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| Visionary Kanye West Shares His Vision w/ Photographer |
This isn't anything you haven't heard before. However, I do think it was a good read from the New York Time's Nicholas D. Kristof.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Claiming to have “ashamed and defeated our attackers,” President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya on Tuesday declared victory over the Islamists militants who stormed into a crowded Nairobi shopping mall and killed dozens of civilians.In a national address, Mr. Kenyatta declared three days of mourning, saying that 61 civilians and six members of Kenya’s security forces had died in the effort to retake the mall. He added that “five terrorists were killed with gunfire” and that 11 suspects were in custody.“These cowards will meet justice, as will their accomplices and patrons wherever they are,” he said. “Kenya endured. Kenya endures.”
With a shrinking circle of trust inside the White House, Obama is having trouble establishing trust outside with once reliable factions: grass-roots Democrats and liberals in Congress. As Peter Baker wrote in The Times, the president is finding himself increasingly “frustrated” by the defiance of Democrats who are despairing of his passive, reactive leadership.
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana on the banking committee, told Jonathan Martin for Politico in February, after he scraped through to a second term, that the president was not engaged with the Hill, that he had not met with Obama at the White House since 2010, and that he was sorely missing aides like Rahm Emanuel, who tirelessly worked and stroked Democrats in Congress. Tester was one of three Democrats who spurned the president on his favorite to run the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers. The White House didn’t call Tester until Friday, when it was too late; Summers was allowed to twist in the wind, like Susan Rice before him. Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.
You might recall last year when JPMorgan Chase caught everybody's attention after it reportedly lost $2 Billion dollars on a single trade (subsequent reports noted that the loss was actually $6.2 Billion). This became known as the "London Whale" scandal named after Chase's London-based trader Bruno Iksil who made huge bets in the derivatives market on Chase's behalf. I'll spare you the details, but long story short Chase's "London Whale" began placing risky bets on a massive scale that caught the attention of smart hedge fund managers like Boaz Weinstein who, in turn, began betting against JPMorgan Chase. In the end, Weinstein won. Chase lost. Big time.
The threat of a government shutdown became a lot more real
this week. The House Republican leadership was forced to delay
a vote to fund federal agencies after fiscal 2013 ends on Sept. 30 because
the party’s most conservative wing refused to support the temporary spending
measure. Tea Party Republicans called a concurrent resolution defunding
Obamacare and linked to the stopgap measure a gimmick because Senate Democrats
could have easily defeated it and kept the government open by passing a clean
continuing resolution.
When I was a young kid I was constantly getting busted in elementary school. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a bad kid (at least not by today's standards). In fact I was a nerd in school. I studied hard, got good grades, always did my homework, etc. But for some strange reason, whenever I made a joke in class or goofed off with the class clown(s), invariably my teachers would make it a point to hold me accountable while letting my peers go Scott free. In fact, 9 times out of 10, whenever I would get reprimanded for doing something wrong it was because I was doing the exact same thing that the other kids were doing. This, of course, led to many speeches from my folks as to whether or not I would jump off a bridge if all of my friends jumped off a bridge. Bridge speeches notwithstanding, something still seemed odd to me, even then, about my detention record versus the detention records of my respective peers. It was as if they could do no wrong, and I was the convenient scapegoat. 25 kids could have all laughed at the same classroom prank but my name was the only one that would end up being written on the board. To this day, I honestly can't say why I was singled out more than my peers. Perhaps it was because I was the new kid. Maybe it was because all my teachers saw "so much potential" in me that they didn't see in my classmates. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because I was the only black student in my entire class all throughout elementary school.
“Mo’ Meta Blues” is the title of a new memoir from Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, the thoughtful and charismatic drummer for the hip-hop/neo-soul band the Roots. He’s also the musical director of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and an irrepressible presence on Twitter, where he has more than 2.5 million followers.If you’ve seen Mr. Thompson, you probably haven’t forgotten him. He describes himself in his memoir as “a peculiar-looking 6-foot-2 walking Afro,” which isn’t far-off. There’s something intense yet beatific about him. He’d probably groan at the comparison, but visually he’s hip-hop’s Jerry Garcia. He presides.“Mo’ Meta Blues” — the title is a nod toward Spike Lee’s drama “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter — is a busy thicket of musical geekery. It’s a proper memoir in the sense that it eventually gets his story told, all 42 years of it thus far.But it’s more about the music that’s pricked up his ears, the stuff that’s made him the tastemaker that he is. The end pages on my copy are crammed with song titles; they resemble the back of a popular girl’s senior yearbook.I suspect I’m going to be listening to more Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Prince, the Isley Brothers, Rufus, Public Enemy and D’Angelo than I have for a long time.Mr. Thompson grew up in Philadelphia. His father was a pioneering doo-wop singer who later toured on the oldies circuit. His mother was a singer and dancer who ran a clothing store. The whole family sometimes went on tour, like a groovier version of the Partridge Family. From a young age, he sat behind the drums.At home he was an indoor kid, obsessed with vinyl. Other kids played dress-up or house. “I played record store,” he says. He collected back issues of Rolling Stone and made wallpaper out of the Robert Risko drawings that accompanied the lead reviews.To this day, when he is making a new Roots record, he admits, “I write the review I think the album will receive and lay out the page, just like it’s a Rolling Stone page from when I was 10 or 11.”This is among the reasons Mr. Thompson and his book are so likable. He thinks and sounds the way you think you’d like to think and sound if you were a rock star: funny, self-deprecating, a bit awe-struck.
