Listening To: Michael Franti

Yell Fire!

When trying to limit free speech people often quote a Supreme Court opinion saying that you don’t have the right to “Shout fire in a crowded theater.” Of course what most people have forgotten is that the original said that you could not falsely shout fire, because if there was a fire one can and should shout “Fire!”

Michael Franti and Spearhead are doing just that with their new album “Yell Fire!”

This album is required listening. The beats are large, the bass is loud, the lyrics are straight ahead truth telling with an undaunted optimism. Progressives will love it. Conservatives ought to love it. I love this album. I hope you love it too.

While many Hip Hop artists limit their vision to the crime and grime of the ghetto, Franti has boldly and honestly picked up Bob Marley’s One Love banner and he waves it high in the air while still keeping his feet on the ground. And best of all he keeps your booty shaking. Get a copy or download it at eMusic (http://www.emusic.com/album/10943/10943250.html)

Life is bigger than just one decision,
Music is bigger than just one station,
Love is bigger than just one nation, (and)
God is bigger than just one religion

NeoCons Desperate for War

If we were living in a sane and democratic America our government would be putting extreme pressure on Israel to stop its attacks on Lebanon and Gaza. The Administration would be talking to Iran and Syria about controlling Hezbollah and Hamas. The Pentagon would be trying to stop the Iraqi civil war by giving concessions to the Sunnis and making the Shiites pretend that they like it, while making plans for an orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. And the White House would be forcefully standing between the Israelis and the Palestinians and making them move the peace process forward as if millions of lives depended on it.

But of course we do not live in a sane and democratic America. We live in an America that has been hijacked by the Neo Conservative Chicken Hawks and their Corporate and War Industry Cronies. Recently the Neo Cons have been losing ground politically and in the courts, but never underestimate the desire of these people to maintain power and manipulate the world to suit their interests, namely high oil prices, lots of defense contracts, and a population that is scared of terrorists and whipped into a patriotic fervor by war.

Apparently, the Neo Cons are operating in Israel as well as the U.S., because Israel’s actions of late can in no way be seen as a reasonable or legitimate response to recent small scale attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead Israel has used these small attacks as an excuse to launch strategic attacks with the aim of crushing Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and destroying Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel would never have launched these attacks without assurances that the United States (or at least the White House) would support them. And as long as the U.S. Administration supports Israel they will continue to attack and attack and attack. And I believe Israel is also counting on this military action to strengthen the hand of the Neo Cons in the White House. Israel is already trying to ensnare Syria and Iran into the conflict. And combine that with the occupation and civil war in Iraq and you now have one Unified Middle East War where the U.S. has no choice (in the minds of the Neo Cons and their apologists) but to stand with our ally Israel against the Arabs.

Now the United States faces a huge dilemma. The Israelis are betting that President Bush will do whatever Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld tell him to do: give Israel a clear thumbs-up, escalate the war of words with Syria and Iran, and increase our involvement in the occupation of Iraq. Israel has used war to get what they could not get politically. There will be no peace process, no talking with Hamas. There will be war, war which may soon encompass the entire Middle East and the rest of the world.

And the fact that the U.S. opened this can of worms by invading Iraq is not lost on the Israelis. They now feel free to do as they wish militarily in the region, knowing that U.S. hands are too dirty, knowing that the U.S. does not have the moral high ground to stand on. Even if we wanted to stop what the Israelis are doing, the Administration would have to admit its own wrong doing in the region.

Agents of Peace Bomb Airport

Lebanon Airport receives peace-loving lesson in self defence from Israel.

President Bush when asked about the escalating violence and warfare in Gaza and Lebanon said:
“My attitude is this. There are a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace. And those of us who are peace-loving must work together to help the agents of peace - Israel, President Abbas, and others - to achieve their objective.
Israel has the right to defend herself.”

So apparently the bombing of the Beirut Airport is just the peace-loving “agents of peace” from Israel thwarting those “terrorists” who want to stop the advance of peace. Who knew that waging peace was such a violent enterprise?

The “terrorists” launch missiles into civilian neighborhoods in Israel. And the “agents of peace” are busy launching attacks against civilians in Lebanon, including Beirut International Airport, 10 bridges and an electricity power station.

In the past the United States has played a big role in restraining this kind of violence in and around Israel, but George W. Bush is defending Israel’s actions as self defense. I guess the good old days when the Geneva Convention made reprisal attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure illegal are truly over. The White House has made it clear that the Geneva Convention is just a quaint relic of a past century and no longer applies in an age of perpetual war against terrorism.

As long as bombing airports can be called “self defense” and “peace-loving” we had better buckle in for a long drawn out war in the Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and soon Syria and Iran. I’m sure the American “defense” industry will make billions of dollars providing “agents of peace” with much needed “anti-terrorist” weapons to blow each other to bits with while lawfully “defending themselves.”

Or we could call these things what they actually are: War waged with weapons of mass destruction against entire civilian populations as collective punishment. Bombs, rockets and bullets are killing people and making it impossible for them to live their lives in a peaceful and secure way. War is not peace. War is War.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Syd Barrett 1946 - 2006

Trip to heave and ho, up down, to and fro'
you have no word
trip, trip to a dream dragon
hide your wings in a ghost tower
sails cackling at every plate we break
cracked by scattered needles
the little minute gong
coughs and clears his throat
madam you see before you stand
hey ho, never be still
the old original favorite grand
grasshoppers green Herbarian band
and the tune they play is "In Us Confide"
so trip to heave and ho, up down, to and fro'
you have no word
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
Isn't it good to be lost in the wood
isn't it bad so quiet there, in the wood
meant even less to me than I thought
with a honey plough of yellow prickly seeds
clover honey pots and mystic shining feed...
well, the madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
"Cheat" he cried shouting kangaroo
it's true in their tree they cried
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
The madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
the winds they blew and the leaves did wag
they'll never put me in their bag
the seas will reach and always seep
so high you go, so low you creep
the wind it blows in tropical heat
the drones they throng on mossy seats
the squeaking door will always squeak
two up, two down we'll never-[lee] limit
so merrily trip forgo my side
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
-- Octopus by Syd Barrett

Not So Instant Karma: SCOTUS Style

John Lennon warned us that Instant Karma was gonna get us. Unfortunately Karma is not always instant, but Karma does seem to be persistent, if not instant. As we have watched the President and his Administration grab more and more power and abuse and ignore the Constitution of the United States in the name of fighting terrorism, it has been hard to imagine that Karma was going to ever catch up to these guys. What with Congress not doing its job and refusing to conduct oversight hearings into the Administrations activities, specifically the “war on terror”, their secret prisons, their new classifications of prisoners (“illegal combatants”), and their flaunting of the Geneva Conventions. Our last branch of government was the judicial, and the Supreme Court has been slanted toward the NeoConservative, Corporate-Purchased Right. So us Karma fans weren’t expecting much from the same Supreme Court that proclaimed George W President.

But hold the presses. The Supreme Court has recently told the White House that they do not have the authority to capture, imprison, try, sentence and execute people all on their own with no oversight. The Justices seem to think that the Presidents “military commissions” offer limited protections for the rights of the accused, violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the basic provisions of Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions. And this is the real kicker, apparently way back in January of 2002 several State Department lawyers sent a memo to the Justice Department and the White House warning them that the handling and treatment of prisoners planned by the Administration would be illegal and would create a backlash from US courts and overseas governments.

Newsweek got a copy of the memo. You can read about it here. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13773997/site/newsweek/)

The hard nosed NeoCons, especially in the Vice President’s office, ignored the warnings and claimed that the President has “virtually unlimited powers to defend the nation” in time of “war”, and they kept saying that Congress had given them a blank check after 911. But the Supreme Court says, NO:

“Now other antiterror programs that the president has justified by invoking the same congressional resolution might be vulnerable to serious legal challenge. Some legal scholars and current and former administration officials believe the case could undermine the secret foreign detention centers and the NSA eavesdropping program, two cornerstones of the terror war. "This is an extremely damaging decision for presidential power," says a former senior administration lawyer, who asked for anonymity owing to his intimate involvement in the legal wrangling over prisoner treatment. "And it was largely a self-inflicted wound." The bitter irony: an administration determined to expand executive power may have caused a serious contraction.” – Newsweek

Cheney’s office wants Congress to expressly give the President the powers that the Court has rejected. It will be a sad day if Congress rubberstamps illegal detentions and torture. But sources close to the White House say the ruling has them nervous.
Maybe Karma will finally catch up with this gang of thieves?

Listening to: Cloud Cult

A Strange thing happened at the music store. I picked up a CD by Medeski, Martin & Wood (http://www.mmw.net/), a great acid jazz trio I have been listening to for over ten years. I went to the register and purchased my CD. Went to my car and started removing the obnoxious plastic rap that encases all CDs and noticed that my MMW album had transformed into a completely different CD. I found myself holding a CD by a band called Cloud Cult, titled “Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus.”

WTF? I huffed and started to get out of the car to go back and exchange this unwanted mystery CD for the jazz CD I had selected from the racks. Then I started looking at the cover. It displayed a quirky pen & ink drawing of a little boy on a rocking horse with an astronaut helmet on. And there were 23 tracks with intriguing titles like “Living on the Outside of your skin,” and “Transistor Radio”. Well 23 is a strange but lucky number, and If you have been exposed to (bored by) any of my music you know I have a thing for astronauts/cosmonauts and old radios.

So I finished peeling the CD and put it in my car stereo. Wow! I love this CD. Cloud Cult seems to be a projection from the mind of Craig Minowa. The songs are short, lo-fi, home recorded masterpieces with a dreamy quality. They tell the kinds of stories that roll through your head when you are just waking up but you aren’t ready to move yet. Personal and emotional yet profound and universal in nature, these songs paint the room with colors that are usually only found inside your head. The music is strange yet comfortingly familiar all at once.

I highly recommend Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus (http://www.cloudcult.com/).
I am also glad to learn that Cloud Cult has taken a non-traditional route into the record stores and their love for the environment. On their website the history of the band is laid out, detailing the trials and tribulations of these artists who want to make the world a better place.

I’m glad this CD found me and hope it finds its way into your hands as well.
NOTE: the album art above is from the band website (http://www.cloudcult.com/) and is completely different yet the same as the cover on my CD. Just another bit of weirdness connected with this mystery CD.