ShadowProof – New Link

Kevin Gosztola has a project that’s very informative…

http://shadowproof.com/

Common Core the Horror Movie–But It’s Real

Arkansas Mom Exposes Common Core For The Nightmare It Is

This “Common Core” balderdash may be the coup de gras of the American experiment. The government just forced idiocy down the throats of a generation, while the rest of the world actually learns useful information. Such a grotesque betrayal of a nation is seldom seen. Someone with some sense is usually found somewhere in the chain? Right?

Expert Chroma Key Tips

This is everything you need to know about green/blue screens.

Unintentional Support for Sanders?

Counterpunch has been a blatherpocalypse these past few months. For and against Sanders has been the hot-button topic.

This dude, Andrew Stewart, makes a great case for Sanders by making it easy to reject the hair-brained communist-manifesto rhetoric of himself, Andrew Stewart:

“I am by choice one who describes his politics as anarcho-syndicalist, which I feel has a more tenable chance of being achieved in this country than the parliamentary road.”

So a flavor of anarchist, but he then goes on to praise the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in any number of ways, like that was a noteworthy success we might emulate, only to take it much further this time…?

Stewart says:

“The nationalization of the banks and socialization of the means of production are bare essentials of any real socialist program, regardless of ideological tendency.”

This is false, as Scandinavian countries, and most of the western world for that matter, instituted countless social assistance programs without doing either. The demand to seize the “means of production” in a sweeping totalitarian maneuver is so radical on its face, and so impossible in reality–not to mention undesirable–that it would force a society that resembles North Korea or STASI Germany in order to implement it!

Verdict: Andrew Stewart’s prescription for humanity is a kind of 19th century totalitarianism. His criticism of Sanders is that Bernie is in no position to upend the entire economy of the planet, use military force and come marching in some sort of revolution to please the handful of diehard communists (or anarchists? he seems confused) who will accept nothing less.

So, perhaps Bernie is doing something right.

Trump vs?

People may be shocked to hear what The Donald has been saying recently.

“They want to start World War III over Syria. Give me a break,” Trump said at the State Fairgrounds in Oklahoma City.

Trump: GOP rivals want to ‘start World War III over Syria’

“Obamacare’s going to be repealed and replaced. Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what’s going on with premiums where they’re up 40, 50, 55 percent,” replied Trump.

Is that even true? Anyone fact checking?

Trump continued, “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

Trump Proposes Replacing Obamacare with Government-Funded Universal Healthcare

Putin at the UN

Putin’s been consistent, forthright and on the side of International Law. The US has violated every International Law that exists with complete impunity for so long it’s absurd.

But we believe that attempts to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the United Nations are extremely dangerous. This can lead to the collapse of the entire architecture of international relations,” Putin said.In this case there would be no other rules left “but the rule of force,” he warned. The world would be dominated by “selfishness rather than collective work” and characterized by “dictate rather than equality.”

Note this phrasing:

“We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and [Kurdish] militia are truly fighting Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria,” he added.

Trevor Noah’s Big Moment

I clicked on this Bloomberg News provocative title to find a dozen incompetent grammatical errors. So, does the sloppiness of the author undermine the observations? This is relevant to how they’re all pre-judging Trevor Noah, who takes over at The Daily Show tonight.

Trevor Noah Finds Himself in a Political Straitjacket

I’m not a big fan of Jon Stewart, or The Daily Show, but he occasionally made good criticisms — and he occasionally pandered to war criminals. His mindless audience cheered for anything, like drones, head bobbers, a laugh track. It was all a bit surreal and dystopian.

But here is proof that Trevor Noah is a funny mother fucker.

Cowards, Pussies, Intellectual Midgets

We’ve entered the age of cowardly sniping, drone button-pushing without the possibility of retaliation. And I’m just referring to people shooting their mouths off in blissful ignorance, while hiding behind digital firewalls, banishing any and all critical responses to their moronic assertions.

The mouthpieces of the entrenched media don’t respond to the critics. They use the bully pulpit to advantage, and alternative voices are silenced by default. That’s the point of owning a media empire, and it’s not dialogue.

But this one-sided broadcast model has filtered down to every realm now. It’s a firewalled world. The ignorant remain unchallenged and hostile to alternative points of view, no matter how grotesquely wrong they happen to be.

The modern age is an insular, mindless exercise in edited perception. Even Facebook groups and message boards are heavily policed to avoid uncomfortable truths, and for the maintenance of whatever delusions prevail locally.

And it’s resulted in a pandemic of douchebaggery. These people cannot debate the most mundane, simple topics. They have no concept of logic, fallacy, evidence, accuracy, meaning, none of it. It has never mattered to them, and may never. They simply ban those who confront them with superior logic and facts.

This is the status quo today.

Decline of the western world?

It sure looks that way to me.

Wrecking Crew: The Unsung Musicians Behind the Hits

by Kim Niccolini

Last year, I bought my daughter a portable record player for her 16th birthday. She is fascinated with music from the early and mid-60s (the time when I grew up), and I thought listening to records of that music would be a great experience for her. I remembered how much joy I got out of my portable record player as a kid, so I wanted to share that joy with my daughter.

She loves her record player as much as I loved mine. Since I got it for her nearly a year ago, she has grown quite a collection of vinyl from re-issues to original releases that we have found at our local independent and used record stores. So along with an appreciation of vinyl, she has also learned to appreciate the record store (before it becomes another extinct artifact of Late Capitalism). Her collection includes all the Beatles albums (including a few original releases in pristine condition, of which she is mightily proud to own), Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Velvet Underground, the Mama & the Papas and Janis Joplin.

After seeing the movieLove & Mercy, my daughter developed a very strong identification with Brian Wilson, and Pet Sounds joined the ranks of her favorite albums of all time. A couple of weeks ago, we pulled her vinyl copy of Pet Sounds off the shelf and listened to it on her record player. The layers of sound are unbelievable. In the film Love & Mercy we see how Brian Wilson worked with studio musicians to create these sounds. He translated his fierce vision into complex layers of sound by working with a whole cadre of musicians who played everything from guitar to cello to bass, drums and saxophone. Hearing the album on vinyl and remembering the scenes in the movie with the studio musicians, the layers of orchestral under-sounds in Pet Sounds became even more mesmerizing.

After Pet Sounds, we pulled a Simon & Garfunkel album off the shelf. I placed the needle on the groove of the record, and we closed our eyes and listened. I hadn’t heard the album since I was a young girl of twelve. The first thing I noticed when I listened a couple of weeks ago was a complexity of sound that I never noticed before. It was especially notable coming directly on the heels of the Beach Boys. I said, “Wait a minute. Do you hear that? This album has the same level of complex sounds as Pet Sounds!”

A few days later I watched the documentary The WreckingCrew on Netflix. I learned of the film after writing about Love & Mercy when a friend mentioned I should watch the documentary about the band that played back-up on Pet Sounds. So I went into the movie thinking it was going to be about the band that played for the Beach Boys. What I didn’t know until watching this documentary is that The Wrecking Crew was the “back-up” band that literally defined a whole generation of music – the very music I grew up with in the 1960s. The reason the sounds on the Simon & Garfunkel album reminded me of Pet Sounds is because it is The Wrecking Crew playing the instruments on both records. It’s the same band, just different vocalists and songs.

The Wrecking Crew consisted of a group of musicians that backed songs from the top of the music charts of the 50s, 60s and 70s. They were responsible for Phil Spector’s groundbreaking “Wall of Sound” featured on such Spector enterprises as The Ronettes and The Crystals. But the Crew didn’t stop with Phil Spector. For nearly three decades, this uncredited band of musicians provided the pop sound that sold records by Elvis Presley, The Mamas & the Papas, the 5th Dimension, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, The Byrds, The Carpenters, Sam Cooke, Harry Nillson, Cher, The Monkees, and dozens of other musicians. Check out a sampling of Wrecking Crew songs here.

As I was watching the documentary, and the songs piled up, it was like flipping through the pop radio station dial on my portable radio when I was a kid. My daughter would squeal from the other room as one of her favorite tunes was sampled in the film. “I love that song!” I would chime in with, “I loved that song when I was a kid too!” What I didn’t know is how a specific sound manufactured by the Los Angeles music business was responsible for the soundtrack of my childhood and created by artists whose names I never knew until I watched this film.

Speaking of kids, the movie was made by Denny Tedesco, the son of one of the most hardworking members of the Wrecking Crew – guitarist Tommy Tedesco. The reason I don’t cite the date of the film during its first mention is because assigning a singular date to this movie would be as misleading as giving The Byrds credit for the music behind their hit single “Mr. Tambourine Man,” music which was played by The Wrecking Crew because The Byrds did not actually know how to play instruments when the song was released. The film took nearly two decades to make, and it was only with dedication, sweat, and a lot of scraped-together cash and materials that it ever was released to the public.

Good Kill Comes Up Short

Hollywood does drones in “Good Kill,” but misses the larger point

Red Strikes Back

 RED’s new Raven camera seeks to compete a bit cheaper. How much cheaper? Well not exactly cheap ($6-10k depending upon if you’d like it to actually work).

But it has the Dragon sensor, which has finally arrived with unbelievable dynamic range, plus 120 frames per second 4k footage??? This competes with the Blackmagic Ursa line and the Kinefinity cameras, plus those other more familiar brands.

Robert Rodriguez Spills All (podcast)

Robert Rodriguez Interview: How to Build a Filmmaking Empire