hippies vs. football September 13, 2007
Posted by AP in Uncategorized.add a comment
can someone please explain how “free speech” and “trespassing on someone else’s property” are the same thing?
stones throw podcast: b-ball zombie war September 12, 2007
Posted by KG in basketball, hip-hop, music, sports, tech.add a comment
the newest pbw podcast (32:43 mp3) features snippets from the upcoming stones throw helmed nba 2k8 soundtrack. features the recently formed supreme team (madlib & karriem riggins), kweli & tip, and mf doom over a dilla production, among others. the supreme track track is beautifully funky & raw. check it out.
update: new interview with karriem riggins
Scheme: How long have you been emceeing and were you at any point intimidated by it?
Karriem Riggins: I do so much it’s kind of hard to stay on one thing because I’m always doing everything. Common would be working on his album and I would come up with a chant or something, recently I started writing to whatever beat that inspires me and I got a lot of rhymes man (laughs). I met up with Madlib and he gave me 7 beat cd’s with 50 beats on each. So we decided to do that album together and we have five albums in the can. We have five jazz albums and we’re trying to finish the Supreme Team album. Madlib and I actually have a jazz group call the Jahari Masamba Unit and it’s coming out on Stones Throw.
podcast tracklist after the jump:
mos def, cornel west, and ralph nader on bill maher September 12, 2007
Posted by KG in comedy, hip-hop, music, news, politics, terrorism.add a comment
…a classic episode, rife with hilarity. while i’m a fan of mos def’s music, it pains me to see some of his political commentary. his outspokenness on katrina and stories like the jena six are to be commended though. (we also find out that maher has listened to mos def’s the new danger.)
i left out the opening monologue, interview with col. larry wilkerson and the ending but you can get those on the youtubes.
part 3 (9:58)
part 4 (7:27)
student advocate’s office gets some publicity September 7, 2007
Posted by AP in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
from the daily cal. i like how in the last paragraph his initials become “AJ”.
Five Minutes With… Ajay Krishnamurthy
Student Advocate Hopes for Visibility
BY JULIA SZINAI
Daily Cal Staff Writer
Saturday, September 1, 2007The Daily Californian sat down with the ASUC Student Advocate Ajay Krishnamurthy, who said he hopes to improve the visibility of his office and make it more progressive.
Daily Californian: Can you describe your position and why did you choose to run for student advocate?
Ajay Krishnamurthy: The student advocate’s office is billed as … the student’s public defender, which means that we represent and advise students having disputes with the university. That can range from anything from ‘I was accused of plagiarism,’ to ‘I was accused of assault,’ to grade appeals, financial aid and residency issues. … UC Berkeley is not an easy place to get through, even in the best of circumstances. But when students are facing problems … they really do need some kind of institutional shoulder support. I don’t think that really exists outside of our office that much.
DC: What kind of issues are facing students today?
AK: I don’t think there is a single issue that is most prevalent. … We are set up in a way that we deal with conduct issues, academic issues, residency, as well as grievances, which is any time a student is bringing a complaint to the university. … An overriding theme is that sometimes there is a lack of transparency about how things are processed in the university, where students are not really sure where they should go to resolve certain issues. … That’s really where our role comes in.
DC: What kind of tools do you have to increase the transparency of those issues?
AK: This office has built up a lot of good will with the administration in the last five or six years. … Even though we may be seen as an adversary, we are not really. Ostensibly the administration and our office are working for the same thing, which is to try to help resolve those issues. … We have built up a lot of capital with them and so we can start being a little bit more progressive in the work that we do.
DC: Are you working to make the office more visible to students?
AJ: That is our biggest issue we are facing this year. I think we do a great job with the cases we handle and we do handle a good number of cases, a little bit under 400 per year. But most students don’t know we exist. … What we really need to do is try to create a kind of formalized referral process so that … administrators can refer them to us. … Right now any time a student is accused of a conduct violation they get a letter from our office in the same file. Hopefully we can get a similar system with the financial office … as well as advising office.
eco-enslavement September 6, 2007
Posted by AP in environment, politics.add a comment
from spiked, on when consciousness over carbon-offsetting goes a bit too far:
If you thought that the era of British bigwigs keeping Indians as personal servants came to an end with the fall of the Raj in 1947, then you must have had a rude awakening last week.
In a feature about carbon offsetting in The Times (London), it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.
Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement.
vanity fair makes al gore feel better about himself September 6, 2007
Posted by KG in environment, news, politics.add a comment
(photo courtesy of time)…does a coffee table book exist with pictures of the desks of famous people?
A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”
vanity fair looks at media bias during the 2000 election. evgenia peretz highlights the mainstream media’s obsession with the caricature of a lying, elitist, and aloof al gore. is this really anything new though? the media loves to caricature people for obvious reasons. are some politicians just easier to caricature? i don’t really think so – it’s a question of whether or not that caricature takes off or not, how much it’s repeated and whether it’s of a generally negative tone or not. peretz suggests that some of the unfair coverage of gore comes from a “self-loathing” liberal attitude, which is an interesting theory and might make for some entertaining pop-sociology discussion, but ultimately i don’t think that’s enough to explain the media bias discrepancy. she goes back and interviews some of the op-ed columnists and anchors who all seem to admit they could have done a better job and then kind of summarily say – “oh well.” the question is – what combination of things resulted in bush benefiting from a generally positive “folksy compassionate conservative” caricature as opposed to gore’s unflattering one. if you send out a simple message, the media is more likely to pick it up and run with it, and i don’t think gore really had a clear message. once that clear message is repeated enough it sticks, at which point the other factors become less important because even if you don’t agree with the caricature, your writing or commentary reacts to it. they’ve essentially framed the image of the person and then you probably sound defensive disagreeing with it after it’s been repeated so much.
i guess we should mention larry craig (since we are a blog of record) September 6, 2007
Posted by agarvin in politics.1 comment so far
i don’t have a nytimes account, otherwise i would paste the article. i’m too lazy to get one. anyway, the point of the article is to say that both the officer and craig likely lied. the officer claimed that he did not respond to any of craig’s signals, and so he was being harassed – but that doesn’t make any sense since the whole signaling procedure requires response. craig claimed that he didn’t do anything wrong and that he ‘just has a wide stance’, but the officer’s account of things is right in line with the canonical signaling procedure.
the author also points out that it’s really quite strange that minnesota still has officers doing these sorts of missions in the first place. most of the people that engage in these activities are upstanding outside of their one fetish.
i thought the article was interesting because, somewhat counterintuitively i suppose, i don’t think that craig should resign. sure, he’s hella hypocritical, but that doesn’t seem like a resignation-worthy offense. in addition, while soliciting sex in bathrooms is odd, i don’t see it as a bad thing per se – and the article explains this pretty well. at the very least, i think it’s utterly ridiculous to put craig’s action on the same plateau as the mark foley page harassment incident.
barney frank on excessive economic inequality September 3, 2007
Posted by KG in econ, news, politics.add a comment
photo courtesy of boston globe (joyce dopkeen)
congressman barney frank (d-ma) interviewed by paul solman on pbs’ “newshour” – he discusses his goals as the chairman of the house financial services committee and his proposed “grand bargain.” also speaks about the negative effects of long-term rising inequality, executive compensation, the sub-prime lending crisis, and taxing hedge fund managers at an income tax rate.
week in pictures September 2, 2007
Posted by KG in international, misc, photography.add a comment
from msnbc week in pictures 23-30 august 2007 (thomas peter / reuters).
“We walk the line: Children train on the tightrope in Tsovkra-1, some 3,000 meters above sea level in Russia’s Caucasus region of Dagestan, on Monday, Aug. 20. For children in this remote mountain village on Russia’s southern fringe, after-school games means balancing on a wire suspended one story above the ground. By a quirk of history so far back that in time [sic] no one really remembers the reason, nearly every man, woman and child in Tsovkra-1 can walk the tightrope.”
rick rubin makes columbia records less irrelevant September 2, 2007
Posted by KG in arts/culture, music, news.1 comment so far
photo courtesy of mtv
from nytimes magazine:
Rubin, wearing his usual uniform of loose khaki pants and billowing white T-shirt, his sunglasses in his pocket, his feet bare, fingers a string of lapis lazuli Buddhist prayer beads, believed to bring wisdom to the wearer. Since Rubin’s beard and hair nearly cover his face, his voice, which is soft and reassuring, becomes that much more vivid. He seems to be one with the room, which is lined in floor-to-ceiling books, most of which are of a spiritual nature, whether about Buddhism, the Bible or New Age quests for enlightenment. The library and the house are filled with religious iconography mixed with mementos from the world of pop. A massive brass Buddha is flanked by equally enormous speakers; vintage cardboard cutouts of John, Paul, George and Ringo circa “Help!” are placed around a multiarmed statue of Vishnu. On a low table, there are crystals and an old RadioShack cassette recorder that Rubin uses to listen to demo tapes; a framed photo of Jim Morrison stares at a crystal ball. In Rubin’s world, music and spirituality collide.
…
In addition to his “never wearing a suit, never traveling, never going to an office” demands, Rubin also suggested (strongly) that Columbia become the first major record company to go green and abolish plastic jewel boxes for all its CDs. “They thought about it and agreed,” Rubin said. “And that made me think they would listen to me. It was also a turning point in terms of how big my reach could be. In the past, I would not normally have access to that kind of sweeping change. At Columbia, I’m able to operate on a much larger scale.”
