myweblogtoletuknow

Song of the Day

I cannot stop listening to The-Dream's CD, Love Hate, especially this song.  Enjoy!

The-Dream - Nikki

Deja Vu All Over Again?

There is a good article in a recent Newsweek about misusing the “lessons” of the past (“The Mythology of Munich” by Evan Thomas).  In particular, it talks about how “Munich appeasement” and the  "Vietnam quagmire" are tropes that have been taken out of context and used for political expediency (big surprise) by the two major candidates.  He goes on to explain how both situations were more complicated than their current portrayals allow and argues that Obama and McCain would do well to provide a more nuanced evaluation of the current situation in Iraq, Iran, and all the other locales we have on our radar.  Here are a few choice quotes:

“It may be true, as the saying goes, that leaders who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.  But it’s also true that leaders who carelessly or heedlessly use historical analogies, who twist or hype the lessons of the past, may be destined to make even bigger mistakes than their predecessors.” 

“McCain’s all-or-nothing mentality makes a kind of sense and has a certain purity and nobility.  But it may not reflect the messy reality of limited wars against local insurgencies.  Statesmanship, particularly for a superpower, inevitably requires compromise – including, in some cases, saying one thing while doing another…  Ronald Reagan is a case in point.  Reagan came into office in 1981 inveighing against the “Evil Empire.”  But he spent much of his second term negotiating with Soviet leaders, even, briefly, discussing the abolition of nuclear weapons.  He was able to negotiate, however, because he was dealing from a position of strength, having committed billions to building up conventional nuclear forces and developing a missile defense system.”  [hard to take that one completely at face value, but it does show that the “two-tracking” approach has been useful to both sides of the political spectrum]

“There is a risk that, as Election Day 2008 approaches, voters will be fooled or swept away by the clichés about Munich and Vietnam.  In the reality of power, presidents generally realize that the choice between negotiation and force is rarely clear-cut or either-or.  It can be hard to tell what either McCain or Obama would do if they were actually to take on the burdens and responsibilities of the presidency.  But most voters know what, more than any other quality – more than tough talk or promises of conciliation – they are looking for in a president: good judgment.”

The Itch

This is completely bizarre, but I found it interesting.  An article in the latest New Yorker, called “The Itch” by Atul Gawande, talks about the phenomenon of a sort of phantom itch, in which patients who have suffered some sort of nerve trauma (often from something like shingles) develop a persistent itch after symptoms have resolved.  From there, it goes on to discuss emerging theories of perception in science that are starting to overtake “the naïve view” that our understanding of objects in the world comes entirely, or at least primarily, from sensory data – the messages sent to the brain by our eyes, ears, etc.  The newer view is that a significant portion – perhaps even the majority – of what we “perceive” is based less on actual sensory perception than on our brains’ constructions around minimal sensory input.  So we see some impoverished visual input but our brain uses prior experience, general knowledge of the world, and so on to construct our mental image of what we’re seeing.  The example they use in the article is our perception of a dog running behind a picket fence: we can’t really perceive the dog from the fleeting images between the slats, but we construct a mental image of just this anyway, based on our knowledge of how such things normally work.  The larger implications of this new theory concern problems with phantom limbs, or even phantom itching or burning.  They developed a kind of mirror therapy where you position yourself aligned with a mirror so it looks like the problematic/missing limb is actually there and moving in parallel with your working limb, and this helps the brain “reset” a faulty sense trigger that is going off when it shouldn’t be.  Like the brain knows something has gone wrong, but the message it is delivering is all off kilter, telling you you have an itch or a pain when you really don’t. 

All this is interesting in itself, but it reminds me a lot of linguistic theory too, and the rethinking that has been done about how we actually construct and interpret language.  For example, instead of the traditional view that we simply construct sentences on-line, so to speak, one word at a time, until we have created a “well-formed” utterance, linguists have shown that much of our linguistic understanding and output is based on already formed, already uttered words or combinations of words that we fit, chunk by chunk, into their “correct” places.  We use our history with a language constantly, and much more than you might initially imagine, in both interpreting and creating new instances of it.  This experiential element of language use also helps explain how centrally important our own perceptions and biases ABOUT language are to our interpretations of its use, such as erroneous beliefs that African American English is “deficient” or without rules when it clearly is based on a history of racism that denies the intellectual capacities of blacks in the U.S.  (You knew I had to make this at least partly political, right?)

Random, I know, but I enjoyed that article way more than I probably should have, and it was mostly because of the whole phenomenological bent to this “new” scientific theory.  I find it interesting that this theory of perception, which really isn’t all that new in social science circles, is only now blazing new trails in the “hard” sciences.  Go figure, huh?  

Exhillaration

This is the best retrospective of the Democratic primary that I've read, and it takes a more reasoned approach to the whole gender/race battle royale for most oppressed that less skilled commentators (Gloria Steinem, anyone?) failed to do justice to.  It's from a newer issue of the New Yorker, and it's by Hendrik Hertzberg. Here's the link.

****

The Presidential flight of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had been aloft for nearly a year, began its descent stage on January 3, 2008, somewhere over Iowa. Five months later to the day, she piloted it to a smooth touchdown, though not without experiencing some turbulence during the final approach. First, there was her non-concession speech, delivered on the final Tuesday of the primary season; then, after a few days of cogitation, consultation, and commiseration, there was her Saturday speech. Tuesday’s speech was anything but full of grace, and, on the whole, was poorly received. Saturday’s was greeted rapturously, often by the same commentators. “The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand,” Clinton said, “is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States.” And she said, echoing the signature chant of the Obama campaign, “Today, I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes, we can!” She could scarcely have been more emphatic.

With that, the most astounding primary season in American history came to an end. It was astounding not because of the policy differences separating the competing sides (these were trivial compared with their vast reaches of agreement), or because of the turmoil of the times and the bitterness of the clash (compared with the two campaigns of the Vietnam War era, 1968 and 1972, all was calm and collegial), but because of who the candidates were—more precisely, because of what they were. The first woman and the first man of color to have a serious chance of victory contended for the right to represent America’s party of progressive change in the contest for the most powerful office on earth, and they fought each other very nearly to a draw. This conspicuous, astonishing fact was not much discussed by the candidates themselves; for them, the point was to transcend “identity politics,” lest they be trapped in its stereotypes. Only when compelled by the antics of the retiring minister of his church did Obama directly confront the questions of race and identity, doing so in a speech of such power and nuance that it saved his campaign. Clinton—whose “identity,” after all, comprises more than half the electorate and extends, by definition, into every family on earth—treated her gender as a grace note, a significant but ultimately secondary feature, like Jimmy Carter’s Southernness or Bob Dole’s war wound. Only in the final appearance of her exhausting campaign did Hillary Clinton speak at length about, in her words, “what it means to be a woman running for President.”

Much of what she said was phrased in such a way as to apply to Obama as well as to herself. “I am a woman and, like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us,” she declared. “There are no acceptable limits, and there are no acceptable prejudices in the twenty-first century in our country.” And, speaking of herself, Obama, and the supporters of both: “We will make history together.”

In the emotional climax of her speech, she said, “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it—and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.” Some people interpreted this to imply that it was her gender that denied her the prize. Only she knows whether she meant it that way, or whether that’s what she believes. In such a close race, of course, almost any factor can be viewed as decisive. But it’s hard to find anyone who will dispute that if she had not voted to authorize the Iraq war, or if her delegate-hunting strategy had been as astute as her principal opponent’s, or if that opponent had been a slightly more ordinary politician, or, perhaps, if her campaign messages had been more coherent and less negative, then she would have breezed to the nomination and made history all by herself.

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Clinton was right to say that from now on it will be “unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States”—and that, in large measure, is her doing. But the Speaker of the House is a woman; and there are, at the moment, sixteen women in the Senate and eight in the nation’s governors’ offices, the pools from which Presidential candidates are usually drawn. There are two African-American governors, only one of whom was elected to that office. There is one African-American senator—and seven months from now that one may have a different job.

Clinton’s defeat has left many of her supporters, especially among older women, not just disappointed but angry. Their anger is directed partly, sometimes mainly, at “the media,” especially at a handful of commentators on the cable news networks, particularly MSNBC. (Fox News is hopeless; you might as well get angry at mildew.) One such commentator, in a fairly representative remark, described Clinton as “looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.” Ugly, yes, and arguably misogynistic, but not much uglier (and probably less politically damaging) than the ridicule once heaped upon Michael Dukakis for looking wimpy in a tank and Al Gore for being stiff, or sighing, or wearing “earth tones” at the supposed urging of a feminist adviser—insults rooted, like the probate-court crack, in male stupidity. And the likelihood is that this sort of thing pushed more women into the Clinton column than men away from it.

Barack Obama—reared by a single mother, married to a strong-willed woman, father of two daughters—has an unblemished record of support for the goals of the mainstream women’s movement. Yet, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken over the weekend Clinton withdrew, in a hypothetical matchup with John McCain— whose record with respect to those goals ranges from indifference to hostility—she would win among white suburban women and Obama would lose. The anger of many such women is real, even if Obama is merely a momentary target of opportunity for it, even if it has little or nothing to do with anything he has done or said and everything to do with their own life experience. Fairly or unfairly, it’s up to him to demonstrate anew that he respects their experience and understands their anger. And it’s up to them to respond.

Review: The Gambit - Rosary

link to review on RapReviews.com

Lyric of the Day - Immortal Technique Edition

"I used to be a Christian and a political pawn

'The Bible is right and all your native culture is wrong!'"

- "Crossing the Boundary," Revolutionary Vol. 2

"I hate it when they tell us how far we came to be

As if our people's history started with slavery"

- "Leaving the Past," Revolutionary Vol. 2

"They vote for us to go to war instantly

But none of their kids serve in the infantry

The odds are stacked against us like a casino

Think about it - most of the Army is black and Latino

Tryna escape from the ghetto with your ignorant ways

But you can't read history at an illiterate stage

And you can't raise a family on minimum wage

Why the fuck you think most of us are locked in a cage?

I give niggas the truth, cuz they pride is indigent

You better off rich and guilty than poor and innocent"

- "Harlem Streets," Revolutionary Vol. 2

"They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem, and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fightin for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fightin for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the south, my nigga
I'd be fightin to keep the occupation out, my nigga
You ever clock someone who talk shit, or look at you wrong?
Imagine if they shot at you, and was rapin your moms
And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons
We sold him that shit, after Ronald Reagan's election
Mercenary contractors fightin' a new era
Corporate military bankin off the war on terror
They controllin the ghetto, with the failed attack
Tryna distract the fact that they engineerin the crack"

- "Bin Laden" featuring Mos Def

Immortal Technique - The 3rd World

I haven't heard it yet, but the new Immortal Technique is set to come out tomorrow (Tuesday, June 24).  I've been waiting for this one since 2003, so expectations are high.  It's a collaboration with DJ Green Lantern, which points in a good direction as well.  Go buy it and support dude - he's one of the good ones.  

More on Ronaldo

Apparently, the higher-ups at Manchester United have decided their only ploy for trying to keep Cristiano Ronaldo is to avoid him, at least for the time being.  It sounds silly, but Sir Alex Ferguson and chief executive David Gill "will not cut short their breaks" to meet with Ronaldo when he returns for treatment this week.  Eh.  Whatever works.  

On the Madrid side, the team is supposedly in some pretty serious debt and will have to sell some players, including a couple big names, in order to afford Ronaldo's sure-to-be-hefty transfer fee.  Robinho seems the likeliest candidate, and they have also mentioned Van Nistelrooy and Sneijder.  Personally, I think they'd be fools to sell Van Nistelrooy, and with Ronaldo, Sneijder would be less than essential.  But what do I know?  

Here are some articles on this stuff (courtesy of goal.com):

Fergie & Co To Make Ronaldo Wait

Madrid To Sell Six To Finance Ronaldo

Shaq-Fu

I find this shit funny as hell.  Shaq was freestyling in a New York night club and decided to drop some choice lines about Lakers #24.  Let me be honest here - I'm generally a Kobe fan, being from L.A. and all, but he has repeatedly played the bitch when it comes to Shaq as well as others (including his family and himself), so this is pure hilarity to me.  Of course, afterward Shaq had to say it's all love and it was just a freestyle, but come on - if it's true that Kobe's little snitch move after he got in trouble for the rap charges helped break up Shaq's marriage, don't you think it's a little more serious than that?  In any case, here's a link to the story with a video of the incident.  

HipHopDx: Shaq Takes Aim At Kobe (Again)

Pretty Boy to Real?

Okay, I've already posted too much today -- did I mention I'm a little manic at the moment?? -- but this one is big news, at least in my world.  There's been lots of speculation about Real Madrid's efforts to win over (AKA buy) Cristiano Ronaldo, and after Portugal's surprise loss to Germany in the quarterfinals of Euro 2008, he announced that he hoped to join the Spanish juggernaut next season.  Things are a little dicey because Man U's coach Sir Alex Ferguson has repeatedly stated that Ronaldo is "not for sale," but it seems unlikely that the team would actually block the deal if Mr. Ronaldo truly wants to leave.  The interesting subplot here is that Ronaldo has been open about the advice he has received from Luis Felipe Scolari, the Portuguese national team coach and newly instated coach of Man U's rival Chelsea, who has apparently urged the star to accept this once in a lifetime opportunity.  Playing for Real Madrid is now being spun as a "dream" of his, and Scolari, who surely has a vested interest in seeing arguably the world's best player in another league, is pushing him in that direction.  And I thought Major League Baseball had some corrupt dealings...

Latest Article: Cristiano Ronaldo: I do not need Ferguson