Perhaps a Dave Liebman recording from the early 1980's isn't the best sound track for my late evening blogging. I am interested in hearing more of this accomplished and influential post-Coltrane saxophonist, so I will let it roll. I know it isn't the vibe I need to write what is on my mind, but that is okay. It's the effort that counts. "Democracy dies when good men do nothing." (or is it, "Evil flourishes when good men do nothing, or "Democracy dies in darkness.) Whatever. The fight is on, and each day now we are required to hit the ground running or enter the ring punching. The question of who and what were are fighting is contentious. Why would Senator Joe Manchin use a Sunday morning Fox News program to drop his "Go Branden" bomb? That is a low blow, and while he may be a leader with proven integrity, using Fox News as his soap box was wrong. This is the fallacy of social media. The internet has provided immediacy for the human condition, and because of its instant communication no longer do we have to wait for the casserole to bake. The time frame of life drastically has changed, but has it? Take a look around outside. Ignore the television and what it is saying. Take a break from streaming, gaming, or masturbating to internet pornography. How families can stay holed up inside a house is beyond me. What allows this particular behavior is the immediacy of the internet. Human life has shifted from real life live interaction to constructed scenarios on the web. We don't take as much time to enjoy life live anymore, because the majority of our emotional fulfillment now comes from the computer. It is an addictive pill. The warm hues of color on the screen, the kinetic satisfaction of using our digits, and instant gratification all are addictive in such an immediate and accessible interface. I would suggest we all are addicted to something. The reality is fentanyl should be our enemy number one as an addiction, and its affect on our society is from foreign deliberation. Foreign interests are making this drug available to young Americans, and in essence these foreign interests are murderers. As a nation America is being attacked on multiple fronts. I guess it is inevitable the great global free power of the world falls from grace. We do not deserve this assault, or do we? I don't want to reflect on bad politics. President Joe Biden did what Osama Bin Laden asked. "Get the infidels out of our countries." So be it. We on the large scale our out of the Middle East. Of course we are not. There is some large covert presence of American "boots on the ground" stationed around the world at military bases abroad. That is par for the course. (How is the Liebman recording?) The irony is this particular Youtube album is a virtual pinnacle of jazz fusion talent. Kenny Kirkland, Steve Gadd, and Marcus Miller. Wow! Those are names we haven't heard in a while. I was into jazz fusion for a long period in my musical studies. Interestingly Disco was a very large influence in this music as was Latin rhythm. Some opt to call it pop jazz or instrumental pop, but it is not. Pop has its own significant bubble of guitar-oriented rhythm, and it does try to swing in its own way. Most of it is not successful, because "It don't mean a thing...." Not everyone swings. Elvis swung. The Beatles swung. Prince swung. Swing is a particular kind of emotion-generated feeling. In a nutshell swing mostly is happy and joyous music. It is honest, authentic, and spiritual. There is not much room for bitterness in swing, although like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus proved, jazz can have serious undertones. In some circles it is called Third Stream. I can think of worse music. It just does not represent the dynamic of current American life. We are not at liberty to snort coke, drink alcohol, and dance "under the disco round" till the wee hours of the morning. That was a late 1970's kind of thing. It also was an underground Manhattan gay thing. Disco was a strong rhythmic music which required technical proficiency on both bass and drums. The music "hits hard," which means there is no room for pussy performance. Pop in many circumstances consists of weak technical performances where the mike, the amplification, or the "tracks" do most of the work. There is some virtue in the "pop" approach, but it is not the roots. The roots of musical performance are and always have been in classical technique. Like magic it is not possible that musical technique suddenly became something else because of technology. That is what today's pop culture would have you believe. This is why I cannot watch or listen to most music on television. It makes my physically sick. Talk about posing. I prefer to listen to something with value, not some product posing as something else. Welcome to today's world. Welcome to the world of Donald Trump. We should be concerned about Fentanyl, because as the evening news said it has made it to the top of the list of American killers. Covid and Fentanyl have become America's number one killers, and they both have been made available to us by whom? We don't know, and that is upsetting. To not know one's enemy's identity is a major strategical weakness. We must know who the enemy is, so the source of Fentanyl and Covid need to be disclosed. This covert assault on us is the metaphor for evil. Those who understand religion would understand Satan walks the earth in human form, and these types of egregious acts are perpetrated by him. Satan. The Devil. I think this title is a proper noun, because surely we need to know who he is and of what he is capable. Two of those things are the Covid assault and the distribution of Fentanyl. With the push of a button the 80 degree Fahrenheit temperature of yesterday, a record setting and disturbingly common occurrence, becomes freezing cold winter today. In the push of a button the miserably hot and humid hell hole of yesterday, when I could not cool down my study, today again has become winter. The HAARP facility in Alaska now which has been turned over to the university and is being rented out for monetary gain, was built to heat the ionosphere. (I think that is the appropriate scientic term) They want to experiment with heating the upper atmosphere to observe its effects. In reality they wanted to learn how to send low frequency radio waves around the world in a super heated electrically charged space high up in the sky. To accomplish this they devised the phased array antenna. That is what HAARP is, and necessarily it spawned many conspiracy theories. They are grounded in truth. Like many things seemingly sanctioned by the United States government, they necessarily are not good or appropriate for the sanctity of human life. Most often they are rooted in commerce or more specifically revenue. It's all about money, the green stuff. Fuck the human race and the planet Earth, so they seem to be doing. It is tiresome having to think about it each day. Then again I have lived most of my life within the comfort zone of not having to worry about my own survival. So many other generations have had to worry about their own survival, so I guess it is our time. (I have moved on to saxophonist Tom Scott) If one takes a minute to reflect on a "phased array antenna," what reveals itself is that in place of one emitter usually of microwaves, there are multiple or many emitters whose signals become a summation of themselves. The signal is addative, hence it is much stronger, because there are so many signals. These signals are controllable, and by phasing them or shifting their characteristics they summed signal becomes steerable without having to move the hardware. They won't show us these antenneas in the aviation industry. "If I show you what is in the nose cone of this aircraft, I will have to kill you," quipped one military official. Elon Musk's Starlink network consists of thousands of low earth orbit satellites with four phased array antennas per unit. They can interface with one another creating an enveloping microwave transmission for broadcasting high speed internet. The problem with this is, as anyone can imagine, is that this electrical energy or RF waves are much more powerful than anything that has proceeded them. The same is true for G5, and if I am not mistaken, this relatively new wireless communication standard makes use of phased array antennas. Global warming you say? The proof is in the pudding.