Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
There is talk on local hiphop site D. U. Nation about the shootings at the Quest the other night. Citypages staffer Peter Scholtes just posted an interesting account of the concert & incident. Forum member Tanqueray_Loccsta adds the improbable MySpace + Gangsta fusion:
Man they aint gonna close the quest, they got Mark Webster back. He's gonna clean it up just like he had it when I was a bouncer there. I was gonna work there with him but I got my own drama, Anyway I only got time for my Muzic from now on.
But for those that dont Know this street shit is real it no movie or t.v shit its mufuccas out here like myself that really lived this shit or still are living it now. And most beef that happens aint about someones shoes getting stepped on, or getting bumped into.
Its about real shit that took place in the streets and then you so happen to see the mufucca that fucced you over and its on right there. aint no fuccin talkin just drama.
The only fucced up part about it is it makes it hard for niggaz like me to do shows cuz they be scared of the type of crowed that will come. so the only cats that get the good venues are backpack rappers. no offence to yall...
but the streets are real.. shit My big bro O.G K-Wood just got murdered july 31st 2005 over north. check out his muzic at
http://www.myspace.com/murda4hire
this shit is real man mufuccas is gangstas 4 real man...
and it aint all superficial like ppl think it aint about being cool or tuff only ppl think that is on the outside looking in.
Tanqueray Loccsta says he's performing on Dec 13 at Minnesota Snipe's CD release party. I'd never seen a MySpace site in memory of a slain guy from the North Side -- complete with some of his tracks. It seems like a good idea, to make sure there's a spot on the Internet where their loss is marked, with music that celebrates them.
DailyKos says today that there are rumors that Bush has considered a jolt of Joementum to replace Rumsfeld. Yes, Joe Lieberman could run the Pentagon. It doesn't really seem plausible. I can't believe they would go Joe rather than find someone more tough-looking. Lieberman is horrible, and kos points out it would free Senate Democrats from his the grip of his nasty faux-centralism, but I don't know.
Given the circumstances I would really like a SecDef who was A) competent and experienced B) not murderously senile. I actually believe that the Republicans could come up with someone like that, but sadly they probably won't.
Speaking of the DKos, the site went down for a while when the server was being moved in a van, and a dog sniffed an apparent bomb that was actually cologne or something. So the government got them down for a while on a false positive.
Everyone's on a hair trigger?
Right now on C-SPAN, they're having the final session of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which was the low-budget sequel to the 9/11 Commission. They gave the government a lot of 'bad grades' for how it has failed to come up with specific measures intended to counter terrorism, which was more critical than I expected.
There is a lot of boring blather, but I thought the most interesting bit of the closing remarks was when Richard Ben-Veniste called for public hearings into the Able Danger intelligence project, and cited several programs (Eagle Eye and Talon, I think two were called) that he believed deserved greater scrutiny. I think they were being used to amass information at the Defense Department about American citizens. We'll hear more about this later, I hope, and I don't have a transcript.
Also on C-SPAN, Rumsfeld had some thing at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins, in which he elaborated about the war and the media / information environment etc. He said it was soo much more difficult because they can't break the law or lie, unlike the Enemies. And I laughed. Tragically I didn't see the whole thing, but it looked like a classic.
C-SPAN is a damn good service. Look at all these videos you can watch through their website. Ben-Veniste was right to thank them for broadcasting the hearings, to make the American people eyewitnesses to the operations of the government. But it's going to take a long time for it to Work...