Well...

As an addendum to this post talking about Obama's endorsement by lawyers for Gitmo detainees I feel like I should mention this:

Clinton vs. Obama on the Cluster Bomb Vote by Brad Jacobson

Go read it.

Also worth reading is this:

Sen Barack Obama Reacts to US Bill Approving Torture From Deborah White

Seriously, you lot.

The guy's probably the best shot you'll ever have of getting a vaguely decent human being in the Whitehouse.

Don't throw that away.

Interesting...

Melodic Rhetoric
Posted on: February 4, 2008 10:34 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo at the end is a little too obvious.

And yet, it works. The short video manipulates you even though you know you're being manipulated. I'm not a big fan of celebrities mixing with progressive politics, but I still got shivers at the end of the song, right when the "Yes we can!" chorus picks up speed.

Those shivers are the sole message of the video. To paraphrase Walter Pater, every political speech aspires to the condition of music, and this short video fulfills that aspiration. No ideas or policy proposals interfere with its emotions: it works on our feelings directly. But what interests me most about the video is that it reveals the strong element of music existing just below the surface of the best speeches. It makes the implicit melody of the words explicit. I hope this is the start of a new mash-up genre.

He's right, although it's simpler than that.

74. Musical Scales Mimic the Sound of Language
The harmonics of human vocalization may generate the frequencies used in music.
by Susan Kruglinski

Throughout history, humans of many cultures have found approximately the same small set of sound frequencies musically appealing, as in the 12-note chromatic scale played on the black and white keys of a piano. The frequency of every note occurs in a simple ratio to those of other notes, such as 3:2 or 2:1.

Dale Purves, a neuroscientist at Duke University, set out to understand if there was a ­biological origin to this tonal preference, and struck a chord in April when he reported (pdf) that the tones of the chromatic scale are dominated by the harmonic ratios found in the sound of the human voice.

“Tonality in nature seems to come only from vocalization,” Purves says, but previous researchers had found no evidence of music-like intervals in the rise and fall of speech. So he looked at the harmonics of vowel sounds, which are created when air passes through vocal folds that can be controlled with a precision similar to the range of a musical instrument. He discovered that when the tonal intervals, or harmonics, of a single vowel sound were broken down, the frequency ratios of our familiar music scales are usually found.

“If this really holds water, it’s an entry into the whole question—and it’s a very divisive question—of what human aesthetics is all about,” says Purves, who usually studies the neuroscience of vision. “The implicit conclusion in this work is that aesthetics is reduced to biological information, and that is not what musicians and philosophers want to hear.”

In a way, when we speak, we speak in music.

I've heard theories that music came first, then language.

Wow...

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama

More than 80 volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees today endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid.

The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to "restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community." The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.

...

Several Boston lawyers were among the signatories to the endorsement statement, including P. Sabin Willett, Stephen H. Oleskey, Jason Pinney, and Neil McGaraghan. Other names on the list included Washington lawyer Thomas Wilner, retired federal appeals court judge John Gibbons, Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, and retired Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy's top JAG officer from 2000 to 2002 and who is now the dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh.

From he joint statement itself:

...

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration's efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration's bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo. He has understood that our strength as a nation stems from our commitment to our core values, and that we are strong enough to protect both our security and those values. Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates.

...

Wow...

Just wow...