August 2016

"AK Breaks"

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"AK Breaks" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Weeks in the making -- while I did other stuff -- but it does take longer to do five minute tracks. The "AK" refers to the Adventure Kid single cycle waves, played in Reaktor with "cheap spring reverb" effects. The "breaks" refers to some drum breaks I downloaded from Ableton, which perk things up, for me at least. Also featuring some sounds made with Linux Ardour, driving my modular synth, and on a separate track, playing those E-Mu Orbit soundfonts featured a while back.
The final mix was done in Ableton, with generous amounts of space-echo style tape delay (from NI's Guitar Rig effects rack) vibrating throughout.
Arrangement-wise, it takes time getting where it's going, but am happy with the way the motifs pile up at the end.

Update: Trimmed slightly, re-uploaded.

creepy, and yet, indispensable

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For a while this blog had stalkers in the form of copycat blogs, maintained by intrepid souls who thought... not sure, exactly. One of them tried to summarize the posts every day, but that got tiring so by the end it was just "July 2 - He hates Facebook, July 3 - More Facebook, July 5 Facebook blah blah." (Another blog disappeared entirely except for the ominous words "Don't trust him." As in -- he has opinions.)
Eventually the entire new media world moved to Facebook and it became irrelevant what any blogger thought. Rhizome.org opined that one simply had to use the portal for global theoretical discourse, and in fact they hoped one day to be technically adept enough to preserve chunks of this branded argumentation for posterity.
Pockets of FB hate still exist, however. Some of the noise comes from right wingers, who think Zuckerberg is a liberal and is suppressing them. A few on both the right and the left continue to object to the site's privacy quagmire.
So for today's Facebook blah blah here is the libertarian-inclined Liberty Blitzkrieg with a post titled Facebook Just Got a Whole Lot Creepier, with links to stories about people receiving friend recommendations from lists that were supposed to be confidential, such as a therapist's patients. Read, and then get back on Facebook to discuss!

but she's all we've got

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The Clinton Foundation sleaze is finally percolating up to the media's attention. From a Boston Globe opinion column:

This week, the Associated Press reported that half the people outside of government who met with Clinton as secretary of state donated to the Clinton family charity. Also, a judge ordered the State Department to fast-track a review of 15,000 previously undisclosed e-mails the FBI discovered during an investigation of Clinton’s e-mail server. Both stories contradict what Clinton has told the public: that there is no connection between her work as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation, and that she turned over all her work-related e-mails to the State Department in 2014.

No wonder leading Democratic Senate candidates, like US Representative Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona and Governor Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, are reluctant to vouch for Clinton’s trustworthiness on camera.

There is a documentary called Clinton Cash that covers foundation maneuvers, narrated by Peter Schweizer and based on his book of the same name. You might be inclined to blow it off as the latest right wing clintonconspiracymongering, but it's pretty much in line with the critique coming from the center-left (such as the Clinton Foundation Timeline).
Here's a three part review by Nina Illingham of the movie that gives ample reasons to be skeptical of the source while still waving at the stench emanating from Clinton World. Just because the wingnuts are paranoid doesn't mean Bill and Hill aren't working the dark side. Illingham writes:

There is also a curious, off-beat leftist tone to the film as Schweizer repeatedly comes back to the idea that the Clintons are actively professing to help the disadvantaged globally, but are instead actually preying on devastated countries for massive profit and political power. As the author details human rights violations, the swindling of natural resources from the poor for the benefit of brutal oligarchs and the unconscionable murders that donors to the foundation have helped facilitate – it’s hard not to get the sense that Schweizer actually cares about these horrible crimes; as much or perhaps even more than he cares about tearing down a powerful Democrat on the verge of the presidency.

Update: Lauren Weinstein pounds the podium about AP's "half the people outside of government" statistic. This is how it works: if it looks like the AP cooked its numbers, Clinton diehards will howl and thus keep attention off the main story. Possibly Weinstein hasn't seen the Clinton Foundation Timeline website or Clinton Cash and is still living the 1990s "media is so unfair to the Clintons" scenario. He should be happy that the Foundation is finally in the news; people should know what they're voting for.