Author: VD

The true and obscure history of Psykosonik, part I

Among the very small number of people still interested in Psykosonik, there is a fair amount of confusion as to what actually happened concerning the band’s beginnings as well as its end. It was an interesting, and I would have to say, generally positive experience even if we never realized our potential, never put too much effort into it, and basically demonstrated how far one could expect to go without seriously trying.

Psykosonik began with a small, personable guy named Gordie, who was determined to be a nightclub impresario. He got his start with a little place in Minneapolis called The Upper Level, in partnership with a rich kid from Minnetonka named John something or other. John was a short, good-looking blond guy who, if he had been taller, could have played the villain in every 80’s movie. He could have defined the term “douchebag”. The featured attraction at The Upper Level was a band called Smilehouse, which in addition to John and Gordie, featured the music, singing, guitar, and keyboard programming of a tall, handsome, diffident musician named Paul Skrowaczewski.

Paul came by his skills naturally, being the son of Stanislau Skrowaczewski, who at the time was the conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. His younger brother Nick was also in Smilehouse, (more about him later), and played the drums. They had a very 80’s sound and were really rather good, although I was always skeptical about whether Gordie and John were actually playing anything on keyboards and bass. I think the Smilehouse name was meant to trade on the Acid House that had been big in the UK around that time, but there was nothing either Acid or House about the music, which was straightforward dance pop written by Paul. Their most popular song was “All Night Party”, an upbeat dance number, but I really liked the more subdued and mysterious “Perfect Stranger”.

The summer before, in 1987, Big Chilly and I had formed a cover band called NoBoys with his brother Sharp and our friend Horn, which wasn’t particularly serious and was more devoted to figuring out how to program the electronics of the songs we liked than anything. We learned how to play songs by Depeche Mode, New Order, Shriekback, Erasure, and Information Society, whose singer, Kurt Harland, happened to be from the next suburb over. More about him later too. The name was a bit of a joke, standing for North Oaks Boys, which was about as far from “the street” as you could get without going to an East Coast prep school. Had we started it just a little later, after Straight Outta Compton was released, (we were huge PE and NWA fans from the start), I have no doubt we would have called it NoBoyz….

Right before we all went back to college in the summer of 1988, I played a tape to Gordie and we discussed NoBoys playing at The Upper Level. He was excited, because at the time, with the exception of Prince and the various Prince-related bands, all the live bands played rock and roll, not dance music. He came out to my parents’ house where we practiced in the exercise room in the basement, liked the song selections and the fact that all four of us could sing, and hired us for what turned out to be NoBoys second and final live performance. So, we got The Upper Level gig in return for a percentage of the evening take.

This was the picture used in the flyer that Gordie distributed. From left: Big Chilly, Vox, Sharp, Horn.

As would happen later a few blocks away, with Psykosonik, the crowd completely abandoned the floor once the DJ stopped and the stage lights went on, only to return with delight once they heard the electronics kick in and everyone realized we weren’t going to play music that was 20 years out of date. We played for an hour and the set went over well, extremely well. So well, in fact, that John, Gordie’s partner, was furious that the crowd was so much more enthusiastic than it had been lately about Smilehouse. (This was because Smilehouse had been playing there all summer, not because their songs were bad. Also, when it comes to dancing, people tend to prefer covers to original music by unknown bands, live crowds never want to hear anything new even if it is U2 or Springsteen that is introducing it. Although in the latter case, that will seldom stop them from bragging about it later….)

John was so jealous that he not only pulled the plug on us once we’d hit precisely the one hour allotted, (we were just about to kick into our big closing number, a rocked-up version of Malaria by Shriekback(1), he actually had the DJ play “Blue Monday” by New Order, the last song we’d been permitted to finish. This was a mistake, because our programming was very good and thus our version sounded almost precisely the same, (except for the vocals)(3), and he just about lost it when people kept asking him why it was being repeated. The four of us were so indignant about being prevented from finishing our set when it was going so well that we refused to accept the few hundred dollars we were due from Gordie, who was a nice guy and extremely embarrassed by his partner’s behavior. I also met a pretty blonde waitress that evening who was very sympathetic to us, which eventually proved to be of minor significance, as shall be seen later.

But Gordie and I stayed in touch, and the following winter, he invited me to see his new club, an all-ages place called The Underground, near the University of Minnesota campus in Dinkytown. He had the most ridiculous little “VIP” section roped off, with just enough room for about ten people and invited me to come sit with him in there.(2) As it happened, that evening there was already one other “VIP” sitting there smoking a cigarette behind the ropes, a guy that I recognized right away as the lead singer of Smilehouse. Gordie introduced us, and that was how I met Paul Sebastien.

The true and obscure history of Psykosonik part II

(1) Man, we loved that Shriekback song. And everyone went nuts when we played it, Malaria was the one big exception to the rule about live crowds not liking songs they hadn’t heard before. With his big bass voice, Big Chilly just ripped it up, both vocally and on guitar. And how can you not respect a band that not only incorporates the word “parthenogenesis”, but does so in the freaking chorus! If you haven’t heard Shriekback’s Oil and Gold CD, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

(2) I was tremendously amused to see that for the dance floor, Gordie had used the same black-and-white linoleum tile at that he had admired so in my parent’s basement exercise room.

(3) “Blue Monday” was one of the two songs on which I sang lead, because the other three were all talented vocalists who didn’t sound plugged-up and drugged-out enough for New Order. And by talented vocalists, I mean genuinely talented.

The inevitable result of the “Arab Spring”

Perhaps, my dear anklebiters, you may recall when you said I had no idea what I was talking about when I scoffed at the idea that the “Arab Spring” would lead to that vision of shiny secular democracy that is dying in the West and will never exist in the Middle East. After all, weren’t there STUDENT LEADERS speaking ENGLISH to CNN reporters? Surely the ability of two or three twenty-somethings to appear presentable on camera must have been a reliable indicator of their political power in Egypt! And I’m sure you haven’t forgotten all your pooh-poohing of the idea that democracy would lead directly to rule by religious fundamentalist parties:

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Quelle surprise! The entire point of establishing the various kings and military dictatorships at the end of the European colonial era was to avoid popular governments and thereby prevent the revival of violent Islamic expansion. And I have no sympathy for the neocons, particularly the Jewish ones who loudly advocated democratic revolution in the Arab world and will soon be shrieking about how their precious Israel is now increasingly threatened by the democratic governments they helped establish.

The neocons have clearly already made geo-politics much more unstable with their unrestrained interventionist strategery. I suggest they all shut the hell up and simply watch as the Arabs, Israelis, and Americans go about pursuing their national interests without the “benefit” of advice from the idiot interventionist lobby.

Democracy is not, and has never been, an intrinsic good in and of itself. It is not freedom. It is not liberty. And very often, it is a very good way of ensuring that human freedom and liberty are repressed.

Is the Denver D holding back Tebow?

It astonishes me that it is necessary to walk the doubters through this, but Denver is not winning because it has a great defense. Nor can it be honestly said that Denver’s offense is terrible because Tim Tebow is the starting quarterback. Consider the following facts:

Denver DEF

Points per game: 23.6 (22nd)
Rush yds per game: 120.5 (19th)
Pass yds per game: 234.7 (17th)
Interceptions: 7 (26th)
Fumbles Recovered: 6 (14th)
Sacks: 30 (7th)

Denver OFF

Points per game: 20.1 (21st)
Rush yds per game: 159.7 (1st)
Pass yds per game: 153.1 (31st)
Interceptions: 1 (1st)
Fumbles Lost: 9 (27th)
Sacks given: 16 (10th)

(Note that the NFL ranks sacks given and interceptions by QB rather than by team: Tebow has thrown one while Orton threw eight.)

The astonishing thing isn’t that Denver doesn’t have the league’s best defense, but that it doesn’t even have the league’s worst PASSING offense. What is often overlooked in assessing the Broncos is that in addition to saddling Denver with a low-risk, low-performance passing game, Tebow also provides his team with an EXCELLENT running game. Jacksonville has a much better defense than Denver and an even worse passing game; the primary difference is that Denver gains 40 more rushing yards per game and throws one less interception than the Jaguars. The NFL being a game of inches, that is the difference between 5-1 and 1-5. And given that Tebow rushes for 50.6 yards per game without losing any fumbles and throwing only 0.15 INT per game, it should be fairly obvious that in the case of Denver, the difference is #15.

If Denver’s defense was genuinely as good as everyone keeps saying it is, the Broncos would be the favorites to not only win the AFC West, but would probably have the AFC’s best shot at beating the Packers in the Super Bowl. (Ironically, in light of Tebow’s connection to the First Coast, he would likely have the Jaguars winning the AFC South and playing for home field advantage right now if he was playing with MoJo Drew and the league’s fifth-rated defense instead of a Ravens reject and the league’s 22nd-rated defense.) Tebow isn’t proving a team can win in the NFL with an excellent defense and a caretaker quarterback who doesn’t turn the ball over, that was Trent Dilfer and the 2000 Ravens. He is proving instead that a team can win in the NFL with an average defense, a low-risk, low-performance passing game, and the best running game in the league.

Be grateful for President Obama

It could have been a lot worse… John McCain might have won:

Buried in the annual defense appropriations bill is a provision that would give the President the power to use the military to intern anyone – including American citizens – indefinitely, and hold them without charges or trial, anywhere in the world, including on American soil. The provision essentially repeals the longstanding Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from engaging in law enforcement on US territory – the greatest fear of the Founders. Approved by a Senate subcommittee in secret hearings, the provisions open the road to a military dictatorship in this country – and for that we can thank Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, who introduced the measure. Both the FBI and the Pentagon came out against the Levin-McCain monstrosity, and Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) introduced an amendment striking the provision: the amendment was defeated in the Senate, 37-61.

The mind reels.

Given how spectacularly awful McCain has been as a senator, it still boggles the mind that he managed to win the Republican nomination. Any Republican Those who are arguing for supporting Mitt Romney based on the idea that he can defeat Obama in 2012 are forgetting the obvious problem: given his political record and the principle of counter-push, there is absolutely no guarantee that Romney won’t actually turn out to be even worse than Obama.

There can be little question at this point that McCain would have been. The one good thing about Obama is that he is far too passive and lazy to want to be a dictator, because then he would actually have to stop voting present.

On second thought, perhaps Obama might be as bad as McCain after all. Or at least someone in his administration is.

“The initial bill reported by the committee included language expressly precluding ‘the detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.’ The Administration asked that this language be removed from the bill.”

Well, at least we’ll have a bipartisan military dictatorship. And bipartisan is always good, right?

More Fed futility

Don’t be surprised if the Dow jump from the Fed’s latest desperation effort fades within a week:

Six central banks led by the Federal Reserve lowered the cost of emergency dollar funding for financial companies in a global effort to ease Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. The new interest rate is the dollar overnight index swap rate plus 50 basis points, a half percentage-point cut, and the program was extended by six months to Feb. 1, 2013, the Fed said today in a statement in Washington….

The dollar swap lines were previously set to expire Aug. 1, 2012. The new pricing will be applied to operations starting on Dec. 5. Seven-day loans would carry an interest rate of about 0.58 percent, down from 1.08 percent, based on the current one- week OIS rate of 0.08 percent.

They can cut it to zero and it’s not going to work. It’s supposed to be “confidence-inspiring” that all the central banks are “working together”. Of course, the fact that they are doing so only underlies how impotent and desperate they are. No amount of jump-starting will revive a battery that is truly dead.

Zerohedge has a theory concerning what galvanized them into action: “It appears that a big European bank got close to failure last night. European banks, especially French banks, rely heavily on funding in the wholesale money markets. It appears that a major bank was having difficulty funding its immediate liquidity needs. The cavalry was called in and has come to the successful rescue.” >

For the time being…. Here’s what happened last time.

Three strikes for corporations

Karl Denninger has an idea for forcing corporations to abide by the law:

Our current “justice system”, in short simply makes fraud a business model that has costs dramatically smaller than what the offenders can steal through their misconduct. Judge Rakoff is exactly correct in refusing to endorse this model, as despite the claims that this is an “effective” model for discipline of wrong-doing we have decades of experience with it now and all it has produces is serial re-offenders.

Were this a violent criminal context we would have protests on the courthouse steps demanding “three strikes” and similar laws, and we’d get them, exactly as we did years ago.

It is well beyond the time that we should have a “three strkes” rule for corporate misconduct and put a stop to the “neither admit or deny” negotiated settlement.

If individuals can be locked up for life on the basis of three felonies, then obviously it makes a great deal of sense to shut down a corporation after it commits three felonies as well. Corporations only exist by the action of the state and they are terminated by a subsequent action of the state on a regular basis.

While regulators could theoretically keep corporations under control, the historical fact is that they are rapidly captured by the very corporations they are meant to police and transformed into an insurance policy. Imagine how often banks would be robbed if each time someone robbed a bank, they were forced to pay a fine equal to about five percent of what they stole and told not to do it again… or they would pay another similar fine.

The present system of fraud and theft legalized after the fact isn’t good for the nation or the economy, and it isn’t even beneficial for the corporations in the long run. Veal may make for a nice meal, but if you eat all the calves, you’re not going to be eating beef for very long.

One way or another

Since they were unable to get all 50 attorneys general to sign on to the ex post facto legal whitewashing of their massive title fraud, it appears that some bankers may have decided to take more direct action to cover their tracks:

The notary who signed tens of thousands of false documents in a massive robo-signing scandal case was found dead in her home on Monday. The notary, 43-year-old Tracy Lawrence, was supposed to be in court at 8:30 Monday morning for her sentencing hearing. When her attorney did not hear from her for more than an hour, Sr. Deputy Attorney General Robert Giunta asked for a bench warrant to be issued for Lawrence. The judge denied the request.

Police were sent to Lawrence’s house to check on her after her lawyer expressed concern for her client’s well-being. They found her body inside her home.

I have little doubt the coroner will determine that she committed suicide by shooting herself three times. In the back of the head.

Mailvox: two questions

DW asks about overpopulation and marital submission:

I’m a fairly new reader of your blog and a big fan. I have two questions. Some of my friends are scientists—a biologist, a chemist and a biochemist. They all tell me that the world is overpopulated. I don’t believe them. Do you think the world is overpopulated? Also, since you’re a Christian, do you believe the stuff Paul wrote about a wife being submissive to her husband? I’ve been… trying to figure out how to argue for the traditional Christian view that the husband is the head of the wife and that women shouldn’t hold authoritative positions in the Church in today’s world.

I think some parts of the world are overpopulated, which is to say the parts of the world that cannot manage to feed or maintain civilized societies without external support. It is absurd to be sending vast quantities of food, medicine, and money to third world nations that cannot provide for themselves while simultaneously permitting third-world immigration. This is actually a monstrous policy that not only ensures devastation throughout the third world, but throughout the civilized world as well.

If you consider that the Nigerian city of Lagos alone has 1.6 million more Nigerians than there are Swiss in Switzerland, it should be readily apparent that Europe’s money, technology, and medicine has helped expand the African population to quantities it can no longer reasonably support than America’s money, technology, and medicine could support China.

So, the world is overpopulated in parts and the consequent idea of substituting immigrants for natives – or electing a new people, as the Democrats are now explicitly doing with their creation of an “Obama Coalition” – will turn out to be even more disastrous than the attempts to industrialize the uncivilized have been.

As to the second question, yes, there is no shortage of historical and scientific evidence in support of the Biblical concept of female submissiveness in marriage. It should not be necessary to argue this at all with fellow Christians, as the Churchian concept of mutual submission is not only illogical, it is outright anti-Christian.

In light of the Biblical analogy, the concept of mutual submission requires the belief that Jesus Christ submits himself to his church. I would no more accept a nominally Christian authority that taught “mutual submission” as being legitimate as I would one that taught one should pray in the name of Obama instead of Jesus Christ.

The Harassinator strikes again!

Herman Cain says he was just helping a woman financially… in much the same way that Eddie Murphy was just giving that tranny prostitute a ride and Hugh Grant was just helping Destiny Brown floss her teeth. Such good samaritans, the three of them:

An Atlanta businesswoman is breaking her silence, claiming she has been involved in a 13-year-long affair with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain…. She says the physical relationship ended about eight months ago, right before Cain announced he was running for president. But the communication did not. When we asked for any corroborating evidence, she pointed us to her cell phone contacts. One name: Herman Cain.

She showed us some of her cell phone bills that included 61 phone calls or text messages to or from a number starting with 678. She says it is Herman Cain’s private cell phone. The calls were made during four different months– calls or texts made as early as 4:26 in the early morning, and as late as 7:52 at night. The latest were in September of this year.

“We’ve never worked together,” said White. “And I can’t imagine someone phoning or texting me for the last two and a half years, just because.”

We texted the number and Herman Cain called us back. He told us he “knew Ginger White” but said these are “more false allegations.” He said she had his number because he was “trying to help her financially.”

I’m sure he is telling the truth, if by “help her financially” he meant “provide her with a taste of that sweet, sweet, forbidden fruit that is known by the name of Herman Cain”. The best part is the way she describes him: “Herman Cain loves Herman Cain.” That sums it all up right there. You may recall that I told you, right from the start, that the man’s candidacy was a joke.

I shall now commence to bathe in the invigorating saline waters of Fred Backer’s tears.

UPDATE: In a conference call this morning, Herman Cain told his senior staff that he is “reassessing” whether to remain in the race. He will make his final decision “over the next several days.”

The Left goes full circle

So much for the notion of free speech in the UK:

The 34-year-old from New Addington in Croydon, south London, was held on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence after a video came to light on YouTube. The two-minute clip showed a woman insulting passengers while holding a toddler on her lap in a full tram carriage on the Croydon to Wimbledon service in South London.

It quickly spread via Twitter and YouTube, sparking outrage, as the woman in the video could be heard demanding foreign workers “go back to their own country”.

It is fascinating to see how the Left, which originally claimed to exist solely represent the interests of the working class, have now turned on the working class and is willing to criminalize a member of the working class for expressing the interests of the working class.

The UK unemployment rate is 8.3%. That means that several million members of the British working class are unemployed, while millions of third-world Africans and Asians are being permitted to migrate to Britain. If you haven’t been to London recently, it is shocking how few British people you will see on the streets there; on one occasion, I was the only white person – more than that, actually, the only individual of actual British descent – on the train the last time I was there.

This isn’t sustainable. Many, if not most British people feel exactly the same way the woman who is the latest thought criminal does, and eventually they will reach the point where they are not content to simply express themselves with futile words on the train. No doubt all right-thinking Brits are supposed to be shocked and horrified by the woman’s outburst, but I there can be little doubt that the majority of the population is in silent agreement with her.

In Germany, the media reported a record-setting heavy newborn. His name is Jihad. He is the youngest of 14 children. This, too, is not sustainable.

The multicultural concept has failed. Abysmally. It was founded on false premises. And every serious student of history knows what comes next. Periods of mass human migration are generally periods of war and other serious unpleasantries.