Well it didn’t take long for Predator drone surveillance aircraft to be used in the U.S.. Turns out that the border enforcement has been buying drones since 2005.
Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.
via Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front – latimes.com.
Filed under Surveillance
Several prominent US businesses have withdrawn advertising from the television show All-American Muslims. They were pressured by right wing anti-Muslim groups who believe the show humanizes humans.
Well dang.
Here is Edward Said explaining the early days when there were only a few dozen so-called-experts who exploited the moral panic over Islam to earn money.
There’s a whole group of these people, numbering thirty or forty, who are trundled out whenever there’s a crisis, a hostage crisis, a hijacking, a massacre of some sort or another, to demonstrate the necessary connection between Islam, Arab culture and the Arab character, as it’s sometimes referred to, or the Islamic character and random violence. To my mind, the great misfortune is that these Orientalists whose role is to understand, to interpret the culture of Islam and the Arabs, and it’s a culture from which they earn their living, and in fact have no sympathy with it. They deal with it from an adversarial and oppositional position.
– Said & Barsamian The Pen and the Sword 1994 p.27-28
Thanks to Feministe we get a list of the cowardly businesses who bowed to pressure.
Anyway, the companies who pulled their ads include Lowe’s, Bank of America, the Campbell Soup Co., Dell, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Goodyear, Green Mountain Coffee, McDonalds, Sears, and Wal-Mart. So many don’t give your money to those companies this holiday season? Or call Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock at (704) 758-2084 or Executive Support Mr. Andrew Kilby at (866) 900-4650 and let them know what you think about this decision (keep it respectful, please).
Filed under academics, colonialism, representation
Thanks to Flea Market Funk for the clip. FMF rock every day of the week, but made the Humboldt-approved-blog list with the profile of DJ Mantease’s record art work. Thanks FMF!
Filed under funk & soul, hip hop
I love Fugazi. My high school and college years are infused with the tracks from the first two albums. Turns out the band has been recording all their shows. They are going to release the audio of all 850 live show recordings to the public. The advantage is to hear some of the awesome songs, but also to get some of that patented Fugazi-audience interactions on tape.
“There’s a really great show from Munich, in I think the early ’90s, ’93,” MacKaye says. “At that time, it was pretty typical for the audience to say things like, ‘Get on with it!’ and ‘Play the music! Just play!’ I remember we had come back on stage for an encore, and somebody was lost or confused, or I don’t know; something had happened and somebody needed help. So we were trying to say, ‘Hey, there’s a woman back here, she’s lost and she’s looking for her friends.’ And some guy was just yelling, ‘Get on with it! Just play!’ And at that moment, I understood the dynamic, what was going on in this relationship, where he was a consumer and wanted to consume. He wanted sound. So at that moment, we just all turned on our guitars and started feedback, and it was a wall of feedback. And it was like, ‘Okay, here’s sound. You just want sound.’ There was no actual engagement with the music; it was just sound they wanted.
“So it’s maybe five minutes of just feedback. It was a totally surreal moment, and when I hear that, I can smell that moment. It’s so visceral to me, but it’s one of my favorites, because we go right into a song from that. I’m not sure that’s even up yet, but it’ll show up.”
Filed under communication, music, representation
I am appreciative of the thoughtful engagement given to a doctor who brags about sterilizing an Tanzanian woman while saving her life during childbirth. I first read about it on Feministe, but followed the original authors back to a new intellectual hotspot: Femonomics. Check out my favorite two paragraphs:
No matter how benign this paternalism masquerading as benevolence might sound, forced sterilization is a crime that is committed against women (and sometimes men, such as in Indira Ghandi’s India), stripping them of free agency and human dignity. Patients get to decide what medical procedures are performed on them for a variety of reasons. They get to decide because there is no medical procedure that does not have risks as well as benefits, no matter how enormous the benefits or how small the risks. They get to decide because lots of things that doctors used to think were really good (e.g., hormone replacement therapy) are sometimes really bad. They get to decide because what makes sense for one person may not make sense for someone else. Fully informed consent, where someone is told of the risks and benefits of a procedure, and allowed to make their own, non-coerced, lucid decision, is one of the hallmarks of ethical medical care.
In the case of sterilization specifically, the stakes can be incredibly high. For some women, being able to produce children may be their guarantee of economic security. If they stop producing, their husband may seek another wife, and cut off spousal support. In Zambia, infertile women have told of being divorced and treated as a burden by their community. In South Asia, failure to produce children has been offered up as one predicator of bride burning. In an environment where women lack access to many conventional forms of capital, their ability to produce something valued by society in the form of children may be vital to their physical and economic security.
via femonomics: Involuntary Sterilization, Cowboy Doctors, and the West in Africa.
Filed under colonialism, feminism, health, human rights
There has been a lot of discussion about football injuries and concussions. The New York Times is building a fascinating case study about an NHL enforcer. Here is the short film about Derek Boogaard. I’m impressed with the access and the tone.
Filed under documentary, sport
How do they get all those border officers to think alike? They fire the dissident ones.
Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.
Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”
via Officers Punished for Supporting Eased Drug Laws – NYTimes.com.
Filed under communication, human rights, learning, police
I bought Yelawolf’s debut album Radioactive, a couple of days ago. I’ve given it a couple of listens and there are some winners, but it mostly makes me want to listen to Trunk Muzik.
There is nothing wrong with Yela’s flow, but his beat selection is too entwined with pop for my tastes. Radioactive suffers from the Wiz Khalifa major label input syndrome. The label can sell a couple hundred thousand if the rapper can just be convinced to make a pop hit. In this case, the production and love that oozed out of Yela’s tapes dries up — in it’s place we get a sterile couple of pop-branded flops.
I do like a couple of the tracks. I’m in love with the melody of “Let’s Roll,” a string-heavy knocker of a smooth tune. “Animal” also gets me, despite the supple snares and synth overload, this tune contains the most head-nodding potential for the whole album. “Slumerican citizen” with worth consideration simply because it has Killa Mike on the chorus (although the conflation of class with race is way too simplified for my politics).
Oh well, I suspect that Yela will make a couple more albums. I’m not throwing in the towel on dude, but I wish for more. In the mean time, here is the old Yelawolf (of like 14 months ago) with Bun B from Trunk Muzik. Go get the mixtape if you don’t have it.
Filed under hip hop
photo by Paula Brownstein, from the Guardian
A couple of decades after a military dictatorship started to lock up and exterminate the local Burmese populations, the United States has decided to check in. Above we see Hillary Clinton shaking hands with Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.
I’m not a romantic about international affairs. I know that ugly stuff happens. But the Burmese government is truly nasty.
What would fuel such a sudden rush to check in on Burma? In my opinion there are two elements which bring US-Burma relations to the forefront.
1. Many US businesses have been salivating to set up work in the dictatorship. Turns out that when the military leaders can just shoot labor union organizers and lock up those who complain about bad working conditions, business profits can soar. A couple of years ago, French and US energy companies built a massive natural gas pipeline through the dictatorship. Unocol hired a consultant to see just how much evil they were on the hook for (public relations-wise).
And consider this: according to company sources, Unocal hired a former Pentagon analyst to investigate whether the army was abusing human rights along their pipeline. And he warned Unocal executives that Myanmar’s military was committing “egregious human rights” violations. According to company sources, the consultant flatly told executives that when they keep insisting that slave labor is not being used to support the project, they appear “at best naïve and at worst a willing partner in the situation.”
via American Radio Works – Blood and Oil in Burma.
2. American force projection is taking serious losses. Talk about going from a dominant first world power to a second-tier nation in the span of a couple of years. Military backlash in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Yemen, and everywhere an American soldier shows his head. Check out the softpower backlash in every place where US aid money is deposited in the bank accounts of local elites. Bottom line, the United States empire is running out of “little buddies.” The bid to drop money and relations on Burma is a last-gasp effort to shore up the US empire. The fact that we have to turn to Burma is in itself evidence of just how little clout the US wields.
Filed under colonialism, human rights, propaganda
Go buy it. All of it. Every single J-live record, tape, cd and 8-track. Just do it, you’ll thank me later.
Life of refinement 