Plausible Deniability

One of my favorite phrases has gone missing!  No one has mentioned the real result of these State Department memos being released- it eliminates the possibility of denial.

The truth of the substance of these memos can be seen in the vigorousness of the push-back.  They really hate being able to deny the actions that we all knew they were doing (wink wink).

What surprises me is how readily some folks identify with the state.  As if the state were some honest broker who had been done wrong by this scoundrel.

We have to stop being led around by the official propaganda like this.  It gets us killed.

Any comments about Pay Pal and the WikiLeaks deal?

That American twist.
I watched a classic old movie last night- No Orchids for Miss Blandish.  The 1948 British version.
It's a very bad movie in many ways, but it's good in others.  The good parts stem from the original novel, a crime story that was quite shocking in late 1930's Britain in its portrayal of murder, abduction, torture, and drug use.  There are some unforgettable characters in the story.
The bad parts come from what appear to be the attempts of the movie makers to clean it up to get it past the censors.  The socialite girl is no longer doped up and held against her will by the sociopathic gangster.  Instead, she falls for him.
This makes everything Hollywood perfect, and while they both die in the end, I suppose that's the price to be paid for love.
Still, it's fascinating to watch the hoops that the actress playing the socialite must leap through in her attempts to portray a woman who is simultaneously "brains and beauty", a pampered princess, and a woman in love with a cold, unfeeling murderer.  Could be a great role for someone, I guess.
Her character is much more believable as a doped-up victim.  But then it wouldn't have that American twist...

What was your favorite show at the Spectrum in Philly?

Any comments about the downloads at Steam Powered?

Watching a program on the early days of film making last night, which followed a film about a failed film inventor.  In the program, many descendants of  famous early movie people gave accounts of the character of their ancestors and how their strength, risk-taking, creativity and sheer willpower led them to succeed.
These were guys who invested everything they had in a projector and a storefront and built that into companies like Warner brothers and Fox.  American success stories.
We love to hear these stories- but what about that failed inventor?  His story got made into a film, at least.  I suppose if you believe in an afterlife, and you further believe that anyone there would care about such things, you might believe he is satisfied now that his story has been told.
Me, I like the boring stories.  Stories about people who neither succeeded nor failed spectacularly, but who just lived their lives and enjoyed themselves doing it.  It doesn't mean they didn't do interesting things, have powerful feelings, love or hate deeply.  It doesn't mean they weren't strong or didn't take risks or were not creative or lacked willpower.  Ordinary people do amazing things sometimes.
Living an ordinary life takes more courage and willpower than we give credit for.  There really ought to be more stories about it.
(Of course, history is written by the victors.  The thousands of nickelodean operators whose storefront businesses didn't grow into major studios never got the chance to make a movie about their lives.  But these days we all can, if we want to.)

Webbed Feet.

What would have been a hot bass rig for a jam band/bar band circe 1991.  Same question for keyboards.

A scary thought for Halloween.

Think about the last election.  One party fielded the oldest man ever to run for president, whose cancer is in remission.  His running mate was someone with such radically right-wing beliefs that she refused to reveal what magazines she read.

What's scary is that many people took them for serious candidates.  Fortunately, the powers in control of these things gave us a reasonable option.

Politics in America is fucked up because we live in a world of lies.  I do believe people can make good decisions if they are well informed.  That is why the people who run things spend a lot of money to keep us deluded.

Here's a clue.  If you have strong emotional reasons for choosing one candidate or the other, please don't vote.  You've been duped, fooled, manipulated, and I don't care how many catch phrases you have absorbed to justify your feelings.  If you vote your gut you are failing in your duty as a responsible adult to make an informed choice.  Just fume at home, throw things at the TV, shake your fist at the sky.

This isn't some game.

Comments on You Can't Lie?

Any Wheat Heads want to share their fondest memories of Whole Wheat Radio?

I'm trying to figure out what to do with all these wheatberrys...

Here's a spot for any comments about the new mix of Desert Girl.

If anyone knows anything specific about the old Manheim Rock Theatre please post here.  I am interested in finding out when they first opened the doors, when they shut down, who was running the place, and who played there.

Photos greatly appreciated.

Working on the very dynamic song Sparrows. and listening closely to the mix leads me to be disgusted with mp3 compression.

Of course it's always been there with mp3 files, but we tend to say "oh, at 256K they aren't so bad" and get over it.  Well, they really are so bad, especially if you've got a clean 24 bit .wav file to compare them to.

I don't know, I've read that some people prefer that sound, and it doesn't surprise me.  I used to "like" the sound of cassette tapes...

This has been the Steam Powered recording schedule for August so far-

That's 13 nights in the studio recording, mixing, backing up songs or repairing equipment.

My daughter asked me if I'm getting paid for this.  Like it's a job or something.

Income is a convenient yardstick for success.  That's a problem, because some very lame activities (brokerage) pay very well, and some very worthy activities (teaching) pay very little.

In America it seems that all work must turn a profit.  I believe this is a trap.

I'll do the work because I like doing it.  We'll see what sort of material profit, if any, comes from it.

This is pretty weird.  I spend a lot of my time reading progressive blogs and I check Google news several times a day, yet I didn't hear about the formation of a group called One Nation until I read about it in my local dead tree Sunday afternoon.

That article was a reprint of an article that had appeared in the Washington Post last Friday.  Now, Fridays are  notorious as news dump day, when things hit the papers that folks hope will not be noticed.  Sort of like the old joke "and your cat died".

Added to this the fact that the Wash Post is one of the most active sources of disinformation/corporate propaganda on the planet, and I suspect that this was an attempt by them to set the tone for the discussion of this organization.  That "tone" being that this is a group like the bizarre, reactionary Tea Baggers.

The lack of response by progressive bloggers is a bit puzzling, but I suppose they all have better things to do in the summertime on a Friday.  Sadly, most of these guys are beyond bitter about the actions taken by the Obama administration so far.  Expectations for the possibility of change are quite low.

What they forget is that they don't represent ordinary folks.  Ordinary folks aren't quite so hooked into all the battles and maneuverings in Washington that progressives follow like the plot of some suspense novel.  Sure, ordinary folks are disappointed, but they still believe in the process.

The timing of this call for change seems good to me.  Organizing a march on Washington in October seems like a good idea to me.  The call for unity among the majority who voted this man into office seems good to me.  I want more, but this is a good start.

(later)
Still remarkable net silence about this.  I found a piece by George Gresham on the Majority Agenda(?) website.

Looking for a longish read on a wet afternoon?

Here's an evaluation of the current state of the union by Eric Alterman.  Hits it just about right, I think.

Endless War.

There's always a precedent.  I've just rediscovered the Hundred Years' War.  It was basically the French versus the English (although back in those days the English elite were French).  They "engaged in hostilities" for a period of more than 100 years, off and on.

They did this while the Black Plague was raging.  It was a war over territory, control of resources, and partly a pissing match.  It was a war between the elite classes, fought by the peasants.  It wasn't the peasants' fight- the peasants had nothing in particular to gain or lose by who they worked for.

We still fight their wars, only the elite aren't titled "kings" and "dukes" anymore.  The wars are still about territory, control of resources, and who has the bigger dick.

plus ça change...

Zombie economics is easy to understand.  Someone profits from this.

The American Dream isn't dead.  It's very much in practice today.  But what used to be implied by the American Dream- that anyone can achieve it- has been stripped down to something simpler.

We all know that not "everyone" can achieve it.  Only the select few who are smart enough, resourceful enough, tough enough to deserve it.  And these select few have no obligation whatsoever to anyone else.

But the myth is kept alive, because, well, if yins stopped working so hard, the select few would have a bit more trouble staying on top.

I had a dream...

Like I'm watching a movie, there are scenes from a girl's life.  In one of them, there are kids on a playground in winter.  It is dark.  The kids stand around in bunches, talking together, until some break off and run around.  Eventually a teacher summons them back to class.  They form up a double file line, and the rear most pair of girls withdraw cigarettes from string purses and somehow light up and have a few drags during the march back to school.

The incident is related in a book- a slim, beige hardbound book that covers a year in the life of its subject.  There is a woman with a stack of these books in her home telling the stories behind them.  Her husband is here with her- she is young middle aged.  She explains how the books worked.  "It really is a club," she says at one point.  She and her friend were both members.  She divides the stack of volumes according to the towns she lived in- at one point explaining that she moved away for a while, but then moved back.  She seems to want to sort the books by the town rather than follow the order of years, so the stack is not in order from newest to oldest.  She opens a volume.

The paper is odd, like the old encyclopedias, sort of yellowish, but smooth.  On each page is a series of dated paragraphs, either describing general events in history or specific instances in the woman's life.  This column takes up the central third of the page- there's plenty of room in the margins for hand-written notes.  A typical entry was like- "August 14, 1969.  Begin two weeks of camp at Nabobiskybobie.  Mom cried."

So it's like a diary, but one with permanence, meant to be shared with others in the club. 

Concerning this 1984-style renaming of torture, it's something that we all know happened.  It happened as we watched.  Should there be more outrage about this?

I think we're pretty outraged as it is.  But our outrage has no outlet.

We have a couple of options here.  Number one: ignore it.  This is a very popular option.

Number two: accept the change.  This is also a popular option.  We convince ourselves that what the world and we ourselves used to call torture is no longer torture.  Or is OK as long as the "good guys" are doing it.  Just go along with our leaders, they know what they're doing.

Number three: express outrage.  This certainly works for some people- it can be a source of strength.  Still, it's hard to express this feeling when there are so many outrageous things going on.

Number four:  refuse to accept the change.  Makes it difficult to maintain a positive view of the country when you face the fact that our leaders are war criminals.  There is a whole chain of logical conclusions that follow from this.  See Chomsky, etc.