Spring peepers and tree frog concert, plus the chickens and my...

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A post shared by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on May 9, 2018 at 5:53pm PDT

Spring peepers and tree frog concert, plus the chickens and my sisters talking in the background. (We were up closing up the hens to move them tomorrow.) (at Laughing Earth)
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All right, mom and dad are back in town and I have POUNCED and have a date now with Dad to make the.

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All right, mom and dad are back in town and I have POUNCED and have a date now with Dad to make the remaining necessary laths to fix the yurt wall so I can set it up. I hate asking for stuff so it was like… I obnoxiously leaned on him like HEY WHEN ARE YOU NOT BUSY SO I CAN DO THE THING.

This would be easier if I knew how to use a table saw competently. I mean, I know how. But I’ve never done it.

So Friday at 2pm I’m going over with the entire khana from the yurt and we’re going to make new slats and repair it. (Oh, actually, pretty much exactly like that search result I linked to. Ha!) 

Which means uh. I can maybe? set up the yurt on friday night? but more likely Saturday afternoon, which leaves me precisely one night to cram all my shit into it and sleep in it to make sure it stays up, and then I leave. But. It’ll be up.

If I get it fixed but not set up I will be really… I dunno man, just bummed. Not like I got it set up any earlier last year, but it was real stuffy in here tonight and I wanted to be outside.

It was such a beautiful night last night– Middle-Little came to dinner, and after sunset Farmsister’s phone alarm went off and she sighed, since she’d already changed into her pajama pants, and said “crap, I have to close up the hens,” and I said OH I’LL GO! because I’d been meaning to go up to the hens after dark and steal a bunch of feathers from the spangled Homburgs. 

So Middle-Little came along, and Farmsister put her work pants back on, and we went up and one of the Homburg hens was perched right within reach in the nest box house, so I tucked her under my elbow and cut off several of her tail feathers (it takes so much strength to cut them off, I always get scared that I’m hurting the animal, but it’s just like cutting a fingernail), and then went into the perch house (there are two rolling hen houses, one with nest boxes and one just filled with perches) and sure enough, one of the little Homburg roosters was right by the entrance, so I nabbed him and Farmsister grabbed his spurs before he fucked me up, and then he went still and quiet and let me steal a good dozen or so of his hackle feathers, which are this gorgeous semi-transparent white dotted here and there with black.

I want to make a fascinator to wear to this upcoming wedding. We’ll see if I really have any time at all, but between last night’s haul and a few assorted feathers we’ve got around, I should be able to come up with something. 

Anyway– the hens are currently slow-mo rolling past the pond, and so the spring peeper chorus was in full throat, with some tree frog accompaniment, and it was so incredibly gorgeous. I snagged a video and put it on Instagram, but it doesn’t do it justice. It’s not winter anymore and we’re past the point of cold nights now.
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US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

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US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government:

tobermoriansass:

An excerpt:

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government.

McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the US government.

McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.

Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAid document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

“There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project’s contractors. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.”

USAid spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with US law.

“USAid is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world,” he said.

“In the implementation,” he added, “has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That’s how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we’re working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.”

But the ZunZuneo program muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of foreign governments.

“On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and chairman of the appropriations committee’s State Department and foreign operations subcommittee.

“There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAid subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested.”

The Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project’s development. The AP independently verified the project’s scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo.

Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the US government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government
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Thanks to streaming, recording industry revenues are back up to pre-internet levels, but musicians a

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mostlysignssomeportents:

Since the days of Napster, record labels have recruited recording
artists as allies in their fight against unauthorized music services,
arguing that what was good for capital was also good for labor.

But as Teresa Nielsen Hayden says, “Just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side.”

Since the rise of streaming services, recording artists have complained
bitterly about the pittances they receive in royalties, while the
streaming services countered that they were sending billions to the
labels, who were pocketing all the money without passing it on to the
talent.

Last year, the record industry gained an extra $1.4 billion in
new revenues, mostly from streaming, restoring its overall revenues to
pre-internet levels, when the labels had grown accustomed to reselling
the same music every couple of years in new formats (vinyl, 8-track,
cassette, CD). Overall, streaming services remit $7.4 billion to
rightsholders.

But musicians’ median income continues to fall, and it’s not hard to
understand why: it just takes a basic grasp of supply and demand. The
number of labels has dwindled to four, meaning fewer bidders to put
musicians under contract, and thus ever-worsening basic contract terms.
Signing with a label isn’t necessarily optional for artists: if you want
to make music that incorporates samples, you’ll find that you need to sign up with a label or you’ll likely be refused a license.

Meanwhile, there has been a concomitant reduction in the number of
online services that would help indie artists survive without a label,
thanks in part to higher compliance costs demanded by the labels in the
name of fighting copyright infringement (despite the immense expense of
these measures, the labels would be the first to tell you that they’re
not working). These costs reduce the likelihood of new entrants into the
market – it’s one thing to start Youtube with a couple dudes in a
garage; it’s another altogether to start a Youtube competitor in 2018
and raise a couple hundred million dollars extra in order to put
together a Content ID-style system to forestall legal action from the
record labels.

As the number of online services has dwindled, the extent to which they
compete for musicians by offering better terms has likewise declined;
indeed, it’s now become customary for Big Tech and Big Content to sit
down and negotiate deals that indies are then forced to accept,
effectively binding everyone – regardless of whether they’re signed to
a label – into a sharecropper in the labels’ fields, with Big Tech
serving as crew boss and enforcer.

The fight isn’t – and has never been – about Tech vs Content. It’s
always been about labor vs capital – but in the early days, the forces
of capital on the tech side were fragmented, mutually uncooperative, and
competitive, and could be played off against each other. More than a
decade later and the copyright wars has helped Big Tech grow into a
unified front, jointly presented with the entertainment industry (with
minor, occasional skirmishes), arrayed against the working artists of
the world and the fans that love them.

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/24/which-side-are-you-on-3.html
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New lil floofs, the ones Kiddo and I met off the truck this...

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A post shared by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on May 10, 2018 at 1:37pm PDT

New lil floofs, the ones Kiddo and I met off the truck this morning. (at Laughing Earth)
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