cheese it, the cops!

michael gerson is a pretty excellent columnist and thinker. and that defense of brit hume on tiger woods seems basically right to me.

Jamaican Deejay Playlist

Highlights of the vast territory of Jamaican deejay music from the rock steady period (circa 1968) until the digital era (early 80s), when the deejay became even more prevalent. A deejay in Jamaican music is what hip hop refers to as a rapper; the role developed from sound-system selectors chattering over records. I include two cuts in the "singjay" style, by Mikey Dread and the astounding Eek-A-Mouse.

Count Machuki, "Dance Beat"
Count Machuki, "Warfare"
King Stitt, "Fire Corner"
King Stitt, "Rockers Corner"
King Stitt, "Herbman Shuffle"
Prince Francis, "Mojo Rock Steady"
U-Roy, "Wake the Town"
U-Roy, "Version Galore"
U-Roy, "Wear You to the Ball"
U-Roy, "OK Corral"
U-Roy, "Night Nurse"
U-Roy and the Melodians, "Rock Away"
Dennis Alcapone, "Go Lizzy Go"
Dennis Alcapone, "Guns Don't Argue"
Dennis Alcapone, "Rocking to Ethiopia"
Dennis Alcapone, "Jungle of Crime"
Dennis Alcapone, "My Voice is Insured for Half a Million Dollars"
I-Roy, "Black Cinderella"
I-Roy, "Don't Get Weary Joe Frazier"
I-Roy, "Holy Satta"
I-Roy, "Welding"
Big Youth, "Screaming Target"
Big Youth, "Every Nigger is a Star"
Big Youth, "Be Careful"
Big Youth, "S.90 Skank"
[Glen Brown and] Big Youth, "Opportunity Rock"
[Hugh Blackwood and] Dr. Alimantado, "Reggae Music"
U Brown, "New to the Nation"
U Brown, "Stop Them Jah"
Trinity, "Three Piece Suit"
Charlie Chaplin, "Chaplin Chant"
Mikey Dread, "Roots and Culture"
Eek-a-Mouse, "Border Patrol"

dub playlist

Dub Playlist (2 Discs)

The attributions are all very confusing. Some of the songs are attributed to the original singers who issued the singles; some are attributed to the producers who originally made the song; and some are attributed to the dub engineer (Tubby, Scientist, Philip Smart, Jammy). The question of who is the artist of this material, pointedly, has no clear answer. That in itself shows you what happens to intellectual property in postmodernism. Adrian Sherwood and Mad Prof (Neil Fraser) are British producers of the early eighties (to the present) who took up the mantle and innovated digital techniques.

King Tubby, "Tubby on the Throne"
Dub Syndicate (Adrian Sherwood), "Empires Falling"
King Tubby, "Dubbing My Way"
Augustus Pablo, "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown"
Scientist, "De Materialize"
Wackie's, "Addis Ababa Dub" (from African Roots, volume 1)
Scientist, "Red Shift"
Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Super Ape"
Keith Hudson, "Black Heart"
Lee Perry, "Zion Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Satta Dub"
Mad Professor, "Systematic Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Vibrate On (Version)"
Yabby You, "Chant Jah Victory"
Yabby You, "Jah Victory Dub"
Errol Thompson, "Extraordinary Version"
Philip Smart, "Cool This Dub"
Dub Syndicate "Hard and Tuff"
Prince Jammy, "Dub There"
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke, "Murderer"
Lee Perry, "Noah Sugar Pan"
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke, "Black Foundation"
King Tubby, "King Tubby's Badness Dub"
Lloyd's All-Stars, "Dread Dub"
Glen Brown, "Realise (Version)"
Wackie's, "Wackie Rock Tune" (from African Roots, volume 1)
Dub Syndicate, "Tremolo Dub"
Mad Professor,  "Masquerade Dub"
Keith Hudson, "Michael Talbot Affair"
Glen Brown, "Tel Aviv Drums"

black nationalism 4: roots and dub

like you, i only ask one question when i'm trying to figure out who to vote for: who will keep me safe? but what do i mean by that?

(1) who will listen to me whine? for that is the meaning of democracy.

(2) who will tell me who my enemies are and kill and torture them for me, wherever they may be found, along with whomever may be anywhere near them or be misidentified as being among them? one thing i ask of every candidate: will you klll for me? it hardly matters who. prove that you love me.

(3) who can best control the universe? that is, who can achieve omnipotence? if you want my vote you're going to have to control all microscopic organisms - viruses, in particular. and you're going to have to seize command of  earth's atmosphere and prevent hurricanes from coming my way, for example. lob them into central america or something. i need you to control the sun and its solar system, totally and immediately. if i am dissatisfied with today's temperature, barometric pressure, or relative humidity, i will vote for your opponents.

(4) who will shelter me from disease and poverty and pain? or in short: who among you can make me invulnerable and immortal, or help me transcend the material plane entirely and render america something that does not exist at all? that is: who will kill me and transport me to unearthly bliss, immediately? what i mean by safety is indistinguishable from death. please kill me.

these are the questions that all of us face, as we make the cosmic choice: dick cheney or janet napolitano?

i think it's an interesting question who is more dangerous, more brutal, more embroiled in an incomprehensible, monstrous ideology: al qaeda? or dc party crashers? and we must, following the security breeches, or at any rate short skirts, ask who will keep us - specifically me - safe from party girls? whomever will keep me safe has my vote, and anything else is unacceptable. actually existing party girls have literally driven me insane and non-literally killed me, or at any rate made me see that life is empty, purposeless, and wrong. we must poteck the president from a set of values emptier than the absolute void of meaningless total annihilation.

one good thing about party girls: even if they wore underwear, or on the other hand anything other than underwear, there would be no room for explosives in their underwear, beneath their skintight transparent clothes, or underwear as the case may be. and yet ten minutes of listening to them talk as they gulp mojitos and snort lines makes becoming a suicide bomber and setting your package on fire seem like a rational alternative. in other words, i suggest that there may be a direct connection between michaela salahi and the crotch bomber. probably, like everyone else, he met her at a party.

obviously, the yemeni army is marching into the desert under u.s. urging/threat. but the complexity of the situation (which you can begin to understand here) should give us pause. they're dealing with a shiite rebellion. a leftist insurgency, a proxy war between saudi arabia and iran. now: where are they marching? against whom? it's not a matter of just kicking someone's ass. there are many, many ways this becomes an impossibly complex disaster.

ska playlist

any minute now, i'll be putting up the vid for black nationalism 3: ska and rock steady. unfortunately there isn't any music on it, and precious little mention of specific songs/artists. hereis the rock steady playlist - a compromise between historical significance and awesome listenability. as is the ska list below, which also mixes places and eras: jamaican ska circa 1960-66; british two-tone revival, late seventies; american punk-ska circa early nineties and later.

Ska (2 disc set)

Folkes Brothers, "O Carolina"
Skatalites, "Guns of Navarone"
Prince Buster, "Al Capone"
Voodoo Glow Skulls, "Left for Dead"
Justin Hinds and the Dominos, "Carry Go Bring Come"
Lynn Taitt, "Storm Warning"
Rancid, "Time Bomb"
Prince Buster, "Hard Man Fi Dead"
Derrick and Patsy, "Housewives' Choice"
Operation Ivy, "Unity"
Tommy McCook, "Doctor Zhivago"
The Charmers, "Skinhead Train"
Toots and the Maytals, "Six and Seven Books"
The Untouchables, "Mandingo"
Prince Buster, "One Step Beyond"
Operation Ivy, "Freeze Up"
Sublime, "Same in the End"
The English Beat, "Ranking Full Stop"
Toots and the Maytals, "It's You"
The Specials, "Concrete Jungle"
The Ethiopians, "Train to Skaville"
The Paragons, "The Tide is High"
Bob Marley and Wailers, "Simmer Down"
Bad Manners, "Skaville UK"
Rancid, "Red Hot Moon"
Mighty Might Bosstones, "The Impression That I Get"
The Clash, "This is Radio Clash"
Don Drummond, "Don De lion"
Millie Small, "My Boy Lollipop"
Jimmy Cliff, "Miss Jamaica"
Don Drummond, "Man in the Street"
The Skatalites, "Strolling In"
Lynn Taitt, "Independence Ska"

there are probably no actual political positions on which david brooks and i agree. but he is the best op-ed columnist working right now. he's been in rare form of late, and this is excellent. one thing it shows about brooks is his distance: it's about what things are like without having to hop immediately to how the anti-"educated" are evil dolts. implicit in this treatment is the idea of the tea party movement is virtually or will become a third party. i've been waiting for the two-party chumpocracy to disintegrate since i was a child, and i've lost hope, really. still it's interesting. not only that, but i agree with every position brooks attributes to the partiers, so it seems like a hopeful moment to me.

brooks sets the thing up as tea party vs educated opinion. one reading of course is that teaparty-type opinion is uninformed, ignorant etc. another way into this is to understand that american education is indoctrination and subordination, both in the 'information" it conveys and in the institutional framework through which it conveys it. a perfect expression of this is that the people who manage to persist as students in such institutions for 25 years - professors in other words - are entirely unanimous; they finally achieve a critical consciousness equivalent to that of mud puddles. i bet if you examined this in detail, you'd see that people who have twelve years of american education agree with one another and with, say, al gore, more than those who have ten years, and so on throughout.

obviously, we're suddenly trying to bring the situation in yemen into focus. me too, and one thing i can say is that it's pretty darn complex. a person i know sent me from yemen the following summary of the situation, which i am throwing down verbatim.

The current war between the Huthis and the government forces (now the saudi forces as well) is not the first, but is almost the 6th offensive to try and get rid of the whole movement in the Sa'ada Province (northeast of the country). These guys are called the Huthis after their leader Hussein Al-Huthi, who was killed by one of these army offensives in 2003. The interesting part, though, is that this guy and his brother had govenment scholarships to go study in Iran, and needless to say, the Huthi family is a very big family of the Shiite sect (Zaidi Faction) in the country, and their ancestry goes back to the fallen Imam who ruled Northern Yemen back in the late 50s and until 1962. So these Huthi brothers came back from Iran with their fine religious education and actually joined the Parliament as members of the "Haq" Party-meaning truth, but then our guy in the sportlight, Hussein, dropped out of the party because he had disagreements with his family and the members of the party regarding some Shiite-belief details (some factions believe in 4 Imams and some in 12- i can't really ive much detail here coz I am Sunni). Of course, here you wonder why would the Sunni government support a Shiite religious leader just like that, but the truth is, Yemen still prety much functions under tribal laws, especially the North, and since the government itself, in addition to being a military government, is pretty much a tribal government as well (most members of the ruling party come from the president's tribe, etc) and these laws are basically that you pacify possible factions by giving them government posts, peices of land, money, certain regional power, etc. Now we all know Yemen is predominantly Sunni, and needless to say, the Shiites are a silenced minority (lots of people think that shiites don't believe in the prophet and are semi-worshipping Khumaini, etc etc), but this never really surfaced. Now, after Hussein Al-Huthi left the Parliament, he started this movement called "Al-Shabab Al-Mu'emeneen" meaning the Faithful Youth, and rumour has it tha during that time, HUGE amounts of money was being wired to Al-Huthi, and the government pretended not to notice, because quite frankly, there is nothing in Sa'ada, it is a dry mountanous land with absolutely no resources in it. We don't know if this was the government being stupid and only expecting mutiny from the Socialists, r if it were a political move. So, in 2003, the youth group became a full-fledged religious/political movement that spoke out against the government, and against all "infidels", including America, Israel, etc etc. Now, unlike other groups, these guys did not kidnap foreigners or bomb random foreign interests, they were only targetting military bases and personnel. So this kind of set them apart, and I guess they were not taken very seriously as a threat because it was more like a "family business"- i mean look at the name- rather than serious opposition....or again, it could all be part of a political game that the gov is playing a part in just to get rid of some thorns on its side.

Alright, so what did Al-Huthi want? no one really knows, the guy was killed before anyone really found out, and I doubt the Huthis themselves really know if they have a sepcific goal in their rebellion. Some ppl claim that these guys want the whole country to return to Imamite rule and go under the same laws as Iran, some ppl say that they want the seperation and autonomy of Sa'ada as a Shiite state under their own laws, some people think that these people simply got sick of living in the margin and wanted to be part of the political life (but then, who the hell is included in it anyway, shiite or not?) And it turned out that these guys had arms, massive arms, and that the movement has become popular and succeedded in building up quite a support base. The government freaked out, because now, in addition to the South always being a threat, the Al-Qaeda existance that has not yet been under control, and the factions within the factions in every governorate in the whole damn country, there are these guys who are not only strong locally, but also have the outside support of almighty Iran. So wars have been faught and many many many people killed. Yes, the Huthi insurgents have captured and killed many military personnel and high profile officers, etc, and launched attacks against bases and certain government offices in Sa'ada, but the governmet forces have been killing left and right, with no regard to who is being killed (they have used such words as "eradicating and cleansing" Sa'ada from Huthis and Huthi sympathizers, including random civilians. It has been easy for the gov to market this whole war as a war against factionism, anti-nationlism, and instead of using "infidelity" which they used against the leftists, they added terrorism (which has been easily bought by the masses since those guys broadcast videos saying death to Israel and Death to America and death to the infidels). So, after their leader died and the government assumed the whole thing wud die out, they became eve more vigilant, and the war got even more intense. A story someone who was arrested for trespassing a banned area in Sa'ada has told me that this quarentined village in Sa'ada had green air and scattered with bloated deformed bodies, hundreds of them they said, many were kids. The airraids are something that's been happening in the past couple of years only, and yes, villages and schools have also been "mistakenly" targeted (i can actually hear the fighterjets right now). Yemen has become a headlines sensation especially that the situation of the ppl of Sa'ada has been going from bad to worse to just plain old screwed up as hell and it is upsetting the international community and hmanitarian organizations are trying to push for aid for this disaster region. A couple of UNHCR workers were arrested several months ago for sticking their noses in the gov business, and now the government has of course launched its own aid efforts to Sa'ada (food, clothes, water) just to shut everyone up...and the bombarding continues.

Now, do the Huthis have Iran's support? most probably yes, but then the government kindda knew that from the getgo, and these guys are not just waiting for smuggled arms, another confidential resource has informed someone i know that after the Huthis evacuated a certain moutainous area, the gov orces found a gigantic pit dug under one of the mountains which looked like an assembly line for manifacturing arms...dunno if it's true or not, but it is def possible. Now, with saudi it gets a bit tricky. We don't like the Saudis and they certainly do not like us, not governments and not populations, but since Sa'ada is on the Yemeni  border with Saudi, and refugees were trying to rush in, the Saudis naturally felt threatened, coz 1- they do not want Yemeni refugees, 2- they do not want their borders compromised by rebel groups 3-they sure as hell do not want Iran sticking its hand in there. So, the yemeni government gave them the green light to go ahead and bombard the crap out of the Huthis and whoever they feel like levelling to the ground in that area anyway. Alot of people are seeing this as ethnic cleansing, and truthfully, in many ways it is. But we still do not know what the Huthis want, and what is really the extent of their power.

Now, alot of people who are not shiite and are not huthi are huthi sympathizers because everyone is sick of the government and it's kind of a breath of fresh air that someone is daring to stand up to it. Alot of the opposition parties have no beef at all with the Huthis, and were even encouraged by their rebellion to voice some of their own concerns as well. The exiled socialists have been on TV demanding the seperation of the south again, and demanding their nice little democratic marxist state back instead of the north-imposed tyranny...even some of the very famous president's puppets have been on TV talking shit about the guy and asking him to step down from the eagle's throne. So it's really really getting messy.