Iron nuts. Nuts that clang when you walk.Impenetrable testicles with built-in airbags:

Executives of Detroit's Big Three automakers traveled to Washington on Thursday to press their case for more financial aid from the federal government because of the bleak prospects for their industry.

Wow, lets see.

Global warming, the destruction of community in America, the murder of various mass transit systems, massive death from pollutants, global warming, lobbying against fuel efficiency, a history of technology suppression and oh, did I mention global warming?

Yes, they DO make balls in Detroit. 

Its kind of shocking to read some of these stories and realize how, well, how shocked I don't feel. Is the modern nervous system so overstimulated as to be insusceptible to such outrageousness? 

No doubt the nine banks into which the US is planning to inject billions in capital - again, all taxpayer dollars - have their lawyers searching for those escape hatches. ...the Institute for Policy Studies calculated that last year the CEO's of those nine banks took home "on average, $32.2 million each, nearly triple the average CEO pay at the 500 biggest US companies. This is more than $600,000 a week." Apiece.

I mean, this is just utterly incomprehensible, this volume of money. And yet my emotional reaction is "meh."

About five years ago I created some Flash animation for this website... a bold, but flickering statement "IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPIRE." (You can still see that when launching the media player.)

While obviously prescient, I had no idea how profoundly overstated this Empire would flaunt itself. Hence, perhaps the deer in headlights feeling while reading these stories as of late. Its so brazen that one actually can't process it fully.

OR, I've just gotten so used to the idea of the "end of the world as we know it" that these things no longer surprise. Truth has certainly out-stranged fiction and this hazy incomprehensibility is in need of a new word.

Recently a friend turned me on to some excellent mastering software, so I crunched the ones and zeroes, fattened up the bass and fortified the funk. (Oh man, its hard writing this cheeky editorial crap).

Anyway, posted the following...

* remastered versions of the instraMENTALs collection
* five remixes of some favorite tunes
* a new dancier version of Crop Circles (from Hallucignosis)
* remixed versions of two old tracks to be found in the Rarities section

Log in, download and turn up the speakers! 

A couple of my tracks got featured in a mini-documentary on inter-racial marriage. Its a sweet little film about the power of unity to melt hearts and change minds. Watch it and then visit their site for more.

The arduous journey of completing my first CD "Hallucignosis" would make for a twisted novel. (It would have to be in novel format as it would not be possible document that gnarly history in true biographical form.)

For the sake of brevity, I'll only concentrate on the most recent phase of (mis)adventure -- the last 9 years. I'll leave the story about all of the bands, open-mic nights on a guitar in Hollywood, etc for another time.

I came to electronica production around 1999. Having grown up a "rock guy" (whose main instrument was a trap kit) it took a few years of listening to Jason Bentley on KCRW (97-99) to realize that THAT was the sound I was hearing in my head when I'd bang on an acoustic guitar. The expansive soundscapes, the other-worldly noises, the grinding bass, the haunting melodies... this was the home I'd been searching for at last. (Believe me, growing up on the Doors, Zep, Beatles, et al... this was a strange thing to realize.)

So in 1999 I got my first decent job as a web designer for a small company in LA. Finally got out of debt, got some credit built up and could invest in some gear. This was the beginning of the age of digital music production and there were some major missteps on finding the right tools. It took a few years for me to settle in to the right approach, but once it was found, I was more snugly tucked in than a CEO in a senator's back pocket.

But there was one major problem to contend with -- infinity.

...about Climate Change. Michael Pollan asks some significant questions about personal responsibility for climate change. Here's a few paragraphs from the article. Highly recommend reading the rest.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

 

...these wankers debate who should get the deck chair rental fees.

Because thats what carbon emissions trading amounts to - a clever way to make it look like a lot of action is going on but is really only so much smoke and mirrors. (More smoke heating up the atmosphere and more mirrors trained on the little ice thats left!) The report: 

A climate-change bill that has widespread support as it heads to the Senate floor will create an estimated $150 billion of new assets in the first year it takes effect. Between now and 2050, regulating greenhouse gases could easily generate $3 trillion worth in value in the United States.

Should that value go to utility companies, electricity customers who will face rising rates, government investments in new technology or tax cuts? Or should it be returned to all Americans? That question is being debated vigorously by energy companies, politicians and environmental groups.

Why is this debate so similar to debating the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic? Because carbon trading is a flawed and distracting action against global warming.

Preeminent climate scientist James Hansen has declared that the only hope we have of preserving a climate "upon which civilization developed" is to initiate the complete cessation of fossil fuel use and a massive reforestation program (a BILLION trees) among other sweeping changes to the very structure of global economic society.

Five plus years later, after marching in the streets (and other seemingly useless gestures) something I've dreamed about has finally come to pass: protest of the war in Iraq has moved into the blue-collar world:

William Yardley, for The New York Times: "West Coast ports were shut down on Thursday as thousands of longshoremen failed to report for work, part of what their union leaders said was a one-day, one-shift protest against the war in Iraq. Cranes and forklifts stood still from Seattle to San Diego, and ships were stalled at sea as workers held rallies up and down the coast to blame the war for distracting public attention and money from domestic needs like health care and education."

This is an excerpt from utterly amazing sermon delivered on Earth Day:

Jim Hansen, the world's foremost climate scientist, is circulating a draft paper arguing that the climate "tipping point" must be reset at 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon, a point we passed two years ago.

If we do not immediately return below that level, Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves will collapse, with a catastrophic rise in sea levels. From the study of ancient ice cores and sea sediment, we now know that sea level change is episodic and quick ... measured in feet per decade, rather than inches per century.

Neither civilization nor global ecosystems can adapt to change this rapid.

Hansen sketches a solution of appropriate scale: immediate halt to burning coal; crash Marshall program to replace it with renewables; limit oil and gas use to known, economically viable reserves; full-scale reforestation and adoption of carbon-storing agricultural practices.

Read the rest. Its more fuel to the fire (bad metaphor) that we need to completely reverse direction before its too late.

US Prison Population Dwarfs That of Other Nations

Adam Liptak of the International Herald Tribune writes: "The United States has less than five percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."

Land of the free MY ASS!

This is an abolutely amazing interview with a brilliant hero of the Earth, Lester Brown. Please read in its entirety:

Go to Original

    How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left?
    By Terrence McNally
    AlterNet

    Tuesday 22 April 2008

Lester Brown, author of "Plan B 3.0," shows us how we can change in enough time to save life on earth, as we know it.

    Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key messages of PLAN-B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the newest book by Lester Brown - available as a free download at earthpolicy.org.

    Plan A - the western fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economic model - is not going to work for China, India, or the 3 billion other people in developing countries, and it will not continue to work for the industrial countries either.

    It's time for Plan B - an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of threats facing civilization.

    The four overriding goals of Plan B 3.0 are to stabilize climate and population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth's damaged ecosystems. Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.

    "We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize," says Brown. "These deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock."

This is mega-depressing. I want to start shopping at W***mart for the extra large bottle of prozac:

In seven years [the Bush administration] has spent 1.5 billion dollars on climate change. "To put this in perspective, the American public spent five billion dollars on Halloween," a children's holiday, she said.

Time to build an earthship and wait for the hurricanes. 

Seeds from varieties of potatoes, barley, lettuce, aubergines, black-eyed pea, sorghum and wheat were among the first to be placed in the doomsday vault inside the Arctic circle.

A specially prepared box of rice originating from 104 countries was the first to be deposited in the vault, where it will be kept at minus 18C (minus 0.4F). Thousands more species will be added as organisers attempt to get specimens of every agricultural plant in the world.

Read the rest of the story.

Sometimes the paranoia is justified. For years I've observed certain milestones in America and noticed a chilling resemblance to the shifts from democracy to fascism (Italy, Germany, Russia, etc). But not since watching this lecture has it been so clearly demonstrated to me that indeed, the worst has already happened. History is indeed being repeated again. Watch this video if you think your country is worth saving: