James Comey sucks

The most shocking thing about James Comey’s book is how much it sucks. This isn't quite the review I was looking for. I read only a bit, starting with the murder of Michael Brown & ending with Comey exculpating himself with Obama calling Comey a good man or some such bullshit. James Comey signed off on waterboarding. Comey also states in his memos that Trump's travel ban is legally valid. James Comey is not a good man, despite whatever David Brooks nonsense he's trying to spin.

I'm one of the few weirdos who still believes that Hillary Clinton should have been charged for her use of a private email server to evade her records being subject to FOIA. (Karl Rove should have been charged too. Also, the whle Bush administration should have been charged for war crimes & the banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis should have been dismantled & their executives punished.) However, she should have been charged early and removed from the presidential race. That didn't happen.

When the FBI chose not to recommend charging her (too late in the race. Hillary should have been cleared earlier,) it should have been dropped and never discussed again. It was obvious that Trump was an existential threat to the country. His prima donna bullshit on the eve of the election is unforgivable. Everything Comey did demonstrates his only concerned with appearances, not substance. His support of torture and discriminatory immigration shows that Comey is in no way moral.

Friday morning

William S. Burroughs and the Dead-End Horror of the Centipede God. I'd skimmed this piece years before, but it's even better now.

Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall. I avoid Russia stories because I don't want to fall prey to the "Putin is behind everything!" disease. However, Maxim Borodin was assassinated. He's the journalist who recently wrote about the Russian mercenaries in Syria, the Wagner Group.

Law Enforcement Has Quietly Backed Anti-Protest Bills in at Least 8 States Since Trump’s Election. The public discourse has been raging over the Second Amendment. It's a smokescreen for this. Anti-racist & environmental groups are viewed as a greater threat to the system than mass shooters.

Huckster. Elon Musk is worthless. A few months ago, he was down in Chile fooling around with the lithium market down there. Guess who's actually cornering that lithium market? Musk is a dilettante and a distraction to how the future is unfolding.

Washington State Fusion Center accidentally releases records on remote mind control. Muckrock doesn't think these are government documents but why did they have them?

clear, chilly spring morning.

Slipped up on the blogging project. Last week was inventory at work & it threw off everything. 

Need to dump some links & move on. 

Why Americans Can’t See That “Isle of Dogs” Is About Japanese Politics. It's still an artifact of a small, now irrelevant, era.

How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe: A Special Investigation.

Genetic prehistory of Iberia differs from central and northern Europe. Not much turnover from Pontic-Caspian steppe herders.

The Long Walk: Did the Aryans migrate into India? New genetics study adds to debate. 

Where’d Trump’s Record Inauguration Spending Go? 'It’s Inexplicable' This story wasn't on my radar. Now it seems to tie into some other RNC corruption... but yeah, Russians. 

A major climate boundary in the central U.S. has shifted 140 miles due to global warming. It's since the 19th Century. 100th meridian was boundary. It moved east because of human habitation. 

Here’s What We Learned From Thousands Of Secret NYPD Disciplinary Files. It's not just about my usual ACAB hobbyhorse. Cops are treated like shit too. 

"For example, one officer told a supervisor that as a single mother, she needed a couple of days to arrange for child care before being assigned to a new post. She was charged with “failing to comply with an order” and was suspended for 122 days and forced to give up more than a month of pay.

rainy Saturday evening

Cleaned up Feedly a lot, but might be switching to Inoreader for RSS reading.

listened to Chapo Trap House talk about Ready Player One. It's surprising for them to be as generous to it as they are. I probably won't see the movie, as I read the book years ago, enjoyed it for the trash it was, and want it buried & forgotten. They mention a scene in which people are dancing to New Order "Blue Monday" only to have someone go "old school" to dancing to Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive." Those two songs were released were released six years apart, 1977 & 1983.

Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers. I'm absolutely certain that the Bush administration did this, and then the Obama administration. However. I can't find a story backing that suspicion up. The only relevant bit seems this 2016 James Risen opinion piece on how the Obama administration spied on journalists, not quite the same thing as a database tracking their "sentiments" but close enough. There was also the Bush administration payment of columnists, which was certainly far more widespread than was uncovered. None of this excuses the fascism of the Trump administration, but this didn't happen overnight on January 20th, 2017.

Facebook sent a doctor on a secret mission to ask hospitals to share patient data. All kinds of harm can be done here, like sharing with future employers who pay to have access to data that Facebook collects.

Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes. No surprise. Zuckerberg covers the camera on his computers and mic jack output.

This Cat Power confused the hell out of me. I know I never saw it before and became convinced it was recreation. Her illness in 2012 when Sun was released was also news I missed until now. Damn. I've been deep in my peculiar ruts for quite some time, although I made a good stab at blogging in 2016-17. 

stormy Saturday morning

Waking up to listen to early Mekons & the Gang of Four. I never connected to the Mekons when i was exploring early punk, an arbitrary miss on my part. Superior Viaduct is reissuing their first singles, which challenged me to re-explore what I was missing. Youtube keeps slipping Gang of Four into autoplay & they're too good to swap tabs to force it back to the Mekons.

Mueller has evidence that Trump supporter's meeting with Putin ally may not have been a chance encounter. The Mueller investigations leave me cold except when it veers into what Erik Prince being involved. He met with George Nader in New York prior to Prince's trip to the Seychelles, meeting with Kirill Dmitriev there. Once again, it's all about Putin & Russia, but no mention of China. Dmitriev has interests in China, as does Erik Prince. It shouldn't be about a "stolen" election, but a worldwide network of billionaire oligarchs operating outside any normal understanding of nations.

Simon Pegg Said J.J. Abrams Had A Different Plan for Rey’s Parents in Star Wars. Abrams would be a fool to mess that up. Rey being outside of any dyanastic line in Star Wars is one of the best things to come out of the new movies. It's more important that having a female protagonist unto itself. A woman who is no one.

Revisiting the Raincoats now. I heard the Raincoats many times back in the '90s, liked them well enough, but no matter how many times i come back to them, I feel that I underestimated them previously.

Massive Ancient Drawings Found in Peruvian Desert. "...archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D." 50 new glyphs, many of which depict human figures.

Fluted Spear Points Prove Early Native Americans Liked to Travel.  "...we found that early settlers in the emerging ice-free corridor of interior western Canada were traveling north to Alaska, not south from Alaska, as previously interpreted.”



Found the oldest Neanderthal wooden tools in the Iberian Peninsula. 90,000 years old. Fire hardened. Aranbaltza. Not even close in age to the 170k old wooden tools found in Central Italy.

DNA from another mystery human ancestor lingers in some people. West Africa. Yoruba. Homo heidelbergensis?

Parts of the Amazon thought uninhabited were actually home to up to a million people. Cool to see that this has become the new mainstream.

a not-so-chilly Friday dawn

Still writing posts for my future self, who rarely recalls what his previous self wrote or why.

For the past few years, I narrowed most of my internet activity to how it centered Twitter. I swapped it for an RSS feed because it was easier to use with a baby to care for, then a young child. Twitter remains far easier to steal glances at while i'm at work. Twitter had already tweaked its algorithms so badly that its usefulness for catching breaking news on subjects other than Trump or mass shootings is diminished. I've been keeping three notebooks next to computer to take notes on different subjects for a few months, but it feels less than efficient. 

Scrubbing Feedly of dead & boring RSS feeds. Several old bloggers have called for the return to blogging. I waste most of that effort on trying to get the old blog archives back up so I can search my old posts for opportunities for self-loathing. It's wasted effort obviously. I need to keep better track of my consumption of music and keep tabs on the anthropology & archaeology stories right now. Obvious, mainstream records & stories have been slipping through the cracks for years. 

The new Melody's Echo Chamber seems good enough.

Screenwriter Says Rogue One Was ‘Just A Mess’ Before Reshoots. It feels like Edwards was too in awe of making a Star Wars movie.

Still undecided on the new King Tuff material. He was stuck, lost his muse, & apparently got mired in depression, so it's cool to see him writing & recording again. It all owes to '70s material that I never much connected to. The same problem arose for me with Foxygen, although Hang is a step back towards my comfort zone. 

There's also a new Guided by Voices record & they're coming to One-Eyed Jack's too. Probably skipping that. It feels too safe. Listenable, but I crave novelty. ("See My Field" is more interesting song anyway.) 

It's the Yo La Tengo record, There's a Riot Going On that's more useful. It's harder to perceive the loss of youthful energy when the band has always been subdued. 

rainy morning, April 4th

Started the morning listening to the Cut Worms. They're opening for King Tuff at One-Eyed Jacks on May 11th, but I'm already recoiling at the thought of leaving the house.

Dino Buzzati's Catastrophe showed up in the mail the other day. Witkacy's Narcotics has yet to ship, despite it being ordered February 2nd. Odd. No plans to start Catastrophe. I'm a lazy shit who'd rather read just comic books & history for awhile longer. 

Realized yesterday that I never finished Pierre Senges' The Major Refutation when i saw a tweet in which a translator has been unsuccessfully submitting another book of his. Damn it. 

Almost skipped this Vice piece surveying Drag City albums because the label now streams on Spotify, because I don't use Spotify. I only had a revelation on how much i underappreciated Flying Saucer Attack at the time this past weekend. Still mad at myself for not buying Hey Drag City on vinyl from either Parasol mail order or from Tower Records back in the day. Deep into Edith Frost's Telescopic now- a neglected classic.

(It's odd to see Frost compared to Alex G. I'd never heard of Alex G until relatively recently. One of my coworkers at the bookstore has been unsuccessfully attempting to turn me onto him for months. He plans to go on a pilgrimage to see him in Vermont & New York in May.) 

Someone spotted that Rick & Morty lifts from Venture Bros. TBH, i missed that bit, but knew that Ventures Bros was owed. The piece that more deeply explores the differences between the shows, why one is a relatively obscure cult hit, while the other a pop culture phenomenon has yet to be written. That Venture Bros never deviates from self-loathing failure & accepting it while Rick & Morty focuses on celebrating narcissistic misanthropy is the key.

Silver Jews American Water now. I've tried this album so many damned times. 

links 04.03.18

Need to do something to collect links better. Inauspicious beginning.

Sinclair Chairman Claims Entire Print Media Has ‘No Credibility’

So-called ‘intellectuals’ can’t let go of “The Bell Curve”

Why There Are So Many Bad Sheriffs.

Scott Pruitt Bypassed the White House to Give Big Raises to Favorite Aides.