May 2003 Archives

Now that Smalls is closing — its final night is tonight — we can begin to appreciate how rare it was, how helpful it was for developing musicians and how hard it would be for anyone else to duplicate.

One of my more recent favorite NYC jazz clubs (it wasn't around when I lived there) is closing tonight because they can't afford the rising rent. If you're in NYC, don't miss its last hurrah.

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn't. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.

Mark Bowden - author of Black Hawk Down and a very interesting profile of Saddam - on the problems resulting from selling a war on false pretenses.

In other words, the GOP has to starve the government to stay in power. (Which is the opposite of FDR aide Harry Hopkin's mantra, "tax tax tax, spend spend spend, elect elect elect." ) It's far easier to cut taxes than to cut government programs. So the GOP will try to cut taxes every year that George Bush is president, without cutting many programs whole hog. The debt will pile up, of course, and eventually, it'll bankrupt the government, especially the two most popular entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. Since conservatives hate those programs, they don't mind, especially if it precipitates them being privatized. And they probably won't be held responsible by voters for the country's fiscal disaster, because Democrats will be trying constantly to restore federal spending -- so it'll look like it's at least partially their fault.

TAPPED nicely sums up the Republican strategy behind the tax cuts.

Go listen to Kenneth Pollack, author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" retract (with plenty of qualifications) his Case for Invading Iraq.

Don't feel too bad Kenneth. A lot of folks fell for it, myself included.

[via Metafilter]

Swear words and phrases are dysphemisms. A dysphemism - the exact opposite of a euphemism - is a means of expressing something considered offensive, harsh, crude, rude, taboo or embarrassing in a particular culture in terms that maximize its offensive impact. It is language used as a weapon; not neutralized, pacified and waved as a white flag. Swearing, profanity, obscenity, blasphemy, cursing, cussing and insulting - it's all here!

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it, this is the largest resource of foreign languages swear words and phrases and their English translations ever compiled. Here, you will learn how to insult, swear, cuss and curse in 106 languages. This section is updated regularly, so keep the new entries and modifications coming, and we'll keep adding them.

For those that like to swear. Like Jake.

Colorado's Patrick Roy is retiring, ending the 18-year career of one of the greatest goaltenders in NHL history.

8(

Patrick Roy has been my hockey hero since I was 13 years old and he won the first of four Stanley Cup and and first of his record-setting three Conn Smythe Trophy's in his rookie year. I decided I wanted to be a goalie because of that performance. Since then he's broken just about every record in the book for the position many believe to be the most important in all sports. Tomorrow will be a sad day.

SKERIK'S SYNCOPATED TAINT SEPTET: DATE SET: JUNE 24TH SKERIK (n.insane seattle sax hero. see, ie, garage-a-trois, critters buggin, mad season, les claypool). SYNCOPATED (vt. to place the accents on beats that are normally unaccented). TAINT (n. a trace of something bad, offensive or harmful. SEPTET (n. any group of seven persons or things. skerik's syncopated taint septet - coming june 24th from the outrageous side of Ropeadope.

...because he's releasing his first 'solo' album on my Birthday on Ropeadope.

In avant-garde jazz circles in the mid-1960's, Henry Grimes was one of the most respected bassists working. Trained at Juilliard, he had already played with Anita O'Day, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins when he was in his 20's.

He went on to play on some of the seminal albums of the free-jazz era, by such musicians as Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders. He was known for his ability to alternate from long Eastern-sounding bowing to hard pizzicato plucking, all of which generated tremendous calluses on his hands.

But in the early 70's, after moving to California, Mr. Grimes disappeared. For three decades nobody in music circles heard from him. Several reference works listed him as dead.

And that is how the story of Mr. Grimes might have ended if it were not for a determined fan from Athens, Ga., named Marshall Marrotte

Henry Grimes played at the Vision Festival in NYC earlier today. The New York Times covers a bit of the story, but I read the whole thing a few months back when Mr Marrotte told it in Signal to Noise Magazine. If you don't already subscribe, you should.

If we were telling the Saudis the truth, we would tell them that their antimodern and antipluralist brand of Islam — known as Wahhabism — combined with their oil wealth has become a destabilizing force in the world. By financing mosques and schools that foster the least tolerant version of Islam, they are breeding the very extremists who are trying to burn down their house and ours.

But we also need to tell ourselves the truth. We constantly complain about the blank checks the Saudis write to buy off their extremists. But who writes the blank checks to the Saudis? We do — with our gluttonous energy habits, renewed addiction to big cars, and our president who has made "conservation" a dirty word.

In the wake of the Iraq war, the E.P.A. announced that the average fuel economy of America's cars and trucks fell to its lowest level in 22 years, with the 2002 model year. That is a travesty. No wonder foreigners think we sent our U.S. Army Humvees to control Iraq, just so we could drive more G.M. Hummers over here. When our president insists that we can have it all — big cars, big oil, lower taxes, with no sacrifices or conservation — why shouldn't the world believe that all we are about is protecting our right to binge?

And so the circle is complete: President Bush won't tell Americans the truth, so we won't tell Saudis the truth, so they won't tell their extremists the truth, so they can go on pumping intolerance and we can go on guzzling gas. Someday, our kids will condemn us for all of this.   

Tom Friedman on hard truths that aren't being told.

I have been neglecting my music category for a while now. This must change. As an extremely nerdish audiophile, I have, for many years, eschewed mp3 players as a waste of money. I was wrong, or at least I'm now wrong. The new iPod's are the bomb. A few weeks back, I bought one. I have not regretted it. The AAC encoding provides an audibly superior advantage over MP3 rivals. I have a very hard time distinguishing it from CD in most cases. In addition, over the last few weeks, I've discovered that the convenience of being able to carry a good portion of my CD collection - in an extremely listenable format - in my shirt pocket just frickin rocks!

More importantly, as I've posted previously and continue to believe, the iTunes Music Store might just save the music industry. Along these lines, here is a list of albums, or partial albums, that I've purchased from the iTunes Music Store:

• The Donnas - Spend the Night
• Praxis - Transmutation
• The Bad Plus - These Are the Vistas
• The Streets - Original Pirate Material
• Tony Williams - Turn It Over
• The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Live From The Middle East
• Sonic Youth - Sister
• Cibo Matto - Stereo Type A
• Afroman - Because I Got High (just the one song because that shit is funny)

All of these items are things that I was on the fence about purchasing or were for backfilling my current CD collection with things I used to have on cassette. I probably never would have considered them if they were more than $9.90.

If anyone is on the fence about purchasing an iPod, just do it. Apple has a huge winner on it's hands, and combined with the iTunes Music Store, could very well own the online-music biz for quite a while unless something changes quickly.

Yet Prof. John J. Pitney, a Claremont College political scientist, said: "In the past couple of years, I think we've seen a shift from rough parity to a slight Republican advantage, which I think reflects a shift in public interest to national security, which Republicans own. If you think about bombs and rockets most of the time, you're probably going to vote Republican."

A very good article in the Times about the Republican plans to sew up long-term dominance in the 2004 election. If the concept presented bothers you, it's time to get involved! Don't let the Republican's own national security!

The great struggle being waged by President Bush and his supporters is not really about making "the world a safer, better place." It's not even really about an imperial "Pax Americana." It's about the search for meaning by a people so bored, complacent, comfortable and desperate for significance that for them war gives birth not only to terrible beauty but to terrible joy.

This is why even dispassionate, prudential questions about foreign policy provoke outraged invective. Such questions are not merely seen as a threat to a policy position, but as a threat to a metaphysical, religious belief system.

"There comes a time in the late afternoon, when the children tire of their games," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "It is then that they turn to torturing the cat."

It is late afternoon in America, and tired at last of our meaningless games, we're looking for a new source of excitement.

An interesting commentary.

[via Matthew Yglesias]

Let's face it, CDs are a pain. They are a great way to store your data, but when you have hundreds, or even thousands of CDRs and not much physical space, storage becomes a problem. With the advent of DVD+/-Rs DVD-RAM and Blu-ray this problem will not go away, since we all will collect thousends of those in the coming years. Jewel cases take up too much space; CD folders are better, but still wasteful (and expensive); and spindles are great, but you can't find anything. I've toyed with the idea of buying paper CD envelopes, and fill up a couple of old-fashioned 5 1/4" floppy cases with CDs (those were efficient: 200+ floppies in a plastic shoebox!), but there may be a better solution out there. So, Slashdot: how do you store your CDs?

Holy crap! Something useful on Slashdot!

A good thread on various and sundry ways to store your cd's.

The American people agree with us on many vital issues--but they believe that we Democrats are weak and indecisive when it comes to standing up to dictators and terrorists, and when it comes to the primary responsibility of government: defending the nation. No matter how compelling our positions on the economy, health care, Social Security, the environment and privacy, if voters continue to see us as feckless and effete they will not listen to our message next year and they will re-elect Mr. Bush.

As we prepare to mount our challenge in 2004, Democrats need to return to the muscular national security principles of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and the other Democrats who understood that only by confronting threats abroad could our party achieve its other great mission of expanding equality, opportunity and progress here at home

An important "call to arms" for the Democrats in an op-ed from Donna Brazile - Gore 2000 campaign manager, and Timothy Bergreen - founder of Democrats for National Security.

Supporters of making dividends tax-free like to paint critics as promoters of class warfare. The fact is, however, that their proposal promotes class welfare. For my class.

Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, calls a spade a spade in a Washington Post editorial.

Oh yeah, George Soros, one of the other richest men in the world, is pissed too:

"I have to disclose that I now have a short position against the dollar because I listen to what the Secretary of the Treasury is telling me," Soros said in the CNBC interview.

He was referring to recent remarks by U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow, who has recently suggested that he was unconcerned by the dollar's sharp decline. Soros criticized Snow's apparent shift away from the strong dollar policy as a "mistake."

Finally on the economic front, The Daily Kos thinks that the Democratic Party should be the party of the socially liberal/fiscally conservative center of the country - those currently pulling the Republican's to the left and the Democrat's to the right:

I've made hay about how the GOP is actually BAD for fiscal responsibility -- how both Bush presidencies have been marked by record deficits. How GOP governors are currently leading the way with tax increases while most of their newly elected Dem counterparts avoid raising taxes. How the stock market performs best during Democratic administrations.

But the myth persists that the GOP is a better steward of the taxpayer's money. Reality is quite different. Those days are long past, the roles reversed.

At long last, the military brass, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his civilian advisers at the Pentagon, and even the State Department agree about U.S. policy toward Iraq. They all support an administration plan that calls for a fairly rapid drawdown of American forces there: Whereas the United States currently has 130,000 troops in Iraq, by the fall it intends to have just 30,000.

Don't miss this month's issue of TNR. Iraq is rapidly falling apart, and the administration seems to show no capability or interest in fixing it. All of the "Balking Hawk" concerns seem to be coming to fruition and we've found no sign of WMD. Now, I was one that bought Powell's presentation to the UN hook line and sinker, so I still think there were WMD's in Iraq somewhere, but if we're having this much trouble finding any evidence of them, were they really the imminent threat they were presented as? I don't think so and, needless to say, neither does the rest of the world. And if we can't find them, where did they go?

Subscribe to TNR Digital, or pick it up at a newsstand near you.

Quack Quack.

For those that don't watch hockey, you're missing J.S. Giguere make history. If Anaheim wins the cup, Giguere will have proven himself a worthy successor to Patrick Roy's possibly soon to be abandoned crown. They've got a while to rest before the Eastern contender is decided.

Personally, I'm hoping for a showdown between New Jersey's Broduer - possibly the second greatest goalie of all time after Roy - and Giguere. It could be some of the best hockey in the last 10 years. Cross your fingers.

Ha ha! Texas governor Rick Perry, desperate to drag hiding Democrats back into Austin to pass DeLay and Rove's re-redistricting plan, asked New Mexico for permission to send in Texas rangers to arrest those Dems hiding in that state.

From the Daily Kos, it looks like some of the Texans have fled to New Mexico. Democratic state officials in both NM and Oklahoma are refusing to help get the legislators back to Texas. New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid:

"Some are speculating this request from the Texas Governor's office concerns an effort to locate missing Texas House Democrats," Madrid wrote. "If so, Texas should understand that since ski season is over, the Santa Fe Opera has not begun and President Bush was just in town, I don't think they are in Santa Fe now. Nevertheless, I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the look out for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy."

The Texas Department of Public Safety is asking the public for assistance in locating 53 Texas legislators who have disappeared. Anyone who has information regarding the current whereabouts of the legislators listed below is asked to call 1-800-525-5555.

Under the Texas Constitution, the majority of members present in session in the House can vote to compel the presence of enough members to make a quorum. Members of the House did so this morning and directed the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House and the DPS to locate the absent members and bring them back to Austin.

DPS troopers and investigators are searching for the absent legislators.

Following on the tail of Colorado's own Karl Rove inspired GOP-friendly redistricting comes a similar attempt by the GOP controlled Texas legislature. The Democrat's aren't taking it though. They're preventing the quorum required for a vote on the plan by hiding out en masse in a Oklahoma motel just across the border. The Texas Rangers are looking for them. More coverage at Political Wire.

Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war -- at home, anyway -- is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I'm against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie. Their opposition to Bush has made liberals embrace principles -- such as the notion that the United States must never fight without U.N. approval except in self-defense -- to which the Clinton administration never adhered (see Operation Desert Fox in 1998, or the Kosovo campaign in 1999). And it has made them forget that there are governments in the world even more odious and untrustworthy than the Bush administration.

Amen. Assuming that anything Bush is for must be bad takes the exact amount of brain power the left accuses the right of using when taking everything Bush is for as good. At one point, the left appreciated nuance - what's happened?

RecordStoreReview.com features record store listings and reviews from around the world including the US, Canada, England, Japan and more. We're building the guide together with a community of collectors (like you) who share reviews of stores they've visited. We hope the directory leads you to those elusive records and CDs missing from your collection.

Cool!

Everyone who has TiVo (TIVO) loves TiVo; it is to television what Macintosh was to computing -- a revelation. Which is exactly why Apple (AAPL) should buy TiVo and once again redefine the intersection of culture and technology.

This is a very interesting idea. TiVo has already announced they will be using Rendezvous, allowing TiVo's to access media files stored on a Mac. And Steve Jobs has demonstrated he has at least some influence with media companies through Pixar and the recent Apple Music Store. Can Steve Jobs resolve Big Media's concerns with TiVo?

Right here!

At 11:30 p.m. last night, Senate Republicans passed their just-unveiled US House redistricting bill on an 18-0 vote after the body's 17 Democrats walked out in protest. Attorney General Ken Salazar announced his office will fight the measure in court.

Looks like the Republicans are using the media distraction of the Denver elections to solidify their congressional hold. I now live in a solidly red 7th CD.

"I've concluded that I do not have sufficient enthusiasm for the mechanical side of campaigning, the money, the media and the polling and so forth to go forward with a campaign," Hart said in a telephone interview.

This is disappointing. I guess I'm going to have to settle for second-best. Now I just need to figure out who that is.

Find the 0xdeadbeef Bloggers.

[thanks to meg for the picture]

If Syria is ever expelled—a big if—and Hezbollah is allowed to set its own agenda, it may well moderate considerably and invest in the future an independent Lebanese state. Moreover, if the U.S. is successful at integrating disenfranchised Iraqi Shiites into the nascent government—another big if—the Iraqis could provide a model for Shiites in multi-ethnic Lebanon.

A very interesting article in the Columbia Political Review on Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and the future of Lebanon in a post-Saddam world.

[via Matthew Yglesias]

I will be in New York City for the next week, so I probably won't be blogging much. Bye!

Enough already! It's time to end all the bickering and back-stabbing about our war against Saddam Hussein.

Jeffrey Shaffer of the Christian Science Monitor has an interesting suggestion for our own national reconciliation.