Month: March 2012

I love the juxtaposition of photo and title in this Cincinnati Enquirer piece. There a picture of total devastation in Moscow, Ohio from a tornado that touched down there yesterday, and that is paired with a Kasich turns down federal disaster aid headline. It couldn’t make it clearer that Ohio’s governor is a simple-minded demagogue who puts his ideology over any concern for his citizens.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said thanks but no thanks to immediate federal disaster relief Saturday, even as governors in Indiana and Kentucky welcomed the help.

Kasich did not rule out asking for assistance later, but his decision means tornado-ravaged towns in Ohio will not get federal aid now and are not eligible at this time for potentially millions of dollars in payments and loans.

The governor said Ohio can respond to the crisis without federal help and he would not ask federal authorities to declare the region a disaster area.

“I believe that we can handle this,” Kasich said while visiting a shelter for storm victims at New Richmond High School. “We’ll have down here all the assets of the state.”

[h/t to Zandar, via the Twitter Machine]

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission case removed all restrictions on corporate spending on electioneering communications. The Court said that the First Amendment protected corporations’ speech. In other words, “corporations are people, my friend.” And, as long as the Supreme Court thinks that corporations are people, we will have no chance of having a political system that has more than a passing resemblance to a representative democracy. The ruling struck down provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). Specifically, it made it possible to run unlimited television advertisements in the 60-day window before an election. The result has been an immediate change in how our presidential elections are run. Super PACs are now spending more than the candidates in the Republican nominating process.

Can we agree that this a bad thing? Yes? Okay. So, what can be done about it? Passing laws isn’t going to help. They’ll just be struck down as unconstitutional.

Well, there are two things we can do. The first thing is to realize that the Citizens United case was narrowly decided. If we can replace, with a reasonable person, one of the five conservative Justices who ruled against the FEC, the Court will probably overturn itself. There would be a whole process to that involving the creation of a challenge to the prior ruling. But I’ll leave that to the lawyers. The bottom line is that reelecting Barack Obama will create a four-year window in which we might be able to change the composition of the Court from 5-4 conservative to 5-4 liberal. Reelecting Obama gives us a potential opportunity to fix the problem created by the Citizens United ruling. It’s only a potential opportunity because there is no guarantee that Obama will have a chance to replace one of the conservative members of the Court.

The second thing we can do is to amend the Constitution of the United States to make it legally permissible to regulate money in our elections in whatever way we see fit. That’s easy to say, but much harder to do. How does one amend the Constitution?

The procedure is spelled out in Article Five of the Constitution.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

Let me clear this up a little. First, let’s get rid of the clutter at the end. The part about not allowing any amendments until 1808 is about slavery and taxes. The first clause of the Ninth Section of the First Article says:

The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.

The fourth clause also imposes a limit on taxation. These clauses were the result of some intense negotiations led by South Carolina delegate John Rutledge. The history is very interesting, but it need not concern us here. This part of the Constitution has been superseded by the 13th and 16th Amendments.

What we are interested in is the first part about the two different ways we can amend the Constitution. Under the first provision, if we can convince two-thirds of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives to agree to convene a convention for proposing amendments, and we can get them to pass our amendment by a two-thirds majority, it will go to the states legislatures. Then we will need three-quarters (or thirty-eight out of fifty) of our state legislatures to ratify the amendment. In every state except Nebraska, which has a unicameral legislature, passing the amendment will require both the lower and upper houses to agree. This first procedure is how all of our amendments have been passed, including the first ten, which are known collectively as the Bill of Rights.

The second provision has never been used. In this scenario, we would need to get the legislatures of two-thirds (not three-fourths) of the states to petition the Congress to convene a convention for the consideration of amendments. If we were successful, the process would be identical to the first scenario from that point forward. We would need two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives to approve our amendment, and then we would need three-fourths (or thirty-eight) of our states to ratify it.

One interesting side note belongs here. Amendments can come with time limits, although that has created some controversy. Our most recent amendment (the Twenty-Seventh) was sent to the states along with the Bill of Rights. The states didn’t get around to ratifying it until 1992. It obviously did not have a time limit. The Equal Rights Amendment, on the other hand, was sent to the states in 1972 with a seven-year deadline. The deadline was later extended to ten years. When less than 38 states had ratified the ERA by mid-1982, the bill expired. One thing to watch out for are efforts to put a timeline on our amendment. It will take time to build support for our efforts, and we don’t want to have to worry about stalling tactics killing our project.

I am going to suggest that the best way to successfully pass a constitutional amendment that will fix the problem of corporate financing of our elections, is to use the process that has never been used before. This is because of the uniqueness of this particular problem. Our Congress has been corrupted in a way that precludes it from being a leader in de-corrupting itself. With only a handful of temporary exceptions, every member of Congress has been elected. To get elected, they’ve successfully navigated a system that is absolutely awash with corporate money. They may not like the system, but they’ve mastered it. And they won’t willingly change a system that protects them and creates such a giant barrier to entry for potential competitors. We can build a grassroots army of citizens to put ever-increasing pressure on Congress to pass an amendment, but I can’t foresee a time in even the distant future when we’ll be able to convince 67% of both houses of Congress to do away with corporate dominance of our politics.

If we are going to have any chance of convincing Congress to act, we’re going to need two-thirds of the state legislatures to make the request on our behalf. In many ways, state politics are significantly more corrupt than federal politics. It costs less money to peddle influence and there is much less sunlight from the media and an inquisitive citizenry. But other factors work in our favor. The political parties are less polarized at the state and local level. The lower cost of creating influence works in our favor. We can afford to play. And many legislators are not career politicians. Many have full-time jobs. When it comes to corporate influence, many on the right don’t see it as something to protect because it advantages their side of the aisle. They see it as simple corruption.

I don’t think most rank-and-file Republicans and right-leaning independents have any investment at all in a system that is awash in corporate and labor union money. These are the people we need to identify and mobilize. And we need to do it all over the country on the local level. And that means we can’t make it about partisanship or class warfare. It has to be about good government. It has to be neighbors talking to neighbors.

It will take a long time. People should plan on it taking more than a decade, and perhaps two. But, if we can get one state legislature to pass it, we can move on to the second one, and the third. If Congress is ever presented with a petition from two-thirds of the states, they will be under tremendous pressure to act, especially considering what that accomplishment would imply about the organization of the movement that made it happen.

What else are we going to do? Sit around on our asses and watch this country go down the drain?

[In the interests of full disclosure, I am consulting with Democracy for America on issues that may be mentioned on this blog. While I will continue to express my own views and opinions, any articles that may present a conflict of interest will contain this disclosure.]

Booman has a piece up here, Remember When Pop Was Great. In it and in the (so far) 33 responses, the ongoing demise of this culture is being discussed on the very focused level of “pop” music.

Read on for a musical expert’s take on the matter.

Expanded.

Bet on it.
I am a working professional freelance musician in NYC…40 years and counting…and I have lived through the change being discussed in Booman’s thread. My own take on it? As “pop” music…including all of the music that we hear on the media (Background music, advertising music, etc., easily more than 90% of the music that the average American “hears”)…as the music that we consume stepped away from acoustically-based to technologically-based performance and production, the excellence to which the people on this thread are referring simply disappeared. This was an economically driven change. It is quite simply cheaper to use electronics to produce music than it is to use the musical expertise of real people.

This is the culture’s loss, and it goes way beyond “pop” music. It is a sea change that affects the very basis of this society…its people and how they function on a day-to-day basis. So-called background music…film + TV scores, music that is left on as we go about our daily lives, advertising music…subliminally affects us in very serious ways. It times in our motions, so to speak. Our emotions as well. The complexity of the sounds that human beings make with instruments that have as their base a physical existence in the world is literally thousands of times greater than sounds that are produced electronically, yet from the advent of the synthesizer as a practical, easily usable musical instrument…say the late ’70s/early ’80…through to the present the acoustic content of almost all of the music that we consume has steadily declined. Even the voice…the first and most important instrument, really…is now basically synthesized in most of the music that we hear. That is, vocals are electronically controlled so that the final product most often sounds absolutely nothing like what the singer was singing.

Add to this movement the digital recording and propagation techniques that compress sounds so that they are more easily stored and reproduced on small media…first CDs, now mp3s and the like…and what you get is almost a flatlining of the music. It’s “there”, but it’s not beating. Barely beating, anyway.

Long story short?

No emotional content. Like fast food. It’s there, but there’s no there there.

This is not just a “pop” phenomenon, either. I rarely listen to recorded music except for research…who’s doing what and if it’s interesting to me, how they’re doing it. (Technical stuff…if it’s interesting enough, I transcribe it by ear in order to better understand it.) I’m involved in making great music on an almost daily basis in live situations, so not consuming recorded music is no great loss to me. But just a couple of days ago I was driving in midtown Manhattan traffic…don’t ask, we all make mistakes sometimes…and I got bored. So I put on the local jazz station, WBGO. Now I don’t listen much to WBGO either, because most of the “jazz” on it is really mediocre. It’s simply rewarmed, 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation remakes of the music of the great bop and post-bop jazz masters. If I want to hear Miles Davis or John Coltrane, I listen to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Duh. Hell, I heard them live. Anyway, WBGO was playing a track by a fantastically good trumpet player who shall remain nameless because I have to work with him once in a while. I didn’t know who it was while I was listening, but he was playing the horn as well as it can be played and the piece of music he was playing was amazingly complex. Harmonically, rhythmically…every way possible. A very fast tempo, and he and the rhythm section were doing absolutely incredible things. (I don’t say this lightly, either. I have played with the best of the best for a long, long while.)

So I pulled over at a fire hydrant and sat there, listening. But after a minute or two I began to get…antsy. Like…where’s the emotion? Where’s the blues? Where’s the feeling? I have a pretty good sound system in my car and I keep it well balanced in terms of EQ, so as I thought about it I realized that:

1-The recording mix…the way the instruments had been balanced after the music was recorded…was missing a lot of information. It was clear, it was easy to hear every note and every part of the drum set, but there was no fire left in it. It sounded…like a synthesizer! Like the world’s greatest sampler had sampled what the musicians were playing and then recreated it without any mistakes. Without any apparent “effort.” It sounded totally inhuman. I have played music on that level, and let me tell you…there is effort there. Listen to ‘Trane or the great Miles groups on the original vinyl or on the (increasingly rare) digital versions that have not been remixed to near death for evidence of what I am saying. The humanity coming out of the speakers is palpable. But here? Again…no there there. Musicians call it “presence.” The notes were there…you could hear them all…but they had no presence. No weight.

2-After having done nearly a thousand recording sessions, I could hear that the musicians themselves were separated from one another acoustically, that they were receiving each other’s information through earphones and that they were each in a fairly small space, physically separated from one another. I could sense this by the way that they were playing.

Now think about this idea for a minute. Think about the difference between:

   A-Four people sitting at a table having an intense discussion, passionately improvising around a subject in which they were all masters.

and

   B-The same four people having the same discussion, only in separate little rooms listening to the others’ voices on earphones. Good earphones, but still earphones. And someone else was deciding how much of each voice they were receiving in those earphones. Someone who was a master of recording but not of the particular subject that was under discussion. And not only were they listening to the others on earphones but since they had to wear earphones they were also listening to themselves on the earphones too. Reality takes a step away. So does passion. Bet on it.

Then add to that difficulty the following. A couple of them farted or burped or misspoke or simply didn’t get their point across clearly during some parts of the discussion. No problem, Fred…we’ll just redo your part for that sentence. We’ll punch it in. And…what’s that you say, Mikey? You don’t like the way your voice is sounding today? You have a little cold? You’re jet-lagged? Don’t worry, baby…we’ll fix it in the mix. What? You want to do the whole thing over? No way. Sorry. Too expensive. On to the next discussion. Trust me. It was fine. Next!!!

And so it goes.

I was listening to a digitally altered recreation of a make-believe version of how people play this music live, on stage.

It’s not like there was no “there” there. There most certainly was, but an important part of it was missing. It was partially a remembered there. A reanimated there. An undead, Draculaized there. A digitized there.

So now the recording goes out into the world. And people who know very little about the reality of the music listen to it, which is the way it’s supposed to be. No sense playing if there’s no one listening, right?. But…to what are people really listening if not the actual “music,” if not the notes, the rhythms, etc? They are listening to the effort, to the expertise of a lifetime of talented effort. And it is that effort…that heat, that passion…that has been edited out and dumbed down by this process. So people don’t listen, and in not listening they don’t get tuned up.

Now go back to the ‘Trane or Miles recordings…or Basie or Ellington or Louis Armstrong in his prime or Bill Evans or Stan Getz or any of the other live music masters of jazz. It’s all there. Heat, passion…the works.

Expand this syndrome throughout the music world. This is not a “jazz” problem, it is a societal problem. It’s the same up and down, from pop to country, from latin to jazz to Western European style orchestral music. The funk is missing. It’s been digitalled out. It’s been moneyed out.

Now expand it to the other arts.

Same same.

Now…expand it to the political and media info world.

Same same same.

We got a cool Prez, right? He works on digital. But the important info? You can’t hear it. He’s been digitized. Will we ever again hear a public servant say something like “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” and witness that expression make real, emotional waves in the culture? No, it would be digitized out into just another soundbite.

What y’all are complaining about?

It’s the sound, babies.

It’s the sound.

We have all been soundbitten. Digitized. Compressed. Aurally undeaded.

Turn the shit off and go walk in the sun. Go listen to live people saying and doing live things. Go have a party. (No, not the DemocRatpublican Party. Something not prerecorded, not synthesized.) Go do something, goddammit!!!

You be bettah off.

Bet on it.

Over and out…

AG

.
Issuing the latest warning to Barack Hussein Obama … Very interested to learn Obama’s choice in his speech: pandering to the Israel lobby or show courage as leader of the free world. See my recent diary –  Obama’s Self Interest and Re-election. Interesting analysis on Syria – 6 ways the U.S. has faltered on Syria.

Daylight: New film blasts Obama’s Israel record

(FP The Cable) – One day before the AIPAC conference kicks off in Washington, an anti-Obama pro-Israel group is widening its criticism of President Barack Obama’s record on Israel — while the White House defends its treatment of the relationship.

The trailer for a new 30-minute video, entitled “Daylight: The Story of Obama and Israel,” cuts together clips of Obama quotes and outside commentary to put forth the narrative that Obama has made statements and taken actions as president that have put him out of step with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters.

 « click for ad NY Times

“We believe that that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,” Obama is shown saying, a reference to his May, 2011 speech, where he for the first time explicitly defined U.S. policy as supporting the 1967 borders with agreed swaps as the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

A product of William Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI).

“He didn’t quite have a full grasp of what the full region looks like,” conservative journalist Lee Smith is shown saying in the video. “This is not how you treat an ally.”

The ad goes beyond the Israeli issue to suggest that the president is too solicitous of Muslim concerns. The end of the trailer shows Obama saying, “I want to make sure we end before the call to prayer,” a clip from his town hall meeting with Turkish students in Istanbul in April 2009.

Assassinate Barack Obama to Save Israel ¶ Uproar

• Why Netanyahu’s Visit to Discuss Iran Puts Obama in a Political Minefield

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Below this sentence you will see the extent to which Ron Paul’s dangerous agenda will get enacted into law or policy.
Sorry, there’s nothing.

I remember when pop music was really good and the people producing it were incredibly talented, from the singers (who could also dance), to the front musicians, to the string and horn arrangements, to the costume makers. Here’s a reminder:

I just watched Heatwave do this on PBS. It was, if anything, a little bit better than the near flawless version 35 year-old version in this YouTube. Also, too:

Something horrible happened to the music scene in this country during the 1980’s. I don’t know if it was Reagan or MTV or just a hangover from the 70’s. We still have lots of great musicians making lots of great music. But our popular music is just awful.

Here’s how I feel about this. Buying a home that costs over a million dollars and then making zero mortgage payments for five years while using ever tool in the book to avoid and postpone foreclosure is not a socially responsible thing to do. But look at their excuse:

“It was never our intention to get here and never make a mortgage payment,” Keith Ritter said. “We don’t believe in living for free.”

But he and Janet, a 51-year-old real estate agent, make no apology for using every tactic available to them to stay in their house, including challenging the foreclosure sale in court, requesting mediation and claiming they had a tenant living with them. Their adversaries, they argued, are giant financial institutions with armies of lawyers that are out to make as much money as possible at the expense of homeowners.

In truth, they are just the other side of the coin. They’re holding up a mirror to the financial institutions that screwed the rest of us. This is how you look.

So, are you hearing normally apolitical people in your life make comments about the attack on birth control, the government-mandated vaginal probes, and the unhinged attacks on Sandra Fluke? Is your social media blowing up with outrage from normally quiet quarters? Have you overheard conversations on the street or at work? My answer is yes, to all of the above.

It’s almost funny to watch how hard it is for Republicans to criticize Rush Limbaugh. Instead of calling him a misogynist and a bully, they say he is being “absurd” and chose the wrong words. Rush’s sponsors, on the other hand, are getting a little skittish. He’s lost at least six advertisers in the last couple of days, including: Citrix Systems, LegalZoom, Quicken Loans, Sleep Number, and The Sleep Train.

I just find it amusing that Limbaugh thinks the Pill costs more if you have more sex. I guess his wives have been telling him that to extort more shopping money from him. I guess they’ve convinced him that their pills work just like the Viagra pills he used down in the Dominican Republic while he was shopping in the sex slave market.

This is a man who committed prescription fraud in order get enough Oxy-Contin to make himself deaf. Four wives and no children. Could Limbaugh be sterile?

And now Bill ‘Falafel’ O’Reilly is saying that this dispute is all about subsidizing a promiscuous lifestyle, too. How much did he pay out in his sexual harassment settlement?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I’ll be continuing with the Sedona, Arizona roadway scene.  The photo that I am using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on an 10×10 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ve begun to differentiate the buttes a bit.  The heavily shadowed area across the central butte has received a layer of dark paint.    The butte’s base and the other buttes have also had another layer of paint.  Right now the central butte does not appear unified but this will hopefully be resolved for next week.

Above, the sky has been revised and now contrasts nicely, especially with the dark central butte.  Below, the grassy areas adjacent to the roadway have been started.  Things are starting to become somewhat organized but there is much to do.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be  seen here.