Entries from March 2003 ↓

Over at Legal MP3 Downloads, they’re maintaining a blog listing of free and cheap music downloads. The songs are usually in only one of the major formats: MP3, WMA, or Liquid Audio.

While there might not be an infinite selection, the front page lists over 70 cuts by artists from Lil’ Kim to Allison Kraus to Faith No More, to Australian star Paul Kelly.

I’m sure the selection will get even better as time goes on, and with more user suggestions. One thing I’d like to see… if it’s possible: a stream of the songs — from their original sites. This would be similar to what epitonic.com does with their Epitonic Radio.

[Via Frank Fields' FURDLog]

UPDATE: I heard from David Lawrence, at the Legal MP3 Downloads blog and he points me to an article (which I missed) where he discusses the original purpose of the site. In his e-mail to me, he says:

He’s got a clear purpose, a narrow focus, and that’s going to be what makes the site work. Good luck, David!

The “Fair and Balanced” network used their Times Square news ticker to offer some objective coverage of the recent “die-ins” in Manhattan, according to an article from North Jersey.com:

Always glad to see real journalists in action.

From The Declaration of Independence by John Ashcroft:

Andrew Bayer Is Dreaming of China pointed me to the website of WFNX (Boston), where they’re currently showing a list of “The Top 500 Ever” Alternative songs. As Andrew says:

I’m not even gonna quibble about the order of the songs. What I want to know is: what is the criteria for “alternative”? Roxy Music’s 1976 hit “Love Is the Drug” (#340)? David Bowie’s 1969 Top 5 UK hit “Space Oddity” (#46)? “One Love” by Bob Marley and the Wailers from 1977 (#36)?

“Rock” is a big genre. (Rock could probably be classed as a sub-genre of “Pop” or “Popular” Music, which is distinguished from “Classical” and maybe “Folk/Ethnic” and “Liturgical”.) Rock has plenty of sub-genres — Reggae, Singer/Songwriter, Electronica, Folk-rock, Dance, Hard, Britpop — which overlap with its historical periods — Glam, Punk, New Wave, Grunge, College, Psychedelic, Hair-bands.

This selection of “Alternative” songs — which span five decades, major labels, indie labels, top ten hits, album cuts, acoustic songs, electronic cuts, cover versions — have absolutely nothing to unite them and are therefore meaningless as a classification. I wish the appellation would just disappear forever.

(There is one thing I did notice while looking through the list: with the exception of Bob Marley — 4 songs — and Lenny Kravitz — 3 songs — this is a very white list…)

On plasticbag.org, Tom was describing some Good things to do with noises…

One of the items he mentioned was SpeechGear‘s Compadre, a voice-to-speech translation system. His less-than-optimistic description of its probable success:

Hit me right in the funnybone. I needed a good laugh.

Yahoo!, through one of its service providers, Capitol Advantage, provides a free service called MegaVote. Sign up with just your ZIP code and your e-mail address and you’ll receive weekly e-mails detailing your representative’s recent votes, upcoming votes, and links to send e-mails to your Congress critters.

If I’d had this service running last week, I wouldn’t have missed the vote on the tax cut due to my preoccupation with the war.

[via A Klog Apart]

According to Reuters, US Secretary of War Defense Donald Rumsfeld, appearing on CBS news, was shown Al-Jazeera video footage of captured and killed US troops.

To its credit, Reuters followed Rumsfeld’s statement with a further paragraph, stating:

Although the Geneva Conventions do not explicitly mention “photographing or interrogation by media,” they do protect POWs “against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” I am not familiar with the body of international precedent related to treatment of POWs, but the International Committee of the Red Cross does seem to consider the Iraqis to be violating the rights of prisoners. (The spokesperson very carefully avoids making an absolute determination that the footage does violate the convention, despite the certainty of the article’s headline.)

Of course, Mr. Rumsfeld should be very careful in citing the Geneva Conventions. The US may be in direct violation of those conventions in holding 650 suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members at its Guantanamo Bay facility for the past 14 months. The US, despite the requests of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and other international organizations maintains that the Camp Delta prisoners are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” and therefore, not subject to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

The recent decision by the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in Al Odah v. United States skirts the issue of Geneva Convention violations by claiming that “…Cuba – not the United States – has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay.” (I’m not making this up! Despite warships, fences, armed guards and 45 years of embargo, we’re claiming that Cuba is the sovereign authority.) By avoiding any claim of jurisdiction, the Circuit Court has put the prisoners beyond the pale of any laws. The US claims

• the detainees are not Prisoners of War and are, therefore, not subject to the Geneva Convention,
• they are not on US soil and are not entitled to the protections of US law,
• they are being detained on “the field of battle”, because, as Judge Randolph claims in his concurring opinion in Al Odah, the “historical meaning of ‘in the field’ was not restricted to the field of battle”, but also applies to camps maintained at a safe location,
• the US is not obligated to return them to their countries of origin because the hostilities are not yet over, and
• even if the hostilities were over, these prisoners pose a security threat to the United States and would not be released.

Even in his most ironic, satiric moment, Joseph Heller never dreamed of a “catch” like this one. They’ve been cast into a legal black hole and the US would be very happy if the rest of the world forgot about the detainees.

Of course, there is a solution to the detainee problem, which could be justified by all of my government’s tortuously convoluted bending of the law. See, it goes like this: Back in November of 2002, the US assasinated a key Al Qaeda operative in Yemen, using an unmanned drone aircraft to deliver a Hellfire missile. Despite President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 which orders “[N]o person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination,” the administration was not concerned that it had violated this ban. As Professor Jeffrey Addicott of St. Mary’s University School of Law explains,

So, the detainees at Guantanamo have been captured on the field of battle (the field of battle being defined as “wherever they are found”), are now in military custody on soil that is not part of the sovereign territory of the US. By that definition, they are “legitimate targets” and may be lawfully killed. Easy, ain’t it?

Lucky thing the Iraqis don’t have such good lawyers who can justify killing POWs. They’ll probably just hold our captured servicemen in keeping with the Geneva Convention.

This week’s Baltimore City Paper has a very clever parody of a Dr. Seuss story entitled The Great Go-Goop War.

Not so much funny as true, like this week’s terrific installment of Get Your War On.

More evidence that the Constitutional “originalists” read the Constitution as it suits them, when it suits them. An AP story reports that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is receiving the Citadel of Free Speech Award from the City Club of Cleveland.

Now, we’ll forget about the obvious irony, that a recipient of a Free Speech award should insist on banning the Press — the bastion of Free Speech — from the awards ceremony tonight, because, in all fairness, the Constitutional ban on restriction of speech and the press is only applied to government. Justice Scalia is violating no laws demanding that the press be banned from the event.

Considering, however, that he is receiving the award based on his decisions and duties as an official of the United States government, it is questionable whether he is violating some spirit of the the First Amendment in requiring the banning of the press.

What really bothered me about the article was the Justice’s assertion that

There is definitely vagueness in many areas of the Constitution. The Second Amendment, for example, with its ungainly wording and division into two competing phrases, will always require interpretation.

When it comes to the First Amendment, interpretations are not so easy. “Congress shall make no law…” the text begins, then lists the items which Congress (and the States, by extension of the 9th, 10th, 11th and 14th Amendments) can make no law about: establishment of religion, practice of religion, freedom of speeech, freedom of the press, the right to peacably assemble, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grivances.

There’s no vaguesness in “Congress shall make no law…” so I’m not sure how Justice Scalia can claim that the rights I enjoy are beyond the “minimums” set by the Constitution. Freedom of speech is limited in any number of laws, ranging from public safety laws, to child pornography laws, to hate speech rules, to gag orders, to advertising restrictions. Peaceful assembly is zoned and regulated and often requires permits, involving legal and administrative oversight in a realm where a strict reading of the Constitution admits “no law”.

If Justice Scalia is referring to first amendment rights, then his reading of the Constitutional guarantees as “minimums” is just plain wrong. There is no minimum expressed or implied by “no law”; it is, instead a maximum limitation on Congress’s powers.

And finally, Scalia’s mention of “the rights you enjoy” implies that these rights have been granted us by the government and are subject to restriction or rescention by a paternal government in much the same way that a teenager may find herself suddenly grounded by a change in her father’s mood. This is so foreign to the concept of the basis of government stemming from “We the people”, that I can hardly believe that Justice Scalia would say this. The rights we “enjoy” are natural rights, inalienable rights, rights which define what it means to be human. The government does not grant us rights, rather, we grant the government its very existence for the purpose of protecting these rights.

This conception of rights is so fundamental to the understanding of the Constitution and the nation, that I am more worried than ever about our country’s future. If those men and women who are sworn to uphold the Constitution do not understand — or seek actively to undermine — that which they must uphold, then we are truly fucked.

An assassination in Serbia. Chemical weapons. Turkish unrest. Russia in the economic pits. Shifting alliances between the Great Powers. Tribal warfare in the Middle East, South Asia, the Indian subcontinent.

I know, in my mind, that the situation today is very different. But as I think about current events, and of the complexity of interactions which led up to the start of World War I, I can’t help but hear Santayana‘s words of doom echoing in my head.