WolframAlpha perhaps needs a little more work.
Rob’s notebook
Recommended reading
This guy’s like Gandhi, but better; he likes puppets. I love puppets. I love Fraggle Rock. I love Lamb Chop. I love Elmo, Sesame Street, Bert and Ernie, Snuffleupagus? Fucks my shit UP.
They’ve got their little categories, like ‘conscious’ and ‘gangsta’. It used to be a thing where hip-hop was all together. Fresh Prince would be on tour with N.W.A. It wasn’t like, ‘You have got to like me in order for me to like you.’ That’s just some more white folks trying to think that all niggas are alike, and now it’s expanded. It used to be one type of nigga; now it’s two. There is so much more dimension to who we are. A monolith is a monolith, even if there’s two monoliths to choose from. I ain’t mad at Snoop. I’m not mad at Master P. I ain’t mad at the Hot Boys. I’m mad when that’s all I see. I would be mad if I looked up and all I saw on TV was me or Common or The Roots, because I know that ain’t the whole deal. The real joy is when you can kick it with everyone. That’s what hip-hop is all about. … They keep trying to slip the ‘conscious rapper’ thing on me. I come from Roosevelt Projects, man. The ghetto. I drank the same sugar water, ate hard candy. And they try to get me because I’m supposed to be more articulate, I’m supposed to be not like the other Negroes, to get me to say something against my brothers. I’m not going out like that, man.
The Roots feat. Common - Act too (Love of my life)
“And it sounds so nice, hip-hop you the love of my life.”
Throughout the rich world, government has simply got too big and Mr Cameron’s crew currently have the most promising approach to trimming it.
Teachers and doctors (many of whom supported Mr Clegg) seldom welcome change.
‘Surge’ smoke follows Petraeus to Afpak
Pepe Escobar:
The heart of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in the south and southeast don’t want Karzai, don’t want Petraeus, don’t want surge, don’t want US and don’t want NATO. They want to be left alone to rule their local tribal land as they see fit. And to top it off, all those strands lumped as “Taliban” believe in their heart of hearts that their own brand of counter-surge is the real deal - that is, taking over Kabul by the end of 2012.
Petraeus’ cash diplomacy is doomed. The Taliban in all their strands, compared with Sunni Iraqis, are infinitely stronger, as much as Karzai is much weaker than Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. And even if only 30% of tribal Afghan Pashtuns actively support the Taliban, the majority totally supports their fierce anti-occupation struggle. The Washington notion that Petraeus can influence complex tribal Pashtun politics is risible.
If Petraeus goes “clear, hold and build” COIN in Pashtun lands he is doomed. If Petraeus gets restless and produces a Fallujah in Pashtun lands, he is also doomed (that may be in effect right away, as one of his minions told Fox News that rules of engagement will be more “kinetic” - code for more US firepower and more civilian casualties.)
So what’s the point of all this upcoming carnage? Well, there are so many - the poppy trade, the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, the ultimate pipe dream known as Trans-Afghan Pipeline, those military bases spying both Russia and China … So many rats scurrying around the sinking US flotilla in the sand, but what the hell, there’s another successful “surge” to sell and the (war) show must go on.
(via Instapaper)
WikiLeaks has a problem going mainstream | Colin Horgan
For all the freedom that the internet grants users, we still ask that the kind of information in “collateral murder” be interpreted for us. That interpretation and contextualisation of the footage took place on a more traditional medium: TV news and opinion programmes. There it fell victim in the very system it tried to undermine. It became part of a homogeneous message of The Way Things Are.
The “collateral murder” video has been viewed almost 7m times on YouTube – that’s 128 times fewer than the video for Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA. That comparison might seem silly, but it hints at a bigger problem. That is, the “collateral murder” video, as it became a part of the usual TV structure of message-advertisement-message, was reduced to an equivalent of all other parts of the usual pattern of disarticulation and abstraction of signs. In essence, “collateral murder” was overshadowed by a Miley Cyrus video because, in the end, it became part of a structure inherently designed to nullify its message by promoting the status quo of the culture industry.
(via Instapaper)
