Magpie

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Is the US a color-blind society?

NPR commentator Connie Rice has some requirements that she thinks need to be met before the US makes the grade. And she's made a couple of lists, one of which we've included here.

10. When Chris Rock gets puzzled silence instead of belly laughter.

9. When sperm banks stop shipping their product in color-coded vials.

8. When real estate agents no longer ask me to leave and remove family pictures before showing my house.

7. When the black unemployment numbers cease to be a multiple of the white unemployment rate.

6. When magazine covers featuring dark-skinned people no longer depress sales.

5. When abandoned black kids in our back yards get adopted before Chinese and Russian children overseas.

4. When prison populations look like America instead of slave ships.

3. When black women stop using weapons of mass destruction to straighten their hair.

2. When black folk stop treating immigrant Latinos like white people in Mississippi treated them.

1. When the prostate cancer rate for black men is no longer 10 times what it is for Korean-American men.

Via Follow Me Here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:58 PM | Get permalink

The FBI is watching you.

If you're in the antiwar movement in the US, that is.

According to the New York Times, the FBI is compiling information on the 'tactics, training, and organization' of antiwar activists and organizations, and has sent out a memo to local law enforcement agencies urging them to report similar information to FBI counter-terrorism squads. These FBI activies are reminiscent of the spying that the agency did on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists under its rabidly anti-communist former director J. Edgar Hoover.

The FBI memo alerted law enforcement agencies to various activities engaged in by anti-war groups, such as:

— Using training camps to 'to rehearse tactics and counter-strategies for dealing with the police and to resolve any logistical issues'
— Using the Internet 'to recruit, raise funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations'
— Raising money 'to help pay for lawyers for those arrested'
— Using gas masks to protect demonstrators against tear gas
— Videotaping police while they make arrests (an attempt to 'intimidate' the cops, says the memo)

The fact that these are all lawful activities didn't seem to matter to the FBI, which also warned local police agencies that demonstrators might use forged documents to get into secured areas or commit violent acts using homemade bombs.

Even the Times has to admit that the memo 'appears to offer the first corroboration of a coordinated, nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding demonstrations.'

While the FBI is denying that its memo indicates any sinister motives, it has surfaced in a political climate in which antiwar activists have found themselves unable to get on airplance because their names are on 'no-fly' lists, and in which local police agencies are apparently already involved in surreptitious activities againts anti-war demonstators. In this connection, the Times article points to accusations that authorities in Denver and Fresno (CA) have infiltrated planning meetings or spied on activists; and how the NY City police has been questioning arrested demonstators about their political activies.

Civil libertarians and some legal scholars think the FBI memo could be early evidence that the type of spying that Hoover's FBI did on Martin Luther King could be about to return.

"The F.B.I. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."

Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University who has written about F.B.I. history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal.

But he added: "As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, 'We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in F.B.I. files."

[Free reg. req'd.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:37 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, November 20, 2003

'The whole art of it is in the bowing.'

One of Magpie's earliest purchases when we started learning to play the fiddle was Matt Cranitch's The Irish Fiddle Book. It's one of the best tutors for playing Irish traditional music on the fiddle, and we refer to it frequently. A mighty fiddler, Cranitch has been a notable presence in Irish music for decades, having worked with the groups Na Filí and Any Old Time (the Irish one, not the US one). Currently he plays with Sliabh Notes (groan!).

The indispensable Fiddler Magazine has an interview with Matt Cranitch in its Winter 2003/04 issue. A good part of the interview is online here.

The more I learn about fiddle playing, the more I realize that the secret, the whole art of it is in the bowing. While it's the left hand that makes the notes, it's the bow hand that makes the music, and I don't mean something just as straightforward as the bowing directions. Bowing is so much more than that. The bow makes the sound -- the bow is the only contact that the player has with making the sound. You can argue that the left hand makes the notes and that there are rolls -- and so there are -- but how you articulate the rolls, how you articulate the trebles, where you put the stress, where you put the accent, how you attack the note, whether you play it softly and all the rest -- it's the bowing that does that. A lot of people nowadays learning traditional music grow up in a household where traditional music is not known, for instance people in cities where pop music is on the radio all day the children listen to pop music but the parents would like them to be traditional musicians. They go to fiddle class a half hour a week and for the rest of the week they don't hear a note of the music, so they have no reference. The only thing they have is the bow directions, but for the most part they would often interpret the bow directions like a classical player would interpret them. Now contrast that with, let's say, the time when Pádraig O'Keeffe was teaching: there weren't radios, the only music that a lot of people heard was fiddle players playing in houses, so there was a lot of unwritten and unspoken musical education imparted in the sense that you knew how the music should sound, you knew what the swing was, you had all that unwritten information and nobody needed to tell you about it. When I was doing the book, I felt that I wanted to be able to give sufficient directions that people got some sense of the swing of the music. If I were writing the fiddle book now, in the light of the additional knowledge I have, I would probably be even more overt in that sense. When I give workshops I tend to start from that viewpoint; at a lot of workshops people get taught tune after tune after tune but, in my opinion, very few tutors talk about the "how." Over the years, people have asked me, "How do you do it, how do you play that?" All of which has led me today to be very interested in trying to answer the question of what it is that the fiddle players are doing to make the music sound the way it does. When I talk about Pádraig O'Keeffe or Paddy Canny or Johnny Doherty or Jay Ungar or whoever, I'm interested in what they're doing, and in the power of the bow. The power of the bowhand is absolutely immense and greatly underrated.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:46 PM | Get permalink

Dubya's war against Saddam Hussein (revised and corrected).

This Reuben Bolling strip nails it.

Via Salon.

[Paid sub. or ad view req'd.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:36 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Sharing the Thanksgiving bounty.

Magpie received a message from the Working Families e-Activist Network at the AFL-CIO. It's worth quoting in full.

Usually we ask for your activism to win the fights we share. But today we're asking for something different. We're asking you to give thanks to the 80,000 grocery workers in California, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio who are holding the line for health care and good jobs--theirs and ours--by making a small contribution so their Thanksgiving will be a little less bleak. Please click on the link below to donate or keep reading for more information.

https://secure.ga3.org/08/thankgroceryworkers/nZ1111111s1wa

Striking workers--like Rafael Morga, on the job 30 years with Ralphs supermarket in Chino, Calif.--are sacrificing their paychecks to win the battle against employer health care cutbacks--a fight in which we all have a stake.

These workers need our help. The strike fund dollars they receive from their union help but can't stretch to cover even the basic needs of their working families.

As we approach Thanksgiving, give thanks for the stand these workers are taking...and GIVE just a little to help support them.

For just $15, you can provide a turkey that will feed the family of a striking grocery worker this Thanksgiving. (Every additional $15 you give helps another family.) And you'll let them know you are grateful for the sacrifice they are making. Please click below to make your donation.

https://secure.ga3.org/08/thankgroceryworkers/nZ1111111s1wa

The grocery chains are demanding the workers accept what amounts to a 75 percent cut in health coverage for new workers and a 50 percent cut for current employees. Like employers across America, they are trying to boost their profits at the expense of workers and workers' families. If the grocery chains win, we'll all have a harder time holding on to the health care benefits we've bargained and fought for.

Please take a moment today to make a secure donation so workers holding the line for health care can have a great Thanksgiving.

Magpie just sent off our donation. Want to join us?

[Links fixed. Thanks Di!]

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:43 PM | Get permalink

Sunday, November 16, 2003

Turning up the heat in Iraq?

From a BBC report:

The US has launched a new operation against insurgents in Iraq, backed by hi-tech missiles, fighter jets and attack helicopters.

US forces fired a satellite-guided missile at a "guerrilla camp" about 25km (15 miles) west of Kirkuk, for the first time since major combat ended. [...]

Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Macdonald, spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division base in Tikrit, said the operation marked a "more aggressive" approach in the region.

"We want to demonstrate that we have the capability to co-ordinate operations simultaneously over a large area," he said.

Does this all make anyone else think of the phrase 'shock and awe'? And about how effective those tactics were?

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:25 AM | Get permalink

The Blogfather.

That Ayn Clouter sure must have a lot of time on her hands. But her newest post sure is a lot of fun, in the usual twisted Clouter fashion.

This novel presents the blogging world like a struggle between Mafia bosses, fighting not for money or power, but for links to their web sites. The main figure is the one with the most traffic and the most powerful links: Instypoohbah, the Blogfather, referred to by his supporters (who truncate his site's name at both ends) as Typo, or more respectfully, Don Typo.

The book begins in a courtroom, where TV commentator Bob Oriole watches in helpless anger as a judge, corrupted by fuzzy liberal ideas, throws out his lawsuit against a so-called comic for stealing the slogan of his news network. When his shouts of "Shut up!" are ignored by the judge, he realizes that the only place he can go for justice is to the Blogfather.

And that's only the start.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 AM | Get permalink