Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Just ask the axis

We caught the Hendrix Experience show at the Rady Shell last night. 

It was really good for me, a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. 

If you are not it might have been a bit much.

There is a fluid roster of performers at the various shows on this tour, we did not see Robby Krieger or Samantha Fish.

But what we did see was mostly very, very good.

It was a gray and foggy evening down at the Convention Center. 

The blue shell juxtaposed beautifully with the monochromatic background.

Some people really got into the spirit of the thing and wore swinging sixties psychedelic duds.

I saw some cool madras bell bottoms.

The music?

I loved it. 

My favorite was Eric Johnson, so smooth, elegant and sublime. 

Kenny Wayne Shepherd was a powerhouse. 

His vocalist Noah was the best singer of the night.

Dweezil Zappa was great, the lap steel guys the slide brothers were great, Taj was great, Kingfish was great. Ayron Jones was really good.

If you are a Hendrix style gunslinger getting up on this stage you better be able to play.

Who wasn't great?

Zkk Wylde, Ozzy's ex guitar player, is not particularly to my taste.

Leslie thought we were watching Spinal Tap.

Pointy guitar shredder, metal guy, flexing, playing with his teeth and behind his neck, very hard for me and the people sitting next to me to sit through.

But I am sure some people loved him, just not my bag.

Mitch Mitchell was my all time favorite drummer. The drummer last night was not Mitch Mitchell (but who is?) in fact he had very little energy at all.

But all in all a great time with friends, was gifted upgrade seats, all good.

Backlit Buteo

 

Jefferson Airplane

Now and a little then

Beth and Beth are in Scotland for the Porridge Festival. She sent this note:

Was in the Isle of Skye yesterday. The cows are specially bred small because big cows would sink in the soft ground.

Carrbridge. People bring dogs and kids to the pub. I had Haggis lasagna. It was so good but I couldn't finish it. 

Well, it certainly looks lovely. Not sure about the haggis but I love menudo and it can't be much grosser to some people.

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Leslie found a cute praying mantis on our back wall. She took a video of it cleaning itself up but it is unfortunately too long for this platform.

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The scarecrow people did an extra great job this year. I love this octopus at the coffee place formerly known as the hearth.

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Dr. Neon had an epic 71st birthday party. 

I brought a friend who was worried that he was going to get dosed and said that he felt like he was at a Jefferson Airplane concert. 

He should be so lucky...

I had to tell him that we are all too old for that sort of stuff nowadays.

Very fun bunch. Lots of local and Laguna color.

Met some interesting people too.

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Had a nice dinner at Cork and Fire with Greg, Ed, Shepard and Leslie.

Greg and Ed brought two really nice bottles of wine.

Nice restaurant, we sometimes forget about it.

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I visited my friend Chuck's house recently and he showed me a guitar that once belonged to Fleetwood Mac's Jeremy Spencer.

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Big Dave sends pics from 44 years ago this week outside of the Warfield for the Dead's 15 show run in 1980.

I went to a whole mess of them, don't remember the exact count.

But the cool thing was delivering artwork to Jerry before the show, concept drawings and a painting for the new album cover painted by my friend Rick Griffin.

We had ourselves a really nice long chat, first of several.

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Happy New Year to all of my Jewish friends and brethren!

Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me - Ella Fitzgerald

Poison Profiteers

 

Your tax dollars at work. Chinese company Syngenta goes after pesticide researchers with your money.

The profiling is part of an effort – that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars – to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports.

It collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the publication of this investigation.

The efforts were spearheaded by a “reputation management” firm in Missouri called v-Fluence. The company provides services that it describes as “intelligence gathering”, “proprietary data mining” and “risk communications”.

The revelations demonstrate how industry advocates have established a “private social network” to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops in Africa, Europe and other parts of the world, while also denigrating organic and other alternative farming methods.

More than 30 current government officials are on the membership list, most of whom are from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Records show that Jay Byrne, a former Monsanto executive and founder of v-Fluence, led the effort. Byrne advised US officials and attempted to sabotage opposition to products created by the world’s largest agrochemical companies.

He and v-Fluence are named as co-defendants in a case against the Chinese-owned agrochemical firm Syngenta. They are accused of helping Syngenta suppress information about risks that the company’s paraquat weedkillers could cause Parkinson’s disease, and of helping “neutralize” its critics. (Syngenta denies there’s a proven causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s.) 

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The network can't be publicly accessed because it blocks Google. 

Reputation-management company chief Jay Byrne, the brains behind Bonus Eventus, has years of experience working for the chemical industry and government.

Public spending records show his company v-Fluence received subcontracts funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) worth more than $400,000 from approximately 2013 through 2019 for services that included counteracting "opportunistic stakeholders" critical of "modern agriculture approaches" in Africa and Asia.

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The making of an Agribusiness Apologist - Mother Jones 

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Meet Jay Byrne

... George Monbiot described a covert tactic that agrichemical corporations and their PR operatives have been using for decades to promote and defend their products: creating fake personalities and fake websites to silence critics and influence online search results.

Monbiot reported that “fake citizens” (people who did not actually exist) “had been bombarding internet listservers with messages denouncing the scientists and environmentalists who were critical of GM crops” – and the fake citizens had been traced back to Monsanto’s PR firm Bivings. 

“At the end of last year, Jay Byrne, formerly [Monsanto’s] director of internet outreach, explained to a number of other firms the tactics he had used at Monsanto. He showed how, before he got to work, the top GM sites listed by an internet search engine were all critical of the technology. Following his intervention, the top sites were all supportive ones (four of them established by Monsanto’s PR firm Bivings). He told them to ‘think of the internet as a weapon on the table. Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed.’

Freedom to lie

I didn't watch too much of last night's debate but one interchange really bothered me. Vance was asked about certifying the last election and this is what we got:

"You have said you would not have certified the last presidential election, and would have asked the states to submit alternative electors. That has been called unconstitutional and illegal,” moderator Norah O’Donnell said to Vance. “Would you again seek to challenge this year’s election results, even if every governor certifies the results?”

Vance said that instead of the threats to democracy decried by Democrats, what’s really worrying is the threat of “big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens.” Vance said Harris would like to “censor people who engage in misinformation,” which he described as “a much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen” in the last four or 40 years.

This has been a popular topic on the part of many on the right of late, the right to engage in patently and often knowingly false information. The Alex Jones types who push theories that school shootings are staged, the Q Anon nonsense that liberals are harvesting christian children's blood at pizza parlors, the ridiculous drivel from Stone, Giuliani, RFK jr. and Bannon.

So now the enemy is fact checking and those that would interfere in our freedom to prevaricate. The GOP thinks we need to make a stand for misinformation. They are even targeting researchers studying the subject. And they are bummed when reporters call them on their bull crap, witness last night:

Republicans are crying foul after CBS' Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan, one of two debate moderators for the vice presidential showdown on Tuesday, fact-checked false claims by Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, that "illegal immigration" was the root cause of a crisis in Springfield, Ohio.

Vance himself admitted in the past that he was "creating a story" about Haitian immigrants to draw attention to the apparent suffering of his constituents, who now face bomb threats from people who think Springfield is the epicenter of immigrant pet-eating and other crimes.

The right wing wants the freedom to lie and they say that it is a matter of their freedom of speech. I think it merits jail terms. We the American people should not be "down with dissembling."

60 minutes ran a story earlier this year on this topic which I think was good and accurate. Misinformation is largely coming from one direction, the right.

"We were very specifically looking at misinformation about election processes, procedures and election results," said Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington and a leader of the Election Integrity Partnership, a group she helped launch in 2020. "If we saw something about that, we would pass it along to the platforms if we thought it violated one of their policies."

Researchers flagged a November 2020 tweet saying that election software in Michigan switched 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Twitter labeled the post with a warning.

Starbird said her research has found that more misinformation is spread by conservatives. 

And GOP leadership is clearly down with it if it serves their ends.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, argues that tech companies shouldn't remove most of what they call misinformation. 

"I think you let the American people, respect the American people, their common sense, to figure out what's accurate, what isn't," Jordan said in an interview.

While Jordan acknowledges there is misinformation online, he sees a bigger problem in what he views as an attack on First Amendment liberties. His committee last year produced a report that concluded there was a "censorship industrial complex" where the federal government and tech companies colluded with academic researchers to disproportionately silence conservatives — an allegation that Starbird vigorously denies. 

Do you respect the American people's ability to figure out what is accurate? I thought I did, until one party decided to deliberately form their base from a demographic of uneducated people who never went to college. 

The Ignorance Party.

Flat earthers who think Elvis is still alive out there with JFK Jr. and calling the shots from their bunker somewhere. A plurality of Republicans do not believe in evolution, or climate change for that matter. You know, the earth is less than six thousand years old and Jesus rode a pet dinosaur.

You certainly have a right to believe in anything you want and I have the right to think you are batshit crazy as well as incredibly ignorant.

But neither of us have the right to broadcast knowing lies and misinformation that is not clearly parody. There are too many people who lack critical thinking skills and will believe anything they are told to believe. 

And that is why Covid mortality rates were so much higher in areas where people refused to vaccinate, wear masks or not congregate on Sundays.

The United States experienced 1 277 697 excess deaths between March 2020 and July 2023. Almost 90% of these deaths were attributed to COVID-19, and 51.5% occurred after vaccines were available. The highest excess death rates first occurred in the Northeast and then shifted to the South and Mountain states. Between weeks ending June 20, 2020, through March 19, 2022, excess death rates were higher in states with Republican governors and greater Republican representation in state legislatures.

Oh wait, I know. That's just another lie. Jim Jordan told you so.

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Make them riot.

Parchman Farm

Fox in the henhouse

There is an interesting article at Bloomberg, Boar's Head disaster shows the price of deregulation.

This summer, Boar’s Head Provisions Co. entered the recent pantheon of companies, alongside Boeing Co. and Abbott Laboratories, that could’ve used a little more oversight for their own good. The deli food giant spent more than a century building itself into a nationwide leader across multiple product categories only to torch its reputation over the past few months with tainted deli meat. A listeria outbreak that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked to unsanitary conditions in the company’s Jarratt, Virginia, plant has killed 10 people and sickened far more, prompting multiple lawsuits and a promised congressional investigation. Boar’s Head has announced it will close the affected plant, wiping out more than 200 jobs in a small town that depended on it, according to the New York Times.

Ten people dead from Boar's Head products. I didn't know that, did you?

The cry from the GOP that ripples through their talking points and their Project 2025 handbook, is to open it up and get the government off businesses backs. They can police themselves, right?

They can't and they don't.

This is a Robert Reich opinion piece that is a year and a half old but still salient, Republican Deregulation Is Dragging Us Back to the 19th Century. It is still worth reading, the whole thing, not just what I have excerpted and highlighted.

I'm not surprised that migrant children who have been coming into the United States from Latin America without their parents, fleeing violence and poverty, have ended up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country. And I'm not surprised that a train carrying dangerous chemicals derailed, causing a toxic plume that is sickening people in Ohio. In fact, I'm not surprised that corporate greed is making life dangerous for ever greater numbers of people.

I saw it when I was secretary of labor in the early 1990s, overseeing enforcing the nation's labor laws. The department had only 1,100 inspectors responsible for the health and safety of 130 million workers, including any children who might be working illegally in dangerous conditions. And not even the biggest penalty we could impose was high enough to deter companies that treated such fines as the cost of doing business.

The labor department is still woefully understaffed and penalties are still too low. Every time the department's budget is up for review, members of Congress—mostly though not entirely Republicans—refuse to appropriate enough funds for inspectors or to increase penalties.

So of course migrant children coming into the United States, fleeing violence and poverty, have ended up in dangerous jobs. In Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina, young children are working in slaughterhouses. In Michigan, young children are making auto parts used by Ford and General Motors. In Virginia, girls as young as 13 are washing hotel sheets. In Florida and Tennessee, 12-year-olds are doing roofing jobs. In South Dakota, children are sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts.

Unfortunately we can't trust businesses to police themselves . And I don't think we can trust the Elon Musks of the world to run our space programs or Starlink, where he can show favoritism to Putin and his right wing cronies and punish Ukraine.

Mark Cuban did a good job showing the world what a liar Musk is this week.

“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform that’s lost nearly 80% of its value since he took over.

He then asserted, without any evidence, that Democrats are flying immigrants “directly into swing states” who are then “fast-tracked to citizenship” for the purpose of altering the outcome of the election.

The claim is false.

It turns out that noncitizens must first spend at least five years as a lawful permanent resident before they’re  eligible for naturalization, Musk’s conspiracy theory would have had to begin during the Trump administration to bear any meaningful fruit. (The average number of years in the U.S. for citizens naturalized in 2023 was actually longer: seven years.)

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the top 10 states where people who were naturalized last year reside are: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia . 

Nine-tenths of those are not swing states. Pennsylvania, the lone exception, only accounted for 2.8% of those naturalized in 2023. More than 50% live in California, Texas, Florida and New York.

Musk’s rant also caught the eye of Mark Cuban, who fact-checked Musk using Twitter’s own “anti-woke” AI chatbot Grok, which Musk concocted after finding competitors were too politically liberal.

“Hey [Elon Musk], truly appreciate the work you have done with [Grok].” Cuban wrote to Musk in a public message. “It’s a great way to factcheck you.”

Cuban then shared a link to Grok’s lengthy analysis of Musk’s claim.

The chatbot concluded that Musk’s xenophobic theory “contains exaggerated claims and speculative fears rather than factual analysis,” and was “presented in an alarmist and overly deterministic manner.”

I could have told you.

We need government regulation. It protects our food, our drugs, our water, our air, our soil. As bloated and inefficient as they admittedly are, I trust the regulators a hell of a lot more than I trust big business.

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Third Teen Worker Killed In Industrial Accident As States Try To Loosen Child Labor Laws

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Seven ways the Trump administration deregulated the food system during the Covid 19 pandemic.

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The Republican party puts polluters over people.

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Trump administration rolled back over 100 environmental laws.

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Party of pollution, disease and death

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Immigrant child laborers are being killed in US factories. Companies are walking away with fines.