A Toxic Gas Chamber

So "Snarky Pundit" and "Storm is Coming" keep posting on my Facebook feed.  I agree with most of what they are saying.  It is a shite state of affairs.  There was a post with an article from 2010 listing the six large 'mega-corporations.'  I am familiar with most of them, and I have been railing against them for years.  I don't much like Rupert and his gang.  An Aussie from down under doesn't have much insight into the workings of America.  Put some shrimp on the barbie, R., but your news is not good news.  It is a corporate monopoly.  Why would anyone want to own everything?  Jesus Christ.  Talk about ego.  When I was in high school, a time I don't reminisce about often, competition was great.  At the great Terry Sanford High School, FTS, the educational system was functioning at an efficient rate.  John Sasser was the principal.  He was tough.  He was strict, and the education you received was coveted.  Likewise at UNC-Chapel Hill back in the day, your education there was exemplar and coveted.  I'm not sure that is true today, but education in general in America is a pale, polluted, distant shadow of its former self.  Lolita.  Pale, polluted and distant Lolita still maintained the immense power always she possessed.  It is a kind of spiritual quality, one of which I am aware.  I have had it at times.  The last few days it has been absent with a capital A.  I guess I am an egotist for saying I once had the Mojo.  In the field of music you must.  It is called talent.  America does not have talent.  No longer, and all of the imported exploitative television programming which is stroking families, not paying professionals, and robbing the arts of their true history needs to be chucked.  I'm not sure, but it may only be in America we have become this selfish, immediate, and shallow.  Then again our ability once to excel from our environment has ceased.  Our environment no longer supports us.  It supports industry.  It supports big business.  It supports mega-corporations.  It supports government.  It supports the military, but it does not support citizens.  Washington, at the behest of the Koch operation, General Electric, defense contractors and the rest are trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.  Our blood, and there is none to be had.  It has been clear to me all along.  It is called Fascism, and it is not far in our past.  The genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany was less than a century ago.  That atrocity, which is a distant memory to most of us, looms grievously on the American horizon unless something happens.  Perhaps it will be a revolution.  Perhaps it will be a coup.  These tendencies have been brewing for decades, but like most relevant news they are swept under the rug in lieu of cheap meaningless fodder.  If I had to choose between the Koch operation and Cargill, I would choose Cargill.  They feed people, and they are private.  They too are a corporate monopoly, but it seems they are just.  When you have too much money and are not faced with soul searching scenarios, possibly your morality recedes.  It is not needed, to justify yourself in God's eyes.  Who is God anyway?  He is not a Koch, and they would tell you that.  Self-righteous assholes.  It seems most of them live in Texas.  Competition was great when I was in high school.  If you wanted a girlfriend, you had to work for it.  I did.  I excelled in music.  Although it did not feel like it, it earned me a true love, an experience of seven years that shaped my life.  I had mine early, and never will I forget it, but it is becoming difficult.  Good times, good vibes, and relaxation are not on the menu for America at the moment.  Instead it is rebellion against the most dysfunctional White House in recent history.  I try not to pay attention, but I cannot feel good about my personal pursuits when they are not supported by the Presidency, the leadership of America.  It must be better in other places.  Canada perhaps?  They do not swing.  Europe is not pinnacle of success.  Scandinavia has a proven track record of happiness and intelligence.  To excel competition is necessary.  We have it in high school, college, and professional sports.  No longer do we have it in media.  Everything is owned by the same untalented wannabes, and no one is willing to pay professionals to do their jobs.  Somehow in America paying a labor force has gone out of vogue.  Possibly the 2008 financial crisis created this vacuum, when American dollars were paid out to individuals who shelved the money overseas.  Things got tight.  When I was working for Royal Caribbean, Captain Bil Wright informed us that 1 billion of their dollars no longer were there.  That is a thousand million to you and me.  The current defense budget which has been proposed is at 850 billion dollars.  @#$%^!!!  That is 850 thousand million dollars.  We could rebuild the world with that scratch, and yet it will go to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, and the rest.  These companies do nothing for the average American, except try to charge one billion dollars for an F-15 jet.  A hammer is $300.00.  This is government.  Trump was supposed to bring his business savvy to the White House, cut corners, and get things done.  Side step the bureauocracy, Mitch and his fuddy duddies, McCain, and step up to the plate for Americans which voted for him.  Has this happened?  So far his personal dealings have been deflecting shit.  There was a brief period of bringing jobs back to America.  There was a tense moment with Tim Cooke.  Apple runs a slave compound somewhere in China.  Without competition, without innovation, and without diversity Capitalism cannot exist.  It becomes Fascism, and that is what we have.  It won't be long before they'll be shipping us off to gas furnaces.  The world all ready is reaching that point, and maybe that is the goal.  When you have mansions, servants, and money to disguise toxicity, like your conscience your opinion of the world becomes less urging. 

Rob Zombieland

Of all of the possible things on which we could be focusing...  
Is a national LGBT presence one of them?  I am not a homophobe.  I support and agree with an individual's right to choose for themselves.  Also I feel God is a supreme power more worthy of determining what His flock should do and be.  It's a bit like Bill Clinton's "Don't ask, don't tell."  It worked.  Obama changed that.  Now the Donald is tweeting that he conferred with his Generals, and they decided it is not appropriate for transgender persons to serve in America's military.  So be it.  He is our Commander and Chief.  I can think of other more relevant things on which our country should focus rather than, "Am I a man or a woman?"  When it comes down to it, when nuclear war emerges, or when Christ makes His second coming to earth, is this really important?  Do we not have more worthy things about which to think?  If one must contemplate this issue, then do so.  How is an entitlement to the poor any different to an entitlement to the LGBT community?  I'm not positive that being born into the wrong body qualifies for a government subsidy.  Marriage, heterosexual marriage, does carry its tax benefits.  So does death.  I do not agree with making your personal life a platform for existence.  That's why it used to be called a personal life.  Intimacy.  Love.  These are not public matters.  They are personal.  If and when Christ did arrive to judge, what would He say about America?  The meek shall inherit the earth, that's what He will say.  That could be a long wait. What do we represent?  Nothing comes to mind.  That must be why I depressed.  The only thing that was in my mind today as I cut the grass was Rience Prebus.  I don't know how to spell his name.  It kept spinning around in my brain.  Beavis.  Mischievous.  Flat top.  Rence.  Pence.  "Oh my God!"  Why am I thinking about this.  The answer is because this is what is in the national news.  Mooch is in, Prence is out, or Prebus, or whatever.  Beavis.  It's all such an incredible diversion.  Hide the rich, exploit the poor in America.  That is what it all comes down to.  Congress can't function, because the grift simply is between the rich and the poor.  There is no ideology.  There is no philosophy.  It's rich versus poor.  "Let them eat cake."  Let them eat dogfood.  If we believed what we saw on television, you would think the new me is private, greed-oriented, misleading companies casually quizzing the masses into buying their dog food.  I am so sick of seeing it.  Quizzes.  Cronies asking millennials ridiculous questions convincing them their product is better.  "Let's all get in the game!"  Question answer, like Pavlov's dog.  Operant Conditioning.  Rote labor.  Let's say it enough on television, and they will begin to believe it.  It really is demonic.  It is Newspeak.  Coercive advertising disguised as a seminar quiz.  Shit man.  No wonder the state of the country is what it is.  Everyone is brainwashed texting while driving, snapping selfies, and ?  The land of the living dead.  Yes. 

A Palm Pilot America

It has been three weeks since a standing wave has inhabited my house.  The powers at be say, "You think that's bad, boy.  Try this on for size."  It's the way satan works.  Things in my house jump around.  I spill things.  I can't feel anything, because a low frequency standing wave is in my house.  Radar is a standing electromagnetic wave.  What could cause a standing wave in your home?  Ask our iconic war department supported by defense contractors who feed on America.  Recently we went to a meeting at City Hall concerning the destruction of Mirror Lake dam.  The city owns it, and therefore are responsible for its reconstruction.  Luckily past Governor Pat McCrory now is the head of FEMA.  The city of Fayetteville was able to lobby Washington and get FEMA to pay for the reconstruction of our dam.  The only problem is it will take over a year, and Mirror Lake Drive, an entrance to our neighborhood will remain closed until then.  It is an inconvenience.  One must drive around one's arsehole to get to the store.  Okay.  The meeting was not helpful.  Mainly it explained the repair timeline.  A consulting firm had to be hired by the city to accepts bids from engineering firms competing for the contract to repair the dam.  What it showed me was how government works.  There is city money, and it is being solicited by firms who need the work and want the money.  Those in power hand out the taxpayers or in this case FEMA's dollars.  It is politics with a capital P.  They are not really interested in the opinions of the citizens.  These guys were nervous and squirrely.  What was the big deal?  2.5 million to repair the dam.  That is a lot of scratch, and by looking at it it doesn't seem like it would take that to fix it.  Because FEMA is reimbursing the cost of repairing the dam, all of these factions must sign on and supervise the repair.  It was made clear by the City Manager that it must be repaired to exactly the same specifications it was.  Neighbors asked if a sidewalk could be added.  The consulting firm said such a small addition was not a problem.  The City Manager disagreed, and pointed out no modifications could be made.  It also has been made clear that the dam must be rebuilt to higher standards, yet the concrete spillway, in essence the dam itself did not fail.  It still is there.  I remember when they replaced it the last time.  What happened was water cascading over the top of the dam, over the street, and washed out the back side.  It is an earthen dam, but a concrete structure stops and controls the water.  It still is in tact.  I doesn't look like it would take much to haul in dirt and rock and fill in the damage.  They all ready have replaced a large sewer pipe.  2.5 million to pay all of these people that must be involved.  Politics.  This is what Trump is good at, circumventing red tape and getting real estate built.  I bet he could rebuild the dam for half of that figure.  I came out of the high profile meeting with an icky feeling of local corruption and politics.  I am glad FEMA will pay the city back for repairing our dam, but those involved gave me the creeps.  They appeared to me as tight-pant city slickers, but those are the ones after city money.  One month ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the Fayetteville Observer suggesting Rowan Street Park was a more appropriate location for a city skatepark.  Today on the front page a military collaboration readying soldiers for deployment to the Middle East confirmed my assertion.  It seems they contemplated several locations for a city skatepark, and my suggestion was best.  Rowan Street Park.  I chuckled out loud.  I am glad that agreed.  It was validation that my suggestion was appropriate.  The article said the soldiers' suggestions would save the city loads of money.  That is because soldiers deploying to Fort Bragg have no interest in city money.  Fayetteville regularly allots money to consulting firms for studies on everything.  Large sums of money are dished out for studies.  There is a rail study online, an in depth look at rail traffic in Fayetteville, yet no one has paid attention.  They suggested a new section of track should be built connecting the spur servicing Fort Bragg.  It would keep two mile long military trains from having to back up onto Russell Street.  Never has it been done.  Why?  CSX-T pulls trains out of Fort Bragg.  The Cape Fear Railways puts them together in the Honeycutt Marshalling Yard and pushed them out to Fort Junction where CSX-T picks them up.  I don't like CSX-T much, because I remember both the Seaboard and Atlantic Coastline railroads.  Rail traffic in Fayetteville was existent but not prolific.  Now CSX-T has built two huge railyards in the modest towns of Hamlet and Rocky Mount.  Norfolk Southern has large yards in North Carolina as well.  One is en route to Wilmington, and CSX-T wanted to horn in on the action to the port of Wilmington.  The east/west line that services Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point juntions the north/south line in Pembroke.  Lumberton is one of the poorest regions in the nation.  STRACNET or the Strategic Rail Corridor assures that munition trains are protected, hence rail traffic in Fayetteville and surrounding areas is imminent.  It is here to stay, and there are many areas of Fayetteville that have been developed with neighborhoods adjacent to the CSX-T mainline tracks.  Surprise!  What's the big deal?  Like many things in America that have dropped from public consciousness rumbling freight trains are not an augmentation of quality of life.  They have contributed to declining property values in Cumberland County.  It stays well hidden.  CSX-T is a Fortune 500 company, and their lobbying arm is strong.  They get what they want, and we suffer in the refuse of their activity.  This is the refuse of the large military industrial complex.  I don't, like most business-owners in Fayetteville, look at the soldiers of Fort Bragg as a menace.  Conversely they provide the economic prowess of what was once prosperous Fayetteville.  With these men and women deployed to fight another man's war, dollars are not flowing in Fayetteville.  Still we wallow in the refuse of the military machine, its support mechanism, and the support mechanism of surrounding industry.  There was a time not long ago when trucking became a viable industry.  When gas was reasonable drivers didn't mind hitting the road in a semi to haul freight down the interstate.  CSX-T put a stop to that.  They became a corporate monopoly like most businesses in America these days.  Regulation, something that was necessary through out federal government, was dismantled under George W. Bush.  After America saw fit to break up the telecommunications industry into the Baby Bells, now with deregulation companies have been forming mega-corporations wielding the majority of power in America and the rest of the world.  At the turn of the century Trusts were of a similar threat.  Money that was trusted from generation to generation ensured power stayed in the hands of the wealthy.  I have a friend, a peer, a confidant, who needs money to build his business.  Once it was called a small business loan, and they were common.  They were necessary for middle class America to function.  Now there is no middle class, and America is such a shell.  We are a shell company standing for nothing.  I watch television, and occasionally I see things of worth.  Things I see of worth are culture not embraced, utilized, or championed in America.  We are a vulgar, crass, selfish society, or so we have become.  In the film Original Sin, there was a scene in a Latin American brothel.  There was nothing sordid or depraved about the place.  Conversely to me it made perfect sense.  Having traveled on cruise ships for over a decade, I am familiar with cultural habits not practiced in America.  Yes, on the outskirts of Las Vegas, there are compounds who engage in legal prostitution.  For the most part this practice is illegal in America.  It may not be because tight-ass far-right extreme Republicans deem it inappropriate.  It is because like most things, they want to have and control America's money despite how it should be dispatched via the needs and desires of Americans.  Instead we get strip clubs where you piss your money away not actually getting what you desire.  This has been the ill fate of Capitalism for some time.  Businesses have begun to dupe the American populace rather than understanding and providing what we want.  Luckily politics has loosened the reins on pot.  What a strange thing.  We pay a tariff to the federal government for gasoline, alcohol, and cigarettes, fifty percent to be exact, for things that are considered luxuries.  In fact they have become necessities to deal with living in the refuse of the military industrial complex and corporate America.  We medicate ourselves out of necessity.  We cannot afford appropriate medical care.  We, like most other civilized countries, cannot adequately provide quality medical care for our citizens.  We are not providing a solid public education.  At the grassroots level America has failed at most things, except addicting our people to their palms. 

AC 4000

Fibromyalgia is caused by aberrant airborne electricity.  That is a pretentious statement, but I invite anyone to dispute it.  Knowing that electricity is is a core component of the human body?  Does anyone know this?  Brainwaves are alpha, beta, and theta, 8, 10, and 12 Hz.  That means cycles per second.  Low frequency electricity.  What produces low frequency electricity in this world?  Ask GE.  They have staked their company on it among other more disastrous products.  It is not required that American companies are ethical.  Most aren't.  What machines produce low frequency electricity in this world?  You wall is 60 cycles per second  Why not some other frequency?  Someone decided.  What machines in America produce low frequency electricity?  What machines are capable of effecting human brain waves.  The GWEN study, which I have in my file cabinet, states the brain locks onto external frequencies in essence changing your mood with little choice.  If the bombarding frequency is strong enough and constant enough your subconscious mind will lock onto the external frequency.  Manic Depression or the PC term, bipolar, most probably is not a physiological imbalance of chemicals.  It is submission of the brain to external low frequency electricity.  What machines in America produce low frequency electricity?  I put it to you, Jim!  We won't stand for a condemnation of America!  Last night the ephemeral AC 4000 made it presence known.  What?  Not an ES44AC?  I heard it, and it was the precursor to the ES44AC.  I in my library have recordings of most diesel/electric locomotives.  The one that sounds like a UFO taking off is an AC 4000.  I heard that last night.  Yea!  You can't break the laws of physics and survive.  Event Horizon. 

Tesla or GE?

Back in the day a Russian scientist discovered your could transmit electricity through the air.  He devised plans for a huge dish-like transmitter that would provide electricity to the world for free.  Free.  That lasted a nanosecond, about the amount of time it took California to realize that residents could not live without water.  They would have to pay for it.  It wouldn't come freely from rivers, streams, springs, wells, or the sky.  Californians would pay for it.  The movie Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson is a tell all for the water industry in Cali.  The country has been drinking bottled water long enough to make a lot of people rich, enough bottles of plastic to circle the globe how many times?  Many of these bottles wash up in Hawaii.  These bottles are not biodegradable.  Plastic.  Plastic is indispensable for certain things.  We have manufacturing plants here in Fayetteville that produce plastic.  DAK Americas produces polyester resin.  Chemours and DuPont do the same.  They like the Cape Fear River.  How did an entire generation, Gen. X, end up in the Cape Fear River?  Not the Baby Boomers.  Not millennials. Gen. X.  Probably today like most things, no one remembers Gen. X, the generation of slackers who wear loose flannel and hang out in the Pacific Northwest.  Gen. X actually is a pseudonym for another chemical that causes cancer.  They changed the name so the EPA would not list it as a cancer-causing agent.   These two plants have been releasing it into the Cape Fear River for decades.  Only now are the residents of Wilmington, the North Carolina, the city with the highest opioid abuse, finding out their drinking water is  tainted with a carcinogen.  General Electric is a fitting title.  There is electricity in the air in Fayetteville 24/7.  My home is full of it.  "I know, I know.  You're up too.  Why not call the line of ------  and get some sleep.  Let me handle your problems."  This is what lawyers do.  I jest not.  We know that the Ground Forces Command at Fort Bragg must communicate with their charges.  The Navy's antenna is in the tri-state area of Illinois and Indiana.  It is 150 miles long, the length needed to transmit ELF radio waves to submarines around the globe.  That was before HAARP discovered how to do this with the earth's ionosphere, generate and transmit low frequency radio waves using the earth's ionosphere as a vessel.  Talk about global warming!  That must be a conspiracy!  There couldn't be such a thing, except that its finding are documented clearly on the internet.  Perhaps their mission statement was different, studying the earth's ionosphere.  The ultimate goal was substituting the earth's ionosphere for a 150 mile long wire transmitter in the tri-state area.  Once the U.S. military wanted to use the earth as its transmitter.  It was called GWEN, Ground Wave Emergency Network.  When nuclear fallout from a Russion missile blocks radio transmission in the air, GWEN was supposed to save the day until citizens decided they didn't want electricity in the ground.  I have electricity in the air.  A bit of electricity in the air is common.  It used to be FM, AM, UHF, VHF,  and HAM radio.  When Clinton, with his infinite wisdom, auctioned off the dangerous frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum to telecommunication companies, that changed.  Aside from NASA nobody much was using satellite-based telecommunications.  The military.  When they practise in the field at Fort Bragg for war, they practise with a telecommunication system which uses a point-based node system.  A little airplane flies around the battlefield transceiving signals from a truck and a satellite at the same time.  It connects the system to allow troops on the ground to communicate reliably.  Sometimes I wonder if the little plane that flies over our neighborhood daily is that.  Other times I think it is an undercover FBI plane (of which there are many attached to nameless shell companies) searching for human trafficking and drugs.  Other times I think it is a Department of Homeland Security Kingair 350 cruising the Department of Defense Arms Room on Executive Place behind Harris Teeter.  It is a gated building in which able bodied individuals and computer manage each and every munition at Fort Bragg.  That is a tall order.  Maybe I should call them up and order a few RPG's on my Paypal account.  I could Local Pick-Up seeing as before the Mirror Lake Damn was breached you could get there in less than three minutes.  That's how close it is to our house.  The CSX-T mainline is almost as close, and you know it every hour.  Amtrack bursts through at one and four in the afternoon and twelve forty and one twenty in the morning.  These prime movers are unmistakable mainly because they are the same engines GE has manufactured and supplied to its ES44AC's.  Why would a passenger engine need a sixteen cylinder, turbo-charged, alternating current prime mover?  It's because this pulsing, vibrating, electrifying monolith is strong enough to supply the coaches with electricity in addition to HEP, head end power.  If the prime mover is in Notch 8, it is spinning at full capacity producing full power, even if the throttle is down.  If and when the engineer remembers while stopped he can drop the engine down to Notch 4 where there is sufficient electricity to supply the coaches.  When they stop in Fayetteville often they forget, and the severe vibration of the GE7FDL-16 is in my bed.  While not quite as severe as Raytheon's Active Denial System, it is similar.  It is not as bad as what happens in the morning when all the wheels are turning in America's industrial machine.  This is when it feels like I have barnacles living in my crotch and on my neck.  Subliminally in my lucid dreams, I try to scrape them off like a fungus, but they are electricity, and they are in the air, our air.   Electricity should be in wire. 

America the Useless

Almost I am too tired to write, but I am going to do it anyway.  Alot of things have been on my mind, I just can't think of them at the moment because of fatigue.  The most ironic one is America is the world's champion of Capitalism, and yet we are the nation who refuses to pay a living wage.  We outsource jobs to Asia which pay a fraction of a wage in America.  This tells you two things about the failure of Capitalism with a capital C.  First there are no good jobs, even if Americans did want to work.  Textiles, farming, and manufacturing have been moved abroad.  Only yuppie jobs exists for millennials who have been brainwashed to believe the rhetoric of General Electric.  On that note a class action lawsuit is in the future for GE.  The amount of destruction their 30,000+ Tier 4 locomotives create.  Trains are quieter than ever.  You never will hear it coming, until you are squashed like a bug.  They have managed to replicate Raytheon's Active Denial System.  While their device may not be powered by a gyrotron, it produces the same effect.  Heating of the skin with millimeter waves.  Each of the 30,000 ES44AC's have a transceiver which send and receive microwave data from GE's control center.  I will stop on that note, and continue that while in the job market we have a repeat of the l980's yuppie era, we do not have the spoils.  The spoils are blockbuster movies, cutting edge music, fashion, and romance.  If you are stupid you can work for one of these companies.  If you are average, you can flip burgers or work at Walmart with no benefits and collect food stamps.  Walmart is a pinnacle of Americanism.  It builds one of America's most wealthy empires, and disables American Capitalism at the same time.  How have workers become so persecuted?  Slaves were persecuted, and evidently those plantation owners who grew the South have evolved into business owning biggots.  Americans deserve no more than to work for slave wages, which is a misnomer.  Slaves were not paid.  The biggest joke in American history is a country which championed a free market system, and yet now refuses to pay workers a living wage.  The second thing that is proven as corporations have out-sourced their labor forces is inflation in America has risen to an unlivable rate.  Americans are and have been living on credit since Bill Clinton proclaimed everyone should be able to own their own home.  This is when credit became a commodity and companies were giving it away.  This is what created the eventual housing bust, when borrowers defaulted on their inflated mortgages.  We live in a country of the affluent, who refuse to pay civil wages and demand exorbitant costs for their products.  We must change the name from Capitalism to something else.  Monopolism.  The affluent in America have a monopoly on the populace, and government is doing nothing about it.  We allocate 700 billion dollars to the Department of Defense and starve the population.  America is great.  Go figure this out.

American Deconstructionism

I am tired of my ears ringing.  Tinnitus is caused abstractly by low frequency noise.  For your ears to ring you must have some hearing loss.  Somehow low frequency sound causes the lost frequencies to "ring."  Val Kilmer explained it in his movie, where he played a combat veteran.  My left ear in particular rings, and only when low frequency noise is in the house.  That I found cruising in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.  How could my ears be ringing?  It was because of the commercial aircraft flying above.  In Fayettenam, a small town festering on the Cape Fear River transected by the CSX-T main line connecting Miami and New York, freight traffic is 30+ a day.  That figure comes from a government subsidized rail study available on the web.  When I lived in Columbus, OH it was 24 a day.  The proliferation of the ES44AC has exacerbated my tinnitus.  It is continuous at times, especially on the weekends when local freight is being hauled around.  What better time to assemble trains than on a lazy Sunday afternoon?  Tell that to the pilot who flies his aircraft over our neighborhood constantly.  His craft also produces tinnitus, and it is difficult to tell sometimes the origin of my discomfort.  (It's better not to divulge your weaknesses, or America certainly with exploit them)  It's kind of a terrorist perspective.  Don't support your citizens like America once did.  Instead antagonize them preparing for mock war in the Middle East.  There are times when I am so angry, that I do want to fire my Mauser hunting rifle into the sky pointed at his craft.  That is the perfect trap.  Torment you, until YOU crack.  It is happening all over America.  Certainly 2017, the year of the Donald, truly has become murder alley.  The local news usually begins with the new murders and continues to the older ones.  Durham, Cumberland Country, Raleigh.  The title should be changed from Hog Alley to Murder Alley.  No one seems to ask why.  No one, especially if they won't pay attention or give credence to climate change, would ever suggest infrasound could play a part in mental health.  Gavreau's studies are published.  The effects of infrasound are tangible and real.  The could account for many things happening in today's society, but that would thwart the deconstructionist theory and plan of America.   We must keep America in chaos to be in control.  Miseducate and torment the populace.  Sound familiar?

Exploiting Millennials

I want to congratulate SNL for their skit eradicating Kelly Anne Conway from the broadcast news.  I only caught a portion of the sketch that aired last night (and I think it was a rerun), but it was one of the better skits the writers have come up with in a long while.  It had real drama, real acting, and a real concept.  It was based on other things, things that have a place in American culture.  It was edgy, innovative, and enjoyable to watch.  It even had heterosexual content.  !  With the roiling LGBT movement, heterosexuality has taken a back seat in American culture.  Imagine also eradicating heterosexuality from American consciousness.  Perhaps we have.  Certainly it no longer drives American culture, but I don't subscribe to HBO.  Maybe Pay Per View is the outlet for heterosexuality.  Like Charter School and vouchers, I have not taken the time to study whether streaming has improved or killed television.  Like most things it ebbs and flows.  Charter schools were meant to improve the educational system granting schools control of their own agenda without regulation from the government.  I believe they have failed inexplicably becoming token associations required to admit low performing students.  I would need a few education courses to reacquaint myself with this system.  Maybe that is just the ticket.  To re-accredit my expired teaching certificate, I would need some college credits.  I am not really interested in being a teacher.  Not only because teacher pay in North Carolina is second to last in the nation, but because teaching like America is a pale shadow of its former self.  I taught college, because students who attend want to learn.  College professors and lecturers are not babysitters.  Some of them actually teach, although the adage, "If you can't teach, teach teachers" still is applicable in many situations.  I had my fair share of poor college professors including a music history teacher at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I didn't know I could come to resent the subject matter in my class, but I did.  I hated the History of Classical music, not because of its content because because of poor teaching by the professor.  It was a popularity contest.  I took the class again at USC working on my Masters degree in composition and made an A.  The professor counts and their pedagogy, methodology, and persona.   Maybe Netflicks is better than television, but I don't want to have to search for my television programming.  Networks used to handle this, and it was good competition.  In any case this particular skit was far above the normal SNL fare.  They even used some Renderman type of effects to put Kelly Anne back together again.  Finally something was on the tube that was worth watching unlike barf-o-mmercials.  They get worse by the day, and when I watch I am bombarded by the most inane, patronizing, mind-numbing, soul-quashing fare.  The worst is Mark Wahlberg selling soap.  I have enjoyed his acting in quite a few films including Boogie Nights.  How does a well-endowed actor (prosthetic or not) stoop to selling soap on mainstream television?  It's like evil Disney has inhabited TV.  All of the commercials are like this it seems.  Mock seminars with joking millennials laughing over the best products.  Is this how you make a decision involving $30,000.00 of your hard-earned dollars?  I think not, but they are pitching it hard.  Irresponsibility.  Television Barf-O-Mmercials next to cell phones have become the purgatory of human existence.  Luckily you still can make an informed decision to turn the phone off or turn the channel when such fodder emerges.  During prime time and especially during late night television programming, these cartoonish evil-Disney advertisements are rampant.  One after another of the most childish, ridiculous, patronizing ads that mean nothing.  Certainly they mimic our current public education system to a tee.  We have been miseducating our youth for over a decade.  It was a conscious decision not to empower the future of America by investing in her youth.  Instead we decided to exploit them and take their money.  This is modern America, and we should be ashamed. 

No Music For You

After spending an entire day preparing slow-cooked tomato sauce, I had to sit down.  The pressure/slow cooker is an indispensable cooking tool.  It can keep your sauce warm an entire day, sealed, and mostly immune from the growing of harmful bacteria.  After I make a tomato sauce beginning at eleven in the evening the day before, I am ready to move on to other foods.  It was delicious spaghetti, better than most restaurants.  It was a good thing, but I am glad to be done with the cooking.  I would rather think and write something, not that many people are reading my blog these days.  Working abroad on cruise ships for twelve years spoiled me.  ?  I didn't know that was possible.  Being a ship orchestra pianist was the hardest task I ever accomplished next to graduation from UNC-Chapel Hill.  I had to look in the program on graduation day to make sure my name was there.  I almost failed Sightsinging ll.  In fact I did with a 59, but my professor, the first woman to graduate Yale with a music degree knew I had done my work.  I just didn't see the point in using syllables to sing intervals.  I had twelve years of piano lessons beginning in first grade.  I understood music and harmony.  I learned my intervals in Music Theory 101.  I could sing them.  What I couldn't do is remember a syllable name.  I knew the interval and how to sing it.  What good was trying to remember a perfect fifth was the syllable "sol?"  It was extraneous information, at least for me.  For others the syllables could be necessary as a way to teach the sound of the intervals.  She understood this, and I aced the piano proficiency test.  Harmonize a simple chorale melody and then transpose it to a different key.  These are thing pianists do, especially when one is trying to learn to improvise in jazz style.  The orchestra job on the cruise ship may be one of the most difficult, although most will scoff.  The way I became successful at it was using my academic composition background.  I analyzed shows, especially the piano music.  It was necessary, because the copywork or notation of ship piano music must be the worst in existence.  The arrangers of the production shows are required to provide recorded tracks.  This is their primary focus, producing these tracks.  Printed music for live ship musicians is an afterthough, and it was obvious.  Often times they would transpose an entire number for a production singer, and the resulting enharmonic spellings of accidentals was a travesty not to mention the fingerings on piano.  I struggled to play these arrangements finally realizing they had been transposed from a more accessible key.  It explained the awkward fingerings.  Anyway, this job was the most challenging of my life.  Because I was devoted to it, and because I did not have other responsibilities I could manage it.  The ship crew mess provides your meals.  Hotel provides your quarters.  While you do have to clean and pick up linens, it allows you time to specialize in your job.  I was a full-time musician, and I enjoyed it.  Now I am a home-owner.  Wow!  Who knew life in America could be so challenging.  Yard work, lots of it.  Constant yard work.  Cooking, everyday.  Chores.  Repairs.  Solving ongoing problems.  The problem is America no longer is helping Americans.  Instead we have to fight the machine.  Life is difficult and challenging, and we are receiving little help from government.  In fact local and federal government are exploiting Americans.  Not only are we being shafted from things we deserve, such as a quality public education, there are no jobs, especially in Southeastern North Carolina.  The music industry is a pale shadow of its former glory.  It makes me realize how America has shrunk in importance.  We no longer champion the American Dream.  In a certain sense we are free to roam, but the economic opportunities once America afforded us are gone.  The music industry is a perfect metaphor.  Throughout America's history, music has played an important role in American culture.  Always it has been intertwined with Americans' lives.  No more.  Music has been deemed unimportant, simply because it is more powerful than a room full of CEO's.  It is more powerful than a room full of board members.  While CEO's and board members today have more power than ever before in America, they control the world with money, not culture.  They have eliminated culture and thus the soul of America to control the world with money.  What is important to America today?  It is a simple question.  What is important to America today?  Music?  Entertainment?  Hollywood?  Movies?  All of it is floundering, because mass industry is what is important and only to those who own it.  The rest of us attempt to survive in its refuse.  We live the ruins of the military industrial complex.  Carolina beaches are training grounds for war.  War is scattered up and down the eastern seaboard.  Navy stations in Charleston and Norfolk, in Florida and the elsewhere.  Should common middleclass Americans have to worry about war?  There have been times in America where we were not fighting for survival.  There have been times of prosperity.  This is not a time of prosperity.  This is the modern American Dark Ages.  Art and culture are at a historical low point, and only small disparate groups are keeping it alive.  I applaud those doing this.  For those of us that are artists and musicians, our prospects are bleak.  There is no money to be made unless you sing new pop country.  The music licensing system has failed, and musicians once who were able to make a living are struggling.  Music has been deemed unimportant to America. 

Nothing to Gain in America

The last two times I have blogged, I did not write what I meant to write.  I had every intention of criticizing television and its decline from the Golden Age.  Then again there have been times in my life fervently I believed that watching "that box" truly could rot your brain.  It ebbs and flows like most things, like life, like water.  There are ups and down.  America is down and has been since Bush was in the White House.  I watched his movie recently, W., and it seemed almost like a parody.  I always have said he was one of the worst presidents we have had, and our country has not recovered from his misguided corporate lobbied policies.  "Storm is Coming," which keeps showing up in my Facebook newsfeed, says most of it.  America, or rather those that control America, the money, have sought to eradicate God from our existence.  You would not know that from living in Fayetteville.  There are bible compounds all over the place, large complexes with names like Berean and Manna.  I don't know what they are or what they represent religiously.  What I do know is that they are tax shelters taking advantage of their "non profit" status.  We here in the American South are excellent at fraud.  It is in our blood.  Those damn Confederates are just a lot of slave-owning, plantation-running, red necks.  I am surrounded by it.  After living back in Fayetteville since my youth, it has become apparent to me that the folk living here, that have stayed here, the locals, are sheltered.  They have not been to other places.  They have not experienced other more enlightened things.  Big Harry's Tavern is about the extent of it.  There is no jazz, although the elites have founded a good symphony orchestra.  For it to be as good as it is, most of its players live and are from other places.  Only one or two actually live in Fayetteville.  How can you call it the Fayetteville Symphony?  They drive from as far as Charleston, Greensboro, and Ashville.  It is amazing to me that it functions this way.  Many businesses in North Carolina include commuting great distances.  At the health clinic where I used to get ship physicals, the doctor who runs the place is Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at the hospital in Rocky Mount and lives in Raleigh.  ?  My days of slogging up and down I-95 with my musical equipment in the back of my Toyota Tercel wagon are over.  Never do I want to waste my time doing that again.  Rather I enjoy composing music, recording music, cooking, and working in the yard when Fort Bragg permits.  Today and yesterday the temperature in Fayetteville is seven degrees hotter than surrounding North Carolina towns.  It is not because we are in a "hole."  This has been a common assertion since I have lived here.  Fayetteville is hot because it is in some kind of topical depression.  If anything that would be the Cape Fear River Valley.  Okay.  Fayetteville is hotter because of Fort Bragg.  When the 82nd Airborne is deploying they are flying aircraft continuously hauling soldiers afar.  Likewise their gear must meet them at the destination, and the responsibility rests upon the Cape Fear Railways and CSX-T.  Cape Fear Railways assembles the two-mile-long munitions trains underground at Fort Bragg, and CSX-T picks them up at Fort Junction.  Likewise aircraft fuel must make it to Fort Bragg, and I believe it also is via CSX-T and the Cape Fear Railways.  If one takes a look at Fort Bragg with Google Satellite you can see the black tanker cars lined up at the fuel depot which also is the depot for uncoming truck cargo.  It is the closest point to Fayetteville on Bragg Boulevard where Iron Mike used to stand.  The aircraft fuel is unloaded here and is carried by pipeline to Pope Field and Simmons Army Airforce base.  There is a reason they closed Gruber Road at the Boulevard and at 292.  I think the pipeline runs directly underderneath it to Simmons to fuel their helicopters.  Upon another look at Google Satellite it is easy to see where the preexisting tracks at Fort Bragg strategically were placed underground.  That mainline running from the Honeycutt Marshalling Yard would divide the entire post in half.  It would be like downtown Fayetteville when they deploy those two mile long munition trains.  Fayetteville has been trying to solve this problem for decades, and a solution was offered that is simple.  A new section of track must be built so that these munition trains do not have to back up onto the Vander line transecting Russell Street.  Trains must back down this track and cross the CSX-T mainlines through the crossover.  Then they on the other side switch to the local line that goes directly to the CSX-T Milan Yard.  This is what CSX uses for their local freight.  It goes to the yard on Russell Street that is shared by Norfolk Souther, CSX-T, and the Aberdeen and Rockfish.  The munitions train pulls right to the Milan yard until it clears the Vander line on Russell Street.  Then it goes south on the CSX-T mainline to Pembroke where it performs the same maneuver to get to Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point south of Wilmington.  I think it is the Koch brothers that supply Fort Bragg with its aircraft fuel.  Why else would Texas oil tycoons have a presence in the Carolinas?  That is big business, and it stands to reason that the Koch's, the Department of Defense, and CSX-T pretty much control everything that is happening.  This is all because still we are engaged in the longest war in American history, the War in Afghanistan.  Those abundant natural resources are just too good to ignore.  Consequently America really is bankrupt at least for the common people.  The majority of our money, that which Bush dipped his hand into the piggy bank of the AMerican people called Troubled Assets Relief Program which spawned America's Tea Party, went to pay off those Wall Street Investors who bet against the American economy during the financial crisis of 2008.  So watch "The Big Short," and you will understand that Hank Paulson told W. that we had to pay off this handful of investors to prove the economy would not collapse.  Henceforth they took our hard-earned-cash and stashed it overseas, like Apple, like General Electric, and the rest.  Our money is sitting in huge foreign bank accounts rather than circulating through the American economy like it should for Capitalism to work.  It is a shite state of affairs.  While America has been successful disguising the presence of God in our culture through media, Rupert Murdoch, et al, it cannot change that evil only can manifest itself through human form.  For evil to live, it needs a human host, a vessel to do its bidding.  America is rife with evil, thus America is rife with evil people mostly running the country in cognito lining their pockets with the money of the American people.  I have come to realize that there are grievous evils in our world, and if one takes a look back always they have been there.  They just are candy-coated through the media.  Again consciously this is not what I meant to write, but it came out.  What I do want to say is why television is experiencing decreasing ratings.  Isn't it obvious?  Maybe if you are a millennial and never have seen television programming from the Golden Age when entertainment still was based on Minstrel Shows.  (That was when white entertainers put show polish on their faces to play comedic black slaves)  Ouch.  Television cannot endure without the same criteria for any art form, although often it is not art.  It should strive to be.  Simple television cannot endure where there is more commercial programming than content during a show.  There are so many commercials shown in a row and for so long, it is easy to forget what program you are watching!  This is frustrating, trying to watch a show, and being thwarted.  Who in their right mind would make it difficult for a viewer to watch?  An idiot.  Likewise the cinema experience is doing the same thing.  When I went to see Alien Covenant a few days ago, I had to sit through a half an hour of product commercials!  Good grief, at the movies?  It was interminable and tortuous.  People are not going to watch television if it is not fun and entertaining.  It can and should be educational.  It cannot be manipulative.  It cannot be patronizing.  Television today is all of these things, and the same idiots who are running the large evil corporations must be the same people producing television.  They are not very smart.  When General Electric sees fit to produce a You Tube video glorying a Tier 4 diesel/electric freight locomotive, one of the most polluting machines in existence, then it tells you something.  It tells you that they know it pollutes, and they are trying to cover it up.  Like society has been doing for over a decade, we are exploiting millennials.  Current television commercials patronize viewers with vignettes depicting the most ignorant human beings in existence.  Either they are stupid, or they are at wits end trying to battle the machine in America.  They are Zombies in denial of America's shite state of affairs.  Maybe we all can sympathize with this perspective.  Just eat it.  Candy.  Fast Food.  What do we have to lose.  Certainly there is nothing to gain in American anymore. 

Television Barf-O-Mmercials

So what does he mean by "Barf-o-mmercial?"  For television to be able to air, they need to sell soap.  Once they were called soap operas.  It was understood.  Back in the day art mimicked life.  Life in America was interesting, because people were educated by a quality public school system.  No more.  No mas.  The lines of demarcation of human existence have been skewed, and I will not take this opportunity to describe them.  Instead I will publish a list of television barf-o-mmercials which are patronizing, manipulative, mind numbing, and ignorant.   

1.  Pizza Hut-  Stand up, sit down, like clowns. 

2.  Corona Extra-  Drinking our yellow malt somehow will transport you to a beach with tits and ass.

3.  Reeses-  You eat it.

4.  Toyota-  Action heroes are fictitious 

5.  Bacardi-  Drinking our sugary rum wtill transport you to a dance party in Old San Juan.   

6.  Dairy Queen-  ?

7.  Lending Tree- Green puppets are for babies, not consumers wishing to buy a property.

8.  Kia-  Buying a car does not ensure you will enjoy summer more, really.  There will be no salesman in your backseat massaging your shoulders while you drive. 

9.  The General-  Cartoons are for babies. 

10.  Monster-  Cartoons are for babies.  

11.  Snapple-  Appleheads are for babies. 

12.  Sonic-  ?

13.  Captain Morgan-  Pirates are for Johnny Depp only.

14.  Entyvio-  Drug commercials should be for doctors and taken off the air like cigarette ads in the 70's.   

15.  Candy Crush-  Candy is for babies.  

16.  Dave and Busters-  Video games are for ?

17.  Dos XX-  This man is not very interesting.  

18.  eSurance-  Patronizing assholes.  

Any television barf-o-mmericial that uses a pseudo instructional seminar to teach (brainwash) consumers how great their product is....  should be off television.  FCC, please do your job.  

On the other hand effective and intelligent advertising, like other aesthetics, is welcome both educating and possibly persuading a person to buy.  

Progressive
Craftsmen
XOXO Trojans.  

Mac Death and Resurrection

As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon listening to Aaron Copland through my vintage Luxman stereo receiver (Luxman once was the "home" audio component of Alpine) and typing on a dying Macbook Pro, I wish to thank one particular You Tube contributor.  When the GPU on my motherboard fried and stopped working, I researched quite a bit what to do.  The consensus among computer technicians was to take out the motherboard and heat the chip with a heat gun for five minutes.  Somehow baking the chip after it all ready had overheated and failed breathes new life in the GPU.  Statistic said eight out of ten Macbook Pros could be brought back to life with this method.  I made an appointment at the Apple Store in Raleigh, but after reflecting decided not to go.  The manager with whom I spoke on the phone quoted me an estimate of $200.00 to replace the GPU.  His conversational skills were ackward, and while he entered my information into his computer barely could he answer my questions.  The nature of Apple Stores it seems is manic energy.  They are like nightclubs, not a place to seek or find thoughtful computer repair.  I opted out of the appointment, because after watching a few computer repair You Tube videos, and reflecting on the past death of my iBook, I decided it was not worth it.  I would spend a lot of money for nothing.  Instead I took the hard core route, and followed the simple instructions of one You Tube Contributor.  Obviously he knew what he was talking about.  He gave you a command to start you Mac in "single user mode" and input UNIX codes to disable the external GPU.  I had to transcribe his codes both by listening to his accented voice and watching his computer screen.  I was familiar with the language because I studied computer music at OSU.  It has been a long time ago, more than twenty years ago.  I understood the language.  You create a folder for disable extensions, and move the drivers and supporting files for the external GPU into it.  When the computer re-boots, it will be forced to use the onboard GPU.  ???  What?  The graphic functions of the laptop will be reduced, but it will boot and run.  Wow!  The alternative was a dead ass Macbook Pro.  I inputted his codes and re-booted and voila!  Here I sit typing on what would have been a useless computer.  It could have been quite a soul searching scenario.  Pretty expensive computer quits working.  I only paid $900.00 for the machine, and it gave me three years of solid use with a large external Hewlett Packard monitor.  I couldn't complain.  I got my use out of it, so no sour grapes.  The sour grapes were thwarted by this You Tube contributor, who allowed me to keep my machine running while I purchased another computer and transferred my programs to it.  I knew all along I should have bought a Mac Pro, but them internets kept saying a  Macbook Pro would run Pro Tools or Digital Performer.  It did ironically, until the GPU died.  The 7200 rpm hard drive still is running.  The lesson to be learned is that the Radeon chip was a budget component.  Tim Cooke knew this, and his consent to use this chip in Steve Job's high level creation was inspired by greed.  More dinero for Apple, more headache for the consumer.  As we speak my Macbook from 2005 still is running unabated.  It sits quietly in sleep mode, and without a hitch comes to life when I lift its lid.  There was a class action lawsuit over the late 2011 Macbook Pro, and assuredly the eBay seller who sold me this computer knew it.  No matter.  I have gotten my money out of it, learned a lesson, and was forced to use my dormant computer skills to build a far more worthy music workstation.  I will knock on wood that my words are not in vain, and my "new" machine will continue to tool away streamlined and turbocharged.  So far so good.  If and when the computer puts itself to sleep, there always seems to be a glitch with its awaking.  I have had to re-start once, because of this.  I do look forward to the relay clicking when I hit a key and hearing the drives spin up.  There is no substitute for quality engineering.