Hip Hop has been hijacked by one-dimensional caricatures who stand to significantly retard, if not outright roll back, the progress African Americans have made in the past half-century.

True hip-hop "artists" - and yes, you EZ 101 listeners out there, such a thing exists - today mostly find themselves preaching to a like-minded but small choir of educated, socially conscious listeners who must actively seek out their message at live performances or online.

But don't try to find such artists on prime time, over-the-air radio, a lowest-common-denominator trough where crudity, not quality, equals cash.

What does sell en masse and gets radio airplay in a cycle of reciprocal financial fellatio, is sonic sewage from the likes of the currently red-hot 50 Cent and his G-Unit cronies, materially-obsessed Nelly, the decreasingly relevant Ja Rule and a Great Migration's worth of unintelligible rappers from the South.

Coming from this writer, an avid N.W.A. listener back in the day, and someone who can nearly out-muthafucka(!) the late Richard Pryor, readers should find the fact that even I'm saying "whoa," at the current state of affairs, to be quite troubling.   more »

Aside from the element of a possible cover-up, the hunting episode provides a further glimpse into the lives of America’s wealthy and powerful political elite, a reality that the US media is generally obliging enough to keep concealed.

Cheney was quail hunting, as he does at least once a year, on the 50,000-acre Armstrong ranch. Katharine Armstrong’s father, Tobin, a politically powerful rancher, spent 48 years as director of the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers Association—an organization formed by wealthy landowners to bring cattle rustlers “to justice.”

In 1944, Armstrong’s older brother married an heir of the nearby King Ranch, which claims to be the largest in the world (in the early 1970s, King Ranch holdings worldwide totaled approximately 11.5 million acres), thus linking two of the biggest ranches in Texas.

The Armstrong ranch subsequently went global, with properties in Australia and South America.

The ranch has been host to many Republican dignitaries, including the first and second President Bush. The Rockefellers (Tobin Armstrong’s father was an executive of the Standard Oil Co.) and Prince Charles have also been guests. Speaking in 2002 of his outings with Cheney, Tobin Armstrong remarked, “We go out when the dew is still on the grass, and then hunt until we shoot our limit. Then we pick a fine spot and have a wild game picnic lunch.”   more »

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered?

Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For that matter it is not vastly different from other colonialist instances or tales of national liberation.

It of course has its distinctive features, but in the grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group of people who left their homelands because they were persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as their own and did everything in their power to drive out the indigenous people who lived there.

Like any historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be, and has been, told in many different ways.

However, the naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else's country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.   more »

At a time of growing political tension between the Muslim world and the West, a new bad idea is creeping into the discourse of European and North American political leaders and is being used to justify an intensification of Western political and military intervention in the Muslim world.

Donald Rumsfeld wheeled this bad idea out at a conference on global security in Munich last week. George Bush alluded to it in his 2006 State of the Union address in January.

Tony Blair and his Home Office minister, Charles Clarke, have both spoken of it in the past six months. Dick Cheney has bandied it about for even longer. The rhetoric of the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests she too has signed up.

The new bad idea is this: the “free West,” having defeated German Nazism and Soviet Communism, now faces a new strategic challenge from the ambition of Muslim radicals to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and impose Islamic law on half the world.

As the U.S. Defense Secretary put it at last week’s Munich conference, Islamic radicals “seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent.   more »

Whatever your circumstances, you will have noticed that everyone is talking about love. The most succinct rendition of the kind of chat I'm talking about came from John Gray - the LSE philosopher, not the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus - in the Sunday Times.

"In a curious twist," he wrote, "the Christian-Romantic ideal of personal relations has turned out to be the perfect vehicle for consumer culture."

He validates this with reference to the grooming culture, the dating culture, the myriad ways in which opportunities to spend attach themselves to the business of getting laid.

Actually, it's not so much a curiosity as a dovetail - the romantic ideal of love, all beating hearts and intoxication, is a short-lived state whose novelty is integral to its value.

This is mirrored in every aspect of the consumer experience - you want that car/umbrella because it's new; you state a desire for durability, since this conveys quality, but longevity is the very last thing you want, since you know in your heart that it will obviate the quest for newness, which is where all the fun of the whole business resides.   more »

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election.

The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

The officials also argue that a close look at the election results shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.

The officials and diplomats, who said this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the Israeli government, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

They say Hamas will be given a choice: recognize Israel's right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements — as called for by the United Nations and the West — or face isolation and collapse.   more »

The Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information.

The plan appears in a recently declassified document, “The Information Operations Roadmap”, which was provided under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and revealed in an article by the BBC.

The Pentagon sees the internet in terms of a military adversary that poses a vital threat to its stated mission of global domination.

This explains the confrontational language in the document which speaks of “fighting the net”; implying that the internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system."

The Defense Dept. places a high-value on controlling information. The new program illustrates their determination to establish the parameters of free speech.

The Pentagon sees information as essential in manipulating perceptions and, thus, a crucial tool in eliciting public support for unpopular policies.   more »

13 FEBRUARY

Bush, the Well-Trained Rat, Always Pushes the 9/11 Button

"Terrorism" Justifies Massive Spending by the 'Defense' [War?] Department

America Buys Fascism Lite

Who Are the Ruling Class in America?

Bob Herbert: Burning Bush

Why Does No One Challenge the Need for War on Terror?

Paul Krugman: Bush Plays Monopoly with the Economy

UK Soldiers Brutalize Teenage Iraqis [Watch Video}