"Skyler's Pool"

As she relates in the video, a well-known Sacramento radio jockey didn't know what to call her new band at first, but being a "Breaking Bad" binge-watcher, she finally settled on "Skyler's Pool":

On Friday, Skyler’s Pool will celebrate the release of its first EP, “Under the Wire,” at Harlow’s nightclub.

“We feel like we are getting into the music scene just under the wire,” O’Neal said during a joint interview with Spataro at a local coffeehouse. They’re doing so gracefully, with a breezy alternative-rock sound, thoughtful lyrics and live shows that are energetic yet dignified, with drummer Ben Harvey, bass player Bob LoRusso and backing vocalist/keyboard player Lori Sacco-Nelson (O’Neal’s former KFBK colleague) rounding out the lineup.

Play Into It

I agreed with this Sacramento Bee editorial, until the last sentence:

Milo Yiannopoulos has a game that he has been playing for months. He’s really good at it, too.

First, the alt-right cult hero accepts invitations to speak on college campuses. Then, as word spreads, he revels in the backlash from liberal students who condemn his hateful rhetoric. And when unruly protesters force him to cancel, he wins – the public relations war anyway.

It worked in January at UC Davis, where angry students showed up in droves and made campus police nervous. It worked at UCLA, too, where administrators canceled his speaking engagement days in advance over security concerns.

Unfortunately, UC Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, is just the latest to get played. The truth about the riots that broke out on campus Wednesday night before his speech has been twisted by a master provocateur.

...Yet, in this cowardly new world of alternative facts, the narrative that UC Berkeley is full of intolerant leftists who shut down speech they don’t like with rocks and commercial-grade fireworks has taken off. Yiannopoulos got what he wanted. And Trump, who has no problem with false narratives, went a step further by threatening to withhold federal funding from the UC system if “innocent people with a different point of view” aren’t allowed to speak.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a UC Regent, called Trump’s tweet “asinine.” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, called it an empty threat that’s an abuse of power by a man who is “president, not a dictator.”

Far be it from us to dissuade condemnations or peaceful protests against Trump or Yiannopoulos. But there is a larger game afoot here. Don’t play into it.

Feature on Our Jamaican Dancehall Class

Love this!

A Toothache

A healthy, young Sacramento truck driver dies suddenly of - a toothache:

He was driving a truck route from Truckee to New York last Tuesday when he started to feel pain in the lower left side of his mouth, said his wife, Nataliya Kondratyuk. He pulled over in Oklahoma to see a dentist, who diagnosed an infection and prescribed antibiotics.

The pain subsided at first but then worsened, and Vadim Kondratyuk called his wife several times while driving to complain about the tooth. He made his delivery in New York, but his mouth was uncomfortably swollen and he couldn’t make the long drive home alone. His brother flew to New York to escort him back to Antelope where Nataliya, 22, was anxiously waiting with their 2-year-old and their 11-month-old.

On the way, Kondratyuk’s breathing became labored and he grew pale, Nataliya said. His brother rushed him to a Utah hospital, where he was placed on oxygen and then flown to a larger facility in Salt Lake City. Doctors there prescribed stronger antibiotics and put him on dialysis, but the tooth infection had spread to his blood and lungs, she said. She flew to his bedside and was able to say goodbye before he died on Monday morning.

Reading The "Indivisible" Agenda, And Liking It

You'll like it too.

Steve Bannon Decides to Attack and Defeat the Federal Judiciary

Crisis time, of many to come:

Andrew Jackson’s confrontational attitude toward the courts, particularly on matters of race, war, and human decency, bears particular scrutiny. Jackson hated the courts, making every attempt to limit their power and even instigate clashes with the judiciary. Jackson felt that judges had no authority to place any limits on majoritarian rule. Both states and the federal government attempted to nullify or simply refuse to enforce judicial rulings, and various crises were only resolved when majorities who favored court decisions protecting minority interests once again won elected office and created a government culture in which the judiciary was better respected.

Fast forward to the recent Muslim ban. Bannon had to know that the courts would immediately step in to halt the deportations on multiple legal grounds. But not only did Bannon seek that confrontation, he did so in the most provocative way possible: it was Bannon’s idea to overrule the Department of Homeland Security and include green card holders in the immigration ban.

And, in fact, a Constitutional crisis has already arisen: some border patrol have been defying court orders by detaining legal residents without access to attorneys, in spite of direct personal pressure from United States senators and armies of lawyers.

It’s possible that this chaos is simply a result of overzealousness and incompetence on the part of the Administration. But Bannon is known to be a cunning a strategist who doesn’t show his hand and doesn’t like to openly talk about his tactics. His actions are seldom random and always deliberate.

Magic Carpet Stops Here

E. Discusses Trump's Problems

(E. spots headline on my computer screen, entitled "Psychologists believe Trump is showing signs of severe mental illness".)

E.: MMMMMAAARRRRCCCC! I believe that headline might be true, because he's nearly alone!

M.: Trump is nearly alone?

E.: Yes! Did you see him in all those debates with Hillary? There was no one around him. There's no one to help him. He's doing it all by himself. Can you imagine? All that stress! I don't even think his wife is helping him, or his daughter and her husband. Can you imagine how hard that must be? Running for President all by yourself, until maybe Election Day, when everyone else showed up, or something?

M.: So, maybe Trump isn't getting enough sleep, trying to do it all himself.

E.: Yes. Poor guy. All he wants is to make America great again, but no one's helping. So, maybe he's showing signs of mental illness. He's the oldest President too. That doesn't help.

M.: Poor guy!

A Few Photos from Today's Groovmekanex Locking Masterclass

I'm fairly unfamiliar with Locking, but it was big in the early Seventies. Here is Don Campbell and his Lockers, including Toni Basil, back in the day:

Steve Aoki feat. Machine Gun Kelly - Free the Madness

I can't believe I missed this all this time! An excellent, funny House Music video featuring Steve Aoki, Breaking Bad, and three irritated girl scouts:

Michel Foucault Documentary

By chance, Chloe mentioned Ubu.com, which is a very unusual resource on the World Wide Web. Ubu is deliberately maintained in an anachronistic form, but it has many wonderful features, like this Michel Foucault Documentary:

The 1993 documentary film above, Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil, explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture. Biographer James Miller points out that Foucault was “preoccupied with exploring states that were beyond normal everyday experience… drugs, certain forms of eroticism,” as a way to “reconfigure the world and his place in it.” In this, says anthropologist Paul Rabinow, Foucault sought to resurrect the questions that sober analytic philosophy had largely abandoned: questions about what it means to be human, beyond the social categories we take as natural and given.