Uche’s posthaven

It's nice to see the mainstream media gain some backbone in repudiating the nonsense furore over ACORN, and instead focusing on how we need to enhance rather than suppress voter participation. Here is the Gray Lady on the subject:

 

But for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t saying anything about another more serious voter-registration scandal: the fact that about one-third of eligible voters are not registered. The racial gaps are significant and particularly disturbing. According to a study by Project Vote, a voting-rights group, in 2006, 71 percent of eligible whites were registered, compared with 61 percent of blacks, 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asian-Americans.

Much of the blame for this lies with overly restrictive registration rules. Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements.

[...]

The real threats to the fabric of democracy are the unreasonable barriers that stand in the way of eligible voters casting ballots.

Yeah. CORNy and the fly girls? A threat to democracy? Be serious!

I took a bunch of notes at October's Boulder Denver New Tech, but thanks to the fact that iChat upon a crash seems to like to nuke recent history, it's lost.

So I'll just mention that my friends, founders of IOUNote (which I've mentioned here before). Erika Archer, Ben Monlezun and Scott Archer (who all have a side line as Kung Fu killas) did the presentation and even used me for a prop, sending me an IOUnote for $1,000 that I guess I'll cash in when they IPO, or get bought by Facebook. And that's not far-fetched, or anything. They've been on a roll lately. As this article puts it (IOUNote is the dessert post Guy Kawasaki platter):

IOUNote.com is a social lending upstart about to flip to version 2.0. It was voted as one of the top 18 innovative new companies in Colorado this year and has revenue-stream potential with the ability to take advantage
of the latest stressed-out head-banging on Wall Street.

The site has a free zany component. You owe your friend a bucket of chicken or a day at Disneyland. You can register what you owe. You lose a bet on Monday Night Football? Register what you owe. You can keep
track of even the most minuscule IOU online.

You owe your two-year-old a college education? Get it online and start that tracking procedure.

Version 2.0 has a revenue model built in that includes lending between social circles. These friend-to-friend circles includes larger amounts than simply you owing your kid a new Star Wars action figure after
crushing his last one in the driveway while backing out.

Oh hey, can I reverse that? I'm fittin'a write one to Osi for leaving his scooter behing my weeks-old Prius last year and thus causing me to rip a big, expensive hole in the front right panel.

The article includes a nice photo of Erika, fresh from rescuing the IOUNote stick man from the Blair Witch.

And I have some shots I took on Scott's iPhone at the meetup. Fortunately @$#&*! iChat wasn't in a
position to deprive me of those.

Earlier on I commented that "I go Chop ya Dollar" is not a good song to choose as the anthem of 419ers. I'd have to say that the real 419ers anthem is Olu Maintain's awful "Yahooze". Please feel free to skip this video, since it's an insult to Nigerian music, but for soi-disant journalistic reasons , here it is:

Much more satisfaction is the "New Dawn" segment where Funmi Iyanda parks Olu between several indignant Nigerian women and has them peck his very deserving eyes out (or something like that).

Yahoozee indeedy!

Those might be the most hardcore lyrics in the history of song "May whomever my sh.. pisses off die from being pissed off". OK, it's really "my thing", not "my sh..", but that just doesn't carry, seen? So the words are from this song particularly enjoyed by young Igbo girls on the playground (and if anyone thinks there is a species with a sharper tongue than young Igbo girls on the playground, I've got a wager for ya). And one of those young girls grew up to be the lovely Onyeka Owenu who worked bits of that playground song into the pan-African hit "Ekwe" (a "talk to the hand, ya'll" to the jealous). Good song, if you can find it, these days.

I can't find the Owenu version, but I came across Omawumi Megbele, a pretty fly lawyer from Delta State, doing a hearty, if overwrought version on Idols West Africa.

Ekwe!

Ekwe O! Ekwe O! Ekwe O! Ekwe O! Ekwe!

Ekwe mbadikwe, ekwe (2X)

Anu kwa ebe m i jeru bia
E we na ebe akwa, m we ju,
E we na ario m, m we ju
Ina ebe akwa ? onye na egbu gi? ekwe!
Ekwe mbadikwe, ekwe (2X)

Onye ifem na ewe iwe, ya biko we gbuo ya (selense)
Osukwa su nwa nkpi, ya biko sugbo ya (selense)
E kpota papa gi, ma kpota mama mu (selense)
E kpota mama gi, ma kpota papa mu (selense)
Mama, mama, obu na ni gi nywere mama? (selense)
Papa, papa, obu na ni gi nywere papa? (selense)

Osisi kporo nku, egbe eligwe gba gbuo ya (selense)
Anum nga m na eri nri, ndi iro mu na ele m anya (selense)
Anum nga m na asu ahu, ndi iro mu na ele m anya (selense)

E lecha mu anya , onye hu ihe i ga eme mu (selense)
I hu kwa m na uzo, mu na gi aluwaya (selense)

"Selense!" "See if I care!" Really, "selense" is pretty much untranslatable. Closest thing would be the AAVE "What'd I say?" and even then not exactly in the Ray Charles sense. "See if I care!" is probably close enough.

Selense!

Yeah, I wouldn't mind a new laptop, but luckily the new unibody design is only available in 15" MacBookPros.

Nice. Maybe by the time the 17" model catches up, I'll actually be fit to afford one. But only if the new design is at least as durable as the old one. I've bashed up my 17" MBP pretty well.

You know, you don't even have to say something is a Hype Williams jawn. It's usually self-evident. No exception here. Interesting how Common alternates his flow between the UTFO-style stop/start of the chorus (that's supposed to be Pharrell in the chorus, right?) and standard modern common (i.e. after his stylistic tightening in Electric Circus). I'm not sure I'm feeling the Neptunes beat, though. I'd like to hear a few remixes.

OK, and here's a little gratuitous look back. You can't mention Common these days without mad buss lick shot out to that brilliant track with the brilliant video where Common shows his prescience of the late 2008 hot topic. "My raps ignite the people, like Obama".

No matter what the people gonna see ya, bro. Wouldn't it be just right to have Common performing "The People" at the Obama inauguration. We'd even let him bring along Will.I.Am's corny ass. Can we start a campaign for that? I guess it's not really appropriate until at last the 5th <wink>

I don't know how I missed it, but this past week was the 10th anniversary of the murder of Matthew Shepard. If you were sleeping on October 6th, 1998, I hope you woke up October 7th. I certainly did. I don't think I've ever had a problem with homosexuality, but I'd never really took a stand on it one way or another until that horrible day. We had just moved to Colorado, and the events struck us hard in what we already knew would be our new home.

To Matthew Shepard's family, to his friends, and to everyone who saw a threat towards their own security reflected in the crime that took his life, I wish you peace.

In the U.S., come election day we have poor safeguards against voter suppression, poor transparency of the ballot process, and a system where your location determines the effective value of your vote. I think these fundamental problems with voting in the U.S. translate to secondary problems such as the focus on the media on trivia and personality rather than issues, the influence of lobbyists and inevitable corruption, and poor turnout, and in general turnout driven by narow interest rather than civic responsibility.

Happily there are several groups attacking different aspects of our national electoral system in search of improvements. I may not agree with everything all of them are fighting for, but I think we need a revolution, and in a revolution you don't focus on the distasteful state of your comrade's dress. I'll only mention non-partisan or bi-partisan groups (AFAICT).

Working towards better voting apparatus is the Open Voting Consortium:

"OVC develops and promotes a new concept/process for election administration. If realized, this idea will mean we will have a publicly-owned and publicly-administered voting system. Your right to a secret ballot will be preserved while everything else about the system will be public....OVC is needed because the current system is faulty and too expensive. Billions have been wasted in recent years on inadequate solutions."

The site focuses on the credibility and desirability of the election processes and devices they favor, which is a salutary contrast to the back-room dealings of commercial giants such as Diebold.

Working towards electoral college reform is National Popular Vote Inc..

"The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee a majority of the Electoral College to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would reform the Electoral College so that the electoral vote in the Electoral College reflects the choice of the nation's voters for President of the United States."

Their Web site emphasizes support by legislators (state legislators, who are the key to this proposal), which is nice, but it would seem to require a sweep of legislative clarity ignoring whatever electoral college calculus might favor one party or another, which hardly seems on the horizon.

Another major problem with our system is the dominance of two parties that come nowhere close covering the the ideological diversity of the people. Third parties have had a very difficult time throughout most of U.S. political history, regardless of merit, and there are a good number of groups promoting improved nomination rules (a.k.a. ballot access rules) . One good source of information on this issue is the Ballot Access News newsletter.

A major group that focuses on this in addition to other electoral issues is FairVote USA (formerly the Center for Voting and Democracy, but DotCom times apparently demanded DotComNaming).

"FairVote acts to transform our elections to achieve universal access to participation, a full spectrum of meaningful ballot choices and majority rule with fair representation for all. As a catalyst for change, we build support for innovative strategies to win a constitutionally protected right to vote, universal voter registration, a national popular vote for president, instant runoff voting and proportional representation."

The organization pushes a broad slate of programs in addition to nomination rule reform, including advance voter registration (starting voter registration when people turn 16), universal voter education, elections for U.S. Senate vacancies (rather than by state governor appointment).

One thing to be mindful of is that some of these movements overlap advocacy of direct democracy, which I think is another matter altogether, and very dangerous. The most common examples of direct democracy are state ballot initiatives (of which this year Colorado has a depressing 14. I sure as heck am not standing in line Nov 4th. Hello early voting.). I generally oppose these because it's much better for legislatures to legislate. Mob law is not entirely conducive to civilization. My general principle is that each citizen should have a fair and equal opportunity to select their representation, but not to then demolish the powers of that representation.

I'm used to thinking of Miriam Makeba as the elder stateswoman of African music, so it was pretty cool to find this clip of a younger Makeba splashing her charisma all over the stage in Brasil. I love the black-is-beautiful hairstyles, too.

(via Brian Sletten)

And even an older Makeba has the same marvellous presence. Here is a sweet duet.

Too bad not every queen of African pop enjoys such a lengthy run. Oh where are the Yvonne Chaka Chakas of yesterday?

Ah, fond memories there :)

So I've always liked NFL. It's fun to watch. But I used to love to watch NBA as well. I used to watch all the big games in both sports, as well as Tennis, and of course the sport I can never get enough of--soccer, i.e. the real football. In the early '00s, we got a cable package with, thanks to a tip from my Dad, Fox Sports World, as it was then called (now Fox Soccer Channel). This meant I could watch a fair amount of soccer on TV, and time became short for watching NBA. At the same time, the NBA started to become uninteresting. There was less of the plays and intricacies, and more and more of ridiculously gifted athletes taking turns running across the floor then dunking. Fun for a while, but after a while, you watch one game, you've watched them all. WNBA is actually better, because it involves so much more of the sort of play NBA used to offer.

The interesting thing is that the folk American complaint against soccer--that there isn't enough scoring, is precisely what makes it interesting to those of us who can't get enough playing and watching the sport. It's hard to score in soccer. Sure it takes supremely talented individual athletes, but it also takes a lot of teamwork, and a lot of clever play-making. The plays are intricate, and the variety is infinite. English Premier League is a completely different beast than La Liga (Spain) or Serie A (Italy) or Bundesliga (Germany), and when teams play one another in European or world club competitions, the contrasts of styles, and the drama and atmosphere is just irresistible. I should say that except in the World Cup, national soccer is rarely as good as club soccer, which sucks right now since this weekend is the international break, and national teams are all that's on display.

Anyway soon my TV routine was soccer on Saturday, soccer and NFL on Sunday, Monday Night Football (i.e. the British football version, on Monday afternoon U.S. time) and then Monday Night Football (i.e. the American football version). That sounds like a lot of TV, but I'm pretty creative about managing how much of my actual non-disposable time it takes up. And then something happened. Over the years, I started watching fewer and fewer NFL games. Really the same thing was happening as with the case of NBA. A lot of the passion and unpredictability was ebbing away. One culprit I can pinpoint is the New England Patriots. If there is a less watchable sporting event on earth than an NFL game that includes the Patriots, it must be on a Baseball diamond (sorry, but that's how I see it). It's all so button-down tidy, and all so utterly joyless. And since they win, everyone copies them. And the joylessness spreads.

This year I've surprised myself. I haven't yet watched a single, full NFL game. I've watched snatches of games here and there, but it's getting so my heart's not in it. One of the things that's happening is that now that I've figured out even more ways to watch even more soccer, there is less and less time for NFL.

But I wouldn't mind a spark to enliven American Football for me again. Could it be the A-11?

Wow. That's one heck of an electric jolt. I mean, forward-pass type revolution. Even the description of this formation gets me excited, and I've found some video clips, and I what wouldn't I give to see it in the professional level? It would be like going back to the Warren-Moon-led Houston run and shoot which was one of the things that really captivated me about NFL when I first returned to the US as a tween. That is, until defenses found out how to smother it, in a trend that kept on growing in its funlessness until it became the awful cover-2, which made enjoyable offense pretty much suicidal. Is it possible that the complete chaos that the A-11 opens up could be exploited by a good (and rootin'-tootin') coach with an abundance of NFL-class athletes? It's probably wishful thinking. Simple risk analysis means that despite any innovation defense always comes on top in any sport (just ask those of us who can't stand joyless Italian soccer and had to watch Italy hoist the last World Cup). But the A-11 could give us a few years of a truly explosive game. Couldn't it? Couldn't it? Well, the first problem is that the powers that be in football don't seem to like it. Everyone seems to be in a hurry to ban it. Joyless punks. Too bad. It looks like the A-11 requires a soccer-like level of intricate team play-making.

Ah well. I can't dream, can't I? At least in this one weekend when the soccer on display is not quite up to snuff. Probably by next week, when the Arsenal take the field again, you'll ask me and I'll say "A-11"? Who's that? Adebayor with the wrong number shirt on?