Growing up, I was exposed to most types of music around. My mother loved classical music, my father loved jazz, and they both loved forties big band and Latin music. My mother is musical and played the piano by ear. When I was a child, my parents gave me and my sister piano lessons. I stuck with it for four years but still cannot play very well. My sister made it six months and quit. But despite my failing to learn an instrument, I have always enjoyed music. For several years I sang in a church choir. Choir people are the fun people in a church. I also sang with a community chorus for a while.

With all the exposure I had to various types of music at home and through my peers, like R & B and various forms of rock, I never listened much to blue grass until we came to North Carolina. The very first night we were in this town, my husband and I wandered into a local Mexican restaurant for dinner. There was a blue grass band playing that night and we really enjoyed listening to them. Thus was my first exposure to blue grass. So now blue grass is a part of my music listening.

Originally, the Infamous Stringdusters was founded in 2007 as a six piece acoustic band featuring a guitar, banjo, mandolin, dobro, fiddle and double bass. However in 2011, the mandolin player left the group citing the stress of travel. The Stringdusters never replaced him and now travel as a five piece band. In some of the earlier recordings, you can hear his wonderful mandolin playing in them. Unlike many other bands, the Infamous Stringdusters have three members who share the lead vocals. The Stringdusters are mostly a touring band and spend many weeks on the road each year.

The Stringdusters’ resume includes five studio albums, three International Bluegrass Music Association awards, and a Grammy nomination, but their true brilliance lies in their passion for live performance. Intricate harmonies, cleverly composed arrangements and their profound commitment to presentation induces traditionalists and newcomers to stomp their feet on common ground.

Without further ado, here are the Infamous Stringdusters! I hope you will enjoy listening to them as much my husband and I do.

This first song might be my favorite. It has a wonderful guitar solo in it. It is called Hitchhiker.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYhuqwYigyI&list=RDBYhuqwYigyI&index=1]

Magic #9 is an instrumental that was nominated for a Grammy in 2011 in the best country instrumental category.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0uukT_rAgk&list=RDBYhuqwYigyI&index=7]

Here's a cover of a traditional blue grass tune, Get It While You Can.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIVgf-o2urc&list=RDBYhuqwYigyI&index=21]

And in honor of Bernie's call to revolution, here's You Can't Stop the Changes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwAuZJsDXQE]

And finally a song that both my husband I really like. It is my husband's favorite. All The Same.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXg2USQmL4I]

Here are just a few news clips to start your day. First from Salon on how the mainstream media is doing everything it can to destroy the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Last week the New York Times deigned to notice that Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is running for president – have you heard about this? – and even by the Gray Lady’s usual standard of treating everyone to the left of the Obama-Clinton Democratic center as a two-headed, kazoo-playing talking dog, it was quite a piece of work. Times reporter Jason Horowitz’s dispatch from a recent Sanders rally in Dubuque, Iowa, barely even pretended to be a news article. It emanated tangible hostility from beginning to end – sometimes veering toward distaste, sometimes toward mockery — and was loaded with scare quotes and attack adjectives.

It is always about following the money as this article by Lee Fang of the Intercept shows.

Christopher Horner, an attorney who claims that the earth is cooling, is known within the scientific community for hounding climate change researchers with relentless investigations and public ridicule, often deriding scientists as “communists” and frauds.

Horner is a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks and legal organizations over the last decade. He has called for investigations of climate scientists affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, and inundated climate researchers at major universities across the country with records requests that critics say are designed to distract them from their work.

New court documents reveal one source of Horner’s funding: big coal.

Meanwhile the coal industry is collapsing, but the damage done still remains. This article originally appeared at Tomdispatch, but I am linking it via Juan Cole because Cole has also included a video with the article. It is a long read.

However, Hensley doesn’t know and can hardly imagine what this region — his home — was like before the peaks were removed. “I wasn’t alive when those mountains were there,” he observes a few hours later. And even though the industry in West Virginia is in the grips of an unprecedented collapse that threatens to dethrone King Coal once and for all, this 14-year-old and all the other children growing up in the shadow of these “blank spaces” will never see the decapitated peaks return to thickly forested mountain tops.

The King Is Dead

In the first half of this year, at least six domestic coal companies filed for bankruptcy. In February, West Virginia’s Covington Coal fell, followed by Xinergy and Grass Creek Coal in April, Patriot and Birmingham Coal & Coke in May, and A&M Coal in June. In August came the biggest announcement of all: the $10-billion coal giant Alpha Natural Resources had entered the bankruptcy sweepstakes, too.

But climate change is real and the foot dragging by the world's leaders has put us into crisis mode. Courtesy of Common Dreams, climate justice activists appeal to the world's leaders for immediate action.

"For more than 20 years," the statement declares, "governments have been meeting, yet greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased and the climate keeps changing. The forces of inertia and obstruction prevail, even as scientific warnings become ever more dire."

Acknowledging their set of demands "implies a great historical shift," the signers of the statement say the globalized justice movement for will no longer "wait for states" to make the needed changes on schedules dictated by the powerful fossil fuel corporations, large agro-businesses, financial elites, or governments in the thrall of such interests.

"Slavery and apartheid did not end because states decided to abolish them," the statement reads. "Mass mobilisations left political leaders no other choice."