Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 7:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
Tonight's music is mostly early Chicago blues. Before the later electric blues of Muddy Waters and the Chess records crowd, there was an earlier generation of bluesmen like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson that came to Chicago and recorded some pretty amazing music.
A good case can be made for Tampa Red being the influential precursor that led to the modern rock guitar solo. Tampa Red got one of the first National Steel resonator guitars in 1928. The resonator guitar was significantly louder with a tone that could be heard above other loud instruments which allowed Tampa Red evolve a style based upon single note runs which would later be emulated by players like Elmore James and Muddy Waters among many others.
I hope you enjoy it.
Tampa Red - it hurts me too
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
-- H.L. Mencken
News
"Inside Job" Director Charles Ferguson: Wall Street Has Turned the U.S. into a "Predatory Nation"
Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream
It’s time to put the taboo subject of public ownership back on the progressive agenda. It is the only way to solve some of the most serious problems facing the nation. We contend that it is possible not only to talk about this once forbidden subject but to begin to build a serious politics that can do what needs to be done in key sectors. ...
Public ownership in certain sectors of the economy is the only way to solve some of America’s most pressing problems. Take the financial arena, where the current recession was hatched. Today, five giant banks control more than one-third of all deposits. Wall Street claims this makes it more efficient; but even if the Big Five banks were efficient (which is open to question—how “efficient” are institutions that didn’t know they were carrying a huge backlog of underwater loans?), they were all deeply involved in creating the meltdown that cost taxpayers billions in bailouts, and the overall economy trillions. Numerous economists, left and right, believe that these unbridled operations will inevitably lead to another crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s recent speculative loss of at least $2 billion should be fair warning. ...
As a matter of cold logic, then, if some of the most important corporations have a disruptive and costly impact on the economy and the environment—and if regulation and antitrust laws in many areas are likely to be subverted by these corporations—a public takeover is the only logical solution. This argument was put forward most forcefully not by liberals or socialists but by the founders of the conservative Chicago School of Economics. Nobel laureate George Stigler repeatedly observed that regulatory strategies were “designed and operated primarily for [the industries’] benefit.” Henry Simons, Milton Friedman’s teacher and one of the most important Chicago School thinkers, was even more forceful: the state “should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly…industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions.”
Quebec Student Movement Grows with Popular Support
Occupy London Global Spring Day
Senate defeats attempt to study genetically engineered salmon
The Senate Thursday defeated an amendment, 45-50, by Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to require comprehensive environmental study of what she called a “test tube” salmon before the government approves it for the food supply. ...
The salmon would be the first transgenic animal crop to be approved. So-callled GMO crops, limited mostly to corn, cotton and soybeans, have become commonplace in the food supply and have had unintended collateral environmental effects, such as killing the Midwestern habitat of Monarch butterflies. ...
“We need to look before we leap here, and make that a long hard look,” Murkowski said in a statement. She argued the FDA evaluation of the scientific and biological risks of what she called “Frankenfish” does not include evaluation of “how a worst-case scenario of fish escaping into the ocean ecosystem could adversely impact the seafood industry.”
Campaign Stop at Factory Farm Propaganda Site, Billed as "Grassroots Event"
Even though Obama’s campaign stop in Iowa may seem routine, for many Iowans, especially family farmers, environmentalists, animal welfare advocates and rural residents, the location of the visit, at the Paul R. Knapp Animal Learning Center is certain to cause real alarm.
While the name of the building on the Iowa state fairgrounds sounds fairly innocuous, during the famous state fair, the building is transformed into a major propaganda set piece for industrial agriculture, complete with life-size gestation crates, full of sows with newborn baby pigs, dioramas of factory farms and posters full of factory farm PR platitudes. ... While factory farms may seem to be an odd issue to outsiders, the ungodly stench of pig shit from factory hog confinements and the political collusion in Iowa’s state capital have been leading hot button issues during state and presidential campaigns since the mid 1990s.
In the past nearly four years, Obama’s family farm and rural supporters have watched as his administration has caved on nearly every major campaign promise he made in his now famous shrinking rural agenda. While President Obama planted a garden on the White House lawn and his wife launched a major healthy food initiative called Let’s Move, the Obama USDA, FDA and EPA have gone out of their way to favor agribusiness in their rule making and review processes, including the failure to ban subtherapeutic antibiotics for livestock used for treatment of human diseases, the White House’s caving to agribusiness on GIPSA (or fair market livestock reforms for family farmers) to their rampant approval of genetically engineered crops and Obama’s failure to follow through on his campaign promise to label GMOs.
Radioactive bluefin tuna crossed the Pacific to US
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...
Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.
But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
The private-equity problem with Romney and GS Technologies
Minn. pastor supports gay rights, may lose church
ST. PAUL, Minn. — A Minnesota pastor who watched most of his congregation leave after he voiced his support for gay marriage is now at risk of losing his church, unless he can collect enough donations to keep the doors open.
The Rev. Oliver White, 69, runs Grace Community United Church of Christ. He needs to raise $200,000 by June 30 to pay off a loan the St. Paul church took out in 2007.
While the odds are steep, supporters from around the country have taken up his cause. Most of White's fundraising efforts have entailed asking supporters to each mail in $1, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports (http://bit.ly/... ). As of last week he had raised $13,000, he said.
A Little Night Music
Big Bill Broonzy - Key to the Highway
Tampa Red - It Hurts Me Too
Tommy McClennan - Guitar King
Tampa Red + Georgia Tom - You Can't Get That Stuff No More
The piano player, "Georgia Tom" would eventually give up secular music and went on to fame as Thomas Dorsey, the composer of many gospel songs including the standard, "Take My Hand Precious Lord."
John Lee (Sonny Boy) Williamson - Better Cut That Out
Tampa Red - Let me Play With Your Poodle
Big Bill Broonzy - Long Tall Mama
Further listening:
Tampa Red - I'm Gonna Get High , It's Tight Like That
Million Year Blues - John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson
Big Bill Broonzy - See See Rider
Tommy McClennan - Cross Cut Saw Blues
Tampa Red - Sugar Mama Blues No. 1