Prometheus 6

For the July issue of Italian Vogue, Mr. Meisel has photographed only black models. In a reverse of the general pattern of fashion magazines, all the faces are black, and all the feature topics are related to black women in the arts and entertainment. Mr. Meisel was given roughly 100 pages for his pictures. The issue will be on European newsstands next Thursday and in the United States soon after.

Conspicuous by Their Presence
By CATHY HORYN

RACIAL prejudice in the fashion industry has long persisted because of tokenism and lookism. “We already have our black girl,” says a designer to a fashion-show casting agent, declining to see others. Or: “She doesn’t have the right look.” Laziness, paranoia and pedantry may also have something to do with the failure to hire black models for shows and magazine features in any meaningful number, but, hey, that’s just a guess.

Obama Backs Bill Giving Immunity To Telecoms
The Huffington Post   |   June 20, 2008 04:25 PM

"Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.

Standing in the Shadow of the Silhouette Figure
Kara Walker's Success Inspires Arlington Exhibit
By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, June 20, 2008; C02

You remember Kara Walker, whose stark cut-paper silhouettes show unflinching scenes of slavery and racism. The African American artist, recipient of a 1997 MacArthur genius grant at age 27 and subject of a major touring exhibition organized last year by the Walker Art Center, has enjoyed unprecedented success since her 1994 New York debut.

Now, those same achievements have earned her a new label: oppressor.

The Loud Silence Of Feminists
By Mary C. Curtis
Saturday, June 21, 2008; A17

Michelle Obama has become an issue in the presidential campaign even though she isn't running for anything. An educated, successful lawyer, devoted wife and caring mother has been labeled "angry" and unpatriotic and snidely referred to as Barack Obama's "baby mama."

Democrats, Republicans, independents, everyone should be offended.

And this black woman is wondering: Where are Obama's feminist defenders?

It's not as though they're out of practice. In 1992, Hillary Clinton was deemed too assertive and not first lady material. Similar, and worse, claims were made this year. But just as you didn't have to be for Clinton to decry the sexism in the coverage of her campaign, you don't have to be an Obama supporter to defend Michelle Obama against similar treatment.

They live by the old rules of Washington politics and, simply stated, they are in it for themselves.

To be sure, as dedicated partisans, they want their new president to succeed. But unlike untried recruits and enlistees eager to go the distance for their leader, Washington insiders will go to the ground at the first sign of a threat to their own eminence.

Which means any sign of an attempt to heed this advice will inspire the entire horde to go into self defense mode. Fun times ensue.

You don't get to Senator, much less President, without your crew being chock full of insiders. Still, there's some pretty basic stuff here that are really good reality checks. Yeah, plural.

A Heretic's Advice To Obama
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, June 21, 2008; A17

Today, I shall commit an act of heresy so offensive to cherished Washington beliefs that revocation of my citizenship in the nation's capital is quite likely to follow.

Nonetheless, I press on.

My offense? I contend, contrary to accepted Washington doctrine, that should Barack Obama be elected president, he ought not to allow his administration to fall into the clutches of Washington insiders.

(The distant sound you hear is that of long knives being sharpened.)

This advice is offered for Obama's own good.

More than 30 years of observation has led me to conclude that Washington insiders are to new administrations what steroids are to baseball. They are easily available, can produce a profound sense of strength and are hard to withdraw from once trouble hits home.

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.

Take note: You should only ever agree to give Republican suggestions the serious consideration they are due.

Ever since Watergate, the ideal of campaign finance reform has been to replace a system fueled by special interests and big money with either full public financing or a system of civic-minded small donors. The former is abhorred by much of the public while the latter looks remarkably like barackobama.com. In effect, the Obama campaign has come closer to achieving the ideals of campaign finance reform than 30-plus years of regulation. To condemn the campaign’s departure from the system is to elevate rules over the principle that gave birth to the rules in the first place.

Bring It On
By Francis Wilkinson

MPAA Says No Proof Needed in P2P Copyright Infringement Lawsuits
By David Kravets
June 20, 2008 | 3:24:09 PM

The Motion Picture Association of America said  Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

Just build the damn network we were promised as part of telecom deregulationlo, these many years ago. After all, we customers have already paid for it.

ISPs experimenting with new P2P controls
P2P traffic management methods debated at big NXTComm telecom show
By Brad Reed , Network World , 06/19/2008

Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year's NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecom industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches.

ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. Because the RST packets did not appear to be sent directly from the company, critics accused Comcast of deceiving its customers and actively blocking their ability to share files online. Although Comcast has said it doesn't actively block any P2P protocols and merely "delays" P2P uploads during times of heavy congestion, the company has agreed to change its P2P traffic management policies and stop targeting traffic such as that of BitTorrent.

And just ignore the socket at the base of your skull.

"The idea of this project is to build a visual device that is attentive, that can do the kind of low-level visual processing that your eyes do naturally," Hasler said in an e-mail to The Baltimore Daily Record. "You would see a certain picture in your field of view, but the device would actually be looking over a much wider space — and if it found something interesting it would present you with that picture as well."

"You need to present the soldier with many images and then use the person's brain to figure out what is of interest," said Sensics CEO Yuval Boger.

Northrop Grumman to Develop Brain-Wave Binoculars
Friday , June 20, 2008

For President Bush to call for an end to the ban seemed helpful enough to New Jersey Democrats — for Mr. McCain to take the same position may be a bonanza.

Then again, there’s a good chance that Mr. McCain and his advisers never took very seriously the talk of his carrying New Jersey, and that his strategy is aimed at solidifying support in red states where Republicans are dismayed over the high price of gasoline. Mr. Bush’s call for an end to the federal ban may be part of his effort to ease the way for future development for the oil companies before he leaves office.

Whatever the motivation, the talk of ending the moratorium does not augur well for New Jersey Republicans.

McCain’s Latest Trouble in New Jersey: Oil Drilling
By The Editorial Board

This is the time of year, every four years, when the Republican Party looks at the polls in New Jersey and decides it might have a chance to capture the Garden State’s 15 electoral votes.

Although the polls are often close, this has been a tough state for Republicans to win presidential and U.S. Senate races in lately.

Just as this talk began to heat up again–after polls showing John McCain running decently in the state–the GOP’s chances in New Jersey have taken a wallop, delivered by the candidate himself.

Electronic transaction reporting requirements slipped into Housing bill
By Julian Sanchez | Published: June 20, 2008 - 12:54PM CT

A bill under consideration in Congress to bail out homeowners affected by the mortgage crisis enjoys strong bipartisan support, despite a recent White House veto threat. But the free-market advocacy group FreedomWorks is drawing attention to a provision introduced on the Senate side that has little to do with housing loans: a measure that would require credit card companies and electronic payment processors, such as PayPal, to file aggregate transaction reports with the IRS listing their total annual payments to individual merchants who receive more than $10,000 and conduct more than 200 transactions each year.

TWO SUMMERS, ONE AGENDA 1866, 2008
June 13, 2008

It was the summer of 1866. Congress with much rancor and many protests passed the 13th amendment. Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and outspoken supporter of women’s rights had campaigned long and hard for the amendment. He worked with anyone to forward his agenda of justice and opportunity for all. "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong," he would say in response to the coalitions he built. The ultimate goal was to have all people regardless of gender or race able to access all of the opportunities that this country could provide. Although white women had been supporters of Frederick Douglass for years, most abandoned him when he aggressively worked for the passage of the 13th amendment which outlawed slavery, outside of penal institutions, and provided Black (men) with the rights that white men had, e.g., the right to vote. When Douglass came out to speak after the 13th Amendment passed and white women still did not have the vote he was soundly booed by white women. He was abandoned in his ongoing struggles for justice despite his strident record as, what would now be called, a feminist. The case for white women was clear, how could the black man get the vote before the white woman. It was not fair, it was not just, they were after all, well, white.

Fast forward to 2008 as history is being made in the United States of America.

So two days ago I wrote a post about my reaction to Obama's Father's Day speech titled Part 1. Political, in which I wrote

There's a couple of issues that come up around this speech...political issues, sociological issues, hell, psychological issues...and they get kind of tangled in the discussion. So I want to comb through mine and lay it out for examination.

I actually had "Part 2. Sociological" and "3. Psychological" in mind. As I started Part 2 I got...stuck. I'm not sure "sociological" encapsulates what I had in mind as I wrote that. Parts of it is social, rather than sociological. Other part are collective in nature.

In a way I feel like there's very little left to say about it. But...

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.

With apologies to Michael Myers.

Rush Limbaugh Attacks Black Katrina victims and praises Whites as the Floods hit.

Limbaugh: I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

He didn't see any of that in New Orleans either. He SAID all that but saw none of it. If I could, I'd challenge him to find reports documenting his claims on Lexis/Nexis. Now just rants from the likes of WorldNetDaily but arrest reports and such.

Since the places he's lauding are also gun nut country, he may well have seen all that if help was a week in coming.

Bush Says He Still Believes Iraq War Was The Fun Thing To Do
June 18, 2008 | Issue 44•25

WASHINGTON—Despite harsh criticism from both sides of the political aisle, the U.S. populace, and former members of his own administration, President Bush once again defended his 2003 decision to invade Iraq, saying that, in the end, it was the fun thing to do.

"On Sept. 11, 2001, we as a nation faced a difficult decision, an important decision, a decision between what was fun and what was wrong," Bush said during a speech before Pentagon officials Wednesday. "We could have backed down and allowed the terrorists to win. But instead, we stood up to the challenge before us, and we said, 'Bring it on—bring the good times on!'"

"Mark my words," Bush continued. "When the dust settles and the smoke clears, history will look back on the Iraq War as a total blast."

Girlfriend X, meet Boyfriend X.

I'm reading Ask The White Guy over at Jack and Jill Politics, which takes me to Diversity, Inc. I start clicking around and run into this statement:

...the point is that nobody wants to be called a "typical" (race, gender, disability, age, orientation, sexual identity, culture). I think it's insulting.

Which reminded me of the question I always meant to ask: Why?

Political Checkpoint
Why are there more protests about a police crackdown in Northeast than about the murders that caused it?
Thursday, June 19, 2008; A18

..."We're in crisis mode," resident Kathy Henderson told the D.C. Council in powerful testimony that chided those who, by virtue of Zip codes in crime-free neighborhoods, are able to engage in an "academic discussion" of the program's merits. Her words reminded us what all of the Washington area felt during the three weeks in 2002 when two snipers stalked the region. We don't recall anyone complaining about the inconvenience or constitutionality of police stops then.

Okay, dap for that line.

I found the question being asked by the editorial fascinating. It sounds like folks like Kathy Henderson here have been protestingall along. If you counted the folks that live there, the absurdity of the question becomes obvious.

But you don't count them, do you?

So here's the question: what are you going to do beyond a weekend blockade? Seriously. Because this is like trying to stop a post of water from boiling by throwing in some ice cubes. It works...but you better take that pot off the fire, too. 

Y'all ain't doing the necessary last step. And that's why you see the protests that you're willing to admit to.

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.

When Images Galvanized the Nation
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA — If ever social change was propelled by photographs, it was during the civil rights movement. Burning buses and raised batons, snarling police dogs and blasting hoses, the young black girl in bobby socks and gingham trailed by a group of sneering white girls as she tried to enter high school — the images spurred a national reckoning in a way that words could not.

Behind the pictures are stories of smashed equipment and journalists beaten, of activists drawn south by images, of amateurs who picked up cameras for the first time. “The Race Beat,” a book by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history last year, traces the news coverage of the movement in heart-stopping detail. Now the High Museum of Art here has opened a large and popular exhibit that brings to light many new images of the era, along with the struggles of the photographers who made them.

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.