Pinging stuff I care about.
Excellent essay/article/poem about what being poor is.
Some will probably prefer this reaction to the essay; others should not read it unless they have something nearby to punch repeatedly in anger.
And a completely different reaction here, which includes a short exchange with the original author where an understanding is arrived at.
A lot of people are talking about how the back of the Bush administration has been broken by Katrina, how people are finally “seeing through” them, and so on. I don’t know; that seems like wishful thinking to me. This Katrina thing seems pretty typical for them, and heck, it’s not like they lied about weapons of mass destruction in New Orleans to trick the American people and Congress into approving a hurricane.
It’s horrible, but they’ve been involved in horrible things for a long time, and have been a lot more responsible for them. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Thousands and thousands of dead civilian Iraqis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Abuses in Afghanistan. Extraordinary Rendition. Indefinite detention of Jose Padilla without charges.
If the American people reelected them besides all that, why should their failure to respond to the destuction of a major American city matter?
The Princess and the Pirate: Theodore Geisel Cost Me Sleep
You know, that would freak me out bad too.
I was listening to WYCE the other day and this sweet song came on; it turned out to be Higher Law by Victor Wooten.
And it had all the hallmarks of a late 80s/early 90s Tackhead [wikipedia] song, say, Strange Things-era. The vocal style, the guitar, the drums, even the lyrics — they all sounded heavily Tackheadish. (Maybe they and Tackhead share a common source I’m not familiar with…) I checked it out and one member of Tackhead, drummer Keith LeBlanc, is credited with vocals on that album and that track specifically, but I did not find the hand of Adrian Sherwood anywhere in it, which surprised me.
Maybe “Victa” digs Tackhead, or maybe they both dig the same people.
Well, the blog’s back. Dreamhost was down for most of a day. Something to do with those LA power outages.
Hm.