5-31-07 What're They Fighting For???

I find it beyond my ability to rationalize why, just why, this news story isn't the lead story in the mainstream media this week.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test 100% of their source livestock for Mad Cow disease. You'd think that this would be just fine, but because some big company(s) see this as "unfair competition" they've managed to get the US Agriculture Department to force Creekstone into court, and prevent them from doing this.
Outrageous? You betcha! And they've even got the President of the United States on the side of "Big Beef", saying that "it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease," according the above linked article.

This goes WAY beyond mere fascism, as far as I'm concerned, when the US government prevents a business from doing the utmost to safeguard its customers from getting sick from consuming their product. When the course of the government's assets are turned against the safety of the public in favor of the possibility that some large businesses may have to ante up the money to do the same, ...well, let's just call a corrupt administration what it is.

What is the Bush administration fighting for here? It definitely isn't the safety of the American public, that's for sure!

5-30-07 Privatization at work

Here's a sample of what privatization is all about: A family in Gilbert, Arizona, lost their home to a fire. The privatized firefighting company that responded arrived too late to save it. But because the home was in an area that wasn't "subscribing" to the privatized firefighting company's services, there is a bill for them responding.

Not only has this family lost their home and all their belongings, they now also owe the privatized firefighting company a whopping $10,000 for "services rendered."

Read the story here.

The problem with privatizing community services and infrastructure is that these things which are traditionally funded with tax money are given the added burden of "turning a profit." When you add the burden of profit, the end cost is more than it was when funded by taxes. This is a very simple equation, and does not take any sort of genius to figure it out. Yet, the proponents of privatization claim reduced taxes, and reduced costs for the public as a result of more efficient operation, when making their case. It just isn't true. It simply cannot be true when the burden of profit is added.

But adding the burden of profit isn't the only problem with privatization, as the above story demonstrates. As is the case with privatized healthcare, it's all about the billing. It isn't about providing great service, it isn't about the product, and it isn't about increasing efficiency. With privatization, it's all about the billing and the pumping up of accounts receivables each quarter.

Only a corrupt (or extremely stupid) politician would advocate privatization of anything, due to being connected in some way with businesses that stand to gain from it.

5-24-07 Happy Birthday, Bob!

It's tough to realize that Bob Dylan turns 66 today. If he ever reads this, I only have this to say to him, "Thanks for all the great music, Bob!"

He was great when he was doing his Woody Guthrie impersonations. He was great when he went into his "I'd rather be a rock'n'roll star" phase. He was great when he went into his "wouldn't it be fun to sing like Johnny Cash" phase. And he's just continued to be great, even now in this "hey, let's sing like Tom Waits" phase.

A friend of mine in California once said of Dylan, "He just doesn't belong on this planet... he's a gift." I can hardly disagree. Bob Dylan is a gift that keeps on giving, year after year.

5-23-07 New Rules

Yep.

Up there in Hooksett, New Hampshire, four employees at tbe town hall were fired for gossiping. This is a news story where I have to scratch my head and ask, "What are we missing, here?" Is there some as yet unrevealed aspect to this story that hasn't been reported? I mean, HUH???

So, the new rules for Hooksett include "no talking about the boss behind his or her back." The concept of "politically correct" has now been carried to a new low. Yes, ideally, we would conduct ourselves in a manner that precluded backstabbing, gossip, and so forth, and the world might be a better place as a result. But the actual enforcement of such is, in actual practice, still truly beyond the reach of our present day social and psychic abilities, at least without looking completely absurd. In keeping with that insistence upon absurdity, however, as now demonstrated by the powers that be in Hooksett, the way to enforce this ridiculous standard is to hire a lawyer to question the suspects and then fire them for what they said they might have gossiped about. At least, that's the way the story is being spun so far.

Other new rules being worked on in Hooksett are "no thinking bad thoughts about the boss," and "no seeing the boss's mistakes." The boss's new clothes, as well, must always be seen the way the boss wants them to be seen.

5-22-07 Why Ethanol?

About a hundred years ago, when Henry Ford was introducing his new "automobile" to the world, the fuel of choice was alcohol. Indeed, the fuel that Ford originally designed his first cars to run on was alcohol. As a renewable fuel, alcohol was a no brainer. Unfortunately, a by-product of kerosene distillation that had (up to that time) been thrown away was also available in much larger quantity. This by-product was "gasoline."

The petrochemical industry was, essentially, born upon the discovery that a waste product could be turned into a product. They've been turning waste products into products ever since.

Now, a hundred years later, alcohol as a fuel for the automobile is gaining traction again.

The big story on alcohol fuels during the past couple decades, however, has been in Brazil.

The interesting thing about alcohol fuels in THIS country is that, well, ...the whole scene is beginning to remind me of what it's like feeding the pigeons in the park. You toss some tidbit of food, and they all come swooping in and fight over it. That's pretty much the way it looks to me, with all the big agribusinesses flocking onto the ethanol fuel bandwagon.

When I look for the backstory, I usually find it in the relatively "fringe" areas of news. The mainstream media really isn't up to the task of fully informing the public anymore. Such is the case with this story, wherein the Christian Science Monitor has managed to go out there and do the actual journalism to bring us the story.

The sad facts are that current US government policies, and those that are on the drawing board, are basically just pork-barrel politics, designed mostly to benefit big agribusiness no matter what the scientists and economists are saying. Current and planned policy on ethanol fuels in this country are going to produce more problems than they solve. Read the CSM story, and you'll understand why.

5-21-07 YouTube

About five months ago, I joined YouTube and uploaded a video of my sister singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow from a practice session she did with her old band, Zonkaraz, at the Blue Moon Cafe on 12-30-06. I had videotaped the whole practice there, before an audience of, perhaps, a dozen or so people, and ended up editing it down for my sister onto a DVD.

After I watched the YouTube clip a few times, I became very unsatisfied with the audio, and decided to try setting up the upload file using Nero Recode, instead of whatever else I had used previously. This version came out better, but by the time I had this second one uploaded, the first clip had gotten so many hits, plus a comment or two, that I didn't have the heart to take it down.

The trouble with YouTube is that it takes forever to upload a decent clip. Of course, people the world over are constantly trying to figure out why their uploads look and sound like crap. Well, the first thing that one needs to do in order to get a decent clip onto YouTube is to read the instructions. The second thing one needs to know is how to produce a decent ".avi" file in full NTSC video. The source file you start with makes all the difference in the world.

I use DV format, shot with a 3-ccd camcorder. I use MediaStudio Pro to edit and create an "avi" clip (still using DV type 1 format). Then I use Nero Recode to compress that source file down to 320x240 MPEG-4, and that's what I upload to YouTube.

It takes forever.

The reason it takes forever is because YouTube's server re-compresses what your uploading (on the fly) into a "flash" format video. I've had uploads stop and stay stopped after painfully waiting a half hour to an hour, and nearly complete, but never resume again. It's really frustrating to waste so much time and have to re-start and upload from scratch, but that's what happens (at least on this end)... and I've got a cable modem... blazing speed everywhere else except uploading to YouTube!

But I take these sort of things with a grain of salt, roll with the punches, and figure that once I've navigated these waters I can do it again and again.

A little over a week ago, I had videotaped a really nice clip of an old friend of mine, Rich MacDuffie, doing a cover of the song, "Trainyard Girl".

I really like this clip, because MacDuff is so much fun to watch performing. And, despite the fact that the clip was from an informal get-together and he wasn't so much performing as just having fun, this clip is one that I knew the minute I'd shot it that I wanted to put it up on YouTube. The guys that call themselves "The Danelectros" are all guys that I grew up with. I enjoy watching these guys play in that informal setting more than any scene in a nightclub or a concert hall because, basically, I just don't like crowds.

MacDuff, Bob Jordan, and Jeff Baskowski played last week at the Cafe Fantastique for Bob's annual birthday celebration (of Bob Dylan's birthday), where local singers and musicians do covers of Dylan's songs in a couple of hour long sets. It's a lot of fun, it's a small room, and it's a mostly over-30 crowd ...so my dislike of crowds is abated greatly in that venue. I decided to try to videotape both sets, and luckily, I succeeded.

There was one musician there who did a cover of Highway 61 Revisited, and he just blew my socks off! When I got all the video from the event captured onto the computer the next day, I went right to that clip and set it up for YouTube, converted it, and uploaded it.

BLAT!

That's when I realized that I had spelled the guy's name wrong on the clip credits! And what's even more humiliating is that the guy is one of my stepson's best friends... and I didn't REALIZE this until I had wrapped up the clip! "That's THAT Ed???" I said to myself...

Then, to add insult to injury, I put the mis-spelled last name onto the clip credits...

Oh, I gotta tell ya! Its not nice what happens to ya when ya get old!

So, I re-did the clip from scratch, correcting the spelling of Ed Barnett's last name, compressed it into MPEG-4, and tried to upload it all that day (yesterday) onto YouTube. No joy. I tried again this morning when I left for work, but when I came home for break around mid-morning... no joy. I re-started the upload when I went back to work, and when I came home this afternoon, VOILA! It was DONE.

This clip is just GREAT!

Ed's such a cool performer, I can't imagine why I haven't heard about his talent from anywhere else but my stepson. Sean has mentioned more than once that Ed's a good guitar player, but I'm an old fart... I don't like crowds... and going to some bar or under-30 concert venue just isn't up my alley. So Ed's talent has eluded my cognizance all these years that Sean and Ed have been friends.

I want to take the first Ed Barnett clip I uploaded off, once the new Ed Barnett clip has had a chance to get all the search tags into the database. That way, my mistake won't be left on YouTube for everyone to see for the rest of eternity... like it has with my sister's Over the Rainbow clips.

5-17-07 The US Thug General

It would be too kind to refer to Alberto Gonzalez as an attorney, the Attorney General, or in any other way refer to this thug as a member of the United States of America's judiciary branch, or any other branch of our government. He is, in my opinion, the worst example of what this current administration is all about... well, so far.


Here is an honorable man, James Comey, testifying to a congressional committee how Alberto Gonzalez behaved towards then Attorney General Ashcroft, as Ashcroft lay in a hospital bed in intensive care, back in 2004. This testimony is nothing short of astonishing. The President who shames his office, the Attorney General who merely acts as a henchman for his long-time buddy George, and the rest of this administration has, without a doubt, done more damage to the moral high ground that this nation once held than anyone could have imagined possible, before September 11, 2001.

I also never thought it possible to think that John Ashcroft could have been an honorable man. But he was, despite practically being on death's door, adamant to the point of complete exhaustion in refusing to cave in to this episode of Bush and Gonzalez behaving like the Sopranos.

Plenty of news stories to read about this... here, here, here, here, ...ad infinitum.

5-11-07 Tree-Hugging

It's terribly difficult to imagine that some extremely simple idea can have any sort of big impact, but consider the proposition suggested on this webpage...

If Google were to change their main webpage background color from white to black, it is calculated that this would save 750 MegaWatt Hours of electric power every year, from then on. This change would cost nothing.

Compare that potential savings of 750 MWH per year as the result of one person changing one setting on one server system, to having a billion luminescent lightbulbs replaced by a billion compact flourescent lightbulbs.

These are the sort of energy-saving, tree-hugging, environmentally friendly ideas that are needed... the ones that don't cost anything.

5-5-07 Jail Time?

With two million people in jail in this country, you'd think it would be more economically sensible to reduce the number of laws that put people in jail, especially for victimless crimes. This is an example of a felony that really shouldn't be a felony. The trouble with the aforementioned felony is that it's absurd. Denying such people future access to flying on that particular company's airline should be enough.

I can just see it now. There he is in the jail mess hall, sitting next to a murderer who asks, "What're you in for?" And this guy has to say, "Cunnilingus on a plane." And, like so many other inmates, he will be maintaining his innocence throughout his jail term.

The crime of making other passengers nervous, or being rude to a flight attendant should garner a penalty that's appropriate, ie- future access to the services of that airline should be denied. That would be forever. Just like the access to a particular store or restaurant would be denied to unwelcome customers, this penalty is nothing new.

If you're a jerk, and you make other custormers nervous, or you're rude to people, you'll find that that sort of behavior gets you thrown out, and thrown out permanently.

But jail time? A felony conviction? This is absolutely the most ridiculous thing imaginable!