Musical Excursion

      Tomorrow I leave for a brief but sure to be sweet mini-tour with Damages, a hardcore band I drum in originating from Dayton, and Black Kites, a New Jersey band. I played drums in Damages all summer in Dayton as I was finishing up school and I've had a great time.  The forced hiatus due to moving back to Massachusetts has been a drag...We're going to get to reconnect with some bands we played with this summer while we're out over these next few days; it'll be great to see everyone again. 

 

The Schedule:

Wednesday October 21st Dayton, Ohio

Black Kites/Damages/Colonial/Sok/Others - 214 Shroyer Road 

Thursday October 22nd Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - House Show

Black Kites/Damages/Others TBA

Friday October 23rd Brooklyn, New York - Stolen Sleeves Collective

Black Kites/Damages/The Men/Rational Animals

Saturday October 24th Amherst, Massachusetts - Hampshire College

Black Kites/Damages/Relics/Coerced

Sunday October 25th New Brunswick, New Jersey - Ask Somebody House

Black Kites/Damages/Stressed Out (Last Show)

Needless to say I'm excited for all of this. Also: Just got a deal on a nice ride cymbal off craigslist to replace my embarrassingly destroyed current ride cymbal situation.  

I got a backpack, sleeping bag, cymbals, sticks, and a skateboard.

Tom

And So It Begins...

      While scanning the news headlines this morning I happened upon a disturbing article: A U.S. Census worker was found dead, having been hung from a tree in Kentucky. If that wasn't enough to kick the worrying into high gear, he also had a the words "FED" scrawled across his body. While the police and Federal authorities are still investigating the motivations for the killing, they have ruled that it was an apparent homicide. I hate to assume the worst, but it's almost too obvious in this situation: this appears to be a politically motivated killing as a probable reaction to the growing paranoia surrounding the upcoming U.S. Census. 

       Associated Press reporter Devlin Barret was a guest on the Rachel Maddow show last night to talk about the implications of the crime, aside from its' already brutal circumstances. 

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

   As Barrett mentioned in the video, it seems unlikely that the Federal authorities would remain involved in the investigation of a homicide for this long after the fact (a week and a half) was there not a political element.

   One can't help but connect the dots between the absurd rhetoric regarding the Census coming from the far, far Right, and this most recent occurrence of political violence. Hopefully the authorities will get to the bottom of this immediately so Justice can be served and order be restored, 

The UK Just Loves Orwellian Ironies

File this under: Self-righteous good intentions gone horribly wrong; more potential social destruction to come.

I had done a post in the past regarding the UK's obsession with CCTV cameras and its' social and legal implications. While I didn't expect that to be the last word on the issue, I never expected this:

THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far.

But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million.

While the intentions are for the best: routing out drug problems and anti-social behavior in struggling home environment, the means in which it is being carried out are deeply disturbing. At a certain point it is up to the responsibility of the family to curtail the behavior of their children within the home and that should be it. A person's home is meant to serve as the last frontier of your privacy, especially in this day and age. While one might argue that these families had their to prove their responsibility, I think that this action is totally inappropriate.

From a month ago: Let's rehash it...

I am sick and tired of hearing the same debunked Republican talking points regurgitated over and over again in attempts to scare the American people away from a health-care reform bill that would have a Public Option. OPTION. As in, you DON'T have to choose it. Here's a video in which former Governor Dr. Howard Dean slams (in the nicest way possible, even though it must be incredibly frustrating to refute this garbage time and time again) Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC's onslaught of bogus accusations. I mean it's like she literally collected the worthless dribble that's been sliding out of Mitch McConnell's mouth for the last four months and put it into the teleprompter...Here's the video:



Thanks to crooksandliars.com for the video.

Shameless Self-Promotion Content: My Bands.

You might know by now that I have some other past times besides politics...okay, I have one: Music. I currently play drums in two bands based out of Dayton, Ohio. Colonial is a band I started last year with two friends but has now been reduced to a two-piece outfit. My roommate and friend Matt Ewald is responsible for the guitar playing while I take care of the drums. I'd describe our sound as a throwback to the late '90's hardcore/screamo sound. Think bands like Neil Perry, Joshua Fit For Battle, La Quiete, and Raein. Other people have described us as emo-violence.
I have also fairly recently started drumming in a power-violence/hardcore/thrash band called Damages. James does the vocals and used to play in Hex Noir (A Dayton black metal band) while still currently occaisonlly doing stuff with his pet project known as Altars (I have done some drumming for this as well). Ryan, ex-Hex Noir bassist, plays the four string for us in Damages while Justin, who was in Hex Noir for all of 30 seconds, plays guitar in Damages.
Tonight Damages will be playing a show with Punch (SF), Regrets(CHI), and Rad Company (DYT) at 214 Shroyer road in Dayton, Ohio. Pretty excited, seeing as the other bands are excellent and Damages played well at our last show. We will have our demo tapes as well as cd-r's and some badass looking t-shirts. Get down.
The last was filled with so many good shows that I was able to particpate in with both of my bands. It really reminded me how much I miss being able to play all the time. There's talk of a Damages/Black Kites mini-tour in August. This would be a phenomenal thing.

Republicans! WHAT?!

More on Republican's and their ridiculousness tomorrow.

Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan Campaign

Robert Greenwald and Brave New Film's have been working hard on their Rethink Afghanistan campaign to bring about more public awareness to the staggering toll the war has taken on Afghanistan's innocent civilian population. Most people's connection with the war seems to be through mainstream media sources or the stories they catch in the newspaper which, while providing content relating to military causalities and Taliban deaths, hardly ever delve into the grim reality of the civilian death toll.

Rethink Afghanistan Part 4

It's the elephant in the room that people refuse to recognize or simply just lack a real grasp of: We are murdering thousands of innocent people. Yes, we all know the old caveat "war is hell", but that shouldn't act as a blanket statement of comfort for the American people (let alone the Afghani people).

When does this end? It's not like some day we're going to kill the last member of the Taliban and they will become some sort of figment of history. As long as we keep making their country resemble the surface of Mars, we will continue to do the Taliban's recruiting for them. We're fighting a war against intangible enemy fueled by ideology that thrives in its' underdog status. Theres got to be a more effective way to curtail them because the current method is not working. There is no justice here. No liberation. Just annihilation

If we want to rid Afghanistan of as much terrorism as we can, then we must change the approach. All of the money that we funnel into guns, bombs, tanks, and body armor could be spent on rebuilding their country, feeding them, clothing them, et cetera. These are all things that would GREATLY improve America's image in the eyes of the average Afhangi citizen, because after all, that's what we really are trying to acomplish here.
The numbers are staggering. 235,000 people are living in tents in camps because of U.S. airstrikes that have obliterated their homes and jobs. People are starving to death. Everyday that this continues, more and more people in Afghanistan join up with the Taliban because they are fed up with America trying to liberate them with bombs.

The equation is seemingly simple one: The more we do to ruin the lives of Afghani citizens, no matter how inadvertent or noble we thought our intentions to be, we will continue to the hearts and minds and strengthen the Taliban's motives and reasoning.