Grand Theft Semantics

I wrote a short essay on educated fools a few weeks ago & this 60 Minutes clip of Judge Antonin Scalia fits oh-so-snugly into my definition of what one is. What an unrepentant buffoon! In the 60 Minutes interview, we learned (amongst other tidbits) that he never received a grade less than an "A" and was always on top in his class. I guess his 'high intelligence' served him well when he gave the 2000 elections to President Bush and when he says that torture should not be considered as punishment (check this critique as well)...Sharp and critical minds like former Supreme Court Justice Brennan & Thurgood Marshall are sorely missed.


::MixMasterE::

...the superfluity of words...

                                 (..there are times when we all just need to shut the hell up....)


:::Silence is as deep as eternity; speech as shallow as time:::~~


:::It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers/sisters. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers/sisters for what they are, not for what they say:::


:::Silence is a source of great strength:::


:::Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over:::


:::Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation:::


:::Music is the silence between the notes:::


OneLove


MixMasterE

"Rich people, God Bless Us!"

This has to be one of the most ignorant statements I have ever heard ( and I have heard some doosies). This coming from a presidential candidate who claims to be looking out for the middle to low-income people of this nation. What an abomination as it is the rich who continue to make off like the bandits that they are at the majority's expense. Welcome to the saddest sideshow in town: Witness the greatest concentration of income since 1928, with 23.9 percent of all income going to the richest one percent of the population. Behold!This one percent now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent (that's us, the crumb-catchers and our offspring, the crumb-snatchers). This same one percent also owns 36.9 percent of all corporate stock and are getting additional benefits from unprecedented levels of capital gains income. Today, the world's 1,100 billionaires have a net worth double that of the bottom 2.5 billion people. The richest 10% of adults worldwide own 85% of global wealth while the poorest half barely own 1%. The 10 million millionaires worldwide have seen their wealth double to nearly $37 trillion over the past 10 years...I can go on, but you get the point: we are getting pimped big time and the biggest pimps are not the ones standing on the corner with the wide-brimmed hats with the long feather sticking out & matching fur coats, The biggest pimps are the Mastercard/Visa, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Veritas Capital, Bank of America, Monsanto, L-3, Walmart & Blackstones of the world who are playing cities, states, nations and families like dispensable fodder to feed their avaricious, bottomless appetites.

"Rich people..God bless us?" God has nothing to do with this so-called blessing. It's the same old corrupt and conniving bullshit, Senator.

::MixMasterE::

Authentic Soul: Erykah Badu & Jill Scott

Erykah Badu - Soldier (LIVE @ VH1 Soul Stage)
Uploaded by leatik

..the whole set on VH1 Soul Stage was OUTSTANDING! Listen to the lyrics and hypnotic bass riffs on the cut "Me"--Solid performance:

http://www.vh1.com/video/play.jhtml?id=1582333&vid=212499

Nightmare Overhanging Darkly

• The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It ranks first in the world in locking up its fellow citizens
• The U.S now imprisons more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offences 
• The U.S sends more people to prison, for more different offences, for longer periods of time than anybody else
• The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people is the highest, followed by 611 in Russia
• A U.S. Justice Department report showed that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.
• US Government figures show that overall black people account for 46% of prisoners in America, compared to 36% who are white.
• More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their twenties, 1 in every 8 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.
• Two-thirds of the prison population are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, representing the first time in American history that more people are confined for crimes involving no violence.

These are such sad, dismal facts but what is even sadder is the lack of political will & a louder public outcry to confront the root causes of crime such as educational & economic inequities and the  overwhelming media focus on the crimes of non-whites which feeds on the larger social tragedy of a criminal justice system that favors whites over black&brown people (especially so in crack-cocaine sentencing vs powder cocaine & in the coverage of black entertainers/sports figures vs white entertainers/sports figures). Soon, 1 out of 3 black males will be in prison if this trend continues. I'm no conspiracy-theorist, but this seems so systematic, so viciously Orwellian in its execution of social domination & control. Indeed, the mass media & the educational/legal/political/economic/socio-cultural infrastructure seem so well-oiled& calibrated so as to produce the desired outcomes. You now have some black and brown people even believing a lot of nonsense passing as the truth about themselves & their prospects--Self-fulfilling prophecies in the flesh.

We have to end this.

Dwele hints at an answer in a laid-back, jazz-infused piece, "My People": "There's never been a worse time to be young & black.....Tonight my eyes will burn in prayer that we will learn to love our people...(Still)I feel the good will outweigh the bad.."


Stay Alive!

:::MixMasterE:::

....oh hum de dum....

(Where does he get his information from? A fortune cookie?)

Bill Maher Discusses Race, Elitism, Barack, the Pope...

I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Maher's show on Friday. His kick-ass, no-nonsense style is a breath of fresh air in an era of media consolidation & the intolerance of alternative viewpoints(thanks to the FCC). Although there were a lot of factual errors in the show (like the claims of the Pope being a Nazi sympathizer and that Iran has nuclear weapons), it was otherwise quite thought-provoking and funny as hell. Any true democracy requires an informed public and Bill Maher's show is really one of the few remaining that informs and entertains at the same time.

Batten Down The Hatches!!

Oil at $110/barrel and more than $3.35 at the pump...My grocery bill looks like a damn mortgage and lots of folks are catching hell...Yet still I read that CEO pay is increasing, even for failing companies? I think we're all getting punk'd....

..down the roller-coaster we gooooo............


Peace (..watch your pennies..)

:::MixMasterE:::

Underground Soul Commune

I ran across this great website that highlights some incredible soul music,vintage videos & interviews. Check this site out when time permits: http://soulcommune.ning.com. Below is a playlist I created on this site which boasts a number of established & up & coming R&B artists as members (Eric Roberson, Kem, Mint Condition, Trina Brossard, to name a few)

An Unbearable Lightness Of Being: James Baldwin's Existential Blues

Ever since I read my first book by James Baldwin, namely, "No Name In The Street", I was transformed. Something shifted within me & the way I viewed the world would never be the same. Oh, there were other books I read at that time that shook the ground beneath my feet like, "Breaking Bread-Insurgent Black Intellectual Life" by Cornel West & Bell Hooks, "Necessay Illusions-Thought Control In Democratic Societies" by Noam Chomsky & "Inventing Reality: the Politics of News Media" by Michael Parenti to name a few, but it was Baldwin's book that had the most impact.

"No Name In The Street" is a deeply personal, reflective piece of the rage,fury & despair of the sixties and seventies that turned Baldwin's world upside down. In vivid yet painful detail he reflects on his upbringing in Harlem that shaped his early consciousness & the later events that impacted him deeply-—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his experiences in Europe and Hollywood and his return to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

I wrote copious notes along the margins of the book which I personally baptized as holy text--hahaa. Here are some of quotes from the book which are as relevant today as they were decades ago. Unafraid to wield his pen as a sword, he sliced through hypocrisy, ignorance, conformity, all the enemies of art and enlightenment, with his Third Eye ablaze :

The administration of justice in the U.S is a wicked farce--it has no love for justice or any concept of it.

Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Power is dependent on human energy, on the wills & desires of human beings. When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities--and seas of blood.

Many white people appear to live in a state of carefully repressed terror in relation to black people.

All men are primitive, but not in the same way, for in that absolutely unassailable privacy of the soul, they do not worship the same gods.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

Brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility.

One can learn from one's errors. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your errors for you, discarding your own vision--in which, at least, you believe--for someone else's vision, in which you do not believe.

On racist terror:It was as though he were wrestling with the mighty fact that the danger in which he stood was as nothing compared to the spiritual horror which drove those who were trying to destroy him---they endangered him....but they doomed themselves


To learn more about one of America's greatest novelist/essayist, check out these resources:

American Masters

Life Of James Baldwin




Stay open....

One Love

:::MixMasterE:::

Forgotten Angels

Poverty is the worst form of violence.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)




Imagine yourself so poor & hungry that your only way to feed yourself outside of begging is to eat dirt? Many of you may have read of Haiti's poor having to resort to
eating mud cookies made of butter, salt, water and dirt to stave off hunger. 80 percent of Haiti's eight million citizens live on less than a dollar a day. 85 percent are illiterate. Most children suffer from malnutrition. Life expectancy is under 50. How did such a thing happen to a place, once the most prosperous island in the Antilles and the first in the Americas after the United States to gain independence?

The answer is as old and sad and pathetic as empire itself.

In a nutshell, during the 1600s and 1700s the French plantation owners brought in black slaves & brutally enslaved them to turn sugar into profit. From 1791 to 1804, the proud and resilient Haitians held Destiny in their tight, calloused hands & fought courageously against the French (British & Spanish as well) until they finally got the upper hand with a dazzling display of strategic planning & ferocious fighting under the brilliant leadership of Toussaint Louverture & Jean Jacques Dessalines. Napoleon was sent packing and the first black independent nation was born.

But no Empire just folds its' arms and walks away. The French felt insulted by this monumental defeat of their colonial forces & thus devised a counter-attack: Britain, France, Spain and the US, all rivals but united in exploitation and dehumanization, imposed an economic naval blockade from the moment of its independence for about 60 years. Without the ships of these countries and their traders, the plantations of Haiti could not sell any of the sugarcane, tobacco, cotton or coffee. This led increasing desperation and poverty for the vast majority of the population. What finally bought Haiti to its' knees was when they were forced to pay compensation (an equivalent of $21 billion) to France for taking over the slave plantations during the revolution. The familiar cycle of poverty, indebtedness and political instability was established and continues to this day (aided and abetted by numerous U.S military invasions and political meddling to keep things "in order").This is how the promise of their inspired revolution ('a beacon for freedom in the Western Hemisphere') was killed and with wave after wave of brutal dictatorships (except for Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was politically assassinated), Haiti is today one of the world's poorest countries.

For information on what you can do to help and to learn more about what is happening in Haiti, check out these resources:

Food For The Poor
Jubilee2000
Institute For Justice & Democracy In Haiti

OneLove

::MixMastere::

Of Fools & Legends

The Thinking Man's Dictionary

I ran across this rather mischievously irreverent site after searching diligently for a term that could best match my angst towards a certain type of individual, that being an educated fool. I know what one is--a person who fetishizes & wears his/her academic credentials like a blazing, unassailable seal of superiority and enlightenment yet possessing, in reality, the deepest, most stubborn ignorance & impoverished vision that not even the light of one simple truth can dare enter. We all know who they are--many of them work with us, some are members of our own family & quite a number reach the highest echelons of power and priveledge (G.W is the Mad Magazinesque Poster boy). Truly, I am sick of educated fools who, if one must be brutally honest, are the greatest purveyors of barbarism, corruption, falsehoods, cowardice and laziness-posing-as-delegation-of-tasks-to-the-less-thans. Maya Angelou once said that, "some people unable to go to school were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors.” I'm sure most folks can identify with this salient observation. Bob Marley mirrored this wisdom in many of his songs like, "Stiff-necked Fools", "Crazy Baldheads" and "Time will Reveal". He quipped in one interview, "If I was educated, I'd be a damn fool.”

I am not against education-- I am against those who believe education is simply the collection of certificates in the quest to be top dog in their narrow field of endeavor. Why does humility have to wither? Why must people be trivialized and disrespected in the pursuit of titles and fat pay checks? Why must education itself be nothing more than a market-driven tragedy of creating a minority of a priveledged few sitting on top of a vast majority of "less-thans"? How schools are financed, how teachers are trained, how school districts select textbooks, how certain groups are low-balled and tracked to failure, federal/state budget priorities, what constitutes "knowledge" and how certain facts are priveledged over others and a whole host of other forces play into this farce and spectacle termed "education".

So, to all the educated fools out there who think that your shit smells like sweet mocha chocolate with a dash of cinnamon, be careful of those who can truly see you for what you are. Hopefully, one day you'll allow some light into your dark, musty quarters and gradually, if not fully, embrace what an educated, selfless mind can do to uplift the least amongst us.

One Love

::MixMasterE::

Rumi's Vision

The Alchemy of Love

You come to us
from another world

From beyond the stars
and void of space.
Transcendent, Pure,
Of unimaginable beauty,
Bringing with you
the essence of love.

You transform all
who are touched by you.
Mundane concerns,
troubles, and sorrows
dissolve in your presence,
Bringing joy
to ruler and ruled
To peasant and King.

You bewilder us
with your grace.
All evils
transform into
goodness.

You are the master alchemist.

You light the fire of love
in earth and sky
in heart and soul
of every being.

Through your loving
existence and nonexistence merge
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
becomes sacred again.

- Rumi

Winter In The Heart

Delusion: noun:the act of deluding; deception by creating illusory ideas;
noun:(psychology) an erroneous belief that is held in the face of evidence to the contrary.



The first time any country gets real power,it is abused. Like Rome, China, Mongolia, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, so with the United States. Empires rise, empires fall. And the United States appears to be on a downward spiral. Perhaps my assessment is wrong about the U.S empire's current decline, however, at some point, like all empires that preceded it, it will run out of gas and another power will rise to continue this sickening cycle of power, wealth, wars, corruption and an assortment of grand delusions to mask it all/fool us all.

Why are human societies so tragically flawed? Why haven't our so-called leaders learned anything from the past? In the 30,000 years or so since the blossoming of modern human beings, we've been at each other's throats for one reason or another (land, water, oil, women, geopolitics, religion,.....). And of course, everyone/every nation (in the modern era) feels justified/finds justification in this blood-letting by mouthing off a plethora of diversionary yet stunning array of high-sounding principles (regurgitations)--"national security", "protection of the homeland", "survival/self-preservation", "protection of our interests", "high values", "civilization at stake", and, the supreme principle, "peace" . George Orwell's dystopic term, "double-speak" comes to mind here.

If we dissect the tragedies that have been carried out in our names, we may be able to get a glimpse of some essential truths underlying the forces that feed this drive to conquer and, perhaps, if one must hope, make this Earth a safer home for our children in the long run. George Orwell once wrote, " War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. " We have to see through the blindfolds, re-examine what undergirds our patriotism and reclaim our rights to be fully informed & engaged citizens of our global community (by implication, challenging nationalism/nation-state which I will take up at a later time). Must we be forever slaves to our drives and to the dictates of our leaders who claim to have our best interests at heart?

Check out this Flash Presentation: Hope & Memory

To all the warmongers in our midst, from Bush to Mugabe to Hu Jintao: Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant (a C.L. Montague quote). Indeed, enemies will multiply if we continue to be this way as darkness cannot be fought with darkness--only the light of love and understanding can do that.

peace

::MixMasterE::

The Question Of....you

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living? -Bob Marley

One of the most enigmatic figures I have come across in my continuing search for answers to the ageless question of, "Why Are We here?"(besides "Jesus Christ" - "Yeshua" being the original Aramaic proper name for Jesus the Nazarene) & Prophet Muhammed) is the man known as The Buddha. I have been studying his words for years and have found profound synchronicities between his precepts and my experiences. Like a monk says in the brief but riveting documentary below, if his teachings can somehow be summed up in two words, it would be, "Live mindfully". I am no expert in Buddhist philosophy & practices, but it really does appear to me that Siddharta Gotama who became known as The Buddha (the 'enlightened one') revealed something timeless & universal enough to penetrate all religions without diminishing them in any way (the Four Noble Truths & The Eightfold Path are simply luminescent).

Check out this BBC documentary:-

Keep Searchin'!

:::MixMasterE:::

Journeys

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore




~Cool Meditations~

MixMasterE

My Battle With Arrogance

One of my biggest pet peeves is arrogance.

Whether by friends, family members or folks at work, this deluded, imperious strain that seems to be an all too common attribute pretty much anywhere you go, causes such a heavy vexation to my soul.

So you have money or command a large salary...So you have a Ph.D...So you have a fancy title with a spacious corner office overlooking the city....So you rub elbows with the boss and go to happy hour on Fridays with him/her....so...so what???

As vex as I often get with the arrogant, pity soon follows as I have realized that underneath the hubris lay an unimaginable emptiness & a deep, perhaps unconscious fear of exposure. I am not the judgmental type, however, when it comes to those who float around thinking that they're better than you or anyone else based on some contorted world-view, well, the gloves come off and I pretty much expose them for the pieces of dysfunctional shits that they have allowed themselves to become. Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe in righteous indignation and I will stomp on those who step to me in such a manner. Some years ago, I exposed an entire organization I worked for publicly (in a newspaper article) which embarrassed all the would-be Kings of the company. Since I used an alias, no one knew who wrote the article, but a few suspected that I was probably the one. In any case, a corporate re-organization shortly followed and things got a lot better before I resigned. My point was made.

Destroying arrogance begins with really seeing--being real. When we examine our burdensome and inflated assumptions about ourselves, gradually we begin to unmask the imposter within and soon come to the realization that, fundamentally, we are at the same level of importance as others: not higher, despite our gifts, and not lower, despite our defects - just damn ordinary! At the end of the day, folks are not going to remember you by whatever power or material possessions that you may have acquired, but by the true substance of your soul.

Be real!

OneLove~MixMasterE

Crank Dat Obama!!

Hilarious! Check the wicked footwork!

Street Prophet: Lupe Fiasco

One of the most searing, iconoclastic and original Hip Hop artists on the scene today is Chicago-born rapper, producer & song-writer Lupe Fiasco. What's different about Lupe is his conscious attempt to overturn debilitating and pernicious stereotypes that still serve as open wounds on the socio-cultural & politico-historical fabric of this nation. Like Nas, Talib Kweli and Common, he cleverly weaves complex tapestries and multi-dimensional character portrayals that take you on a journey to spheres that may be unfamiliar. Being only 26 years old makes him even more remarkable indeed.  Admittedly, some of the landscapes he etches are really dark, brooding and foreboding pieces, but he makes his point convincingly.


Check him out on the Tavis Smiley show explaining how he furtively slips his music past commercial radio's predominant format of lasciviousness:




OneLove

:::MME:::

Michael Eric Dyson on Barack, Hillary and Playa-Haters

One of my favorite public intellectuals, Michael Eric Dyson, really shines the light on contemporary realities. His opinion of Barack is spot-on.

Also check out Barack's brilliant speech again....



OneLove