Prometheus 6

I'm sorry.

America’s Mayor Goes to America
By MATT BAI

Rudy Giuliani has staked his campaign on the idea that he will keep America safe from terror the same way he kept New York City safe from crime — with ruthless efficiency. Is there a method to his relentlessness?

I immediately jumped to Giuliani's decision to put the Office of Emergency Management where it could be destroyed in the next emergency. Even though he was warned not to. And lied about being warned in subsequent interviews.

This was supposed to be about his claiming responsibility for the drop in crime in thr 1990s. About his efficient ruthlessness.

Even though the drop in crime started before his 1994 change in policing strategy.

America’s Mayor Goes to America
By MATT BAI

Rudy Giuliani has staked his campaign on the idea that he will keep America safe from terror the same way he kept New York City safe from crime — with ruthless efficiency. Is there a method to his relentlessness?

No damn good either way.

Fred, Did We Really Know You?
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, September 8, 2007; A15

Far be it from me to start trouble, but former Tennessee Republican senator Fred Thompson, the presidential candidate who portrays himself as a conservative outsider capable of reforming Washington, is playing down his kinship with this town. Thompson may campaign as a steadfast son of the South, but he is really one of us.

In fact, no other White House hopeful, Republican or Democrat, can come close to matching Thompson's insider credentials. He alone among the contenders has managed to reach the pinnacle of Washington influence: the presidency of the Federal City Council, a powerful, behind-the-scenes group comprising a who's who of this city's top business, professional and civic leaders. The Federal City Council is synonymous with the Washington establishment, and Thompson was its chosen leader from 2003 to 2005.

So who are the rappers really aiming at? Many rap songs use the "N-word" a dozen times or more. But I can count on two hands the number of times I've heard the words "whitey" or "cracker" in rap music. I wonder: If the Grand Wizard himself owned a record label, how much different would the music sound?

I also wonder what would happen if rap artists started talking about selling dope in the suburbs, or shooting white people or beating down white men. Would rap's comfortable white fans continue to consume it? I suspect the record companies wouldn't even sell it. Like the majority of people who buy rap music, the majority of people who get rich off it are white. That sort of thing might hit a little too close to home for hip-hop's fans and profiteers.

The other day, my 3-year-old wanted to listen to some music on my iPod. Before I let her, I checked out what I had on there. Much of it was trash I wouldn't let her listen to. I've been waxing intellectual for years about the state of rap and how it needs to change, and there I was, looking at my iPod and seeing songs such as "Hustlin'," "Bury Me a G" and "Poppin' My Collar," all of which are guilty of the very offenses I just decried and all of which I purchased within the past year.

That's when it hit me: I'm the problem. It's time for me and others like me to own up to our role in peddling degrading hip-hop.

Offended? The Rap's on Me.
By Justin D. Ross
Sunday, September 9, 2007; B02

When it comes to sexism and racism in hip-hop, I'm part of the problem.

Let me explain. I love hip-hop -- have ever since it first came on the scene when I was in elementary school. Over the years, I've bought hundreds of tapes, CDs and downloads, gone to countless rap concerts, even worn my favorite artists' clothing lines. We used to think of hip-hop as just a black thing, but it's not. The largest share of rap music sales in America goes to white listeners. That would be me.

We shall also be noting that, after the failure to find a "fourth gunman", a notion that arose simply because it was one of a few possibilities that could be spun into a defense of these officers, they are now looking for the other spinnable concept. 

After Detective Isnora left the club to retrieve his weapon, badge and bullet-resistant vest to make the arrest, [he said] he saw a “loud argument” involving Mr. Bell, his friends and a woman who “told the group of men that she was not going to go to a hotel room with them, where they wanted to have sex with her.”

[He said] The driver of a black sport utility vehicle, who was standing with the woman, “directed unpleasant comments in the direction of Guzman and Bell,” prompting Mr. Guzman to say, “Get my gun, get my gun.”

At that point, the memorandum states, Detective Isnora was convinced that Mr. Bell and his friends “were intending to drive back to the Kalua Club, to do a drive-by shooting of the driver of the black S.U.V.”

Judge Refuses to Dismiss Charges in Bell Shooting
By ELLEN BARRY

A State Supreme Court judge in Queens refused yesterday to dismiss charges against three detectives in the shooting of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old man who died in a volley of police gunfire on his wedding day.

There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.

First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year....

Second, Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters....

Third, any plan that depends on the White House recognizing reality is an idle fantasy....

Fourth, the lesson of the past six years is that Republicans will accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic no matter what the Democrats do....

Finally, the public hates this war and wants to see it ended....

Jeff Jacoby said

White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.

He should be forced to read “Do you understand where you are?” aloud immediately on waking and just before going to bed for three days.

This quote is insufficient. In fact, don't even read it here. Go read it all at Group News Blog.

LATER: Changed my mind. It's long, and I don't want you to miss the part that struck me.

And then I saw them. The town's White folks. scattered to and fro. On their front steps...leaning casually against mailboxes...some just peering over the roofs of their cars, resting heads in propped hands. Casual as can be. They knew what had gone down the night before. I remember seeing one old guy just chuckle as he walked up his driveway to his side door. We were crazed, and these folks had an eerie, “What? You don't get it?” calm to 'em as they watched us fume and spit.

About a half hour later, a large family meeting was called in the high school's lunchroom (a family friend was of course, the school's custodian, and had access). Spleens were to say the least, seriously vented.

“We can't tolerate this!”

“This ain't 1920! What are we gonna do about this?”

“Fuck this!” (much grumbling and “Heys!” from the crowd) “Sorry. Sorry about my language. But, this is 1993! How does something like this happen?”

And then my Uncle R. The supposedly “crazy” Uncle R. (mentioned in comments in Jesse's “Genius” post) stood up, towering in his crisp overalls and bright red work shirt—and brought his frying pan-sized hand down suddenly on a table, and it boomed like a grenade in the lunchroom, stopping us all dead in our tracks.

He thundered, “Ya'll have no clue do you? No clue at all! I read the papers—I hear about what goes on up north. Cops shootin' you down every God-blessed day, but that's okay! That's fine! And then you all come down here, thinkin' everything is fine and mellow. You haven't a care in the world. And you leave your brains at home and forget the simplest things. Do you have the common sense that God gave a gnat? Do you understand where-you-are?”

The room fell silent. He looked around at the assembled and repeated it.

“Do you understand...where-you-are?” He took a breath. “Where we are?”

We all knew what he meant. That where we all had come from—those four corners of the world were not much different. That we had our own silent codes we had to live under. And that in our descending on Tiny Town, N.C., we had forgotten about that place's awful, and indelible codes and behavior because of race. How in this day and age, flouting those codes was still in many ways a potentially dangerous thing. And that we needed to realize that.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”...

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

Madeleine L’Engle, Children’s Writer, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Right. At MoveOn.org

Not only did the report show that there was no job growth last month, but it also found that the job market was significantly weaker in June and July than the government first reported. Revisions to earlier jobs reports showed that 81,000 fewer jobs were created than initially estimated.

4-Year Growth in Jobs Ends; Dow Off 200
By JEREMY W. PETERS

Employers eliminated 4,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said today, bringing an end to four years of uninterrupted job growth.

Economists said the report provides the Federal Reserve with ample justification to lower interest rates at least a quarter point when it meets Sept. 18. But the numbers also raised fresh fears of a recession and suggested that the damage from the recent turmoil in financial markets could be spreading.

Yeah, it's just a sample but it's funny so you should watch the whole thing.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights IS the old-line civil rights network. Their web presence is civilrights.org, which maintains several conceptual support sites, and they just opened a new one: Reclaim Civil Rights.

Based on a brief email I think they're proud of their Civil Rights Timeline, which really is a good starting point for following the official response to the spread of Liberty within the USofA. Student's ought to love it, actually. Me, I find the utility in the resources section. Long Road to Justice: The Civil Rights Division at 50 is the currently the most relevant.

As I investigate stuff, I always mention it here. I don't always (okay, even usually) spell out the specifics of what I pick up, I just incorporate what I learn.

It's going to be like that this time.

George Kelly hipped me to From Cool to Passé: Identity Signaling and Product Domains, which gives an overview of research on how product trends come and go. Seems part of the reason they come is that they identify in-groups in various ways...from common expressions of style and taste to the ability to acquire or maintain the product/indicator.

Interesting. Possibly useful.

I've already downloaded a copy of the paper the article is based on. 

Who thought of this? Who said, "I wonder what would happen if we put cells from a rat's heart on some plastic and shock it!" Who said, "Wow, man! Let's find out!" Who said, "Here, take this money and get what you need."

The researchers are optimistic that the findings could point the way to sophisticated new "soft robots," effective replacement organs, and better prosthetic devices.

And why does that sound like an excuse from geeks caught building stuff in the back of the lab?

Flexing Muscle Sheets Made With Rat Heart Cells
Mason Inman
for National Geographic News
September 6, 2007

Imagine origami that can fold itself into the shape of a fish or a slug—and then swim or crawl around under its own power.

Researchers at Harvard University have created thin sheets of elastic film studded with rat heart muscle cells that are bringing that fantastic scenario closer to reality.

Like Dr. Frankenstein using lightning to bring his monster to life, the research team—led by biomedical engineer Kit Parker—zapped their muscle-bound sheets with electricity.

Mayor Bloomberg released the results of a survey of New York City's students, teachers and parents yesterday. It was "a $2 million survey." That gives it credibility.

Noting that 90 percent of parents who answered the survey were satisfied or very satisfied with their children’s teachers and that 84 percent were similarly pleased with how their children’s schools communicated with them, Mr. Bloomberg said the results showed a “generally high level of approval among parents.”

Sadly, it lends so credibility at all the conclusions publicly drawn from it. This one, for instance, is just not justified.

Still, only 26 percent of parents responded. The rates were better among teachers and students. Forty-four percent of teachers and 65 percent of middle and high school students filled out the survey. Parent and teacher response rates were lower in schools that are largely poor and minority....

Mark Corallo, a volunteer who helped launch the notion of a Thompson bid, became the fourth high-level press aide to leave the campaign.

"About the only people who haven't worked in the Fred Thompson press shop this summer are Larry Craig and that woman astronaut who wore those diapers cross-country," said Jim Mills, who also left last week.

No one else is going to carry that quote in their news section.

That's from the NY Post coverage of ol' Fred coming out of the electoral closet the other day. The New York Post, as you probably know, is a Rupert Murdoch property. And Murdoch is a Giuliani supporter...largely because Giuliani was instrumental in the establishment of the Fox News.

In Cable TV Fight, Mayor Plans to Put Fox Channel on a City Station

You know what cracks me up about this? 

At a later rally in Council Bluffs, several people said they saw similarities to another actor-turned-politician, the late President Ronald Reagan, in how Thompson sounded broad conservative themes and generally avoided specifics.

"He has the same leadership qualities," said David Clark, 47, a carpenter, who saw Reagan as a teenager. "He can bring people onboard to his way of thinking."

It's avoiding specifics as a "leadership quality." 

Thompson isn't going to lie to you. He's going to be nebulous enough to allow YOU to do all the projection.

Fred Thompson opens campaign in Iowa with wife
BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, September 7th 2007, 4:00 AM

DES MOINES - His young second family at his side, GOP latecomer Fred Thompson auditioned before Iowa voters yesterday, declaring his conservative "core beliefs" hold the solution to the nation's problems.

"The preseason is over; let's get on with it," the politician-turned-actor-turned-politician told a modest crowd of 200 supporters who had plenty of room in a walled-off section of the convention center.

"I am determined to make decisions that will leave us a stronger nation, a more prosperous nation, and that's why I'm running," Thompson said. The Des Moines appearance was the first for the former two-term senator from Tennessee as an official Republican presidential candidate.

I'm going to get this book , and some comics.

What the hell we doing, listening to DNA anyway, ain't that stuff got something to do with that evil-lution stuff?

Virtually no effort has been made to find the man who raped the girl, Christine Jackson, and dumped her body in a creek in Noxubee County, one of the most rural in the state.

This is the first time prosecutors have sought a new capital murder trial after a conviction was overturned by DNA evidence, said Peter Neufeld, director of the Innocence Project, a legal aid group based in New York that has used DNA testing to exonerate the wrongly convicted since 1992. Usually such cases are simply dropped.

Despite DNA Test, a Case is Retried
By SHAILA DEWAN

MACON, Miss., Aug. 31 — The scene in the tiny Noxubee County jail on a rainy afternoon has become almost commonplace. Kennedy Brewer, sentenced to death and locked up for 15 years for the rape and murder of a 3-year-old, was released on the strength of a DNA test showing that the semen in the rape kit was not his.

The bail bondswoman snapped a Polaroid.

Mr. Brewer’s sister, Martha, smiled and said, “I ain’t got to mow the lawn no more.”

Back home on Highway 388, two of Mr. Brewer’s nieces sketched out a T-shirt design to read “Welcome Home Kenny.”

But Mr. Brewer is not free and clear. He is only out on bail.

In a move that appears to be novel, prosecutors intend to retry him for the crime.

Jason Straczewski, director of employment and labor policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, added: "Essentially, this legislation would open the door to lawsuits that employers cannot defend."

Hello?? Ain't that the reason the legislation is needed?

The business community is scrambling to fight what would be the first legislative initiative of the Democratically controlled Congress to overturn a decision by the emerging conservative majority on the court, headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Exhibit A in Painting Court as Too Far Right
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; A19

Lilly Ledbetter's pay discrimination case before the Supreme Court raised no constitutional quandaries and never received much attention.

Until it was decided.

Since the court ruled 5 to 4 that her suit against Goodyear Tire and Rubber was filed too late and that she was not entitled to the hundreds of thousands of dollars awarded to her by a federal judge and jury, Democrats and legal groups on the left have done their best to make Ledbetter a cause celebre.

Chertoff: U.S. 'Unequivocally' Safer Now From Attacks
Secretary Says Security Gaps Remain for Private Airplanes, Small Boats
By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; 2:32 PM

The United States is "unequivocally" safer from terrorist attacks than it was six years ago, but security gaps remain, notably for private airplanes and small boats, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today.

In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, Chertoff said his department would shortly unveil plans to tighten security for private planes coming to the United States from overseas and screen the aircraft for radiological or nuclear material before they take off.

He said the government also is starting a pilot program on the West Coast to screen small boats for such material.

He even complains that I won't protect his family from intruders, like that's supposed to be my job or something! Look, buddy - I'm a 15-pound dog, and you're a 170-pound man. Yet somehow I'm the wimp in this situation?

My Master is an Asshole

Apparently my master thinks I'm an asshole. Well, big deal. I can tell you the feeling is mutual.

If you don't think he's an asshole, then explain to me why he wants me to call him my "master," like I'm in frickin' "I Dream of Jeannie" or something. Hell, if I was a genie, I'd blink my eyes and transport myself to some poodle harem. And then I'd turn Nick into a cockapoo, if for no other reason just because the name fits him. Anyway, he's not my "master" - he's my captor.