Prometheus 6

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.

Viacom also requested YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema.

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom
By Ryan Singel
July 02, 2008 | 7:16:54 PM

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched byYouTube users, including  users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

San Francisco to Halt 'Sanctuary' Policy
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008; A02

LOS ANGELES, July 2 -- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that the city would begin handing over for deportation juvenile illegal immigrants with drug convictions, reversing a controversial policy of flying the youths back to their home countries at the city's expense.

The flights, rooted in a 1989 ordinance declaring the city a "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants, ceased this spring after the U.S. attorney threatened to prosecute officials for harboring criminals.

About the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained a city probation official in the Houston airport along with two Honduran juveniles the official was putting on a plane to Tegucigalpa, the capital.

the legal limitations on self-defense typically do not allow use of force at a distance. Defensive force is considered “immediately necessary” only when the defender can wait no longer, when the threat is “imminent.”

Except, of course, in Texas (where you can shoot folks on your neighbor's property who aren't threatening you at all ) and New York (where you can't even accidentally shoot members of a threatening mob on your own property).

Shoot to Stun
By PAUL H. ROBINSON

Philadelphia

A NARROWLY divided Supreme Court ruled last week that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to keep a loaded gun at home for their personal use. Presumably, citizens can use these weapons to defend themselves from intruders. But given the growing effectiveness and availability of less lethal weapons, it is likely that state laws will increasingly keep people from actually using their guns for self-defense.

The states impose carefully defined limitations on the use of deadly force in self-defense. (These rules are fairly uniform, state to state; most are based on the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code of 1962.) A person may use only as much force as is “immediately necessary.” If a less lethal means of defense is available, the use of deadly force is illegal. Firearms are by law deadly force. (The police are given somewhat greater authority to use force, even aggressive force.)

Guns have been considered a primary weapon for self-defense [P6: Not true...they are offense, just ask all the guys who are buildng arsenals against the possibility the US Government will try to enslave them, or an Russian invasion. But go on...]. But now there are nonlethal alternatives — some not yet on the market — that can quickly disable an attacker even more reliably than a firearm can.

An Urban "Street Lit" Retirement
Omar Tyree | Posted June 19, 2008 9:49 AM

For the record, I never called my work "street literature" and I never will. When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them "urban classics." They were "urban" because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or "urban" population areas. They were "classics" because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era. But now, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, I feel like the man who created the monster Frankenstein. Things have gotten way out of hand. So it's now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects.

The South Will Fall Again
By THOMAS F. SCHALLER

Washington

THE interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South.

Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the Republicans is not so simple.

Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi.

Just in case, here it is again. Or watch it on CSPAN tonight.

The 12 participants (who were paid $100 each for their time) comprised six Democrats, two independents who leaned Democratic, two Republicans and two pure independents. None of the 12 supported Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain in the Pennsylvania primary on April 22; seven voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton. One of Hart's principal interests was to learn how those Clinton supporters felt about Obama....

Charles Fasano, a 56-year-old undertaker, identified himself as "a Democrat . . . thinking more about McCain, just because I don't trust Osama -- I mean Obama. It's only one letter difference. His middle name's Hussein. He comes from a Muslim family. It's not right, I can't see it. I just fear for America if he comes in." Later in the discussion Fasano predicted race riots in America if Obama is elected. These were classic examples of sentiments that no poll would ever uncover, but came bubbling up freely in this focus group.

Hearts, Not Minds
Polls Tell Them What Voters Think, But Moderators Say the Focus Group Reveals How Emotion Trumps Analysis
By Robert G. Kaiser
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 30, 2008; C01

What if the 2008 presidential election were decided by voters acting not on their political judgments or analyses of the candidates, but on their emotions? In the view of some experts, this is a trick question -- of course the election will be decided emotionally. Elections always are.

"Campaigns are about emotions and values more than about information," says John Russonello, a partner in a research and communications firm who loves to discover the feelings and visceral reactions that can move voters.

Russonello does this with focus groups, now a ubiquitous tool in American politics and business.

The bill has been opposed by every scientific society that has voiced a position on it, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS CEO Alan Leshner warned that the bill would "unleash an assault against scientific integrity, leaving students confused about science and unprepared to excel in a modern workforce."

Jindal, who was a biology major during his time at Brown University, even received a veto plea from his former genetics professor. "Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense," Professor Arthur Landy wrote. "I hope he [Jindal] doesn't do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors."

Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic freedom" law
By John Timmer | Published: June 27, 2008 - 02:13PM CT

As we noted last month, a number of states have been considering laws that, under the guise of "academic freedom," single out evolution for special criticism. Most of them haven't made it out of the state legislatures, and one that did was promptly vetoed. But the last of these bills under consideration, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), was enacted by the signature of Governor Bobby Jindal yesterday. The bill would allow local school boards to approve supplemental classroom materials specifically for the critique of scientific theories, allowing poorly-informed board members to stick their communities with Dover-sized legal fees.

The text of the LSEA suggests that it's intended to foster critical thinking, calling on the state Board of Education to "assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories." Unfortunately, it's remarkably selective in its suggestion of topics that need critical thinking, as it cites scientific subjects "including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Oddly, the last item on the list is not the subject of any scientific theory; the remainder are notable for being topics that are the focus of frequent political controversies rather than scientific ones.

[S]upporters of the court’s decision were already pressing their case, with similar lawsuits in the offing in three Chicago suburbs, Mr. LaPierre said. He said his group was also considering challenging gun ordinances in New York City, which has a strict permit system for guns, and where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is a vocal opponent of guns. 

Challenges to Bans on Handguns Begin
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO — Using the new judicial muscle provided by the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association and another pro-gun group sued San Francisco and its housing authority on Friday to invalidate a ban on handguns in public housing.

The lawsuit said the ban violated the Second Amendment and “renders responsible, law-abiding adult public housing residents especially vulnerable.”

The decision isn't as bad as I thought it would be. It doesn't allow the ability to buy guns from coin operated vending machines, which seems to be the N.R.A.'s goal. We have the individual right of ownership affirmed, and the locality's right to restrict transactions and concealed carry.

You're still going to get more dead people, though.

Deadly Consequences -- But the Right Call
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 27, 2008; A17

Few landmark Supreme Court rulings have been so widely predicted as yesterday's decision striking down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns. The mere fact that the court agreed to hear the case was a pretty good indication that the justices were itching to make some kind of big statement about the Second Amendment. Questions from the bench during oral arguments in March left little doubt as to which way the wind was blowing.

This case, for me, is one of those uncomfortable situations in which my honest opinion is not the one I'd desperately like to be able to argue. As much as I abhor the possible real-word impact of the ruling, I fear that it's probably right.

Until then, there's David Brooks to contend with.

Brooks knows he's dealing with a collective...you know because he keeps making up names for them he thinks is flattering.

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam’s Club voters feeling insecure.

That's okay. And he finally says what we've been saying in response to HIS apologist ravings over the last seven-plus years.

Conservatives have offered almost nothing. The G.O.P. has lost contact with its own working-class base. This is the intellectual vacuum that “Grand New Party” seeks to fill.

(Grand New Party is the book he's pimping today)

Senator Obama has two choices. He can focus on winning the election to the exclusion of all else and, like Robert Redford in “The Candidate,” ask, “What do we do now?” after it is over. Or he can use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it....

Senator Obama’s attempt to introduce the next American cycle should include, at minimum, three elements. National security requires a new, expanded, post-cold-war definition. America must transition from a consumer economy to a producing one. And the moral obligations of our stewardship of the planet must become paramount.

You will note that I try to hew as closely to current physical reality as possible. However, I can do utopianism. I kinda do already, actually, I just immediately, maybe even reflexively, scale it back to the possible. Then I scale it back to the probable.

Some will seek to blame this disturbing news on Juno or Jamie Lynn Spears, but the trends predate both. They do not, however, predate the Bush administration's abstinence-only policy, which requires that any groups or states receiving federal funds for pregnancy prevention not discuss contraception and must teach that sex outside marriage will lead to harmful psychological and physical effects.

Abstinence-only policy is bearing fruit
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

So all we know for sure is that something happened in Gloucester, Mass.

What that something was depends on whom you believe. Last week on its website, Time magazine quoted Gloucester High Principal Dr. Joseph Sullivan as saying that, of 17 girls who became pregnant during the school year, nearly half did so as part of a ''pact'' to have and raise their babies together. Sue Todd, president of a group that runs a day-care at the school, told Time she had heard a similar story from a social worker.

To Avoid Student Turnover, Parents Get Rent Help
By ERIK ECKHOLM

FLINT, Mich. — Because he has moved so often, 9-year-old Richard Kennedy has already attended four different schools in Flint. In his mother’s latest rental house the other day, he described how it felt to enter an unfamiliar classroom.

“My mind gets mixed up,” he said softly. “They’re always starting with different stuff than what I know.”

He could only nod, tears welling up, when asked if it was hard to make new friends.

The frequent dislocations may help explain why he is being held back in the fourth grade, and why his 11-year-old sister, who has attended eight different schools, can barely read. No one doubts that the constant turnover of students here is taking a huge educational toll on those who move too much and, less obviously, those who stay put, too.

It took him a couple of days to get to it, but it's actually not a bad idea to think about controvesial stuff before speaking. As a general practice.

“We should be making it easier for fathers who make responsible choices and harder for those who avoid them,” he said.

But a lot more is needed. One of the main reasons out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed in recent decades is because it has become so difficult for poor and poorly educated young men to earn enough to support a family.

There is no doubt that a lot of clowns have fathered babies when they shouldn’t have, and too many have irresponsibly taken a walk. But it’s also incredibly difficult for many of these young people to find the kind of employment that makes raising a family feasible.

The U.S. economy does not come close to providing decent employment — enough jobs — for everyone who wants to work. At the lowest end of the economic ladder the crisis in employment is reminiscent of the Great Depression in its intensity.

It is in this group of poor and educationally deprived young people that out-of-wedlock births are highest.

Newsweek is on the girls with the pregnancy pact too.

Seems this is scaring the shit out of white folks. Scaring them right into denial.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk told The Associated Press on Friday that many factors are involved in the surge in pregnancies in her community, a hardscrabble fishing village which has fallen on tough economic times and cut teachers and services, including some health classes.

"I don't think there was a pact in the order of a dozen girls conspiring to get pregnant. That would really surprise me, and I have seen no evidence of it," she said.

Via the African American Literature Book Club.

The 10th HARLEM BOOK FAIR
Anniversary Celebration & Gala
Harlem, New York
in association with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
July 17 - 20, 2008
West 135th Street from 5th Avenue
  to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd.

The programs of the 10th Anniversary Gala and Celebration of the Harlem Book Fair will begin on Thursday, July 17th at Abyssinian Baptist Church and conclude on Sunday, July 20th at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The outdoor festival will be held on Saturday, July 19, from 11 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on West 135th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues.

Time Magazine has published a story about a cohort of teenaged girls who made a pregnancy pact. The New York Times basically rewrote the article today (they gave credit to Time), though it adds an interview with a school board member. You can read either, but read one of them.

School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

“No one in America should place any faith in any alleged study coming from the Brady campaign,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the N.R.A.

“If anyone is breaking the law, they ought to be charged criminally,” Mr. Arulanandam said. “There are plenty of laws on the books that address that issue, and all that needs to be done is those laws need to be enforced.”

Many Guns Go Missing From Shops, Study Says
By AUSTIN BOGUES

WASHINGTON — More than 30,000 firearms are unaccounted for in gun dealers’ inventories nationwide, according to a new study by a gun control group.

Further, the group, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says its finding most likely undercounts the missing firearms, since the data used, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, are drawn from the compliance inspections that were conducted at gun dealerships in the 2007 fiscal year. Just 10,000 dealers were inspected, one-sixth of the nation’s total.

The center, which released the study Tuesday, is calling for increased regulation of gun dealers, including a requirement that they take physical inventory of their firearms to account for each weapon annually. At present, dealers need keep a record of their acquisition and disposition of firearms, but not a regular inventory.

Letting this happen, like letting the summer jobs programs die out, is some serious penny-wise, pound-foolish shit.

Public Housing Residents Face Loss of Their Community Centers
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

The community center at Parkside Houses, a public housing complex in the Bronx, has one floor, four rooms and many uses.

Adults work on their résumés on one of 10 computers or play Scrabble on Friday nights. Teenagers congregate around the pool tables in the game room or train for competition as part of the Parkside Knights track and field team. But the center, on the ground floor of a red-brick building across from a wooded stretch of the Bronx River Parkway, is really a children’s place.

After school on Thursday, about a dozen children sat in the multipurpose room making Father’s Day cards out of construction paper and buttons while several boys and girls played chess and video games down the hall. They ate turkey and cheese sandwiches. They got help with their homework.

Shocking!

“It’s been a mixed bag,” said Jacob Venter, a 44-year-old child psychiatrist who married Billy Boney, a 36-year-old hairdresser, a month after it became legal to do so. They have disagreements over money, the in-laws and whether to adopt children or have their own.

“Nothing turns out the way you imagine,” Mr. Venter said. “There are no role models for gay marriage.”

Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON — Four years after Massachusetts became the first state to allow gay couples to marry, there have been blissful unions, painful divorces and everything in between.

Some same-sex couples say being married has made a big difference, and some say it has made no difference at all. There are devoted couples who have decided marriage is not for them, couples whose lawyers or accountants advised them against marrying, and couples in which one partner wants to marry but the other does not.

...when I saw the title of Susan Faludi's op-ed today. Turns out I was a bit over-defensive, though I suspect there are still a few that won't take it as well as I did. I think I got the drift early on

The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched over her infant....

Let me show you that statue, courtesy of UVa's American Studies department. It really set the theme well.

"Four-dollar-a-gallon of gasoline only reflects $100 oil because the refiners' margins are squeezed," he said. "At $300, you have $12 a gallon of gasoline and riots in Newark, Los Angeles, Harlem, Oakland, Cleveland, Detroit, Dallas."

This unnamed oil speculator is wrong. Not about $12/gallon gasoline at $300/barrel oil. He's not even wrong about the riots.

He's wrong about where the riots will take place. I guess "riot" automatically invokes majority Black neighborhoods in this unnamed oil speculator's mind (he said "Harlem," not "New York"). Meanwhile it's rural American that's suffering most...in the cities we got public transportation, for the most part.

How Iran Has Bush Over a Barrel
By Robert Baer

If wasn't clear before it should be now: the Bush Administration can't afford to attack Iran. With gas already at $4 a gallon and rising almost every day, Iran figuratively and literally has the United States over a barrel. As much as the Administration is tempted, it is not about to test Iran's promise to "explode" the Middle East if it is attacked.

This graphic accompanied Study Shows Colorado Has Largest Rise in Child Poverty.

We're talking rates of increase here, not absolute rates. In absolute terms, Colorado's child poverty rate is still below the national average. Given that the national average is 18% that's still nothing to brag about.

Accompanying Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average, the NY Times presented The Varying Impact of Gas Prices, which maps median income, gas prices and percent of income spent on gas. All three maps would remind you of the above map.

We're all familiar enough with the red state/blus state maps to see the areas with the biggest problems are those that trend Republican. This is a suggestive correlation, I think.