Anyway.

In an effort to bring a bit more “staff generated” content to the internet, i’ve put First Flight Music on Twitter.
I’m (slowly) looking into a variety of open source CMS platforms for a website update,  but for now we’re gonna stick to a separate blog.  So, i’ll have to setup a blog :) And from there, i’ll use Twitterfeed to publish posts quickly. Look for a blog blob on the main page soon enough.

In the mean time,

Look for tweets on new used arrivals (guitars, keyboards, etc), new new arrivals (fx pedals, accessories, etc), and general anecdotes from Shira.

The Links:
Follow First Flight Music on Twitter
And don’t forget to visit FirstFlightMusic.com

Scott Wheeler is a former television producer and investigative journalist. As a writer he has focused on domestic and international security issues. Mr. Wheeler has produced seventeen television documentaries and consulted on more than a dozen others. For the past eight years Mr. Wheeler has been on the forefront of the most crucial issues facing national security – from the war zones in Yugoslavia, to the drug fields of South America and following the trails of international arms smugglers to Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Mr. Wheeler is a veteran of the U.S. Army infantry.
Peter Leitner Treasurer

Dr. Leitner formerly worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense starting with Casper Weinberger up until his retirement under current secretary Robert Gates. He was also a founding professor at the National Center for Biodefense at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Dr. Leitner brings 31 years of experience as a high-ranking federal official in a number of national security positions, particularly in the field of technology controls, nonproliferation, biodefense and counterterrorism. He has testified before the U.S. Congress numerous times and holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California and four master’s degrees.
========

Wikipedia has no entry for “scott wheeler”.
Wikipedia has no entry for “peter leitner”.

nope, nothing but obama forsaking
far right platform classics like:
-anti-immigration (period)
and my personal favorite,
-english as the national language
that have no credible URL sources listed (and they’re all URLs)
to back up their lies.

====

I nearly decided to abandon my search just now, thinking it futile.
But then i realized, how much money does it take to put a 1minute
add on NBC primetime, NFL coverage?  NFL ratings are some of the
best ratings networks get, especially on weekends (there IS no other
programming Sunday night for this reason).

now i’m on to that question:

How much does NFL regular season commercial advertising cost on NBC this year?

((whois lookup source: internit.inc))

so then, i moved on to the target URL,
nationalrepublicantust.com

Domain Name: NATIONALREPUBLICANTRUST.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
Name Server: NS55.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS56.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 01-oct-2008
Creation Date: 01-oct-2008
Expiration Date: 01-oct-2009
ah.  so THAT domain was created on october 1st.

from their website http://nationalrepublicantrust.com/about.html:

=======
“the National Republican Trust Political Action Committee (NRT PAC) was formed as an independent organization to help promote American values and support federal candidates for Congress, Senate and the Presidency who share those values.

The NRT is committed to continuing the legacy of Ronald Reagan. As such, the NRT PAC promotes a political vision that includes several core ideas:

* Government is best when it is limited.
* The free enterprise system and entrepreneurship are the cornerstones of America’s economic strength.
* Taxes are a necessary evil and should be reduced.
* Our national security protects our economic and political freedoms.
* A strong national defense is the best way to avoid war and deter aggression.
* The American civilization finds its foundation in strong moral and family values.
* Supporters of NRT come from all walks of life. They share one common belief, that America has been a great nation because of her people and their enduring values.”

Paid for by The National Republican Trust PAC.
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
2100 M St. NW Suite 170-340 Washington, DC 20037-1233

========

Great.  how many PACs are on M St in DC?

Their contribute link goes to this mess:

https://secure.yourpatriot.com/ou/tnrt/the_national_republican_trust_/donate.aspx

a secure transaction site, being served by this domain
========http://www.yourpatriot.com/Home.aspx======
What is Patriot?

Patriot is a web based system designed to support the common needs of non-profit and politicians, and other political organizations.  It has just about everything you need under a single roof and can be operational in minutes.  From easily collecting donations from credit cards, organizing events and handling fees, to managing volunteers our solution has much to offer.  Patriot can be used with any existing website, regardless of where it is hosted.  So, there is nothing stopping you from adding donations to your website today!

Our system was created to deliver all of this functionality to organizations of any size for around $1 a day.  Therefore it is now possible for very small organizations, or those with strict budgets to have amazingly powerful management tools.
==========

heh.  these guys can’t even hire a web developer right :)
if i was less tired, i’d consider [an attempt] to hack the shit out of them right now.
i’ll bet they’re running that slop on apache 1.1.

It was a one minute add slamming obama and
our good reverend wright.

“reverend wright: he [obama] never complained once”

ahh,
527 groups.  and here i was, wondering if
would poke your heads out for this election.

the URL listed on their commercial was this:
goptrust.com
which immediately resolved to this:

http://nationalrepublicantrust.com/

who have petty successfully googlebombed
themselves.

the following search phrase:
“who is national republican trust”
returns anti-obama spam.

i’m was pretty these guys are pretty famous by now.
i supposed my failure to note them is due to
my lack of (network) television exposure.

just now though, i found a recent post [  Posted 06:24 PM on 10/03/2008]
on huffpo.com that confirmed my observation:

Searching via Google for “National Republican Trust PAC” I don’t find any such organization. You have been spammed by someone for political motives…
(permalink here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/29/free-palin-mccain-camp-re_n_130146.html?show_comment_id=16441144#comment_16441144)

i’m turning into quite the politico..

i’ll report more as i find it…

Yesterday, I got burned bad by a Mobile Me sync.
It had rendered my address book from ~400 contacts
down to 6, and had synced this to all my computers.

Only my iPhone contained an un-tainted version, albeit missing
a few lesser used address groups.

I had a mobile me backup from Oct 6th, but i had created many new
contacts since.

So here’s what i did to fix it.

=========

I didn’t want to sync
the iPhone yet though, as i wanted to make sure i could backup its address book
properly.

First, i had to go hunting.
There are a variety of was to do this; you could use the iPhone app
“Finder” (which is excellent, just make sure to switch on hidden files) OR
if you have a jailbroken phone like I do, SSH in to it.

Here’s where I found the iPhone address book database location:
((this is in the iPhone directory structure)
/User/Library/AddressBook

In that directory were two files (both sqllite databases):
AddressBook.sqlitedb AND
AddressBookImages.sqlitedb

Using the Finder.app iphone program, navigate to that directory, and email
yourself both databases (or copy them to another location).  Now, you have a backup.

Using the SSH method, simply SCP said databases to a location of your choice on your
computer.

========

Now that my address book was safe, i decided to see what would happen if i syncd
my iPhone; sure enough, it blew away all my iPhone contacts with the 6 from the failed
mobile me sync.

So i restored my computer’s address book thusly:

======================

(the location of the address book data is ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/

I simply replaced the file
AddressBook-v22.abcddb , which is the database.
This restored my contacts list to the Oct. 6th backup.

=======================

Next, i replaced my now tainted iPhone contact list with my backup.
I simply moved my copied AddressBook.sqlitedb via SSH to the iPhone path
(/User/Library/AddressBook)

=======================

So with my proper iPhone address book back, and my October 6th restore on my computer,
it was time to sync the iPhone again.

Everything worked properly, with a full merge of my newly created contacts on my iPhone.
Score one for the good guys!

=======================

The moral of the story is, mobile me sync has been good lately so i’d become lazy about
my backups.

I just wrote a CRON’d RSYNC script that will bakcup my address book data every other day :).

Happy restoring!

From there, I went back to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, which has had a few zillion new editions since i’d read it right out of high school.  From Zinn I went on to Chomsky, which I’d also hit hard at the beginning of my current trend (“Hegemony or Survival” and “Failed States”); I went back in time and read “American Power and the New Mandarins”, his first book.  Mandarins really struck a chord with me; so much of our current state is the direct result of a Great Repeat of our past, modern history.  Everyone has drawn parallels from Vietnam to Iraq 2.0, but they somehow are un-heeded.

Chomsky’s “Mandarins” was a call to arms of the intellectual class to the peace movement of the late ‘60s.  In his day, intellectuals were much more hesitant to become involved in the anti-war movement (or speak out against the government in general); the McCarthy era was still fresh. What makes Mandarins special is that Chomsky lays out a critical, academic analysis of all aspects of the Vietnam war. This was something that no intellectual at that point had really done.

After Mandarins, I delved a bit deeper into the causes of our issues, and not just the issues themselves.  Naomi Klein’s No Logo was excellent, but at this point is a bit dated.  It is an expose on the dangers of global capitalism and free trade.  Unfortunately, there is no way around it now.  Globalization is here to stay.  All we can do is hope to raise the humanitarian standard in the third world.  Much more poignant to our current situation is her recent book Shock Doctrine: The rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Shock Doctrine is a thorough examination of the rise of Milton Friedman’s take on Laissez-Fairee economics; an extreme ideology known as Neo-Liberalism (better known today as Neo-Conservatism).  Friedman went on to develop the infamous “Chicago School” of economics.  To sum up their system: Deregulation, deregulation, deregulation, and small goverment.  The world saw the implementation of this ideology (in the first world at least) in the 1980s.  Ronald Reagan and Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher opened the floodgates and paved the way for globalization, smaller government, and loosely regulated financial markets.  This trend has continued, full steam ahead since (including through the presidency of democrat Bill Clinton, who pushed it over the edge with NAFTA).

From Shock doctrine, I moved to “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash”, which I read a year ago.  And yes, a year ago, Charles Morris (among many others) fully predicted our current economic meltdown.  To a T.  I won’t get into that either, but I would like to say this: the current Republican trend to blame the housing crisis on “poor blacks” getting into mortgages they couldn’t afford is insane.  Anyone with any amount of brains who read any sort of news saw this disaster in the making.  And it wasn’t caused by poor blacks.

Shock Doctrine and Meltdown lead me to the reason I’m writing this post.
Our habit of repeating past mistakes is most troubling, and at this point in time, dangerous and negligent.  Vietnam, the energy crisis of the late ‘70s, and trickle-down-economics are all issues which we’re repeating today.  And the price is just as high as it was the first time around.

I won’t start to analyze the current presidential campaign, because lots of other people do that much better than I do.  I will however single out a few key points of interest and tie them to my studies.

We are obviously at a very important crossroads for our country.  One road leads to certain depression and more war; quite possibly the end of western civilization.  The other leads to the difficult future of reform.  What is for sure, though, is we’re facing the potential end of neo-liberalism.  Just as NeoCon Grover Norquist famously proclaimed his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”,
progressives have shrunk the neoliberal movement.  It’s time to put on the drowning gloves.

Modern conservative ideology is the ultimate hypocrisy.  In the same breath, John McCain will tell you we need to get “government out of our lives” and the urgent need to “buy up mortgages from working class Americans, just like FDR did”.  Since the NeoCon hijacking of the old Republican party (which i have respect for, though disagree with), they have expanded federal goverment 40%; decreased our personal liberties (re: Patriot Act, FISA), and increased our involvement in foreign affairs.

Which leads me to my final point (and newest area of study):
FDR and the New Deal.

Just like the Vietnam to Iraq comparisons, every two bit pundit has called the economic meltdown the “worst financial crisis since the great depression”.  By that logic, would we not seek to repair the damage done, with the New Deal as a successful model do emulate?

The same people who decry “government intervention” rely on it everyday (though even McCain supports regulation of the financial markets these days).   Whether it’s a worker who has OSHA standards in his workplace, or a corporation that enjoys import protections, government exists to protect the best interest of its citizens.  By deregulating oversight organizations, NeoCons have struck the very hand that feeds us all.

Most people aren’t aware (i’m sure John McCain is included), FDR was very much bent on setting up a “Second” bill of rights for Americans.  He felt the Constitution was incomplete, and didn’t fully represent the needs of Americans in the 20th century.
He also wanted to prevent the series of events which led to the Great Depression in the first place.

In a little known speech he gave in 1941, Roosevelt outlined the promise of four freedoms:
1)Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Religion
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
From Sunstein’s The Second Bill Of Rights (which I just started):
“To make a long story short, the second bill [of rights] was spurred by a recognition that no one is really against government invervention. The wealthy, at least as much as the poor, receive help from the government and the benefits it bestows”

Roosevelt believed in the Free Market.  He believed in individual liberties; but he ALSO believed that the wealthy were obligated to bear more burden monetarily to improve the quality of life for all Americans.  He didn’t want to redistribute the wealth, as the conservatives now scream of Obama’s tax plan.  And Obama’s tax plan has got nothin on FDR.

“The nation cannot be content, no matter how hight that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people-whether it be one-third…. or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure”. -FDR

We need a loud, proud progressive movement to restore our standard of living in this country, and bury the worn out Friedman NeoCon ideology.  And I hope that Obama will, at the very least, open the door.

Click Here to read.

mae lecturing.

Click Here to listen to the .mp3

anyway, i went to pret for a sandwich just to catch the vibe down there.

there were news trucks/satellite trucks/firetrucks lining “exhange lane” -
with extra stockbrokers outside looking nervous.

i saw a few news casters getting primped and readied to bullshit their respective cameras.
gotta have fear of something people don’t understand or trust in the first place!
boogey boogey!

behold.

Click here to visit

stay tuned for the transcript from her lecture at arse-elektronika.