Prometheus 6

 from Camp Codependence by Judith Warner

In our society, you don’t have to be wealthy to suffer from affluenza. Its symptoms — “debt, overwork, waste, and harm to the environment, leading to psychological disorders, alienation, and distress,” in adults; “lack of motivation … apathy, laziness, or failure to commit to and achieve goals … overindulgence and attitudes of entitlement” in children, according to the New York University Child Study Center (pdf), are pervasive — and no one is immune.

For affluenza is not just a constellation of symptoms. It is an ethic, a play-the-system, lie-and-cheat-your-way-to-what-you-want, don’t-let-the-peons-stand-in-your-way ethic of amorality. You rock, kid, parents teach. And you — alone — rule.

First anniversary of Chauncey Bailey’s murder: impunity still prevails
Launch of a petition on www.rsf.org to call for "Justice for Chauncey Bailey"

Sign the petition

On the eve of the first anniversary of Chauncey Bailey’s murder, Reporters Without Borders is very disappointed that the investigation has not made any progress. Instead, the case has become more complicated as aspects surrounding the motives for Bailey’s murder have been unleashed. Evidence, some recorded by the police and some uncovered by investigative reporters, points at someone other than the currently accused defendant as a potential perpetrator(s) and/or mastermind(s) of the crime, and suggests that local police officials may be protecting those responsible for Mr. Bailey’s death. Reporters Without Borders also disapproves of Oakland Police Chief Tucker and Deputy Chief Howard A. Jordan’s unwillingness to talk to the media.

2nd Teen Charged In Bomb, Gun Case
Ex-Montgomery Police Intern Jailed
By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 2, 2008; B01

Montgomery County detectives yesterday charged a second teenager in an ongoing bombmaking investigation, saying the youth worked at one of their precincts and stole department letterhead paper to help obtain products restricted to law enforcement officers.

Court records allege that the duo, ages 18 and 17, tested pipe bombs three times in a Gaithersburg field, going back to last summer. Their ultimate intentions remain unclear.

Investigators have said that the 18-year-old, Collin McKenzie-Gude of Bethesda, was compiling a list of addresses of teachers at St. John's College High School in the District, the private high school from which he recently graduated.

The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.

Running While Black
By BOB HERBERT

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected, given the 200-year history of this country, it is really fraught with peril.” 

Injection implies that, after a pure start, race was found deep beneath the surface of things like some sort of abscess. But let's be real.

Not to reignite any smoldering embers but we just went through several months of explicitly race-based appeals to ethnic whites in the Democratic primaries. And don't play like Hillary was the only one making them, either. She was just the one using Southern Strategy tactics.

That sort of stuff is like farting in an elevator. You can't take it back.

More fundamentally, we ARE talking about a society in which race was a central organizing factor, economically and socially and therefore politically, since literally before day one. If you have a national scale discussion with no reference to race, it's because you've screened it out.

Race Proves to Be Unwelcome but Persistent Issue
By Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 2, 2008; A04

PANAMA CITY, Fla., Aug. 1 -- Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama tried yesterday to step back from a divisive debate over race, with each candidate denying that he was the first to inject the issue into the campaign.

Nonetheless, the candidates and campaigns battled throughout the day over the issue and over which side was engaged in "low road" politics, an indication that race is likely to remain a major point of contention in what is becoming an increasingly bitter contest.

For Obama, the argument was an unwelcome distraction that could complicate his efforts to win over voters who may be skeptical of a relative newcomer with an atypical background. It also pulled the focus away from his efforts to stress bread-and-butter economic issues. For McCain, any hint of racist tactics would hurt his efforts with the moderates and independents he needs to win in November.

Prof. George in California, this is for you.

A couple of weeks back it was said on prometheus6: "I believe collegiate level whiteness studies are deeply flawed by their focus on white privilege rather than white identity. "

A friend of mine (black woman who has left college teaching for other climes) is wondering if you would expand on the above.  The context is, we were discussing the aftermath of the Obama New Yorker cover and one of the blogs (Racialicious I believe) had a lengthy Tim Wise comment that got us going on white privilege for a bit.  This included how one of our own academic colleagues did whiteness-- quite erudite but also plenty of privilege and guilt.  So she was wondering how you thought the field could have developed differently.  I could harvest your published comments and try to patch something together as to what I thought you might have meant, but then I figured why not just ask you...

Editor's note: The full document is available here.

Did McCain's foreign-policy advisor profit from the Iraq war?
In a confidential memo, a company tells investors consultant Randy Scheunemann can help it win Iraqi oil contracts -- because he was a "key player" in getting the U.S. to invade.
By Mark Benjamin

Aug. 01, 2008 | As recently as last year, John McCain's senior foreign-policy and national security advisor, a neoconservative who played a leading role in pushing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was trying to use his role in promoting the Iraq war to make money off Iraqi oil. In a confidential memo, a company called World Strategic Energy, for which top McCain aide Randy Scheunemann was an executive consultant, told prospective investors that Scheunemann could help World Strategic Energy win oil contracts in Iraq because he was well-connected in the Iraqi exile community and had been a "key player" in getting the U.S. involved in Iraq. The memo was first published by blogger and Salon contributor Lindsay Beyerstein, who wrote that the 44-page brochure-style "placement memorandum" was being circulated to potential investors in late 2007.

Let's be clear: It is not the protectionists of the AFL-CIO or CNN who are primarily to blame for the erosion of public support for trade in the United States, as bone-headed as they may be. The blame lies squarely with a business community that continues to support Republican politicians who refuse to raise the taxes and spend the money necessary to provide the economic safety net for American workers that a free-market economy has not, and will not, provide.

Much, much, MUCH more sensible.

Wave Goodbye to the Invisible Hand
By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, August 1, 2008; D01

Poor David Brooks is witnessing the end of his world.

The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

His new term, globosclerosis, as a play on the geriatric disease arteriosclerosis, is appropriate. The global problem is the system is run by old men that refuse to change their grip on a world that cannot hold still.

The only way we’re going to get action, I’d suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral. Incidentally, that’s why I was disappointed with Barack Obama’s response to Mr. McCain’s energy posturing — that it was “the same old politics.” Mr. Obama was dismissive when he should have been outraged.

sigh

Can This Planet Be Saved?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Recently the Web site The Politico asked Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, why she was blocking attempts to tack offshore drilling amendments onto appropriations bills. “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she replied.

I’m glad to hear it. But I’m still worried about the planet’s prospects.

Jobless Rate Climbs to 5.7% as 51,000 Jobs Lost in July
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

The nation’s employers eliminated 51,000 jobs in July, the seventh consecutive contraction in the labor market, as the unemployment rate reached a four-year high, signs that the pressure on business owners and consumers is likely to continue.

Still, the decline in the job market has softened since the spring. The number of layoffs was less than the 75,000 that economists had expected, and the government said that businesses cut fewer jobs in June and May than previously reported.

Still, the nation’s unemployment rate has steadily moved higher. In July, it rose to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent in June, its highest level since March 2004.

As safety nets break, more laws broken
BY MYRIAM MARQUEZ

A fallen light pole on Biscayne Boulevard serves as this week's metaphor for South Florida's plight -- and promise.

A 43-year-old man saw the pole on 83rd Street and Biscayne Boulevard on Tuesday and viewed it as an opportunity. He decided to haul the pole to a recycling center, hoping to make a few hundred bucks from public property.

A Miami police officer saw a van carrying the huge pole and arrested the driver.

On the same day, cops spotted a 40-year-old man pushing a shopping cart with a manhole cover inside -- another growing trend. He was heading to a recycling center. He, too, was charged with grand theft and dealing in stolen property.

DESPERATE TIMES

In criminal circles, these goods are chump change. But they're also a sign of desperation.

As the economy tanks, we'll see more of this lawlessness.

The McCain campaign's excursion into popular culture has been so aggressive that the Obama campaign felt obliged to promptly denounce a new song by Ludacris that criticizes both McCain and Hillary Clinton in crude terms. Never mind that the rapper has no association with Obama's candidacy, and never mind that McCain is probably not intimately familiar with the Ludacris oeuvre. All this gnashing and flailing would be laughable if it weren't so purposeful. The aim is to cast an aura of doubt around Obama -- to portray him as handsome and popular but insubstantial, as a "celebrity" who's not really up to the job. Oh, and not that we would ever mention such a thing, but did you notice that Obama had the audacity to mention that he's African American?

Obama's best response would have been along the lines of, "Interesting that McCain is a Ludacris fan. Interesting that he has the time to listen to him."

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in
By LARA JAKES JORDAN and DAVID DISHNEAU
The Associated Press
Friday, August 1, 2008; 2:17 AM

WASHINGTON -- A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

Sprint early termination fees are illegal, judge rules
COURT: CALIFORNIA LAW FORBIDS EARLY TERMINATION CHARGES
By Steve Johnson
Mercury News
Article Launched: 07/30/2008 01:31:13 AM PDT

Californians fed up with being charged for ending their cell phone service prematurely won a major victory in a Bay Area court decision that concluded such fees violate state law.

In a preliminary ruling Monday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw said Sprint Nextel must pay California mobile-phone consumers $18.2 million as part of a class-action lawsuit challenging early termination fees.

Though the decision could be appealed, it's the first in the country to declare the fees illegal in a state and could affect other similar lawsuits, with broad implications for the nation's fast-growing legions of cell phone users.

In a criminal court complaint, Officer Pogan wrote that Mr. Long deliberately attacked him with the bike — although the videotape shows Mr. Long veering away from Officer Pogan, who pursues him toward the curb.

The officer said he was knocked to the ground by Mr. Long. Throughout the tape, though, he remains on his feet, even after banging into Mr. Long.

The police officer wrote that Mr. Long had been “weaving” in and out of traffic, “thereby forcing multiple vehicles to stop abruptly or change their direction in order to avoid hitting” Mr. Long. However, in the videotape, it appears that there are no cars on the street....

The availability of cheap digital technology — video cameras, digital cameras, cellphone cameras — has ended a monopoly on the history of public gatherings that was limited to the official narratives, like the sworn documents created by police officers and prosecutors. The digital age has brought in free-range history. 

When Official Truth Collides With Cheap Digital Technology
By JIM DWYER

Around 9:30 on Friday night, a bicyclist pedaling down Seventh Avenue veered to the left, trying to avoid hitting a police officer who was in the middle of the street.

But the officer, Patrick Pogan, took a few quick steps toward the biker, Christopher Long, braced himself and drove his upper body into Mr. Long.

Officer Pogan, an all-star football player in high school, hit Mr. Long as if he were a halfback running along the sidelines, and sent him flying.

It's Troll Day on the net!

R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008

Usenet has been dying for years, of course. Some people date Usenet's decline as early as 1993, when millions of AOL users dropped into what was previously a geek paradise. As the '90s went on, the eye candy of the Web and the marketing dollars of Web site owners helped push people over to profit-making sites. Usenet's slightly arcane access methods and text-only protocols have nothing on the glitz and glamour of MySpace.

The Web also gave Usenet a new life through the mid-90s as a searchable database of questions and answers, via DejaNews and Google. But searchability also killed off some of Usenet's social functions. More chaotic and ad-hoc groups functioned through a sort of security in obscurity; as long as nobody bothered to click on them, nobody would know what people were talking about. With Google Groups, every word you wrote became enshrined and eternally searchable.

It's Troll Day on the net!

Since libel lawsuits are mostly about clearing one's name, Solove finds himself lamenting the lost ritual of duels, which he describes as an elaborate nonjudicial way of settling disputes that rarely actually got to the shooting phase.

Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora's Box
By Ryan Singel
07.30.08

"Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.

Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

It's Troll Day on the net!

This one is chock full of fucked up people, activities and beliefs.

Malwebolence

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”