Prometheus 6

Mr. Godinez was apprehended at 1 a.m., in Oxon Hill, Md., about nine miles from Washington, according to James T. Plousis, the United States marshal for New Jersey. The authorities found Mr. Godinez, along with eight other people, in a rundown apartment near the Capital Beltway. Mr. Godinez’s arrest took place without incident, Mr. Plousis said.

An hour later and 20 miles away, in Woodbridge, Va., a 16-year-old was arrested. There was one other person in the apartment at the time, Mr. Plousis said.

Two More Arrested in Newark Killings
By KAREEM FAHIM

After an intense manhunt spanning several states, a 24-year-old man and his teenage half brother were arrested yesterday in the Aug. 4 killings of three friends in Newark, said Garry F. McCarthy, Newark’s police director.

“We got a bunch of really hot tips in the last few days,” he said, adding that the information led a task force headed by United States marshals to the two, Rodolfo Godinez, 24, and his half brother, a 16-year-old, in apartments in Maryland and Virginia.

The letter, signed by Foxman and Glen S. Lewy, the ADL's national chairman, said "we have acknowledged the massacres of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire and called on Turkey to do more to confront its past and reconcile with Armenia. We will continue to press Turkey, publicly and privately . . ." But the letter also makes clear that the national ADL feels the safety of Israel, which considers Turkey a rare Muslim ally, is paramount.

Ah. That's his problem.

ADL local leader fired on Armenian issue
Genocide question sparked bitter debate
By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff  |  August 18, 2007

The national Anti-Defamation League fired its New England regional director yesterday, one day after he broke ranks with national ADL leadership and said the human rights organization should acknowledge the Armenian genocide that began in 1915.

The firing of Andrew H. Tarsy, who had served as regional director for about two years and as civil rights counsel for about five years before that, prompted an immediate backlash among prominent local Jewish leaders against the ADL's national leadership and its national director, Abraham H. Foxman.

"My reaction is that this was a vindictive, intolerant, and destructive act, ironically by an organization and leader whose mission -- fundamental mission -- is to promote tolerance," Newton businessman Steve Grossman, a former ADL regional board member, said yesterday.

I read this headline

Higher Caps Urged For Fannie, Freddie
Democrats Seek Bigger Role for Firms

...and was not happy. Who does it really help to make it easier to buy half million dollar houses?  

Giuliani: I'll Discuss My Family My Way
By LIBBY QUAID
The Associated Press
Friday, August 17, 2007; 10:51 PM

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- A day after urging people to "leave my family alone," Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Friday said he'll talk about his family _ on his terms.

"Sure I will," Giuliani told reporters outside a cafe where he visited with voters. "But I'll talk about it appropriately, and in a way to preserve as much as I can the privacy of my family and my children, which I think any decent person would."

Dude. Who tried to move his mistress into City Hall before divorcing his (current) wife? You're the one that put your business in the public domain. Anyway, I'm not disagreeing...you talk about it your way, we'll talk about it our way.

Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

It is a familiar story, and seems to conclude with a happy ending. But in truth the Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Western Europe, where it was first conceived.

The Politics of God
By MARK LILLA

I. “The Will of God Will Prevail”

The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

“What the Fed is really saying is that this recovery is more in danger than it has been since it started nearly six years ago,” said Jan Hatzius, chief United States economist for Goldman Sachs, who predicted an initial cut in the funds rate to 5 percent, from the present 5.25 percent.

The discount move, coupled with formal acknowledgment that the economy might be in trouble, represents Mr. Bernanke’s boldest attempts to relieve the financial crisis, his first real test since becoming Fed chairman 18 months ago.

Fearing Slide in Economy, Fed Cuts Its Discount Rate
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

The Federal Reserve, saying for the first time that the recent disorder in the financial markets has raised the risk of an economic downturn, took the unusual step yesterday of encouraging the nation’s banks to borrow directly from the Fed, particularly to support home mortgage lending.

I'm sorry, but anything that lauds Jesse Lee Patterson is trash.

And if we become the international police, under Giuliani we'd be unable to talk to the international fire fighters.

A realistic peace is not a peace to be achieved by embracing the "realist" school of foreign policy thought. That doctrine defines America's interests too narrowly and avoids attempts to reform the international system according to our values.

Toward a Realistic Peace
By Rudolph Giuliani
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007

We are all members of the 9/11 generation.

The highlighted quote comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center

Even though it has largely left "respectability" behind, the Council still wields a big political stick in Mississippi, where it claims some 5,000 members. The Council helped organize opposition to a 2001 referendum to change Mississippi's state flag to a less Dixie-fied design (the flag included a miniature representation of the Confederate battle flag). The referendum's thumping defeat in a racially polarized vote — 64% to 36% — was a major victory for the CCC.

Haley Barbour (center), later elected governor of Mississippi, appeared at a 2003 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) fund-raising event with CCC supporters and officials, including CCC Field Director Bill Lord (far right).

The Council also flexed some muscle in last year's gubernatorial election, which pitted incumbent Democrat Ronnie Musgrove — who led the fight to change the Mississippi state flag — against Republican Haley Barbour. During the campaign, the CCC Web site ran a photograph of Barbour posing with Council luminaries at the Black Hawk Barbecue, a CCC fundraising event for "private academy" school buses.

When the photo caused a stir, Barbour was quick to call the CCC's segregationist views "indefensible." But he refused to ask that his picture be taken down from the Web site. It was a matter of principle, Barbour explained. "Once you start down the slippery slope of saying, 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?" he asked. "Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan?"

Mississippi Governor's Associates Profit From Katrina Recovery
By Timothy J. Burger

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour's efforts to rebuild the state's devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina. The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped residents move to new or repaired homes.

That they had to figure it out or that it took this long.

Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
By Noah Shachtman
08.17.07 | 2:00 AM

For years, the military has been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual's blog.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

My suspicions were first aroused by the number of five star awards I received for my PerfectTablePlan software. When I went to these sites all the other programs on them seemed to have five star awards as well. I also noticed that some of my weaker competitors were proudly displaying pages full of five star awards. I saw very few three or four star awards. Something smelt fishy. Being a scientist by original training, I decided to run a little experiment to see if a completely worthless piece of software would win any awards.

The software awards scam

It is no accident that banks did not succumb to the subprime siren song. Questionable products and sales tactics would surely be picked up by the banks' regulators so there's every incentive for bankers to avoid bad deeds and self-disclose the ones already committed. There is a chance that investment banks, had they shared the same relationship with their regulators, may have shied away from these combustible products and been more transparent in their pricing.

Avoiding the subprime siren song
By Cornelius Hurley  |  August 17, 2007

This Sunday Janks Morton will be on C-SPAN's Q and A. Though some of his sponsors give me the creeps I'll still be buying a copy.

In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, there were 864,000 black men in college. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 802,000 in federal and state prisons and jails, "even with the old heads holding on," Morton says.

Between the ages of 18 and 24, however, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.

Still, the idea that the reverse is true stems from an image that has been perpetuated, Morton says, by the government, the media and the black leadership, whoever they are.

So you ask him to ask the white men sitting behind him at the restaurant.

"I'm not worried about them," he says. "My point is I'm worried about us and what we think about ourselves."

A Filmmaker's Attempt To Peel Off the Labels
'What Black Men Think' Tackles Stereotypes
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 4, 2007; C01

Quick. Pop quiz. And no cheating. No Googling. No calling the NAACP. [P6: I'm not sure calling them would help anyway]

Are there more black men in college or in jail?

Janks Morton, a new movie director, is willing to bet you got the wrong answer. You who have been fed negative images of black men for so many years.

"I'm a longtime supporter of the ADL, and I think the work the organization has done has often been stellar," said Rabbi Ronne Friedman, senior rabbi of Boston's largest synagogue, Temple Israel. "But I'm really saddened that Abe Foxman, the national director, has failed to affirm the historical fact of this genocide, and I really think that failure represents a moral myopia."...

Jews, being victims of Adolf Hitler's genocide plan, should understand the importance of this issue, Friedman said.

Foxman understands the importance of this issue. But he will NEVER acknowledge anyone but the Jewish community is entitled to use the word "genocide."

Local chapter breaks with ADL position
Armenian genocide at issue
By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff  |  August 17, 2007

The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League broke ranks with its national leadership yesterday amid growing outrage by area Jewish leaders over the ADL's refusal to acknowledge the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians as genocide.

In an emergency meeting yesterday afternoon, the regional ADL board adopted resolutions calling on the national organization, which has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide, to change its policy, according to a source familiar with the proposal.

Also, Andrew H. Tarsy, the ADL's New England regional director who had defended the ADL's position as recently as Tuesday, reversed course, saying the ADL should acknowledge the genocide.

State officials acknowledge that insurance is unaffordable for some, but have made no special accommodations for older people. The state intends to fine anyone who doesn't obtain insurance, but will waive the penalty if premiums are deemed unaffordable for an individual.

Older residents feel insurance law pinch
Age-based prices too high for some
By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff | August 17, 2007

Older people shopping for health insurance through the state's new initiative are discovering a sobering reality: Prices for unsubsidized plans are twice as expensive if you're 60 than if you're 27, making insurance unaffordable or barely affordable for many in their later years.

Massachusetts has long allowed age-based pricing of private health insurance plans, but the new requirement that all adults have insurance combined with the new ability to compare plans on the Internet is leading to a mini- revolt.

Romney, Giuliani Escalate Their Immigration Fight
By Michael D. Shear and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 17, 2007; A02

The two leading Republican presidential candidates have turned the GOP primary campaign into a nasty, week-long debate about illegal immigration, accusing each other of supporting efforts to give undocumented residents sanctuary from federal immigration laws.

At campaign stops, in radio ads and with increasingly hostile statements by supporters, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani are talking about little else as they position themselves on an issue critical to conservatives in their party.

"They are trying to rattle their sabers louder than the other and thump on their chests," said Angela Kelley, the deputy director of the pro-immigrant National Immigration Forum. "Both of these guys are trying to remake themselves."

The problem with stealth technology, however, is that the intrusion -- and that's what it is, call it what they will -- is unseen and undetected. Unlike, say, a search warrant executed on someone's home, it leaves no traces. And it is omnipresent. There will be more satellites, not fewer, and they work around the clock.

According to DHS, the proper congressional committees have given their blessing to the plan. Internal procedures will ''ensure the appropriate protection of privacy and civil liberties.'' Maybe, but we would feel more reassured if the program were subject to independent oversight by the courts or an independent-review panel that did not answer to the executive branch. Once surrendered, privacy is rarely given back. You don't have to be paranoid to believe that.

Snooping comes closer to your home

According to an old adage, being paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't actually out to get you. The saying comes to mind because the government is expanding the access to information from spy satellites to include more domestic users in law enforcement. This brings government spying one step closer to home, and you don't have to be paranoid to feel uneasy about that.

Right of privacy

The Department of Homeland Security discreetly sidestepped use of words that might raise red flags -- like ''snooping,'' ''spying'' or even ''surveillance'' -- in announcing the move. A new DHS agency called the National Applications Office ''will provide more robust access to needed remote sensing information to appropriate customers.'' Sounds a lot like surveillance, doesn't it? Reading further, it becomes clear that this means, among other things, sharing intelligence and information with ``federal, state, and local government and law enforcement users.''

Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other....

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve."

Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities

Science Daily — Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They also point to a possible new explanation for the origin of life on earth.

Simple phrase was key to case
A 1996 provision making a crime to 'provide material support' to terrorists was crucial to the prosecution.
By David G. Savage
August 17, 2007 

A key to the government's successful prosecution of Jose Padilla was a broad and simple phrase added to an anti-terrorism law in 1996 that made it a crime to "provide material support" to a terrorist group.

Since 2001, prosecutors have used that provision to win convictions or guilty pleas in more than a dozen terrorism cases without having to show that the accused committed violent acts against Americans or did anything illegal in the United States.

In Padilla's case, the government produced evidence that the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2000 and registered to attend an Al Qaeda training camp. That alone could be enough to send him to prison for 15 years to life.

Credit-rating agencies such as Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are paid by banks to assess the creditworthiness of the securities that the banks issue.

The agencies have been under fire -- in the United States and Europe -- because throughout the housing boom they gave top rating to securities backed by risky mortgages, allowing Wall Street banks to easily sell those securities to investors. Those securities have plunged in value as defaults on subprime mortgages have jumped.

Trouble Tracks Far and Wide
Probe Is Urged As Slide Deepens From Paris to Tokyo
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 17, 2007; D01

PARIS, Aug. 16 -- European officials called for investigations into whether conflicts of interest between credit-rating agencies and the banks they oversee contributed to the market slide that continued Thursday around the world.

As stock markets from Paris to Tokyo declined for a second day in response to an international credit crunch that started in the U.S. mortgage industry, European leaders scrutinized the cause of the fall. They paid special interest to an oversight system that failed to provide adequate warning to financial institutions and investors on the weaknesses in the subprime mortgage lending business.

China's military must open up, U.S. says
The incoming head of the Joint Chiefs begins a visit today, but some in the Pentagon complain about too little access.
By Peter Spiegel
August 17, 2007 

After Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited China in March, he came home glowing about the access he had been given. He had sat in the Chinese military's top fighter plane and ridden in its most sophisticated tank.

"They took me to places no other U.S. officer had been," Pace said. "They took me to their private offices. They took me to their command centers and showed me their maps and their plans."

But others in the Pentagon were less impressed.

In the months that followed, senior Defense officials insisted that U.S. officers were routinely being denied access to Chinese sites during trips here, even as the Americans allowed visiting Chinese officers into some of the United States' most sophisticated and advanced facilities.

The best thing I can say is kind of, 'Leave my family alone,' just like I'll leave your family alone.

Giuliani Makes It Clear: 'Leave My Family Alone'

As Rudolph W. Giuliani has jumped to the top of most national polls for the GOP presidential race, a lingering question has been whether his recent bitter divorce and the fact that he's on his third marriage will drag him down among social conservatives.

Yesterday, the issue flared up at a town hall meeting in Derry, N.H. As her 5-year-old daughter played nearby, Katherine Prudhomme-O'Brien, 36, asked Giuliani why he should expect loyalty from GOP voters when his own children aren't backing him.

Giuliani's 21-year-old son, a student at Duke University, has been quoted as saying that he does not expect to campaign for his father. Last week, Slate, the online magazine, reported that Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter belonged to a Facebook group of Barack Obama supporters.

How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
By PETER GURALNICK
Published: August 11, 2007

Answer: by being born when and where he was.

Really.

And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”

In 1958, white artists stole Black folks' music. I don't understand how Mr. Guralnick can quote this...can cheer and agree this theft is integration of any sort.