional level. Wills may not have chosen to include them in his book had it been written later, and for that, we have Thomas Frank and his explosive "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule", which deconstructs what happens when those who believe the federal government is not a legitimate authority take possession of the levers of power.

This pair of books go very nicely together. I recommend them both heartily to anyone who enjoys learning something new.

Exactly Right

Frank Rich sums up the McCain/Palin effort to delegitimize Barack Obama as a candidate for president.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Full article.

To The Reichstag!

Put Godwin aside, for the moment.

Consider the recent assertions by the McCain/Palin campaign that Senator Obama is "palling around with terrorists". It has been spoken by Palin at her rallies, spurring cries of "terrorist!" and "kill him!". The locals who introduce either candidate continue the disingenuous maneuver of using Obama's middle name every time they mention him, in an effort to paint him as "other". McCain has just released an ad for the web (which inevitably get lots of free air time on the various cable news programs - talk about return on the dollar!) which reaffirms that Obama is friends with a violent terrorist and "cannot be trusted" with the presidency.

They say this:



And people believe it:



I realize we are not in second grade any more, but go ahead and take a moment to read that over again, and really contemplate what it means. A major party candidate for the highest office in the land, and possibly the most powerful office on earth, is accusing his opponent of being a sworn enemy of his own country. That is exactly what those statements and ads amount to - an accusation of murderous treason on the part of a US Senator with aspirations on the presidency.

And those making these assertions know full well there is not a shred of truth in them.

So while I am not usually inclined to make a serious comparison between the Republican party and the Nazis, I am free to make it now, and it sticks. This is the "Big Lie" tactic, where one political party or figure asserts the other party or candidate is in fact, the enemy, a person who intends to commit treason and destroy his own country. Not content to frighten Americans with "the terrorists" from some foreign land, they have moved to equating a fellow serving senator with those who really would strap on a bomb or steal an airliner and murder American citizens. It is astonishing when you really consider the magnitude of the accusation, and the likely ripple effects it is engendering now that will be in play well after McCain loses the election and returns to the senate.

Bereft in this campaign without a policy leg left to stand on, they have descended to the lowest form of political discourse, beyond the usual shots at character involving hints and allegations of financial wrongdoing or sketchy family background. This entire "Obama is a terrorist" meme is directly on par with the "he's a Jew" or "he's a communist" labels used in Germany in the 1930's to paint people as enemies of the state and all good Germans everywhere. There is absolutely no substantive difference between what the Brown shirts were doing then, and what McCain, Palin, and their campaign surrogates are engaged in today.

True Left

You read and hear all the time about how far to the left Barack Obama is. This is a standard canard of the Republicans during presidential campaigns, (never true) designed to convince stupid voters who cannot think for themselves that the Democratic nominee is some sort of flaming commie stooge. Of course it is a naked lie, no matter how many time they repeat it.

This year's version goes thusly:

"Senator Orrin Hatch appeared and took this recurring shot used by the Republican attack dogs: "In all honesty the two Democrats are very fine people but they both are extremely left. They are both to the left of Bernie Sanders, who is the socialist from Vermont, if that doesn't tell you something I don't know what does. If you use the term liberal it really means something here."

Of course, neither the candidate's voting records nor their stated and practiced political philosophy proves this point - to the contrary they explicitly debunk it.

And Bernie Sanders has something to say about this:

Q: As far as this redbating goes, what do you think Republicans are trying to scare people about – about you?

A: First of all, is they assume that when people hear the word socialist what they are talking about is the Soviet Union and communism. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders wants to renegotiate permanent normal trade relations with China – and George Bush just loves it by the way, and corporate America loves and is very proud of investing tens of billions of dollars in China, rather than in the United States, which is an interesting irony. And the Chamber of Commerce is very upset that the Chinese government wants to liberalize labor law in China, interestingly enough. You know, clearly what they are trying to do is what they always do, is confuse the social democratic policies which have been very successful in countries like Finland, Denmark, Sweden, other European countries – which guarantee healthcare to all people through a national healthcare program; which make sure that preschool education is available to all working families regardless of income; where in most cases college education is free or very inexpensive; where workers have more vacation time than they do in the United States; where unions are stronger… So, instead of looking at what goes on in some of the social democratic countries, which have virtually eliminated childhood poverty, while we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world – instead of looking at those policies, what they do is say, "This is socialism." Socialism we equate with communism, or authoritarianism, and lack of democracy. So, it's not a new tactic, it's been going on for about 40 or 50 years.

Now that's true left!

Link

Open mic night

I admit I am taking no small amount of glee in Republicans recent misfortunes, so many of which center around the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP pick. Teen pregnancy aside (yes, abstain from ragging on the youngsters) she is the gift that keeps on giving, with an abuse of power investigation only the tip of the rotten ice berg.

Mike Murphy, a former McCain adviser, and Peggy Noonan, formerly a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and indubitably still in puppy love with him, are caught on an open microphone during a stint on MSNBC giving their assessments of the Republican National Convention.

The video with all of the unintended truthy goodness.

And for the video impaired, the transcript:

Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we'll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We'll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she's the right woman for the job Up next, one man who's already convinced and he'll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.

(cut away)

Peggy Noonan: Yeah.

Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys -- this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it's not gonna work. And --

PN: It's over.

MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.

PN: Saw Kay this morning.

CT: Yeah, she's never looked comfortable about this --

MM: They're all bummed out.

CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --

CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.

MM: I totally agree.

PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it.

MM: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.

CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.

MM: Yeah.

Almost trivial

A very good article about how simple it can be to have your personal email and financial accounts hijacked. We are constantly reminded that everything we do online is permanent and searchable, but few people really contemplate the potential consequences involved.

...pretty as a picture, right in the very front row...

Errol Morris delves once again into the issue of photography as truth in the case of the Iranian "4 missiles or three" images.

Inevitably, he adds perspective and context that went missing from the many rounds of Internet gotcha! that followed in the days the alterations were revealed.

Sober Rock

I haven't had a drink in over ten years, but Foghat's "Road Fever" from Foghat Live is still a down and dirty, head banging piece of loud slide guitar, four-on-the-floor rock nastiness.

Best played at volume setting 11.

That is all.

Supremes Get It Wrong

I suppose the clumsy syntax of the Second Amendment bears some minor responsibility for leaving a crack of daylight through which the NRA have jammed a jackhammer, but it is to the Supreme Court's everlasting shame it chose to abdicate its responsibilities.

There is no coincidence that Scalia's majority opinion reads exactly like Bush administration talking points, as his hysterical dissent in the Guantanamo related case did.

Self-Evidence

There is nothing more irritating then reading a column in a major national newspaper in which the author has that light bulb moment the rest of us experienced decades ago. You know, the one where he/she discovers that Republicans have no principles other than the Law Of Maximum Short Term Gain. The corollary to it is that those same fraudulent "free market" profiteers inevitably turn to government to assume the destructive debt they incur in the chase of imaginary money - derivatives, shitty loans, outright theft.

It is revolting in the extreme, but typical. I call your attention to the Enron-Arthur Andersen criminalities of the late 1990's early 2000's. Cast back a little farther and you run into the wall of the S&L rip off of the early 1980's.

But remember kids, regulation is evil and the government is the enemy. Except when it isn't.

EJ Dionne, this is your wake up call.

A side note

I never did finish any of my useless ruminations on guitar players, rock music, and the albums of Led Zeppelin.

I probably never will.

This blog has utterly lost its focus which is in some part a mirror of its author's internal clutter and messiness.

Alas.

This is a bit I posted to a discussion thread on Flickr.

For those too lazy to follow the link nor read the discussion (okok, I know all four of you are really busy) it was in the context of the trend amongst many Flickr photographers to get caught up in the technical perfection of photos and perhaps losing sight of composition and, most importantly, subject and impact. The famous photo of Jimi Hendrix on his knees on stage at Monterey in 1967, summoning forth flames from his guitar was posed as an example. Iconic photograph of an out of the world moment, captured on film but not following any of the rules of photography as taught in schools or touted on photo sites.

A bit of back and forth (including an unwanted correction by me about where the photo was taken - the OP said "Ashbury" which had nothing at all to do with Monterey), and then I mentioned this:

We actually agree - if the image doesn't have something to captivate the eye or the mind or the soul, no amount of post processing or multi-thousand dollar gear is going to compensate for that. I do think the technical aspects have their place, and can improve a great image into something beyond that (my superlative well is running dry), but without the undefinable "it", all of that falls by the way side.

When I was a kid I read a lot of books about the Second World War. Many of them were heavily illustrated with photographs, some of them quite remarkable both in terms of subject and emotion, and the technical captures themselves.

One, however, stays with me and played a large role in defining my thoughts and feelings about war generally. It is a lousy photograph, from a technical standpoint - bad composition, lighting, exposure, so on and so forth. But the subject remains imprinted on my brain.

It shows the flattened body of a German infantryman after being run over by a tank he had been walking in front of, as part of a long column. All you can really see is this flat, muddy, uniformed figure, surrounded by a torn up dirt road turned to swampy mud, with a stopped tank behind him. It isn't gory, there are no body parts or blood apparent - you can almost believe it is just an empty uniform, lying in the mud.

Almost.

And that sentiment, that photograph, brings basically back where I started with my posts in March of 2003 - the first one being about the opening salvo of death-bringing bombs falling on Baghdad while Dan Rather tries to suppress the hard on he obviously had going under the news desk as buildings and the humans in them were blown literally to pieces.

My problem has become this: nothing has changed. More of ours are dying now than ever before, Iraq is a squalid, internecine street fight we can neither control nor suppress, and our country is becoming irrelevant to human progress. An impediment, even.

Makes me wish for those old time, over sized barf bags airlines used to have in every seat back pouch.

Fuck it.

Maybe writing convoluted irrelevancies about music and other shit that interests me the way shiny things entrance monkeys is the way to go. My anger is otherwise uncontrollable...

You've Been Euphemized

Oh Joy!

Oh Bliss!

Hunger has been eradicated in the United States!

Oh, wait. Maybe not.

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.

Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.

The United States has set a goal of reducing the proportion of food-insecure households to 6 percent or less by 2010, or half the 1995 level, but it is proving difficult. The number of hungriest Americans has risen over the past five years. Last year, the total share of food-insecure households stood at 11 percent.

Well. *I* for one am relieved. Wouldn't want anyone in the richest nation on earth to go HUNGRY.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/15/AR2006111501621.html

A glimpse of leather

Saw a bat as I was getting ready to let Rufus out to do his thing. I hadn't opened the door yet. A large flying insect was beating it's wings around the front porch light, and from behind the sliding glass doors in the kitchen I saw a sudden blur of flapping leathery wings. The bat half circled the light , then snatched it's prey and vanished into the dark up in the palm trees just as I opened the door.

Startling, but very cool.

Suffocation

I try to imagine not being able to breathe, reaching that point where the lungs will burst, your head explode, your vision narrowed to a pinpoint, and still the air doesn't come. I've been at the bottom of the pool longer than I should have, knowing that I could hold out for one more painful second then push off and find sweet air above the surface.

In my mother's case, the surface is a very long way away. A lifetime smoker, she was eventually diagnosed with Emphysema, and then C.O.P.D. The latter is a death sentence, a matter of when and not if, the rate of degeneracy the determinant. Then, not to my surprise, she was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her right lung. One type of surgery seemed viable, so she signed up for it and played it up to us as being relatively safe, as major operations involving lung removal possibly can be.

A month later and she remains in the ICU, unable to breathe on her own, fighting a host of smaller, nagging problems that have utterly inhibited her ability to begin recovery. After a lesser procedure we are told things are "improving", presumably relative to where things stood the week prior. The respirator tube has been moved from her mouth to a tracheotomy to kill off an infection in her throat and to render intubation a little less painful. She is also on light dialysis to speed up her kidney function, which had fallen way off when her system was unable to process enough waste. We are told the dialysis is nothing to worry about.

We shall see.

The hope is that in the next week or so she will be deemed strong enough to have the respirator turned off and begin breathing on her own, something that should have happened weeks ago. If it does come to pass, she may well be on her way to a long, but successful recovery. If she cannot, then she is at the bottom of the pool, staring up at the surface without the strength to launch herself toward air, fresh air.

Academia or Advocacy?

A very decent op-edpiece in The New York Times differentiating between professors advocating a particular political or religious point of view and teaching students about those subjects. This is a rare bit of clarity in the shoutfest the Righties have started up in their quest to purge from universities an invented liberal bias that does not exist. What the Righties want is to eradicate any truths but their own.

Shaken to death

My cousin Susan died a week or so ago.

She was discovered dead in the bathtub in her apartment by her mother, who had come to see if anything was wrong after a number of unreturned phone calls. From what I'm told some time had passed between her death and the discovery of her body, adding an additional layer to her mother's profound grief in the form of the beginning stages of decomposition.

No autopsy will be performed. The proximate cause of death appears to be drowning, likely brought on by the after effects of an epileptic seizure. Cousin Susie was prone to seizures, had been since she was born, her life imbued by her struggle to control those seizures and live a normalized life. The speculation is that she fell asleep while relaxing in the bath, then seized as she began to awaken, apparently a common part of her seizure pattern. Her seizures sometimes lasted as long as several minutes, and she tended to roll to one side and assume the fetal position as the seizure came to a close. For many epileptics the end of the seizures is followed immediately by a period of unconsciousness. Somewhere between the ending of the seizure and unconsciousness, Susie drowned.

I'm 40, and best I can recall Susie was a year or two younger than I, making her 38-39 at the time of her death, an age in our society considered relatively young for such an end. Her passing has given me some pause, but not as you might think - a fellow epileptic with the inside knowledge wondering at my own behavior, potential risks to be avoided, the wisdom of taking a bath when home alone. No, her death gives me pause because she and I have not been close in many years. My seizures didn't begin until I was 20 years old, and we've pursued very different treatment paths. We both wanted the same things - a modicum of "normality", a way to live that resembled the lives of those around us.

Susie had a 20 year jump on me when it came to living with seizures, the familial strains it can cause, the tremendous side effects of the powerful medications used to exert some control over the frequency and severity of seizures, and the personality distortions they contribute to. When I had my first seizure, I was conscious during the entire thing as initially my feet, then progressively the rest of my body locked up so tightly I could no longer call for help. Fortunately I had chosen my dorm hall steps as the venue for my epileptic debut, so a number of people who had heard came running. My room mate at the time, Neil, was trained as a paramedic, and he tried to take control of what was happening, but I was so deep into the seizure, and the outside world was disappearing at such a fantastic rate that all I had to time to think before that last pinhole of light was swallowed by complete darkness was" Don't worry, Neil, I'm only dying."

I awoke trying to punch out an Air Force paramedic. He retaliated by giving me a hefty injection of Valium. We reconciled.

This is my personal perspective about my misbehaving brain. I've stepped back from the threshold of the intense surgical route my cousin chose, instead attempting to find my own way to live with them, around them, whatever.

Susie and I had not been close in many years, but I feel the loss of her as my cousin, as a human being, and as someone who had great courage and will to render herself "normal".

All about me

I've rambled and ranted about guitar players recently, perhaps as the initial sign of an impending middle age crisis. If that is the case, please shoot me before I start wearing Lycra shorts and leasing a Porsche. So far I don't feel the yearning for ice cream suits and shiny blue shirts with overly wide collars, so I think I'm safe, for the moment anyway.

Doesn't mean my self indulgence need end here. In fact, that is the core essence of blogging - self indulgence, an ode to the self, myself, me. Regardless of topic, extent of outside sources and links, blogging is at its heart a pursuit inherently All About Me. I don't mean to disparage anyone who engages in the practice but I also lend little weight to the notion that blogging is itself akin to responsible journalism. Note the use of the word "responsible", a term not entirely applicable to many major newspapers, and especially news developed for television, be it the nightly half hour of Death TV or the round the clock breathlessness of CableSpews. In the mix of all this the "blogosphere" (gag me with a laptop) is said to beat the major news outlets to the story. This all sounds like ideal citizen journalism, but most of it isn't anything more than energy for a feedback loop repeating poorly or completely unsourced stories, which then bounce in and out of the major media.

In the old days of named sources, the days when no self-respecting reporter would use the term "reportedly" in order to introduce speculations or utter fabrications to the construct of an actual news story, none of this drivel would see the light of the day. The blogosphere's sole redeeming quality has been its willingness to continue the pursuit of the details of a story even after it falls out of the bare minority of news organizations that have earned the moniker "responsible". This carries its own difficulties as many of these stories are already done to death, and the pursuit comes full circle as the hunt for clarity descends once again into a morass of rumor and allegation without evidence.

But hey, what do I know? The threshold of evidence required to get a story on the front page of a major news daily is remarkably low. Astonishingly so.

The good news is that Led Zeppelin II is still one hell of a record, put together in bits and pieces as the band toured the U.S. for the first time. What were once simple blues riffs were given an accelerant and a match, and an amp turned up to 11. Sure, you have "Ramble On", a juvenile lyric fill of Tolkienisms, but the music backing those pathetic lyrics is straightforward. Driving drums, inspired guitar lines.

Heartbreaker stands out on this record for me because again it highlights Jimmy Page's use of multi-tracked guitar to achieve a useful musical end. If you listen closely to the track you may discover that the best guitar lines in that song are not necessarily the blistering solos.

And to close the show is a clearly stolen blues riff over which Robert Plant uses a harmonica sparingly, backed by lots of good old analog reverb. I'm not completely enamored if his imitation of the sound of some of the great black blues singers, but that is washed away as soon as the electric guitar riff injects the song with a bit of intravenous amphetamine. Page again demonstrates why he is arguably one of the greatest riff-writers in all of rock history, and includes a bit of counterpoint to set it all into context.

There is only one thing wrong with this album. Zeppelin wound up in a court battle with Willie Dixon over whether or not "Whole Lotta Love" was too close for comfort to one of his own tunes. Instead of fighting a real blues player in court, the Zepp should have been more gracious about it and found a way to settle. Something a lot of people forget is that while white boys on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were borrowing, imitating and outright stealing their American bluesmens' work, their idols and inspirations, those who made their brand of rock even possible had mostly been screwed financially by the music industry. It would have been a small thing for Zepp to part with a slice of their many millions and acknowledge outright that those who came before were worthy of recognition and recompense.

My new friend

Seems I've made a friend here in Florida already.:)

Fire in the legs

I've got these little bites all over my right leg. Well, not so little bites that are taking days to heal.

They're nasty.

They're from fire ants.

Welcome to Florida.

Startling as the vampire like holes in my leg were the over-sized flying cockroaches. Fat flitting roaches. How fucking unfair is that? Nature cursed us with roaches to begin with, then gave them wings that are certainly not vestigial and asks us to be kind to her? Fuck that. I'm giving up my green ways until She rethinks this monstrosity. There is also a sub-tropical variety that isn't repelled by light as most roaches are. Quite the opposite. In yet another slap to the human face, nature has decided that the relative safety bright light provides from these insidious home invaders no longer applies. In fact, this particular sub species is attracted to light.

Next time you hear that bump in the night and go to investigate with your thirty pound baseball Maglite, reconsider. Those noises you hear, the clumsy stumbling over the garbage can, a whispered curse, are not produced by a potential burglar. They are the genesis of a trap, designed to get you to open the door and turn on that overpowered flashlight, sealing your doom.

So fuck nature. Screw recycling. I'm sick of rinsing cans and sicker of the mess left at the bottom of the container when I fail to do it. Fire ants and dive bombing roaches the size of a golf ball. I'm gonna go out and fill my tank with Super Duper Unleaded Environment Murdering Gasoline, and see how She likes that. Fucking bitch. I'll get you for those horror show bugs.

Well I'm off to the beach. Not a cloud in the sky, light breeze in off the Atlantic, temperatures slightly higher than I'd like, but pleasant nonetheless.

Gone Gamma

Flickr , the self-described coolest photo sharing site in all of creation has declared itself now in Gamma , status. This follows a period that saw many site functionality improvements, a Yahoo buy in, and an explosion of users. The developers have wisely kept themselves out of a numbers game in the face of the proliferation of photo sharing sites, some of a flavor distinctly different from Flickr, any others pathetic rip offs, devoid of useful features and any sign of community.

Not to say Flickr is perfect. One need only examine the rapidly lengthening threads in various forums to read of much dissent from the recent site changes. This happens every time the Flickrati decide to alter anything. I take it in stride - the entire project is still very much in development, and can do an amazing number and variation of things no other site centered around photography can do. I've found a place to extend my interest in photography, not only through uploading my own, but perusing the works of others by swinging my way through the endless vines attached to the infinite number of trees in the Flickr forest. It is possible to begin in one place and wind up many place otherwise not found except by choosing to peruse those photos "favorited" by a contact, or randomly entering phrases into the Tag search boxes and seeing what is returned.

I use a lot of the online offerings from Google , despite the cries of data mining and world information domination. Google is attempting to develop ever changing ways to deal with rapidly growing amounts and types of digital information (and analog too, if you consider the book projects), and most importantly, the relationships between bits of data indexed.

Beyond their stated mission, Google has wisely allowed individual employees and teams considerable leeway when it comes to project concepts, trial testing and sometimes, a public release. The latter often infuriates computer "experts" and avid participants of computer forums all across the Web. The complaint is that Google is basically releasing unfinished software and allowing the world to beta test it for them.

True.

This is compared by critics to Microsoft's sorry track record when it comes to developing and releasing newer versions of its' Windows Operating System. True, MS does usually release the latest Windows version knowing a billion bugs would pop up, other software would break and it would take the company months and even years to make major fixes in the form of Service Packs, which carry their own built in fuck ups.

I find the comparison between software written by a for profit company but released for free and not required in order for your computer to function to an entire operating system that is released as a finished product for a fat fee when it is clearly still quite broken absurd, and reeking of a particularly foul strand of sour grapes. Google responds over time to the millions of suggestions made about each of it's software offerings, improving and experimenting with new features, some of which don't stick if user feedback is overwhelmingly negative. The chronic state of "beta-ness" allows for this.

By contrast, Flickr offered limited free user account next to pair annual user accounts which offered considerably more storage and other features. Buying a pro account back then was a bit of a gamble - none of us had any clear idea if the site would still be around three months down the road or if our money and uploaded pictures would all be gone one morning. Flickr survived, was bought by Yahoo, and is still cool, a small miracle considering who bought it.


Not sure what the point of any of this ramble is except to say to those who obsess over every Gmail detail or an entire site re-rendering at Flickr - remain calm. A few days down the line and you'll have adjusted to the alterations, incorporated those you have use for into your routine and discarded those that prove personally worthless. In some cases, new features that totally suck will die a quiet death, and a very brief moment of reflection will have you wondering why you were so wound up in the first place. :)

More Dinosaurs

OK, so last time I was extolling the virtues of Jeff Beck as guitarist extraordinaire, and mentioned only in passing a contemporary who is also a favorite of mine,Jimmy Page. He haunted the same London music scene Beck and Clapton did, but honed his skills doing more studio work than either of the other two. He eventually joined the Yardbirds in their final incarnation, initially as bass player, then lead guitarist when Beck left the group. It was in the midst of attempting to form the New Yardbirds followed on that Led Zeppelin formed.

I've been listening to the Zep catalog recently, and doing so out of order to avoid babbling about the chronology of the band, blah blah blah. All of that is readily accessible all over the Web. I just wanted to delve back into the music in a manner that escapes the tiny Classic Rock Radio box the band has been stuffed in since the format was invented 20 years ago. For anyone who cares, it was known as Album Oriented Rock prior to the all-the-same shite radio we have across the nation, and the playlist was still very much in the hands of the individual DJs. Of course hot records got more play, but they had a lot of leeway, so tracks other than the "hits" got decent exposure, as did bands then defunct or not selling in large numbers. In those days you could still call up and make requests, and if a song were already playing, get the DJ himself on the line.

But no more. Classic Rock Radio killed all of that, which is why the only DJs who become semi-famous in any radio market are a small number of live club DJs, and those numbnuts idiots that have turned your morning and afternoon commute into a low brow, vulgar shout fest. Gag me with a wet T shirt.

I digress. Please excuse.

So I'm listening to the original Zepp records out of order, letting the music wash over me, move me, drive me, entertain me all while I reconsider it in the context of the 25 years that have passed since I bought my first record. Zeppelin did release singles like most bands, but did little to push individual songs, relying instead on the full body of the music to carry a particular album, then backing it up with epic tour marathons. Unlike many bands in the very end of the sixties and into the seventies, Led Zeppelin did not travel with an opening act. They were the entire show, and still sold staggering numbers of tickets, setting attendance records all across the US.

So each album is a thing unto itself. I started with Houses Of The Holy, whose cover always looked as though it had been photographed under a sodium lamp, all weird orange and purple, and whatnot. The opening track (Song Remains The Same) has an insistent, compelling riff that pushes you right into the rhythm of the song. Page was consumed by the possibilities of his guitar in a way unlike Hendrix, who was said to have been frustrated by the disconnect between the sounds in his head and those he could actually conjure from a guitar. Page wanted to create layers of guitar voices, each one different but complementary to the others. One voice might be popping out the rhythm that Bonham's drums would pick up while another would add in chords edging on discordance, and the whole thing would somehow fall into place when it was so utterly clear from the first few notes that it couldn't possibly work.

Several songs from Houses Of The Holy appear on "greatest" compilations and Classic Rock (Heretofore known as CR cause I'm a lazy bitch) and rightly so, but this time around I found myself really smiling and grooving to the closing, and simplest track of the record, The Ocean. The recording is stripped way down, the guitar is loud and clean, and the riff as perfect as most of Page's riffs are.

Next up was In Through The Out Door the final release from the band before drummer John Bonham died. His death was a shock to the band, its fans, and the music world generally. Zepp had released their first record in three years, played a huge festival show at Knebworth, and was in rehearsal for a US tour when Bonham died. I can recall even now, reading it on Page 3 of the Stars And Stripes newspaper while in Tokyo. The only word from the band was "we're done". Just started tenth grade at The American School in Japan which was proving a very difficult transition and music was all the refuge I had. In other words, I was fucked. The ground beneath my very feet had betrayed me several times that week in a series of medium strength of earthquakes, and now the mighty Zepp had fallen.

And in truth, I wasn't lovin' the final record. In Through The Out Door spawned three very popular radio hits, only one of which I could really stand at all - In The Evening, mostly because of the groaning, murky sludge that lays the foundation for the signature riff to follow. That record does have its moments, however, but to my ears the hits, while well crafted rock tunes, are not what stand out. Two tracks, "Carouselambra" and "I'm Gonna Crawl" appeal most to me following this "relistening" I've been doing. The first does rely on a somewhat cheesy synthesizer sound, but once it gets rolling it's gone, and you can tell the guitar was slung way low down over Pages' shoulder as he tears the chords out. The mix is really dark, but that adds to the appeal. The second track also has too much synth for my tastes, but it falls quickly into the background. It's basically a blues track without the raunch, but plenty of testifying by Plant. Stacked against the monster reputation of so many other Zepp tunes it isn't much, but it really does close out this album on a strong note.

That's it for tonight. Thought I'd do more, but listening to entire albums is not something I do often enough anymore. The popular music industry is in many ways coming full circle. In the fifties and sixties in particular, it thrived on singles. Good old 45RPM records with that one song everyone had to have and a flip side that may or may not have been any good. By the mid sixties record companies were combining those few hit singles with other tunes already recorded by a band an releasing it as an LP. To the execs it seemed a sure fire way to sell more vinyl - the hits were on these 12 inchers, the kids loved the hits, so they'd buy these to get all they could from their favorite bands. The execs were right.

A lot of other factors combined with this economic motive to turn LPs into organic musical beasts. Some of the bands making whole LPs were also still releasing singles, but many fans were bypassing the two song 45RPM for the whole 33 1/3 enchilada. Now, in the era of computers, downloads (legal and not), and televisions' ability to push a song the LP (now in the form of a CD) is falling by the wayside. Most bands still make them even if they are nothing more than an unrelated collection of songs, but those who buy the music are moving away from wanting the whole thing. Think of how many CDs or LPs you bought primarily to get one or two songs off it. If you rip your music to computer, it is likely those tunes that never interested you in the first place are not going to make it onto your hard drive. Illegal downloading of music often centers around a particular song from really popular acts.

In other words, the single is where it's at, all over again. I currently have 13,033 songs on my computer in six different formats. And I've yet to finish ripping my entire CD collection. I've left off songs from many of the CDs I've ripped. Since my computer has become my primary listening place (one of my stereo speakers was rendered unusable after a cat knocked it over and rode it down to safety as it crashed into the wall. Claws and woofer surrounds do not mix well) the way I deal with the music itself has changed. It's all just files now, so I can move them here and there, copy them, back them up, alter their formats, and play them in any order I want, or ferret them out using various parameters, or just load up a gigantic list in Winamp , hit "shuffle", and let it fly. Beats the fuck out of craptastic radio, and has the blessed benefit of "next" anytime what's playing is not moving me to the groove.

More dinosaur ruminations for you all next time around. I may even finish my half-ass Page tribute/analysis/baseless rant.

Fuck all that...

it's time to get on with this.

I originally started this spastic blog with politics, news, and my muted outrage in mind. Over time, I've discovered that while my rage is less muted my will to pore over the daily news and other pertinent articles, process them, then spew here has waned. The three people who might actually read this already know what is really happening, how fucked up our country has become, and don't need me to understand that. When I started writing three years ago, just as the war was getting underway I could have been part of the alleged "blogosphere" had I the persistence. I did not, so Andrew Sullivan gets to be on TV, not me. :)

Tonight I want to talk about Jeff Beck . I had occasion recently to see a live show of his taped in Tokyo in 1999. I had pretty much given up on anything from Beck since somewhere in the 1970's when he was making extraordinary music incorporating ground breaking guitar playing. The meld was far more than much of the musical masturbation that passes for guitar technique these days, but it seemed to me his best days were long behind him. Then I encounter this unreleased DVD of a one night show recorded in Tokyo, backed by musicians I have never even heard of.

And there's Jeff, same hair he's had for 30 years, wielding a white Stratocaster and no pick. I thought the only modern electric rock guitarist left to play without one was Mark Knopfler . Nice to be wrong. The electric guitar is a difficult beast to tame and for rhythmic purposes, a pick can be a powerful tool. Beck plays brilliantly during this show, well in control of the music and his instrument, not skipping a beat or missing a note as tears through each piece. While his tone is certainly somewhat processed it is recognizably a Strat, and one in the hands of a master. From one phrase to the next it can go from singing to screaming but remain connected. Not all of the pieces played during the show appealed to me but I felt compelled to watch the entire thing just to see what he would do next, to hear the barely possible sounds come out of his guitar.

Beck was one of the "big three" English guitarists of the 1960's, alongside Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. All three of them were in the Yardbirds at one time or another but took rather different paths afterward. Beck's was the most divergent. Whilst Page made the Gibson Les Paul famous and invented a hundred now famous and familiar riffs, and Clapton made it safe for white men to play the blues and be really good at it, Beck rapidly moved off into less popular territory. After a few albums with Rod Stewart (Truth and Beckola) as lead singer (what a wasted talent he wound up being) that included the wildest rendition of "Jailhouse Rock" ever recorded, Jeff Beck spun himself off into the nebulous realm where jazz and electric music meet. His forays were not as relentless as say, John McLaughlin, nor were they intended to be some sort of spiritual machinery, but instead were examinations of how the guitar can be stretched into new territory and still be recognizable as an instrument. Beck played on those albums from the mid seventies as if he could barely contain the instrument in his hands, as if it were going to careen out of control and literally explode.

Aw, fuck. What the hell do I know.

Beck never achieved the fame of Led Zeppelin nor the reverence that surrounds Eric Clapton these days. Page can't play a lot of his own stuff any longer, not with the precision and energy he once had, and Clapton, while likely more technically perfect than ever, is dull as dishwater in recent years. So it was refreshing to see that one of them can not only still play, but can do so with energy and joy, right on the edge of chaos while still coming off as precise.

Like I said, some of the compositions didn't really do it for me, but Beck was utterly in his element.

Get these two records if you have any interest in what I'm talking about.

Blow By Blow

Wired

Next time maybe I'll write about the many virtues of belly button fuzz.

Big Money

Wow.

The FBI busted a few people in West Virginia for buying votes - $2,000 worth! I feel better knowing our electoral system has been safeguarded against this sort of major voter fraud.

They allege Esposito gave $2,000 in government-supplied money to a resident who had offered to bribe voters on his behalf.

They also credit the undercover sting operation for last year's guilty pleas by the sheriff of Logan County and the police chief in the coal-mining city of Logan, who both admitted to election violations.

The chief judge of West Virginia's southern federal court district condoned the tactic Thursday in an election fraud case against Perry French Harvey Jr., the man who allegedly accepted the $2,000.

Judge David Faber rejected arguments from Harvey's lawyer that the government had acted improperly by putting up a sham candidate.

Of course, the FBI will no doubt be turning it's powerful crime fighting abilities to the massive voter fraud and campaign finance abuses taking place at the national level, right? I mean, they are the Federal Bureau of Investigation...

Full AP story.

morris the cat meets jules verne at the end of time

morris the cat meets jules verne at the end of time
Originally uploaded by awfulsara.

This woman sees things the rest of us do not. Check her out.

Now playing on dust radio...

Chris Whitley has passed away. My world is a lesser place without him in it.

Read his obituary. Then go buy some good music, cause life is really fucking short.

To Sum Up

In better words than mine:

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he was being prevented from acting by bureaucracy and the sheer magnitude of the situation. Where are the stories of how he was in his office freaking the fuck out because there were tens of thousands of Americans trapped without food and water? Where's the story of how he ripped a strip off of somebody, demanding to know what the holy hell the holdup is getting water and food to those people?

Read all of it succinctly put, here:

http://www.thisisnotover.com/archives/2005/09/heres_what_gets.html

Wading through The Inevitable

Statistically, this had to happen. Now, levees are failing and the city of New Orleans is vanishing under the rising waters. It is difficult to get the mind around the sheer scale of the destruction. I've seen some less than thinking people compare this to September 11. September 11 was two buildings, and part of another. This is thousands and thousands of buildings, perhaps, when all is said and done, an entire major American city. Sure you can compare death tols, but it is absurd.

At any rate, I suppose such comparisons are a feeble attempt to put this into some sort of perspective.

I can't really get my mind around it.

One thing, amidst the sensational media coverage that comes to mind: Why so much focus on looting? People are dead, more will die, and many remain to be rescued. Businesses are insured, or ought to be. They can write off their entire inventories as a loss and be reimbursed. Cops are wasting their time chasing people stealing armfuls of Pampers, snack foods, and drinks. Why, oh why is anyone trying to stop them, and why is the media beating the drum of "widespread looting?" It's inane, and irrelevant.

The Politics Of Stupidity

I'm glad I don't have kids, who will enter a public school system being taken over by zealous, anti-science, anti-thinking religious barbarians, to be taught the bible in science class. In school boards and state legislatures across the country proponents of the redressed Creationist "philosophy" (now slickly termed Intelligent Design) are framing the debate as a need to teach the "controversy" surrounding the theory of evolution and natural selection. That controversy is wholly contrived by those who wish to teach it. Imagine for a moment that science classes started teaching that homosexuality is genetically driven behavior. These same nuts who want to subvert rational thinking would throw themselves beneath the wheels of school buses the world over.

Which proves my point...

Full article

Bone Dry

In April 2001 I wrote an article about the dwindling supply of water in the Great American Desert. The focus of the article was the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, a desert fantasy oasis of bright lights, limitless possibilities, and an abundance of water. Vegas is truly in the middle of the desert. Drive a few miles beyond the edges of it's sprawl and the air suddenly goes skin-wrinkling dry, no longer sprinkled with the water of a thousand fountains. Drive a few more miles and you come upon Hoover Dam, which stands astride the Colorado River.

The Colorado is the primary source of water for Las Vegas, and the city has now reached the limits of Nevada's allotment. Officials at the city and state level have known for years this day would come, and they have been preparing. All of the outdoor fountains in Las Vegas have been turned off, and the rest of the city is under strict rationing.

Just kidding.

Las Vegas, instead of generating and enforcing strict regulations on the use of precious water, has gone hunting for more to satisfy it's insatiable demand. It proposes to pump water out of the ground in Nevada and western Utah and transport it via pipeline more than 500 miles to Las Vegas. The local people living above that water, which nurtures their crops and keeps their patch of desert from completely blowing away, are protesting.

It will do no good. There is too much money at stake, too much political pressure being applied to stop this. The Bureau Of Land Management and US Geological Survey will likely confirm Vegas' contention that there is more than enough water for the city to suck 25,000 acre-feet (enough water to cover that acreage to a depth of one foot) per year out of the ground. And in a few years, when Vegas continues to expand and it's appetite for water grows sharper, it will reach out further, deeper, to slake it's thirst. Eventually, it will suck all the remaining water out of the western United States, dry up, wither and blow away.

And there will be no water left, not a drop.

Presidentus Ignoramus

If ignorance is bliss, we should all be the Shrub. From an interview with some Texas print reporters:

On Intelligent Design

Ron Hutcheson writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and 'intelligent design' Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life. . .

"Scientists concede that evolution doesn't answer every question about the creation of life, but most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.

"Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over 'creationism,' a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.

"On Monday the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design 'so people can understand what the debate is about.' "

Hutcheson writes that Bush "didn't seem eager to talk about the topic."

Here, in fact, is the entire exchange, prompted by Hutcheson's question:

"Q I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?

"THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor . . . Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.

"Q Both sides should be properly taught?

"THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about.

"Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?

"THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."