Donbas, DPR, LPR - what's really happening?

Ukraine and NATO v Russia. I'm trying very hard to get both sides of the story. But Big Tech (GOOG, FB, TWTR, YT, MSOFT) are actors for Gov'ts. They kick off anyone who dares to go against their one-way narrative. Watching the reporting on the current Donbas/Kyiv drama I can't help but draw parallels with the untransparent way information/misinformation about THAT virus was handled. 

Anything contrary to the World Health Organisation's agenda was labelled as a conspiracy theory. Natural immunity. Zinc, vitamins C and D. Healthy exercise in the fresh outdoors instead of confinement indoors. Bushwalking, golf, surfing, or just the beach. Prophylactic use of antivirals etc (Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine - they are actual medicines). Eating lots of fruit and vegetables, and herbs, or doing anything to boost the immune system. 

NONE of these were recommended by WHO, to the point of medical experts labelling them as taboo. Yeah… sure they are. Even meditating and/yoga would probably help but no-one is gonna say "got a virus? Get hip, man!" Ffs, the WHO didn't even recommend Vit C for it! 

The problem with protocols is that they work well with known situations, but sometimes new circumstances require novel approaches (pun intended). I'm sure War Experts know everything about strategies, targets, decoys, which type of combat or Forces to deploy, etc. And as depicted in sci-fi films with invading aliens, often the usual military tactics are useless if not counter-productive. 

We have to know the enemy. That is the key to winning, whether it's a virus or a mutant alien lizard-man. Or a puppet battle with a hidden agenda and secret enemies pulling the strings. If you think this Donbas thing is just Russia trying to get back some lost Soviet territory then you have fallen hook, line and sinker for the picture newsmedia is trying to paint. Do you really think Putin is that stupid to bombastically clomp around trying to take over countries because he's on a megalomaniac power trip? 

That's exactly what America/NATO want you to think. I guarantee he's not that stupid. Neither is Trump. Not saying a word about Biden. But sure, they all love power. All successful politicians do - tell me one that doesn't! 

But what's really going on? 

Electronics, Digitisation, Faithful Acoustics and EQ

With acoustic instruments, it is fairly straightforward using equalisation to render a recorded channel faithful to the natural sound. Usually it is as close as possible to the ideal, or to be contrary, it is deliberately or accidentally made to sound different to achieve a particular effect. 

For example, acoustic steel string guitars rarely sound "good in the mix" unless the middle frequencies are taken out, often with both extremes of the bass and treble range boosted as well. Mainly this is to make the guitar stand out, as the middle frequencies clash because they are shared by vocals and so many other instruments of the middle register. 

However, we have no way of knowing in unbiased reality what electronic/digital instruments actually sound like 'unprocessed' (think Moog synthesiser), because their sounds do not occur in nature. They only come out of amplifiers and speakers, and depending on the types used, sound completely different in different set-ups.

 Even without effects processing, every amplifier lends its own colouration to any driven sound. And so do speaker systems - even more so. A quick and simple way to grasp this concept is to try to put the bottom end through tweeters and the treble end through woofers. Neither speaker is designed to faithfully replicate those opposite ends of the frequency spectrum, and they end up 'colouring' them to the point where both sound like someone banging a china plate on a table. There goes your cymbals and bass drum, gone! 

In fact we are so used to the way sound engineers have mixed electronic instruments in the past (think Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rick Wakeman) that we take it for granted that's the way they're supposed to sound. 

And in the same way that our subconscious mind interprets film score cues - pizzicato strings to build suspense, tubas to illustrate clumsy buffoon-like idiocy, violins for romance, or bass and guitar riffs for Al Capone drama (theme from Peter Gunn, James Bond) - in a similar fashion à la Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf - we attribute certain digitally fabricated tones such as the famous Fairlight CMI and even the analogically generated ones such as the Hammond B3 organ and Moog synth as an unquestioned 'given'. We expect them to sound a certain way purely from being conditioned by our past experiences. 

But - they all sound different depending on which amp and speakers are used. And without them you won't hear nuthin'. They don't have a sound of their own. Except maybe, if you're old enough you'll know the sound of putting a needle on a spinning record without amplification. Sort of like a bunch of ants yelling in a foam coffee cup. I suspect that if digital music had a similar naturally produced sound it'd be like the old dialup to get on the net. A cacophony of bleeps and squawks. 

I hear a lot of so-called 'music' these days that simply would not exist without electricity. Or computers. It is impossible to reproduce those sounds on any acoustic instrument apart from the human voice. And therein lies their only validity - if it wasn't for that, I would just call it noise. Any of that rap, dance, house and hip-hop converted and played on purely acoustic instruments would immediately sound like a Weird Al Jankovic send-up. 

Which just gave me an idea, to record my next song totally á cappella, mimicking synthesisers and drum machines. Weird Sam Yankabit.