I have been on vacation (and more), so it has been hard to concentrate. I did come across this, though, and thought it was pretty funny.
Turns out there is an intellectual dispute among philosophers and one of them is a Miami boy. I can't wait to get a Phd. and get into stupid arguments that no one cares about.
Our friend Alan is a big time reporter for USAToday. When I am bored at work, I read his stories and try to pick out any mistakes that were made--mostly grammar mistakes. In his defensiveness he showed me the recent AP story, and while I hate to be the grammar police can anyone tell me what this lead means:
Motorists slid off roads Sunday across the Great Lakes states and into New England as a storm already blamed for three deaths cut visibility and iced over highways with a wind-blown brew of snow, sleet and freezing rainAnyone?
There is an article in The New York TImes about a "new" philosophy. Though I don't see how this is any kind of new philosophy.
Maybe someone knows better than I, but this seems like it would fall under some kind of philosophy of science and technology.
And then there is the thought experiment that the article brings up:
Kripke offered a thought experiment: Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to? According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”
To which experimentalists reply: What do you mean “we,” kemo sabe? Recently, a team of philosophers led by Machery came up with situations that had the same form as Kripke’s and presented them to two groups of undergraduates — one in New Jersey and another in Hong Kong. The Americans, it turned out, were significantly more likely to give the responses that Kripke took to be obvious; the Chinese students had intuitions that were consonant with the older theory of reference. Maybe this relates to the supposed individualism of Westerners; maybe their concern that we get Schmidt’s name right isn’t shared by the supposedly more group-minded East Asians. Whatever the explanation, it’s a discomforting result. “We simply are not”: well, that may be so at Princeton or Rutgers. On the other side of the planet, it might seem we are. What should philosophers make of that?
I finally finished The Crying of Lot 49 after doing all my grading and such.
The plot is a simple one: Opedia Mass, a restless wife and thinker, is married to a somewhat vapid disc jockey. The novel starts off with her getting a letter informing her that she has been made the executor of her ex-boyfriend's will, Pierce Invararity, who is some rich guy in California. She decides to go to (the fictional) town of San Narciso to fullfill her duties. After meeting her lawyer, the once child star, and the Paranoids--she begins to unravel a world-wide postal conspiracy dating back to the 1400's.
The novel then becomes a satirical detective novel as Opedia meets strange characters that all seem to be connected in some way to W.A.S.T.E--it all has to do with the postal conspiracy. She continues to search through Southern California even though she starts to see the people around her crumble into insanity (mostly from using too much LSD), and she wonders, herself, if she is not falling into the same kind of paranoid fantasy.
The actual plot of the novel is almost secondary. It is not so much what Pynchon is saying, but the way in which he says it. And the way that Pynchon tells his story is fascinating. The novel is, first of all, funny. Secondly, the novel deals with all those complex post-structural ideas that make a English Lit. nerd like myself toes tingle.
If we merely look at the name of the town and the hotel Opedia stays at, into account, we see the reference to the Greek myth of Narcisus and Echo. Opedia is an obvious allusion to the odyssey that Opedia takes. There is a motif in those stories that is seen throughout this one: the problem of communication, the problem about how language is never fully present, about how people are disconnected from each other because they can not understand each other through words. The tension in the novel is achieved through this mis-communication.
I will not get into the deeper philosophical issues here as I promised the owner of this blog that I would stay away from the mental masturbation, but feel free to make comments if you would like to discuss these issues and the many others that arise in the book.
I discovered Pynchon through a great short story called Entropy , and I have been meaning to read Crying for a long time. I highly recommend both of these stories to anyone looking to get into Pynchon and the ideal post-modern novel.
You can read an excerpt of the novel here.
As I procrastinate in grading papers, I came across this highly aggressive review which states how this crop of BBoW books are trite and something yadda yadda...
The only book I have read of the books being "reviewed" is "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by David Eggers. While the book has its flaws, it is still, in my opinion, a wonderful and wonderfully original work. And when I see the author say:
Maybe I’m taking literally what’s meant to be sarcastic, but beneath the sarcasm lays real disdain. This is most evident at his sister’s wedding, a presumably significant event in Eggers family annals. Instead of extending the lattice, however, the sole, incredibly tepid description he gives of the groom is that he’s “a nice young man named James.” As for the other guests, Dave thinks, “I am not them. I am . . . a hundred years old.”This, in my opinion, is a complete misread of the story. It makes the review sound as if he hadn't read the rest of the book. Eggers says he want to be the lattice, but that he can not/does not know how to achieve it. And the reason that Eggers says, "I am not them. I am...a hundred years old" is because of his situation. He was thrown into raising his little brother while still being a bit of a child himself.
As I sit up at night unable to sleep, I came across this article. No commentary necessary other than "duh." But I'll comment for the hell of it.
As I started teaching English Composition and Rhetoric (as ENC 1101 at FIU is now called), I start every semester asking all the students what their favorite books are and more and more the answer is: Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and The Alchemist.
The way the students answer the question makes it sound like their favorite book is the only book that they have read. Time after time it is the student who can't answer that question (because he/she has too many favorites) who is the better writer.
So my question is: are these finding really a suprise?
Seeing the school I teach at take out Literature from the composition classroom, it makes me wonder if the students leaving my classroom aren't leaving without the tools needed to succeed? I also wonder: if these kids don't read a book in my English class, and they are only required to read one story in their ENC 1102 class, well, then, are they ever going to read another book besides Harry Potter and the one in 1102? After all, as the report states:
In seeking to detail the consequences of a decline in reading, the study showed that reading appeared to correlate with other academic achievement. In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.
As promised earlier... It seems the kids over at FIU have joined forces with the kids over at the University of Miami and Miami-Dade College to start a new magazine. The way Robert, the humanaties editor describes it is:
Basically, the magazine is about topics that are interesting to the College student.
Some of the sections are:
The Humanities: (My section. I deal with Arts, culture, and topics like religion and philosophy. I do reviews of interesting arts events around the Miami area, book reviews, T.V. reviews, and upcoming movie reviews. The section also deals with Fiction/Poetry/Prose.)
Spit it Out UM, MDC, and FIU: (Deals with upcoming events in each of the campuses, gossip, and anything directly related to each university)
Hot Spots: (Cool places to visit. Mostly underground, undiscovered places which Backslash wants to bring attention to)
Fashion: (Deals with trends)
The Who: (features interesting persons that have something to do with the universities)
Politics: (Deals with Politics or events somehow related to)
The Future: (Has to do with neat technological advances that a reader might be interested in reading about. Such as bionic parts or melanin pills that are meant to give a supposed natural-artificial tan)
These are only some of the already outlined sections. Still, the magazine is evolving until the specific mood that we envision is established. What the Backslash staff see is a magazine that is slick and humorous, informative and exciting.
As a child when I was first becoming interested in music, I was, of course, influenced by the high pitched vocals, grimy guitar, and pounding drums blaring out of the stereo speakers as my older brother played his heavy metal. Additionally, after about a year of not having some new channel called MTV, my family finally got cable, and I got to see images attached to the music.
One of the first video's I remember was this Quiet Riot video. I would put a speaker up to the screen door of the house and blast this song as I played basketball with my brother. The song was loud and obnoxious and (for a 10 year old) dirty.
Years later as a 24 year old, I was at Bennigan's waiting for a friend when some 36 year old started talking to me. She mentioned to me how she had gone out with the guitarist from Quit Riot (not the gay one), and how she went to Randy Rhodes funeral. After many many drinks, the cougar and I ended up in my car-- and I will leave out the details, but it was a good time.
What I am saying here is that Quiet Riots has a special place in my heart because I associate it with many fond memories. And with that said, tragedy has struck
It turns out Kevin Dubrow has passed at the age of 52. I ask that we have a moment of "quiet" for the dearly departed. Quiet Riot was one of the first bands that began the hair metal scene. They were the first to mix the pop and metal genre for better or for worse with thier cover the Slade song by the same name ("cum on feel the noise").
"Metal Health" was another song of theirs that I always liked.
Metal Health'll cure your crazy
Metal Health'll cure your mad
Metal Health is what we all need
It's what you have to have
"It's a very unattractive defendant, but the law is on their side," said Mark Graber, a constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law."
"This has come up before in abortion cases. You can't go outside a doctor's house and protest because you're targeting that person," Summers said. "This isn't 'I love the war, I hate the war.' You're targeting that family."
I'm going to have to agree with the latter. One thing is freedom of speech, but
these people are just evil. Where does the Bible say to hate anyone? You hate
the sin not the sinner. Their sign should read "God hates sodomy", not "fags."
Fags are people too. If these nut-jobs hate gays so much, why don't they go protest outside some gay club or something. I think the reason they don't is because they would get what they deserve--an ass pounding.
The Supreme court, I'm sure, will put in its two cents soon enough on the issue. We'll just have to wait and see.
Hello. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Jose (Apa), and in recently talking to the owner of this blog (Andy), I expressed to him how I was thinking of starting my own blog. He graciously invited me to just join his, so here I am. Forgive me as I become acquanted with this system and learn how to "blog." As a new contributor, I would like to start a weekly (though it will probably end up being a monthly) post on what I'm reading. I know this sounds a bit self-absorbed, but isn't blogging in general such an activity?
Of course, I would love to hear people's responses and opinions on the books being discussed. I offer a review of Chuck Palahniuk's latest work as the first installment of hopefully many. This is a review I wrote for a new magazine (called Backslash, I believe) that is going to be published through FIU, UM, and FAMU (though I'm not sure about that last university). I will post the details as they are made available to me.
Here is the review:
Chuck Palahniuk. Rant: An Oral Biography
Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for presenting characters one hates to love (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club, charismatic and boisterous but with fascist tendencies). In Rant: An Oral Biography, Buster “Rant” Casey is the kid you remember from elementary school who was always dirty and smelled of urine and old Tampons, but he fascinated you because he flustered the teacher.
The reader learns—through the ranting (pun fully intended) of family, friends, acquaintances, doctors, and psychologist— Rant’s story which involves rabies, the tooth fairy, a trained, heightened sense of smell and taste, a game involving people crashing their cars into one another, virtual reality implanted in your brain a la Matrix, time travel, and possibly incest.
In one of the tamer scenes of the novel, the reader learns how Rant got his name from a Halloween prank he pulls off in which he makes all the school children of his little town vomit. Remember those Halloween parties in which you were blindfolded, and then told to put your hand into a bowl of “brains” and “eyes”? Take out the quotation marks, and you have kids ranting after touching cow eyeballs and pig intestines.
Tension is added in the novel through the use of a myriad of contradictory anecdotes detailing not only Rant’s life but also the setting of the story: a pseudo-apocalyptic future in which over-population has led to laws which relegate people to “Day-timers” and “Night-timers,” and in which the government has an Orwellian eye on their citizens.
The anecdotes are entertaining, and leave the reader wondering what is real and what is artifice. Until the final fourth of the book when Palahniuk tries to explain all the obscure time travel and rabies he's deftly introduced rather than leave the reader in the dark, and let the reader use his own imagination. It is like getting food poisoning. You enjoy the meal while you eat it, but then you are left (excuse the pun) ranting afterwards. Palahniuk should stay away from the pseudo-sci-fi and stick to the pseudo Gothic he is much more talented at.
As Matthew Yglesias points out, Clinton shows Democrats how you respond to Republican attacks:
Damn, he's good.
We all love Springsteen, but it's important to note, as Howie Klein reminds us, that he had no business covering this song, even though he's from Jersey and doesn't want you to forget, because it was already perfect.
C'mon Bruce, you should know better than to add lyrics to a Tom Waits' song.
Yep. Failure in American politics only means you could probably get a job somewhere else, like the Ukraine, as a senior aide for Bob Dole found:
But Mr. Yanukovich has not done it all on his own. From an anonymous office off Kiev’s main square, a seasoned American political strategist who was once a senior aide in Senator Bob Dole’s Republican presidential campaign has labored for months on a Yanukovich makeover.Okay, so it's not only failures, which is probably good news 'cause it means endless retirement options for aging political hitmen. Any Bahamian candidates looking for a communications director?
Though the strategist, Paul J. Manafort, has sought to remain behind the scenes, his handiwork has been evident in Mr. Yanukovich’s tightly organized campaign events, in his pointed speeches and in how he has presented himself to the world.
Mr. Manafort is by no means the only well-known American strategist lured to Kiev by the prospect of sizable fees and the chance to shape the course of a young and tumultuous democracy.
President Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, has received advice from the firm run by Bill Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg; from Stephen E. Schmidt, campaign manager for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; and from Neil Newhouse, a pollster who worked for Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, when he was Massachusetts governor.
Rick Perlstein gives us good juxtaposition:
Here's a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?How a nation so great succumbs so easily to pettiness I'll never understand.
So: what is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.
Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
CARACAS, Venezuela - Actor Kevin Spacey met privately Monday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of Washington's most outspoken critics in Latin America.Who'd have thought so many people want to sit through this ugly fuck's speeches?
A bittersweet--okay, just sweet--anecdote (with picture) over at Feministing.
As the ex-owner of a very mischievous dog, Oliver Wendell Holmes III (below), who even as a puppy was a big dolt of a dog with a massive, cinder-block head, I sympathize.
No one regrets the dormant state of AGI more than yours truly. Things have been unexpectedly hectic lately, but we should be back to our regularly scheduled programming in about a week. In the meantime, enjoy Diana Krall covering Joni Mitchell.
For the Things Don't Change file: Charles Dickens describing the House of Representatives in American Notes:
I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon's teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind;, and artful suppressions of all tis good influences; such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.(crosslisted with Humanizing The Vacuum)
Remember when people served at the pleasure of the president? Not Tony Snow. He serves at the pleasure of the president until he can't make due with his $160,000 salary anymore.
"I've already made it clear I'm not going to be able to go the distance, but that's primarily for financial reasons," Snow said on conservative radio program "The Hugh Hewitt Show."You have to wonder how in the world this administration dares question anyone's patriotism.
"I've told people when my money runs out, then I've got to go."
Russia's getting back in the game.
MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he had ordered the military to resume regular long-range flights of strategic bombers, news agencies reported, returning to a practice that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.More here.
Speaking as Russian and Chinese forces held major war games exercises for the first time on Russian territory, Putin said a halt in long-range bombers' flights after the Soviet collapse had affected Russia's security as other nations had continued such missions — an oblique reference to the United States.
The Red Bulls' Jozy Altidore has a great post over at the NYT's soccer blog on the subtle, underapreciated strengths of David Beckham's as well as his limitations in promoting the MLS.
He’s not a guy who’s going to break you down on the dribble with a bunch of moves like Ronaldinho. But he’s going to hit a good cross 9 out of 10 times. And if there’s a free kick near the area you better start biting your nails because he’s going to whip it in. He’s not really a flashy player, but when it’s his turn, he steps up and does the job.That's absolutely true. Beckham's not as entertaining to watch as Ronaldinho or Zidane, but he's a player that can turn a game around by mastering the basic skills. I totally agree with Altidore, the fact that he doesn't show off on the pitch and shows off a little too much off it, is the reason why he's often dismissed and underestimated as a player. Well, that and the fact that he can't do shit with his left leg, which Altidore doesn't mentioned. (But he makes up for it, and then some, with the right.)
I think it’s easy for people to underestimate him as a player. I think people want to see a flashy-type player who scores flashy-type goals and makes flashy-type moves. They are always the best and are very hard to find. But I think the guys who play it simple are best.
I think, for sure, he will put people in the seats, for sure. We’ve already seen it in every city he goes to, it’s sold out. In terms of really elevating the game, one player can’t elevate every team. He can elevate his team, but as for all the others, they are still the same. Maybe when they play against Los Angeles the stakes are a little higher, but really it’s all the same — one player can’t change the whole league. He can help it, but there’s 12 other teams and he can only do so much. But I think it’s great to have a name like that in the league. It gives us exposure, brings more money, it benefits nearly everybody in the process.Beckham will help the MLS tremendously, but don't for a second think he's the Christ figure of American soccer. At one point, the novelty will wear off and people will grow weary of his dominance on the league. What the MLS needs is another marquis player, who's already had a stellar career in Europe, someone like a Zidane or a Ronaldo, for a juicy rivalry which will keep seats filled long enough to establish a growing fan base.
From Bloomberg:
Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.And these people are running a war? Clemenceau must be turning in his grave.
The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.
It is a sad, self-fulfilling prophecy when two respected scholars from two of the country's top universities can't give talks on the book they've coauthored because it is "too controversial."
A Grand Illusion, one of the oldest--though not most frequently updated--Miami blogs, turns three today. You can read my inaugural post here, a pissed off reaction to Chavez winning the 2004 referendum.
Today is a great day for Bolivarian movements. According to The New York Times, Chavez won the revocatory referendum. Chavez, in true Bolivarian fashion, gave a speech clad in ridiculous red—the representative color of his retrograde movement and a horrible color for a dress shirt—in which he cited the old Roman adage, “vox populi vox Dei.” If this is indeed true, God is some sort of asshole and he surely hates Venezuelans.On other news, today, as searching for normalcy reminds us with a video, is the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death.
If you're ever trying to elude cops chasing you 'cause they suspect you're driving drunk, remember not to leave any evidence behind:
A man in Orange County suspected of driving drunk was captured Tuesday night after he jumped out of a vehicle and ran from officers still holding a beer in his hand, according to the sheriff's deputies.Local 6 has more, including video.
Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman:
I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of “The Seventh Seal.” And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.The NYT has more.
I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life.
A story moved by the AP late last night confirms what anyone who's ever seen a picture of Lincoln could already discern, there was something seriously wrong with his face.
CHICAGO - Artists, sculptors and photographers knew Abraham Lincoln's face had a good side. Now it's confirmed by science. Laser scans of two life masks, made from plaster casts of Lincoln's face, reveal the 16th president's unusual degree of facial asymmetry, according to a new study.Nobody was more aware of this than Lincoln, who often poked fun at his own lack of physical beauty. One of these jokes is one of my favorite Lincoln anecdotes:
The left side of Lincoln's face was much smaller than the right, an aberration called cranial facial microsomia. The defect joins a long list of ailments — including smallpox, heart illness and depression — that modern doctors have diagnosed in Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was once accused of being two-faced. "If I were two-faced," he retorted, "would I be wearing this one?"
Andy and I have quarreled mildly over my dedicated contrarianism, but even he, a sincere liberal, must be devastated at the ease with which the Democrats have folded since their victory last November. Sure, they got the power to start investigations, but, as Alexander Cockburn remarks in this devastating critique, what good is this power when you vote to give the President the warrant-less wiretapping he sought by a comfortable margin? With the exception of Senator Russ Feingold, who's been pretty good in the last several months and a consistent critic of the Bush administration for years, it's been business as usual. No, worse:
Democrats I know are sanguine about their party's presidential prospects next year, but there's little to gloat about. When the prospects are not-a-liberal-bone-in-her-body Hillary Clinton, grotesque Reagan parody Mitt Romney, and a genial gay-loving, ferret-hating fascist like Rudy Giulani, they're mighty grim indeed. Is it any wonder that the genuinely weird Ron Paul -- a bizarre fusion of Arthur Vandenberg and Ross Perot -- has generated so much excitement? It's so simple that, of course, our elected representatives don't get it:The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she’d really wanted to. But she didn’t. The Democrats’ game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base about to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.
The row over the U.S. attorneys and the conduct of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has always been something of a typhoon in a teaspoon. The Democrats love it since they imagine it portrays them to the public as resolute guardians of the impartial administration of justice, a concept whose credibility most Americans sensibly deride. The Democrats now plan to track Gonzales’s firing of the US attorneys back to that comic opera villain of the Bush era, Karl Rove, another great provoker of dust storms.
A war people hate, Gitmo, Bush’s police -state executive orders of July 17 -- the Democrats have signed the White House dance card on all of them, and guess what, their poll numbers are gong down. Bush’s, on the other hand, are going up by five points in Gullup from early July. People are beginning to think the surge is working, courtesy of The New York Times. So, are we better or worse off since the Democrats won back Congress?Speaking of the Gray Old Lady, there was no greater demonstration of the way in which our national press fawns over those in power than the wet, dreary obits written for the long, happy political life of Karl Rove. The tone of most of the coverage emitted a barely suppressed nostalgia for the days when Shitflower snapped his fingers and the Republican hordes threatened to hold the three branches of government forever (Rove, no fool, was even making William McKinley allusions). As usual, the Washington press understands just thing: who's in power and who's not. The Democrats mattered in 2006 because they won the Congressional elections and the GOP did not. Thus, the narrative required that the evil genius moniker that Rove wore rather better than his jackets be stripped from him.
All that liberatin' has finally made its way to Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe just signed into law a new bill which would... well, why don't I let Voice of America tell the story:
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday signed into law the controversial Interception of Communications Bill, which gives his government the authority to eavesdrop on phone and Internet communications and read physical mail.Clearly, there is no modern precedent for this blanket intrusion into a population's civil liberties, and the developed nations of the world will surely issue a stern... oh wait.
But Communications Minister Christopher Mushowe said Zimbabwe is not unique in the world in passing such legislation, citing electronic eavesdropping programs in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa, among other countries.Well, at least America's still an example to the rest of the world when it comes to something.
Want to read a narrow, but relatively in-depth account of the Padilla trial? Jared Beck, who doesn't want you to forget he graduated from Harvard Law, has this insightful bit of legal journalism.
Her name is Cecilia, she is smoking hot, and she's selective when it comes to the company she keeps:
PARIS (AFP) - Cecilia Sarkozy's decision to bow out of a picnic with the president of the United States this weekend is the latest proof of the French first lady's unpredictable, even rebellious take on her new role.I think I'm in love.
President Nicolas Sarkozy travelled alone to meet George W. Bush and his family at their Atlantic holiday home after Cecilia -- staying just an hour away at a US lakeside resort -- bowed out due to a throat ailment.
The US leader said he was "disappointed" but understanding after Cecilia called Laura Bush at the last minute to excuse herself, but the change of plan sounded a false note in what was billed as a rare personal get-together.
She was photographed later Sunday taking a stroll in town with two friends.
From AP:
WASHINGTON - Karl Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, plans to leave the White House at the end of August, joining a lengthening line of senior officials heading for the exits in the final 1 1/2 years of the administration.
I'm on my way to sample the Cuban food in DC, even though a friend of mine who works in a Cuban-American congressman/woman's office was warned by the congressman/woman him/herself to avoid Cuban restaurants and dance clubs in the District because that's where all the Cuban spies hang out. We shall see; maybe I'll meet a smoking hot cubanita spy, and we'll play out our own tropical version of "The Spy Who Loved Me."
In the meantime, enjoy this brilliant collaboration between Ben Folds and Dr. Dre.
The administration keeps saying we are fighting Al Qaeda... in Iraq. No arguing with that logic, 'cept:
BAGHDAD - Iraq's most senior Sunni politician issued a desperate appeal Sunday for Arab nations to help stop what he called an "unprecedented genocide campaign" by Shiite militias armed, trained and controlled by Iran.Nah, we're not policing a civil war.
Americans' life expectancy is now shorter than 41 countries'. At 77.9, Americans will live shorter lives than most Europeans, the Japanese, Jordanians and people from the Cayman Islands.
Our infant mortality rate is also very high. With 6.8 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, we're ranked 40th in the world when it comes to infant mortality rate.
This brief AP story, moved today, goes into some of the reasons,
But "it's not as simple as saying we don't have national health insurance," said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal. "It's not that easy."Interestingly, the story, unlike Michael Moore's awful movie, also mentions other causes aside from not having socialized health care. Our lack of a national health care system--there are 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance!--is undoubtedly the number one cause for our population being so unhealthy. But other factors, like the quality of our eating habits and lifestyles should not be ignored.
Among the other factors:
• Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
"The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy," said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. "We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times."
• Racial disparities. Black Americans have an average life expectancy of 73.3 years, five years shorter than white Americans.
Black American males have a life expectancy of 69.8 years, slightly longer than the averages for Iran and Syria and slightly shorter than in Nicaragua and Morocco.This is shameful; that we're allowing a discernible part of our population live by Third World standards.
• A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.
Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.
"It really reflects the social conditions in which African American women grow up and have children," said Dr. Marie C. McCormick, professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health. "We haven't done anything to eliminate those disparities."
In a column in the Philadelphia Daily News yesterday, Bykofsky proposed that "another 9/11 would help America." Three thousand lives lost--not to mention countless others in ensuing wars--are a fair price to pay according to Bykofsky for a national circle jerk.
What bothers Bykofsky, it seems, is what he perceives as the lack of collective will to continue to fight the Iraq war:
Most Americans today believe Iraq was a mistake. Why?There's no real way to argue against a guy who claims to know what the "American way" is, except to say that if the American way is to prolong a war with no real objective, and a half-assed commitment from the party in power, then we need look no further than the Vietnam disaster. We stayed in that conflict long enough for 58,000 Americans to lose their lives, as well as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. And if that weren't enough, we so destabilized the government in Cambodia that a genocide followed the end of the war.
Not because Americans are "anti-war."
Americans have turned their backs because the war has dragged on too long and we don't have the patience for a long slog. We've been in Iraq for four years, but to some it seems like a century. In contrast, Britain just pulled its soldiers out of Northern Ireland where they had been, often being shot at, almost 40 years.
That's not the American way.
David Plotz is right. I too fucking hate August.
August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It's beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.Not only that. Fidel Castro and Kathie Lee Gifford were born in August.
W.:
But one of the things I found interesting in my questions was, there is revenue sharing -- in other words, a central-government revenue sharing -- to provincial governments. I -- it surprised me, frankly, because the impression you get from the people who are reporting out of Iraq is that it's like totally dysfunctional. That's what your -- I guess your kind of -- your friend or whoever you talked to is implying.So, Iraq is not "like totally dysfunctional"? Mission accomplished.
Jeremy Hernandez found himself in a tipping school bus with 50 children inside as the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed beneath him. "[H]e kicked open the back door and began helping them one by one to safety." For his heroism, Hernandez, who had to drop out of an automotive repair program because he could not afford the $15,000 tuition, was given a bunch of scholarships and private donations.
But if you don't think that's cool enough--you heartless bastard--here's the coupe de grâce for the doubters:
He spent the weekend fishing. When President Bush’s staff contacted him to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,’ ” she said.Mr. Hernandez, you are my hero.
We all know it's a slippery slope. First, the hallucinogenic mushrooms go, then the pot... Next thing you know you have a group of extreme, right-wing bloggers railing 'cause a reporter may or may not have solicited a prostitute for a blow job.
I can't even begin to conceive the mechanics to make this work, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
CHICAGO - Do bloggers need their own Norma Rae?Some of the benefits sound great, but I don't know If I'm willing to pay the price. And I don't mean the cash needed to fund such a union. I mean losing the very diversity that attracted me to blogging in the first place. We can accomplish great things if we come together, but there's also the danger of losing our individual identity.
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
From AP:
Roth, who split from the rock group in the mid-1980s in hopes of solo stardom, will reunite with co-founders Eddie Van Halen on guitar and brother Alex Van Halen on drums. Eddie's teenage son Wolfgang will sub for Michael Anthony on bass.It's only appropriate...
We find out today that Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral was arrested on Friday on charges that he solicited prostitution.
A Miami Herald reporter was arrested late Friday on charges that he solicited a prostitute in Miami, police said.It's never a good sign when people in tough situations are so eager to clear their names. Usually, innocent people are pissed as shit, and "look forward" to suing the police department for wrongful arrest.
Oscar Corral, 32, a veteran Metro reporter for the newspaper, was one of 13 people busted in a prostitution operation in the Flagami neighborhood shortly before midnight, Sgt. Albert Pacheco said.
Corral, who covers Miami's Cuban community, was arrested and issued a notice to appear in court. He was charged with soliciting to commit prostitution, a second-degree misdemeanor.
''I'm innocent,'' Corral said Monday. ``I look forward to having my name cleared in court.''
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." [On Kosovo, Houston Chronicle, April 9, 1999]
Sometimes I'm really inspired by the House of Representatives--the fiery debates, the populism, the sheer sense of democracy in action. Then people like Virgil Goode quickly snap me out of all that silliness.
Do you have Asperger syndrome or are you just a geek? Here's an online test.
As it turns out, with a score of 21, I don't have Asperger syndrome, I'm just a dweeb. Shucks.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
Saudi Arabia is considering reopening their embassy in Iraq.
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said Wednesday that his country would consider reopening an embassy in Baghdad, a step long sought by the Bush administration to help legitimize the Shiite-led Iraqi government.Hmmm... I wonder if that has anything to do with that huge arms deal we just gave them.
I'm all for Fox News finally covering segments of society it systematically neglects and clearly doesn't understand, like the internets, and Black America. But, as it turns out, juggling the two can be tricky.
Via Jesus' General.
The Washington Post is hosting a very interesting feature about Cuba on its website. As part of it, they have a live chat with an expert on a specific Cuba issue each day. Yesterday's featured Manuel Roig-Franzia, the Post's Mexico City bureau chief who was in Havana at the time. You can read it here. One question caught my eye:
Venice, Fla.: Candidates from both parties appear to be lining up along the traditional lines of opposing changes in Cuba policy in order to protect their chances of winning votes from the Cuban exile community in Florida. Given that several polls in Miami of Cuban-Americans indicate a broad shift in public opinion toward favoring diplomatic relations and easing of travel restrictions, is it possible that some candidates boldly will offer new alternatives?Maybe there is hope after all.
Manuel Roig-Franzia: That'll be interesting to watch. I've seen similar polls.
I'll never forget election night 2004, a night I spent in Miami's Little Havana. Outside the venerable restaurant, Versailles, hundreds of Bush supporters waved flags and chanted slogans. Across the street, where John Kerry had taken the confrontational step of placing his local headquarters, were hundreds of Kerry supporters.
On the Versailles side of the street, much of the talk was about confronting Fidel Castro and preserving the embargo. On the other side of the street hardly anyone was talking about Fidel--instead they were talking about the same things most American voters talk about: education, the economy, the war in Iraq.
The crowds on both sides of the street were Cuban-Americans, but the Kerry supporters were much younger. I know that night in Little Havana was a small, unscientific sampling, but it seems to be in line with the conclusions of pollsters and analysts who believe second-generation Cuban-Americans are much less fired up about the embargo and might be more likely to accept a loosening of that policy or ending it all together.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged on Tuesday he was wrong in 2005 when he insisted the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes."Maybe I'm still not fully awake because I think I just read that Cheney acknowledged being wrong about something. Let me read on.
"I firmly believe," Cheney said, "that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy."Now, that's more like the Dick we know.
And yet... a story just moved by the AP reports that Florida voting machines are still not entirely tamper-proof:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Florida's optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.Let me clarify; it's not that easy. To get to the memory card one would have to unscrew the case, which is kind of hard to do without drawing a lot of attention. But I'm not even comfortable with chances of it happening being that small. What happens when voting machines are being transported to the polling place? Are these things constantly being watched?
At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.
"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.
The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.
70 percent of Americans think Congress is right to investigate Alberto Gonzales. And 51 percent think the Bush administration is more corrupt than previous administrations.
Via TPM.
According to the White House, its arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel is meant to counter Iranian power in the Middle East, and that country's desire to build a nuclear arsenal. For example, part of the deal with Saudi Arabia, for example, calls on stricter enforcement of trade restrictions with Iran.
I'm not sold by that.
Someone in the administration or the relevant departments has to understand that further arming Iran's neighbors will only strengthen its resolve to go nuclear. A confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia or Egypt would never get to the point where the new weapons would make a difference. I doubt even Israel would dare attack Iran on the eve of its developing a nuclear weapon. We've seen how much pressure Iran can exert on Israel via Hezbollah, and it's safe to assume their power has since grown. Beyond that, it would seem a little counter intuitive for Israel to go along with a huge arms deal with the Saudis and Egypt. Ehud Olmert even said at a cabinet meeting that Israelis “understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderate states, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran.” But then you read this:
Mr. Burns said that under the plan American military aid for Israel would increase to $3 billion annually over 10 years, from $2.4 billion now.Matthew Yglesias also points to an interesting point made by Brad Plumer. The Saudi Royal family keeps "the size of the national army and air force to the barest minimum" for fear of a coupe. Have the Saudis all of the sudden decided to change this policy?
Walk Score, a very cool tool that lets you type in your address and figures out the walkability of your neighborhood depending on proximity to coffee shops, grocery stores and so on, rates my apartment in Midtown Miami a 60 out of a 100. My place near Dupont Circle in DC gets a 98.
Miami has a long way to go. Maybe once they finish this, the Miami score will go up.
Via Critical Miami.
This weekend, my parents come up to DC, which they'd never visited before. I've spent the last couple of days showing them around. I took them to most of the cliche places: Mount Vernon, Vietnam wall, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial... The Lincoln Memorial is by far my favorite DC monument. Like Nixon, I've gone in the late night and sat quietly by the huge, 19-foot statute. (And like Nixon, I may not have been sober at the time.)
Every time, I read his second inaugural address engraved on the marble wall, and try to imagine him--lanky, awkward, freakishly tall yet benign and strong--giving the speech. The end of the speech, "with malice toward none, with charity for all..."--the non-idiot's precedent to Bush's "uniter, not a divider" incoherence--always made me wish for many more Lincolns in our presidential future. This time around, I focused on several sentences which I probably looked over in the past because I didn't remember ever reading them.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.Yes. In these times of indiscriminate religious invocation and overreach, we are in need of another Lincoln, or at the very least, we must make use of his wisdom.
Max Blumenthal has the rare gift of both making you laugh and scaring the shit out of you simultaneously. Check out his latest video, "Rapture Ready" on Christians for Israel.
I know this makes it three video posts in a row, which I really don't like doing. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it. But this does include all the bad things in life that must be actively mocked--fanatical Christianity, fanatical Zionism, Rick Santorum, Joseph Lieberman...
Yep. There's a nice brouhaha going down between Rick at Stuck on the Palmetto and the fanatics over at Babalu Blog--which I don't link to because I care about your brain cells--over Rebecca Wakefield's interview. I don't totally agree with Rick on Oscar Corral. I think he gives him too much credit for standing up "the goons and bullies that slink through the back alleys of Little Havana." That is his job, and while Oscar deserves credit for other things, that is not exactly one of them.
Plus, the characterization is something of the cultural stereotype Oscar does a decent job of debunking in his reporting. I know plenty of people who live in Little Havana who find the stuff on the extremist right-wing, Cuban-American blogs and radio stations just as offensive as the rest of rational world.
I am also uncomfortable with the fact that Rebecca Wakefield runs with that whole wide-eyed reporter talking point. Oscar might think the Herald is a "fortress of truth", but there's a daily section in the paper called "Corrections and Clarifications" which begs to differ.
But let's face it, compared to the egotistical, delusional nostalgia and reactionary politics that go down at Babalu, Rick's post sounds like Cartesian logic to me.
Josh Marshall is totally right. Bush can't fire Gonzalez because he could never find another clown to lie for him so shamelessly.
I was finally able to bring AGI back to fully functional status. I'm going to be making some substantial changes to the blog in the next couple of days. Most notably, it's going to stop being a group blog. As you know, Alfred Soto, who blogged in this space for two years and practically kept the blog alive, has started his own blog. And my work load right now--even though we're in the middle of a huge anti-war campaign--is not so much that I can't blog regularly. I am still looking for some guest bloggers who would like to contribute sporadically. So if you would like to blog for AGI, let me know. And stay tuned, I think you're going to like the upgrades.
In sharp contrast to last week's Max Blumenthal's video of College Republicans coming up with ridiculous, minor medical conditions to excuse why they support the war but can't serve themselves, today we hear that Obama's foreign-policy adviser has been called up by the Naval Reserve.
Barack Obama is losing his top foreign-policy adviser to active military duty. Mark Lippert, who has helped to write every major Obama foreign-policy speech and is known as “an expert at nailing down details,” has been called up by the Naval Reserve. He’s in training now but says his orders don’t specify where or how long he’ll deploy. This will be the first tour for the lieutenant junior grade, who signed up for the Reserve about three years ago.Take notice of the fact that Lippert, who has a master's from Stanford, signed up for the Reserve three years ago, while both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were raging.
Here's a video called jetBlows, made after jetBlue decided to drop its sponsorship of the Yearly Kos conference due to pressure from Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin.
In the words of John Aravosis, "jetBlue can go fuck itself."
Via AMERICAblog.
We're having some technical difficulties here at AGI. I hope to have the site fully operational very soon. Thanks.
Blogs are self-indulgent; blogs force posters to write tortured autobiographical narratives; blogs inhibit thoughtful extended writing.
These are just three of the objections I raised almost three years ago when Andy told me that he was starting one of these things. Persuading me taxed his powers (and he wasn't yet in law school). I was so embarrassed by my first entry that I didn't post it myself: he did it for me after I'd emailed it to him. Although I'm grateful that there's enough interest in my work to encourage my leaving the nest, I still owe Andy immeasurably for boosting my confidence.
Meanwhile you can find me now at Humanizing The Vacuum. I'll cross-post a few entries now and then. AGI, thanks for the memories.
This morning's New York Times rips Republicans a new one for their total lack of spine:
Republicans have the right to filibuster under centuries-old rules that this page has long defended. It is the height of hypocrisy for this band of Republicans to use that power since only about two years ago they were ready to unilaterally ban filibusters to push through some of Mr. Bush's most ideologically blinkered judicial nominees.Makes you wish we had a parliamentary system and could call a no-confidence vote at any time.
[...]
The Iraq war stands apart as a watershed issue -- a downward spiral that the public increasingly sees as a colossal waste of the nation's blood and treasure.
In postponing real action to September and beyond, Republicans laughed off the all-night debate as a "slumber party" of "twilight zone" theatrics by the Democrats. In fact, Bush loyalists seem trapped in the twilight zone, ducking their responsibility to represent constituents by applying credible pressure on the president to come up with an end to his sorry war.
From The Independent, via News Hounds:
Lance Price, Mr Campbell's deputy, called Mr Murdoch 'the 24th member of the [Blair] Cabinet'. He added: 'His presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored.'I almost don't want to believe that.
You know how they say youth is wasted on the young, well, as it turns out, super-fast internet access is wasted on the old.
From Kos:
Having survived second-album-syndrome, Dizzee Rascal delivers his most confident release to date. It's almost silly to write excitedly about Maths + English now that whatever NPR-created aura of exoticism has dissipated, but the indifference with which this has been greeted offends me a bit. We do things a bit differently in America, unlike the British music press' fervent devotion to one-album ephemerality; I expect a bit more. The most depressing concert I've attended in my life was Dizzee's Miami show in April 2006. In a club with a dancefloor capacity of 250 I counted – no joke - 16 fellow revelers.
Anyway, M+E shows a Dizzee whose at last found a musical correlative for his swollen paranoia, which remains his great subject (accusing him of being repetitive on this count is like accusing Jay-Z of egomania). His flow relaxed, syllables enunciated, he's more approachable, as if resolved to say his peace and let the arrangements rough you up for a change. Sound effects, like the knives-as-percussion on opener "World Outside," remind him and us that he needs this world as much as the rest of us, even if it's closing in. On a purely musical level, it's my favorite album of the year; Dizzee's evolved from the spartan ethos of, say, Eric B & Rakim's Paid in Full to the multi-colored approach of Let The Rhythm Hit'Em. As Marcello remarks, "Da Feelin'" practically begs to be a summer anthem (indeed, it's Dizzee's version of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's immortal "Summertime"), and beside the rush of "Flex," a hybrid of "Britfunk, electro, and purple Unique 3" that Marcello is right to say is a complete success, the album's middle stretch begs the question of what this guy can do for an encore.
Well, not much. The "industry" serves as target and inspiration: it fucks him over ("Hardback"), threatens his identity ("Where's Da G's"), or fattens him to the point of satiety ("Wanna Be"). For the first time the duds – retreads like "Hardback (Industry)" and "U Can't Tell Me Nuffin'" – represent scantily developed ideas unsalvaged by Dizzee's enthusiasm. I cringed when I saw a song titled "Suk My Dik," then relaxed when I realized that this was funnier and faster than anything he'd previously attempted ("Bubbles" does the same trick with Boy in Da Corner's "What U On"). Once in a while we hear the Sega/Nintendo beeps on which his first two albums relied, but they serve as reminders of troubles he can't forget, habits he can't break. Speaking of the industry, two tracks demonstrate that if he can't beat them, he'll join them. The presence of Arctic Monkey leader Alex Turner on "Temptation" is crucial; here's another young guy who can't sort out his girl problems and whose own group's popularity has ebbed back home (not so's you'd notice though). But Turner's chorus adds aphoristic emphasis ("Temptation leads like your naughty mate/The one that used to get you in bother/The one you can never bring yourself to hate") to Dizzee's grim accounting of sin and forebearance ("Temptation" is Biggie Smalls' "Juicy" told from the point of view of a friend who failed to benefit from Biggie's sudden largesse). As for all-around gadfly Lily Allen's cameo on "Wanna Be," she mocks Dizzee exactly as you'd expect – she'd giggle at his obsession with size if she'd let him. Comfortable with conflict, ever smutty, ever present, he mocks his manhood with more swagger than his American counterparts.
