So the brothers don’t like Rand and are prepared to dump a Billion in 2016.

I wish I could say this is news or a surprise.  Things that don’t go better with?  Democracy.

Tonight’s question?

Where are the ‘liberal’ Billionaires?

Keeping it 100 and being f#@ked up with your answers are not mutually exclusive.

Oh and I don’t trust the government or Tuskegee either and I’m never giving up comedy.  Sorry kids.  On the other hand I think I’ll keep my day job.

Continuity

Friends don’t let friends broadcast drunk

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 1/28: Oscar Isaac
• Thursday 1/29: Sarah Chayes

Sigh.  Tonight’s interview with Oscar Isaac is the sort of thing that used to be right in Stephen’s wheelhouse.  He’s an X-Wing pilot, Poe Dameron, in The Force Awakens AND En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse but he’ll probably only talk about A Most Violent Year which opened New Year’s Eve.

Below the fold is Jill Leovy’s web exclusive extended interview as well as the real news.

Tutankhamun’s botched beard: conservation chief demoted to royal vehicles role

Patrick Kingsley, The Guardian

Tuesday 27 January 2015 09.26 EST

It’s a pharaoh cop, Egyptian archaeology officials have admitted. After initially downplaying reports that Tutankhamun’s beard had been fixed with the wrong glue, the Egyptian Museum has owned up to the error – and moved its chief conservator to less glamorous pastures.

…

Last week, her duties included the conservation of one of the world’s most important collection of artefacts, including Tutankhamun’s fabled death mask and jewellery, as well as hundreds of ancient mummies, tombs and statues. From now on her role will be limited to overseeing the contents of Egypt’s royal stables.

…

Her move follows the museum’s admission that Tutankhamun’s beard was damaged last year, and that conservators subsequently fixed it with too conspicuous a glue.

The discovery initially came to light after anonymous curators leaked the information to the press last week. “One night they wanted to fix the lighting in the showcase, and when they did that they held the mask in the wrong way and broke the beard,” one curator told the Guardian at the time. “They tried to fix it overnight with the wrong material, but it wasn’t fixed in the right way.”

For several days, officials downplayed the claims. Abdelrahman argued that while the wrong glue was indeed applied, the beard was never itself broken. “If it was broken, it would have been a big problem, and we would have written a report about it,” she said.

In which I present actual commentary from people who know what they’re talking about as opposed to NeoLibBC.

Transcript

Yanis Varoufakis, familiar to readers of Naked Capitalism

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

I only do Cartnoons.

You know, what is so dumb about the anti-vaxxers is that most of them grew up when eating lead infused paint chips was a popular pastime for toddlers.

What?  You didn’t eat paint chips?  Well, you breathed air didn’t you?  And TetraEthyl Lead was only phased out as an additive to gasoline in the early 2000s.  Feeling a little stupid and ragey now?  Join the Romans who liked lead waterpipes because it was malliable and easy to work with and sometimes lined their wine goblets with it because it imparts a sweet taste.  Like asbestos it was everywhere and Atrios (who’s an economist not a Doctor Jim) attributes the decline in its pervasiveness to our falling crime rate.

Leeches and bleeding were once the cutting edge (c’mon, get the joke) of medical practice just as they are of public policy today.

Anyway, I give you-

Pig Killing

Yup.  Animal sacrifice makes just as much sense today as it did when Abraham strapped Isaac to Mount Moriah.  Some Supreme Being you’ve hitched your metaphysical wagon to folks, but as a militant atheist I can hardly be expected to understand the sacred nature of your belief in Invisible Pink Unicorns (How do you know she’s pink?  Because she’s invisible.).

I’m too busy laughing which is going to get me burned at the stake someday.

It’s a fair cop.

Below the fold we have Julian Castro’s web exclusive extended interview (not that I think he needed it, also the real news

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 1/27: Jill Leovy
• Wednesday 1/28: Oscar Isaac
• Thursday 1/29: Sarah Chayes

Jill Leovy is the author of Ghettoside which I think goes too far in excusing the egregious behavior of out militarized police.  There is a reason people don’t trust cops and it’s abundantly justified.  There are three phrases to remember-

• Am I free to leave?
• I will not talk without my attorney.
• I do not consent to any search.

You’ll probably get shot or tazed anyway, but at least you did the right thing.

The reason we use drones to kill brown people at random because they have the wrong skin color and religion or associate with those who do (please, if we had actual evidence there would be no such thing as a ‘signature’ strike) is because it’s cheap and easy to do.  So cheap and easy that your average drunken government employee (not that I’m implying that all government employees are drunk, even most of the time) can buy everything they need at the local Radio Shack.

White House Drone Crash Is Tied to Drinking by Intelligence Worker

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MICHAEL D. SHEAR, The New York Times

JAN. 27, 2015

It was 42 degrees, lightly raining and pitch black near the White House when an inebriated, off-duty employee for a government intelligence agency decided it was a good time to test-fly his friend’s quadcopter drone that sells for hundreds of dollars and is popular among hobbyists.

…

Investigators said the man had been drinking at an apartment nearby. It was not until the next morning, when he woke to his friends telling him that his drone was all over the news, that he contacted his employer, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and then called the Secret Service to confess.

…

The geospatial-intelligence agency, with headquarters near Springfield, Va., employs satellites to gather data for the military and other agencies by using imagery to detect human activity and to map out changes in physical features on the ground. The website for the agency cites the discovery of “atrocities in Kosovo,” support for intelligence operations during the Olympics and assistance responding to Hurricane Katrina.

James R. Clapper Jr., the current director of national intelligence, became the head of the agency, then called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

…

President Obama, who was traveling abroad, declined to comment on the drone episode. But in an interview with CNN broadcast on Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama said he had instructed federal agencies to examine the need for regulations on commercial drone technology.

Mr. Obama said he had told the agencies to make sure that “these things aren’t dangerous and that they’re not violating people’s privacy.” He said that commercially available drones empower individuals, but that the government needed to provide “some sort of framework that ensures that we get the good and minimize the bad.”

“There are incredibly useful functions that these drones can play in terms of farmers who are managing crops and conservationists who want to take stock of wildlife,” the president told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “There are a whole range of things we can do with it.”

But he noted that the drone that landed at the White House was the kind “you buy at Radio Shack.” And he said that the government had failed to keep up with the use of the flying devices by hobbyists and commercial enterprises.

“We don’t really have any kind of regulatory structure at all for it,” Mr. Obama said.

Umm… yeah.  That sound you hear is me slamming my head against the desk repeatedly.

Library Visit, Then Held at Gunpoint

Charles Blow, The New York Times

JAN. 26, 2015

This is how my son remembers it:

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book he had requested. The book hadn’t arrived yet, but since he was there he put in a request for some multimedia equipment for a project he was working on.

Then he left to walk back to his dorm room. He says he saw an officer “jogging” toward the entrance of another building across the grounds from the building he’d just left.

Then this:

“I did not pay him any mind, and continued to walk back towards my room. I looked behind me, and noticed that the police officer was following me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio and said, ‘I got him.’

“I faced forward again, presuming that the officer was not talking to me. I then heard him say, ‘Hey, turn around!’ – which I did.

“The officer raised his gun at me, and told me to get on the ground.

“At this point, I stopped looking directly at the officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised, then laid down on my stomach.

“The officer asked me what my name was. I gave him my name.

“The officer asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale University.

“At this point, the officer told me to get up.”

The officer gave his name, then asked my son to “give him a call the next day.”

My son continued:

“I got up slowly, and continued to walk back to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said, ‘Hey, my man. Can you step off to the side?’ I did.”

The officer asked him to turn around so he could see the back of his jacket. He asked his name again, then, finally, asked to see my son’s ID. My son produced his school ID from his wallet.

The officer asked more questions, and my son answered. All the while the officer was relaying this information to someone over his radio.

My son heard someone on the radio say back to the officer “something to the effect of: ‘Keep him there until we get this sorted out.’ ” The officer told my son that an incident report would be filed, and then he walked away.

A female officer approached. My son recalled, “I told her that an officer had just stopped me and pointed his gun at me, and that I wanted to know what this was all about.” She explained students had called about a burglary suspect who fit my son’s description.

You know, if I had to pick a military specialty (outside of Supreme Commander for which I’m eminently qualified, just ask me) it would be a sniper because I have a keen appreciation of a well aimed kill from outside the range of immediate relatiation which is why when people like me are captured we’re generally executed on the spot as the cowards we are.

Alas my eyesight barely qualifies me for bayonet work and my natural distrust of authority makes me a poor match for the military and besides, I can’t drink with them.

No, seriously.  I ran into some Navy recruiters one night and I woke up in a parking lot miles away with no idea how I got there.  It’s my only black out and an experience I’m not willing to repeat because I could just as easily have found myself in Shanghai and as much as I appreciate the history of the oldest culture on earth I have no desire to visit as a victim of a press gang.  I do my own reporting and don’t need no stinkin’ paparazzi.

We’ll be talking tonight about Chris Kyle, the racist mass murdering asshole celebrated by the senile Clint Eastwood who was so stupid (how stupid was he Gene?), so stupid he gave a guy suffering from extreme PTSD a gun and turned his back on him.

Got a Darwin Award for that he did, but maybe he wanted to die.

We could have asked Larry anything about Veterans including why we treat them like crap when they’re no use as soldiers anymore, but we missed our window of opportunity.

Tonight’s panel- Irving Nicholas, Paul Rickhoff, Matt Taibbi, Sabrina Jalees.

Continuity

It’s because they’re Black Jon

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 1/26: Julian Castro
• Tuesday 1/27: Jill Leovy
• Wednesday 1/28: Oscar Isaac
• Thursday 1/29: Sarah Chayes

No, not the colostomy Castro, the twin who couldn’t get elected and is now HUD Secretary.

Rap had it’s origins in an African-American form of poetic competition called Dozens which consists of the exchange of elaborate rhymed insults

The first academic study was in 1939, but it’s certainly much older than that with some attributing it to Zulu combat traditions or various Nigerian and Ghanan “games”.  Like Scrabble it can be played for sport or for blood (my Grandmother was a fierce Scrabble player and practically had tantrums when I hit her with words like rhythm or phlox, particularly when triple letter scores were involved).  The loser is the one who can’t find a come back or gets angry.

Kind of like blogging.

Lest you think pre-combat boasting and call-outs a particularly African tradition, it was a common practice in many classical cultures to muster “armies” to face each other and engage in taunting and then send forth a champion (or several) for individual duels to decide the victory.

Successful empires like the Egyptians, Macedonians, and Romans were decidedly unsentimental about things like that and would generally just slaughter the lot of you where you stood no matter how hard you sang or witty you were, but the Bronze Age Greeks indulged- read the Iliad.

Anyway it certainly goes back much farther than 1939. In 1929 Speckled Red recorded a song called “The Dirty Dozen”-

Hmm…

Hip-Hop developed out of a branch of early techno-funk from Detroit (other off shoots were Techno which I like and Disco which is evil anti-music).

The early center was the South Bronx where the movement got a boost from equipment looted during the New York City Blackout of 1977 (kind of like capturing a Carillon or an Organ and using it to make music instead of cannons and cannon balls).  I had thought for many years that Debbie Harry’s Rapture was simply another Elvis-type rip off but as it turns out she was simply an early adopter who happened to be white and female.

During the mid to late 80s the Los Angeles ‘Gangsta Rap’ scene emerged and by the early 90s it was the dominant movement in Hip Hop.

Now when we say ‘Gangsta’ we mean that many of these artists had affiliations with the Crips and the Bloods and boasted in their songs about street violence and drug use and dealing.  Eric Wright (Eazy-E) founded the seminal ‘Gangsta’ label, Ruthless, probably out of crack income.

Just keeping it 100 folks.

Now as everyone on the right coast knows, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere (and in fact many of the most prominent West Coast artists were originally from New York or Philadelphia) and by 1991 we have the rumblings (when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet, from your first cigarette, to your last dying day) of discontent from those left behind in the person of the otherwise unremarkable Tim Dog in a song about Compton.

Yeah.

So anyway by 1994 the East Coast has seen a resurgence and the hot new labels are ‘Bad Boy’ (based in the South Bronx, run by A&R Records and ‘Puff Daddy’ Sean Combs and ‘Death Row’ (based in LA and run by Suge Knight).  Their most prominent artists were Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.) from Queens and Tupac Shakur a New York ex-pat.

Tupac accused Combs, Wallace, and Andre Harrell of participation in a robbery where Shakur was shot 5 times.  They denied it.  Knight took a dig at Combs and Wallace during an awards show and a friend was fatally shot.  Knight bailed out Tupac from 5 counts of sexual abuse and he signed with Death Row.

In 1995 – 96 Tupac wrote numerous songs aimed at Combs and Wallace and in September of 96 he was killed in a drive by shooting in Las Vegas hours after beating up a Crip.  Wallace was shot dead in another drive by in Los Angeles in early 1997.  No one was charged in either murder though it was widely suspected tha Knight was involved in both.

And with the death of Sonny and Sollozo the great Rap War sputtered out.

But ek you say, what does this have to do with 19th Century Art Music?

I told you, these guys were Rock Stars.  Back in the day when I was into QXR our Bando lingo for that was MozartBachandBrahms as in “Did you hear about (latest scandlously gyrating pop icon)?”, “No, I only listen to long haired music, MozartBachandBrahms.”

Now Mozart and Bach are easily justified (though listed in the wrong order) as being representative of the Classical and Barouque periods of Art Music.  Brahms on the other hand, is no Beethoven nor even a Wagner.

He was, however a leader of the older and more conservative school of Romanticism that arose after Beethoven which focused more on Beethoven’s more traditional elements rather than his raw theatricality.  Liszt and Wagner were all about the pyrotechnics.

So in the mid-1800s this petty and pointless feud broke out between musicians and composers who were overwhelming German called The War of the Romantics.  It was hardly noticed by anyone else in the Art Music world because they were working out their own nationalistic, emotive, and programmatic aspirations.

Personally I find the music of Neudeutsche Schule earnest and overweening to the point of self-parody and am interested only in the ironic sense of its inherent contradictions and influence on broader historical movements (the rise of Fascism for instance).  The Leipzig school is much easier and more restful if a bit boring and derivative.  It’s not without its own sophisticated charm however.

The first piece for your consideration today was written by Brahms in response to a pointed request from the University of Breslau, which had awarded him an Honorary Doctorate, that some form of dedicated musical reciprocation was expected.  So he wrote a compilation of collegiate drinking songs titled the Academic Festival Overture which he deliberately overscored and stylized as a musical pie in the face.

F#@k You Breslau.  It remains a great hit among student musicians to this very day and is among his most performed works.

A companion piece from the same year is the Tragic Overture.  It emphasizes the Romantic detachment from narrative and a complicated formalism and allusion to other composers, Beethoven in particular.

A German Requiem is considered his masterwork (it’s certainly the longest and most orchestrated) and is controversial only in the sense that it’s based on the Lutheran Bible, concentrates more on the comfort of the living than the pitiable condition of the dead, and contrasts with his disinterest in organized religion at all.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

State of the Union 2015: Lethal, Predatory, Delusional

by Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

Wed, 01/21/2015 – 16:32

Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party’s perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers.

On closer examination, his grab bag of bills and requests for legislation contains even less than advertized – a vapor-thin rhetorical veneer for a center-right presidency whose real accomplishment has been to re-inflate the Wall Street casino, flush the last vestiges of secure employment out of the economy, and put the imperial war machine back on the offensive. Corporate pundits describe Obama’s antics as an appeal to his party’s “base.” In a world in which words actually mean something, a politician’s base would be composed of the people whose interests he actually serves, rather than those he victimizes. But, such logic does not apply in late capitalist America, where both parties cater to the needs of the moneyed classes; one, shamelessly, without inhibition, the other through deployment of talented liars like Obama.

…

Obama celebrated the “resilience” of the “strong, tight-knit” American family, exemplified by a Minneapolis couple that have both regained employment. “Our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” said Obama – bad jobs, in a nation of growing inequality. For Blacks, wages relative to whites have regressed to 1980 levels, and Black household wealth has collapsed so completely there is no statistical possibility of ever reaching parity with whites under the existing economic system – period.

…

Thousands of U.S. troops now man the machinery of war in Iraq, where the U.S. was compelled to withdraw, five years ago.

Obama has no plans whatsoever to leave Afghanistan, where about 10,000 U.S. troops, largely Special Forces, remain on indefinite assignment. Yet, he begins his State of the Union address with the lie: “Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.”

What is over – kaput! – is the U.S.’s ability to compete in a world that is breaking the chains of Euro-American imperial bondage. Washington can muster no response, except war. Neither can it maintain living standards for the vast majority of its own people, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the financial ruling class to whom the Democrats and Republicans answer.

As he prepares for transition, two years from now, to more lucrative position in service of the Lords of Capital, Obama harkens back to his national television debut, at the Democratic convention, in 2004. “I gave a speech in Boston where I said there wasn’t a liberal America, or a conservative America; a black America or a white America - but a United States of America.”

He was lying back then, just as he lied Tuesday night when he promised “to reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves us all.”

So said the man who gave the final coup de grace to due process and the rule of law with his preventive detention bill, his Tuesday assassination sessions, and his ever expanding Kill List.

It’s Time for a Revolution: Bankrupt Policies, Historic Losses Call for New Generation of Leaders

By Bill Curry, Salon.com

January 18, 2015

Progressives have long cohabited with Democrats. The relationship, while abusive, is hard for them to quit. Starting over is always scary, and building movements is hard even in good times, so the temptation is strong to keep on doing what they’re doing. Besides, how can you tell the Democrats are really dead? You can’t call in a coroner or poke them with a stick. It’s simple, really. All you have to do is look.

Life is change and these Democrats never change. It’s like watching “Groundhog Day” but without laughs, a love interest or a learning curve. Democrats in Congress ran the same race in 2014 they ran in 1994, lost badly, and then reelected all their leaders. Obama handled the budget this year the same way he does every year, with the same result. Hillary Clinton is poised to run the same awful race in 2016 she ran in 2008.

In 2014 Democrats were supposed to hold a populist revival. Aside from a few tinny sounding ads, they didn’t. Tied to the tracks with a giant locomotive barreling down on them, they couldn’t bring themselves to cut their Wall Street ties and dodge otherwise certain death. Now, after six years of blown chances, they say they’re ready to act as our tribunes and ask us once again to commingle our hopes and dreams with theirs. I say not so fast.

Obama has made more populist gestures in the last two months than in his first six years as president. It’s why his popularity’s rising. Some say it’s the economy, but the economy rose for some time without the middle class or Obama’s ratings being much helped by it. Proposals to fund universal access to community colleges and tax Wall Street speculators to finance a middle class tax cut are catnip not just to the left but to the middle class. The question for us all is whether this populist charm offensive signals real change.

…

The cosseting of the rich is more brazen now and more subversive of the public interest, and people hate it.

Worst of all was the Democrats’ complicity in passing a corrupt, shameful budget. Aside from its senseless priorities – wars are winding down so let’s give the military some more dough – it curtailed efforts to slow global warming, restored Wall Street grifters’ ability to shift their losses onto honest wage earners and weakened what’s left of campaign finance laws. Without scores of Democratic votes it could never have passed.

…

Within weeks of an inglorious defeat the Dems had a chance to hit the reset button. Instead they gave Republicans priceless cover while making it harder for their own members to go on posing as populists. They bartered their honor and got nothing in return. Someone should tell these “realists” that their compromises are killing them.