Indianapolis garage rock thrashers Brother O Brother have announced that their new album Skin Walker will be released as a guitar pedal. And if that doesn't make any sense at all, it's exactly as it sounds: it's a vinyl record, and it's also a guitar pedal. This unholy innovation comes from pioneering vinyl experimentalists Romanus Records, who have something of track record when it comes to taking the humble long-player places it's never been before. Romanus filled one LP with razor blades and gunpowder, embedded LEDs in another, and even worked on a limited edition "liquid-filled snowglobe variant" vinyl edition of the soundtrack of the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged. Skin Walker will be released as a pair of vinyl LPs, each considerably thickened to house the pedal electronics, with the control knobs positioned on the centre labels. One pedal will offer overdrive/boost, and feature a toggle switch to control two different channels, while the other is a delay pedal, with four settings to create unique combinations of delay.

For almost a week straight, #MAGACommunism has been trending on Twitter. The rank and file British Empire Left has been … MAGA Communism is Based Read More »

Sheriff’s deputies raided the home of LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl on Wednesday morning. The department says the raid is tied to an investigation about county contracts awarded to Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit run by Patti Giggans, who is friends with Kuehl. Giggans is also a member of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, which oversees the department and has clashed repeatedly with Sheriff Alex Villanueva over his refusal to comply with subpoenas. Both Kuehl and Giggans have called for removing Villanueva, who’s up for reelection in November. The sheriff says he had no prior knowledge of the raid and recused himself from the investigation. Kuehl tells KCRW that she’s not connected with the no-bid contracts that LA Metro gave Peace Over Violence to run a sexual harassment hotline for people to report sexual violence on public transit. She adds that she happens to be friends with Giggans due to her decades-long work in domestic violence. “You can see everybody else has contracted with [Giggans] as well. I didn't have to do anything, and indeed never even knew about it. The administration at LA Metro looked at all the organizations, chose Peace Over Violence to do their sexual harassment work, and it never came to the …[supervisors] board. The sheriff seized their server yesterday. So now they're not even able to serve the women who are calling in for help.”

Right-wing pundits, landlords, and tech executives all believe they can prove we are amid a crime wave with just one more video.

Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English

How the arrest of a burned-out intelligence officer exposed an economic-espionage machine.

A South Korean court has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the primary developer of cryptocurrencies Luna and TerraUSD, whose spectacular collapse in May roiled crypto markets around the world.

A day after Gov. Ron DeSantis took credit for sending undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, the governor suggested at a press conference on Thursday that his efforts prevented those migrants from ever making it into Florida. “One of the reasons why we want to transfer [people is] because, obviously it’s expensive if people are coming here, you got to pay taxes, social services, and all these other things,” DeSantis said at a Thursday news conference in Niceville, which is just north of Fort Walton Beach in the Panhandle. If Florida can send people to so-called sanctuary cities instead, “Well, then the chance that they come to Florida goes down dramatically,” he said. His comments raise questions about Florida’s plans to relocate undocumented immigrants, in protest of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. DeSantis’ administration is only allowed to “transport unauthorized aliens from this state,” according to budget language approved by state lawmakers this year. The governor’s office did not immediately respond when asked whether the migrants had moved to Florida or whether the state-funded program helped transport migrants from another state. DeSantis provided no details about the flights during a Thursday news conference.

The website studied 200 major U.S. cities, looking at marriage, divorce and separation rates. It also factored in addition to the number of places to meet for an affair and the Google searches for the word "affair" and the affair hookup website Ashley Madison.

In threatening to disrupt the nation’s economy, freight rail workers are seeking basic dignities every other worker takes for granted.

The plane flight carrying dozens of migrants and paid by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the latest move by Republican officials to send migrants to Democrat-controlled cities.

Stephen Clay McGehee is an avowed white supremacist. He is also a prominent Florida election tech figure who sells campaign finance software. Florida politics is littered with hate groups, accused Capitol rioters, and far-right extremists. Although many operate in public, or have been outed in recent years, beneath the surface even more malevolent beliefs and ideology can fester. The Daily Dot recently discovered that one of the companies the state authorizes to provide campaigns and political action committees (PACs) with campaign finance software is owned by an open and avowed white supremacist who still praises the Confederacy. Stephen Clay McGehee owns Adjutant Workshop, one of eight companies the Florida Division of Elections approves to provide this service. Adjutant Workshop’s software enables campaigns to electronically file contribution and expenditure records. Its website claims its software, called Campaign ToolBox, “has been the most widely-used political campaign finance reporting software in Florida since 1996.”

Somehow, that seems appropriate.

How the band managed to use artificial intelligence as a collaborator, a sort of phantom band member, has already become part of music-industry lore. Starting in 2016, the members of YACHT took the music from their first six albums, 82 songs in all, and ran it through a series of algorithms that essentially chewed up their body of work, analyzed it, and spat out brand-new songs. Chain Tripping — the album’s name was also machine-generated — garnered national headlines for its use of the burgeoning technology, a Grammy nomination for best immersive audio album, and mostly positive reviews; one music magazine called it “an oddity worth exploration.” Now, three years after the album’s release, the band isn’t converting fully to AI songwriting. But Evans says the experience has not only changed their creative process, but also their understanding of how music is made. “We went into this naively and blindly,” says Evans. “Part of the intent of this project was that, maybe by running our back catalog through these mystical algorithmic processes, we will come to some better understanding of who we are, tap into the DNA of a YACHT song, and understand the formula of what makes us who we are. I think what doing this made us realize is that that formula doesn’t exist.”

Inside the Los Angeles County jail’s booking center, people with severe mental illness are chained to benches or chairs for days on end, often forced to defecate and urinate on themselves, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleged in a filing submitted in federal court last week. The Los Angeles County jail system’s Inmate Reception Center (IRC) has become so overcrowded that detainees are left to sleep on the ground, most of them without blankets, according to the ACLU. The floor is covered in garbage and urine. The men are denied showers and clean clothes. The toilets are clogged and smeared with feces.

one of us better win

The film was reportedly withdrawn "due to rights issues" after holding one screening

In an Oklahoma compound linked to the Universal Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang, officers found what they believe to be a body-dumping ground. The caller had news but warned LaVonne Harris not to get her hopes up. Harris’s son, 33-year-old Nathan Smith, had vanished along a dirt road in Oklahoma one freezing night more than two years earlier. Detectives had long stopped checking in with her, and Harris could feel her search growing lonelier with each passing month. The call in April, from an advocate for families of the missing, wasn’t encouraging, but it was a lead: Authorities in rural Logan County, just north of here, had discovered human remains belonging to more than one person. Also, the caller added delicately, the remains weren’t intact. Harris, 58, sat down to steady herself. She listened, then hung up to tell her daughter. “I said, ‘Lou, they found these bodies,’ ” Harris recalled. “ ‘They’ve been burned and cut.’ ” Smith is among a dozen or more people who have disappeared in recent years from the wooded, unincorporated terrain outside the Oklahoma City metro area, a rural haven for drug traffickers. Some families said they’re scared to call police or even to put up “missing person” signs because they suspect the involvement of violent white-supremacist prison gangs.

Baseless accusations are branding people as satanist pedophiles at the speed of the internet — just ask a GOP prosecutor who recently lost re-election.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was in town last week to tubthump the slow-rolling disaster that is the Central Subway project and to claim that, on the undetermined date it does commence service, it’ll be worth the wait. That’s a hell of a thing to say, considering this project has been in conception since he was in high school and was put before voters when he was just out of college. In that time, the price tag for this project has more than tripled; the final cost is now tabbed at upwards of $1.9 billion, and will all but certainly be significantly higher than that. Close to half a billion of those dollars figure to come from local sources. That’s something to think about the next time your bus doesn’t show up; Muni is a system with infinite needs and finite resources. And this is how it’s spending them. The sclerotic process of the Central Subway is, by definition, an old story. We’ve had lots of time to write about how it’s taking lots of time. That doesn’t make it okay, but you’ve read this. The exploding cost is also not a revelation, and San Francisco officials have long since given up feigning concern about a couple hundred million here or couple hundred million there. Hey! Stuff costs money! So get off it! As an ostensible cost-saving measure, the Central Subway tunnel platforms were designed to only accommodate two-car trains — a disastrous decision, among so many disastrous decisions, that singularly dooms this multi-billion dollar project to failure. Someday in the future, the Central Subway will finally open. And someday after that, the transit riders of San Francisco will pine for the days that it was closed. “As a transit nerd and subway fan, it is painful how badly they built this subway,” laments former longtime BART commissioner Tom Radulovich.