Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Woe, the rich man’s burden to pay too much tax. Gonna leave to Grand Cayman unless he gets it back. Woe, the rich man’s burden to carry all the poor. An endless trail of sorrow he cannot tread no more.
The poor don’t pay enuff. They spend it all on liquor! If we stopped it all right now we’d get rich a whole lot quicker.
Wait a couple secs for the Atlas Shrugged Boogie.
Rich Man’s Burden — MP3 without video.
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The first, an everyman’s adventure. The second about rent-seeking and corporate tax cheats/parasites. A year after Occupy Wall Street and growing knowledge of great inequality and national erosion due to 1 percent tax evasion, all still true.
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OccupyMusicians is here. The tune is there.
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The 80’s, too.
Here is an interesting interview with Tom Werman. He produced many straight hard rock acts who turned into big sellers and arena draws, mostly by dint of singles which charted off the projects he did with them.
Werman says he fell into the work, never having a career plan. He also tells the interviewer he saw himself as a pop guy, making records he liked to hear. The industry, because he worked with Ted Nugent, saw him as a hard rock producer.
This served those he worked with well. When Werman stopped producing Ted Nugent, Howard stopped getting on the radio.
Indeed, the only stuff from Howard’s back catalog that gets played today is the material produced by Tom Werman.
Werman also did the big sellers for Cheap Trick, Twisted Sister, Poison and Molly Hatchet.
One of the more interesting excerpts is on Mother’s Finest, one of his non-successes:
“A mostly black rock ‘n’ roll band with two white guys – people didn’t know what to think of them. They were tight, rocked hard, and man, did they love Led Zeppelin, which is what they sounded like – a very funky version of Zeppelin.
“I tried to bring a commercial sensibility to them, a pop side to go with their funk and hard rock. But the record stiffed. Radio just didn’t take to it. The official line I was given from the label was, ‘It slipped through the cracks,??? which meant it was too white for black radio and too black for white radio.
“Even so, I think they were ahead of their time. I’m very proud of this album.???
One of the tracks produced by Werman, surely a hoot to do, was “Mickey’s Monkey,” a conversion of the Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ hit into Led Zeppelin’s “Custard Pie.” It’s here.
Funny as hell with the rip of LZ, it shoulda been huge.
I still have most of the Werman-produced records.
The profile of the man is here.
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From the wire, on lean finely textured beef:
Larry Smith, with the Institute for Crisis Management public relations firm, said he’s not sure the makers of pink slime — including Cargill and BPI — will be able to overcome the public stigma against their product at this point.
“I can’t think of a single solitary message that a manufacturer could use that would resonate with anybody right now,” Smith said.
Hold on there, lil’ pardner! I have just the resonation for reinvigoration!
Baby Eat Pink Slime! A near perfect p.r. song. Surely one of the problems with the defenders of finely textured beef is: Those dudes can’t laugh at themselves! They’re too serious! Their product is ruined unless they can continue to sell to people with no choice, the US prison population.
Good news, lads! Good news! DD isn’t afraid to make a fool of himself on camera for the sake of a funny video.
The video illustrates the problem with the innovation that’s pink slime processing. It was “invented” as an answer to corporate farming in which hundreds of thousands of cattle stand in unbelievable amounts of excrement and the demonstrated lethal hazard it represents.
What to do about all that shit loaded with virulent bacteria? Add ammonia.
Some inventions just ain’t progress. In fact, some are proof the system
is just plain BAD
Don’t have a fit
Cause it’s mixed with shit
So you don’t get sick
All the time
You know it tastes just fine
Baby, eat pink slime
Now that’s gotta be worth a couple votes.
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Music for the unpleasant themes of our time. No Norman Vincent Peale-isms, love songs, homilies or uplifting messages. Get your hate on because it’s good for you, a sane response to the condition of living in the USA.
“Apple’s reasons for hoarding so much of its money also raise questions … Apple executives said this week that they had lobbied Washington for tax concessions that would relieve them of much of their tax liability if they repatriated the cash. That smacks of corporate welfare and hardly induces sympathy for a company that is minting money, particularly at a time of such big fiscal deficits.
“More broadly, Apple has come to exemplify the conspicuous wealth – both corporate and personal – that is coursing through Silicon Valley.
“The social obligation this creates has so far been ignored … Apple and its peers stand apart in their financial resources yet with their extended global supply chains, they have multiplied jobs abroad rather than at home. Silicon Valley’s success has largely failed to reverberate to the wider benefit of the society that created it …
“[Apple’s] wealth throws into sharp relief the conditions endured by workers at its Chinese suppliers.” —from the Financial Times
From the Financial Times, a compendium of book reviews on national decline and losing it to China:
Americans seem to want to read about national decline. The more dire the prediction, the more heated the prose, the more colourful the book title, the better. Conservative commentator Mark Steyn’s jeremiad After America: Get Ready for Armageddon made it to number four on the New York Times’s bestseller list. Peter D Kiernan’s Becoming China’s Bitch briefly topped the Amazon chart …
The book’s title [Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now] might lead the reader to expect a provocative tract on US-Chinese relations. In fact, this is just one of a huge number of topics that the writer yokes together under the general theme of impending catastrophes that threaten America. In a losing battle to structure his thoughts, Kiernan makes a great many lists. He starts with “five factors that freeze us???, preventing America from dealing with its problems. These are the media, lobbyists, think-tanks, religion in America and its political parties – which seems pretty comprehensive. He then moves on to 10 “impending catastrophes??? that he would like to see dealt with, only the first of which concerns America’s relationship with China. This he describes, obscurely, as “a co-dependency which is decoupling???.
Kiernan’s writing is dazzlingly bad …
Travelling around the world as a reporter and columnist, I have found that an erosion of US economic and political power, and a shift towards China, is already palpable … Europe’s leaders are appealing to Beijing, rather than Washington, for emergency financial assistance. In Africa, a continent is being transformed by Chinese investment. Even in the Americas, Chinese influence is growing: Brazil now does more trade with China than with the US.
The most common reason cited by voters of all political stripes for the rising cost was oil company greed.
Overall, 36 percent of respondents said “oil companies that want to make too much profit” deserve the most blame for higher energy prices. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans said so, as did 44 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of independents.
Twenty-six percent of all respondents said a range of factors was equally to blame, including oil companies, politicians, foreign countries that dominate oil reserves and environmentalists who want to limit oil exploration.
From The Daily Ticker today:
“There is no justification for the current gas prices. This is all about speculation by the people who are speculating on the price of oil and gas,” [says an ex-Senator]. “We could shutdown excess speculation in commodity markets. This government should do that.”
[Then he peddles his book.]
Former Senator Dorgan, a long-time clean energy advocate, joined The Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task to discuss U.S. energy policy (or lack thereof), which is the subject of his new fictionalized thriller, Blowout. It is the first in a two-book series, which the senator calls an “eco-thriller.”
The premise: “What if we were right on the edge of discovering a new source of energy that costs very very little, who would try to stop it and why and how,” he explains.
In “Blowout,” Dorgan writes of a team of scientists who are testing microbes that “eat their way” through coal, leaving dirty waste and methane behind. If successful, coal could be mined and produced without the polluting the atmosphere, which leads to climate change.
[“A Congressional Research Service report] observes that oil companies do not obey market economics and that the ‘oil market … is difficult to fit into the model of free market adjustments.'” — DD blog.
There was an album including all these tunes. But I didn’t have enough money to put it on CD. iTunes, and all it’s second tier imitators, require tithing — more accurately, micro-bribes.
Paying Apple anything to dispense rock n’ roll is anathema. And I’m hardly the only person who thinks so.
Lots of people used to wish for the end of the rule of big record companies. They were granted their wishes. But the result has been like getting what you want in Wishmaster.
There was no real practical option but to give the last record away free, too. Because Steve Jobs and Apple destroyed the album market at a fundamental level, redirecting the profit stream of popular music from recording giants to Cupertino nerds through their technologies of iKit mediated theft creative destruction. Jobs was not innovative in this. He did not create the digital music file format. Jobs’ gift to consumers was a mass storage device for a higgledy-piggledy collection of tunes as a consumer bauble pretty enough for people to covet above everything else. Vulture capitalism and algorithm-greased cutting of throats in the recording industry came built-in with the iPod.
As a bonus, they helped take out the pleasure of going to record stores and few ten thousand businessmen and employees who made, on average, modest livings.
In 1985 I was able to make a record and sell it.
Now a patronizing random asshole gives it away on the Internet, too. (It’s the first link in Google!) Go to the link and leave him some superciliousness in the comments section for me.
I’m astonished by the level of mediocrity in ideas and words it takes to touch off a controversy in some part of the military. It sure doesn’t take much to put the feeble minds on edge.
You read about Marine Gary Stein and expect fire-breathing. The reality is a dullard who can’t write and a Facebook page filled up by a crowd cheering a milchtoast’s taunting of the presidency.
Or there’s the alleged struggle to get a rock concert for atheists, to balance the Bill Graham evangelicals, in the cauldron of steel and bravery that’s Fort Bragg.
And who’s on the bill?
Richard Dawkins. Sound of air going out of tires, people muttering angrily in the audience.
Now, if someone wanted to show balls, and balls are what it takes to be an airborne man, this is the rock concert headliner you’d have at Fort Bragg. To show balance, to demonstrate tolerance and equal regard for all. In honor and celebration of now being able to say you’re gay in the army! To infuriate Jerry Boykin.
Rock the Trans Special Operations Command.
I love it! And a great rip on the old Wilson — Phillips hit, “Hold On.” And, unlike the rest of the flat tires in the recent stories on allegedly trying to make statements, it rocks.
In other matters, I’m betting Willam Belli was tossed off RuPaul’s Drag Race this week because he told Pam Anderson he was wearing a new pair of Versace shoes while in the spotlight.
I’d think the contract the contestants sign stipulates they not do anything that looks like a product endorsement.
Latest mainstream news controversy, the flip side of the Gary Stein coin, a soldier who got his rock concert for atheists approved at Fort Bragg after a long battle for equal representation.
This as a personal cause, a counterbalance to Rock the Fort, a big concert Billy Graham Ministries puts on for the airborne troops.
After a sometimes painful 18 months of gestation, Sgt. Justin Griffith of Fort Bragg, N.C., exclaims, “My baby is about to be born!” His baby is Rock Beyond Belief, apparently the first major atheist event on a U.S. military base.
Griffith, 29, who has served five years in the Army, including two deployments to Iraq, has been wrestling with the overwhelmingly Christian establishment in the Army since September 2010 to get to this point.
The March 31 event is Griffith’s answer to Rock the Fort — a day-long evangelical Christian concert and festival held at Fort Bragg on Sept. 25, 2010, put on by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, with the support and blessing of the military brass. It was the fourth in a series of events sponsored by the group on various U.S. bases dating to 2009.
Among the headliners for the all-day atheist festival on the base are scientist Richard Dawkins, the rock band Aiden and singer/songwriter Roy Zimmerman.
I can consult my rock critic pals like Chuck Eddy and Metal Mike Saunders about the bill. We’d have a really good laugh at the idea.
Richard Dawkins and rock. Not in this universe. Dawkins is big with tech nerds. It’s his audience.
The XVIII Airborne Corps and the US Army Special Operations Command? And Richard Dawkins? You’ll have to pay ’em to go, and maybe even then they’d just run off with the money for some decent beer. That’s what I’d do.
Fort Bragg, not exactly the place you’d find wimpish tech geek fans of Richard Dawkins, despite the post’s tongue-in-cheek title.
Rock the Fort, the Billy Graham Ministries organized festival, doesn’t have quite as bad a bill as Rock Beyond Belief.
But it’s still total crap.
The headliner is Hawk Nelson, a Canadian band accurately described as as second or third tier sissy boy rock.
There are a lot of sweater vest and polo shirt twinky rock bands in North America. The Jonas Brothers and Disney TV guaranteed it. Hawk Nelson aren’t even close to being the best, if that’s the word to use.
The video — well, the little cheer-leading girls are nice.
Real big in the US Army’s airborne corps. Fer sure.
By the way, you can still vote for something a lot better than this dross. Unlike all the above, we do rock. Plus we’re mean and old coots, despising activist atheists and proselytizing evangelicals equally.
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It’s my B-Day today. Blog posts may be light.
It stinks watching entropy slowly turning you into the old coot. The prize is that it overpowers everyone. No
exceptions..
The last twelve months were a tough road — loss, and all that.
But one must retain some optimism. There are always more exciting and interesting failures to endure come!
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