There is a treasure trove of artists and songs that have gone strangely unnoticed in mainstream music over the years. Referred to in the U.S. as Deep Soul and in the UK as Northern Soul, it was a rich vein of music that became a sub-genre all to itself. Rarely did many (or any) get the sales or airplay recognition of the acknowledged hit makers, this was however the backbone, the songs that fairly ached performed by artists who were either largely overlooked, or who went on to achieve fame later in the mainstream.
Tonight's track is by Willie James - a single issued around 1971 which has become a serious collectors item over the years. Down On My Knees is typical of the Deep Soul genre - songs which dealt with themes of loss, betrayal, hurt, determination, pain and love just gone bad.
I think we're going to be paying an extended visit to Deep Soul this week. There's certainly enough to pick from.
This might be new to you. Stick around for the expedition.
After the opening part of his segment where Jon Stewart gave us an overview of Herman Cain's recent campaign meltdown and how that means, in his words, that Mitt Romney is “the luckiest Motherfudger on Earth”, Stewart explained just what he thinks happened to Rick Perry during his bizarre speech in New Hampshire this past weekend.
As Taibbi noted in his article, Perry's entire political ideology seems to be based on which way he sees the wind blowing to continue getting himself elected to office while passing out handouts and political favors for those who've given him campaign contributions.
Right now I think the only person happier than Mitt Romney when it comes to the Herman Cain campaign meltdown has to be Rick Perry who managed to have the damage done by that speech this Friday largely drowned out in the media by Cain's problems. That said, if he doesn't explain what caused his bizarre behavior and what was wrong with him this past Friday, that speech is definitely going to come back to haunt him. He was already tanking in the polls though, so it may not matter much.
Here's a little bit from the beginning of Taibbi's article at Rolling Stone:
Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.
KABUL—A Taliban insurgent driving a vehicle packed with explosives slammed into a U.S. military convoy in Kabul on Saturday, killing at least 13 Americans inside an armored vehicle, according to Western officials and eyewitnesses in Afghanistan.
The midday attack, which also killed at least four Afghans, was believed to be the deadliest strike on American forces in the relatively secure Afghan capital in a decade of war.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force said that those killed were five ISAF soldiers and eight civilian employees.
U.S. Gen. John R. Allen, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, said he was "saddened and outraged" by Saturday's attacks. "The enemies of peace are not martyrs, but murderers," he said.
The Kabul bombing was the worst in a series of attacks across Afghanistan on Saturday, showcasing the insurgency's resilience despite recent coalition assertions of reversing the war's momentum.
In the southern Uruzgan province, an Afghan army officer opened fire on his Western comrades, killing three Australian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, according to the U.S.-led coalition and Western officials.
The attacks came a day after a new Pentagon report hailed a summer drop in violence as a sign that the insurgency is losing steam. Top military officials in Afghanistan argued that President Barack Obama's military surge of 30,000 extra forces had reversed the Taliban momentum and given the U.S.-led coalition a new advantage.
Demonstrators had been occupying the plaza since Oct. 15. Democratic Mayor Dwight C. Jones visited the site Thursday to warn protesters they were breaking a city ordinance that forbids camping on public property.
"We applied for permits from city council but, you know, they didn't accept or decline us getting a permit," one activist explained to WTVR. "At least them declining it would give us an idea what was to come, but we didn't get anything. So we started occupying with high hopes and unfortunately this is what it came down to."
Protesters have vowed to continue their occupation of Richmond even if they can't do it at Kanawha Plaza.
The Occupy movement's brilliance at sustaining a physical presence in public space is awesome--and if sustaining a physical presence in public space is your political goal, well, then we can be very, very happy. But that is not my political goal. In fact, the increasing devotion to that goal as an end in itself has come to define the movement, which makes it guilty of the iron law of bureaucracy: the danger that arises when sustaining the bureaucracy becomes more important than advancing the goals for which the bureaucracy exists. That Occupiers have traveled a ways towards this danger shows, for instance, in the ticker that heads the Occupy Chicago site counting out "Time Occupied," as if this time was an end in itself.
Many Occupiers, especially young ones, have come to define themselves by their refusal to identified with any larger organizational force that can conceivably be conceptualized as "part of the system that got us into this problem in the first place." The anarchist notion of building a new world in the shell of the old, and an angry refusal to even identify this as a "left-wing" movement, are part of this phenomenon. Refusal to engage in "traditional politics" has been seen as no less than a goal. In Chicago, where I live, one manifestation of this has been refusing to negotiate directly with the city; instead, representatives of City Hall have been invited to sign up for two minutes of speaking time at the General Assembly just like anyone else. Some seem to be succumbing to that old left-wing temptation—that voting does not matter. I certainly saw signs to that effect when I visited Occupy Wall Street. I hope to write about this in more detail in the future, but for now i just offer this as an axiom on which to build my reflections; and offer this link as an index of just how prevalent that attitude has become regarding the participation of MoveOn.org, whose 24-hour mobilization was probably responsible for there still being a peaceful Occupy Wall Street in the first place after Mayor Bloomberg made moves to evict them. But MoveOn is largely seen as a front for the Democratic Party, in bed with President Obama, and something to be disparaged.
The Occupiers can point with justifiable pride at two kinds of awesome political victories. The first involves what I write about above: success at keeping and holding public space. For instance, Albany police, recognizing themselves as part of the 99%, have refused orders to making trespassing arrests. And the Los Angeles City Council voted twelve to zero to support Occupy L.A.
The second victory is more subtle: it involves the shifting rhetoric and action of politicians both locally and nationally away from the austerity bullshit that defined politics through spring and summer. But why is this (tentative) victory happening? Why are politicians "listening" to the Occupiers? The answer to this question many Occupiers have reached is that this is proof of the ideas in paragraph (2): that their ideology is working—that the moral force of their refusal to engage in "politics as usual" is making change happen.
I argue that this is wrong, dangerously so. In fact, the reason the Occupiers have changed attitudes in politicians, or at least become a nagging presence in the back of would-be-austerians minds, is a bluntly traditional reason. It is the same reason politicians have always responded to "street heat." Politicians see a crowd, and count votes. Not just the votes of the people in the protesting crowd—the count two votes, ten votes, a hundred votes for every member in a protesting crowd. They understand people willing to undergo hardship—certainly people willing to make the awesome commitment to keep and hold public space—as people with the motivation to influence voters around them.
All this adds up to a conclusion that should be frightening to those most committed to the notion of the Occupy movement as radically removed from traditional politics, who are actively working to keep it as pristinely removed from traditional politics as possible—who say, in short, that the movement shouldn't have anything to do with politics or politicians. The conclusion, simply, is this: once politicians figure out that this is what is going on—that as a matter of principle the most dedicated Occupiers won't be working to make the most traditional of political threats: do what we want or lose your job—the political change will simply stop happening. Politicians will have been given a reason to ignore the movement—even if it doubles or triples in size. It will have become about as political as a rave.
Once more:
If sustaining a physical presence in public space is your political goal, well, then we can be very, very happy. But that is not my political goal.
If figuring out nifty new ways for large groups to make democratic decisions is your political goal, then we can be very, very happy. But that is not my political goal. My goal is...economic justice.
Change, Occupiers, or die. Scare politicians. Systematically. Do politics—even if it means the messy of forming coalitions with the nasty organizations "that got us into this mess in the first place." Human beings got us into this mess in the first place. And no one is saying we shouldn't be working with them. Or if you are, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
So even though he found that his criticisms of warming were unfounded, this Koch-funded physicist is still insisting that the threat of greenhouse gases is not as proven as other scientists say it is. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, right?
WASHINGTON (AP) - A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
[...] There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.
Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.
"Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world," he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.
