Prometheus 6

Okay, Black History Month is two months away. You should tell your local school and/or school district about Freedom's Song.

Farmers has joined with The Association for the Study of African American Life and History to create a documentary film, Freedom’s Song: 100 years of African-American struggle and triumph, that highlights significant milestones in the history of the African-American experience during the past century. It includes living testimonials designed to put a personal face on the actual historical events featured in the film.

The Freedom’s Song package is free to educators and includes a DVD copy of the film, engaging and thought-provoking lesson plans and an interactive web site that will be continually updated with audio and video content.

Good stuff. By way of proof I got the segment on the Tulsa Race Riot for ya.

Congo rebels attack government forces in east
Sat Nov 25, 2006 1:52 AM ET

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Fighters loyal to a dissident general attacked army positions in eastern Congo with heavy weapons and small arms on Saturday, said the government and the United Nations.

The attack, after months of relative calm in Congo's east, occurred amid tensions in the capital Kinshasa where supporters of a former rebel chief are protesting against President Joseph Kabila's victory in last month's presidential run-off election.

"Our military positions in Sake have been coming under attack from (rebel general Laurent) Nkunda since early this morning. Our brigade there is fighting back," Congolese Interior Minister Denis Kalume told Reuters.

Palestinians and Israel Say They Are Open to Truce
By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, Nov. 24 — After another surge of violence in and around the Gaza Strip over the past month, Israel and the Palestinians moved gingerly on Friday toward reinstating an often-broken cease-fire between them.

In Gaza, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas confirmed that the Palestinian factions — including Islamic Jihad, which had previously rejected any cease-fire with Israel — would halt their rocket fire if Israel halted its military operations in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel called the offer a media presentation, but said it was open to a more serious, formal proposal. “It’s not a question of, ‘You go first,’ ” said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “It’s a question of, ‘What are we talking about?’ ” A halt to all Israeli military operations in return for a halt to rocket fire alone would be unacceptable, she said.

Stryker brigade first to take Land Warrior to Iraq
By Matthew Cox
staff writer

Stryker brigade soldiers will deploy to Iraq next year with a wearable computer designed to cut through the fog of war. See the 360-degree tour.

The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division — the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team — recently completed a successful test of the Land Warrior system at Fort Lewis, Wash., which clears the way for the unit to take the high-tech ensemble of digital communications and navigation equipment with them on their scheduled deployment to Iraq next summer, said Lt. Col. Bill Prior, battalion commander, in a recent press release.

That IS the net meaning here. Pull out five brigades by Christmas or it breaks...but we can't pull out those brigades by Christmas...ipso facto, the Army will be broken.

“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”

General: Cut Iraq strength by one-third
By Gina Cavallaro
Staff writer

The U.S. would have to slash combat forces in Iraq to 10 brigades by Christmas to keep the Army from breaking, said retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. See McCaffrey’s GWOT presentation.

State laws give New Yorkers an advantage over homeowners elsewhere. According to PropertyShark’s chief executive, Ryan Slack, New York courts typically consider the buyer of the property to be the owner, while California treats the bank that holds that mortgage as the owner.

Banks in California can foreclose on a property and take it back in roughly seven months, but banks in New York have to go through a legal battle that can take more than two years.

That means that New Yorkers have more time to find ways to hold onto their homes.

Missed Mortgage Payments Rise 20% in Third Quarter
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

In the third quarter of this year, the number of city residents who had missed more than three months of mortgage payments jumped by 20 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago. Still, New Yorkers often have more time to try to hold onto their homes than homeowners in the rest of the country.

Sunnis Are Reportedly Burned Alive in Retaliatory Violence
A day after attacks in the Shi'ite stronghold of Sadr City killed more than 200, the new savage twist to Iraq's sectarian bloodshed promises to escalate the cycle of violence even further
By AP/STEVEN R. HURST

(Baghdad)—Revenge-seeking Shi'ite militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left Friday prayers, drenched them with kerosene and burned them alive, and Iraqi soldiers did nothing to stop the attack, police and witnesses said. The fiery slayings in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Hurriyah were a dramatic escalation of the brutality coursing through the Iraqi capital, coming a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shi'ite district with a combination of bombs and mortars. The attacks culminated Baghdad's deadliest week of sectarian fighting since the war began more than three years ago.

From the way DeYoung has put her book together — two-fifths of it is devoted to the final four years of Powell’s career — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she wrote it in response to a single moment: when Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations and made the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction....

That Powell never allowed race to interfere with his rise in the world appears to have been less a matter of colorblindness than of shrewdness. Ronald Reagan apparently once said, “You know, you don’t even think of Colin as black,” and many of the white officers who promoted him, as well as Powell himself, seemed to concur. (“I ain’t that black,” he once explained to someone who asked how a black man’s career could have met with so little resistance from whites.) Powell, DeYoung writes, “saw no personal profit in racial activism and considered himself largely above, or at least apart from, issues of color.”...

“I detected a common thread running through the careers of officers who ran aground even though they were clearly able,” he wrote, looking back on his time in the Army but also ahead to his time working for several presidents. “They fought what they found foolish or irrelevant, and consequently did not survive to do what they considered vital.” He never forgot, as he put it, to “pay the king his shilling.”... 

Reluctant Warrior
By MICHAEL LEWIS

When her kid brother exhibited a strange new passion for church-going, Marilyn Powell decided he was “as much enthralled with the pageantry and costumes as he was imbued with the Holy Spirit.” A few years later, when Colin Powell, an otherwise aimless freshman at City College in New York, enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program, those who knew him best would conclude that he was less interested in serving his country than in the spit and the shine. “What attracted him more than anything else was their uniforms,”

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell author: Karen DeYoung asin: 1400041708

[T]he security agency, which has historically been restricted from spying within the United States, has monitored thousands of international telephone calls and e-mail messages to and from people in this country, people with knowledge of the operation say. Senior administration officials say it has been critical in helping to identify previously unknown plots, but other government officials involved in the operation have said that it has often led to dead ends and to people with no clear links to terrorism.

...“There’s a lot of uncertainty over this program,” said a former senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the wiretapping program is classified.

Despite a Year of Ire and Angst, Little Has Changed on Wiretaps
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

U.S. Says Violence Is Meant To Topple Iraqi Government
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2006; A15

The Bush administration charged yesterday that the escalating violence in Iraq committed by both Shiites and Sunnis over the past two days is a "brazen effort" to bring down the fragile government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The White House also said that President Bush had no intention of backing out of talks next week with the Iraqi leader, despite threats yesterday from a powerful Shiite militia to pull out of the government if Maliki went ahead with the meeting. The talks, set for Thursday in Amman, Jordan, have suddenly taken on the air of a crisis summit, as Iraq slides closer to all-out civil war.

Just because ol' Dan is a featured post on Memeorandum.

Dan / Riehl World View:
Michael Richards And The "N" Word

I'm not excusing what Richards did. But it seems to me the same people who have denounced Richards the loudest, also defend the tolerance shown to members of the Black community, particularly rappers, who use the epithet all the time. We're told it's simply a form of address.

You have never been told it's simply a form of address. You have ALWAYS been told it can be used between friends as a term of endearment...and the likes 'o you always leaves that out because it would clarifiy everything at a single stroke.

Context. If you ain't my friend, expect an ass-kicking if you call me nigger. You might get one if you're my friend...you definitely get one if you aren't.

from Zentronix...one of them Not Safe for Work joints due to the occasional cussword.

Couple days back I linked to a NY Times piece on Beyond Belief 2006.

Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements - some violent in the extreme - are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?

This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.

Seems the whole thing was recorded and can be downloaded freely. Interesting stuff.

We're all racists, unconsciously
Kramer just blurted out what unfortunately comes naturally to all of us.
By Michael Shermer, MICHAEL SHERMER is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. His latest book is "Why Darwin Matters."
November 24, 2006

AFTER A PAROXYSM of racial viciousness at the Laugh Factory last week, Michael Richards, the 57-year-old comedian who played Kramer on "Seinfeld," explained to David Letterman and his "Late Night" audience Monday: "I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this."

Richards' shattered demeanor and heartfelt repentance leaves us with what I shall call Kramer's Conundrum: How can someone who spews racial epithets genuinely believe he is not a racist? The answer is to be found in the difference between our conscious and unconscious attitudes and our public and private thoughts.

Really. Think about whose responses I don't take seriously.

In sum, NR declared that we were “at war” when we were not, for reasons that it did not specify, against enemies that it could not define, and to achieve goals that war does not advance. “Defining Victory” dresses up as policy but inchoate thirst for vengeance against someone, anyone who hates us. How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed / when vengeance listens to the fool's request! On Oct. 15, 2001, National Review had no position on post-9/11 foreign policy.

It's amazing how many conservative types buried their best instincts for so long...nevermind the Limbaughs of the world (who are straight liars).

Anyway...

Good-bye to All That
A former National Review trustee surveys the wreckage of contemporary conservatism.
by Austin W. Bramwell

Until recently, it has been almost impossible for me to speak candidly about the conservative movement, for it was my strange fate to serve as director and later trustee of the movement’s flagship journal, National Review. Earlier this year, at William F. Buckley’s request, I resigned both positions. I can therefore now declare what perhaps has oft been thought but never, at least not often enough, expressed. Notwithstanding conservatives’ belief that they, in contrast to their partisan opponents, have thought deeply about the challenges facing the United States, it is they who have become unserious.

Why is Africa so attractive to the U.S. in terms of oil?

Africa is on a forward curve in terms of oil production, one of the few places where this is so. This is absolutely critical, because much of the rest of the world is on a downward production curve. Many older oil fields, like in Mexico and the U.S., are in decline.

What makes Africa really appealing is that a lot of the most promising oil fields are offshore. This just lights up the eyes of American oil men, for two reasons. One is that they're the world leaders in the technology necessary to extract deep, offshore oil. Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea do not possess this technology and know-how, so they have to offer partnerships to the American companies and the Europeans. It's different in Saudi Arabia, or Iran or Iraq, because the oil is not below the ocean, and they've mastered that technology. They don't need the Americans as much. But the Africans do. The Chinese companies are also not up to speed on these technologies.

Doesn't that make Mr. Barnett something of a terrorist?

One suit pending in federal court accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants they intercepted, threatening them with dogs and kicking one woman in the group.

Another suit, accusing Mr. Barnett of threatening two Mexican-American hunters and three young children with an assault rifle and insulting them with racial epithets, ended Wednesday night in Bisbee with a jury awarding the hunters $98,750 in damages.

...Although the hunters were not in the United States illegally, they contended that Mr. Barnett’s treatment of them reflected his attitude and practices toward Latinos crossing his land, no matter what their legal status.

A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

For years, Roger Barnett has holstered a pistol to his hip, tucked an assault rifle in his truck and set out over the scrub brush on his thousands of acres of ranchland near the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona to hunt.

Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.

“They’re flooding across, invading the place,” Mr. Barnett told the ABC program “Nightline” this spring. “They’re going to bring their families, their wives, and they’re going to bring their kids. We don’t need them.”

But now, after boasting of having captured 12,000 illegal crossers on land he owns or leases from the state and emerging as one of the earliest and most prominent of the self-appointed border watchers, Mr. Barnett finds himself the prey.

Yes, the regimes in Syria and Iran are bent on undermining U.S. policies, including support for Lebanese Prime Minister Fuoad Siniora, who came to office in last year's pro-democracy Cedar Revolution. But a key reason for the U.S.'s setbacks in the Middle East is it's chronic refusal to wholeheartedly address the root causes of conflict, such as the lack of a negotiated end to Israel's occupation of Arab lands, the failure to establish a Palestinian state and Western support for repressive Arab regimes. Instead, Washington labors under the fantasy that its political and military strength alone can win the day. With that approach fanning an unprecedented number of crises in the region, amid the largest long-term deployment of U.S. military forces in Middle East history, it is past time for Washington to learn from its mistakes.

[I]f anyone still needs evidence that all electronic systems should provide verifiable paper trails so real ballots are available in the event of a recount, let them go to Sarasota.

An Electronic Canary
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, November 24, 2006; Page A41

...The Sarasota undervote in the congressional race amounted to nearly 15 percent. Kendall Coffey, Jennings's lawyer, has pointed out that in the other four counties in the district, the undervote ranged from 2.2 to 5.3 percent. Put another way, roughly 18,000 of the 21,000 undervotes in the contest came from Sarasota County.

It's hard to believe that Sarasota's voters had a different view of the race than voters everywhere else in the district, considering that the undervote on the county's absentee ballots, cast on paper, was only 2.5 percent. The upshot: Any reasonable statistical analysis suggests that only 3,000 to 5,000 of Sarasota's undervotes were intentional, meaning that 13,000 to 15,000 votes were probably not counted.

What a dick. Stay in the Carribean, pal...we don't need any more apologists for racists.

First, Mr Richards has had a hard go of it since the final season of Seinfeld. He has been trying new shows (which failed, or bombed as they say), and new stand-up routines to revive his improbable career; saving him from either having a job like those in his audience, or serving in Rumsfeld’s Iraq, once Congressman Charles Rangel reinstitutes the military draft. 

Imagine yourself in his position, knowing that he failed to ignite the audience because he was so unfunny. He was desperate, afraid and not a little hurt. And when the heckler heckled him, the heckler being black, Richard hurled what words were sure to hurt him as much. That is it: he wanted to hurt the fellow. But really, Mr Richard’s rant is less proof that he is racist, than it is that he is talentless, weak and self-absorbed; as are most people we call celebrities.

Last year in the United States, about 1.6 million children and teenagers — 280,000 of them under age 10 — were given at least two psychiatric drugs in combination, according to an analysis performed by Medco Health Solutions at the request of The New York Times. More than 500,000 were prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs. More than 160,000 got at least four medications together, the analysis found.

Many psychiatrists and parents believe that such drug combinations, often referred to as drug cocktails, help. But there is virtually no scientific evidence to justify this multiplication of pills, researchers say. A few studies have shown that a combination of two drugs can be helpful in adult patients, but the evidence in children is scant. And there is no evidence at all — “zero,” “zip,” “nil,” experts said — that combining three or more drugs is appropriate or even effective in children or adults.

“There are not any good scientific data to support the widespread use of these medicines in children, particularly in young children where the scientific data are even more scarce,” said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Proof Is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young
By GARDINER HARRIS

Their rooms are a mess, their trophies line the walls, and both have profiles on MySpace.com. Stephen and Jacob Meszaros seem like typical teenagers until their mother offers a glimpse into the family’s medicine cabinet.

Bottles of psychiatric medications fill the shelves. Stephen, 15, takes the antidepressants Zoloft and Desyrel for depression, the anticonvulsant Lamictal to moderate his moods and the stimulant Focalin XR to improve concentration. Jacob, 14, takes Focalin XR for concentration, the anticonvulsant Depakote to moderate his moods, the antipsychotic Risperdal to reduce anger and the antihypertensive Catapres to induce sleep.

Over the last three years, each boy has been prescribed 28 different psychiatric drugs.

“Sometimes, when you look at all the drugs they’ve taken, you wonder, ‘Wow, did I really do this to my kids?’ ” said their mother, Tricia Kehoe of Sharpsville, Pa. “But I’ve seen them without the meds, and there’s a major difference.”...

Drug Industry Is on Defensive as Power Shifts
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — Alarmed at the prospect of Democratic control of Congress, top executives from two dozen drug companies met here last week to assess what appears to them to be a harsh new political climate, and to draft a battle plan.

Hoping to prevent Congress from letting the government negotiate lower drug prices for millions of older Americans on Medicare, the pharmaceutical companies have been recruiting Democratic lobbyists, lining up allies in the Bush administration and Congress, and renewing ties with organizations of patients who depend on brand-name drugs.

Conservative Republicans who are blocking the spending bills have the gall to portray themselves as principled budget hawks blocking pork-barrel spending “earmarks” — this after 12 years of earmarking and rubber-stamping the upper-bracket tax cuts of President Bush that tossed all budget discipline to the four winds. The Republicans depart leaving the nation in ever deeper hock to China and other potent bankers, with taxpayers stuck with the bill.

The Spoils of Defeat

The departing Republican majority in Congress is about to leave the nation a memorial to its own shameful history as the grand enabler of record debt and deficits. G.O.P. leaders are preparing to walk away from their most basic constitutional responsibility — passing a budget. Instead of finishing work on government spending bills needed for the next year, they’re reported to be planning nothing more than a cut-and-paste, short-term continuing resolution. That will allow them to run out early from their lame-duck session, leaving the mess to the incoming Democrats in January.

The whole Human Genome thing is turning out very nicely. Anything that crushes incorrect ideas gets my approval. Between this and the whole field of Epigenetics,

Epigenetics is the study of epigenetic inheritance, a set of reversible heritable changes in gene function or other cell phenotype that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). These changes may be induced spontaneously, in response to environmental factors, or in response to the presence of a particular allele, even if it is absent from subsequent generations.

the scientific racists out there will look stupider and stupider as time passes.

"The genome is like an accordion that can stretch or shrink . . . so you have no idea what's normal," said Steve Scherer, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and study co-author.

Even the number of genes people can inherit, he said, a premise set out 150 years ago by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, has been upended.

"We have to think of genetics in an entirely different way. We're actually more like a patchwork of genetic code than bar codes that line up evenly," Dr. Scherer said. "Everything we've been taught is different now." 

Study turns human genetics on its head
Research finds abnormal is really normal, puts in question some medical tests
CAROLYN ABRAHAM
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

It was nice while it lasted. But the idea that all the world's people are 99.9 per cent genetically identical -- that a mere sliver of DNA separates a Dolly Parton from a Dalai Lama -- is untrue.

Here's video number two.

I figured out what I want to do with the Nicholas Lemann interview...the interesting part is the whole damn second half of it, like 20 minutes. That will be up later this evening.