An instructional video of Hubert Sumlin playing some licks from Howlin’ Wolf’s best-known songs. Man, he could sure play some guitar! He died last December 4, and he will be missed. There is an All-Star Apollo Theater tribute to him, featuring Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Derek Trucks. RIP, Hubert Sumlin. I’m just sorry that I missed his passing at the time. I salute you, Hubert.

And the corporatocracy. This is long, but well worth viewing. If you would rather read it, the transcript is here.

For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.

America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.
With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.

In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.

I have nothing further to add to this. I think it says it all.

(1) The bandwidth they purchased is in the middle of the GPS bandwidth.

(2) When GPS was first invented, it had a problem – it tended to spread outside the frequency it was supposed to be using.  However, the military was anxious to have it, so the government didn’t care.  To make sure GPS didn’t effect anything else, they set aside a small section for that “spread”.  Because any high-powered signals in that area would interfere with GPS, the government limited it to only small-power applications.

(3) Lightsquared, who purchased that safety zone with the full knowledge that it could only be used for low-power applications, wants Congress to change that.  Lightsquared doesn’t have any low-power applications — it only has high-power usage.

(4) Now that GPS has better technology available, it doesn’t really need that bandwidth anymore, but older GPS units still need that protection.   In order for Lightsquared to use it the way they want, millions (or maybe billions) of dollars will have to be spent to back-fix the problem with the old units.

(5) Politicians in the pocket of GPS think that, since LightSquared knew they couldn’t use the bandwidth for high-powered applications when they bought it, there’s no issue unless Congress changes the rules. If Congress changes the rules after the fact, then they say either Congress or LightSquared should pay to fix the problem they caused by changing the rules. The politicians that are paid by LightSquared, however, think the GPS people should pay to fix their own problems.

In this day of corporate-owned politicians, it’ll be fun to watch and see which purchased legislators win the battle. How it turns out will depend on which group has the most power.  Lightsquared backed the Democrats.  Maybe they spent a billion dollars on a gamble that may not pay off.

Here at Left Perspectives and elsewhere on the web, the news story of the Florida woman who was critically injured after being tasered by a cop brought a lot of comments. Generally the opinions were that, while a “sad” outcome, she is a bad person and caused the situation and that removes fault from the officer. In this, yet another example of superficial thinking, comment threads displayed a widespread inability to see deeper implications. Even more ominous, the reaction to the story adds more evidence that we as a whole are simply not capable of acting in our own best interests.

I suspect that this post story will generate the same sentiments, that if a person is doing nothing wrong they won’t get into trouble and if they are doing something wrong, or maybe doing something wrong, they have no right to protection from, in this case, intrusive acts by authorities.

In likely a violation of the Constitution’s protections of privacy rights and against unreasonable search and seizure and self-incrimination, a Colorado woman, Ramona Fricosu, suspected of mortgage fraud has been ordered by a federal judge [U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn] to de-encrypt her laptop harddrive and hand it over to police. The de-encryption is required because privacy software is now so sophisticated that often even expert hackers can’t get in.

Analysts say the Fricosu case is unique because of a lack of precedent. One similar case involved a Vermont judge who ordered a child pornography defendant to decrypt his hard drive. In that case, however, authorities knew that child porn was on the computer because they had seen it before the computer was shut down.

In the Fricosu case, authorities do not know what is on the encrypted hard drive; they merely want to see if it contains any incriminating evidence.

Even if she asserts that she has forgotten her password, she could still end up in jail if the judge thinks she is making up the excuse. Fricosu’s attorney says, however, that a person cannot be held in contempt for being unable to comply with a judges order.

The government feels threatened by encryption, so it now wages a vigorous war against the right of computer owners to safeguard their privacy. Recently, the FBI identified people who use encryption as possible terrorists.

Now it looks like people can only assert the Fifth Amendment from a jail cell.

Source

Communities against Terrorism, an FBI and Homeland Security initiative helps define the kind of people whom the Obama regime consider a threat. A flyer distributed by these agencies identifies the following signs of a potential terrorist:

• Anonymizers
• Portals
• Other means to shield IP addresses
• The use of encryption
• Steganography,

Simply put, only terrorists want to be free.

Source

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a brief in the case arguing that if the government forces people to turn over their encryption passwords that it is forcing people to be witnesses against themselves in a way that violates the constitution.

Source

I write often of my faith in and even admiration of the majority of citizens of this country, and there is evidence to support my beliefs, but in understanding the threats against our rights and freedoms and actively working in an outspoken way to protect them…day by day, my enthusiasm dims

Obama

Completely different. I defy you to stay seated and not move your feet, at least, while listening to this. ;-)

Charlie Rich had a hard to pigeonhole musical talent, writing and performing songs that would range from country, gospel, pop, rockabilly, soul, jazz and blues – at times holding strictly to a specific genre, and at others blending those styles to new and exciting effect.  He is best known for the hits he had with Behind Closed Doors and The Most Beautiful Girl in the early ’70s.

His first group in the 50′s featured his soon to be wife, Margaret Ann, on lead vocals for the Velvetones, who focused on jazz and blues numbers.  Through the years, Margaret Ann would have a profound impact on Rich’s career, writing many great songs for Charlie.  Quite a few of those songs were covered by artists as diverse as Tom Jones and Bobby Bland.  Pass On By, which follows Rich’s cover of When Something’s Wrong With My Baby in the link is an additional example of her stellar talent.

It may not be political, but I just had to share it…

Singing the Bessie Smith song, “Kitchen Man.” This lady has some chops! Great voice! And she has some really great backing on this, too.

I think we all remember this incident from last November. The students were gathered peacefully in the school quad, demonstrating against the proposed tuition hike. They were not on a public street. They were on university grounds- the university that they were paying tuition to attend. Presumably, the tuition they are paying should allow them to gather peacefully in a public space at the school. They were sitting on the ground and refusing to move. The campus police pepper-sprayed them from a few feet away.

Documents subsequently received from the University of California indicate that the pepper spray used was military grade and, based on manufacturer instructions should be used from a minimum of six feet away – much farther than the close range at which the students were sprayed.

With the help of the ACLU of Northern California:

nineteen students and alumni filed a federal lawsuit against UC Davis over the University’s treatment of protesters during a Nov. 18 demonstration in which campus police were caught on video dousing seated protesters with pepper spray. The lawsuit seeks to determine why the University violated the demonstrators’ state and federal constitutional rights and seeks to result in better policies that will prevent repetition of such response to a non-violent protest. The lawsuit charges that Administration officials and the campus police department failed to properly train and supervise officers, resulting in series of constitutional violations against the demonstrators.

Thank you, ACLU, as you continue to stand up for our Constitutional rights.

Doesn’t that look tasty?  If Dutch scientists have anything to say about it, you may be eating it soon.  That 0.75 inch-long piece of string is actually a piece of cloned muscle.  They’re hoping to be able to turn that idea into a synthetically-grown, real-meat hamburger by the end of the year.  The idea is to replace the current meat industry and stop the significant environmental damage caused by raising food animals.

Addressing a meeting of scientists in Canada, Maastricht researcher Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by as much as 60 percent.

“We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources,” he said.

Food scientists say current methods of meat production cannot be sustained, so lab-grown meat is a perfect solution.  There’s been no word about whether or not vegetarians would want to eat this processed meat, but I don’t doubt the marketing plan is already being laid.  The future of meat may very well be in those petri dishes, but I, for one, plan to pass up this particular Dutch treat.

Little Jimmy Scott was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 17th, 1925, the third of ten children.  Scott has Kallman’s syndrome, which is a genetic condition that involves an inability to perceive odors (ansomia or hyposmia) as well as delayed puberty.  This resulted in Jimmy Scott’s height remaining 4’11″ until he was 37 years old, at which point he had a growth spurt of 8″.  Around the age of 13, Jimmy’s mother Justine Scott had her arm ripped out of the socket while saving her daughter from a speeding drunk driver.  She died from blood loss.  The driver, who was wealthy, gave $50K to the family, money which a judge placed in trust for the orphaned children.  However the children, who were placed in orphanages and foster homes, never saw any of that money.

“Jimmy Scott can touch you in your deepest parts and even find spots that you never know you had. He sings the slow notes slower than anyone else and he has a way of bending notes that is uncanny. It’s like he is trying to find out how much he can control and try a note without messing up his perfect pitch. He sings behind the beat further than anyone else ever could and every time I’m certain that he finally gets too far back, he returns somehow.“

The NYPD says that counseling services are readily available for any officer who feels they need it, and have actually implemented a program of peer-counseling. But wouldn’t the simple act of seeking help for depression call into question an officer’s job capability? Wouldn’t that make most officers, even if they recognized they had a problem, afraid to come forward and seek help for fear of losing their job, or simply being ridiculed, pitied, or seen as weak, by their fellow officers?

This is by no means isolated to the NYPD. It is a nationwide epidemic. On average, there are around 300 reports of police officer suicides every year. That is nearly twice the number who die in the line of duty. Many police officer suicides go unreported or are just classified as accidental discharges of their firearms, because they don’t want to stigmatize the family or bring unwarranted attention to the issue, mainly to protect that thin blue line.

It is a problem that can’t improve without significant awareness and attention from on high. Not to mention, the recent images of police abuse from the Occupy protests do nothing to help their cause, and can only contribute to their level of stress and distrust from the public. A change in the very culture of law enforcement, that needs to alter the fundamental core of how these organizations operate, is going to be required. Perhaps we even need to examine how working people often have no choice but to work themselves beyond their limits, just to be considered adequate at their job. A good place to start, I think, would be to stop treating police like they are military forces.

Related articles

• NYPD: On-Duty Officer Commits Suicide In Queens (newyork.cbslocal.com)