From Marcus Ranum: Fellow Travelers

So I recently made three posts about my disappointment in Wikileaks and it’s fans. I am still angry about how they have been acting over this most recent presidential election. As Marcus Ranum noted, what I’m experiencing is the realization that Wikileaks was never an organization for good, but a vanity project by Julian Assange to boost his own ego; and that it was Assange and another hacker, Adrian Lamo, who threw Chelsea Manning under the bus.

Marcus wrote an incredible post about all this, drawing from his own first-hand experience with such hackers. I’ll quote the bit about what happened to Chelsea Manning here. But please, go and read the entire thing. It’s a long read, yes, but it’s very good, and deserves your full attention.

[Read more…]

Great Guitar Solos – Lenny Kravitz Plays “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” (feat. John Paul Jones on Bass!)

Sadly, I do not know the name of the lead guitarist on this way (if anyone can tell me the names of his lead guitarist and his drummer, I’d really appreciate it), but I actually really like this solo. It’s short and sweet, but it just… it works for the song. It’s a perfect fit.

This is live at just about the only awards show I ever enjoyed, the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards (and yes… I may have been a fresh 6 years old at the time [turning 6 only four months earlier], but I did actually watch bits of it live… I have subsequently seen the entire thing in later years). And you know I love the fact that John Paul Jones, of Led Zeppelin fame, joined them on the bass. This whole thing is awesome…

The solo starts at 2:41 and ends at 3:12. Enjoy!

Quick warning about my next post: it’s gonna be Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”… it’s a very long one.

Clinton Did Not Want to Assassinate Assange (Warning: Infuriating Twitter Convo and Rant)

This post is basically going to be a long Twitter conversation between myself and an asshole, along with interjections from me here. Please note that I cuss a lot here… also, this is not as long as it looks, because it’s basically a whole lot of tweets. So keep that in mind. You’ll move through it faster than you think…

Basic intro… I’ve got three posts now about WikiLeaks and their bullshit. Of course some people are angry at me for that…

*record scratch*

What? Hold up… *runs off to Snopes*

Oh… oh I see where that comes from… oh okay…

[Read more…]

Is WikiLeaks Being Run by 13-Year-Olds? Or Just Their Task Force Account?

The worst thing about all this is that I feel like I’m being forced to join a whole bunch of conservatives and people on Twitter blocked by the Block Bot to do this criticism, and it makes me feel dirty.

To sum up… a while back, as you may recall, WikiLeaks got in some trouble for doxxing people’s private lives. More recently (as of yesterday), WikiLeaks got angry because Obama’s administration decided to anonymously share some of the CIA’s report linking senior Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, to the DNC email server hack.

You know, I remember a time when WikiLeaks was praised. Even those of us who always wanted Assange to face a court of law for the rape accusations leveled against him pretty much liked what WikiLeaks was doing. Maybe that’s because they became a thing during the Bush II Administration, and as a result, were leaking things that really hurt that administration. But it’s not like President Obama’s administration wasn’t hurt by leaking, both from WikiLeaks and from Edward Snowden. And I support all of that despite largely being a very big fan of President Obama (I cannot express in words how badly I’m going to miss him and the entire family; I have major issues with his foreign policy, but he was a great president, as far as I’m concerned).

But either I’ve been blind to what WikiLeaks really is up until now, or they just decided that now was the time to show their true colors… either that, or a 13-year-old is running their @WLTaskForce account…

[Read more…]

Wow Wikileaks… Just… Wow…

I probably shouldn’t be surprised, and I’m sure many will say that to me, but…

I’m surprised.

I’ve already covered this, technically, but…

Again, I’m a big fan of whistleblowers. I am actually sick of the secrets of people in power, and if there’s shit to leak, especially from a government, it should be leaked, because we deserve to know… especially when that government is elected by the people of the country it governs.

One would think that whistleblowing would be a bi-partisan affair. I recall whistleblowing under both Bush II and President Obama, and just assumed it would continue under Trump. But even while that may be the case, it obviously won’t be happening with Wikileaks, which has clearly outlived its usefulness…

[Read more…]

Hazel Scott; a Piano Prodigy (4 Videos Embedded in Post)

(It’s almost 8:00am. I finally managed to get tired enough around 4:45am to go to bed, only to wake up a couple hours later coughing due to an itchy throat caused by post-nasal drip. I’ve been like this for at least three weeks now… 🙁 )

There are 4 videos embedded here; 1 from Twitter and 3 from YouTube. Beware in case they autoplay.

So… I realize I missed this past Monday’s Great Guitar Solo, and I haven’t brought the Astronomy Picture of the Week series back. Hopefully I’ll be fixing that this coming Monday and Wednesday, respectively. In the meantime, I have another music post for y’all, this time highlighting the supremely talented Hazel Scott.

How I stumbled on her is actually really funny. I’m a huge fan of this podcast called The Read. So naturally, I follow the hosts, Kid Fury and Crissle, on Twitter. After the debacle that was Mariah Carey’s NYE performance, I was very very curious to see what they had to say. Sadly, they didn’t say anything. However, I did find a pretty funny tweet that Kid Fury had retweeted…

[Read more…]

No One Will Miss 2016

So… I originally had this idea to do a 2016 retrospective timeline, highlighting the tiny bit of good and the ridiculously huge amount of bad. But there was so much that this would have had to have been a multi-post series, and I don’t feel like doing that. Then I thought that I would just highlight the major events in politics and deaths, and devote some time to the US’s racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, murderous police force. But even that turns out to be more of a daunting task then I’m willing to take on.

So, instead, I’m going to share some thoughts, some links, a book for you to read, and a video that many of you probably already saw, but I want to share again, anyways. Sadly, I’m afraid I won’t be able to end this post with hope. While I am a cynic first and foremost, I’ve always worked hard to balance that out with optimism, always deliberately assuming that a human being I meet for the first time is fundamentally good (before they inevitably prove me wrong). I hate being a downer, and I really hate bringing other people down with me.

[Read more…]

Great Guitar Solos – Cream Play Crossroads Live

Often, when you love an artist, you eventually end up discovering that they really aren’t a great person. This has held true with Eric Clapton. It kinda sucks that this amazing guitarist who, like many other amazing guitarists, made his money playing the music of black people (the Blues), was also pretty damn racist (and considering the fact that he’s never actually apologized for those remarks, and actually reiterated his support for Enoch Powell over 30 years later, probably still is). Sadly, I can’t hold up one of his greatest guitar solos without at least mentioning his racism.

With that in mind, his guitar solos on their cover of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads is pretty damn incredible. Proof that “Slowhand” was more a misnomer than a nickname; he had speed.

(This video, BTW, was made by taking the track from Cream’s album “Wheels of Fire” and matching it with video from another show of them playing this same song.)

The first guitar solo starts at 1:28 and ends at 2:11. The second guitar solo starts at 2:32 and ends at 3:36.

Enjoy!

Merry/Happy Something or Other! Got Any Good Holiday Music?

I was originally going to write this big rant on all this bullshit about “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Kwanzaa” and “Happy Yule!” and “Season’s Greetings!” and whatnot and about how I will never understand why anyone gives a shit about what greeting is used during this time of the year, because isn’t it the sentiment behind it that matters? But ultimately decided that wasn’t worth my time because… really… I’m over it.

Say “merry Christmas!” to me, and I’ll say it back. Say “happy holidays!” to me, and I’ll say it back. Say any variation of “happy/merry [insert holiday celebrated in December here]” and I’ll say it back because the sentiment matters more to me than the frickin’ words we use.

But anyways…

After various discussions with people, I realized that I am a bit bah humbug about elements of this season…

I mean, I do sort of hate that, in our capitalist society, we have to start “celebrating” Christmas before Halloween ever gets around, but that’s not what this is about.

No.

It’s about the music.

[Read more…]

Great Guitar Solos – David Gilmour Plays This Heaven Live in Gdańsk

I really like this one. This Heaven is such a great song to begin with, and it’s such a really good guitar solo. Here’s Gilmour and his band (including Richard Wright [RIP]) playing this song at the Gdańsk Shipyards on August 26, 2006.

There are, technically, three solos in this song, but the first two are more just short bridges. The third and main solo starts at 2:31:

Enjoy!