guest DJ set list (Sept. 2, 2021) - Brazil '68-'06

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Thanks to ffog for inviting me to guest-DJ again on his weekly internet radio show, Myocyte.
The mix was "simulcast" on anonradio and tilderadio, and has been archived by anonradio (scroll down to "Ffog - Pleasure & Discomfort Myocyte"). An mp3 version of the mix is here: [1 hr mp3] (The show was broadcast at 1 am on September 3 UTC, which is 8 pm Central, September 2, in the US.)

The tracks highlight Brazilian music or musicians (with a few outliers such as Arto Lindsay, an American who grew up there, and various collaborators).

While the tracks were playing I "announced" via text chat on the #sally and #tilderadio channels on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), as well as anonradio's chat service "com," which runs on a command line terminal. Listeners could comment or ask questions. This is an interesting way to DJ, very different from my old FM radio days and a few steps up aesthetically from having everyone's data and souls leeched out on Spotify, Mixcloud, etc.

00:00 Stan Getz/João Gilberto, Águas de Março (1976) - The Best of Two Worlds

04:35 Hermeto Pascoal, Just Listen (Escuta Meu Piano) (1977) - Slaves Mass

09:59 Arto Lindsay, Mundo Civilizado (1996) - Mundo Civilizado

14:12 Nana Vasconcelos, Anarrie (1989) - Rain Dance

16:51 Os Mutantes, Algo Mais (1969) - Mutantes

19:26 Nana Vasconcelos, Eh! Bahia (1989) - Rain Dance

24:08 Os Mutantes, Fuga N° II Dos Mutantes (1969) - Mutantes

27:42 Jorge Ben & Toquinho, LK (Carolina Carol Bela) (DJ Marky & XRS Land Mix) (2002) - The Brazilian Job

31:15 DJ Marky, DJ Patife & ESOM, Só Tinha Que Ser Com Voce (Cosmonautics Mix) (2002) - The Brazilian Job

34:15 Os Mutantes, Panis et Circensis (1968) - Os Mutantes

36:19 Os K-rrascos & Vanessinha Do Picatchu, Bochecha Ardendo (2004) - Funk Carioca mixed by Tetine

40:05 Deise Tigrona, Injeção (2004) - Funk Carioca mixed by Tetine

42:15 Bonde Do Tigrão, Cerol Na Mão (2004) - Funk Carioca mixed by Tetine

43:49 Tati Quebra Barraco, Se Marcar (2004) - Funk Carioca mixed by Tetine

46:20 Unknown, Track 1 (2004?) - Funk Neurotico

49:23 Unknown, Track 2 - (2004?) - Funk Neurotico 23

51:29 Isaac DJ, Jiu Jitsu (Montagem) (2006) - Rio Baile Funk: More Favela Booty Beats

53:56 Unknown (2004) - Diplo: Favela on Blast: Rio Baile Funk 04

58:30 Arto Lindsay, Mundo Civilizado (DJ Soul Slinger Remix) - This Is Jungle Sky IV

bag of money for evictions

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Cory Doctorow writes about evictions and skewers a right-wing talking point about "people who don't want to work" (quoted at length to get the whole crux of the argument):

When it comes to delivering aid to the wealthy, conservatives hate red-tape. When it comes to preventing working people from starving or becoming homeless, conservatives put on a paperwork parade that outshine the pettiest Soviet commissar.

This contradiction arises from a cornerstone of conservative ideology -- the idea of "learned helplessness." Learned helplessness is a real thing that psychologists can induce in lab animals, discouraging them to the point of fatal listlessness.

But that's not what conservatives mean by learned helplessness. For them, learned helplessness is the evidence-free conviction that if you give a person a "handout," they will lose interest in "hard work."

Think of all the fast-food "entrepreneurs" whose signage proclaims "no one wants to work anymore" because of "government handouts," conspicuously failing to mention sub-starvation wages, irregular shifts, and abusive working conditions.

In conservativism, wealth is providential. Markets reward virtue, so the wealthy are inherently virtuous. They know the value of "hard work" and aren't at risk of "learned helplessness" so they can get "bailouts" (not "handouts") without risk of "perverse incentives."

But conservativism contains a contradiction: because capital -- by definition -- earns its returns from someone else's labor, any bailout is also a potential handout. If you save a locked down "heroic small business" with payroll support, you also "pay workers to stay home."

And if you bail out landlords by making up their tenants' missed rental payments, you also let the tenants "live for free" (ignoring for the moment that landlords whose mortgages and living expenses derive from tenant payments are literally "living for free").

So here we are, about to endure a gaping, generations-long self-inflicted wound [mass evictions due to covid -- tm]. We're about to cost millions of renters their homes and potentially put their landlords in default because evicting a tenant doesn't get you a nickel in back-rent.

You couldn't ask for a neater demonstration of the extent to which "conservative business acumen" is a LARP -- a set of culture-war performances rather than any kind of meaningful attention to profit and loss.

Because saving millions of your fellow Americans from destitution and homelessness isn't merely the right (and, you know, Christian) thing to do -- it's also the smart business move. Homelessness is infinitely more expensive than rental assistance.[1]

State conservatives are refusing to hand out $41.3b in order to create a decades-long cycle of public liabilities that will easily cost a hundred times that amount, and they're not just hurting poor people -- they're euthanizing a whole shit-ton of rentiers[2]!

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, it's the kind of thing you'd expect from a party[3] with "two primary core talents: selling quack supplements and lowering taxes."

After all, if you campaign on eliminating government due to its incompetence, then governing incompetently is a feature, not a bug. But for the nation (and the world) which needs its government to manage climate, pandemic, etc, this is a serious bug.

Meanwhile, Dayen has a great suggestion for how to dispense with all the red tape and save landlords and tenants.

Just station a federal official with a "big bag of money" in every eviction court.[4] Every time a judge hears evidence that a tenant is behind in the rent, the official makes them whole out of the big bag of money, and the eviction is cancelled.

This is literally the worst way of doing it, a monumental waste of court resources and an inhumane way to treat tenants (and landlords, too). The only thing worse would be to allow that wave of looming evictions to wash millions of our neighbors onto the streets.


1. Note what Doctorow is doing here: switching from talk of a business budget to a government budget. The cost of homelessness doesn't affect an individual business' bottom line, except perhaps in raised taxes. As for the mega-corporations, Amazon showed great opportunism in subsidizing trailer parks for its homeless workers.
2. Rent-seekers, an increasingly common species of capitalist that adds nothing to the economy and lives off a stream of payments --tm
3. Both parties --tm
4. For budget-balancers: The bag of money could come from, say, closing several hundred military bases we don't need, especially ones in Syria. -- tm

"war on cash" name'n'shame

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WoodSpring Suites, owned by Choice Hotels International, Inc., does not accept cash for a room.

Evidently someone in the management suite was inspired by all the "cashless society" hype (part of the Great Reset ™ designed to limit plebeian freedom).

Many customers, however, prefer to use cash, for privacy, convenience, and the simple belief that cash is money.

about those -- emdashes

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Some authors -- for example, Robert E. Howard -- use quite a few emdashes in their writing. This blog uses two hyphens surrounded by single spaces -- like this -- making it harder for bad browsers to turn the emdash into an endash -- or worse, a single hyphen.

Of course, an ebook reader is a browser and it's essentially reading -- or misreading -- html.

Many publishers think you can just scan a print book and let algorithms fix all the little nuances. The result is text that looks like this:

Some authors-for example, Robert E. Howard-use quite a few emdashes in their writing. This blog uses two hyphens surrounded by single spaces-like this-making it harder for bad browsers to turn the emdash into an endash-or worse, a single hyphen.

Of course, an ebook reader is a browser and it's essentially reading-or misreading-html.

Random House Publishing Group (Del Rey) is one of those publishers, and its epub version of The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is frighteningly -- difficult to read.

20 years of afghanistan war skepticism

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I searched "afghanistan" in my last 20 years' blog posts and found:

October 26, 2001:

Instead of confronting our real problem [Saudi Arabia], we're bombing and starving one of the weakest countries on the planet, to satisfy a desire for instant revenge. Our war against Afghanistan, commenced with only four weeks' planning and against a country not one of whose citizens was alleged to have been a hijacker, is just plain stupid, and has all the signs of a Vietnam-style quagmire.

January 6, 2002:

"Given a choice between protecting American civilians and protecting the client regimes that sponsor and coddle those who murder them, the Bush Administration has taken the second option every time. This seems to me impeachable in the profoundest sense of the term." So says Christopher Hitchens in this week's issue of The Nation, criticizing the catering to the Saudi princes that occurred before and after the massive intelligence failure that was 9/11. I'm glad that Hitchens is finally waking up to how the Bushites put the interests of their business buddies ahead of the lives of Americans -- he actually uses the "I"-word! -- after he wasted energy the last couple of months bashing Chomsky, Sontag, et al. Now, if he could just extend his own logic to the War Against Afghanistan (which he supported) and see that it was also a case of Bush "taking the second option..." [Obviously written before Hitchens turned to the dark side and supported Bush II's Iraq invasion.]

March 28, 2003:

Noam Chomsky is one of the few people who bucked the conventional wisdom that bombing Afghanistan was good -- before and after we "won."

April 8, 2003:

The "hands off the Saudis" edict to intelligence agencies obviously contributed to the 9/11 tragedy, and so far no one's been fired. The military takeover of Afghanistan, and now Iraq (and soon Syria, Iran, etc.) are the worst things to happen to this country since Vietnam. Suddenly after 9 years of (relatively) low-level conflicts, we're in total, pumped-up, IOU-funded war mode, with most of the world hating our guts. And our economy, which depends largely on selling products and rendering services around the globe, is sucking hard. (The war's been great for war profiteers, though.)

April 9, 2003:

With the news media announcing victory over the hapless Iraqis, the right wingers and '"liberal hawks" are dancing in the aisles. Finally, we can start imposing liberal democracy over there at gunpoint! Yippee! (Just like we did in Afghanistan!) Evidently a war is considered successful, or a "cakewalk," if American casualties remain low.

August 27, 2003:

This WaPo editorial articulates a number of [Howard Dean's] positions: it's really disappointing that he wants to be Nixon to Bush's Johnson and keep the good fight going in Iraq and Afghanistan "now that we're there." Screw that. You'll never convince me that policing countries half a world away keeps us safer than competently monitoring known terrorists here at home.

May 25, 2004:

[Susan Sontag] talks about our "quite justified" invasion of Afghanistan, something lefties love to throw as a sop to the right to make complaints about Iraq seem reasonable. Justifed how? By not catching Bin Laden? By jumpstarting the heroin trade over there again? Killing and bombing for women's rights? That war wasn't the right response to 9/11 any more than Iraq was. It was just to make the majority of Americans feel better after the government failed them on 9/11, by bombing some Muslims.

July 5, 2005:

One of the things [Karl Rove supporters] do to discredit certain liberals is say "They opposed Afghanistan!" "Afghanistan was good" is supposed to be the conventional wisdom but not everyone thinks invading that sovereign albeit crappily-run nation and destabilizing it further was any better of a response to 9/11 than "doing" Iraq. When the attacker is a shadowy group as opposed to a nation the only (still) relevant question was whether the severity of 9/11 justified the use of (internationally) extrajudicial means such as commando raids, or whether there were other ways to bag terrorists and pressure countries "harboring" them. Invading meant precisely this: Osama got away, and we now have troops permanently stationed in yet another damn country. Why is this good exactly? ...For the cost of dropping daisy cutters on Afghanistan we could have increased vigilance at home -- say, by actually reading airport passenger manifests -- and been a lot safer. And perhaps it wasn't such a hot idea to let the incompetents who allowed 9/11 to happen be the ones to "go hunt down the terrorists."

August 12, 2007:

Some of us opposed the Afghanistan war because no clear proof existed that "terrorist training camps" were the cause of the 9/11 attacks (did they teach them to fly jet aircraft there? or how to move freely around the US?), at least enough of a cause to justify attacking a sovereign state, especially a state that fairly recently proven to be the quagmire that hastened the end of the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the world it just looked like hitting back in anger -- any Muslim would do -- and that's just not smart.

March 8, 2009:

The US' rationale for invading and destabilizing [Afghanistan] never made much sense. At the time the propaganda was a strange mix of "if they hide terrorists they must be annihilated" coupled with "and besides, we will really be helping the women of Afghanistan." It seemed pretty obvious that Bush and Cheney were trying to deflect attention away from their own failure to protect US citizens from the 9/11 attacks and took advantage of the nation's riled up mood. Now the Obama administration appears to be compounding the problem by committing more troops with no clear mission goals.

March 29, 2009:

Dear President Obama,
"The task of securing Afghanistan and Pakistan from Al Qaeda influence," as you described it on Face the Nation, is a seriously poorly defined mission.
And invoking "al Qaeda" that way is so George Bush. Is it the same "al Qaeda" that was operating in Iraq all those years?
Afghanistan/Pakistan will be your Vietnam -- correction, ours -- if you keep this up.
Please bring those troops home and use the money to employ people in the homeless camps springing up in the US.
Your friend,
Tom

June 6, 2013:

We have the liberal hawks and their precedent of the "good" Balkan bombing to thank for Iraq and Afghanistan. The "kill for peace" pundits provided Democratic cover for the Bush and Cheney invasion plans. Saddam gassed his own people, the Taliban are sexist monsters, so, as caring folk, we needed to invade. It wasn't just about oil or misplaced revenge for 9/11, see.