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An excerpt from Hubris, a new book about the Iraq war by David Corn and Michael Isikoff:
After the invasion, Dick Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.Mark A, who sent this excerpt, comments: "Mad cow disease. Methane gas bombs. These are WMDs."
Also, I love "after the invasion." Could we somehow put to rest the notion that Cheney is a super-competent bureaucrat? The press still believes this, just as it keeps repeating that the equivocating politician John McCain is a "straight talker." Cheney is a paranoid controller and a vain SOB, but he is not competent. He's a bungler.
"Anthropos Essentia" [4.8 MB .mp3]
The title is copped from A. A. Attanasio's book Centuries, 1997. The A.E. were an earth colony on Mars trying to live "old school"--rejecting ion washes and Simviv (and therefore longevity), growing their own food, and warring with the Cogs (robotic minions of the Silicon Mind). One of the colony members wrote a profound piece of music called the "Datum Surface Raga," which helped the metasapient earthling Rafe von Takawa find spiritual equilibrium, much as the datum surface expresses a kind of average level of the shifting Martian topography. The Anthropos Essentia have a secret that will not be revealed here.
Update: made various edits throughout the song, and it's now shorter in length.
"Bass-o-matic" [mp3 removed]
This is the piece I was describing here, process-wise. All the sounds came from the same model of drum machine, with filtering and other sampler manipulation. Mostly they're my samples, but a few came from a Linplug kit that recorded the same piece of analog gear. One thing I'm happy about is the way the song switches meter several times, getting progressively looser and more "rockin" as it goes along.
I am working on a piece of music that is coming along slowly. I am creating "phat" sounds (to my ear anyway) with a hardware drum machine and sampling them, one hit at a time as well as in loops. The samples are then being loaded into various samplers as "drum kits" which can be played with the same MIDI notes used to trigger the original sounds and loops, in addition to any new notes I want to write. What this is doing is dramatically expanding the range of the drum machine. Besides being able to play polyrhythms it can now treat the drum hits as "pitched material," meaning I can write tunes for the tom-toms and flexible "multi" channel (used to synthesize cowbells and such). When raised or lowered in pitch these no longer sound like drums, but rather unusual synthesizers, which can be further modified with a bevy of effects (compression, phasing, resampling) built into the samplers. My plan is first to write a piece consisting entirely of sounds from the original machine, and then to use the sampled kits as rhythm instruments on subsequent tunes. Slow work, but I'm learning a lot.
Tom Moody
Vortex 1, 2006, a work in three parts:
a. ink jet collage on paper, 19 3/4 X 16 3/4 inches
b. DVD-R, loop of animated GIF
c. Blog History:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34049
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34065
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34085
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34135
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34459
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37166
http://tommoody.us/images/aug06/andor1photoreal.gif
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37311
Tom Moody
Vortex 2, 2006, a work in three parts:
a. ink jet collage on paper, 20 3/4 X 16 3/4 inches
b. DVD-R, loop of animated GIF
c. Blog History:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34125
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34145
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34152
http://tommoody.us/animation/AndOr2_Anim_photoreal.GIF
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34459
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34854
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?35330
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37166
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?37311
http://tommoody.us/images/aug06/andor2photoreal.gif
Hey, progressive bloggers, can you please, please stop using Robert Fisk's name as a verb? The veteran reporter for The Independent has been a staunch, pointedly critical source of news about the Middle East for years, a beacon in the smog of propaganda that passes for reportage on this side of the pond. For reasons that make absolutely no sense (see the comments to this post), warmonger troglodyte bloggers started using his name a while back to mean "assiduously refute a blog post." It has an unpleasant sexual ring, as in "fisting."
To be less precise, Wikipedia defines it as "a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or a news story." But why should this be associated with Fisk, as opposed to any other journalist? It's not like the term "bowdlerize," meaning censor, which was named for a man named Bowdler, a censor. There is some etymology in the comments: apparently the term originated with Andrew Sullivan or Instacracker, but it is nonsensical, even as a smear. In any case, given that these blowhards mean it as an insult, why would anyone opposed to Bush's various wars want to do that? Robert Fisk is our friend. Jane Hamsher, others, could you please stop using it? It's even worse that writing "ANWR" instead of Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, a trick right out of Frank Luntz's pro-pollution handbook.
devil tail mandala--artist unknown