After several months of not producing any music, I finally got inspired. I turned on the radio and couldn't find any decent hip-hop, so -- as always -- I came home and made some of my own. I hope you also think it's decent:

The Drive-By

The image at right is borrowed from this site, which has many very disturbing images. Hopefully the allegory is clear in this track -- if not, please ask and I'll break it down.

George Shadroui: What Freaking Ever

So I had some problems with my email (apparently SBC didn't notify me that they were instituting a new spam-blocking filter which kept all but a tiny trickle of emails from reaching me until I went in today and turned it off (and downloaded the 800 that had backed up).

Anyway, George Shadroui had, in fact written me back on 27 September. Most of his email is a series of refutations to my refutations; so while I will gladly share with people his email (if you ask nicely), I won't quote many parts of it.

The main item I was interested to hear back from him about was with regard to East Timor, especially as that case disproves his claim that "the only real hope victims facing catastrophic repression or genocide have is the United States." I expected to get an apology along the lines of "To the people of East Timor I apologize for playing so fast and loose with my words. The US obviously did not offer them hope during their years of catastrophic repression/genocide."

Instead, I got this:

I have, of course, heard of East Timor. And I reference it in my article by way of mentioning Suharto. I agree that we could have and should have withdrawn or cut military aid to that government sooner than we did. What impact would it have had is, as you suggest, another matter. My guess is the French would have stepped in, sold the weapons, and things would have gone as before. We sustained a relationship with Indonesia because it was an important anti-communist country in a part of the world that was contentious and under threat of communist domination.

So whatever. I'm done with this man. He's obviously not interested in dialogue, much less considering seriously any of my main points about perspective, aside from giving Chomsky credit for "raising an occasional legitimate human rights issue."

So, I guess I'm sorry I wasted my time trying to talk rationally to his man, but I hope it served some positive purpose for others who were looking in.

Enjoy the music. Feedback is appreciated!

TimeWaster™

MonkeySlide is fun.

Today I'm listening to: Orbital! (Their "final album"? WHA!?)