#Fulcrum Point New Music Project

[writerpyre]

Hello!!

It’s been a LONG time but if you’re inclined to read please have a bonus chapter to an older fic: first time in just over four years that I’ve posted anything for any fandom!

I found it in my files today and being as it’s been so long, I figured why the heck not, as I reckon it’s about time I came back with something. It’s not technically new writing, but I’m pretty gosh darn happy with myself either way. I’m finally at a place in my life where maybe things are going to be ok? I mean, I’m 31.

I’ll see what else the fates bring (my bestie is pretty unwell — not sure what’s with this people closest to me getting horribly sick thing), but I think I’m in a place where if I go back to using my writing to cope I’ll be fine. I can at least hope.

(For those who have by this point probably given up anticipating an update for Fulcrum (or anything related to it) never fear, for that one is next on my agenda! I’m ‘Bound’ and ‘Determined’ to get John through his decade-long predicament. Haha.)

Either way, have a chapter. :)

(For those who are unaware, Kent is my OC, Virgil’s identical twin who died of complications from a heart condition, three days after their birth. Technically part of my AIE “AU”, I originally wasn’t intending to ever post this part, as it’s a practice piece I used to look at who Kent Tracy may have been had he survived past infancy.)

Midnight

The soft sounds of Virgil’s snores rumble through the room from the top bunk, but Kent lays in the bottom bed, wide awake with his pen in one hand, the flashlight in another; scrawling furiously across the pages of his notebook.

It’s past eleven again, and the fourteen-year-old boy can’t sleep; the insomnia from sleeping all day has kicked in again, and all he can do is while away the hours until his father and older brothers roll out of bed. He doesn’t fear waking up his twin brother; Virgil doesn’t wake up unless someone holds the alarm clock right next to his ear; volume up on full, so it’s highly unlikely that he’s going to be disturbed from the light.

He doesn’t mind overly much though, these quiet hours before the dawn. Being one of six children often means that aside from the two hours of study that their father enforces every day, it’s very rare for any of the Tracy children to have any time to themselves without another sibling interrupting it somehow.

It’s nice to have this time to write, and consider and dream without his two youngest brothers asking ‘What are you doing, KT? Can I see? Lemme look!’ he finds it bliss to not have his father wanting him to help with chores or his grandmother wanting him to watch Alan while she takes Virgil and Gordon out, because their father is busy in the office again.

It’s peaceful, and as much as he likes a bit of chaos and excitement, Kent also likes to have some quiet now and again. He loves the way the moon streams through the curtains in the bedroom, how he can listen to Virgil dreaming and feel his brother’s happiness and quiet soul soar through their twin bond.

He feels the pressures of being the sickly child; the one who everyone has to be careful of and look out for too much, and for Kent, these moments when he doesn’t have them looking over him in concern and hovering when he’s ‘too pale’ or ‘overtired’, it just makes him feel more whole somehow. At fourteen, he just wants them to stop seeing him as the ill one and allow him to grow without them worrying that he’s going to overtax his weakened heart.

In these moments, he can remember his mother, and how like him; she was a writer, although with six children before she died, she never got to achieve her dream of getting a novel published. Sure, she wrote for the local newspaper, along with the kindergarten teaching and the music lessons she taught in order to help their father with the monthly bills, but it’s something that Kent knew she always wanted to do. Now she’s gone, he’s more determined than ever to achieve that dream, and make his mom as proud of him as she was as his other brothers.

That’s not to say that he didn’t think she was, but he just wants to do something that his three older brothers haven’t yet.

Kent loves his family, but he just wants to get out of this little box, pre-packaged, made just for him, the one that labels him as the sickly child, the one who is to be worried over and assisted.

It’s not that his father, Grandpa and Grandma don’t expect him to amount to anything, just that somehow, Kent has this invisible label on him that instantly informs people that he’s ill and that he is given just that little bit more leeway to get to places a little easier. There’s nothing more Kent hates more than to be told that he needs to take it easy, or that he can’t do something, just because he’s sick.

That’s why he uses this time, past the hour he should’ve been in dreamland to work harder on anything he ever has in his life, because he wants to make them proud, to break out of the accidental constraints that his condition has placed upon him. He’ll rise above and beyond those automatic assumptions, and prove to everyone that he can do just as much as his brothers. Even if it takes him a little bit longer, even if he has to work a little bit harder, he will achieve his goals.

As he packs up his book and caps the pen an hour later, still not sleepy but content that he’s worked with what he can for tonight, Kent is determined that he’s going to become a published author before he hits his eighteenth birthday, because he’s a Tracy, and for a Tracy, failure isn’t an option.

He’ll lie awake for the rest of the night, and yes, he’ll be completely exhausted and will spend the day in bed tomorrow, but he’ll keep with him through his grandmother’s fussing and John and Scott’s smothering, the peace and tranquillity that this time has given him.

He’s happy, and he knows that if his mother is watching, she’ll be proud.

[mostlymonk]

Bye – Ya

Concert 4 Peace Big Band

Stephen Burns – trumpet Jim Gailloreto – tenor sax Andy Baker – trombone Karl Montzka – piano Steve Robert – guitar Jason Ellis – bass Jeff Handley – percussion Danny Howard – percussion Jean Leroy – percussion

[pretchatta]

swoon june day 16: heartbeat

[insp]

rating: mature (lap dancing, blood/injury); kanan jarrus/hera syndulla; 2.7k words

---

Hera’s heartbeat thuds in her ears as she enters the private club. All around her she’s aware of richly-dressed patrons sitting around tables being attended to by a variety of beings. She holds her head high in her best imitation of self-importance. Even though women of her species are usually expected to be in a different role in establishments such as these, she has learned that projecting confidence goes a long way towards convincing people that she belongs to nobody.

It doesn’t help her fear that comes from being here in the first place.

The club is warm, enough for her to remove the cloak around her shoulders. Underneath she’s wearing a cowl-neck dress that falls to her ankles, the fine material a deep purple colour. It hugs her figure while leaving her arms bare, and a matching cap covers her head and the base of her lekku. Her heart beats harder with a new fear now, the fear of being seen, of being reduced to her body and her species and nothing else. It’s an old fear, one she can control.

She finds an empty booth in a shadowy corner. Ignoring the way her shoes stick to the black floor, she sits on the circular padded bench that runs around the circumference of the small space. The red material is imitation velvoid – or, at least, she assumes it’s imitation in a place like this. The light is dim enough that she can’t tell. Soft music with a steady beat comes from hidden speakers, and she can feel the bass through the seat.

A zabrak server in dark robes arrives to take her drink order, and to ask if there’s anything else they can get for her. She knows exactly what they mean.

“A human male,” she says, in the same tone she ordered the drink. “Preferably tall, with long hair.”

“I’ll see who’s in for you tonight, Mistress.” The server gives a small bow before leaving.

Hera knows exactly who is in tonight. When Fulcrum had offered her this job, they had made it clear she didn’t have to take it. When she took it anyway, fully expecting that she would be the one to infiltrate the club that was actually a front for zygerrian slavers, she had been surprised when Kanan had insisted he go instead. Surprised, and touched. He’d been on her crew barely six months and still hadn’t shown much interest in her rebellion work, but the moment she’d briefed him on this job he’d been adamant that he would be the one in the field. They were fortunate the zygerrians trafficked in humans.

His target was data: a list of the trackers the zygerrians had implanted in their slaves and the frequencies they operated on. Without it, extraction would be impossible. If the zygerrians couldn’t recapture their prisoners they would simply remotely activate the explosives contained in the trackers, and any rescue would have been for nothing. Kanan would get the data, Hera would transmit it to Fulcrum, and then the rescue would be staged by the small team of bounty hunters Fulcrum had hired to ensure total success on this job.

All Hera had to do was meet Kanan and get the list.

Knowing that he’s the only human here doesn’t stop the relief she feels when he finally appears. It’s been four days of waiting, four days of alternating between worrying about him and feeling guilty and selfish for sending him instead of her. For a moment, the sight of him whole and healthy and unharmed calms her. Then she takes in his appearance and her heartbeat speeds right back up.

Kanan’s loose pants hang low off his hips. The dark material drapes down his legs, the lines of light and shadow shifting when he moves. In contrast, his armless green shirt is skintight, doing little to hide the lines of hard, lean muscles on his chest. He still has the same goatee as before but his hair is different – about half has been pulled up into a topknot and the rest hangs loose about his shoulders. His eyes, smudged with a touch of black eyeliner, immediately fix her with a smouldering gaze.

Hera’s cheeks flush with heat. She’s been so wrapped up in worrying about his well-being that, until now, she hasn’t spared a thought for the service she is posing as a customer for. She still hasn’t sorted out the mess that is her feelings for him, and it dawns on her that they might be about to get a whole lot messier.

He leans against the entrance to her booth with a casual grace.

“Do I meet your requirements for tonight, Mistress?”

His voice is low and husky and goes straight between her legs.

She swallows and tries to keep her voice steady as she replies.

“You’ll do.”

He gives her a small smirk as he pushes off the wall and slinks inside. The music grows louder, coalescing into a thrumming song with a heavy beat. He stops in front of her and smoothly takes her hand, bringing it to his mouth to brush his lips along the back of it.

Her breath catches in the back of her throat. She doesn’t know if he’s joking or if they’re being watched, but she follows his lead and keeps up the act in case it’s the latter.

He slides onto the bench beside her in time with the music, still with her hand near his face and his darkened eyes locked on hers. He brushes his nose against the back of her hand and then continues down her arm in a line, over her wrist and elbow all the way to her shoulder. From there he turns his head so that his lips are barely an inch from her earcone.

“They have cameras everywhere,” he whispers. “We’re both new, they’ll be watching us. Just play along.”

Hera gives him the smallest of nods to show she understands.

Kanan’s next moves flow with the beat of the music so well that she can’t help but wonder if there’s more than just four days of experience behind them. He twists so that he’s on one knee, and then swings his other knee over her lap, straddling her. His body undulates over hers, keeping time with the thrumming bass. She notices he’s very careful not to make contact with her, except for where the material of his pants drapes over her lap.

He lowers himself so that he’s almost sitting on her legs and drops his head, his mouth now next to her other earcone.

“In about two minutes there’s going to be an evacuation. Get out, transmit the data, then meet me round the back with a speeder bike.”

Hera hopes his shoulder hides her mouth from any cameras as she breathes, “Where’s the list?”

Kanan turns his head so that his sly smile hovers just above her mouth. “I’m about to give it to you.”

Heat flares in her body in response. His hands cup her face and tilt her head back. She feels his nose brush her throat, and then his hands are running down to her shoulders, along her arms. His nose reaches the dip between her collarbones.

“They gave me a tracker,” he murmurs, his breath tickling her breastbone, “but I couldn’t get the frequency. That’s why I need an alternate extraction.”

In one smooth movement he’s standing in front of her again, holding her gaze with his eyes. He runs one hand down his chest, then takes the hem of his shirt and slowly lifts it. The hard lines of his tensed abdominal muscles had already been visible, but now she can see his flushed skin and its sparse coating of hair. It’s enough to distract her from the question she was about to ask.

Kanan draws his shirt up further, to his chin, at which point he takes the material between his teeth. Then he steps back towards her. He takes one of her hands and presses it against the highest point of his exposed skin, his breastbone, just under the triangle made by the hem of his shirt. With her palm flat against his hot skin she can feel his heart beating almost as hard as her own.

He then moves her hand down and slightly away, grazing the tips of her fingers down his abs in a line. Hera’s barely breathing. Even if maintaining his cover hadn’t been imperative, she wouldn’t have been able or willing to stop now. But continuing their act was important – they were so close now, the last thing they needed was for the zygerrians watching them to get suspicious.

When her hand reaches the top of his pants he cants his hips so her hand is once again pressed flat against him, and she feels something hard pressing into her palm. She hooks her fingers inside his waistband to retrieve the small datachip tucked into it and doesn’t know whether to be grateful or disappointed that it was off-centre.

He lets her hand fall to her lap. Hera draws it up to her face, her thumb tucking the datachip against her palm. Her cheeks are flushed with heat but she holds his gaze as she flicks out her tongue and slowly drags the length of her hand over it, licking off his sweat. Something flickers in his kohl-smeared eyes as she does. When she’s done, her hand is on her chest and she can tuck the datachip into the cowl of her dress.

Kanan blinks and comes back to himself, dropping to his knees in front of her, in time with the music once again. He places his hands on her legs so that his fingers splay over her thighs, their warmth penetrating through the material of her dress. Then he starts to slowly stroke up, towards her hips. He bends his head to follow, his nose brushing along her inner thigh. Hera feels like her heart might explode, blood pounding hot in her ears.

Without warning, the music cuts out. A moment later an alarm starts blaring. Kanan is immediately on his feet, tugging his shirt back down and offering Hera a hand.

“Evacuation alarm, Mistress,” he says loudly and calmly over the noise. Hera takes a shaky breath and allows him to lead her out of the booth. Her heart feels like it’s trying to beat its way out of her chest, and she doesn’t realise she’s forgotten her cloak until Kanan settles it around her shoulders. She turns to thank him, but they’re back in the main area and his face is set in an expressionless mask.

Hera lets herself be ushered back to the entrance she came through by the servers as Kanan disappears through a curtain into the back. In the noise and confusion it’s easy for her to duck away into a side street and away from the congregating patrons, who range from bewildered to outraged that their night is being interrupted.

The cool night air is soothing against her flushed skin. She takes several deep breaths as she walks back to the place she stashed her speeder bike, doing her best to calm herself. Attached to the bike is the short-range transmitter she installed and she uses it now to send the bounty hunters the frequency data. They should be on standby, ready to go as soon as she gives the word, which means the extraction begins now.

She hops on the bike and revs the engine. Kanan’s extraction begins now, too. She never did ask him how he was intending to disable his tracker, and she squashes the sudden fear that he doesn’t actually have a plan for that yet. Or, at least, she tries to; her hands shake on the handlebars as her heart once again starts pounding.

The back entrance isn’t hard to find, because it’s where the bounty hunters’ ship is hovering. She tears around the corner in time to hear Kanan’s voice.

“...go, I’ve got my own way out!”

She doesn’t see who he was talking to, as they are presumably taken up to the ship. It starts to rise as she brakes, calling out to Kanan.

He appears a moment later.

“Go,” he shouts, leaping onto the bike behind her. Three zygerrians follow him out, whips and crossbows in their hands. She steps on the accelerator as Kanan’s arms encircle her waist from behind.

Several shots sail over their heads as Hera urges the bike down the narrow streets. Driving isn’t quite the same as flying, but the thrill is close enough. She takes several sharp turns to throw off any pursuit, and is about to map out a route back to the Phantom when Kanan speaks into her earcone.

“Pull over, they’ll be tracking me.”

She’d almost forgotten. She finds an empty alley to back the bike into and takes them into the cover of the shadows before turning to him.

“You do have a plan to get it out, don’t you?” She doesn’t know if she’ll be more scared or angry if his answer is no.

“Yeah, but it’s going to be messy and I don’t want anyone else to see this.”

That’s something, at least. She’s still trying to work out what he’s about to do when his shirt comes over his head in one swift movement. The sudden appearance of Kanan’s bare chest stuns her into speechlessness as he starts to tear the thin material into wide strips.

“Can you tie this around here?” He hands her a strip and indicates the upper part of his right arm. “Tight, like a tourniquet.”

Hera takes the offered strip slowly, confused. “What are you doing?”

“No time to explain. Just trust me.”

She ties it and pulls the knot tight, grateful that her hands are no longer shaking, though adrenaline still courses through her veins. Once Kanan is satisfied with her work he hands her the rest of the cloth strips. Then he takes a step back from her and closes his eyes. His left hand comes up to hover just over the inside of his right elbow and a small frown of concentration appears on his brow.

Hera understands what he’s doing a moment later.

Bright red splatters Kanan’s chest as something explodes out of his skin. Hera gets a glimpse of a small, credit-chip-sized electronic device floating in mid-air for a brief second. Then Kanan’s hand clenches in a fist and the device collapses in on itself, crushed by an invisible force.

Blood begins to pour from the wound in his arm and she rushes forwards with the rest of his shirt to try to stem the bleeding. The first strip wasn’t just like a tourniquet – it was a tourniquet, tight enough to slow the blood his heart is trying to beat out of his body.

She doesn’t realise she’s letting out a stream of curses as she tries to stabilise him. She’s angry, she’s scared, she’s covered in Kanan’s blood and all she wants is to be safely back on the Ghost with all the doors locked and everyone’s skin intact.

“–absolute kriffing idiot, wool-headed nerf-herder, you bantha-brained stupa–”

“We need to go,” he cuts in, stopping her tirade.

She gives the bloodied mess of material a final tug to make sure it’s tied in place and then relinquishes his arm. He immediately throws a leg over the bike and sits down heavily, and her heart softens. She’s not angry at him for hurting himself, she’s angry at the galaxy for making this mission a necessity.

Noticing his skin is pebbled with goosebumps she removes her cloak and affixes it around his shoulders before he can complain.

“Just hold on,” she tells him gently, cupping his face with one hand. “We’ll get you back to the Ghost and we can fix you up there.”

He nods in response.

She carefully places herself in front of him and feels him settle against her back. She draws his good arm securely around her waist and then revs the bike’s engines a final time, shooting away into the night.

They did a good thing today. The people they freed would be able to return home, and Kanan would be alright. She’d make sure of it. Anything else could be dealt with later.

[funknrolll]

Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us: The relevancy of the unmatched protest-masterpiece still actual today.

They Don't Care About Us, was perhaps the most monumental and relevant form of audiovisual protest, which force was specifically to draw the attention to social and political issues such as hate, racism, prejudice, police brutality. The form of art is cultivating an ideological allegiance with the greater social plight for minorities. With his art, Michael became the voice of the voiceless, of the oppressed, of the neglected, of the abused. Yes, Michael Jackson was THE voice.

Hi music lovers, today's topic is Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us the song and the music video.

It was from September 1994 to March 1995 that Michael recorded and released HIStory, his 5th studio album. The work was one of the artist's most personal artistic outputs, where music turned into a mirror reflecting Michael's deepest sorrows, fears, anger, and frustrations. It was then when Michael let his music speak louder, providing a perfect clap back to all those who questioned and speculated. The album was a double-disc of greatest hits, HIStory Begins, and new material HIStory Continues.

Speaking of They Don't Care About Us, it is the second track on HIStory Continues, following Scream and precedent to Stranger In Moscow. The song is a straightforward response to the ruthless and ubiquitous injustices perpetrated upon him and more in general upon black people by the racist forces of the white cultural hegemony. Extremely compelling is the aura of pure rage and frustration articulated in They Don't Care About Us, both in the record and in the two poignant and groundbreaking music videos (The Prison version and the clip shot in Brazil), released to accompany the track as a single.

Personally, when I began to approach Michael's music, I did not quite understand the real deep meaning and message the song was delivering. However, as I grew up, I developed interest and curiosity regarding the significance of this timeless masterpiece. Particularly the visual interpretation caught my attention. Hence, this article will entail the information I found through my research. The two videoclips released, were, and still are, wildly exhaustive pieces of art, expressly crafted to challenge our very seldom corrupt societies, people's beliefs and mindsets.

Moreover, in these short movies, the artist did not miss the chance to channel his frustrations and rage through his distinct blueprint that turned everything he did into pure gold. There is a broad range of aspects that compose the audiovisual endeavors that are worth discussing. These elements comprehend the lyrics, the human rights violation, racism, and social injustices; all these perspectives are the fulcrum of the whole work. The acute and fierce language contributed to making the artistic output more impactful.

It is now interesting to also analyze They Don't Care About Us from a Post-Colonialism theoretical standpoint. Firstly, for those not familiar with the Post-Colonialism theories, it is a study of all the effects colonialism had on cultures and societies, concerning both European countries, that brutally conquered other nations, and how the lands and populations won responded and most importantly resisted those invasions and trespasses. Furthermore, the study of Post-Colonialism as a body of theory has and is still going through three major stages. The initial one entails the first phase of awareness of the social, psychological, and cultural unjust condition of inequality and exploitation, enforced by being in a colonized state. Secondly, a struggle for ethnic, cultural, political, and economic autonomy begins. As a consequence, there will be a growing awareness of cultural overlap. Eventually, I would say that some of the post-Colonial elements are quite evident in the two music videos.

The song and the two music videos are eloquent protests against racism. Michael speaking in the first person gives a platform to all the voiceless minorities, offering an accurate and poignant depiction of their conditions of merciless oppression, that stripped minorities of their humanity, pride, and most importantly their rights. Related to the concept of racism, with a simple yet efficacious line, Michael addresses the still hugely relevant and actual issue of police abuse and brutality, which is the central theme of the Prison Version short movie. The artistic output was magistrally filmed by the genius Spike Lee, in a real prison in Queens, New York. The opening sequence shows black schoolchildren standing behind a wire fence in the snow, chanting the chorus of the song, providing a visual accompaniment to the introduction we hear on the record. As the beat kicks in, the scene displayed is quite impressive and provocative, because it employs a poignant and immaculate montage of explicit documentary footage.

The clips complementing the short film are retrieved from the footage of the Rodney King beating and subsequent LA riots and the brutal police beatings of African American people. We then witness the swell of an atomic mushroom cloud, followed swiftly by footage of a Japanese child sitting alone and crying amid a devastated Hiroshima. Alongside, we see a close-up image of an African boy face swarming with flies, then the assassination attempt on George Wallace. Subsequently, come on the screen, some pictures of the student rebellion on Tiananmen Square in China, and finally some footage from the Vietnam War. All these footages contribute to making the video so harsh to the point of getting the audience uncomfortable. In the scenes taken in the cell, Michael appears to be haunted by the ghosts of beaten people.

his film stands out for its immediacy and accuracy, yet these clips do not incite destruction nor hatred, but rather the opposite. Indeed, those footages are stressing compassion, a peaceful reaction to a hurtful and horrible situation, and political reunification. Thus, this is another reason why there is not even a trace of violence or sign incitement to hatred or aggressive reactions. Those were not merely television images, but real-life pictures of a horrid reality of human humiliation, abuse, and suffering that sadly surround us everywhere, that break into our everyday lives through television, social media and computer screens. In the video, the tension is palpable yet, the revolt is peaceful and not suppressed by the guards. However, Michael openly expresses his anger with demonstrative insolence. For instance, he sweeps tableware off, hits a guard's baton right in front of his face. Interestingly, the artist is the only prisoner who moves freely and around the dining room, demonstrating against the disregard for human rights and laws by authorities. During the whole short film, Michael tries to convince people to fight for their rights, raising the spirit of protest against oppression and humiliation.

However, in reality, prison riots never end with prisoners slamming fists against the tables or dancing on top of them and, Michael was very well aware of it. The last scene of the video shows the artist free and running up the stairs, glancing back, running away from the penitentiary in a Brazilian favela (might this be the red thread that connects the first short movie with the second video?) while his scream still lingers in the air … Leaving eventually an open question which is asked through ASL American Sign Language: "I don't know what lies ahead… Where will this spirit of struggle lead me, where will it further manifest?" This part honestly gave me chills!

The second version of They Don't Care About Us was shot in Brazil in February 1997, precisely some parts were filmed in the central district of Salvador de Bahia. The footage where Michael is wearing the iconic Olodum t-shirt and dances with Brazilian people was taken in a favela in Rio. However, for the artist, it was quite a struggle to manage to shoot the short movie in Brazil because the local authorities intended to prohibit the filming, expressing their dislike for the project, given that it would have shown the country in an unfavorable light. Yet other authorities approved the project because it would have been an influential means to draw the world's attention to the condition of poverty. Thus, the region might have benefitted from having such a big platform offered by one of the most prominent artists on earth. However, after the Brazilian government allowed to film the video for 20 days, it changed its mind abruptly and reduced, vastly, the filming period to 5 days only. The Brazilian version opens with a girl speaking in Portuguese saying: “Michael, eles nao ligam pra gente.” which means “they don’t care about us.”, then showing the whole favela with an aerial shot. Eventually, Michael gets out of a door and starts performing.

Although this version is still impactful and manages to deliver the message impeccably, I would say that it presents some fundamental differences from the so-called prison version. Indeed, even though some policemen who look stern and indifferent are part of the short movie, in the Brazilian clip, the atmosphere is quite different from the previous one. As a matter of fact, the festive whirlwind of colors, rhythms, and dances are what reminds the audience of the social meaning of the song.

Furthermore, the vivacious and colorful performance is backed by members of the local cultural and musical group: Olodum. The organization was and still is of particular importance as one of its primary purposes was to combat racism and help cultivate a sense of self-pride and affirmed identity among the Afro-Brazilian community in the region. The organization as well provides a springboard for the promotion of civil rights on behalf of all marginalized groups. Hence, it was not a mystery the reason why Michael was aligned with Olodum, to the point that he supported the organization by wearing their merchandise in his short movie. The display of solidarity was reciprocated, through the act of the collective performance of the group’s musicians who contributed with an additional layer of live percussions and vocals, over Michael’s original studio recording.

Moreover, the language as well plays a fundamental role in this creative output. Indeed, the lyrics and the whole message delivered with this piece were not exuding revenge or aggressiveness, which were typically used to fuel accusations and rage. Au contraire, the song is the manifestation of the indignation and the energy of resistance, empowering self-control and fortitude against repressions. Hence, I would say that the song does not contain a single trace of aggressiveness, and its content and energy stay perfectly within boundaries. The language and expressions employed to address the issues are particularly relevant to explain the horrid effects colonialism and post-colonialism have had on the populations affected and thus to protest against the neglect of fundamental human rights.

Furthermore, it is interesting to point out that the element of the language expresses the manifestation of spiritual endurance and disobedience against the oppressors and lying accusers immaculately and, therefore, the dualism between the artist singing in the first person and the "Us" contained in the title and refrain of the song. Although TDCAU is addressing some social and political injustices, it may as well be true that Michael has attempted to convey his frustrations and anger in this piece, turning them into a timeless audiovisual work of art. Arguably, this could as well be the reason why the artist decided to release two variants of the short movie, the prison video featuring a crude and powerful documentary and the flamboyant, colorful Brazilian clip.

Furthermore, another element related to the Post-Colonialism discourse is how the artist and more in general black people and minorities are very seldom victims of unjust and appalling stereotypes that are addressed in the line “Don’t You Black Or White Me". This brief but straightforward segment of the song could be subjected to double interpretation. On the one hand, there is Michael Jackson, a man, a human being, a son, a brother, a father, a friend, who from the day he was born was put under the magnifying lenses of the whole world, his audience and tabloids. Most of the times he was judged, wrongly, bullied I would say, to the point that he could not even enjoy his life anymore without the anxiety of being abused, ridiculed and humiliated by people who did not take a second of their lives to do their research on his works, life, and what he stood for. Therefore, this line, specifically, is how the artist expressed his frustration towards those utterly racist reactions towards him. On the other hand, Michael decided to extend this statement to a broader scale, becoming the brave advocate who gave voice to all the voiceless people who were victims of racism, prejudice, ignorance in all their nuances and degrees.

Moreover, as Michael responded to the critiques received for the straightforward and sharp lyrics during a press release for the New York Times in 1996 " The song, in fact, is about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone. I am the skinhead, I am the Jew, I am the black man, I am the white man. I am not the one who was attacking. It is about the injustices to young people and how the system can wrongfully accuse them. I am angry and outraged that I could be so misinterpreted." He was the voice of the angry and outraged voiceless.

To conclude, They Don’t Care About Us with its first-person narration, the refrain, and the two iconic music videos, the socially and politically challenging lyrics and message, relates to the problems minorities face every day. They don’t really care about us means they, the society, privileged white people, the governments, do not care about the minorities, about the voiceless who have been abused, oppressed, robbed of their rights. They don’t really care about the people. The challenging lyrics and footages in the prison version offer us a chance to reflect on the importance of these topics. Not to mention the actuality of the song, which is remarkably accurate and relatable to the modern world and times we are living in. This artistic output is the greatest, most compelling and influential statement against every injustice perpetrated against all human mankind, and will forever be part of Michael's and the world's legacy. Therefore, the questions my reflection generated are: is this the world we want to live in? Are these the world and the society we want our children to grow up into? Is this the world without prejudice, ignorance, abuse, oppression, no equality, and equity we want for ourselves? And for the white folks like me: are we using our privilege wisely, to uplift, amplify the voices, the needs and wants of our brothers and sisters who are part of minorities and are facing some serious major struggles and discomforts? As Michael asked at the end of the short movie: “ I don’t know what lies ahead… Where will this spirit of struggle further manifest?”

Reflect deeply.

Thank you for your attention💜 Peace. G✨

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 11 Mar 2020 (Saturated fat and obesity, which foods produce satiety, spying VPNs, Twitter's research-friendly terms of service)

Today's links

Obesity and unsaturated fats: Blaming unsaturated fats for obesity is very plausible, but likely wrong, alas.

The satiety index: Which foods cause or satisfy cravings?

Sensor Tower's VPNs and adblockers spied on users: Like sneaking laxative into Immodium.

Twitter's new Terms of Service help academics: Good bots welcome.

Italy's "I Stay in the House" law: The comprehensive quarantine plan.

Scam-buster hacks into a scam-factory: He gets their CCTVs, recordings of their calls, transaction data, Whatsapp chats, and more. Delicious.

Postmortem: the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive. Testimony from yesterday's Senate hearing.

Podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick: My latest Locus column, on how copyright failed artists and enriched corporations.

This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Obesity and unsaturated fats (permalink)

Scott Alexander does a very deep dive into the literature on diet, weight, and saturated vs unsaturated fats.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/

The most important elements for me were first, the validation that something really has changed: average US adult men's weight went from 155lbs to 195lbs from the 1800s to today. The 90th percentile 1800s man weighed 185lbs, today, it's 320lbs. US obesity rates in the 1800s were 1%. Today, they're 25%.

But the usual culprits can't explain the change: they ate more bread and potatoes in the 1800s, for one thing.

In China, obesity rates were very low even with a diet dominated by white rice.

1970s France had 1800s US obesity rates, on a diet of "baguettes, pastries, cheese, meat. Lots of sugar, white flour, and fat."

It's true that some tactics (intermittent fasting, low-carbing) work for some people, but they're not what worked in 1970s France or 1800s USA. So if those things work, they're "hacks" – not an indictment of carbs or eating three meals a day.

There's a widespread theory that the change is driven by the switch from saturated to unsaturated fats, which was driven by spiking heart disease in the 1950s. It's likely this heart disease epidemic can be attributed to the vast increase in smoking a couple decades earlier, but the tobacco industry's denial machine meant that the blame fell on diet, and the US (and then global) diet's fat composition shifted dramatically.

We ate a lot fewer animal-derived fats and a lot more plant-derived fats. These fats had lots more Omega 6s and (to a lesser extent) 3s, and the ratio of these Omegas also changed dramatically, both in our diet and in our bodily composition. Intriguingly, these play a significant role in metabolism. There's a plausible ring to this whole business – particularly as a way of crisping up what we mean when we say "avoid processed foods." What is "processing?" Maybe it's doing something that requires vegetable fats.

Unfortunately, neither the literature nor the lived experience of experimenters support the theory. Studies don't support it. Meta analyses don't support it. Reddit forums skew heavily to people saying it didn't work for them (dotted with people for whom it did).

Which makes weight gain a mystery. It can't be (just) exercise: we're exercising more now than we did 40 years ago, and we're heavier now. Studies about causes are inconclusive overall, but clear that weight gain is more explained by diet than exercise. What's more, we're seeing weight gain in lab rats, pets and feral animals, so exercise seems an unlikely culprit here.

Alexander ponders other possible causes: plastics or other contaminants in our diet, or that it's a "ratchet" (once your weight set point changes, it doesn't change back.). Both have little evidence to support them.

He concludes that he's "more confused than when I started it," but will avoid unsaturated fats where possible, with the exceptions of Omega-3 rich oils (fish/olive oil).

I am likewise confused, but also better-informed than I was before I read his post.

The satiety index (permalink)

I lost ~100lbs in 2002/3 with a low-carb diet. The thing I immediately noticed when I started eating (lots) more fat and (lots) less carbs was that I was always satiated, with none of the food cravings that had plagued me all my life.

No other diet since has had that effect. I really struggle with cravings (and have put 50lbs back on through my 40s, though some of that is muscle from a much higher level of exercise). For me, satiety is the barrier to sticking to any diet. I don't just get ravenous, I get these all-consuming cravings that I can't put out of my mind, even if I resist them (and the longer I resist, the more likely it is that I'll really blow it out when I give in at last).

So I was really interested in this 1995 open access study, "A Satiety Index of common foods," which offers a league table of the foods that made subjects feel full.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_Index_of_common_foods

The meaty (heh) parts are in these charts on pp682-3.

Sensor Tower's VPNs and adblockers spied on users (permalink)

Sensor Tower, a company that made apps billed as privacy-protecting, installed man-in-the-middle certificates on your devices that let them spy on everything you did online.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/vpn-and-ad-blocking-apps-sensor-tower

They made 20+ VPN apps for Android and Ios, but didn't disclose that all those apps were owned by analytics company, Sensor Tower. The apps had names like "Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data, and Adblock Focus."

The apps installed a "root certificate" in users' devices. With this cert, the company could insert itself in all the device's otherwise secure, encrypted sessions – web browsing, email, etc. Sensor Tower admits that they collected data using this cert, but insists that it was "anonymized," which is something most computer scientists agree is likely impossible for this kind of data. Re-identification of anonymized data is devilishly hard to avoid.

The claim is made even less credible when you listen to the company's other claims about its practices, such as the idea that they hid the authorship of their apps "for competitive reasons."

Or this howler: that "the vast majority of these apps listed are now defunct (inactive) and a few are in the process of sunsetting." Well, yes, they were removed for violating their users' privacy. It's not like the company had a change of heart or anything.

And then there's this: "Apple and Google restrict root certificate privileges due to the security risk to users. Sensor Tower's apps bypass the restrictions by prompting users to install a certificate through an external website after an app is downloaded."

Twitter's new Terms of Service help academics(permalink)

Twitter just published a new, and much-improved developer policy, one that permits academics to field bots for research and auditing purposes.

https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/community/2020/twitter_developer_policy_update.html

"Researchers will be able to share an unlimited number of Tweet IDs and/or User IDs, if they're doing so on behalf of an academic institution and for the sole purpose of non-commercial research, such as peer review."

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/twitter-rewrites-developer-policy-to-better-support-academic-research-and-use-of-good-bots/

Twitter's also creating a bot registry that must include contact info for the botmaster, so that "it's easier for everyone on Twitter to know what's a bot – and what's not."

https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/policy#4-b

Italy's "I Stay in the House" law (permalink)

The FAQ for the Italian government's "I Stay In the House" decree is a fascinating document:

http://www.governo.it/it/articolo/decreto-iorestoacasa-domande-frequenti-sulle-misure-adottate-dal-governo/14278

Most notably, Italy has kicked out its tourists. As Bruce Sterling writes, "It's a tourist-ectomy. An Italy devoid of all tourists. It's fantastic, unheard-of. Surely this hasn't happened in at least 700 years."

https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2020/03/stay-house-decree/

People are allowed to go to work, to shop, and to run errands, provided it is for an "essential purpose," which you must prove "by means of a self-declaration which can be made on pre-printed forms already supplied to the state and local police forces. The veracity of the self-declarations will be subject to subsequent checks and the non-veracity constitutes a crime."

Business travelers are permitted to enter and leave the country, cab, delivery and freight drivers are allowed to do their jobs, and "outdoor motor activity is allowed as long as not in a group."

Public offices are open. Training activities are suspended. Government offices need to provide hand santizer, but if they run out, they have to stay open ("disinfectant is a precautionary measure but itstemporary unavailability does not justify the closure of the office").

Bars, pubs and restaurants may open from 6AM to 6PM, but have to cancel live music, games and screening events. Theaters, cinemas and museums are closed.

Schools are closed. Universities are closed. Exams and graduations will be conducted by video-link. Med schools are not closed. Research institutions are not closed.

Masses and funerals are canceled. Islamic Friday prayers are canceled.

Farms are open.

Scam-buster hacks into a scam-factory (permalink)

Jim Browning is a talented and prolific scambaiter. He calls the numbers listed in pop-up tech support scams and has the scammers log into a specially prepared system that lets him trace them.

In his latest adventure, Browning thoroughly turns the tables on http://Faremart.com , a Delhi travel agency that was the front for a sprawling network of tech-support scammers taking in millions every year through fraud.

Browning not only traces the scammers: he breaks into their unsecured CCTV network so he can watch them work. He compromises their phone system and listens to the recordings of all their scam-sessions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le71yVPh4uk

He gets hold of their ledgers, which list how much money each scam nets for the gang. He doxes the scammers and learns their real names. He gets a confederate to fly a drone over their HQ and maps out their comings and going.

In part II, Browning treats us to a delightful scambaiting session in which he mercilessly trolls a scammer who claims to be in San Jose, CA, tripping him up in a series of ever-more-desperate lies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV-qa9M-o4E

It's part of a growing genre of journalists who explore and document the operations of overseas scam operations. See, for example, Reply All's excellent podcasts on this:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nh3wk https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h5gl

There are two more parts to come in Browning's series (you can watch them now on his Patreon, apparently):

https://www.patreon.com/JimBrowning

He also turned his footage over to the BBC's flagship investigative programme, Panorama, which has produced its own doc based on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rmvhwwiQAY

Postmortem: the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive (postmortem)

Yesterday, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held hearings on "Copyright Law in Foreign Jurisdictions," at which two key copyright experts testified on last year's catastrophic EU Copyright Directive.

First up was Pam Samuelson, one of America's leading copyright experts, who explained in eye-watering detail how the compromises made to pass the Copyright Directive produced an incoherent mess that no one can figure out how to implement in law.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Samuelson%20Testimony.pdf

Next was Julia Reda, who served in the EU Parliament during the passage of the directive and helped spearhead the opposition to it.

Her testimony really shows you where the bodies were buried: how the EU knew it was making a pig's ear out of things.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Reda%20Testimony.pdf

Both are essential reading for anyone striving to understand Article 17 (formerly Article 13) – it is such a tangle of garbage lawmaking that these kinds of guides are indispensable.

Podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick (permalink)

I've just posted my latest podcast: a reading of my new Locus Magazine column, "A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick," on how copyright failed artists and enriched corporations and what we can do about it.

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/11/a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick-2/

Tldr: Giving monopolies to artists doesn't help them gain leverage over the super-concentrated entertainment industry, because the corporations control access to audiences and force artists to sign away those monopolies to get past their gatekeeping.

The more monopolies we give artists, the more monopolies are transfered to corporations, and the more they dominate the market and thus the more they can retain from the earnings generated by the artists' works.

Fights like the EU Copyright Directive are a distraction, a fight over shifting some points from Big Tech's balance sheet to Big Content's – but without any mechanism to move more of that revenue to creators.

Enriching creators means thinking beyond more "monopoly"-style copyright: instead, we have to think about inalienable rights that can be taken away through one-sided contracts (like the "reversion right" that lets US artists take back copyrights after 35 years).

And we have to think beyond copyright itself, by beefing up competition laws to break up entertainment cartels, and by beefing up labor laws to let artists form unions.

There is a role for copyright, but in things like extended collective licensing that would allow all online platforms to access the same catalog and pay for it based on the number of users they have, so a new platform pays pennies while Youtube pays hundreds of millions.

These blanket licenses have been key to keeping other forums for artistic revenues open: think of what the world would be like if one club or radio station could buy the exclusive rights to play the hits of the day, and then use their ensuring dominance to squeeze artists.

If you prefer the written work, you can read the column here for yourself, of course:

https://locusmag.com/2020/03/cory-doctorow-a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick/

Here's a direct link to the MP3 of the reading (thanks as always to Internet Archive for hosting – they'll host you too, for free!):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330_-_A_Lever_Without_a_Fulcrum_Is_Just_a_Stick.mp3

And here's the RSS for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Now in its 14th year (Thanks to Mark Pesce for convincing me to start it)!

This day in history (permalink)

#10yrsago London Olympics: police powers to force spectators to remove non-sponsor items, enter houses, take posters http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100303/tts-uk-olympics-london-ca02f96.html

#10yrsago Leaked documents: UK record industry wrote web-censorship amendment https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/bpi-drafted-web-blocking

#5yrsago Piketty on the pointless cruelty of European austerity https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/thomas-piketty-interview-about-the-european-financial-crisis-a-1022629.html

#5yrsago Rightscorp loses big on extortion racket https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-hemorrhages-cash-profit-from-piracy-remains-elusive-150311/

#5yrsago UK foreign secretary: stop talking about Snowden, let spies get on with it https://web.archive.org/web/20150315031642/http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2399082/government-minister-is-bored-with-snowden-and-wants-to-get-on-with-surveillance

#1yrago Defect in car security system aids carjackers, thieves https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/gone-in-six-seconds-exploiting-car-alarms/

#1yrago Former Archbishop of Canterbury cheers on students who are walking out to demand action on climate change https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/10/rowan-williams-school-pupil-climate-protests

#1yrago Leaked Chinese database of 1.8 million women includes a field indicating whether they are "BreedReady" https://twitter.com/0xDUDE/status/1104482014202351616

#1yrago Why #Article13 inevitably requires filters https://www.communia-association.org/2019/03/05/final-x-ray-article-13-dangerous-legislative-wishful-thinking/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slate Star Codex (https://slatestarcodex.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Fipi Lele, Matthew Rimmer (https://twitter.com/DrRimmer).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330_-_A_Lever_Without_a_Fulcrum_Is_Just_a_Stick.mp3

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[talix18]

November 22

Today I learned what a Japanese tuxedo is (in terms of tattoos) and that David Lee Roth at 65 has more energy in one hour than I’ve had in my entire life put together. I started listening to his appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF? and spent most of that time laughing or with my jaw hanging open. I lost track of Diamond Dave after his stint as an EMT. Now he’s an entrepreneur with a line of skin products formulated for tattooed skin. Gods bless.

Listening to Dave describe his formal music education made me wonder if that’s not what I ought to go back to school for. Music is the thing I love the most but have little actual education in. I took a beginning theory class in college and some sort of classical music appreciation course in grad school; I even played viola for two years in junior high. I guess by the time I got to college I’d ruled music out as a thing one could start studying. One of my high school friends had been playing cello for her entire life and I remember her missing various activities because she was practicing. She’s now making a living with her cello and I guess her example made me assume it was already too late.

Katelyn and I were talking about going back to school the other night. She’s learning young just how hard it is to make new friends once you’re out of school and I think she’d enjoy it, but we’re both looking at our wallets wondering how to pay for it.

School is one of my happy places. I loved learning, I loved feeling my brain work, I hated studying for exams but loved the feeling of understanding the material. I loved explaining to the class what the teacher meant when they couldn’t parse it and I loved making outline after outline of my study notes until I’d whittled the course down to bullet points. I love having conversations with people who are smarter than I am.

I briefly considered pursuing a Certificate of Higher Learning from Oxford because how cool would it be to be able to say I’m an Oxford alum? The majority of classes can be attended virtually, which is where I admit that I don’t just want to be taking classes by myself. I have a wealth of Great Courses available anytime I want to go ahead and start taking them. I want to Go To School. I want to meet smart people. I want to be surrounded by that energy and excitement again.

Now I’m looking up Eddie Van Halen and learning that he’s been in radiation therapy for his cancer for five years and was just in the hospital after a bad reaction to the drugs. Getting older, as my Gram used to say, ain’t for sissies. Love died for me when Eddie and Val got divorced but I’m glad they’re still friends and I’m thrilled he’s been sober for eleven years. I’m not sure I would have survived a rock and roll lifestyle, but then again, I’d rarely be driving.

(Speaking of the brothers Van Halen, how did I never know their mom was Indonesian? Now I understand why Alex’s eyes have looked vaguely Asian to me for all these years. Apparently Valerie has a cooking show and shared Mama VH’s recipe for something that grabbed Mom’s fancy so I can look forward to that!) (Don’t tell her that I’m a little meh on ham for Thanksgiving. She’s finally cooking Brussels sprouts a new way and I am calling that a win.)

(Mom found a recipe YEARS ago that uses Guinness and had faithfully made her “Relapse Brussels sprouts” every year since. They are fine, but they are mushy, and having seen the way, truth, and light of fresh Brussels sprouts roasted with salt and olive oil, I don’t have the heart to tell her that the Relapse BS just aren’t my favorite.)

This is my fourth day in a row of feeling pretty good, and that’s on less sleep than I normally get. I really hope this is because the medication is working. It’s hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other when you feel like you’re doing it in three feet of water. But I’ve been productive at work and at home and actually considered taking on a work training challenge today. I even started my Christmas shopping! (I hate much of what Jeff Bezos stands for, but goddamn if Amazon doesn’t alleviate most of the Christmas crazy.)

The increased meds are not helping the words come out! I have rare free time in front of a keyboard and nothing to say? Maybe that *is* a sign of increased mental health.

December is flat out insane in my family. Thank goodness my aunt moved away with her 12/4 birthday! There were birthday dinners with Mom (12/2), my aunt, me (12/20), and my dad (12/26). My brother’s birthday is also on the 20th and he’s continued the tradition in the latest generation – my niece will be five on 12/1. Her Aunt Lindsay has decided it’s time we start taking her out for birthday dinners. Basically, the fulcrum of the year tips at Thanksgiving and is just a steep slide into New Year’s. (Which I actually have plans for!)

Christmas shopping is so anxiety-laden for me that I have bad dreams about it all year long. (It’s always the same: December 23rd, I’ve purchased nothing, and the only place open in Walgreen’s.) I can’t enjoy the holiday season until I’m relatively sure what everyone’s getting and honestly, I don’t need any more stuff. Just being together and enjoying yummy food is enough for me. The holidays also mean the Hebert Christmas punch tradition from which I’ve been excluded for this will be the 24th time (I can drink anything I want! I choose not to!). My family are all wine and spirit drinkers and most of the time I look around it, but the holidays really make me miss that fuzzy festive feeling.

So how does one achieve that without using? I need to get back on a meditation routine and I need to make upside-down yoga part of my weekly life. Upside-down yoga always made me a little giddy and we rarely invert in the class I take now. I also need to try on my New Year’s Dress and assess how vigilant I have to be between now and then to make it work. I was having some success with an intermediate fasting routine where I’d restrict my calories for two (non-consecutive) days per week. The beauty of that schedule is that I can maintain it through the holidays. I should have just started this week after the colonoscopy.

But I also had a pretty severe mood crash last year and fasting is not for the unstable. Yes, I’m an emotional eater but you know, I’d rather eat my feelings than wish I could opt out of life. I know how to lose weight; necromancy is above my spell level.

Did I ever mention I was a witch and practiced in a coven for a decade? I’ve just gotten to the 20K word mark and it’s likely I’ll start repeating myself any time now. The coven was made of some amazing people but the actual business of witching just felt too much like work. I went in looking for a spiritual experience and what I got was a delightful social experience. That required a lot of time and 40-mile drives and the stagnation of my 12-Step recovery in that decade was not a coincidence.

Yesterday I got to whip out one of my favorite recovery slogans on a friend: “Religion is for people trying to stay out of hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve already been there.” It doesn’t hold up once you consider religions that don’t have conceptions of hell, but it’s catchy.

(The NaNoWriMo website helpfully breaks down how many words one has to produce per day to get to 50K by next Sunday and it is a little overwhelming. I only need 2235 more today to stay on target! [I am not staying on target.])

Somebody give me a topic! (Give me a beat!) Oh! Yesterday I emptied out one of my spare room dressers, which is something that’s been on my project list for, oh, a long time. All I have to do is patch the hole and that room will be ready to paint, which will let me do the floors in that room and the front. With that done I’ll have my closet annex and yoga station all set up and I will finally live in my entire house. And it should inspire me to do the last three rooms.

I’m excited to set up these last two rooms as functional spaces. I can’t tell you what’s taken me so long to surrender to the idea that I need a room-sized closet extension but look…I have to grab joy wherever I can find it. Waiting for the big stuff to fall into place just takes too long and this bizarre timeline provides plenty of reasons to despair. I don’t understand how people can spend eight hours a day in cubes that aren’t decorated and I am not going to limit myself to one of my life’s compulsions if I have room to store it all. (Vanessa is in Tennessee shouting “You’ll never have room for another person in your house that way!” and I’m shouting back “You and your person bought a new house!”)

I do love my house, though, and getting me out of it is going to take some extraordinary conditions. With any luck I’ll meet a life partner who also loves their house and we can commute and share. I still won’t have enough wall space to hang everything I want to; perhaps a rotating gallery space is required. Says the girl who can’t manage to swap the screens out for storm windows and vice versa every year.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

BEATING THE ALTAIR BASIC OF THE MARGINAL

When I was in college. At this point there is nothing new our startup can teach us about funding—or at least the term artificial intelligence, and was an early member of both of the top two computer science departments, MIT and Stanford. A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for a while before starting a startup are so frightening that most people won't even try. However, all the news was bad. On the average trip I bring four books and only read one of them: a list of n things protects the writer from indulging in any flights of fancy. But taking the high road worked.

It sounds to me as if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted to, he had to commit to being despised in his own lifetime. Sometimes I can think with noise. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where VCs have enough information to invest in the earliest stages, will invest based on a two-page agreement. Your natural tendency when an investor says he wants to invest in Microsoft. We have less power. It makes me self-conscious to write about these topics? It makes a better story, partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives you some baseline confidence. This is to be rewritten. The paintings that were popular at the time. The more general version of this problem is exacerbated by having few peers.

The weekend before the demo day for potential investors ten weeks in, and seven of the eight seemed promising by the end of the scale, nature seems to be becoming dramatically more liquid. In the air, beauty had the edge, just. A rounds: millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded by people with established credentials after months of serious, businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a foot thick. Sometimes I can think of only two other writers who came near him for style: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford cared what other people thought of them: he wanted to seem aristocratic; she was afraid she wasn't smart enough. People could have been publishing online in 1995, online stores were all made by hand by human designers, but we can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, but the way one anticipates a delicious dinner. To them the company didn't exist before they invested in it. So please, get on with it. I don't know enough about music to say.

When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Bad circumstances can break the spirit of a strong-willed person, but I wouldn't describe them as intellectually curious. As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar they seemed. That's four years. Locally, all the pressure is in the direction of over-engineering. The other thing that made him different was that he did so many different things that were admirable. In our startup, one of the most difficult problems for startup founders is deciding when to approach VCs.

You're better off avoiding these. The SFP was just an experiment to get things done, and designed languages all too influenced by the technology of the day. When you're young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart. Some of this summer's eight startups will probably die eventually; it would be a huge coup for them if their firm invested in a company, that makes him unique. It's a cliche to call World War II a contest between good and evil, but between fighter designs, it really was. They delayed for an entire year, and when they did finally take a CEO, they chose a guy with a PhD in computer science. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start a company of your own. And so in starting a startup consumed your life, but I don't think it takes years to learn how companies work. Just go to their web site and send them an email. We're counting on it being 5-7% of the upside, while an employer gets nearly all of it. The best sort of job is a consulting project in which you can build whatever software you wanted to sell as a startup.

The big change that experience causes in your brain is learning that you need to start looking for your next round? The angel now owns 200/1200 shares, or a job. Kids are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones. So I'm supposed to finish college and then go work for another company for two years, and the only lasting benefits were a weird ability to identify semitic roots and some insights into how people recognize words. If they're only paying a twentieth as much, they only have to predict a twentieth as well. I was younger. At one extreme is the sort of AI I was trying to answer was how many there were. Because seed firms are companies also means the investment process is more standardized.

And it is completely non-discriminatory. In this case, you trade decreased financial risk for increased risk that your company won't succeed as a startup. What if there was a kid is that much of the best ones were made as a way of studying the world than producing something beautiful. If anywhere should be quiet, that should. So you don't end up having as much competition as you might expect. Modernism, Calder had, and had in a way that he made seem effortless. It takes time to find investors, and time always more than you expect for the deal to close, so we are now three months into the life of the company in restricted stock, vesting over four years. The best I can think with noise.

[artmutt]

Fulcrum Point Annual Peace Concert

The New Music ensemble Fulcrum Point has been doing an annual concert for peace for 21 years now in Chicago. I’ve attended a number of them over the years, notably when the group joined forces with Friends of the Gamelan to do a program honoring Lou Harrison. The concerts have taken place in a variety of venues, but this year’s program was in DePaul University’s new Gannon Concert Hall, a great space with a lively acoustic. This year’s concert, Rites of Devotion and Ecstasy, was focused on Indian classical music and its influences on the West. There were a large number of people of Indian ancestry in the audience, which was a pleasure.

Fulcrum Point’s music director, Stephen Burns, opened the program with Jhula Jhule, a work for trumpet and piano by composer Reena Esmail. The piano part was played by the talented Kuang Hao Huang. The music was not necessarily derivative of Indian music, but the free-flowing almost improvisational nature of the trumpet part suggested certain aspects of Indian classical music.

The second work on the program, Shirish Korde’s Lalit. was more overtly based on the sensibilities and sounds of Indian music, in part because it incorporated Indian tabla, the rather pitched pair of drums used in classical music, and there was also an electronic drone that replaced the traditional tambura. Of course, the saxophone is not native to Indian, so a duo for sax and tabla was beyond the tradition. Yet the music often evoked the energy and style of traditional Indian music, and had the person in front of me (as well as myself) shaking our heads in time to the rhythms. Gregory Ward, sax, and Kalyan Pathak, tabla, gave a wonderful performance.

The major work on the program was the Midwest premiere of Vijay Iyer’s Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a film project by the late Prashant Bhargava, for which Iyer provided the score. Iyer is a gifted jazz pianist and composer, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and his score and the accompanying film about the festival of holi in India are already available on ECM Records. It was great to hear this colorful, rhythmically complex music performed live with the film.

Fulcrum Point is a lively part of the city’s new music scene. We still need to do everything we can to foster peace in the world, and this annual concert is always a welcome event.

[bushdog]

Power in Sound: The Music of Galina Ustvolskaya Festival is a 3-day immersion into Galina Ustvolskaya’s powerful and intense music, October 5-7, 2017. Named “the woman with the hammer,” (Elmer Schonberger) for her use of heavy, homophonic blocks of sound, Ustvolskaya’s music is rarely performed in the Unites States. Organized/curated by Nomi Epstein and Shanna Gutierrez, this will be the first major multi-day festival celebrating the music of Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) in the United States, and only the second outside of Russia. The festival unites some of the city’s most prestigious musicians: Seth Parker Woods, Liz Pearse (Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble), Shanna Gutierrez (Collect/Project), DePaul University’s Ensemble 20+ led by Michael Lewanski, Kevin Harrison (Axiom Brass), Jeff Kimmel (a.pe.ri.od.ic), Andrew Rosenblum (Memoria Nova), Christopher Wendell Jones, Ann Yi, Tara Lynn Ramsey (dal niente), Kuang-Hao Huang (Fulcrum Point New Music Project), and more.

Ustvolskaya Festival in Chicago, Oct 5-7 – Avant Music News

うわーこんなフェスやるのか。ロシアの女性現代作曲家、 「ハンマーの聖女」ガリーナ・ウストヴォルスカヤのフェス。ある意味ハードコアな。

[theabominableblogger]

Rewatching “Rogue One”

Prepare for the pain.  Lots of pain.

A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...

WHERE BE OPENING MUSIC?!?!?

That shot of the planet’s rings is so cool...

What planet is it called again?

MADS MIKKELSEN!  DAT BOI!

God, Galen Erso is probably the best and most important side character in this movie.  I will fight anyone that bad mouths him.

*Saw appears on Lyra’s ‘Skype’ cam*  BOOGITY!

So, do I have this right:  the Death Troopers are basically the Star Wars equivalent of the Super Soldiers from “Captain America:  Civil War” except they’re part kinda zombie?  Is that right?

So if Grand Admiral Thrawn has the authority to have Death Troopers, how is Director Krennic able to?

Theory Time:  is Lyra Force-Sensitive?

*Krennic appears*  Hey, it’s me!

A little backstory for this:  me and @theimpossiblescheme were talking about Krennic one day and I pointed out that I’m a lot like Krennic in that A) I would indeed put my feet up on my desk, sit back, and sip a martini (basically what he did in the Rogue One novelization) and B) we both freak out over anything and everything.  Lo and behold, the association stuck with me.

Where did they film this opening scene because it’s fantastic.

“Oh look, it’s Lyra, back from the dead.  It’s a miracle.”

What I find really interesting is that young Jyn has a toy Stormtrooper.  It’s reminiscent to little kids have action figures of famous people and superheroes.

*whispers*  Her lantern looks like a holocron...

I’m gonna be honest here and please don’t hate me for this but I think Jyn’s characterization is “Meh” compared to everyone else’s.  The first time I saw this in theaters, I noted that she’s not really as interesting as the other characters.  She’s kinda like Katniss in that matter.

*Cassian appears*  Diego Luna!

So Cassian’s a Fulcrum agent?  Are we gonna see him in Rebels?

“It’s the pilot... the detector.”  You’re that one dude in the pre release pics for Rebels S4!

Wobani... is an anagram... of Obi-Wan...

“Congratulations, you are being rescued.”  To quote CinemaSins:  “TUDYKKK!!!!”

Wait, that’s Major Sholto from “Sherlock”!

Mon Mothma!

“What does this got to do with my father?”  Honey, it’s Star Wars; everything is father-related.  If you don’t have a problem with your dad or have a secret sibling, something’s seriously wrong.

The Force theme!

There’s the Ghost!

So what planet does Yavin 4 reside under?

Holy crap, that Geonosian sand really got to Saw...

In all honesty, if you could remove one character from this movie, it’s Saw.  He was kind of an unnecessary addition in my opinion.

BOR GULLET!  BOOGITY!

Something Gareth Edwards, the director, is amazing at is showing you the SIZE of things.  He did the 2014 Godzilla movie and you can clearly see how HUGE it is and he did the same thing with the Death Star under construction.

So how old is Jyn when it comes to the Star Wars canon?

OK, looked it up on Wikipedia:  she’s 21 at the events of this movie.  That only makes her like 2 years older than Ezra in S3...

Is there really any point to this mind reading octopus thing that Saw has?  No, no there isn’t.

Cassian:  Stay on the ship.

K2:  OK (follows them anyway out of sheer boredom)

OK, Chirrut just has to be Force-sensitive.  Maybe that’s how he “sees;” he uses the Force or something.

Saw’s little band of guerilla attackers reminds me a lot of the extremists in al Qaeda.  Maybe that was intentional, I dunno...

“I am taking them... to imprison them... in prison.”

I just realized that Chirrut is wearing a Stormtrooper belt.  That’s badass.

God dang I love Donnie Yen as Chirrut.

K2:  We have no fear.

*Baze points a BFG at him*  One fear.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?  I’M BLIND!

AP?  Or a bot of a similar model?

It’s a physical game of dejarik!

“Are we not still friends?”  Lemme check.... NO!

“It’s a trap, isn’t it?”  Yes.  Everything’s a trap.  The entirety of Star Wars is a trap.

“You’re the pilot?”  “I’m the pilot.���  *sings* YOU ARE, HURRAH FOR BODHI ROOK!  AND IT ‘TIS, IT ‘TIS A GLORIOUS THING TO BE SIR BODHI ROOK!

Galen...

God, this speech is so freaking good...

“Think of where you are...”  *tearfully starts singing Hamilton lyrics*

I legit got upset in the theater when Galen died.

“My God, it’s beautiful.”  This bit is fantastic.

“I’m not very optimistic about our odds.”  NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!

*Saw unplugs his emergency air and dies*  Well at least there’s someone else who chews the scenery more than him.

Get it?  It’s the planet.  XD

“I will be taking control of the weapon that I first spoke of years ago, effective immediately.”  *cue Kill Bill sirens*

“Now there’s a 35% chance [of survival].”  “I don’t wanna know.”  “OK.”

There needs to be more rainy scenes like this in Star Wars

*K2 presses some buttons in the background*  Beep boop beep

OK, Chirrut definitely is Force-sensitive.  I mean, c’mon.

*Cassian looks through the binoculars*  Well there are two Banthas, but I don’t see any Sand People.

Cassian, if you’re trying to shoot someone via sniper gun, at least have a cover over yourself so that you won’t have to keep continually wiping rain off your vision scope.

*Jyn sends a Stormtrooper off the bridge* That was the quietest take down I’ve ever seen.  Even quieter than the take downs in the Batman Arkham games

Why yes, I watch gameplays on YouTube.

“Star-Dust...”  Nope.  Gone.  It’s gone.  My heart has flown out of my chest cavity and has sailed out the window into the appropriately timed storm outside.

They killed off Mads Mikkelsen.  You bastards.

AND THEY DON’T EVEN TAKE HIS BODY BACK FOR A PROPER BURIAL!  THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

MUSTAFAR!

No wonder in Rebels they say it’s where “the Jedi go to die.”  Vader has a freaking castle there!  It probably got built near the end of Season 1 but still.

Is that Julian Richings?

The interior freaking looks like a mix between the tower on Mortis and the Sith temple in “Twilight of the Apprentice.”  So many triangles!

*cue me drawing references to the Illuminati via Snapchat*

“Be careful not to choke on your aspirations, Director.”  Oh my God.

Yes, Bail!

“The Death Star?  This is nonsense!”  Shut up, Anderson, you lower the IQ of the whole galaxy!

Who’s that lady in the gold hood?

C’mon, Mon Mothma!

“General Syndulla, please report to briefing.”  HERA!!!

Please tell me we see her getting promoted to General in S4!  Please Filoni!

“Rogue One.”  Roll credits!  *ding*

Wait, Mon Mothma knows that Obi-Wan’s alive?

“I would trust her with my life.”  GAH!

Oh my gosh, we actually see Imperial faces in the original trilogy and this movie.

Well, Saw Gerrera was an asshole, Jyn.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, there was supposed be a happy ending where everyone survived but Gareth Edwards didn’t get the go ahead to do it so he went with the “everyone dies” ending and made it dark.

Fun Fact:  the scene where they walk through the building on Scarif was filmed in a train station.

“Yeah, they rolled out the T-15s.”  Haaa... and they talk about the T-16s in “A New Hope” and the T-17s in “The Force Awakens”

ARE WE BLIND?!?!?  DEPLOY THE GARRISON!!!!

CHOPPER!

I love this music here when they realize that they have to deploy the Rebel fleet to Scarif.

Oh my God, 3PO...

Oh crap, walkers...

KARABAST!

THE GHOST!!!

Gold Leader!

I was gonna say “Where’s Phoenix Squadron?”  but then I realized that there is no longer a Phoenix Squadron :(

I love how they envoked some of the Vietnam War during the beach battles

Oh Blue Squadron made it in!

The prosthetics on the Mon Calamari are great in this movie.

Haha, that little hair flip Cassian does before using the handles.

K2 takes out the Stormtrooper squadron*  I’LL BEAT A MOTHEREFFA WITH ANOTHER MOTHEREFFA!

“Black Saber?”  What project is that?

Literally the main focus of the finale is to make sure the Internet connection is up and making sure the file is small enough to send.

K2, NOOOOOOO!!!!!

*K2 dies*  I’m done.  I’m done you guys.

What Imperial ships are those?

I’m one with the Force and the Force is with me...

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

EVERYBODY DIES AND I AM NOT HAPPY EVEN THOUGH I’VE SEEN THIS THREE TIMES NOW!

*The Ghost takes down a couple TIEs in front of the Mon Calamari ship*  Oooh, that was nice.

“I’m on it, Gold Leader.”  THAT WAS HERA!!! WE HEAR HER IN THIS! 

I HEAR YOU, VANESSA MARSHALL!

Leia gave us the Hammerheads in Rebels!

[Bodhi dies] *slams head on floor*

Mood:  Mads Mikkelsen opening a bottle of vodka during a “Rogue One” interview”

Baze looks like he has a air tank on his back.

*Baze dies*  God... dammit...

*The Hammerhead takes out two Star Destroyers*  Niiiiccceeeee......

Krennic, the entire Erso family is out to kick your ass throughout this entire movie.

Krennic also has a fancy Imperial pin in his lapel.  The Empire is just full of fancy pens.

*Death Star emerges from hyperspace*  Oh crap.

*Jyn and Cassian look at each other in the elevator*  Oh just kiss already

*Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer emerges from hyperspace*  Oh crap!

Oh God this music!

YAAASSS THIS END SCENE!!!!!

“Open fire!”  Oh hey Sam Witwer!

Fun Fact:  he threw that line in.  Even when he’s not Maul, he’s still improvising in Star Wars

[the camera pans to see Leia]  *sings*  We celebrate a day of peace....

NO!

AND IT LEADS RIGHT UP TO “A NEW HOPE!”

“And Forrest Whitaker”  BOOGITY!

[damonbation]

Chain Reaction - Oliver Renick and Guest Host Kevin Kelly: Macro Matters Series

On this exclusive Macro Matters Series, guest host Kevin Kelly talks to Oliver Renick, lead anchor for TD Ameritrade Network, about his outlook for markets and the way Oliver and his team integrate Bitcoin & crypto into their day-to-day coverage. Oliver discusses his philosophy for covering markets and the move away from 'œmomentum news', the growing importance of bitcoin as a macroeconomic indicator, consensus expectations for monetary policy and the 'œFed fulcrum', what we can expect as the world tries to assess the economic fallout from coronavirus, and much more!

Key Points

Bitcoin's potential as a high-beta safety play - similar to bonds and gold - with a very specific tie into interest rates and monetary policy trends.The imminent risk of coronavirus and the potential ramifications on the global economy if the situation escalates further.Market consensus for lower rates is at an extreme, implying asymmetric downside risk to the bond trade that's pushed long-dated Treasury yields to their lowest level in history if the long-term impact of COVID-19 turns out to be less severe than expected.

Quotes:

'œThere is an imminent risk that has no precedent basically and that is coronavirus and the potential economic impact due to China's supply chain shutting down and the subsequent areas it might crop up in as well.' '" Oliver Renick

'œI suspect we need to continue to think about the risks associated with this concept of a free lunch, essentially, where the bond market can rally and the Fed will cut behind it.' '" Oliver Renick

'œIf the market and signal being sent by gold and bonds right now are correct then it seems to suggest we're going to be in a world of trouble because if the Fed has to cut again, after they said they didn't want to cut, we really have to start giving more credence to the whole '˜bullets in the chamber' argument.' '" Oliver Renick

'œThere's too much that's based on this assumption that we're only going one direction in rates.' '" Oliver Renick

Support The Show

ZenLedger is the official tax software of Chain Reaction for crypto investors and accountants. Get a 15% discount when you use code Chain15.

Visit Delta Exchange For A $10 Welcome Bonus!

To sponsor this top crypto research podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io

Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom Shaughnessy owns tokens in ETH, BTC, STX, SNX, RUNE, sUSD and HNT. Let's Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. These sponsorships are for informational purposes only and are not a solicitation to use any product or service. Guest host Kevin Kelly holds tokens in BTC, ETH, RUNE, and LEO.

Music Attribution:

Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic

from Money 101 https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/chain-reaction-oliver-renick-and-guest-host-kevin-kelly-macro-matters-series via http://www.rssmix.com/

[danielmarkharrison]

Chain Reaction - Oliver Renick and Guest Host Kevin Kelly: Macro Matters Series

On this exclusive Macro Matters Series, guest host Kevin Kelly talks to Oliver Renick, lead anchor for TD Ameritrade Network, about his outlook for markets and the way Oliver and his team integrate Bitcoin & crypto into their day-to-day coverage. Oliver discusses his philosophy for covering markets and the move away from 'œmomentum news', the growing importance of bitcoin as a macroeconomic indicator, consensus expectations for monetary policy and the 'œFed fulcrum', what we can expect as the world tries to assess the economic fallout from coronavirus, and much more!

Key Points

Bitcoin's potential as a high-beta safety play - similar to bonds and gold - with a very specific tie into interest rates and monetary policy trends.The imminent risk of coronavirus and the potential ramifications on the global economy if the situation escalates further.Market consensus for lower rates is at an extreme, implying asymmetric downside risk to the bond trade that's pushed long-dated Treasury yields to their lowest level in history if the long-term impact of COVID-19 turns out to be less severe than expected.

Quotes:

'œThere is an imminent risk that has no precedent basically and that is coronavirus and the potential economic impact due to China's supply chain shutting down and the subsequent areas it might crop up in as well.' '" Oliver Renick

'œI suspect we need to continue to think about the risks associated with this concept of a free lunch, essentially, where the bond market can rally and the Fed will cut behind it.' '" Oliver Renick

'œIf the market and signal being sent by gold and bonds right now are correct then it seems to suggest we're going to be in a world of trouble because if the Fed has to cut again, after they said they didn't want to cut, we really have to start giving more credence to the whole '˜bullets in the chamber' argument.' '" Oliver Renick

'œThere's too much that's based on this assumption that we're only going one direction in rates.' '" Oliver Renick

Support The Show

ZenLedger is the official tax software of Chain Reaction for crypto investors and accountants. Get a 15% discount when you use code Chain15.

Visit Delta Exchange For A $10 Welcome Bonus!

To sponsor this top crypto research podcast, email Tom@DelphiDigital.io

Disclosures: This podcast is strictly informational and educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any tokens or securities or to make any financial decisions. Do not trade or invest in any project, tokens, or securities based upon this podcast episode. The host may personally own tokens that are mentioned on the podcast. Tom Shaughnessy owns tokens in ETH, BTC, STX, SNX, RUNE, sUSD and HNT. Let's Talk Bitcoin is a distribution partner for the Chain Reaction Podcast, and our current show features paid sponsorships which may be featured at the start, middle and/or the end of the episode. These sponsorships are for informational purposes only and are not a solicitation to use any product or service. Guest host Kevin Kelly holds tokens in BTC, ETH, RUNE, and LEO.

Music Attribution:

Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic

from The Let's Talk Bitcoin Network https://ift.tt/2uSFfzK via IFTTT

[josephkitchen0]

Goat Playgrounds: A Place to Play!

by Patrice Lewis

Goats are many things: lively, intelligent, playful, curious, useful.  It’s the playfulness that can be the undoing of the novice goat-owner. Without a suitable outlet for a caprine’s rambunctious nature, that playfulness can translate into destructiveness for infrastructure and fencing. For this reason, goat playgrounds are highly recommended.

Goat playgrounds are more than just cute and amusing facilities; they are a necessary component to keep the animals’ innate curiosity and liveliness from getting out of hand and resulting in damage to property and infrastructure.

From their wild ancestors, today’s domestic goats have inherited a genetic aptitude for climbing. A caprine’s sure-footed nature means they enjoy climbing — not only to explore, but to establish hierarchy among themselves. In the absence of sheer rocky ledges, your car’s roof, a fence ledge, or your bent-over back could act as the next best thing.

Ready to Start Your Own Backyard Flock?

Get tips and tricks for starting your new flock from our chicken experts. Download your FREE guide today! YES! I want this Free Guide »

Are goats smart? Yes, and due to their intelligence, caprines are easily bored and inclined to get into trouble without suitable distraction. How many goat owners have looked out the window to see their goats walking calmly along the tops of their fences? Goats are hard enough on enclosures as it is. Playgrounds distract caprines away from damaging infrastructure by providing them with somewhere besides fences (or your bent-over back) to direct their energy and curiosity.

Like any other active creature, goats need exercise, especially if they spend most of their time confined to pens. Pregnant goats benefit from exercise, as it makes them less likely to encounter problems when kidding. Active goats also require less goat hoof trimming. Some owners prefer play structures with rough surfaces to encourage proper wearing of hooves.

Amie McCormick’s wooden spool goat playground. Photo credit Marissa Ames

The Ultimate DIY Project

While goat playgrounds are available commercially, they’re easily constructed from free or inexpensive parts and can result in years of happy gamboling by your little hoofed creatures.

Some of the aspects of a play structure goats find amusing include:

Inclines

Tunnels (from barrels or culvert sections)

Bridges

Platforms

Seesaws

Stairs

Some common components of goat playgrounds can include:

Tractor tires (try half-burying them upright in the ground)

Logs (with several large tree trunks criss-crossing each other, or a collection of log rounds of different heights stacked around)

Pallets (screw boards or plywood over the pallets to cover the slats, then screw them together to form shapes)

Giant wooden cable spools from power or phone companies (stand them on their ends, screw a board patch over the hole, and fasten a cleated board from the ground to the top for climbing)

Rocks (the bigger, the better)

Cinder blocks (as connectors for boards or fulcrums for seesaws)

Old wooden tables (bury the legs so they won’t tip over)

Old children’s play structures

Old dog houses

  Simple ramps and boxes can serve as toys while also giving goats an elevated surface off wet ground.

Toys are also important to alleviate boredom and keep goats engaged. Goats enjoy movable or interactive parts (including noisemakers), and are particularly intrigued by suspended items. Try hanging a tetherball from a stout rope from a branch. Give goats soccer balls or rolling plastic bottles (such as five-gallon water jugs) they can push around. A series of dangling cowbells fastened to a board provides the animals with a chance to make music. Similarly, sturdy squeaker dog toys attached to a rope or fastened to a board also makes noise. A “music jug” — a heavy-duty clean plastic jug, such as from laundry detergent — filled with rattling things such as walnuts, small stones, beads, etc., encourages goats to butt it to hear the noise.

Try filling a milk crate with hay, leaves, and treats and suspend it from a branch or beam. They’ll eat the treats, then butt and knock it around when it’s empty. Screw or glue heavy-duty scrub brushes to an upright 4×4, and the goats will use them to scratch themselves. Likewise, a doormat with rubber or fiber bristles fastened to a wall allows animals to scratch themselves.

Even sandboxes are popular options. Goats will paw and dig through the sand.

A piece of culvert pipe that the goats like to push around like a hamster wheel. Photo by Goat Journal editor Marissa Ames.

Construction Tips

Goats have a strong climbing instinct, so when constructing a goat playground, think UP. Stairs, ramps, inclines, mounds — everything should lead to a high observation point where the goat can peer down, satisfied he’s safe and secure from his perch. Make sure the playground has numerous platforms or shelves large enough to accommodate one or two animals at a time.

If you’re fortunate enough to come across a second-hand plastic or wooden child’s backyard playground, these can often be repurposed for goats. You might have to glue or screw cleats on some of the smoothest surfaces (such as slides) for goats to climb. Even small trampolines have been repurposed for goat usage.

The one unifying element of building goat playgrounds is sturdiness. Components that are in poor condition to begin with (splintery pallets, torn-up tires, spools or boards with holes or sharp edges, exposed nails or screws) might result in injury to the animals. Instead, look for materials that will stand up to years of hard use and beating from sharp little hooves. Sometimes a scrounged part can be patched (such as screwing a board over a hole). Watch out for wooden pallets, which often have slats spaced wide enough to catch slender legs. To prevent injury, screw boards or plywood over pallets to keep the goats from hurting their legs.

Bolts and nuts are useful for goat construction, since the rounded end won’t hurt the animals and the nut end can be underneath and out of reach.  Screws and nails are fine, as long as the sharp end isn’t sticking out where animals can catch themselves.

If any element of a playground is too slick or slippery, then gluing or screwing cleats at intervals will allow the animals to get purchase on the surface and climb without slipping.  Keep in mind what structural parts may be more slick in rainy or snowy conditions, and add safety features accordingly. Tree logs can be notched; horizontal surfaces can have sand or gravel glued down; and cleats can be spaced to allow goats to get a good grip on inclined surfaces.

When creating this playground, Marissa’s husband secured boards over any areas where wood might come apart to trap little goat hooves.

When pulling different elements of a play structure together, try making some pieces multi-functional in some way. A large tractor tire, half-buried in the ground, can serve as both a bridge and a tunnel. To anchor tires (large or small) in the ground, dig a hole deep enough to sink the tire up to the rim of the tire center (it might be helpful to drill holes into the tire so it won’t collect water), then backfill the tire with gravel or dirt.

Tires laid flat can be stacked and backfilled to make stairs and hills. Horizontal pallets can be both stairs and shelves for lying in the sun, can be stacked to make towers, or can be part of a goat shelter with room beneath. Bridges, either horizontal (joining two components) or inclined (letting the animals climb to the next level) are popular.

Some of the structural components should be scaled down to kid-size. Again, think multi-functional. For example, smaller truck-sized tires anchored in the ground can start young kids on their climbing adventures as older animals tackle the bigger tractor tires.

Goats owned by Goat Journal editor Marissa Ames on one of her caprine playgrounds.

A Happy Goat is an Enriched Goat

According to science writer Barbara Cozzens, “In a 2001 study published in the Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, scientists compared weight gain of goats housed in traditional pens to those housed in pens that were enriched using old tires, wooden railway sleepers and PVC pipes. The results were unmistakable: Goats in the enriched pens were healthier. Eighty-three percent gained weight and a third less stopped eating. In her publication on goat enrichment, research veterinarian Dr. Sara Savage suggests, ‘Somewhere in the evolutionary development of (domestic goats), curiosity and play drive emerged as positive forces for survival.’”

With construction material virtually free, there’s no reason not to build something that will keep your goats happy, content, and non-destructive. A happy goat is an enriched goat!

Goat Playgrounds: A Place to Play! was originally posted by All About Chickens

[funknrolll]

Parliament Funkadelic- Mothership Connection and The Clones of Dr Funkenstein: the revolution of funk

1975 and 1976 were two of the most prolific years for the intergalactic funk band the Parliament Funkadelic. Indeed, the band released their 5th album Mothership Connection in 1975 and the sequel, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein only seven months later. The two albums are extremely different. As a matter of fact, Mothership Connection was created as an act of protest for the conditions under which Afro-American people had to live in the 70s. On the other hand, even if the Clones of Dr. Funkenstein was meant to be the sequel of the previous album, it was less political and more centered on creating music for fun.

With the release of Mothership Connection, the Parliament also begun their US tour where the fans could live one of the most unique experiences ever. When the album was published it soon became certified platinum. What makes this work a masterpiece is the fact that the artists could create one of the greatest manifestations of Afrofuturism and that is to say the black and ultra-technological phenomenon. This vision of black people was not to be found in movies or literature nor in politics during the late 70s. Indeed, the assertion of a black worldview that incorporated modern technologies and black aesthetic, was a deep breakthrough. In addition to that, the uniqueness of the science fiction the album is featuring, contributes to create a series of picturesque parallel universes. Moreover, during the 70s this work became so important for the Afro-American community as the band could express and put into music the struggles for freedom that many black people were feeling, especially young teenagers. Indeed, this peculiar version of black science fiction was also delivering a powerful message. As a matter of fact, due to the deteriorating of many black neighborhoods, P-Funk galaxy was perceived as an escape, almost as an act of flying away to some better worlds or universes. In addition, the other symbolic meaning of the mothership,related to the act of flying away, is being free and freeing the minds and the bodies from the everyday struggles.This album became so relevant to the point that it attracted the larger audience. Indeed, the leader of the band, George Clinton, believed in this project enough to convince Casablanca Records president Neil Bogart to fund the costs of the tour around the country, in massive halls and Arenas. 

Moreover, one of the most emblematic parts of the shows was the landing of the Mothership. In fact, as displayed in some videos, the landing of the spaceship, usually took place at the end of the concert after the song Mothership Connection. The spaceship appeared and flew over the audience and then landed on stage with the bandleader, George Clinton, emerging from the space vehicle dressed as Dr. Funkenstein. Furthermore, Parliament Funkadelic shows, through the elaborate artwork, the sci-fi mythology, and the Afrofuturist universe offered to the audiences an uplifting escape from their everyday struggle. 

  However, the Mothership used on stage during the 70s was then donated by George Clinton to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Moreover, it is not a mystery that the space craft held a powerful and symbolic meaning. Indeed, according to museum specialist Kevin Strait:” He really developed this grand idea of envisioning African-Americans in space as a way to liberate one's mind from the shackles of racism and poverty or any other societal constraints,"…. "The Mothership was this symbolic mode of transporting the conscious self into this ethereal place, which was pretty funky and pretty far out, but represents the grander scope of his thinking.". In addition to that, the man himself, George Clinton, gave an explanation on the importance of the message delivered by the Mothership “I definitely felt we needed something to be proud of as black people," …"We wanted to have a funk opera.”. The artist then added that he saw the spaceship as a monument to black music and therefore he decided to donate it to the museum so that eventually it would give pride to a lot of people.

Furthermore, seven months after the publication of Mothership Connection, on July 26th, 1976 the band released its sequel, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. Compared the deeply political Mothership Connection, this album is a narrative sequel which starts with a Prelude that describes “Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies” sent to Earth to shape it with groove and rhythm. The album begins exactly where Mothership Connection left off, explaining that the alien Starchild (voiced by Garry Shider) had worked for Dr. Funkenstein (voiced by George Clinton,) who is the chosen one, destined to introduce funk to the human race.  

Comparing this this album with Mothership Connection, with the Clones of Dr. Funkenstein the band is focusing on the concept of spirituality. However, that, it is not to say that the political commentary is completely missing. Indeed, one of the main differences between the two works is that Mothership Connection was focused on politics and the issues Afro-American people were experiencing and therefore the album was centered on a sense of rage. On the other hand, the fulcrum of the Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, was a joyful confidence as a constant throughout the whole album. Indeed, quoting Parliament, the album was created “just to funking around for fun”.  

  For instance, the song Children of Production, envisions cloned children brought back to life by Dr. Funkenstein, but this scenario could possibly be open to some other interpretations. As a matter of fact, the song might be an allusion to a symbol for a disruption of labor, as faceless drones are used to join a collective sense of release. Additionally, the song is directly referring to the youngsters in the society who were brainwashed into accepting complacency. Eventually, The Children of Production will recognize the need to "blow the cobwebs from your mind", they are a timebomb "and almost everyone is out of time", but they are "a flawless testimony to the attainment of the P. Funk". They, the youth, the "us". Indeed, they represent the world's best hope and they are ready for any challenge they might be thrown.  

Despite some changes in the band settings, today Parliament are still making music, in fact their new album Medicaid Fraud Dog was released in 2018. In addition to that the band is still performing funkatizing halls and arenas. The best part is that George Clinton is still the undisputed pioneer leader of the band. With this said, all hail to the Mothership

[orendarecords]

David Dominique's "Mask" is a Surrealist Cross-Genre Expression of Angst & Catharsis

Sometimes a mask is as revealing as what lies beneath.

Written over eight years, Mask, the new Orenda Records release from composer, bandleader and brass player David Dominique, bounds between styles, strategies, attitudes and textures. Somehow, the project furthers the language Dominique developed on his enthralling 2013 album, Ritual, while offering a perpetual sense of surprise.

Mask’s aesthetic is one of upheaval, and rightfully so. During the period in which he composed this music, Dominique, a Ph.D. with a thriving academic career, moved across the U.S. three times. He also endured tremendous loss, with his Afro-Caribbean father and Jewish grandmother and uncle passing away within a span of 18 months. A cycle of grief followed, during which Dominique grasped at the fractured pieces of his personal and family history, in hopes of reassembling them into a cohesive identity.

That’s the process in play throughout Mask: an artist in the midst of profound, sometimes painful change, inhabiting and discarding one stylistic or cultural veil after another. The music feels like a surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness dreamscape where any part of Dominique’s imagination or memory can suddenly emerge in full color, without warning or musical transition. While often rollicking and joyous on the surface, these sonic collages are the composer’s attempt to heal his inner strife—a continuing catharsis rooted not only in the feeling of loss but in Dominique’s lifelong effort to communicate through multiple heritages.

In the end, however, Mask’s seemingly incompatible parts are embraced and normalized into a fluid listening experience that remains compelling even when the music’s backstory goes untold. A multi-hyphenate artist with wide-ranging tastes and curiosities, Dominique’s inside-outside take on the avant-garde is as entertaining as it is cerebral, with points of entry for those coming from jazz, the rock underground or the contemporary classical scene.

The brilliantly raucous small-group music of Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy might be a good touchstone - Dominique names Mingus at Antibes as an all-time favorite - but there’s so much more in the mix, built up and then refracted in cubist fashion. “Licks and rhythms are reimagined and warped from multiple perspectives, techniques I’ve learned from Stravinsky - especially the ballet Petrushka,” Dominique writes. “In many of these cases, a particular lick or groove is repeated obsessively, in the mode of American minimalists like Steve Reich - in my case representing fixation on a particular thought and the return to that thought again and again.” He has immersed himself in the art of two renowned Austrian composers, and throughout Mask you can hear the sharp experimentalism of Beat Furrer as well as the electronic and avant-rock leanings of Bernhard Lang.

Joining Dominique is a powerful cast of collaborators up to the tasks set by his visionary music. Shaping potent, direct sound and performances as the album’s producer is jazz trumpet great Nolan Shaheed, a former lead player for the Count Basie Orchestra who’s also shared stages and studios with Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Freddie Hubbard, Jimmy Smith, Phil Collins, David Byrne, Tom Waits and others. Dominique’s cohorts include some of Los Angeles’ brightest rising musicians, all of them sharing his love for composing and his stylistic wanderlust. In addition to Dominique on his trademark flugabone, a compressed valve trombone most often used in marching bands, Mask features Brian Walsh (tenor saxophone, clarinets, co-producer); Joe Santa Maria (alto saxophone, flute); Sam Robles (alto and baritone saxophones); Lauren Baba (viola); Alexander Noice (guitar and electronics); Michael Alvidrez (basses); and Andrew Lessman (drums and drumKAT). Their credits cover a vast range of forward-looking artists, including Eugene Chadbourne, Vampire Weekend, Solange, Niia, Vinny Golia and Wadada Leo Smith.

Raised in New York City and Long Island, Dominique lived on and off in Los Angeles for a decade, and his time in daring L.A. ensembles like Killsonic proved a robust influence on his current music. He is now based in Richmond, Virginia, and works as a professor of music composition and theory at the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg. In 2013 he conducted his score for Starcrosser’s Cut, Joseph Tepperman’s innovative theatre piece about the disgraced astronaut Lisa Nowak. “The musical composition by David Dominique never merely backs or underscores the action,” the Hollywood Reporter said, “but instead comprises an integral component of the overall expression.” Dominique garnered equally effusive praise for his Ritual album, a striking showcase for his ingenious blend of divergent sounds, evoking everything from Mingus and Ellington to Ligeti and Furrer and on to Blonde Redhead and Flying Lotus. “A maximalist inspired by minimalists, composer David Dominique practices a rowdy, muscular brand of modernism. Picture Charles Mingus staging a hostile takeover of the Sun Ra Arkestra with arrangements by Sonic Youth,” DownBeat said. “Dominique’s band teeters on the fulcrum where discipline crumbles into anarchy.”

Dominique will tour with an octet in support of Mask this fall, hitting Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the Philadelphia area and three cities in Virginia: Richmond, Charlottesville and Williamsburg. He will direct the ensemble and play flugabone, and the band will feature cornetist Victor Haskins, the director of the Kennedy Center’s Jazz Outreach Program, and Ian McColm, acclaimed DC-based drummer and composer. Dominique will be available for pre-show lectures and discussions, as well as workshops and masterclasses.

TOUR DATES:

11/9: Williamsburg, VA, College of William & Mary, Ewell Hall 11/10: Richmond, VA, Little Dumbo 11/11: Charlottesville, VA, Charlottesville Jazz Society 11/13: Westchester University (outside Philadelphia) 11/15: New York, NY, Nublu Classic 11/16: Baltimore, MD, Joe Squared 11/17: Washington DC, Rhizome

[threethirtytwo]

I think it was about not necessarily just making period music, which very traditionally you would do. But because they were traditional orchestral sounds, I suppose that's what we hoped was a little unsettling, even though you know all the sounds you're hearing are coming from very old technology. You can just do things with the classical orchestra that do unsettle you, that are sort of slightly wrong, that have some kind of undercurrent that's slightly sinister.

Jonny Greenwood, member of English alternative rock band Radiohead and composer for 2007 drama There Will Be Blood.