Nuke: The Next Generation
Since, apparently, ICBMs are just so yesterday, President Bush has authorized the military to find new, more exciting ways to kill people with nuclear fission, which would, of course, be a violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. See what the BBC has to say about this, and ponder just how many more treaties are their left in the world for Bush & Co. to break..

Movie/Music Collision Quote of the Day

"You can even tell that muthaf---in' Jesse Jackson/ Pay your child support/ Keep your payments up/ Put a rubber on"


- Ice Cube, on the new Westside Connection album, responding to Rev. Jackson's criticism of Barbershop. Somewhere along the way, Cube also manages to take shot at Samuel L. Jackson, too, for complaining about rappers-turned-actors.

I miss this Ice Cube. Now if only he had something to say about Iraq....

Manipulative Restatement of the Day

"If only I wasn't Black. Then people would stop sweating me for contributing to the cultural erosion of the Black community, the further objectification of Black women, and increased demonization of young Black men while I'm lining my pockets. It's SO unfair!"

- my shamelessly manipulative paraphrasing of a lament from BET founder Robert Johnson over the difficulties he faces in his career, from an article found in today's L.A. Times.

"Why isn't anybody saying anything?!?!?"
Here's a speech from Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVa), castigating the Bush administration for recklessly pushing the entire world community to the edge of collapse, both militarily & financially, and the Senate for saying absolutely nothing about it.

Truly Patriotic Quote of the Day

"The president is not a king."

- John Bonifaz, the lawyer representing a group of American soldiers, parents of soldiers, as well as Congressmen John Conyers, D-Mich, Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio; Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.; Jim McDermott, D-Wash.; Jose Serrano, D-N.Y.; and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas who've filled a Federal lawsuit against President Bush and Sec. Rumsfeld. The suit states that the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq is unconstitutional and that the deployment of American soldiers without a congressional declaration of war is illegal.

I find myself reminded of Cassius's plea to Brutus, both members of the Roman senate, as Caesar is contemplating making himself king and replacing the Republic, from Shakespeare:

"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

It's about time somebody tried to do something about this.

The State of the World
I haven't fully digested exactly WHAT the World Economic Forum is, but anytime you put Bill Clinton, John Ashcroft, Bill Gates, the heads of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Sony International & Goldman Sachs, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury in the same room, it's probably in your best interests to know what they're talking about. Here's the POV from a proverbial fly on the wall, and the view ain't pretty.

Escape from L.A.
C.I.A. director George Tenet just confirmed that the North Koreans have the ability, as of right now, to drop a nuke on the West Coast of the United States.

And I can say, right here, right now, in this moment, I became afraid.

I mean, afraid that there is a very real nuclear crisis blowing up in our faces that the President is just hoping will go away so he can go kill a dictator for Daddy. I'm afraid that they're stubborn arrogance to deal with the North Koreans could result in a disaster of unspeakable proportions, and not just because yours truly would get vaporized in the first salvo. After all, if the North Koreans start going nuclear, and we respond in kind, don't you think those itchy trigger fingers in Pakistan & India are going to start scratching?

You'll have to excuse me while I start making my peace with my maker.

Hollywood Shuffle Quote of the Day

"Hey, Shaun, get those eyes bugging. That's the money shot."

- John Bowman, executive producer of "Cedric the Entertainer Presents", said to one of the show's performers.

Yes, this bothers me alot. But, on the other hand, that "The White Man's Holding Me Down" skit is hi-la-ri-ous.

Meteorology
Micah Wright is a former Army Ranger who now makes his living writing, among other things, the comic Stormwatch: Team Achilles, which details the exploits of an elite group of very-human military operatives who are funded by the UN to beat the snot out of any and all super-humans (heroes, villains, mascots, whatever) who make life difficult for the rest of the population. Fun stuff.

However, in his spare time, Micah is a VERY vocal opponent of the Bush Administration's foreign policy towards Iraq, as evidenced by the series of faux-propaganda posters he's created and selling on the web to highlight the lunacy of the impending war. Here's an excerpt from his Delphi web forum where he lays out in broad detail what he thinks is and is not an appropriate application of the most awesome military force in the history of mankind.

The Un-American Way
In case you haven't noticed, Mark Millar, the writer of comic titles like The Authority and The Ultimates, is one of best in the biz, in my opinion. This spring, DC Comics is releasing what may be his masterpiece:

What if the small spacecraft carrying the last survivor of the planet Krypton, instead of touching down in Kansas, the breadbasket of Ameroca, crash landed in Stalinist Ukraine?

Purveyors of Smut
Back in October of 2000, The New York Times did an article that, among other things, included a map that illustrated the percentage of pornography consumption on a state by state basis. Oddly enough, the states with the highest consumption rates map almost exactly to the states that would vote for Al Gore as President the following month. Someone at The Atlantic monthly believes that this is more than a coincidence.

New Age Battle Dress
Here's an article from the Washington Post that details military research at MIT to develop "smart" uniforms for the army, to combine GPS technology, biotoxin detection & relief, performance enhancement, and all other sorts of goodies, through the wonders of nanotechnology.

The Longest Walk
Here's a Time article about "The Passion", Mel Gibson's directorial follow-up to Braveheart, that details the day of the Crucifixtion. The big conceit in this film is that it's all in Aramaic & Latin, the languages of the time, with NO SUBTITLES, because he wants to be as authentic as possible and force the audience to focus on the visuals.

Just a minor suggestion: if you want to be authentic, cast an Arab as Jesus, instead of the VERY-anglo James Caviezel.

Our Very Own Monster
Remember when everyone was afraid that the Japanese were going to buy the entire United States of America, back in the late 80s, because they were making just that much money? You want to know why that never happened? Because they're economy was artificially inflated due to a massive speculative market for investors who made investments in places that didn't have sound financial fundamentals but sounded REALLY cool. In other words, they had a bubble economy. And, like all bubbles, it burst back in the early 90's, plunging Japan into an economic recession that has not ended to this day, despite the efforts of their government and their central banking authorities.

You do realize, of course, that the technology boom in the American economy of the mid to late 90's was also, in fact, a bubble economy that burst at the end of 2000. This article from CNNfn.com talks about why we may be in the same mess that the Japanese are in, and that there may be nothing the government or the Federal Reserve Bank can do about it.

Why Not?
In probably the most shameless example of making lemonade out of lemons in recent memory, Nicole Brown Simpson's sister Denise is considering a run for the United States Senate because, in her words, "I just like Washington, D.C.".

God help us.

Sleepless Knight
Christopher Nolan has just signed to direct a new "Batman" movie.

For those of you who don't know, Mr. Nolan is the writer/director of Memento and the grotesquely underrated Insomnia. And there's a nasty rumor going around about Guy Piece (Leonard Shelby in Memento, as well as Lt. Exley from L.A. Confidential) playing Bruce Wayne.

One word:
Nerd-gasm!

"On the trail of the midnight ride..."
Biker Boyz, the new movie by Reggie Rock-Blythewood (writer of Get on the Bus and writer/director of Dancing In September), starring Messrs. Fishburne & Luke (along with a personal, lost favorite, Larenz "O-Dog" Tate), may seem to be just a motorcycle repeat of The Fast and the Furious. But, beyond the need for speed, it also gets into the lifes of a bunch of affluent, Black professionals who use the motorcycle subculture as an outlet and release for the pressures they endure in the corporate jungle. It's MUCH smarter than the ads let on. Check it out this weekend.

Emmett Till
In 1955, while visiting relatives in the South, a young black boy named Emmett Till supposedly whistled at a white woman as he exited a grocery store. That night, that woman's husband and another white man proceeded to abduct, beat, mutilate, and then shoot Emmett in the head. As you can see from the before & after pictures above, the only way his mother could identify his body was because of a ring she'd given him just before he went on that trip. An all-white jury acquitted the two assailants, and they've subsequently died quietly of old age after a long, peaceful life as racist child murderers.
PBS just aired a documentary detailing the whole sordid affair and the efforts by Emmett's mother, also recently deceased, to find some justice in the world.
As I think about James Tate down in Texas, I'm reminded that, in some places, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

At Least Powell Hasn't Forgotten
Here, Colin Powell seems to be on the other side of the Affirmative Action debate from Dr. Rice & the President. Thank goodness for small wonders.

Fire From the Gods
The White House appears ready to approve the Prometheus project, a NASA nitiative to develop and build the next generation of reusable spaceflight vessels with nuclear-powered engines capable of interplanetary flight (i.e. trips to Mars). Now, ordinarily, I'd be jumping for joy about anything that helps us boldly go where no man or woman has gone before, but the two words "Bush" and "Nuke" in the same sentence makes me a little edgy. And, since our commander-in-chief isn't known for being much of a futurist, it makes me wonder if this has any relationship to our rejection of the ABM treaty, that specifically calls for a ban on space-based weapons.