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"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, 1883
If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.
This time with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep without food and drink and confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."
By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."
On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won't go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an "investigation," a "review of its work procedures" and expressed "regrets." But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we're living in?
Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it's a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.
Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers " that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.
The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been "trashed." ("My son's portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.") During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. ("He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.") His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine's website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild's coverage of his case.
The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: "We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together."
Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the "huddled masses" category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is "a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai," always has the same "galling" experience on entering the country:
"A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf's passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf who goes by 'Your Excellency' at home disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of 'a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy' He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed."
Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:
"A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here."
This is what "homeland security" means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a "tempest-tost" experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.
News from Nowhere
So far, of course, we've only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.
Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA's global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like "the Salt Pit" near Kabul; that it may have used the "British" island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own "black sites" or which it "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.
Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA's incarceration puzzle: an "imposing building" on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA's closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for "CIA prisoners captured in other countries." The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantánamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:
"Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer."
Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider's account of the CIA "black sites" (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that "high-value targets" were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a "full confession" (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, "I am innocent," on a cell wall in his own blood.
Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:
"And then they put like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted."
In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, "[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music." From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, "His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. 'I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,' Bashmilah wrote in his declaration
"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."
No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of and a legacy of George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.
Embedded Reports from the Dark Side
A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be "embedded" in U.S. military units. That term so close in sound to "in bed with" should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and "security."
Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation indicates just how normalized all this has become.
A legacy can often be framed in words. So here's a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:
Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President's office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.
As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration's secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, "Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image," with this telling line from the CIA's then number three official, A. B. Krongard: "You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes." Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA's Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same unsuccessfully.
Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, "A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it." According to that lawyer, the precedent "goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s." This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. "The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington." International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:
"This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the 'law of nations' referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution."
Innocence at Guantánamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year-old German citizen who "chose a bad time to travel." Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantánamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig, "his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist." This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a "dangerous al-Qaeda ally" by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany "goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantánamo Bay."
Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, "[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees told Congress that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding." He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration's nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it "repugnant."
Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to "veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year."
Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding "torture," regretted its use ("we Americans are better than that"), and also insisted that "[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department." In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the "king of torture" and "the monster" by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. ("They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.") He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, "In Abu-Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them." Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.
Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had "illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect." Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.
Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the "surge" months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what's left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.
Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December's melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann "to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture." In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:
"Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition . Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict."General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out."
Or you could mention the news that the "Australian Taliban," David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantánamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given "a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk," including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or but the list is almost unending.
The Bush Legacy
As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad "rendition" began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure.")
Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."
And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.
Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial "24" or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies and little enough of it in real life.
American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.
George W. Bush didn't invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre "torture memos" that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.
It's not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those "enhanced interrogation techniques," was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.
Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of "globalization" in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains "sovereign," and that's the United States of America.
If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk's landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).
Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their "innocence" even when mocked as "innocents abroad" and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, "innocent until proven guilty."
Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a "war" against "terror" supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.
This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah's living nightmare dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt


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Schematic Overview:Midi, Sync and USB
MicroProcessor, HeadphoneAndMixer
Most of it is pretty simple. A block diagram would be redundant, as it would show inputs leading to outputs, with exception to the USB, where it goes through the USB chip first.
These are pretty simple. Mix In and Out both me through J7 and are connected directly to their respective jacks. CV and gate come thorugh J6, and again, are connected directly to their respective jacks.
DinSync is a single sync connector which doubles as a Sync In and Sync Out. Someone needs to dig into the FirmWare and figure out just which sync lines are in and out.
Midi Out send 5V on pin 4 of the jack. The midi data comes straight from the MicroProcessor and then through a 220 Ohm resistor to pin 5.
Midi In is properly opto-isolated. The Midi signal comes in through the jack, and then goes through a LED in the optoisolator, which activates the base of the PhotoTransistor, allowing current to flow from the collector to the emitter. From the emitter, it enters the base of Q50, Which shorts thhe connection of the +5 Volts to ground. This midi signal is split, one is sent through a 220 Ohm resistor and them the Midi Thru, and the other to the MicroProcessor.
A majority of the circuitry here is straight from the datasheet, which is available here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/techproj/USB232/ft232_DS.pdf

subset: commoncrawl


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This post has been moved to my new blog.
You can find it here: Spicy Peanut Noodles on The Creekside Cook
Spicy Peanut Noodles
23 Responses to Spicy Peanut Noodles
I'm so honored to have inspired a new recipe for you! Yours looks far more elegant than my rendition. . . I like the idea of the Sirrachi sauce and the citrus!
And your photography is stunning, as always!!!!
I can hardly wait to try this one out. Any suggestions on what to serve with it?
I love green measuring cups .. things just taste better when you use them! : )
What a find your website is! Beautiful recipe, photos and writing–thank you.
I found these on Foodgawker and I am so glad. I love peanut noodles, but I thought they would be hard to make. These look so simple that I just have to try them. thank you SO much!
This will go on my to-try list for sure. I love your recipes!
Looks so good. I absolutely love noodle dishes. I'm not huge on peanut butter so I would go light on it but I still appreciate it's addition to the dish!
Great recipe and great website. I used rice noodles and before I put in the sauce cracked three eggs in to scramble to make it a main dish. Thanks!! :)
I made these tonight…very good! However, it calls for 1 cup of chicken broth, and if you read it you only use 1/2 of that. So where does the other 1/2 go? It was really good just using the 1/2 cup, anyways…..thanks for a good and healthy recipe!
This looks AMAZING… How does it compare in taste to Pad Thai? Similar? (Obviously you'd add in the egg and whatever meat/tofu)
This recipe is SUPERB! I've never made any sort of Asian themed dish before so this was slightly nervous but it was positively delicious. I've now made it three separate times and all of my friends have been impressed and asking for the recipe. Thank you so much for this fantastic addition to my cooking repertoire!
I love the idea of adding peanut sauce to the noodles. I have tried similar noodles before and its such a flavorful, quick dish
HIGH FIVE!! This was BY FAR the best recipe I have tried from Pinterest. I can't wait to share your genius with my friends!! Thanks for posting…you made me look like a Dinner Wizard
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Ogni giorno offriamo licenze per app e giochi Android che altrimenti dovresti acquistare.
Questo giveaway è scaduto. Second grade Math - Multiplication and Division è adesso regolarmente disponibile.
Intuitive interface powered by handwriting input and a fun and engaging mini game in addition to a regular math trainer mode make our app stand out from the crowd of generic math learning apps.
With Second Grade Math - Multiplication and Division you can practice and improve the following math skills:
- Multiplication tables for 2, 3 and 4
- Multiplication tables up to 5×5
- Multiplication tables for 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10
- Multiplication tables for 6, 7, 8, and 9
- Multiplication tables up to 10×10
- Divisors and quotients up to 5
- Divisors and quotients up to 10
Choose between two different modes:
- Math Trainer
- Math Shot mini-game
Math Trainer mode helps you to master the math facts, you can solve math problems at you own pace without any time constrain.
Math Shot is a math mini-game with fun and engaging game-play and as we all know learning through play and fun is more effective. The game difficulty adapts to player's skills and makes the game suitable for all ages. Math Shot helps students to develop math fact fluency - the result of consistent learning, repetition, and practice.
Sergey Malugin
4.0 and up


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Dan Martensen Shoots H&M FAA 2012 Campaign & Short Film
Dan Martensen shot H&M Fashion Against Aids 2012 campaign and directed the accompanying short film. FAA is a yearly collection created by H&M to rise funds and create awareness about HIV and AIDS among the young.
Photography and film direction by Dan Martensen, styling by Robert Rydberg, hair by Rudi Lewis, makeup by Ozzy Salvatierra, set design by Amy Henry. Models: Kel Markey, Miles Garber, Mackenzie Hamilton, Taylor Fuchs, Adam Wallace, Loammi Goetghebeur, Mitch Baker, Austin Hall, Sedene Blake, Alana Zimmer.
Source: M.A.P.


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vco2 — Implementation of a band-limited oscillator using pre-calculated tables.
vco2 is similar to vco. But the implementation uses pre-calculated tables of band-limited waveforms (see also GEN30) rather than integrating impulses. This opcode can be faster than vco (especially if a low control-rate is used) and also allows better sound quality. Additionally, there are more waveforms and oscillator phase can be modulated at k-rate. The disadvantage is increased memory usage. For more details about vco2 tables, see also vco2init and vco2ft.
imode (optional, default=0) -- a sum of values representing the waveform and its control values.
One may use any of the following values for imode:
16: enable k-rate phase control (if set, kphs is a required k-rate parameter that allows phase modulation)
1: skip initialization
One may use exactly one of these imode values to select the waveform to be generated:
14: user defined waveform -1 (requires using the vco2init opcode)
12: triangle (no ramp, faster)
10: square wave (no PWM, faster)
8: 4 * x * (1 - x) (i.e. integrated sawtooth)
6: pulse (not normalized)
4: sawtooth / triangle / ramp
2: square / PWM
0: sawtooth
The default value for imode is zero, which means a sawtooth wave with no k-rate phase control.
inyx (optional, default=0.5) -- bandwidth of the generated waveform, as percentage (0 to 1) of the sample rate. The expected range is 0 to 0.5 (i.e. up to sr/2), other values are limited to the allowed range.
Setting inyx to 0.25 (sr/4), or 0.3333 (sr/3) can produce a "fatter" sound in some cases, although it is more likely to reduce quality.
ares -- the output audio signal.
kamp -- amplitude scale. In the case of a imode waveform value of 6 (a pulse waveform), the actual output level can be a lot higher than this value.
kcps -- frequency in Hz (should be in the range -sr/2 to sr/2).
kpw (optional) -- the pulse width of the square wave (imode waveform=2) or the ramp characteristics of the triangle wave (imode waveform=4). It is required only by these waveforms and ignored in all other cases. The expected range is 0 to 1, any other value is wrapped to the allowed range.
Warning | |
kpw must not be an exact integer value (e.g. 0 or 1) if a sawtooth / triangle / ramp (imode waveform=4) is generated. In this case, the recommended range is about 0.01 to 0.99. There is no such limitation for a square/PWM waveform. |
kphs (optional) -- oscillator phase (depending on imode, this can be either an optional i-rate parameter that defaults to zero or required k-rate). Similarly to kpw, the expected range is 0 to 1.
Note | |
When a low control-rate is used, pulse width (kpw) and phase (kphs) modulation is internally converted to frequency modulation. This allows for faster processing and reduced artifacts. But in the case of very long notes and continuous fast changes in kpw or kphs, the phase may drift away from the requested value. In most cases, the phase error is at most 0.037 per hour (assuming a sample rate of 44100 Hz). This is a problem mainly in the case of pulse width (kpw), where it may result in various artifacts. While future releases of vco2 may fix such errors, the following work-arounds may also be of some help:
Here is an example of the vco2 opcode. It uses the file vco2.csd.
Example 1188. Example of the vco2 opcode.
See the sections Real-time Audio and Command Line Flags for more information on using command line flags.
<CsoundSynthesizer> <CsOptions> ; Select audio/midi flags here according to platform ; Audio out Audio in No messages -odac -iadc -d ;;;RT audio I/O ; For Non-realtime ouput leave only the line below: ; -o vco2.wav -W ;;; for file output any platform </CsOptions> <CsInstruments> sr = 44100 ksmps = 10 nchnls = 1 ; user defined waveform -1: trapezoid wave with default parameters (can be ; accessed at ftables starting from 10000) itmp ftgen 1, 0, 16384, 7, 0, 2048, 1, 4096, 1, 4096, -1, 4096, -1, 2048, 0 ift vco2init -1, 10000, 0, 0, 0, 1 ; user defined waveform -2: fixed table size (4096), number of partials ; multiplier is 1.02 (~238 tables) itmp ftgen 2, 0, 16384, 7, 1, 4095, 1, 1, -1, 4095, -1, 1, 0, 8192, 0 ift vco2init -2, ift, 1.02, 4096, 4096, 2 instr 1 kcps expon p4, p3, p5 ; instr 1: basic vco2 example a1 vco2 12000, kcps ; (sawtooth wave with default out a1 ; parameters) endin instr 2 kcps expon p4, p3, p5 ; instr 2: kpw linseg 0.1, p3/2, 0.9, p3/2, 0.1 ; PWM example a1 vco2 10000, kcps, 2, kpw out a1 endin instr 3 kcps expon p4, p3, p5 ; instr 3: vco2 with user a1 vco2 14000, kcps, 14 ; defined waveform (-1) aenv linseg 1, p3 - 0.1, 1, 0.1, 0 ; de-click envelope out a1 * aenv endin instr 4 kcps expon p4, p3, p5 ; instr 4: vco2ft example, kfn vco2ft kcps, -2, 0.25 ; with user defined waveform a1 oscilikt 12000, kcps, kfn ; (-2), and sr/4 bandwidth out a1 endin </CsInstruments> <CsScore> i 1 0 3 20 2000 i 2 4 2 200 400 i 3 7 3 400 20 i 4 11 2 100 200 f 0 14 e </CsScore> </CsoundSynthesizer>


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The second week of March is Brain Awareness Week. This is a perfect time to explore ways to keep your noggin working and healthy. Below are easy, simple ways to keep your brain in good shape.
A healthy diet is a healthy mind
There are many reasons to keep a healthy lifestyle and feed your body with foods that make you feel and perform your best. Diets that are low in saturated fats and cholesterol and higher in omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to promote brain health and protect brain cells. Taking a fish oil supplement with DHA or eating fish such as salmon can help improve brain development at any age. DHA, a type of omega-3, may also help prevent certain neurological disorders. Vitamin E and lutein can also help brain health. Incorporate leafy greens such as spinach and kale into your lunch or dinners.
Keep your brain stimulated
At any age, brain exercises are a great thing to get into the habit of. Keeping your brain stimulated can help retain your memory as you get older as well as your capability to learn new skills. The brain is never done learning. Exercises like reading, crosswords, number problems and games like sudoku can help keep your brain stay active and working. If you find yourself experiencing chronic stress, practice daily meditation for as little as five minutes a day to help reduce inflammation and support immune health, which are both controlled by the same area of the brain.
Keeping in touch with friends and family and continuously working on building relationships helps your emotional state as well as your physical health. Surround yourself with people who challenge you, understand you and keep a positive tone. Join organizations or clubs you are interested in and make new connections. Feeling connected to others is always important for your mental wellbeing.
Quit the bad habits
If you smoke, now is never a better time to quit. Consuming an excess in substances such as alcohol, cigarettes and other drugs can lower cognitive processes and decrease overall functioning and health.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine it is believed that the spleen, kidney and heart organs all impact mental capacity and brain activity. These organs influence memory, concentration and recall. When one of these organs is experiencing deficiency or an imbalance, our brain can not function to its fullest. Acupuncture addresses the organs with specific points on the body to return the body back to balance and health.


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Playing Catch up!
WOW – When I go on holiday I really go on holiday don't I! It's been a few months since my last post and the time has long since past for me to get back into posting some work and updating the ol' blog!
Let me begin with a post from my Instagram account (feel free to follow) back on October 17 – www.instagram.com/tukaramatthews . This day is an important one for my wife and I as this is our wedding anniversary – this year also happened to be our 5th wedding anniversary. Perhaps 5 years isn't too long in an eternal perspective but I definitely see it as an achievement and you've gotta celebrate the small wins right?
It has been an awesome rollercoaster ride the last 5 years of marriage and having a little boy – I can't imagine doing anything else though and it would be an empty life without my beautiful little family! So this is one of my more recent illustrations and probably the first one of my wife! I'm always a little scared to draw people close to me because I don't want to offend them if it doesn't turn out to be the greatest illustration. Time to get back into the illustrations and take a break from the freelance work!


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Contrary to popular belief, business plans do not generate business financing. True, there are many kinds of financing options that require a business plan, but nobody invests in a business plan.
Investors need a business plan as a document that communicates ideas and information, but they invest in a company, in a product, and in people.
Small business financing myths:
Venture capital is a growing opportunity for funding businesses. Actually, venture capital financing is very rare. I'll explain more later, but assume that only a very few high-growth plans with high-power management teams are venture opportunities.
Bank loans are the most likely option for funding a new business. Actually, banks don't finance business start-ups. I'll have more on that later, too. Banks aren't supposed to invest depositors' money in new businesses.
Business plans sell investors. Actually, they don't well-written and convincing business plan (and pitch) can sell investors on your business idea, but you're also going to have convince those investors that you are worth investing in. When it comes to investment, it's as much about whether you're the right person to run your business as it is about the viability of your business idea.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have a business plan. You should. Your business plan is an essential piece of the funding puzzle, explaining exactly how much money you need, and where it's going to go, and how long it will take you to earn it back. Everyone you talk to is going to expect to see your business plan.
But, depending on what kind of business you have and what your market opportunities are, you should tailor your funding search and your approach. Don't waste your time looking for the wrong kind of financing.
Where to look for money
The process of looking for money must match the needs of the company. Where you look for money, and how you look for money, depends on your company and the kind of money you need. There is an enormous difference, for example, between a high-growth internet-related company looking for second-round venture funding and a local retail store looking to finance a second location.
In the following sections of this article, I'll talk more specifically about different types of investment and lending available, to help you get your business funded.
1. Venture capital
The business of venture capital is frequently misunderstood. Many start-up companies resent venture capital companies for failing to invest in new ventures or risky ventures. People talk about venture capitalists as sharks-because of their supposedly predatory business practices, or sheep-because they supposedly think like a flock, all wanting the same kinds of deals.
This is not the case. The venture capital business is just that-a business. The people we call venture capitalists are business people who are charged with investing other people's money. They have a professional responsibility to reduce risk as much as possible. They should not take more risk than is absolutely necessary to produce the risk/return ratios that the sources of their capital ask of them.
Venture capital shouldn't be thought of as a source of funding for any but a very few exceptional startup businesses. Venture capital can't afford to invest in startups unless there is a rare combination of product opportunity, market opportunity, and proven management. A venture capital investment has to have a reasonable chance of producing a tenfold increase in business value within three years. It needs to focus on newer products and markets that can reasonably project increasing sales by huge multiples over a short period of time. It needs to work with proven managers who have dealt with successful start-ups in the past.
If you are a potential venture capital investment, you probably know it already. You have management team members who have been through that already. You can convince yourself and a room full of intelligent people, that your company can grow ten times over in three years.
If you have to ask whether your new company is a possible venture capital opportunity, it probably isn't. People in new growth industries, multimedia communications, biotechnology, or the far reaches of high-technology products, generally know about venture capital and venture capital opportunities.
If you are looking for names and addresses of venture capitalists, start with the internet.
The names and addresses of venture capitalists are also available in a couple of annual directories:
The Western Association of Venture Capitalists publishes an annual directory. This organization includes most of the California venture capitalists based in Menlo Park, CA, which is the headquarters of an amazing percentage of the nation's venture capital companies.
Pratt's Guide to Venture Capital Sources is an annual directory available online or in print format.
2. Sort of venture capital: Angels and others
Venture capital is not the only source of investment for start-up businesses or small businesses. Many companies are financed by smaller investors in what is called "private placement." For example, in some areas there are groups of potential investors who meet occasionally to hear proposals. There are also wealthy individuals who occasionally invest in new companies. In the lore of business start-ups, groups of investors are often referred to as "doctors and dentists," and individual investors are often called "angels." Many entrepreneurs turn to friends and family for investment.


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