perfidy

Mark Steyn, in a recent article about the Alito nomination, quotes Michael Barone on the differing effects of the left and right blogosphere on American politics:

The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans.

This does not seem entirely implausible. We have all seen the effect of the right blogosphere in memogate, the spread of the Swift Boat Veteran's message, the fall of Sen. Frist, and many others. The left blogosphere has not really seemed to have any big coups like those of the right, but certainly they have been a powerful force in reinforcing the left's base - keeping them motivated and, more importantly, giving money. Dean's campaign was a classic example of this, as was the campaign of abortive Ohio Congressman and Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett.

It will be interesting to see how the blogosphere - both sides - affect the next election cycle.

UPI is reporting that Australian company Metalstorm will be demonstrating a new weapons system for the US Military in Singapore next month.

The author of the article is not exactly hip to the intricacies of military technology.

Next month a new high-explosive munition will be fired in Singapore and then tested again by the U.S. Army, heralding what may be a sea change in weaponry: a gun that can fire 240,000 rounds per minute.

That's compared to 60 rounds per minute in a standard military machine gun.

While 240,000 rounds a minute is in fact a lot, his figure for regular machine guns is off by an order of magnitude. Just think back to the last war movie you saw - were the machine guns firing one round a second?

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

Not likely. Nevertheless, this is good news. A metalstorm system could be very useful as an automated point defense system to protect our troops from incoming mortar fire. Hooked to a radar system, once an incoming mortar is detected, the metalstorm pod would quickly rotate toward the incoming and fire as many as a hundred rounds in a fraction of a second. Modern military radar systems are quite good, but the limitation has been in the speed of defensive firing systems. If the rate of fire is 600 rounds a minute (ballpark for a typical machine gun) you may - may - get off a few rounds in the seconds before the mortar hits. Odds are, you'll miss.

The beauty of the metalstorm system is that it does not depend on mechanical processes to fire and reload bullets one at a time. No matter how refined that process becomes (and in the case of electric gatling guns, that is very refined indeed) the mechanics of the process limit the maximum rate of fire. Metalstorm has no moving parts. Bullets are fired electronically, and to get around the problem of loading new bullets, they are simply stacked in the barrel. Each barrel could have ten bullets. Get a bundle of barrels 10x10, and you have a thousand rounds. And they can all be fired in very, very rapid succession. Whole pods of barrels could be replaced as a unit, for easy reloading.

With the electronic firing system, bullets can be fired in patterns, or at any desired rate of fire. Lighting up just the top layer of bullets would create a wall of lead - a hundred bullets fired in a fraction of second. And this - combined with an accurate fire-finder radar, would stand a very good chance of hitting an incoming mortar round.

Metalstorm has lots more ideas for its technology beyond mortar defense. They're currently testing a grenade launcher system that could be mounted under an assault rifle in the same way standard grenade launchers can be mounted under the M-16. They've proposed four barreled handguns with a 24 round capacity. These nifty items could fire four rounds simultaneously - before recoil kicks in, for greater accuracy. Air defense, gun pods for uavs, even for use with sub-lethal ammunition - the possibilities are nearly endless.

All they need to do is figure out a way to explode IEDs with them, and we won't have to spend a quarter billion dollars on the F/A/R/C/E 22.

With electronic firing

In reference to Bram's comment on my previous post, Upheaval in the Great White North regarding the Liberal efforts to disarm Canadians leading to a less than interesting Canadian Civil War:

It's being reported that despite the lack of guns in the hands of honest Canadian citizens, the ability of Canadians to commit violence and rapine on their compatriots has not lessened. In fact, it has increased. Canada's rate of violent crime is now twice that of the United States - 963 per 100,000 compared to the States' peacable 475. Sexual assault is also twice the US level. Overall crime rates are half again that of the US. Looking on the sunny side, if you are injured in the course of a violent assault (a likely outcome, all things considered) you won't have to pay for treatment! Isn't that great? Of course, you may have to wait awhile...

After over a decade in power, it seems as if Canada's liberal government is heading toward defeat. Trailing by a substantial margin behind Harper's conservatives, Martin's liberals are unlikely to retain control. Who exactly will have control remains to be seen, as the same polls indicate that it is uncertain whether the conservatives will actually attain a majority.

Columnist Mark Steyn has this appreciation of the situation:

By my math, the Tories are currently about 25 seats short of a majority, and the race does seem to be tightening as "undecideds" come home to their kleptocrat nanny. The Liberal vote seems to be holding up in the Maritimes and possibly in BC as well. The scarification strategy works - though, unlike 2004, it won't work well enough. And, as I wrote below, in Quebec antipathy to the Martinite Grits is so strong you can only scare folks from the Tories to the Bloc and vice-versa. Furthermore, while the bleeding of the Liberal vote to the Tories can be staunched, the desertion by a proportion of the left to the NDP looks less responsive to the scary stuff. So, even if everything else turned out swell, I reckon the Liberals are still looking at a significant loss of seats. If they were by some chance to wind up as the biggest single party, the Governor-General would invite Mr Martin to form his second (and even smaller) minority government.

Bloc Quebecois will get all of its votes from Quebec. The conservatives are stong in the west, and the liberal base is Ontario. However, the loberal vote will be split between the Liberal party and the NDP, which means that the Tories will have the most votes in Ontario. The Maritimes will likely be split evenly.

So what does it all mean? First, the likelihood of Martin keeping his job is slim. The conservatives will likely have to form a minority government, but even a "weak minority government unable to operate without the support of secessionist obstructionists" is better (in my opinion) than a scandal ridden administration that is reflexively anti-American. I'm sure Ross is less happy, but hey, we can always invade.

I'm curious as to where the Canadian sucessionist movement is. They appear to be at least for the moment happy with playing kingmaker in Canadian politics - but regional parties are typically the bane of democratic soceities. Either they will decide on their own to go back to trying to pull out of Canada, or the rest of the nation will get sufficiently pissed as to invite them to leave. The apparently permanent split of the Canadian left seems to leave the door open for continued growth of the Conservatives - something that will likely be fueled by the increasing oil wealth of the west. From what I have read, that part of British Canada that isn't Ontario has often been frustrated by the self-centeredness of the center.

The dark and disaster-hungry part of my soul really wants to see Canada break up. Naturally, I am aware that political instability is not a good thing, and having it on our northern border is even less a good thing. We're already reverse hemorrhaging on the south - an influx of Canadian political refugees is not something we should be asking for.

Nevertheless, just think of the spectacle - Quebec votes for independence, which would force the rest of Canada to contemplate the existential question of what is Canada, exactly, and do we need Quebec in it. Deciding that it does could lead to conflict. Deciding it doesn't could lead to rapid devolution on the model of Yugoslavia. Once the first one goes, there is far less justification for insisting that other parts remain part of the metropole. A rapidly balkanizing Canada would, at least, give Canadians the satisfaction that the Americans would finely being paying attention to them, but the end result would be hard to predict.

Some have speculated that parts of Canada would petition for statehood, Alberta being the most frequently mentioned. Quebec would certainly attempt to pursue an independent course – though problems with an Anglophone minority could prove troublesome. Other parts might decide to follow Quebec's example – British Columbia could go that way. Canada's maritime provinces would be poor candidates for independence, as they are very dependent on transfer payments from the Federal government for their economic livelihood. Ontario's ability to maintain those payments would be minimized at best with the loss of Alberta and the west – perhaps the Maritimes would shop around for a new federal government to subsidize them.

And beyond the secession of provinces from the Federal government, parts of provinces could retro-secede, leading to a patchwork of small independent states, a rump of British Canada with outposts across the northern tier of America, an angry and economically isolated Quebec, and new American states.

So long as no one gets killed, it would be fascinating to watch. And I'm curious to see how we'd design a flag with 57 stars.

Though the most common first name in the world is Muhammad and the most common last name is Chang, there are only two Muhammad Changs. Curiously, both live in Utah and are Mormons.

Alert fans of my writing (all six of you) may recall that back in November, I reviewed an EP by the New England-based quintet The Beatings titled If Not Now, Then When?.

The band are now set to release their second full-length, Holding On To Hand Grenades, later in January, and everything I said about the advance single is true once again. In that piece, I wrote:

It is not damning with faint praise to say that the Beatings remind me of Mission of Burma; only rarely can a band pursue Burma's post-punk ideal of brittle soundscapes replete with feedback, scratchy guitars, and dry vocals and have it sound any good. Usually such bands just sound like they're ripping off Burma with a little Pixies on the side. But the Beatings have managed the rare trick of appropriating some of the astringent, hyperintelligent sound invented by Mission of Burma but making it sound human, intimate, and alive in a way that Burma never could.

But the Beatings aren't a tribute band. Although they do wear their influences on their sleeves (touches of Radiohead, Pixies, Sonic Youth, and giant helpings of Husker Du is what I'm hearing), this is to be expected for a relatively young band working in a close-knit genre looming with giants. It is really, really hard to find your own voice and write original songs (I should know... I've been trying (and failing) for fifteen years), but four(ish) short years into their career, The Beatings sound most like... themselves.

If greater success eludes The Beatings with the release of Hand Grenades then there is no justice in the world. On Hand Grenade the band combine the spiky astringecy of their biggest influences with a deft melodic sense that makes their best songs refreshingly sweet and tart at the same time. Every song on the album is better than those on their previous EP, suggesting that they are growing quickly as songwriters and arrangers.

Like many of the recent generation of indie rock bands, The Beatings thrive on tension. The Pixies' signature loud-soft dynamic makes up a large part of their DNA, but they add new dimensions to this by-now routine strategy by adding Sonic Youth-style sheets of noise and by using three singers, one male with a brittle monotone that can burst into melodic (almost-)screaming, one male with a high and thin voice, and an occasional contribution from bassist Erin Dalbec who (in the best Kim Deal/Kim Gordon tradition) acts as a burst of sunshine over the grey-blue musical landscapes.

Guitarists Tony Skalicki and E.R. interweave their turbulent guitar lines over powerful drumming from Dennis Grabowski. All bassist Dalbec has to do with so much going on is add drive and punch to Grabowski's drumming; that she is able to add harmonic interest is just icing on the cake. The muscular sound drives the fast songs and keeps the slow ones moving along, and the band create gorgeous textures to go with the turbulent rhythms. I don't think I've ever heard a band before who could sound like Public Image Ltd. and Galaxie 500 at the same time, but I'm glad to have had the chance.

Highlights on Holding On To Hand Grenades include the stately and noisy "Upstate Flashbacks," the driving hookiness of "Feel Good Ending," the chilly resignation of "Stockholm Syndrome Revisited," and the cute little weird vignettes like "Oh Shit, My Phaser's Jammed" and the acoustic "Harry's Wild Ride." The album does peter out a bit toward the end, stumbling with "Pennsyltuckey" and "Villains," which simply go on too long, and "False Positive," which mainly suffers for sounding like a couple songs sequenced before it. Still, out of sixteen songs a maximum of three or four could be considered as filler - an impressive ratio by any standard.

It's not as if Boston's punk tradition needed saving, and it's not as if The Beatings need their talent affirmed by comparison with the greats of that scene, but it's true: if ever the world needed an heir to Mission of Burma, Galaxie 500, The Pixies and so on, The Beatings are it, and on their own terms. Holding On To Hand Grenades is an impressively self-assured statement of purpose that should be the Beatings' entry to the World of Bigger And Better Things.

This album is available from cdbaby.com.

As previously covered hither and yon, politics here in the Lone Star State are "fixin" to "git" interesting. Kinky Friedman's still engaged in a run for the Governor's mansion, and though he's not yet acquired the necessary signatures to get on the ballot, my Spidey Sense tells me that he will. Heck, I might even go to his Houston organizing meeting this afternoon to see if I can help. In any event, if he makes it on the ballot, he'll have my vote, for a lot of reasons not worth boring you about, along with one that is: Based on the constitutional definition of the office, the governor in Texas can't do much harm, and can occasionally do some good. Like the man says, "How hard could it be?"

Friday's installment from Kinky Central arrived via email, and it seemed incumbent on me to pass it along, even to non-Texans, as it could be a the best use of 12 minutes of your Sunday evening:

Dear Kinky supporters,

Please tune in this Sunday evening, Jan. 22nd, to CBS’ “60 Minutes” at 6:00 p.m. CST (check your local listings). Kinky’s interview with veteran journalist Morley Safer will air, along with footage of Kinky on the campaign trail and our mega-fundraiser at Willie Nelson’s private ranch and golf course.

We hope you’ll be watching. And telling your friends to watch. And telling your friends to tell their friends to watch … you know the drill!

Happy viewing!

Team Kinky

I wouldn't presume to suggest contributions to his cause, but there is some cool swag available at his website, and I used it as one of my sources for Christmas gifts for my Dad, a huge fan of the Kinkster.

Speaking of Dad, his response to Kinky's note was that he might not tune in to see the show, out of no disaffection for Mr. Friedman, but instead because

For some reason, "60 Minutes" always puts me in mind of a hairy reasoner.

So please act accordingly, as your mileage may vary.

Al Bundy may well have been on to something when he said, "It is good to hate the French," and indeed it is easy and often pleasureable to do so. But it is important to compartmentalize. I do get riled at French government, French foreign policy, and French collective opinions. But the French themselves, and the wonderful bon-vivant culture they have created.... now, those are wonderful things.

For Christmas, I was the beneficiary of an extraordinarily generous gift, a gift certificate to Formaggio Kitchen, a store over in Cambridge who are serious about food. Dead serious.

Yesterday I ventured over there, and aside from a small bottle of 20 year old balsamic vinegar (which is the culinary equivalent of a fine Cuban cigar) and a few impossible to find odds and ends like grey Normandy sea salt, preserved lemons, and black sesame seeds, I picked up dinner for tonight. To wit: a very nice and somewhat pricey Burgundy, a hunk of aged goat's milk cheese from the same region, a hunk of Trois Laits, which is a soft and stinky three-milk cheese also from the same region, and a quarter loaf of pain Poilâne, the signature bread from the most famous baker in France.

Formaggio Kitchen aren't messing around. The cheeses I bought were purchased green from the source, and aged to perfection in a stone cellar purpose-built for that in the basement of the Cambridge store. The bread was baked Wednesday morning and flown via Federal Express to Boston. Lionel Poilâne himself claims that his signature pain Poilâne, a large round three-build sourdough loaf made with 85% extraction flour which he calls a miche, is best eaten about three day after baking, so I'm in business.

Tonight I will sit in my little kitchen in Salem, Massachusetts, and I will eat bread, cheese and wine from Burgundy and Paris nearly as fresh as if I were there. It is modern times, and it is good to love the French.

[wik] N.B. I did try a slice of pain Poilâne last night, and I see what all the hoopla is about. Holy crap. And I, I have the recipe.

Between 1968 and 1973, Sly and the Family Stone had an amazing run. Between their instantly legendary performance at Woodstock and their last hit album in 1973, the band would release three classic records: 1969's Stand!, a party record full of hope and vitriol that is for my money the best album of the 1960s or '70s; 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On, a claustrophobic and paranoid funk workout that jettisoned the upbeat veneer that had lightened Stand!; and 1973's Fresh, full of more conventional grooves but lyrics just as outspoken as the previous two albums.

The Family Stone's signature blend of rock, funk and soul has become a fundamental ingredient of modern hip-hop, R&B and neo-soul, and the legacy of Sly Stone (whose real name is Sylvester Stewart) as a musical innovator remains undimmed. The Family Stone was also the first fully integrated band to hit the big time, an innovation that has not endured quite as well. Unfortunately, with this titanic string of successes came a spiraling drug problem that seemed to sap Stewart's mojo. Although he continued to turn out mediocre-to-decent albums, by 1976 his career was undeniably petering out. Since then Stewart has been reclusive, occasionally turning up to record a (usually perplexing) track here and there.

Considering that The Family Stone remain an important if relatively under-celebrated force in popular music, and considering that the band's leader is apparently no longer able to make new music, Sony's recent idea almost makes sense.

The company owns all the master tapes to the great Sly & The Family Stone albums. On their own these tapes are just sitting in a climate controlled room sucking up rent and not producing income. But if Sony were to lend those tapes out to a wide variety of chart-topping artists - The Roots, Maroon 5, John Legend, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Chuck D, Big Boi of Outkast, Buddy Guy, and so on, to do with them what they please, Sony has a chance to hit that beautiful spot where a cheaply produced album will successfully market to multiple audiences and sell like crackberry hotcakes.

This is an excellent way to make easy money, especially now that the recording industry as a whole has run like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff and is only moving forward thanks to momentum. If the whole label-distributor-retailer physical-product sales scheme is to survive a little longer, it is high time to grab the easy cash wherever it can be found.

So that is exactly what Sony did: lent the tapes out to a number of artists with the understanding that each artist take an original song in its final form and use it to create a new piece of music. Do they creatively lift portions of a song and radically incorporate them into a new track? Do they remix the original substantially, adding their own creations here and there? Or do they just let the original tape roll and overdub a wanky guitar solo or new vocal wherever it fits?

No matter what the strategy, the final result should ideally be a cross between hybrid and homage, a live-action mashup of the old and new. And given the high quality of the originals, artists need to really deliver the goods if their own contributions are going to measure up. Sony even got Sylvester Stewart to give his approval to the enterprise, so this album is coming out as a Sly & The Family Stone recording complete with Sly Stone's own thumbs-up.

The result, titled Different Strokes by Different Folks, is a creatively bankrupt collection of mostly terrible vandalisms of some of the best songs by Sly & The Family Stone. But make no mistake. Despite the billing, this is not a Sly and the Family Stone recording. Instead, it is an awful and embarrassing collection of sort-of covers by some of the biggest names in music.

The worst offenders fall into two categories; those who don't seem to even understand what worked about the songs they are "covering," and those who have nothing new to add, meaning their contributions are at best extraneous and distracting.

Two examples sum up the first group. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas shoehorns the fuzzy driving stomp of "Dance To The Music" into a boring, plodding and nearly undanceable Black Eyed Peas-style "funk" track. The song's throbbing groove is replaced with a lurching two-note riff that sucks all the fun out of the original tune's vocals.

Worse yet, Nappy Roots and Martin Luther manage to miss the entire point of "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey." Whereas the original provocatively explored the dilemmas inherent in American racial politics and pleaded for a solution, the new version jettisons all that in favor of a verse of stock thug/hustler rhymes complete with Glocks and rocks and 'doing what you got to do', a verse about how white kids call each other "nigger," and a verse-long complaint about how black kids today are too materialistic and listen to too much gangsta rap like, presumably, the first verse of the song.

In the second category, Stephen Tyler and Robert Randolph tackle "I Want To Take You Higher" by basically singing and playing along with the complete original master track. Apart from a few seconds of gospel-style introductory music, the entire track is practically intact except that about half of Sly Stone's vocal lines are cut out to make room for Tyler's. The result is perfectly unimpressive; I did the same thing in my bedroom when I was sixteen with a four-track and a Pink Floyd album. But like most things I did alone in my bedroom at sixteen, I never felt the results worthy of public scrutiny.

Devin Lima's version of "If You Want Me To Stay" dresses up the original with new percussion and skritchy guitar that neither adds to nor detracts from the song, but his vocal is a close impression of Sly Stone's original - sometimes so close that I can only tell some of his contributions apart from the portions of Stone's that remain because I have heard the original hundreds of times. While an interesting exercise in impersonation, it is also totally pointless.

The missteps abound. Moby turns "Love City" into a Moby song, too techno for day-spas and too limp for clubs. Buddy Guy and John Mayer (John Mayer?!? When the hell did this walking haircut get street cred??) make space in "You Can Make It If You Try" for some wanky solos that really contribute nothing to the original. John Legend and Joss Stone prove by negative example the value of restraint on a remixed and over-sung version of "Family Affair" that interpolates a few seconds of the Family Stone's "Loose Booty." John Legend and Joss Stone are phenomenally talented newcomers. Unfortunately, as with Stone's appearance with Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammys, all they prove is how far they have to go before they can stand shoulder to shoulder with their idols.

The most disappointing thing is how many people involved in this project should know better. Why did Isaac Hayes and Chuck D agree to participate? Their updated version of "Sing A Simple Song" with D'Angelo basically amounts to Chuck D rapping over the original track about how great a song it is, D'Angelo singing a line or two, and Isaac Hayes literally saying a word here or there. The final result sounds merely rushed and stitched together. So, Chuck... the original was that good? Then why not shut the hell up and let me hear it uninterrupted?

Not everything is so dire. A few interesting choices partially redeem some participants. The Roots, for example, submerge "Star" in their own track in a way that seems more like homage and less like cannibalism, and Maroon 5 (of all people) radically re-conceive "Everyday People" as a techno-guitar workout. This experiment doesn't quite work, but it at least is much bolder than most of the limp and uninspired dreck included elsewhere.

The best cut is probably the last, where DJ Reset does a mashup of Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation 1814" with the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" to surprisingly good effect. Jackson used a sample of "Thank You" as the basis of the original "Rhythm Nation," so although this pairing is obvious, it also works perfectly well.

All in all, Different Strokes by Different Folks does one thing: the album makes me desperate to listen to the original Sly and the Family Stone songs free of all the extra crap and doodazzery smeared on top. I urge all interested souls to pass this compilation by and invest a little money in the original albums. Stand! should be in absolutely everyone's record collection, and There's A Riot Goin' On and Fresh, as well as the Greatest Hits album that sums up everything pre-Stand!, are not far behind.

Different Strokes By Different Folks is a total stinkbomb, a waste of time and money that reflects well on practically no one involved and makes the iconic music of Sly and the Family Stone seem lesser by association. It is too much to expect that Sony Music Group and its employees will ever feel shame over releasing this cheap and cheesy little low profile cash-in at a whopping $18.98 retail, much less billing it as a Sly & The Family Stone album, but at least I can dream that some day when their shortsightedness, avarice, and allergy to creative business practices put them out of work, they come to regret a few of their mistakes.

Jet lag was once called boat lag, back before jets existed.