saul williams' niggy tardust is 'really good™'. that's officially my rating. 4/5 stars, something like that. you should know that means i like it enough that i'm going to have it on incessant repeat on my stereo, my mp3 player, my mind, for the rest of the week and then some. it's right up there with NIN's with_teeth and year-zero, and a step/giant-leap below The Downward Spiral, or Led Zeppelin (the album), or The Wall.

at first i thought it was too obviously crammed with reznor's year-zero soundscaping. but i get it now. saul and trent are a very organic fusion at this moment. Trent can write very intense lyrics when he's picking at his own emotional scabs, and while *he* doesn't get close to that level of power when he's trying social commentary, that's what Saul's all about.

So I don't think Niggy's sound is a case of trent not being able to sound like anything but himself, even when trying to make a hip-hop album. "Niggy" isn't Trent trying to do hip-hop. It's more like an in-between sequels, alternate take of year-zero. It's an iteration of year-zero. it ought to have a halo number. Saul's lyrics, notwithstanding their frequent use of "NGH" (which is often ironic at two or more levels), could easilly have formed the semantic content to year-zero. you might have to listen to Niggy a bit slant to hear that, but that's only fitting: saul's diction is down with dickinson's idea of truth and divinity.

Download it at niggytardust.com

funny addendum: my CD changer just tracked off the end of 'Niggy', and onto NIN's "Broken". Till the lyrics of "WiSH" kicked-in, I didn't quite notice that we'd switched discs!

New York Magazine interviewed Trent and Saul (unfortunately mostly about the distribution model rather than the music). Trent confesses to putting his money where his mouth his [when asked how much he paid for Radiohead's in rainbows]: "I bought the physical one, so I spent a whopping $80. [Pauses.] But, then I re-bought it and paid $5,000, because I really felt that I need to support the arts, so people could follow in my footsteps."

From Yahoo News: WASHINGTON - The economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $1.6 trillion — roughly double the amount the White House has requested thus far, according to a new report by Democrats on Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

The report, released Tuesday, attempted to put a price tag on the two conflicts, including "hidden" costs such as interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars, lost investment, the expense of long-term health care for injured veterans and the cost of oil market disruptions.
Read more...

Fair enough, actually, as an estimation of the *costs* of the war. But they haven't attempted to balance that with the *gains* of the war, so really it's meaningless. What about spurred economic activity due to the war, military manufacturing, jobs created for Americans, and the potential returns from investsments that have been made in reconstruction efforts? I'm not an economist, and I have no idea what these "hidden gains" might be, but I'm sure they total to more than $0.00, which is what the Democrats are implying when they went about tallying hidden costs.

If they'd made a good-faith effort to look at gains as well as losses, the net loss would be a much more potent statistic.

It's not just the war either. Climate change folks need to do this. Sure there may be increased costs to society from the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, land lost to rising seas, species loss, and a slew of public health problems due to flood conditions, increased energy expenditures for heating and cooling, etc. But perhaps grasses or C4 plants (that includes corn and rice) are more productive under higher temperatures? Perhaps growing seasons for some temperate crops will be extended? All plants need CO2 to photosynthesize, but when they open their stomates (basically air- and water- tight pores in the leaves that can open and close) to let CO2 in, they lose water vapor as it evaporates out. Under low water conditions, plants may not be able to photosynthesize as much as they could if they didn't have to conserve water. But with more CO2 in the air, the plants can get more bang for each second they have their stomates open. Under some conditions of heat, water availability, and sunlight, some crops may grow better with more CO2 in the air. (This benefit is NOT likely to be of the same magnitude as the costs of climate change, but it may be a real, measurable effect).

Any attempt to tally costs without equal zeal spent on discovering off-setting benefits is an unscientific and political scam. Same goes for reporters or former Presidents elect Presidential candidates who quickly hand-wave away the potential benefits while schooling us on the costs. That won't do. Give us a *number* for the benefits, say 4 cents on every dollar of costs, and more people will listen. Make the effort to always always report the offsetting number (benefits, when you're reporting about costs; costs, when your reporting on benefits). Should be journalism 101, but I rarely see it done in practice.

Last week the PBS TV show NOW reported statistics on military rape and sexual assault. How about some support for our troops? No, really, how about it?

I don't particularly like it when people report statistics on sexual harrassment along with ones on rape, because it can tend to confuse people. In military terminology, according to NOW "Military Sexual Trauma" includes acts of harassment all the way through acts of rape. I'll make an unjustified assumption that NOW was careful with their editing, and that when they have Dr. Patricia Resick, a V.A. psychologist state, that 15% of women in the firts gulf war were raped (see the show's transcript) they really mean rape.

Fifteen percent of women raped in a few months??! By fellow soldiers? You Go Girls! Join the military. Heck, with ROTC, the military might even pay for you to get rape training in the college fraternity/sorority system so you'll be used to it when you get raped under combat conditions later on.

I'm not being glibly sarcastic. I'm fucking furious. Why the fuck don't we train our men and boys not to rape?

Nine Inch Nails knows how to make money without seeming like that's all they're after. When the 2005 album With_Teeth was released, the *whole album* was available to listen to on mySpace. Hordes of NIN fans went out and bought the album.

NIN promises a new full-length release in April. The marketing for this one is just plain fun. First, they've set up a bunch of websites purportedly created in the 2022 world that the album describes. The sites are ( the usual suspects for a dystopian future world )

Parallel to this Alternate Reality Game (ARG), USB drives are being left in bathroom stalls at NIN concerts. The drives contain mp3s of tracks from the forthcoming NIN album (thusfar three have been leaked), along with other files that contain clues to the ARG. There are more clues in tour T-shirts, and numbers to call with recordings on them. The latest (and most disturbing) is 216-333-1810 (in conjunction with the leak of the song "Me, I'm not" and the uswiretap.com site). WARNING The recording at that phone number is a simulated cellphone call from a girl in a nightclub where people get locked-in and massacred. Not pleasant to listen to (for me, much worse than the torture stuff in the Broken movie, which was clearly simulated), and you can find transcripts online if your interested in the ARG, but not getting the heebie-jeebies.

Oh yeah, the Songs... You can find the dload sites at echoingthesound.org and other places. As these are unofficial "official" leaks from NIN, they're not pirated. Go get them and listen.

was the 1st leak (and indeed is officially released to radio stations). It's OK.

" was next. People have called-it Public Enemy-ish, which is kindof like saying Stravinsky is Mozart-ish because they use the same instrumentation. I'm not sure what to classify it as. It's fun as hell to dance to with it's crazy beat.
came out today. Very, danceable. Not in an 'industrial EBM' way, but just flat-out nightclub stuff. Reminds *me* of the Timbaland/Timberland "Sexy Back" thing, although it's a very different song. Both songs have deceptively insipid sounding lyrics (if you bother to look them up, you'll realize that Justin Timberlake isn't just moaning about 'get your sexy on', but actually goes into some light bdsm stuff in that song!).

Anyway, Year_Zero, is a damn geeky and fun concept for an album release.

Just watched a very tough documentary about an OB/GYN in Afghanistan, himself originally an economic refugee to the States from Afghanistan in the 70s. The one hospital he worked at, which was supported by the US dept. of Health & Human services had rotting toilets, and was so low on supplies that they use dirty needles as paper clips. The problems were not all due to the logistics of US supply and funding however: one pregnant woman was brought near-death to the hospital after first having been taken to a local mullah who beat her with a whip to exorcise her. What he exorcised, unfortunately was her unborn baby, whom he killed. The doctor was caught between the lack of resources on the one hand, and what he himself called "thirteenth century" cultural ignorence of medicine.

Another hospital which was founded and run by a local organization was clean, and adequately supplied, but many of the patients who walked miles to get there were pretty far gone.

Here's the website for the documentary: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/motherlandafghanistan/

Afghanistan's problems started well before we in the US decided to blast it, and I really don't know if we've helped or hurt what was already a dismal situation. We have to stop equating destitute countries who host terrorists with *being* "The Terrorists". I'm not really articulating it but I'm really angry. Ordinary citizens who backed the wars really had no idea of the reality of it all. And we still don't. We continue to watch FoxNews, or perhaps listen to the equally vapid vitriol of AirAmerica, but nobody's watching PBS documentaries.

NPR did a story on PTSD and the lack of mental health care that vets receive. A congressional study found that -- surprise! -- vets are not getting proper mental health care.

One real issue is that the military is built on diciplined training, and mental health problems disrupt that with messy symptoms that, unlike a severed limb or even the flu, might look to commanders like poor dicipline, morale or behavior. Paraphrasing a low-level commander: "PTSD is the classic back-door excuse that soldiers use to get out of the Army". Think about that, folks. It's a volunteer army. There's no draft. People do not *need* excuses to get out of the Army in the way they did during the Vietnam era. There's this whole fucked up economic system of federal jobs -- as advertised on goarmy.com -- and it's sucking people in, and lo and behold when they face the reality of deployment, we the civilians who put them in harms way in the first place, are suprised that they're not hapilly chewing on their Thanksgiving Turkeys or flipping Playstation III's for profit on eBay.

For what it's worth, I'm complicit in the war, and since I'm really not having to pay the price yet, I'm going to be grateful for my blessings. Do something good for yourself, -- or for your friends and familly, or for the world -- today. There are plenty who don't have the opportunity.

I'll try to be brief.

On this Memorial Day, let's please remember to, as the movie Saving Private Ryan exhorts us, earn the sacrifices that were made on our behalf in WWII. We can do so in many ways, encouraging freedom, democracy and prosperity in our own country and abroad. However, if we continue to soil our flag with blood shed in a war waged for reasons of commerce and political expediency, it calls into question the very meanings of the words "freedom", "democracy", and "prosperity". We can't walk out of Iraq, but lets not celebrate what happens there with nationalistic pride misapropriated from WWII.

I watched some of the Memorial Day concert, and was rather moved. The big mistake is in categorizing all war casualties as heroic deaths made in the defense of freedom. Any soldier in combat can desert in the face of the horrors they face. The overwhelming majority do not, and this certainly does make them brave and heroic -- to a depth that most civilians aren't able to comprehend. Unfortunately, the current wars that the US is fighting were not necessary to the defense of freedom: the bombing of Afghanistan was retaliatory, and the war in Iraq is just plain senseless when the human cost is totalled.

During the Memorial Day concert broadcast, great efforts were taken to personalize the sacrifices made by soldiers, including having actors read 1st-person narratives written by a prisoner-of-war, a mother of a dead soldier, and a member of a combat unit that experienced casualties. The taboo that that the broadcast dared not break was to further personalize these accounts into being the accounts simply of people experiencing war, rather than of United States soldiers waging war. When one strips the flags off the carcass, one sees that deaths caused by collateral damage, the deaths of enemy soldiers, and even the deaths whithin terrorist militias all leave behind grieving families.

I'm sure I've said it before: Memorial Day is a profound argument against the unnecessary waging of war. To read of President Bush being "in awe of the men and women who sacrifice for the freedom of the United States of America," or to watch Gen. Colin Powell shake hands with and thank soldiers, makes me sick.

National leadership forces one to make terrible decisions whose consequences are fraught with peril no matter how one decides them. But surely the need for Bush and Powell to send troops to Iraq cannot in any way compare with the need for Roosevelt and his cabinet to enter into WWII. The flags and roses planted each year by Belgian schoolchildren at the foot of the US WWI graves in Flanders Field do not symbolize the same things as the flags that are draped over the steel caskets that are coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Christianity has a saying "love the sinner but hate the sin". In loving the sacrifices made by those in uniform, lets not forget to continue hating war.

Hey all you politics heads out there. Read _Imperial Hubris_. It'll very probably change the way you hear the debates about Iraq, AlQueada, and Terrorism.

He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.

U.S. Declaration of Independence (the same one that goes on to talk of the merciless Indian Savages).

I've been reading a memoir (_Journey into the whirlwind_, by Eugenia Ginzburg) by a woman who had been imprisonned during Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union. Made me thing about how awful it must be living in a totalitarian regime. So it's pushed me across the line; liberating Iraq, if Iraqi's were experincing anything like the Soviets did, was a good thing. Here's a rehash of an email i sent on the subject:

( opinions )
Anyway, I didn't mean to write a political rant. _Journey into the Whirlwind_
evoked strong feelings from me, and it was natural to project them onto the Iraq
situation.