Open thread 4/7/22
My favorite part starts with the lyric, “Not quite a year since you went away.” It’s the quietest part but so effective:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
My favorite part starts with the lyric, “Not quite a year since you went away.” It’s the quietest part but so effective:
Not trying to be evil, but this might get stuck in your head.
Toto “Africa”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQn-7GCh2r0
🙂
Rick Beato talks about this song in his “what makes this song great?” series – (episode 9!):
https://youtu.be/QLoh8zHjGUI
the vocal harmonies are really tight and sound amazing when isolated. And yeah, James Pankow from Chicago plays trombone on this track. 🙂
I really like that brass riff at 1:09. The trumpet is really kicking it. It’s repeated a couple more times in the song.
Wiki trivia:
While one band member said the band name was a Wizard of Oz reference, it was actually derived from “in toto” because so many of the band members were performing in the studio across a broad swath of the LA recording business.
The band spent a big chunk of time doing the sound track for the epic bomb “Dune” (1984).
I was going to mention the similarity to Chicago but deleted it. I did not know about trombonist Pankow.
Oh my. Apparently, Hunter didn’t get the memo from Hillary about using BleachBit on hard drives.
DailyMail
The drummer in the little band I play in is always playing that iconic Jeff Porcara half-time shuffle from that song. It’s pretty tricky to get right.
Emerging from third-world-country status may take some time…but it’s started:
“Ensuring Election Integrity”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18403/ensuring-election-integrity
Key grafs:
“Congratulations to Alabama and Ballotpedia for their invaluable role in protecting our democracy.
“In the age of Covid, with absentee voting now widespread, only one state, Alabama, has safeguards that “explicitly allowed only the voters to return their ballot”, to prevent third parties and ballot harvesters from making your vote disappear….”
To paraphrase the Chinese axiom, “The long haul starts with a single state”.
Let’s hope it’s the first step in a long but successful journey…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrmWFjnAP2E
Somewhat comically, the UN General Assembly voted to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council. Meanwhile they’ve still got such paragons of human rights as China and the United Arab Emerates as members.
As for who is running the show at the White House and our government, perhaps this interview with Obama from November 2020 might give us a clue, especially when Obama, asked by Stephen Colbert how an ilegal third term for him could be arranged says this,
“If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a frontman or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, then I could sort of deliver the lines but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, then I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” *
* See https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bizarre-moment-biden-pulls-something-pocket-eats-middle-obama-speech/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=AE&utm_campaign=can&utm_content=2022-04-06
It’s MLB’s Opening Day! In honor of the occasion, I thought Neo might enjoy a clip from Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly’s 1949 movie, Take Me Out to the Ball Game. “The turn-of-the-century set movie stars Kelly and Sinatra as a pair of baseball players who moonlight as vaudeville performers during the off-season (which explains why they’re prone to bursting into song) . . . ”
Here are the two stars singing and dancing to . . . what else, baseball’s national anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r2luDoV9TI&ab_channel=GoldenHollywoodFan
Sinatra was (IMHO) a surprisingly good dancer in his younger years, though I don’t know how Neo would rate him. The part of the dance routine that I particularly like is when Sinatra and Kelly break into a waltz, because “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is, after all, a tune in 3/4 time.
Fun fact: The 1949 posters advertising the movie describe it as “M-G-M’s Gay Technicolor Musical!” How times have changed . . .
Loving David Mamet’s new book “Recessional.”
they’ve still got such paragons of human rights as China and the United Arab Emerates as members.
The UAE is a country that could improve. China is abusive, creepy, and threatening. They do not belong in the same sentence.
Following up on Snow on Pine’s comment,
We saw the clips of Joe Biden being ignored in the moments after the Tuesday, April 5, 2022 White House event, at which Barack Obama appeared,
celebrating the 12th anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act and Joe’s signing a proposed fix to a so-called “family glitch.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-obama-white-house-visit-biden-1333556/ contends the clips are out of context. But, the full context clips presented by Rolling Stone actually make the Democrats’ ignoring Biden seem worse–despite Rolling Stone’s lying and mischaracterizing the clips.
I hope Republicans create advertisements using the clips and declaring, “If Democrats are willing to disrespect the President of the USA, who is from their own party, what do you think they want to do to you?
Art Deco, it’s my understanding that the UAE practices a partial version of Sharia Law in many areas (flogging and stoning are legal punishments, women need permission from a male gaurdian to marry, apostacy is punishable by death ect.). I mean, that stuff certainly doesn’t rise to the level of the genocide of the Uygers (to pick just one thing among a long list of human rights sins that China continues to commit), but it’s certainly farcical to have them on any sort of “Human Rights Council”.
Although in fairness, some would say the entire UN itself is a fairly farcical organization.
The two most visible former government officials pushing for more transparency on the issue of UFOs, for more of the information collected by the government to be released, are Lou Elizondo, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s ATIP program which studied UFOs, and Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Both have been slowly dropping hints, pieces of the puzzle–and later elaborating on them–about the state of play on this issue within government, and what the government knows.
Recently, Chris Mellon wrote a very detailed analysis describing how the Air Force has been stonewalling Congressional requests for information the Air Force has collected on UFOs, and showing that the Air Force must have collected massive amounts of information on UFOs, given the wide range of different and sophisticated sensor systems they have.
Within the last few days Lou Elizondo has given an interview in which he discussed the kinds of psychological and measurable physical effects suffered by those who have close encounters with UFOs.
Then, just today, appear articles about 1,500 documents dealing with UFOs—including their effects on observers–released by the Air Force in response to a four year old FOIA request by Britain’s “Sun” newspaper. *
It hardly needs to be pointed out that, if UFOs/UAPs were not actual physical objects, people who had close encounters with them would not have any visible or measurable physical effects from these close encounters.
* https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/pentagon-declassifies-1500-pages-ufo-reports-claim-ufo-encounters-cause-nervous-system-damage-unaccounted-pregnancies/
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/04/07/applebaums-apathy-pulitzer-prize-winner-declares-the-legitimacy-of-the-hunter-biden-laptop-to-be-totally-irrelevant/comment-page-1/#comments
By the way, Anne Applebaum is a sh!t.
(flogging and stoning are legal punishments, women need permission from a male gaurdian to marry, apostacy is punishable by death ect.).
1. They practice corporal punishment in Singapore, too, and we should re-instate it here. Especially for petty crimes and young offenders. The cane, the birch, the pillory.
2. In this country, the usual scenario is that the young begin humping each other around age 17, have a decade’s worth of train-wreck ‘relationships’ before marrying, and (about 25% of the time) separate within five years of the wedding, the divorce to follow. Most first born children these days are ba*tards. Those are the pregnancies which do not end at the abortion mill (as about 1 in 5 do). Western societies have for 50 years been incapable of reproducing at the replacement level. I am bloody unmotivated to slam Arab societies about how they order their domestic relations.
3. Last I checked, the UAE executes a mean of 1 person per year. The country records about 50 homicides in a typical year. Punishments on the books are not punishments applied.
The two most visible former government officials pushing for more transparency on the issue of UFOs
I didn’t much care for the 70s the first time ’round, except for bits and pieces of popular music.
P.S. The “Sun” article about the Air Force’s FOIA records dump featured some of the more florid reports–“somehow I became pregnant”–from civilian UFO organization MUFON, which was apparently information that ATIP gathered as part of a broad net spread for information.
But, the much more substantial information in this document dump included things like the Report titled, “Anomalous Acute and and Subacute Field Effects on Human and Biological Tissues.”
I wonder if this particular mix of documents released by the Air Force was intended to discredit all of the material?
The Sun said that they have not yet looked through all of the contents of the AF document dump
We have certainly seen all sorts of manipulations of documents, of release dates, of critical deletions and blacked out sections.
Thus, I wonder what other substantial documents might be buried among those 1,500 documents?
P.P.S.–See Lou Elizondo on Tucker Carlson’s show talking about some of the contents of this document dump at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-5Rk47ol1c&t=187s
Snow on Pine —
including their effects on observers
The main effect seems to be to make everyone screw up the focus on their cameras.
So, it is, or it isn’t, about Rosanna Arquette:
From the Wiki:
Sounds to me as though the song WAS written about Arquette, though perhaps others influenced it. And since the two aren’t together any longer, the band denies it after-the-fact.
Next magical trick: they’re going to explain how the Apple LISA wasn’t named after Steve Jobs’ daughter.
😛
(plus some other interesting info):
She’s in the midst of her fourth set of divorce proceedings. I’d say Mr. Porcaro dodged a bullet.
Next magical trick: they’re going to explain how the Apple LISA wasn’t named after Steve Jobs’ daughter.
He put her mother out on the curb and put considerable effort into attempting to con a state court in California into believing someone else was the sire.