Steve Paul: A new look at the life and contradictions of Thomas Hart Benton (KC Star review): http://t.co/rLkBm3i6 #books #kc #arts

Greg Wilder: Machine Politics: The man who started the hacker wars. http://t.co/ZDlCO6qF

Flip Gaming: Before There Was The Hunger Games, Japan Had This Brutal, Bloody Opus http://t.co/GqAimX0Y

Michael Nyman: Michael Nyman shared a link.

Wired: A U.S. District judge refuses record industry requests to shut down ReDigi, and online market for pre-owned MP3s http://t.co/IWo4QP8M

GigaOM: Are small businesses ready for big data? Um, yes http://t.co/BNzZfGXp

La Angelena: RT @KCETDepartures How did Bunker Hill lose its grand Victorian mansions? Blame Harry Truman: http://t.co/X5sjAvJ7 [& Housing Act of 1949]

Slate: RT @danratherreport: From Dan: This is a must-read. Wish I could go on the air & read it aloud http://t.co/fCMPKTKO

Rupert Colley: Stunning Olympic moment: Hungary v Soviet Union: http://t.co/R79S4FrW via @guardian #coldwar

Pablo Defendini: RT @debcha: RT @jkleske: 5 Years After Banning Outdoor Ads, Brazil's Largest City Is More Vibrant Than Ever http://t.co/fjJYJ3Yf /via @mountain_goats

The New Yorker: Daily Comment: Toobin: The voting-rights fight gives Eric Holder a chance to define his legacy as Attorney General: http://t.co/XNLHL2sH

marc maron: I wound up using this as the cast iron resource. Got a lot of advice but this seemed solid and it seems to have worked. http://t.co/1YNERSpl

misc resources for garage band video projects (via download)

garage band film score project lesson plan

This was an assignment I gave to my clever year 8 music class. We were studying Film Music and what better way to consolidate our learning?
They loved composing sound effects and film textures for this clip from Kung Fu Panda. Some went so far as to rewrite actual score parts as well as importing traditional chinese MIDI pieces into garageband for editing.

If you want to use GarageBand to do film scoring, try using a very simple setup.
Create only one musical cue at a time.
When you are finished with each cue, export it as an audio file. Start the audio file at the beginning of the movie. Each audio file will have long silence from the beginning of the movie to the start of the cue. That's no problem.
Finally when all the cues are finished, mix all the audio clips together just by dragging them all to a blank GarageBand project and start them all at the beginning of the movie.

You can send an iMovie project from iMovie to GarageBand. When you send an iMovie
project, GarageBand opens and a new project is created that contains the iMovie
project. If GarageBand is already open, the current project closes before the new
project is created.

How to score a movie in Garage Band; learn how to create your own electronic music in this free instructional video

To suggest a grim sense of national dysfunction and the unraveling of the American Dream circa 1974, two documents from these controversial former Presidents introduce the show.

To suggest a grim sense of national dysfunction and the unraveling of the American Dream circa 1974, two documents from these controversial former Presidents introduce the show.

Each week we open our mic to readers and lurkers alike to come out of the woodwork and tell us your thoughts and opinion, your experiences and mistakes, what you love and what you hate. We want to hear from you, and here’s your chance.

We’re getting ready to update our lists of recommended websites, and we’d love your input. This week we’ll focus on guitars. Which websites would you tell every guitar player to bookmark?

Jack Schofield: Neal Stephenson Talks About Video Games, The Metaverse, And His New Book, REAMDE -- Forbes http://t.co/8cWpJBjj

John and Ken, who have been mocking the movement on their conservative radio show, receive a mixed response by demonstrators at City Hall.

Conservative talk radio hosts John and Ken showed up at Occupy L.A. for a live broadcast Thursday, setting off a chaotic scene of jostling and shouting. If their aim was to provoke, they succeeded.

"The writings of Philip Dick have deserved at least a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized, still it is only by brute force that they can be jammed into that pulp of materials, destitute of intellectual value and original structure, which makes up SF. Its fans are attracted by the worst in Dick—the typical dash of American SF, reaching to the stars, and the headlong pace of action moving from one surprise to the next—but they hold it against him that, instead of unraveling puzzles, he leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange. Yet his bizarre blendings of hallucinogenic and palingenetic techniques have not won him many admirers outside the ghetto walls, since there readers are repelled by the shoddiness of the props he has adopted from the inventory of SF. Indeed, these writings sometimes fumble their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as it often happens at the sight of a lone imagination's efforts to cope with a shattering superabundance of opportunities—efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory."

"Did that depress you? Now, here comes the good news: exactly because everyone seemingly performs to the lowest still acceptable standards, all you have to do as an artist is to unleash disproportional waves of creativity. Since nothing promises secure success anymore, all considerations to what “works in the marketplace” can be freely dumped and forgotten. The more out there you get, the better. It’s the only way to stand out in a totally dull environment. The advantage is, put cynically, that the old channels are jammed. Whoever tries to break through them following “proven” old ways (which usually means emulating other people’s career paths) is wasting time and energy. We can’t learn much from studying the careers of Carl Craig or Ricardo Villalobos anymore because the conditions that enabled them don’t exist any more. The channels that do work are found elsewhere and are open to those who possess endurance, individuality and substance — the values that are disappearing most rapidly now."

"Against the regulatory and market models we have to formulate alternative models of the university – two in particular. First, the university should be viewed as a critical public sphere in which there is indeed discussion among academics about the nature of the university and its place in society. The recent outpouring of books, discussions, blogs about the university suggest that there is a lively debate about the fate of the university, but it has to happen across disciplines. The humanities cannot confine their defense as repositories of wisdom for the education of responsible citizens – though they must do that – they have also to inject a critical and reflective moment into the discussion about the fate of the university."

The best reporting thus far on the inmate hunger strike that originated in the Pelican Bay SHU—or Special Housing Unit—came from California Watch reporter Michael Montgomery, whose latest story ran on Tuesday in his series on the strike—what it meant, who is behind it, and whether it accomplished anything. One thing you should know is that [...]

a horrifying look at what can happen when the far right takes control of political institutions by legal means

"I decided to write myself a codes of conduct:

- I really thank you for helping me. I will work my arse off to make sure the business will take off, and I can pay you fairly

- I will also find ways to compensate you for the mistreatment.

- When I talk about shares/options, I am serious. I am not trying to con you to be a low-paid slave. I want to share our prosperity and success with you when the time comes.

- If you are an investor, and you think I should pay people peanuts to maximize your investment. Please go away. I disrespect you.

- Finally, thank you thank you thank you. Thank you for believing in me. I will not disappoint you."

The Onion: Seeing Eye Dog Really Blows Off Some Steam In Dog Park http://t.co/4SKSdGE

"NR: Who contributes to Ubu, and how is it curated?

KG: Ubu doesn’t generate any of its own content. Instead, films and sounds are taken from very exclusive file-sharing groups and released to the public. The decision as to what goes on Ubu is made by the section’s curator, or by me. There is no committee, no discussion. Whatever we think is good goes on the site"

"Anyone who has watched the legislative process in Sacramento has witnessed the obvious: Newly elected lawmakers start plotting to capture their next office even before they're sworn in to the one they've just won."

"They're running all the time, for one office or another," complains Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

"Mexico’s carnage is that of the age of effective global government by multinational banks – banks that, according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have been for years kept afloat by laundering drug and criminal profits. Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it – and politicians could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the good burgers of capitalism and their political quislings depend on this money, while bleating about the evils of drugs cooked in the ghetto and snorted up the noses of the rich.

So Mexico’s war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion – but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. Twelve years ago Cardona and the writer Charles Bowden curated a book called Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. They could not have known how prescient their title was. In a recent book, Murder City, Bowden puts it another way: “Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order.”

"Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection."

Soon, though, the true story comes out: the one about how the real power behind the push to end swipe fees is not Mom and Pop at the General Store, but some of the biggest multinational retailers in the world -- small-business-eating godzillas like Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Home Depot -- armed with some of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington.

Bloomberg, not surprisingly, fails to mention this truism: Despite the saccharine rhetoric to the contrary, executives from huge corporation don't altruistically deploy political and financial muscle on behalf of customers -- as is their fiduciary responsibility, they deploy it in search of cold, hard profit for shareholders. But frankly, that fact doesn't have to be explicitly stated -- after a few throwaway lines about "small businesses," the story makes clear that the swipe-fee fight was actually all about "how far the richest interest groups" "are willing to "go when a single decision puts billions of dollars up for grabs."

"Now, many years later, I'm finishing my degree at a certain highly ranked CUNY college on the Upper East Side, with kids who are mostly fresh out of the NYC public school system. The difference is unmistakable. My new, poor classmates lack that degree of polish and sophistication — they know nothing about art or politics and a lot about TV and videogames — but they're smart, motivated, interested, respectful of one another and of the teachers, and love to sit around talking about books, movies, politics, etc. etc., and are filled with ambition and enthusiasm for their careers in a way that is noncompetitive and highly supportive of one another. I could not be happier with the academic environment. My tuition is approximately 5% of what it was at my old school, and I'm getting ten times the education, because not only are the teachers fantastic but there's an amazing value placed on learning by the students themselves, and to me that has made all the difference in the world."

"This is just one of those photo series' that is so random but interesting and almost bizarre that we had to post it. Photographer Anna Skladmann has spent years chronicling and spending time with the children of the super rich of Russia, creating this series of the mini-wealthy. (We credit Spiegel Online for that line). "

"The higher the quality of input to this training process, the higher quality the resulting engine can translate. So the increasing amount of “polluted drinking water” is becoming more statistically relevant. Over time, instead of improving each time more machine learning data is added, the opposite can occur....This results in potentially lower quality translations over time, rather than improvements."

"Let’s put it this way, till about 1980 every European performance of my music was a disaster, almost every single time. Well, time passes, a new generation of musicians grows up listening to the recordings, their teachers have played some of my music and now they play it beautifully. "

"…a practice of some kind … It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. … And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process."

The Zapatista’s themselves were comparatively dismissive of the military aspect of their struggle. Their spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos said “We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.”

In a 1995 letter to the Mexican and international left Marcos explained “It is not our arms which make us radical; it is the new political practice which we propose and in which we are immersed with thousands of men and women in Mexico and the world: the construction of a political practice which does not seek the taking of power but the organization of society.”

"DFW: Well, those are the two possibilities. Either American voters will figure out that there need to be some counterbalances to corporate and capitalist forces, and that balance can be achieved through political process. Or we may very well end up here with a form of fascism. Many people in America throw the term “fascism” around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state. We could be entering a period much like the period Russia went through [for] much of the twentieth century, with a great deal of repression and hollowness and artificiality of the culture."