Folks I'm In Awe Of...

AllOurConditionsAre
HumanVille


When we take road trips these days our soundtrack is made up of, more often than not, the shared podcasts squirrelled away on our phones.

Which, last week on our way to Gabriola Island, got us to talking about Ear Hustle, a pod that gets intimate about the human lives inside San Quentin prison.

Ear Hustle is one of my favourites but E. noted that you can't binge the thing because the depth, detail and impact of each episode becomes too much to bear when they are piled up on top of each other.

I couldn't disagree with that, but I did have a retort, which was:

"Fair enough, but I could listen to a podcast about Earlonne Woods anytime."

****

Earlonne Woods is one of the creative forces behind Ear Hustle who was, until very recently, serving 31-years-to-life for attempted armed robbery on a three-strikes-you're-out abomination.

Late last year, in one of his last acts as the Governor of California, Gerry Brown commuted Mr. Wood's sentence after 21 years.

A few months ago, with roles reversed, Earlonne told his story to Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Here's a small chunk, but the entire thing is well worth the listen:

GROSS: So something I found really interesting is that the group that is multicultural and not segregated by race or ethnicity is the group that's into, like - the nerds, the group that are into, like, sci-fi fantasy and stuff like that. And, like...

{snip}

E WOODS: Hey - so I always go over to the L - I call them L7s. But I always go over to the fantasy game guys, and I'll just sit there for a minute and try to see if I even come close to understanding what's going on on that table.

POOR: It is a different world over there.

E WOODS: It is - they see something that I can't see. I don't think I have the vision to see it.

GROSS: So their...

E WOODS: I love it.

GROSS: Their brothers are the people who live in a similar world of fantasy as opposed to defining their brothers as being, you know, a skin color or ethnicity.

E WOODS: Right, right. And it's just about - you know, they accept anybody, you know? It's like - I think they're not under the constraints or the pressures to not accept people.

GROSS: Earlonne, how did you learn how to keep your calm and live in the kind of confined situation you were in during the more than two decades that you were incarcerated? You have to be able...

E WOODS: Well...

GROSS: ...To stay sane in a situation like that. And you also spent time in solitary, where it's very hard to stay sane.

E WOODS: Right. I'll say I've - on the second term - so the first term is where I did all the solitary stuff. But on the second term after - once you receive a life sentence, there's no guarantee that you'll ever be released from prison. So I think what kept me sane is that I had the philosophy where, I am going to live to the best of my ability every day that I have left on this Earth no matter where I'm at.

So it be at prison, I'm going to enjoy my day every day because at the end of the day, this is all I got, you know? I don't know what tomorrow brings, but I know what's happening today and right now. So I'm going to enjoy. And I think that's a shared philosophy with everybody that's in prison - is that you have to just deal with what's going on today, you know, and just not let the pressures of prison just get to your core and crush you.


Don't know about you, but I'm not sure I could have gotten to the same place under similar circumstances.


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Image at top of the post is by Mark Murrmann for Mother Jones.



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Things I Think About...

SuperDuperFirewall
StatergiesVille


The founder of the separatist group 'Wexit Alberta' Peter Downing is on the stump and Global News is only too happy to help him amplify a message that, apparently, 3 of 10 folks in that fine province think is worth considering:

...Downing says he’s willing to give (Alberta Premier Jason) Kenney a chance with getting pipelines built and succeeding with constitutional challenges.

“If Jason Kenney does not deliver what Albertans want, they are going to give us a shot,” Downing said...

Gosh.

Can't help but wonder...

Now that Mr. Dunning has put Mr. Kenney on notice does this mean that the latter's super-fine war room will soon crank up its flying surrender monkey squadrons to blitzkrieg bop all things W(r)exit?


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Reaching Peak Crazy...

SundayMonday
UnHappyDaysVille


Got back from the beach with the Whackadoodle yesterday morning (bird count: 3 eagles and a herd of herons) and fired up the tubes.

First thing I saw, of course, was reference to the death of the previously convicted hedge fund fellow.

And then I read the following from Charlie Pierce at his (still good) corp blog:

...How in the hell do they let this happen? The guy was incarcerated in the Manhattan Correctional Center. He already had made one try. He had to be on suicide watch. And the suicide happens the day after a massive document dump in which a woman who said she was one of Epstein's victims implicates an entire brigade of celebrity "clients," up to an including some European royalty? There almost can't be a dog more reluctant to hunt than this one...

{snip}

...This country is losing what's left of its mind...


And only then did I head to the Twittmachine.

Here is what I saw on the sidebar...

And then, of coarsest, the stuff like this began to fly:

It would appear that everyone concerned has run out of sharks to jump (while carrying atomic-powered deflector spin skill saws set to eleventy billion).


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The Curse Of Clarklandia's Ever Shrinking Coattails (ctd.)...

VoluntaryBeThyName
MrStewartVille


As first noted by Bob Mackin more than a week ago, Ben Stewart has left the BC Liberal caucus over a matter that apparently involves a donation from his constituency assistant.

Well, as the VSun's Rob Shaw noted Thursday, this process was, according to Mr. Stewart, all started by his voluntary actions:

...“It’s kind of a very small issue, but because the individual is pursuing it and sending around accusations along with that, it makes it very difficult,” Stewart said. “So I thought the best thing to do was approach Elections B.C. and get clarity.”

Stewart said he made the move out of an abundance of caution. “I haven’t seen or heard complaints directly. This is all voluntary.”...


And as for this 'individual (that) is pursuing it', what, exactly, is that all about?

Mr. Shaw has more:

...Stewart stepped away from caucus last week after a constituency assistant complained to Elections B.C., alleging being forced to donate approximately $1,225 on Stewart’s behalf to the B.C. Liberal Party. That amount is near the personal maximum under B.C.’s new donation law, also described as the top-tier “Founders’ Club” level for B.C. Liberal Party members...


Hmmmmm...

So, a staffer to Stewart complains to Elections BC about being forced to make a donation to the BC Liberals on Stewart's behalf and then, suddenly, Mr. Stewart acts 'voluntarily'.

Sure thing.

But here's the real question...

Who 'forced' the staffer to make the donation in the first place given the following:

...The B.C. Liberal Party confirmed Thursday it had refunded the donation in March after the constituency assistant contacted the party and asked for the money back...


Gosh.

Kinda seems like maybe there was very little at all that was truly voluntary in this entire process.


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And note the date that the BCL braintrust paid the staffer back...March...As in five months ago compared to ten days ago when the emergency conference call that announced Mr. Stewart's step aside to caucus took place.


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More! More! More! ... Public Money For Private Schools.

AndreaTrueEducation
ConnectionVille


Jim Stanford, writing in the Star, lets us know that he is worried that Andrew Scheer's proposed, (and Hamish approved!) $4,0000 per annum per kid federal tax deduction will, in addition to costing us up to $2,000,000,000 a year, lead us down a path of no return.

Thing is, as Sandy Garossino pointed out a while back, and updated yesterday, we are already running down said path at breakneck speed.

OK?


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HST Friday...Removing The Soul From That Cycle.

NevermindTheRacism
GiveMeMyTaxCutsVille


Stephen Ross is a billionare who sells a fitness lifestyle to progressive-ish folks through his companies Equinox and SoulCycle.

These folks are now mad at him because he's holding a big money fundraiser for Donald Trump.

Mr. Ross has responded with a statement that 'explains' his position:

...“I have known Donald Trump for 40 years, and while we agree on some issues, we strongly disagree on many others and I have never been bashful about expressing my opinions,” Ross said. “I have been, and will continue to be, an outspoken champion of racial equality, inclusion, diversity, public education and environmental sustainability, and I have and will continue to support leaders on both sides of the aisle to address these challenges.”...


Which brings us to the good Docktor's thoughts on the matter...

...I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth. The GOP is the party of capital...

Hunter Thompson Speaking to Salon's John Glassie

February, 2003

Meanwhile.

Babies in Cages.


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Image at the top of the post from a Vox piece by Matthew Yglesias and Dave Bennett for Getty Images.


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How Much Money Does A Newspaper Have To Make To Stave Off The 'Ghosting'?

IfACallForReWriteFallsInTheForest
DoesAnybodyHereVille


So.

How much money does a local newspaper have to make to stay robust enough that it can actually produce more than fluff and wire copy that folks actually want and are willing to pay for, either in digitial or dead tree form?

Well, if the paper is part of conglomerate it turns out that nobody knows.

Marc Tracy of the money making Grey Lady has the story:

Phil Luciano, a columnist at The Peoria Journal Star, got a story tip recently about Caterpillar, the heavy equipment company that was based in Peoria, Ill., for 90 years before a recent relocation to Cook County.

The tip seemed promising enough. But as one of only seven full-time reporters at the paper, he felt stretched too thin to do much about it.

“Who’s our Caterpillar reporter?” Mr. Luciano asked. “We don’t have one right now.”

In recent years, The Journal Star has been hit with the kind of cutbacks that have become common for newspapers nationwide as they steer a bumpy course toward a digitally focused future. The newsroom had more than 80 guild employees in the 1990s, and now has about a dozen.

The Journal Star is still the largest paper in downstate Illinois. But after covering more than 23 counties in its heyday, it now limits itself to three: Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford...

{snip}

...“I know The Journal Star’s in the black,” Mr. Luciano said. “How much in the black do you have to be? That’s what drives us up a wall.”...


Why?

Hedge funds vultures.

That's why:

...The job of top editor has lost some of its old luster in this era of job cuts and hedge fund ownership. A vocation that once had a dash of grit and glamour has become more administrative, with a lot of bean-counting and heartbreak.

Neil Chase, the former executive editor of the Bay Area News Group, said that the news organization he oversaw regularly received profit targets from its owner, Digital First News — now known as MediaNews Group, a company controlled by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. To hit those targets, he had to slash costs.

During Mr. Chase’s tenure, from 2016 to the start of this year, layoffs and attrition cut the newsroom to around 165 from an already diminished staff of 240, he said.

Mr. Chase and his team tried to preserve the company’s core publications, The Mercury News in San Jose and The East Bay Times. And so the group’s weeklies — titles like The Walnut Creek Journal and The Los Gatos Weekly-Times — took a big hit.

“We gutted those papers by taking the journalism out of them,” said Mr. Chase, now chief executive of CALmatters, a nonprofit covering California state politics.

Those weeklies are now among the nation’s ghost papers. A typical issue contains items from stringers tucked in among articles from Bay Area News Group dailies...


And yet, here in Canada, rather than helping the scrappers and fighters who are trying to do more than generate empty 'ghost papers', we are all in for giving a leg up to the vultures.

Go figure.


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Finding His Religion

That'sNotHimInThe
CornerVille


Local Lotuslandian Media Listicle guy Justin McElroy has found his religion.

It is bicycling and the routes that help make it possible.

Thus, this...

I can't wait.

For those that aren't Adanac 'n craft breweries that is.


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The Keef Report...But, What About Global News?

That'sAstute
WhyDon'tWeGetTogetherAndCallOurselvesAnInstituteVille

Linkish

Hard to argue with that.

But...

Perhaps the Keef could inform his employer.

Link

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Subheader earworm...This.
Hey...Jody Paterson has an important post up about 'The Great Hack' and the deep digital corrosion of democracy everywhere...And Mr. Beer 'N Hockey's latest, and the wee bit of back and forth it engendered, led me to look up Jackie Fuchs' (nee Fox of The Runaways) real story...I think we with the Y chromosomes have to realize that everything was not right with the '70's world for everyone.



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Normalizing Andy?

GinUp
EverythingVille

Link

I haven't quite figured it out yet...

Will the craziest of the crazies split the crazy?

Or will he normalize it.


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My Charlie Gillett Experience.

AllOurMusicalWorlds
WereHisVille


I started this little F-Troop listed blog back in the dinosaur days just before the collective wave of Left Blogistan, as Jane Hamsher saw it, crested.

Back then I used to whip up my posts in the early mornings, often before work, down in the unfinished basement of the rickety old row house we lived in (and loved) at the time.

It was dark and a little dank, and the furnace was a bizarre natural gas conversion that consisted of a giant boiler-like thing that looked like a metal octopus with its mass of vent arms running off in all directions.

But I liked it down there. And we had just gotten decent broad band which meant that I could listen to the BBC World Service every morning as the sun came up while I typed, furiously, on my then still spiffy G3 Mac.

And the guy I liked to hear most on the Beeb was an old guy with a scratchy voice and a weird British accent that I couldn't quite place.

This was Charlie Gillett, who by then was pretty much obsessed with World Music.

And his obsessions, not to mention his enthusiasms were infectious.

As the Interwebz continued to open up, particularly from an audio perspective, I sought out Mr. Gillett more sporadically through the years until he died, sadly, of a horrible autoimmune disease that attacks the blood vessels in 2010.

After that I missed him and sometimes sought out archived versions of his old shows in the same way I do with the work of those wacky MIT-trained brothers from Boston who used to fix cars and make people laugh or a living.

****

Anyway.

Fast forward to last week when I got on a wee bit of a Mark Knopfler binge thanks to the interests of the Doctors of Distortion's real guitar player.

And, as is my nature given my own obsessions, this eventually led me to the original Dire Straits demos recorded in the summer of 1977, before the group even had a record contract.

Those demos were born fully realized and they are truly amazing...

And it turns out that the person who is perhaps most responsible for the entire planet, including a then teenaged me half a pre-digital world away, becoming gobsmacked by the Sultans and all that followed was a then still youngish fellow named...

...Charlie Gillett:

...The demo tapes were given to BBC Radio London DJ Charlie Gillett. Charlie played the tapes calling upon record company executives to sign this new band: enter John Stainze and Ed Bicknell. It is said that Phonogram A&R man Stainze was in the shower listening to the radio when he first heard Dire Straits. A few weeks later he signed the band to Phonogram's Vertigo label and Mark secured a publishing deal with Rondor Music. Towards the end of 1977 Ed Bicknell was working at the NEMS agency when he got a call from Stainze asking him to fix up some gigs for Dire Straits. Ed was invited round to Phonogram's offices in December where he heard the Charlie Gillett demo tapes. He was then taken to Dingwalls Club in North London to meet Dire Straits. The date was the 13th of December, 1977, and as he walked into the club they were playing Down To The Waterline. Ed recalls, "The first thing I noticed was that it wasn't necessary to stand at the back of the room; they were very quiet.

I'd just done The Ramones, who were deafening......The second thing I noticed was that Mark was playing a red Stratocaster, which immediately made me think of Hank Marvin, who I had idolised in the sixties." After hearing two or three numbers Ed decided that he wanted to manage the band. He was organising a tour for Talking Heads and was able to put his new band on the bill as the support act. Dire Straits were paid £50 per night for the Talking Heads tour; a ten-fold increase from their fee at Dingwalls. The rest - as is often said - is history...


Imagine that!


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And just a quick note for anyone who actually bothered to click through to some of the ancestral posts linked to at the top of the page...This place really was a filled to bursting with sloppy drum comments in the old days, pre-Twittmachine...Alas, sadly, all that disappeared in the great Haloscream chainsaw comment massacre of late 2009....

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The Keef Report...Every Possibility Under The Summer Sun.

Gosh.

Has the Keef's uber-doober, super-duper insider access card suddenly suddenly been cancelled, or what?


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Need context?....This.


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HST Fridays....Who Will Be Mr. Trump's Little Johnny Dean?

ItWasANicePlace
TheyWerePrincipledPeopleGenerallyVille

When the Watergate investigations first started Richard Nixon was riding high in the polls.

But as the focused reportage (rather than single in-'n-out news cycle hits) got rolling in earnest and the daily hearings on the TeeVee began in the spring of 1973 those positive numbers began to fall precipitously for months on end.

The biggest drop occurred during the summer of 1973 when millions of housewives and Hunter S. Thompson got hooked on the daily soap opera that was driven by the testimony of a scared straight former food soldier in Mr. Nixon's obstruction offensive named John Dean who suddenly decided to do the right thing and tell the truth.

Here's what Thompson had to say about that summer, and that TeeVee show that dominated it, not in Jann Wenner's pulp of quasi-fiction, but instead on the OpEd page of the New York Times on the first day of 1974:

There is some kind of heavy connection between that memory (of my childhood time as a milkman's foot soldier) and the way I feel right now about this stinking year that just ended. 

Everybody I talk to seems very excited about it. “God damn, man! it was a fantastic year,” they say. “Maybe the most incredible year in our history.”

Which is probably true. I remember thinking that way, myself, back on those hot summer mornings when John Dean's face lit my tube day after day incredible. Here was this crafty little fellow going down the pipe right in front of our eyes and taking Richard Nixon with him.

It was almost too good to be true. Richard Milhous Nixon, the main villain of my political consciousness for as long as I can remember, was finally biting that bullet he's been talking about all those years. The man that not even Goldwater or Eisenhower could tolerate had finally gone too far —and now he was walking the plank, on national TV, six hours a day—with the whole world watching, as it were...

****

So.

If the current crop of Democrats does finally manage to get up the gumption to start a daily soap opera focussed on Mr. Trump's own obstruction offensive, who might turn out to be the Donald's little Johnny Dean?

Well...

Some might predict Michael Cohen.

But my money is on Don McGahn.

And, apparently, the good Mr. Trump is a little worried about that prospect as well, judging by his response to stories of his former counsel's reported cooperation with the Mueller team last summer:

President Donald Trump insisted Sunday that White House lawyer Don McGahn isn’t “a John Dean type ‘RAT,”‘ making reference to the Watergate-era White House attorney who turned on Richard Nixon.

Trump, in a series of angry tweets, blasted a New York Times story reporting that McGahn has been co-operating extensively with the special counsel team investigating Russian election meddling and potential collusion with Trump’s Republican campaign...


Curiously, the AP reporter of that time, Jill Colvin, left out the 'O' word that was front and center in the Mueller Report, Volume 2, and in Mr. Mueller's testimony before Congress last week:

Robert Mueller confirmed former White House counsel Don McGahn was pressured to lie by the White House about whether he was ever asked by Donald Trump to fire the former special counsel while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

"The president told the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, to try to pressure [Don] McGahn to make a false denial. Is that correct?" Democrat Karen Bass asked Mr Mueller.


"That's correct,” he replied...


Imagine that!


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The Curse Of Clarklandia's Ever Shrinking Coattails...

MaybeMrWilkinsonWillOneDayPretendToMoveTo
KelownaTooVille


The seat that Christy Clark once muscled in on and then quit when it suited her is no longer in BC Liberal hands:

Bob Mackin has the story at his Breaker News:

Kelowna West’s Ben Stewart is out of the BC Liberal caucus.

TheBreaker.news understands there was an emergency conference call for caucus members in which they were informed that the MLA in the BC Liberal stronghold has departed because of a matter related to an Elections BC investigation that involves a donation from his constituency assistant...


Gosh.

One can only wonder if the good Mr. Stewart will go full metal blue now that the coat of faux red paint has been removed.

Meanwhile...

It turns out that you can, apparently, bury the lede in a tweet:

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The Great Lotuslandian Land Swindle.

MalcomMcLaren'sOrwellian
RealEstateFarmVille

Is it the M.P.L.A.? 

Or Is it the U.D.A.? 

Or Is it the I.R.A.? 

I thought it was the U.K. 

Cook/Jones/Lydon/Matlock, 1976

Or.

Is it the 'U.D.I.'?

Yes that's right.

According the boss of the local division of the developers' non-profit think tankish thingy that self proclaims itself it to be a "partner in community building & premier voice of BC's real estate development industry" (with or without granite counter-tops, presumably), things that cost less are really not actually more affordable.

But for who, though, really?

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Post Title?....Play on....This.

Earworm...This (with an actual, real bass player and everything).