Month: July 2020
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The synth I kept
Moving to another country requires you to seriously pare down your belongings. I brought only what I could fit in my previous car — Rhonda the Honda — which meant I had to be choosy with what I kept. One of the things I kept is my trusty Korg Wavestation A/D rackmount synthesizer.
Long before that fateful day when Karl Mohr and I took our accordions out on the streets of Toronto, I was a synth player, and my favorite synth was the Wavestation, which I bought from my friend, TV/film composer Steve Skratt back in 1992.
I played it during back at Crazy Go Nuts University, in our grungy, Faith No More-esque band, Volume…
…and after I graduated in all sorts of projects including providing sound effects and background music for my work making interactive CD-ROMS…
…to synth jam sessions, such as the time when Steve Skratt, Karl Mohr, and I were part of the group providing the music for the book launch of The Lion in the Room Next Door, which was written by Karl’s mother, Merilyn Simonds:
As I’m in the process of reviving some old computers of mine and bringing them back to active duty, I’m also bringing the Wavestation A/D back to life. Expect to hear it sometime soon.
If you’re curious about what the Wavestation A/D can do, check out this video, which provides a grand tour of this classic synth:
On Monday night, someone decided to help themselves to the bike rack outside Whatever Pops and Bowls, the gourmet popsicle/gelato/acai bowl/coffee place on Florida, just a couple of blocks south of Hillsborough. In the process, they smashed one of their storefront windows.
Things are already tough for businesses during the pandemic, and the last thing Whatever Pops needs is an unexpected expense like this. Let’s all show them a little love, give them a little business, and pick up a popsicle, gelato, bowl, or coffee sometime this week.
In case you need a little tempting, here’s a list of their popular flavors:
- banana coconut
- chocolate sea salt
- coconut lime
- earl grey lavender lemonade
- orange cream
- pineapple banana veggie (no sugar added)
- pineapple cilantro
- salty chocolate elvis
- strawberry lime
- strawberry mango
- strawberry pineapple pomegranate
In case you were curious, my favorite is the Salty Chocolate Elvis, which is also the name of my next band.
The restaurant rant
Jordan Chan, a Filipina, was celebrating her aunt Mari Orosa’s birthday on the 4th of July weekend at Lucia, a restaurant in the Bernardus Lodge Hotel in Carmel Valley, California when human colostomy bag Michael Lofthouse started making racist remarks at them. Chan started recording his rant on her phone, catching his rant, which included “Trump is going to fuck you. You fuckers need to leave. Fucking Asian piece of shit.”
She then posted it on Instagram:
View this post on Instagram
“We were singing happy birthday. We were just taking pictures and goofing around with each other and then all of a sudden the man, Michael Lofthouse, starts making really loud racist remarks at us,” Chan said.
To Bernardus Lodge’s credit, a staffer immediately responded to Lofthouse by pointing out that Chan’s family are valued guests and saying “No, you do not talk to our guests like that. Get out of here.”
Chan also said in her interview with local station KION 546, , “Even after he got kicked out, he tried to come back because he was inebriated. It was very clear that alcohol was involved.”
Here’s what the management at Bernardus Lodge Vice President and GM Sean Damery had to say to local news station KION:
“This is an extremely unfortunate situation, however we are proud of our staff at Lucia in keeping with Bernardus Lodge’s core values; this incident was handled swiftly and the diner was escorted off property without further escalation. We provide guests with a safe environment for lodging and dining, and extend our sincere apologies to the guests enjoying a birthday celebration on a holiday weekend.”
The racist ranter goes online
Apparently unsatisfied with his restaurant encounter, Lofthouse got into a related altercation on social media:
View this post on Instagram
Who is Michael Lofthouse, anyway?
1. To borrow a phrase, “He’s no angel”. He’s got priors.
- Was found guilty of vandalism in July 2016 and sentenced to two days in prison, three years probation and 80 hours of community service.
- Also had a restraining order placed upon him as a result of the aforementioned case.
- Had also been facing charges of domestic battery and the destruction of telephone lines, but these were dismissed.
2. He “emigrated” to the U.S. in 2010, which makes him newer to the U.S. than the family he harassed.
In an all-too-common fit of bias, Heavy describes him as having “emigrated” from the U.K. to the U.S. in 2010. It’s funny how brown people “immigrate” and are “immigrants”, but white people “emigrate” and are “expats”, isn’t it?
Raymond Orosa, husband of the birthday celebrant Mari Orosa, said that he has lived in the United States for 26 years. If we have to play that stupid game of “last hired, first fired” to determine who belongs more in the country, Lofthouse loses, as the Orosas have been the U.S. nearly three times as long as him.
3. Apparently, he’s a CEO for a tech consultancy that’s probably talking to someone who specializes in crisis communications.
He’s the CEO/founder of a San Francisco Bay Area consultancy named Solid8. If they have a lick of sense, they’re talking to a reputation management or public relations company that handles meltdowns.
Here’s what Michael Lofthouse’s LinkedIn profile would’ve looked like had you gone there last week:
But if you were to go there right now, you’d get redirected to a page that displays this:
It turns out that he’s taken down his Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
[Update, Wednesday, July 8, 2020, 4:23 p.m.] If you go to Solid8’s site, all you’ll see is a newly-minted “Coming Soon” page. Here’s a cached version, showing content so generic that you can’t actually tell what they do.
4. He’s already been de-platformed by Twitter.
His Twitter page says that his account has been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules.
(By the way, “Lofty”, for a tech CEO in the SF Bay Area, that is an incredibly pathetic follower count. You have as much hustle as you have basic decency.)
5. He’s released a statement, (because of course that’s what one does).
Here’s what he provided to a local news station:
“My behavior in the video is appalling. This was clearly a moment where I lost control and made incredibly hurtful and divisive comments. I would like to deeply apologize to the Chan family. I can only imagine the stress and pain they feel. I was taught to respect people of all races, and I will take the time to reflect on my actions and work to better understand the inequality that so many of those around me face every day.”
It’s boiler-plate, but I’ve seen worse.
This is “trickle-down Trump”
Lofthouse’s “Trump is going to fuck you!” didn’t come from nowhere.
It comes from a president who’s got nothing left to run on. He blew it with the pandemic, the economy, and race relations in a matter of months. He’s burned his way through a lot of staff. He has cronies who’ve been sentenced. He’s been impeached. He’s turned a blind eye to autocrats who are actively plotting against the U.S.. He has only one card left to play: The culture war.
So he stokes prejudices against Asians with phrases like “China Virus” or “Kung Flu”. He does it against black people by declaring that the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is a “symbol of hate”. He’s labeled Antifa — more concept that group, just as MAGA is — as a terrorist organization. With him, it’s always some other who’s at fault, and only he can protect you.
It’s trickle-down Trump, and it’s time to stop it.
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Sign of the day
Among the organizations to accept a loan from the government-run, taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program (a.k.a. the PPP) is none other than the Ayn Rand Institute. These loans have an ultra-low interest rate of 1% and mature over either 2 years (if issued before June 5, 2020) or 5 years (if issued after June 5, 2020).
Given that Rand herself was a rabidly anti-government, anti-social services, anti-altruism crank who nevertheless spent her twilight years on that government handout program called social security, the Ayn Rand Institute’s use of the PPP is actually on-brand.
Of course, the Ayn Rand Institute wouldn’t have done this without coming up with some kind of excuse, no matter how weak. Here it is:
“It would be a terrible injustice for pro-capitalists to step aside and leave the funds to those indifferent or actively hostile to capitalism,” Ayn Rand Institute board member Harry Binswanger argued in May, stating that the organization would “take any relief money offered us.”
Recommended viewing: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – Episode 1: Love and Power
I’ve joked that Ayn Rand’s novels were popular with people who majored in business and computer science — the former because she appeals to their greed, the latter because she appeals to their revenge fantasies.
Rand’s shadow still looms large over Silicon Valley and its wanna-bes, and it gave rise to awful things such as the Californian ideology, Peter Thiel, tech bros, and the general dickery that is an unfortunate part of American tech culture. It’s captured quite well in the first episode of a 2011 BBC documentary series called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
Recommended reading
- Ayn Rand’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which includes this gem: “Conspicuous by their absence from Rand’s list of virtues are the ‘virtues of benevolence,’ such as kindness, charity, generosity, and forgiveness.”
- RationalWiki’s entry for Ayn Rand’s philosophy, objectivism. They’re not fans of it, either, despite the fact that objectivism’s supposed highest virtue is supposed to be rationality (little hint: it’s not).
- Blogger John Rogers on Ayn Rand’s writing: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”