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Kanye West, Yeezus Album Review
By Ray Rahman
Yes, Kanye West has gone rogue again. Did you expect anything less?
Five years ago, the Chicago native — known at the time for top-shelf but ultimately traditional hip-hop — confounded scores of fans and critics with his emotional electro opus 808s & Heartbreak. At the time it was an anomaly not just within his own catalog but within the larger landscape of radio rap. Today, in the age of Drake and Frank Ocean, it’s hard to imagine that landscape without the confessional bedroom-beats style that West first brought to the mainstream.
The job of an innovator, of course, is to keep innovating. And while 2010’s superlative My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy deepened his sonic palate, and 2011’s Jay-Z collab Watch the Throne reveled in luxury rap, West’s sixth solo effort plunges directly into the darker crevices of his psyche. In some ways it’s a 180 on 808s: Where that album was, on the surface, his softest and most vulnerable, Yeezus comes off as his hardest — designed, as the man himself says on ”Black Skinhead,” to ”f— up your whole afternoon.” Believe it or not, that’s just ‘Ye being modest: This album has the potential to mess with your whole year.
Read More Kanye West, Yeezus Album Review | Music Reviews and News | Summer Must List | EW.com.
Disney Channel Orders Girl Meets World to Series
By Joyce Eng
Cory and Topanga are officially back! Disney Channel has ordered the Boy Meets World sequel Girl Meets World to series, TVGuide.com has learned.The comedy will start production this summer and will premiere sometime next year. An episode order has not yet been announced.TV shows we want to reuniteHotly anticipated since the pilot was announced in November, the series will follow Riley Matthews (Rowan Blanchard), the daughter of Boy Meets World super-couple Cory (Ben Savage) and Topanga (Danielle Fishel), and her BFF Maya (Sabrina Carpenter), as they embark on 7th grade in New York City — where Cory and Topanga moved in the Boy series finale. Topanga now owns a popular afterschool hangout (think Chubbie’s) that specializes in pudding and Cory has followed Mr. Feeny into teaching. His history class students? Riley and Maya, of course.”Boy Meets World and its story of adolescent self-discovery resonated with an entire generation of tweens,” Adam Bonnett, Disney’s EVP of original programming, said in a statement. “In the same way audiences fell in love with Cory Matthews and Topanga Lawrence, we look forward to introducing our viewers to their daughter Riley Matthews in Girl Meets World and building a memorable connection with a whole new generation of fans.”
Read More Disney Channel Orders Girl Meets World to Series – Today’s News: Our Take | TVGuide.com.
Riddick
David Twohy brings us a new installment of Riddick on September 6, 2013. Vin Diesel returns as the villanous hero. This installment reminds me of the original Pitch Black film. Riddick stars Karl Urban, Katee Sackhoff, Bokeem Woodbine, and Nolan Gerard Funk.
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged Bokeem Woodbine, David Twohy, entertainment, film, Karl Urban, Katee Sackhoff, movie, Nolan Gerard Funk, Pitch Black, Riddick, Vin Diesel
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NYC casinos? Make that 7 years, Cuomo says
By Chris Bragg
After months of arguing that New York should initially site three casinos in upstate New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday morning that he had decided to push for four, while also pushing for a longer moratorium on the building of New York City gambling establishments.”The number is up to four casinos,” Mr. Cuomo said on the public radio program The Capitol Pressroom with Susan Arbetter.Under a proposed constitutional amendment likely to go before voters in November, up to seven casinos could be built statewide. Mr. Cuomo had been pushing a moratorium of five years on any in New York City, but as negotiations heat up with the Legislature, he said during the radio interview that the period should instead be seven years.Presumably, the longer time period would make upstate casino development more attractive, since the establishments would not have worry about competition from a New York City casino for an extra two years. The city has one state-sanctioned gambling venue, Resorts World Casino in Queens, but the state constitution does not allow it to have human dealers. Mr. Cuomo wants to drive tourists to “destination-style” casinos in struggling upstate regions and create jobs, and has not said whether a casino should eventually go to New York City.
via NYC casinos? Make that 7 years, Cuomo says – The Insider Blog | Crains New York Business.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Andrew Cuomo, business, casinos, Cuomo, economy, entertainment, Gambling, New York, New York City, Upstate New York
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NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?
By Timothy B. Lee
Computer programmers believe they know how to build cryptographic systems that are impossible for anyone, even the U.S. government, to crack. So why can the NSA read your e-mail?
Last week, leaks revealed that the Web sites most people use every day are sharing users’ private information with the government. Companies participating in the National Security Agency’s program, code-named PRISM, include Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During the 1990s, a “cypherpunk” movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for governments to spy on ordinary users’ private communications.
The government seemed to believe this story, too. “The ability of just about everybody to encrypt their messages is rapidly outrunning our ability to decode them,” a U.S. intelligence official told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. The government classified cryptographic software as a munition, banning its export outside the United States. And it proposed requiring that cryptographic systems have “back doors” for government interception.
Read More NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?.
Black Woman Gets 20 Years for Firing Shot at Wall; White Man Gets 0 Years for Shooting Man in the Back 3 Times, Killing Him
By Katie Halper
A man in Florida shoots a man he finds having sex with his wife, killing him. A woman in Florida shoots the wall to scare off an abusive husband, harming nobody. Guess which one was acquitted? Guess which one was convicted?
On March 10 of this year, around midnight, Ralph Wald, 70, of Brandon Florida, got out of bed to get a drink and found Walter Conley, 32, having sex his wife, Johanna Lynn Flores, 41, in the living room. He immediately went back into his bedroom, grabbed his gun and shot Conley three times. Conley died. Wald claims that he thought Conley was a stranger who had broken in and was raping his wife – despite the fact that Conley lived next door, had been his wife’s roommate and lover, and had his wife’s name tattooed onto his neck and arm. During a 911 call, when the dispatcher asked Wald if the man he shot was dead, Wald responded, “I hope so!” Wald never used the word rape in later reports to police, opting instead for “fornicate.” And while the fact that the two were lovers doesn’t imply consent, Flores has never accused Conley of rape — nor do prosecutors buy that that’s what Wald actually thought was happening. They say that Wald, who suffers from erectile dysfunction, killed Conley in a jealous rage. Flores admits that she and Conley had sex regularly before and after her marriage to Wald. While testifying, Wald explained that his erectile dysfunction and his wife’s reluctance to have sex with him made them compatible: “In fact, she would joke a lot with me … that we were a perfect couple… She didn’t want to do it, and I couldn’t do it.” On May 30, after deliberating for two hours, a jury found Wald not guilty. After the verdict was announced, Wald continued to show no remorse: “If the same thing happened again, I would do the same thing.”
On Aug. 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, with a Master’s degree and no criminal record, was working for a payroll software company in Jacksonville. She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and . . . I told her… if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her… I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward her…I was cursing and all that… and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one …. I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me… The fact is, you know . . . she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Alexander, Conley, Flores, Florida, law, race, stand your ground, violence, Wald, Wife
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Why the US locks up prisoners for life
By Kate Dailey
Last week, an English court handed a whole-life sentence to Dale Cregan for murdering four people, including two policewomen.
That penalty means he will never be eligible for release, and it puts him in rare company, making him one of about 50 people in the UK serving such a sentence.
Had he been in the US, he would have been less of an anomaly.
In the US, at least 40,000 people are imprisoned without hope for parole, including 2,500 under the age of 18.
That is just a fraction of those who have been given a life sentence but yet may one day win release. The Sentencing Project, a non-profit organisation that studies sentencing and criminal justice in America, estimated in 2009 that at least 140,000 prisoners in the US now serve a life sentence.
This does not include convicts given extremely long sentences with a fixed term, like the Alabama man sentenced to 200 years for kidnapping and armed robbery.
Most of them will have the opportunity for parole – though Sentencing Project Director Marc Mauer says few will receive it.
David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, says several factors underlie the high number of American convicts imprisoned for life.
“In large part it reflects the overly punitive nature of the American criminal justice system,” says Mauer.
Read More BBC News – Why the US locks up prisoners for life.
Do private-sector unions still have a future in the U.S.?
By Brad Plumer
In the latest issue of Democracy, Rich Yeselson has a long and interesting essay considering the decline of private-sector labor unions in the United States and whether they might ever make a comeback.
The piece is way too detailed to summarize in full (which means you should read the whole thing), but I’ll draw out three salient points here:
– Taft-Hartley was the beginning of the end for unions in the private sector. The piece opens with a vivid account of the birth of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which imposed a series of restrictions on union organizing and activities. Congress passed the bill when labor was at its peak and postwar strikes were rampant: “All in all, about 10 percent of the entire American workforce withheld their labor in 1946.”
Scholars have long debated how crucial a role Taft-Hartley played in the decline of private-sector unions in the decades since, as opposed to factors like globalization. Yeselson offers a slightly recast argument here, suggesting that the blizzard of new legal restrictions “bureaucratized labor unions,” by forcing them to lawyer up and “drain[ing] the energy and creativity out of the members and their rank-and-file leadership.”
– Labor’s recent attempts to launch new organizing drives aren’t working. In the last 30 years, as private-sector unions have withered, labor strategists have refocused their energies on creative campaigns to organize workers in fresh territory. The hope was that janitors and hotel maids, say, could make up for losses elsewhere.
Some of these campaigns were quite successful on a small scale — like SEIU’s “Justice for Janitors”push. But Yeselson, who worked on many of these efforts, argues that they simply haven’t been enough to stop labor’s overall decline. One reason, he notes, is that it’s simply much harder to organize on a large scale today. When the UAW organized its famous sit-down strike in GM’s Flint plant in 1937, there were 47,000 workers at stake. A single Wal-Mart store today might yield about 300 workers.
Read More Do private-sector unions still have a future in the U.S.?.
Race vs. Class – The False Dichotomy
By Sherrilyn A. Ifill
THE decision is in. All consideration of race in college admissions is over.
No, the Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision in the landmark case of Fisher v. University of Texas; that ruling is expected any day now. But an alarming number of scholars, pundits and columnists — many of them liberal — have declared that economic class, not race, should be the appropriate focus of university affirmative-action efforts.
How can we explain this decision to throw in the towel on race-based affirmative action? Are we witnessing a surrender in advance of sure defeat? Or just an early weariness with a debate that, a decade ago, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted would last another 25 years?
Perhaps it is the presence of a black president that has encouraged so many to believe that race is simply no longer a significant factor in American life. It is true that we have come a long way since the days of Jim Crow segregation. But the plain fact is that race still matters.
It matters with frightening frequency in the encounters of young black men with the police. It matters in our ability to get access to affordable housing, and in the wealth accumulated (or not) by our families. Whether the name on our résumé is Lakeisha or Leslie matters when we try to get a job interview. And it matters often, though not always, in our views about the continuing significance of race in American life.
Race isn’t the only factor that matters, of course, and universities should take seriously their obligation to educate poor students of all races. But nor should class be the only factor: after all, it was also true in the early 1960s that ignoring race and merely providing more resources to segregated schools would have benefited some poor black students — but that certainly didn’t mean that separate was equal, or that segregation was constitutional, or that pushing for desegregation was a waste of time.
What we might learn from the decades-long (and painfully incomplete) experience of desegregation is the need to deploy multiple efforts to address a chronic problem. In the context of higher education, that menu of efforts should include considering income (if not wealth), as well as an aggressive campaign to raise the quality of K-12 public education.
Read More Race vs. Class – The False Dichotomy – NYTimes.com.
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