9. October 2011 by admin.

Here is some good music to check out if you haven’t heard it already…

Slinky tune from The Herbaliser…”Gadget Funk”

And another one from the same band…

Here’s one from an artist I never heard of before hearing this song, Abbe May with “Mammalian Locomotion”

A very catchy tune from Joy Formidable, “Heavy Abacus”…This is the live version but studio version is also great—like a combo of CBGB-era Talking Heads & Blondie.

A great remix by Jagz Kooner of an already good Kasabian tune…

Here’s one, “DNA”,  that I like from The Kills, Alison Mosshart’s other band…you’ll have to click on the link below to listen though…

http://pigeonsandplanes.com/2011/03/the-kills-dna.html

Great tune from Thievery Corporation that they performed really nicely live when I saw them a few weeks ago on their current tour.  Great show in general, though the vocals were badly miked.

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31. July 2011 by admin.

Hope you are enjoying the Summer.  Here are some more music recommendations, mostly dance tunes.

If you haven’t heard Thievery Corporation’s new album, “Culture of Fear”, you should check it out. Some great tracks, including this one, “Free”…

Kidz in the Hall, “Jukebox”…

This is a great tune from Gil Scot-Heron, who died in May of this year.  “Me and the Devil” from his 2011 album “I’m New Here”.   Video is well done but spooky…

Here’s a previously unreleased but great rocker from New Order, “Hellbent” from the recently released compilation “Total”.  Wish Sumner and Hook would kiss and make up and get back to work together.

What do you get when you mix Queen’s “We Will Rock You” with Folk Implosion’s “Natural One”?  “Kids” by Sleigh Bells…

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17. June 2011 by admin.

Here are some tunes I like that you might also like:

1. Planet Funk is a great Italian dance band, which consistently pumps out great dance tunes.

Here’s one of their best, remixed pretty well: 

Some of their other great tunes include: “Stop Me”, “The Switch”, “Chase the Sun”.

2. This is a great tune by Greyboy with Sharon Jones of the Dap Kings on vocals.  Good remix.

3.   Here’s a tune by an obscure band, Cetu Javu.  Doubt many have heard of it, but it’s a great tune and pretty good remix.

4.   Here’s an awesome tune from a band I’ve never heard of before or since.  I have no idea who they are but I sure like this tune.

5.  An oldie but goodie—Oran “Juice” Jones, “The Rain”

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7. June 2011 by admin.

What is it our soldiers fight to protect?  What makes or used to make the U.S. a great country?  The ability for citizens to express peacefully their ideas and views without fear of retaliation or imprisonment.

At the monument to Thomas Jefferson, who said: 

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."

Police brutalize peaceful citizens whose only ‘offense’ is quietly dancing in front of the monument.  The police refuse to tell the citizens they are harassing what law they are accused of violating.  They then proceed to treat the citizens with unwarranted brutality.

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23. May 2011 by admin.

My guitar hero, David Gilmour, toured several years ago with Rick Wright (R.I.P.) from Pink Floyd, and with Ray Manzanera from Roxy Music on guitar and several great guest stars.  I saw him on this tour, and his revival of “Echoes”, one of my favorite songs, which Floyd hadn’t performed live in decades, was the centerpiece of the show—one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen some great artists over the years).

Here’s a video of Gilmour and his band performing “Echoes” beautifully in Gdansk from the same tour I saw him on.

This next song is one of the greatest dance remixes ever done, period.  It’s a Duran Duran song that, unremixed, is okay (perhaps even mediocre), but as remixed by Paul Oakenfold becomes a masterfully produced and interpreted song—listen to it with headphones.

Here’s a great song by the Charlatans, “Blackened Blue Eyes”—not new, but rocks pretty hard.

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21. May 2011 by admin.

You can see more of my photographs and artwork here

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16. May 2011 by admin.

Greetings!  Haven’t posted in a long time.

Here are some songs/albums I really like—maybe you will like them too:

Ancient Astronauts.

I first heard these outrageously great guys a few months ago, and then was lucky enough to go to their show with Rob Garza (of Thievery Corporation) in San Francisco.  AA rocked the house hard; they are seriously funky.  This is only one of their many really good tracks from both their 2009 album “We are to Answer”  and their most recent album, “Into Bass and Time”.

Here is another one by these guys…

Massive Attack.

I finally saw these guys last May on their current tour.  They had a great live show.  There are several favorite tracks I have from “Heligoland”, including “Girl, I love you” and “Atlas Air”.  But my friend turned me on to this remix of “Pardise Circus” and this has now become another favorite on this LP.

Lykke Li: 

She is a much better singer and more interesting by far than Katy Perry, Kesha, RiHanna, etc.  Lykke has a great voice and presence.

She channels an uncanny resemblance to Roni Spector of the Ronettes back in the ‘60s.  And I think she’s got an Amy Winehouse vibe going that works for her.

This track, “I follow rivers”  is also great, but in a different way.

TV on the Radio

If you haven’t heard TV on the Radio’s new album, you should check it out.  I especially like this track, “Will Do”.  They remind me a little bit of The Roots.

Big Audio Dynamite

Also, if you are, like I am, a fan of Big Audio Dynamite (Mick Jones’ band after The Clash), you will be interested in this video of BAD performing recently in LA, sounding very good.

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27. February 2011 by admin.

By this study’s estimates, parents only spend 3.5 MINUTES per week in meaningful conversation with their kids. And we wonder why Snooki is a media celebrity or why there are 32 million or 1 in 7 U.S. adults who are illiterate–meaning they cann’t read a newspaper or the instructions on a pill bottle.

Television Statistics

According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

I. FAMILY LIFE

Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99

Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24

Percentage of U.S. homes with three or more TV sets: 66

Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes

Percentage of Americans that regularly watch television while eating dinner: 66

Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion

Value of that time assuming an average wage of S5/hour: S1.25 trillion

Percentage of Americans who pay for cable TV: 56

Number of videos rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million

Number of public library items checked out daily: 3 million

Percentage of Americans who say they watch too much TV: 49

II CHILDREN

Approximate number of studies examining TV’s effects on children: 4,000

Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful

conversation with their children: 3.5

Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680

Percentage of day care centers that use TV during a typical day: 70

Percentage of parents who would like to limit their children’s TV watching: 73

Percentage of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV

and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54

Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours

Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500

III VIOLENCE

Number of murders seen on TV by the time an average child finishes elementary school: 8,000

Number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18: 200,000

Percentage of Americans who believe TV violence helps precipitate real life mayhem: 79

IV. COMMERCIALISM

Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 20,000

Number of TV commercials seen by the average person by age 65: 2 million

Percentage of survey participants (1993) who said that TV commercials

aimed at children make them too materialistic: 92

Rank of food products/fast-food restaurants among TV advertisements to kids: 1

Total spending by 100 leading TV advertisers in 1993: $15 billion

V. GENERAL

Percentage of local TV news broadcast time devoted to advertising: 30

Percentage devoted to stories about crime, disaster and war: 53.8

Percentage devoted to public service announcements: 0.7

Percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges: 59

Percentage who can name at least three justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: 17

Compiled by TV-Free America

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27. February 2011 by admin.

I finally consolidated all of my photographs and artwork that I feel are worth checking out in one place on Flickr.  Please leave comments on any images you particularly like or don’t like.  Feedback would be very welcome.

You can see it here.

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16. September 2010 by admin.

I have not been a good blogger…taking far too long between entries. 

Here are some music recommendations:

1. Bryan Ferry “You Can Dance”: Bryan Ferry is the King of Suave, for sure.  If there’s someone creating mournful dance music better than Bryan, let me know.  This is the lead single from his forthcoming album, “Olympia”, which has guest stars like my hero, David Gilmour.

2. Eels “Fresh Blood”:  I’d never heard of the Eels before I heard this song.  I haven’t yet found any other Eels song like this one—most of the rest are nice ballady type songs, but don’t have the same energy as this.  I love the howls—reminds me of Warren Zevon or even John Fogerty.

Plus, the lead singer and songwriter, E, has a great beard.  Pretty spooky looking guy.  Video is pretty good.

3. Cee-Lo Green “No one’s going to love you”, a cover of Band of Horses.  He does a great job on this song.  I didn’t think he’d do well without his Gnarls Barkley partner, Danger Mouse, but he does.  The video’s a bit NSFW…

4.  Blonde Redhead, “Here Sometimes”.  I’d heard of this band before, but never knowingly heard one of their songs.  I came across this one, and it made me think of a much happier Portishead.  Definitely a song worth listening to on headphones, because it has some intricate rhythm interplays.

5. Stereophonics, “Devil”.  This is a rare straight-out hard rock song I don’t hear much anymore.  Great tune.  Definitely something you want to play when you’re driving down the road with the top down on a nice day.

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27. June 2010 by admin.

We’ve now been in Afghanistan so long, that we don’t even think about it that much.  People want to forget that we have this unending war in a country far far away, and that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on it at the same time that we have 40 million+ Americans on food stamps, 1/5th of our children living under the poverty line ($18,000 for a family of 4), and we rank 26th in the world in education.

Our country is falling to pieces, and we are wasting our resources (human, financial, governmental) on a conflict that most Americans don’t want us in. 

Here’s a great NYT Op-ed piece by Bob Herbert on this topic.  If you’re not already mad, hopefully this piece will make you so. 

Our biggest danger is complacency and acceptance of this unacceptable state of affairs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html?scp=2&sq=bob%20herbert&st=cse

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26. June 2010 by admin.

I saw Massive Attack on their current tour recently.  They did a mix of songs from the current album, “Heligoland” and some of their back catalog.  The song they didn’t do that I wish they had was “Protection”.  I wasn’t thrilled with all of their song selections and the sound system at the venue I saw them wasn’t the best, but that wasn’t really their fault.

Massive had a great lighting setup and stage set.  They had an LED (I think) ribbon display behind them and used it to great effect—using it to make statements about peace, world affairs and U.S. affairs.  While the mixing of political activism and entertainment may annoy some people, I thought it was actually well done and welcome.  People need to be aware of what’s going on in the world.

While most veteran bands build towards a climax in their live shows,  saving the best for last, as it were, Massive really did a grea job of not only building to a climax but of taking their songs to the next level within the songs themselves. 

Case in point was “Atlas Air”, one of their final encores.  First, the song, though great on record, was much better live.  Second, they kept a plateau in the song that was at ‘10’ on the energy dial from the start.  Third, about a 1/3 of the way into the song, they raised the level to ‘12’ and then again halfway in, to ‘14’, and then kept the energy going at a level I didn’t know they could reach in the first place.

Here’s a version that approximates what I heard live, though nothing recorded is going to do it justice.  It also gives you some idea of how the led display was used.

I look forward to the next album/tour, but echo what some reviewers have said about ‘”Heligoland”:  more hits please—some of these songs are too esoteric.

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26. June 2010 by admin.

Great jamming tune if you haven’t heard it…

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26. June 2010 by admin.

Not a new song, but one I recently came across that I like…

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26. June 2010 by admin.

My friend Ramin told me about this.  This phone is so advanced, it makes the iPhone 4 look like a wheezy feature phone…

Behold the future at http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

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26. June 2010 by admin.

What more could you ask for out of one video?

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26. June 2010 by admin.

This video, consisting entirely of computer graphics, is pretty amazing.  check it out

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE,INC. from Jp Frenay on Vimeo.

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19. May 2010 by admin.

Occasionally, I post artwork that I have done.  Here’s a piece I did some time ago—I used my Wacom tablet to draw this. 

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16. May 2010 by admin.

This is a really funny parody of self-anointed social media experts. 

Warning: much offensive language.

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25. February 2010 by admin.

Usually, the Federal Reserve (which is a private bank run by both U.S. and foreign national bankers) sells our debt to third parties, like other countries.  However, in 2009, there weren’t enough—by far—entities willing to buy our debt.  So what do you do when you’re having a sale and only 20% of your items are purchased?

If you’re the Federal Reserve, you buy it (80% of our T-Bonds) from yourself.  This way, you provide the illusion to citizens that the economy is actually working and not simply a larger version of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.  But it is an illusion, nonetheless, and that’s what’s depressing as Hell.

Here’s a CNBC clip where this was actually discussed and called a “Ponzi Scheme”.

Here’s the article where I found out about this depressing state of affairs.

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24. February 2010 by admin.

Here’s a great post on why our current economic system is failing and why we need to find a better way….

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9. February 2010 by admin.

This is a photograph I shot at the Farmer’s Market not too far from where I live.  It was a rare sunny day, which might partially account for this woman’s look of bliss.

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9. February 2010 by admin.

“Collapse”:  a documentary about Michael Ruppert.  Ruppert’s story itself is interesting enough (former star LAPD Narcotics Detective who was asked to join the CIA and help smuggle drugs into the U.S., refused and became a journalist instead), but his views on the coming collapse of the age of oil and our way of life based on oil are the most compelling part of the documentary.  Don’t dismiss it as the rantings of some whack-job. 

Ruppert predicted the 2008 financial collapse 3 years in advance.  “It’s not that Bernie Madoff is a pyramid scheme…the whole economy is a pyramid scheme!”

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8. February 2010 by admin.

Here’s a photo from my upcoming photography book on classic American cars.  I’ll post details on where you can purchase the book, as well as more advance photos as I get closer to finishing in 03/2010.

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5. February 2010 by admin.

I predict this is going to be a big hit…a different kind of comic-book-based movie.

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2. February 2010 by admin.

Read this and ask yourself…’how much are we willing to give up in police, fire, social services, infrastructure, so that the U.S. can keep spending $600 BILLION a year on weapons, wars, and equipment we don’t need?

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/01/massive-layoffs-coming-in-nyc-nevada.html

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2. February 2010 by admin.

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2. February 2010 by admin.

Thin line between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-less’.

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19. December 2009 by admin.

Jonathan Pilger is an outstanding journalist who, like Amy Goodman, Greg Palast, and Naomi Klein, works to bring popular attention to the reality of what our politicians are doing in our names.

War is peace. Ignorance is strength

15 Oct 2009

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger draws on George Orwell’s inspiration to describe the Call of Obama: "attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills".

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Ray­theon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations… nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”

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11. December 2009 by admin.

This is from a report created by UC San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center and reported on in the NY Times recently.

Executive Summary
In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

We defined "information" as flows of data delivered to people and we measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information. Video sources (moving pictures) dominate bytes of information, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games. If hours or words are used as the measurement, information sources are more widely distributed, with substantial amounts from radio, Internet browsing, and others. All of our results are estimates.

Previous studies of information have reported much lower quantities. Two previous How Much Information? studies, by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian in 2000 and 2003, analyzed the quantity of original content created, rather than what was consumed. A more recent study measured consumption, but estimated that only .3 zettabytes were consumed worldwide in 2007.

Hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8. More surprising is that information consumption in bytes increased at only 5.4 percent per year. Yet the capacity to process data has been driven by Moore’s Law, rising at least 30 percent per year. One reason for the slow growth in bytes is that color TV changed little over that period. High-definition TV is increasing the number of bytes in TV programs, but slowly.

The traditional media of radio and TV still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 percent of the hours. In total, more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information time is spent with non-computer sources.

Despite this, computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively.Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.

You can access the full report here.

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11. December 2009 by admin.

Maybe not the best name, but hey, it’s free to view…

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11. December 2009 by admin.

What can you really say that the picture itself doesn’t?

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3. December 2009 by admin.

If you haven’t already read this Huffington Post article, read it—a great post about how we are being betrayed economically by the Kleptocracy that runs the United States…whenever you think that our system works well, look at these statistics and the trends that Warren cites over the last 30+ years.

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

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1. December 2009 by admin.

Much to my (and I hope many others’) chagrin and disappointment, President Obama has indicated he will be sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Prior to the announcement, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2010 budget for the Pentagon, released in May, asked for $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the additional 30,000 troops would cost an additional $15-30 Billion a year.  This means that the total war budget—exclusive of weapons development and military operations outside of the war zones—for 2010 will be between $140 and $155 Billion.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost the United States taxpayers close to $1 Trillion dollars.

Of course, the insanity of this is staggering on many levels not the least being the most basic one: you can’t eradicate terrorism or the possibility of terrorism no matter how many troops you send over to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Terrorist groups can form at any time in any place if there are people who have the will to action—the Oklahoma Federal Building was destroyed by American terrorists.  If we kill all of the current generation of adults who might commit acts of terrorism (unlikely no matter how much we spend or how many troops we send over) , there are still future generations who can grow up to become terrorists either in Afghanistan and Iraq or other countries where we’re not presently engaged in military action. And, in fact, there are empirical studies that show that by killing many Iraqis and Afghans, we are actually increasing the likelihood of terrorist groups forming and doing violence to United States citizens.

Moreover, the country that has shown the greatest ideological/religious hostility towards the U.S. is Saudi Arabia—but for many reasons (virtually all economic), we don’t even try to wage war against militant Wahabi sect members, despite the majority of the terrorists who caused the tragedies of 9/11 being Saudis and the architects of this attack being Saudis.

And, if as I (and many others) suspect, that the real and most obvious reason for the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has to do with the control of oil and natural gas resources, why is it that, since the war began, the price of oil has actually risen and that oil companies have made record profits? 

But even if the buildup of troops and the war itself actually made sense, there is still the issue of the U.S. economy and the impact of the downturn on our citizens.  How can we or the government (in prior years, I might have been tempted to write ‘OUR’ government, but the government is no longer OF the people, BY the people, or FOR the people—it’s of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation), in good conscience, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year waging a war when 1 in 6 of our own citizens are either starving or are chronically malnourished?  Is the threat of a bomb being detonated worse than almost 17 million children going to bed hungry every night, not to mention the 50,000,000 Americans who can’t afford proper health care?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA) reported today that 49 million Americans, including nearly 17 million children, are food insecure. The 2009 report on Household Food Insecurity in the United States paints an alarming picture of the pervasiveness of hunger in our nation. 

This is an increase of 36 percent over the numbers released one year by the USDA, which found that 36.2 million American were at risk of hunger.“It is tragic that so many people in this nation of plenty don’t have access to adequate amounts of nutritious food,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America.  “Although these new numbers are staggering, it should be noted that these numbers reflect the state of the nation one year ago, in 2008.  Since then, the economy has significantly weakened, and there are likely many more people struggling with hunger than this report states.

We need to let the politicians (again, not OUR politicians because they don’t work for us—they work for Wall Street, the HMOs, and for the Oil Companies) know that this is ridiculous and unconscionable—the richest country in the world shouldn’t tolerate around 1/6th of its population being chronically malnourished.

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29. November 2009 by admin.

Now that Black Friday has come and gone and the official commerce-countdown-to-Christmas has started, I feel it’s appropriate to offer some holiday music.

I discovered that a band I am a big fan of, “The Dandy Warhols”, has done their own version of “The Little Drummer Boy” in 1994, and I’ve included the video below in case you’re looking for some Christmas music that rocks (and who isn’t?).  You can download the mp3 file of the performance for free from their site.  Next to the version by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, I think it’s hard to beat.

And here’s another great video by the group, “Godless (Massive Attack Remix)” that rocks pretty hard all year ‘round.

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26. November 2009 by admin.

File in the ‘things I didn’t know I needed to know’ file.

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Leeds and reported on by the London Telegraph here…

Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up.

However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that showing too much flesh puts men off because it suggests they might be unfaithful.

Psychologist Dr Colin Hendrie, who led the study, told the Daily Mail: “Any more than 40 per cent and the signal changes from ‘allure’ to one indicating general availability and future infidelity.

“Show some leg, show some arm, but not any more than that.”

The study, published in the journal Behaviour, found that the most popular women combined the 40 per cent rule with tight clothing and provocative dancing. The 15 per cent that combined all three criteria were approached by 40 men each.

Now, if it were up to me,  the next study should focus on what constitutes ‘provocative dancing’ and how much of it is too much?

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25. November 2009 by admin.

It’s a “HeadTime” head massager from Kinatech, a South Korean company (thought it might be more interesting if it were a NORTH Korean company—neuro-enslavement of Western Infidels etc.). 

IHeadTime is a gigantic silver helmet equipped with 29 silicon balls, 34 ceramic balls, and speakers.  It can give you a robotic head message (with heat, if you’d like) and soothe you with the sound of birds chirping and waves crashing piped into your Headtime hat (to quote Huffington Post’s piece on this).

Anyway, if you saw the picture posted some time ago and were wondering what the picture was of…now you know.

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24. November 2009 by admin.

It would be funny to run this ad now, post a URL as part of the message, and see how people responded…

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24. November 2009 by admin.

I came across this picture of a Magnavox “Odyssey 2” game console from 1980.  Quite an evolution to today’s Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, no?  Look at the controllers off to either side…

and, of course, Atari’s…

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16. November 2009 by admin.

I could tell you, but it’s probably not as interesting as what you could come up with…

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16. November 2009 by admin.

You have to wonder what our society has come to when the ad council advertises for kids to go out and play for an hour a day.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid no one had to tell us to go out and play—the questionn was if I would be home in time for dinner and not whether I would find something to do outside for an hour or two or 5…but that was also before there were video game consoles, the consumer Internet, mobile phones, etc.

Anyway, here’s the ad…

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13. November 2009 by admin.

Fight the Power.

This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing…or a Liberal or Conservative thing…this is a survival and common sense thing.   We need to change the way our food is manufactured (and I use that word purposely, because ‘growing’ is only a marginal part of the food creation and delivery process in our country today), and go back to actually eating things that come out of the ground and don’t first go through a factory.  We need to stop subsidizing corn production to enrich large food processors, and start subsidizing (if we are going to subsidize at all) organically grown produce that can give nutrition to our children who need it.

There are only a handful of companies that manufacture food in this country on any scale and they basically control the supermarkets’ 40,000+ products.

Monsanto has patented corn that it has genetically modified, and has succeeeded in getting virtually every farmer in the U.S. to grow corn using its seed.

U.S. taxpayers subsidize farmers to grow and sell corn and soy at below-market prices to food producers who in turn sell the food relatively cheaply (but still make a nice spread at the taxpayers’ expense) to the consumer.   Unfortunately for all of the kids heading towards type II diabetes, the corn-rich food (and that’s most mass produced food and drinks, by the way) is high in empty calories, sugar, etc. and is cheaper than fruits and vegetables, which are not subsidized by the taxpayer.

Poor families often have to choose between the dollar menu at a fast food restaurant that can feed a family of four and produce at the grocery store that can barely feed them for the same money…guess which they choose?

Watch the movie “Food, Inc.” and then tell others about it so they will watch it  It’s not a very pleasant film to watch and it will make you mad, but important if you care about what you put in your mouth. 

It will show you what’s really going on with food production in the U.S. You can see all of the factory-raised chickens, pigs and cows living their whole lives standing in their own excrement, and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics so that they can grow more rapidly and be slaughtered more rapidly.

If you’re already buying food locally and eating organic, then you’re already on the right path.  If you’re buying processed foods and meat, watch this and then change what you do—but only if the idea of eating Frankenfood is repellent to you.

Here’s the trailer.

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13. November 2009 by admin.

Here’s some music I’ve been liking lately…

You’ve probably heard this already so it’s not a new discovery, but I still can’t get it out of my head.  I heard Chris Martin play it live at the Bridge School Benefit Concert at Shoreline late last month and I haven’t got it out of my head since…

“Stranger” by Hooverphonic, a great Belgian band…a little slower in this version than on the album, but still worth checking out…

The always-reliable Dandy Warhols, with “Godless (Massive Attack remix)

One of the greatest rappers/Hip-hop stars, Lyrics Born with Lateef, dropping “Last Trumpet”—listen to the lyrics of the song—definitely relevant to what’s going on in the world…

And, finally, one of my favorite bands, The Crystal Method, with “Blunts and Robots”—only one of many great tunes…no video but you can hear it here…

http://hypem.com/track/848453/The+Crystal+Method+featuring+Peter+Hook+-+Blunts+Robots

and this by the Crystal Method as well—“Divided by Night” the title track from their last album…

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22. October 2009 by admin.

It’s easy with all of the domestic trouble we are experiencing to forget about the wars that are continuing now for many years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many lives—combatants and civilians—that have been lost because of the need to control natural resources (and if you believe that the wars the U.S. is waging truly have anything to do with ending Terrorism, perhaps you’d be interested in joining the Richard Cheney Fan Club) in foreign lands.

But we must not forget that our government in the United States is conducting these wars with more than 50% of the U.S. population in strong opposition.  This opposition continues to exist despite the need for many Americans to focus on their economic survival and preserving the health and well-being of their families.

There’s a site that monitors the ongoing cost of the wars to the U.S. citizenry—appropriate since it is the citizens of the U.S. who pay for the bulk of the wars.  The site is CostofWar.com.

Here’s a snapshot of the ever-increasing war costs in dollars:

Take a long look at these numbers  and think about how much better this money could be spent on food and healthcare for poor families, particularly poor American children—60,000,000+ children are considered ‘food insecure’, either not having enough food to maintain baseline health, or severely undernourished.  We could alternatively provide healthcare to all Americans with that money.

Keep in mind, this is not the military budget per se, so getting rid of these costs would not impact our ability to defend the United States…

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10. October 2009 by admin.

Jonathan Pilger is a fearless journalist who, like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and others, tries to uncover the linkages between American policy and big business and separate what politicians say from what they do.   You can find some excellent documentaries by Pilger on Amazon and Netflix—I strongly encourage you to watch them if you can.

There’s  no question in my mind that President Obama is much more literate, verbally proficient, and intelligent than Bush II is.  And I much prefer Joe Biden to Dick Cheney—in fact I would prefer Spiro Agnew to Dick Cheney. 

However, as I predicted to friends and family before Obama took office, our president doesn’t appear to be doing anything that a centrist Republican (like Clinton—and if you don’t think Clinton was a centrist Republican, take a look at what he did while in office) wouldn’t do.  Obama is backed by the same business, energy sector, and financial interests as Bush was, and has taken a pretty conservative approach in action if not words, as Pilger points out in this brief video below.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

This is a nice picture, entitled “The Anger of Zeus” by a photographer named Pedro Pais.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

Here’s a video of Yamaha singing female she-bot.  While still not photorealistic, the robots are getting ever closer to lifelike.  It makes you wonder if Dick Cheney wasn’t made by Yamaha too.

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29. September 2009 by admin.

This was covered in a great site called “Ghawar Guzzler”.

Potentially Game-Changing Battery May Make Smart Grid Unnecessary

(Hat tip: Peak Oil Debunked)
Now this is a paradigm shift: instead of blowing a wad remolding our antiquated grid system, gearing it to become "smart," perhaps, instead, we should let individual homes become their own power stations, generating and storing their own power. That’s the fantastic idea behind this new battery. Great article.

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.
The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.
It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this
time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to
personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

[…]

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it "smart."
The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.
Solar energy has been around, of course, but it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.
The convergence of these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — has profound implications for oil-strapped America.
"These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables," said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. "They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward."

[…]

Inside Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The embrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.
This may not startle you, but it should. It’s amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.
The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.
Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.
Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That’s a pretty exciting place to live.
And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles — one per day for a decade — you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they’re kaput in a year or so.
A small three-bedroom home in Provo might average, say, 18 kWh of electric consumption per day in the summer — that’s 1,000 watts for 18 hours. A much larger home, say five bedrooms in the Grandview area, might average 80 kWh,
according to Provo Power.;Either way, a supplement of 20 to 40 kWh per day is
substantial. If you could produce that much power in a day — for example through solar cells on the roof — your power bills would
plummet.

Ceramatec’s battery breakthrough now makes that possible.
Clyde Shepherd of Alpine is floored by the prospect. He recently installed the second of two windmills on his property that are each rated at 2.4 kilowatts continuous output. He’s searching for a battery system that can capture and store some of that for later use when it’s calm outside, but he hasn’t found a good solution.
"This changes the whole scope of things and would have a major impact on what we’re trying to do," Shepherd said. "Something that would provide 20 kilowatts would put us near 100 percent of what we would need to be completely independent. It would save literally thousands of dollars a year."
Shepherd is connected to the grid through Rocky Mountain Power, which charges a variable rate for power depending on demand during a given 24-hour period. With his windmill setup, Shepherd has what’s called "net metering" — an electric meter that spins both ways. He pays for electricity coming in, but gets a credit from Rocky Mountain for any excess power generated by his windmills that flows back onto the grid. Already, he’s cut his power bills in half, and with good storage batteries he thinks he could reduce the bill to zero.
While Shepherd opted for windmills over solar at the time he was planning his alternative energy installation, he said he would reconsider that decision today as the bottom continues to fall out of the cost of solar cells.
"Batteries and PV are about to merge," said MIT’s Nocera, using the shorthand for "photovoltaics" or solar power. "First Solar is now saying that it takes $1 a peak watt to manufacture, and another 80 cents for installation. So they’re saying that you can get PV for under $2 a watt. That’s a reduction of cost by a factor of four. Only a few years ago, it was $8. If CoorsTek and Ceramatec come up with a good battery, the market will develop quickly."

[…]

In 2000 Ashok Joshi, a native of India, took the helm at Ceramatec. His international reputation in ion technology and fuel cells kept the company among the first rank of innovators.
Joshi (he prefers A.J.) looked to the potent combination of sodium and sulphur for the basic components of a new battery. That was known chemistry. But while he wanted to achieve a high energy density offered by those elements, he also wanted to get rid of the extreme heat, corrosion and toxicity of liquid sodium batteries.
The key would be found in a paper-thin, yet strong and highly conductive, electrolyte material — an advanced ceramic — to serve as the barrier between the battery’s sodium and sulphur. The thinner the barrier, the cooler the battery can operate. If you can get below the melting point of 98 C, sodium stays in its solid state, and you’ve got enough energy to run a house with safety.Charged particles of sodium and sulphur — ions — now scoot so effortlessly through the new ceramic wafer that the sodium doesn’t even approach 98 C, let alone 350.

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27. September 2009 by admin.

Hello, it’s been a long time since I last posted anything at Wetshadows.  I am going to start to do more regular posts.

Here are some pictures I shot during my recent trip to Italy.  I went to Rome, Positano, Ravello, Capri, Amalfi, Praiano, Sorrento and Pompeii.

View Full Album

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4. June 2009 by admin.

This is an image I shot some time ago but only recently revisited…

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