Art Neville (December 17, 1937 – July 22, 2019)

Musicological Note

Here's a recent conversation (accessible for the next few weeks) on Tom Mazzollini's long-running Blues By The Bay radio program about Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick and their great, unfinished project meant to document the rise and spread of African American vernacular musics in Texas. It is now available, for a price, in the recently published Blues Comes To Texas.

Hearing Chris Strachwitz (who has never been too far wrong about American vernacular music) enthuse about this book is all the convincing I need.

Did Epstein Ever Put The Make On Ivanka?

It would be irresponsible not to speculate. She was just the right age.

Critics Corner

World War II did not lead to a wave of great literature, especially given its overwhelming importance in the twentieth century. But it sure led to a wave of great film.

Eric Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money

Loomis is right. In spite of attempts by commenters to compile a list of great WWII literature, there was no wave of great literature conveying those events equivalent to the wave of great film produced over the course of the past sixty years.

A list, even a big list, is not a wave.

Nevertheless I searched in vain for a comment mentioning Gravity's Rainbow, which is great and literature and seems to be about WWII, more or less, as I recall. Strange that it doesn't immediately come to mind.

João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira (June 10, 1931-July 6, 2019)

Van Morrison Almost

Independence Day

Name That Camp

A History of Concentration Camps in the US

Mandatory Quadrennial Color Calibration

Azaleas, 2015

Econ Wan Oh One

What will one pound be worth, post-Brexit, should Britain chose to stiff the EU for the costs it must bear for removing itself from the union? Asking for a friend.

The Future of the Future In End-Times Rhetoric

Jupiter is almost four times farther away from earth than the earth is from the sun. Neptune is about 28 times farther from earth than earth is from the sun. Neptune is far, far away. To arrive in good order at Neptune would be a prodigious achievement on the part of humanity. Who's to say it's achievable?

I find myself, even in my senescence, leaning pro-Neptune.

Of Which The Moon Is A Part

"I'll take, The sky seen from Mars for $4000, Alex," he said.

"No, I'm sorry, that would be, The Solar System … ah, wait, we have a judges' ruling that the Moon is unquestionably a part of the sky seen from Mars, so we'll allow that answer as well. Congratulations for playing Make Sense of THIS!"

Dr. John, November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019

Betterment

…

When men of science envisage a possibility of this kind, they are prone to a type of fallacy which is common also in other directions. They imagine that a reform inaugurated by men of science would be administered as men of science would wish, by men similar in outlook to those who have advocated it. In like manner women who advocated votes for women used to imagine that the woman voter of the future would resemble the ardent feminist who won her the vote; and socialist leaders imagine that a socialist State would be administered by idealistic reformers like themselves. These are, of course, delusions; a reform, once achieved, is handed over to the average citizen.

—Bertrand Russell, ICARUS or The Future of Science, 1924

And the average citizen, distracted by more immediate concerns, willingly passes administration of the reformed matter over to all the same people who cared enough to fight over the reform in the first place.

Yes, If You Were Asking, That's A War Crime

Duncan Hunter figures he killed hundreds of civilians in Fallujah.

“Quote from Rebecca Solnit,” with explanation of Rebecca Solnit for readers not familiar with Rebecca Solnit.

Explaining San Francisco, a city located on the west coast of the United States, but also in the imagination of the culture, by using a set of algorithms drawn by a bot.

"Lieutenant Slaughter was remembered in the name of a city and a county in Washington Territory, but citizens renamed the city Auburn and the county Kitsap"

I lived in Steilacoom, WA, while stationed at Ft. Lewis, so the story of Slaughter as told by Ulysses Grant and the expansion of its punchline here have a special resonance.

The room I rented overlooked a southern limb of Puget Sound in an old failed hotel that had, it was claimed, once sheltered Grant himself on the Pacific Northwest leg of his post-presidential grand tour of the world.

Update

Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eclipsed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history.

—msn.com

Eleven years ago the hope was to keep the CO2 level in Earth's atmosphere under 350 parts per million to avoid the foreseeable catastrophic consequences of permitting any greater concentration. Eleven years on and we are farther away from that goal than we have ever been in what passes for history among the humans.

The Meaning Of The Document Always Resides Outside The Document, Where It May Be Contested

The Mueller Report is a fundamentally conservative document produced by a fundamentally unobjectionable conservative high ranking career Republican Justice Department/FBI functionary named, not coincidentally, Robert Mueller.

There is enormous restraint in the ambit of Mueller's investigation, tracks leading down avenues some of which he notes but does not pursue, matters which by the generous terms of his remit would be within his right to examine, but nevertheless leaving him with two sore points, the nature and extent of Russian encroachment in the conduct of the 2016 presidential election, and the multitudinous efforts of the President of the United States to undermine that investigation, once begun.

He scrupulously draws within the lines he has created for himself, and comes up with a handful of times the president has quite evidently committed obstruction of justice.

Playing by what he notes are the established rules of the Justice Department, Mueller does not formally indict the President for criminality. He simply points the way.

The currently released redacted version of The Special Counsel's Report, the document itself, violates established Department of Justice requirements as set out by Section 508 in particular, requiring the Department to publish documents in formats which employ various electronic technologies that aid in their accessibility, search functions and the like, are unavailable in the document as released by William Barr's Department of Justice, which is instead made up of a set of rude snapshots of what were once pages in a PDF, a format which fully supports all those assistive requirements of Section 508.

Removing those requirements in the version offered to Congress and the public was the responsibility of Barr and presumably Rosenstein as they worked to redact what they could of Mueller's work with the tools they had at hand.

Who Knew Coups News?

Today at the NRA convention, Donald Trump made preposterous claims about a coup against his presidency that outranked NRA chief Wayne LaPierre's claims about a coup against his own presidency at the same convention. Lot of couping going on there.

Your Simile of the Week Award

One of the most common misunderstandings about Dumb Guys is that they are not capable of doing things. This is false. They can and in fact absolutely love to do complicated-sounding things like scheme and intrigue. They may not do those things well, and will generally do them in arbitrary and ineffective ways. But they will attack the work of scheming and maneuvering and infighting with all the vigor of a dog trying to carry a too-big tree branch through a doorway.

—David Roth

Previously

July, 2001

Dismay

***BREAKING*** Must Credit Quotidian

Apparently, in spite of months spent on the task, Donald Trump cannot be exonerated by the Special Counsel appointed to look into his dealings.

The First Aside of the 2020 Presidential Race

Say what you will about Joe Biden, he spearheaded the bankruptcy bill that made it to the desk and signature of George W. Bush, that effectively indentured a generation of student loan recipients to decades of ineradicable debt payment, itself a mere sidelight to the bill's main aim, removing historic bankruptcy protections from a broad range of consumers.

So there's that.

Long Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away

Guantanamo