Prometheus 6

I just got invited to a speechification by the wandering mendicants. I tried to be nice, take the books and send them away, but the senior mendicant handed the junior one a flyer-slash-invitation to an induction ceremony.

I told them I've been to a Kingdom Hall, listened and I'm way past all that.

Asked what that meant, I said that they read from the Watchtower book, ask a question from the book, get an answer back that quotes the book, and that's not a teaching that can teach me anyway.The mendicant said, "But if you have any questions..." anf I cut it off and said "I have no questions."

"You have no problems, no faults, you're satisfied with everything as it is?"

"No, but that doesn't mean I have questions."

Files put Gonzales at meeting before prosecutors' firing
By Richard B. Schmitt, Tom Hamburger and Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writers
March 24, 2007

WASHINGTON — Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales convened a meeting to discuss firing a group of U.S. attorneys 10 days before they were terminated, according to Justice Department documents released Friday night that could indicate Gonzales was more involved in the process than he has said previously.

The documents show that Gonzales and a group of senior aides, including Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty, met Nov. 27, to review a plan for firing the prosecutors. The dismissals were carried out Dec. 7.

The materials were among 283 new documents the Justice Department turned over Friday to congressional investigators looking into the ouster of eight U.S. attorneys amid allegations that the dismissals were politically motivated.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex processes feelings of empathy, shame, compassion and guilt. Damage to this part of the brain, which occupies a small region in the forehead, causes a diminished capacity for social emotions but leaves logical reasoning intact....

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard psychologist not involved in the research, said the study showed that moral judgment was shaped by two brain systems — one focused on intuitive emotional responses and another that controlled cognition.

"When one of those systems is compromised, decisions are skewed," he said.

Empathy is hard-wired into the mind, study finds
People with a certain type of brain damage showed less aversion to hurting others.
By Denise Gellene
Times Staff Writer
March 22, 2007

Damage to the part of the brain that controls social emotions changes the way people respond to thorny moral problems, demonstrating the role of empathy and other feelings in life-or-death decisions.

Asked to resolve hypothetical dilemmas — such as tossing a person from a bridge into the path of a trolley to save five others — people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex tended to sacrifice one life to save many, according to a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Waxman asked Cooney, "Aren't the edits you were making exactly the types of changes the Petroleum Institute would have made to these reports?"

Cooney ultimately responded, "When I came to the White House, my loyalties -- my sole loyalties -- were to the president and his administration." Of course, that was really easy for him to say since Republican causes have received about 80 percent of the $104 million in political contributions from his pre-Bush and post-Bush industry, the oil lobby, going back to the 2000 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Unlike Zerhouni, Cooney is not a scientist. It was Cooney's political job to keep one hand tied behind America's back. He was just a Bush bully of science. With real researchers putting up both their dukes, the bullies seem much more like 100-pound weaklings.

Science starts to fight back
By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 24, 2007

PRESIDENT BUSH'S war on science continues to disintegrate into unstable elements.

In a hearing before the Senate, Elias Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health, came out unequivocally for stem cell research. This was big news. When Zerhouni was appointed by Bush in 2002, some scientists were concerned about how much the Johns Hopkins researcher who advocated "unimpeded progress" in stem cell research had compromised himself to get the job.

In a New Yorker article in 2004, Stanford stem cell research pioneer Irv Weissman recounted a meeting with Zerhouni and the NIH's stem cell task force leader, James Battey. In the meeting, Weissman offered a scenario of using cell lines from diabetics to fight diabetes. Weissman was told it could not happen under Bush's current rules. Battey later told The New Yorker, "We're not policymakers. We inform policymakers. And the policy, of course, is not made solely based upon scientific input."

Mr. Carton and Mr. Rossi held an on-air news conference a few hours after Mr. Caraballo’s comments. Seeking to profit from the recently ignited firestorm, the Jersey Guys gathered a corps of journalists, most of them Hispanic, in their Trenton studios and gleefully refused to back down. They insisted that the campaign was not anti-Hispanic and that the phrase “La Cucha Gotcha” was inoffensive, likening the song “La Cucaracha” to a lullaby or a patriotic standard like “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

An Immigrant Segment by Radio’s ‘Jersey Guys’ Draws Fire
By ANDREW JACOBS

Last night I signed an online petition requesting Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss, the teachers that lost their jobs for signing a student petition supporting a Black History Month presentation on Emmitt Till, get their jobs back. I'm number 75. I support these  teachers, a Latina and white man, because their motivation was correct. Also the reason Mr. Strauss was given for his termination was troublesome.

In the letter terminating his employment, dated March 6, Strauss was said to have been "disparaging the school to students and parents and authorizing by physical signature a nonsupportive message to the administrative staff."

I guess my problem is I can't imaging them doing a reenactment of the lynching or anything. Well, that and the principal justifying the lynching as a response to sexual harassment.

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present author: Howard Zinn asin: 0060194480

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong author: James W. Loewen asin: 0684818868

McFarlane seems particularly attuned to the needs of the African American students who are the school's majority; she herself is black, of Jamaican and Panamanian descent. She worries that the full story of Celerity is not being told. She points out that the Black History Month assembly included presentations on the murder of Medgar Evers and the beating of Freedom Riders by Ku Klux Klan members — pretty negative stuff. She explains that the seventh-graders studied Till; it's just that when it came to what went on stage, their treatment of the story didn't make the cut.

"I don't see this as contradictory," says McFarlane, who called the treatment too graphic. "One thing doesn't negate the other."

She's right, in theory. But she doesn't quite explain why the Till presentation couldn't have been made suitable for public consumption. I suspect that it's because the slaughter of a boy close to middle-school age was too much of a downer, even for those vested in telling the truth.

Let's face it, for all its heroes, black history in America is mostly a downer. It's ugly. Unlike keepers of the Holocaust, which is taught in all its graphic detail (albeit perhaps not to kindergarteners), keepers of black history are still struggling with its meaning — is it triumphant, tragic, both? What should blacks emphasize, and when? I understand the importance of being positive. But black people excising, or glossing over parts of our history for the sake of uplift, commit the same crime of denial as whites excising those same parts because they'd rather not think about black history at all.

Tell black history's ugly truth
The story of African American struggle isn't always uplifting, but none of it should be denied.
Erin Aubry Kaplan
March 23, 2007

FOR BLACK people obsessed with scrubbing the hated "n-word" clean from the American lexicon, I have another suggestion: the word "positive."

As well as a reminder to myself.

Everthing we're aware of that we don't understand has been given a name, and usually a guessed answer. The names aren't meant to substitute for understanding, and the guesses aren't meant to be accurate—only useful.

[I]f not knowing is a major inconvenience for you, then you're in a tight spot because there's absolutely nowhere else to go.

But recognizing your inability to find answers doesn't remove the need or desire to, and to date there've emerged two different ways of dealing with it. The first is to have faith, and it means choosing an answer—whether its a guess or a culturally accepted idea—and reconciling your wants with your doubts.

Actually, this post is also a public service. 

John Henrik Clarke on Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga - Part One

In 1995 after the Million Man March, Prof. Dr. John Henrik Clarke gave a talk about what he termed "Fake Leaders". The talk focused on Minister Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga and was recorded. I don't know of any transcriptions of the recording, so I transcribed it myself. This is the first part of the transcription. Tune in to get the next parts as I am able to transcribe and post them.

I am not taking any position on the issues Dr. Clarke raised at this time and am posting this because some folks have raised some of these questions. I do feel, however, that none of our leaders, without exception, are and should be beyond criticism, questions, and reproach.

John Henrik Clarke on Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga - Part Two

John Henrik Clarke on Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga - Part Three

John Henrik Clarke on Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga - Part Four

John Henrik Clarke on Louis Farrakhan and Ron Karenga - Conclusion

Because that's where I told you so.

And here's the thing...what is the National Urban League doing that the N.A.A.C.P. isn't?

This could be the first actual example of that domino theory thing strategists worry about all the time.

What did I tell you?

Two Republicans Reject Urban League Invitation

Source: Politico

Giuliani and Romney are skipping the National Urban League’s annual conference this summer, and league president Marc Morial wants them to know he’s not happy about it.

Every Black person that wishes death on the N.A.A.C.P. must realize that if the N.A.A.C.P. is discredited it's mission will be as well. And if its mission is discredited so will be every organization that shares it. And the process is well under way.

It's because a really wish I were wealthy enough to adopt this child. Abiola at Foreign Dispatches spotted this story, and dismembers the essentialist reasoning in the case with both passion and dispassion...

"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake every time we look at her; it is simply impossible to ignore," the judge quoted the parents as saying in their affidavit. "We are conscious of and distressed by this mistake every time we appear in public."

It's going to be miserable for this child though. 

US couple sue clinic for sperm sample mix-up
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Friday March 23, 2007
The Guardian

A Long Island couple are suing a fertility clinic for mixing up sperm samples after their baby girl was born with darker skin than either parent.

Too bad it's not illegal to be manipulative scum. 

“What makes the subprime mortgages so devastating from a community perspective is that they’re so concentrated geographically,” said Dan Immergluck, a professor of city planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology....

Rosa Hutchinson Yates, 62, had kept up payments on her tidy two-story house on Chagrin Boulevard in Shaker Heights for 30 years. Now, she may well lose the house because of a disastrous refinancing deal in 2003 that brought her $24,000 in cash but bills she could not pay....A Shaker Heights city attorney said it appeared that illegally high fees might have been charged and that the broker had overstated Ms. Yates’s income, raising the possibility of a legal challenge.

Ms. Yates, preparing for the worst, has learned that she can move into a subsidized apartment for retirees. But the thought is devastating.

“When folks pay for a home, they expect to die in it,” she said, breaking into tears.

Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight
By ERIK ECKHOLM

SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio — In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation’s hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.

In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and mowing lawns at the vacant houses in hopes of preventing a snowball effect, in which surrounding property values suffer and worried neighbors move away. The officials are also working with financially troubled homeowners to renegotiate debts or, when eviction is unavoidable, to find apartments.

“It’s a tragedy and it’s just beginning,” Mayor Judith H. Rawson of Shaker Heights, a mostly affluent suburb, said of the evictions and vacancies, a problem fueled by a rapid increase in high-interest, subprime loans.

“All those shaky loans are out there, and the foreclosures are coming,” Ms. Rawson said. “Managing the damage to our communities will take years.”

Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did.

My National Security Letter Gag Order
Friday, March 23, 2007; A17

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

Bolton admits Lebanon truce block

A former top American diplomat says the US deliberately resisted calls for a immediate ceasefire during the conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah's military capability.

Mr Bolton said an early ceasefire would have been "dangerous and misguided".

He said the US decided to join efforts to end the conflict only when it was clear Israel's campaign wasn't working.

The former envoy, who stepped down in December 2006, was interviewed for a BBC radio documentary, The Summer War in Lebanon, to be broadcast in April.

Remember this book from yesterday?

A Wreath for Emmett Till (Boston Globe-Horn Book Honors (Awards))

This is the book by Marilyn Nelson that somehow inspired the Principal of a charter school in L.A. to justify Emmitt Till's lynching as a response to sexual harrassment.

I have in my evil clutches Ms. Nelson's reaction to this. I think she is very diplomatic.

I'm seeing a lot of traffic from "Shaquanda Cotton" searches over the last few days. I followed some back to the search pages. An MSN search returns 955 hits.  Got folks from Univ. of Texas System Office of Telecom. Services. The Army Information Systems Command just searched for "judge chuck superville" via Yahoo.

I got one out of google.co.uk yeaterday. International searches for Shaquanda are good things. Might be bad for American propaganda...stories about how George Bush's home state imprisons children for years over trivialities, how is he going to treat your Middle Eastern children? Oh, Shock and Awe, that's right...

Visit and link Free Shaquanda Cotton. Find nice, long comment threads and link them too. Keep the discussion alive.

[TS] Stepping on the Dream
By BOB HERBERT

One of the weirder things at work these days is the fact that we’re making it more difficult for American youngsters to afford college at a time when a college education is a virtual prerequisite for establishing and maintaining a middle-class standard of living.

Young men and women are leaving college with debt loads that would break the back of a mule. Families in many cases are taking out second mortgages, loading up credit cards and raiding 401(k)s to supplement the students’ first wave of debt, the ubiquitous college loan.

At the same time, many thousands of well-qualified young men and women are being shut out of college, denied the benefits and satisfactions of higher education, because they can’t meet the ever-escalating costs.

You want a recipe for making the U.S. less competitive over the next few decades? This is it.

Not so weird.

I'm just now watching the last two days of The Daily Show.

Note this interview with John Bolton.

I think this magnificent rejoinder came about because Mr. Steward was offended by the Crossfire level of mendacity coming from a single person.

What It Means to Be a Leftist in the 21st Century
By Democracy Now!
Posted on March 21, 2007, Printed on March 22, 2007

Professor, culture critic, and social justice advocate Cornel West addressed a panel at the 2007 Left Forum in New York last weekend. West is a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University and has been described as one of America's most vital and eloquent public intellectuals. He has written and co-authored numerous books on philosophy, race and sociology. His most recent book is "Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism."

Below is a transcript of his speech. The video is HERE.

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By NICHOLAS WADE

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Political Spectacle
President Bush and Congress should step back from a confrontation that makes them both look bad.
Thursday, March 22, 2007; A20

THE WHITE HOUSE and congressional Democrats have drawn deep lines in the sand over who will testify, and how, as Congress investigates the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. The stubbornness and overheated rhetoric on both sides threaten an unnecessary constitutional crisis that would only bog down the inquiry in a distracting fight over process.

I think the constitutional crisis is very, very necessary.

The Clinton Justice Department brought the unprecedented civil suit against the country's five largest tobacco companies in 1999. President Bush disparaged the tobacco case while campaigning in 2000. After Bush took office, some officials expressed initial doubts about the government's ability to fund the prosecution, Justice's largest.

Eubanks said McCallum, Keisler and Meron largely ignored the case until it became clear that the government might win. She recalled that "things began to get really tense" after McCallum read news reports in April 2005 that one government expert, professor Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, would argue that tobacco officials who engaged in fraud could be removed from their corporate posts. Eubanks said she received an angry call from McCallum on the day the news broke.

"How could you put that in there?" she recalled him saying. "We're not going to be pursuing that."

Afterward, McCallum, Keisler and Meron told Eubanks to approach other witnesses about softening their testimony, Eubanks said.

Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids was one of the witnesses whom Eubanks asked to change his testimony. Yesterday, he said he found her account to be "the only reasonable explanation" for what transpired.

Two weeks before closing arguments in June, McCallum called for a meeting with Eubanks and her deputy, Stephen Brody, to discuss what McCallum described as "getting the number down" for the $130 billion penalty to create smoking-cessation programs. Brody declined to comment yesterday on the legal team's deliberations, saying that they were private.

During several tense late-night meetings, McCallum repeatedly refused to suggest a figure, Eubanks said, or give clear reasons for the reduction. Brody refused to lower the amount. Finally, on the morning the government was to propose the penalty in court, she said, McCallum ordered it cut to $10 billion.

The most stressful moment, Eubanks said, came when the three appointees ordered her to read word for word a closing argument they had rewritten. The statement explained the validity of seeking a $10 billion penalty....

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

Prosecutor Says Bush Appointees Interfered With Tobacco Case
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 22, 2007; A01

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

US looks to sell arms in Gulf to try to contain Iran
Congressional OK needed
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | March 21, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The State Department and the Pentagon are quietly seeking congressional approval for significant new military sales to US allies in the Persian Gulf region. The move is part of a broader American strategy to contain Iranian influence by strengthening Iran's neighbors and signaling that the United States is still a strong military player in the Middle East, despite all the difficulties in Iraq.

But the arms sales, which would come on top of a recent upgrade of US Patriot antimissile interceptors in Qatar and Kuwait and the deployment of two aircraft carriers to the Gulf, could spark concerns that further military buildup in the volatile region would bring Washington closer to a confrontation with Iran.

[I]n supporting a slate of self-described reformers, some of them political neophytes, Mr. Booker is angering longtime enemies and those who have been his allies, including a family of elected officials whose power extends from Washington to the streets of the Central Ward.

Even some of his supporters are questioning the wisdom of challenging veteran incumbents for the sake of consolidating power....

In what may be a taste of the battle ahead, Mr. Payne wrote to members of the Essex County Democratic committee in February warning that “significant entities in the district” were plotting to disenfranchise Newark’s black population. In what many saw as a veiled reference to Mr. Booker, Mr. Payne ended the letter by writing, “Ironically, the same individuals who were elected by us are overtly or covertly working to end African-American representation and return us to the plantation.”

Calling the letter “patently offensive,” Mr. Booker said he feared that Mr. Payne would run a racially divisive campaign. “This is going back to the same brand of politics that we thought we were getting beyond,” he said. “It’s venal and it appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

Booker Tries to Unseat Legislators, Dividing Party
By ANDREW JACOBS

NEWARK, March 19 — The broom was an effective prop during Cory A. Booker’s electoral juggernaut last spring, when he won the mayor’s office by a landslide and swept his slate of candidates into the nine-seat Municipal Council. On election night, he and his allies pumped corn husk brooms over their heads to drive home the point that they were clearing away the old guard that had governed this city for decades.

Now, eight months after his inauguration, Mr. Booker is hoping to wave those brooms again, this time in a countywide effort to unseat a number of state legislators who he says are standing in the way of his ambitious agenda.