Prometheus 6

Being off the air for 13 hours is too much, even for tolerant little me.

Blacks bring it on themselves: A Response 

Sorry, not feeling clever about this. 

And empathy appears to me now, in much of what I read, to be in particularly short supply, not only among different groups of parents (all those “wars,” Mommy and otherwise) but in the increasingly punitive attitudes of school systems and legislators toward parents and, by extension, their kids. Frequently, I find, there seems to be a kind of studied harshness in the air, an in-your-face obtuseness that tries to pass itself off as some sort of virtue or push for justice. I’m thinking particularly now of the “war on obesity,” which in some school districts is being waged through letters home to parents or in report cards bearing the bad news about students’ body mass indexes. The ostensible goal is to make parents aware that their children’s health is at risk, but the real effect has often been, as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported, to scold parents and humiliate their children.

[TS] Mean Grown-Ups

There’s an absolutely horrifying article in the current issue of Child Magazine about the food fight now raging between parents of children with life-threatening food allergies and parents of the allergy-free. The latter, apparently, have started to push back against “peanut-free” school regulations to assert their children’s natural right to eat whatever they darn well please.

The stories are downright chilling: One parent joked on a message board about having his daughter dress as “the Death Peanut” on Halloween. A North Carolina father at a parent-teacher organization meeting said he’d continue to send his child to school with peanut butter sandwiches and “tell his child to ‘smear’ the peanut butter along the hallway walls.” Another father sent his child to school with a “disguised” sandwich that had peanut butter hidden in the middle of the bread.

Let's have a video introduction to this one.

Iraq Pullout Would Lead To Bloodbath, Bush Warns
Democratic Leader Reid Says War Is Already Lost
By Peter Baker and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 20, 2007; A03

TIPP CITY, Ohio, April 19 -- President Bush warned Thursday that pulling out of Iraq too soon would trigger a bloodbath akin to that of the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s, while Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid declared that it is too late to stay because the war has already been lost.

On a day that reverberated with echoes of the Vietnam War era, Bush and Reid (D-Nev.) engaged in a long-distance debate over the lessons of history and the fate of the latest overseas war as part of a struggle over $100 billion in funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reid cast Iraq as another Vietnam and Bush as another Lyndon B. Johnson, while the president described dire consequences if the past repeats itself.

"I want to remind you that after Vietnam, after we left, millions of people lost their life," Bush said here when an audience member asked about comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. "The Khmer Rouge, for example, in Cambodia. And my concern is there would be a parallel. . . . The same thing would happen. There would be the slaughter of a lot of innocent life. The difference, of course, is that this time around, the enemy wouldn't just be content to stay in the Middle East; they'd follow us here."

By the time this is ratified by all EU members racism will have already been eliminated. In fact, that strikes me as a prerequisite for passage.

"The proposed list risks opening the floodgates on a plethora of historical controversies -- like the crimes of the Stalinist regime or the alleged Armenian genocide -- whose inclusion could pose a grave threat to freedom of speech," Watson said. "The E.U. has no business legislating on history."

E.U. officials said the new regulations include protections for films, theater, art and historical research.

E.U. Ministers Agree on Rules Against Hate Crimes, Racism
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 20, 2007; A25

PARIS, April 19 -- European Union officials agreed Thursday to new regulations for combating hate crimes and racism at a time when xenophobia and concern over immigration have been increasing across the 27-country bloc.

"It is an important political signal for the E.U.," said German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries, who with justice and interior ministers from throughout the European Union reached agreement in Luxembourg after a six-year effort.

The proposed regulations are subject to the approval of national parliaments, and they allow individual countries latitude in defining some crimes and penalizing offenders. Even so, E.U. officials said Thursday's agreement represented a major milestone in persuading all member countries to fight incitement to hatred or violence based on skin color, race or national or ethnic origin.

Didn't he see that Baby Boomers are sicker sooner than our ancestors? 

At the same time, attempts to rein in those Medicare Advantage payments seem to be running aground. Everyone knew that reducing payments would be politically tough. What comes as a bitter surprise is the fact that minority advocacy groups are now part of the problem, with both the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens sending letters to Congressional leaders opposing plans to scale back the subsidy.

What seems to have happened is that both groups have been taken in by insurance industry disinformation, which falsely claims that minorities benefit disproportionately from this subsidy. It’s a claim that has been thoroughly debunked in a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — but apparently the truth isn’t getting through.

No, what seems to have happened is they've responded to their corporate sponsors.

I think a longish excerpt works here.

At the same time, attempts to rein in those Medicare Advantage payments seem to be running aground. Everyone knew that reducing payments would be politically tough. What comes as a bitter surprise is the fact that minority advocacy groups are now part of the problem, with both the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens sending letters to Congressional leaders opposing plans to scale back the subsidy.

What seems to have happened is that both groups have been taken in by insurance industry disinformation, which falsely claims that minorities benefit disproportionately from this subsidy. It’s a claim that has been thoroughly debunked in a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — but apparently the truth isn’t getting through. 

[TS] The Plot Against Medicare
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The plot against Social Security failed: President Bush’s attempt to privatize the system crashed and burned when the public realized what he was up to. But the plot against Medicare is faring better: the stealth privatization embedded in the Medicare Modernization Act, which Congress literally passed in the dead of night back in 2003, is proceeding apace.

Worse yet, the forces behind privatization not only continue to have the G.O.P. in their pocket, but they have also been finding useful idiots within the newly powerful Democratic coalition. And it’s not just politicians with an eye on campaign contributions. There’s no nice way to say it: the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens have become patsies for the insurance industry.

To appreciate what’s going on, you need to know what has been happening to Medicare in the last few years.

In fact, boomers tend to report more stress than earlier generations -- from their jobs, their commutes, taking care of their parents and their kids -- all of which can take a physical toll, which is compounded by having less support from extended families and communities, experts say.

"People are working two jobs. They are not sleeping as much. They're experiencing more job insecurity. They have less time to take care of themselves. They are more socially isolated," said Lisa Berkman of the Harvard School of Public Health. "This all could add up to a huge crisis and really calls for us to examine the things that perhaps we're not doing so well."...

The baby boomers were much less likely than their predecessors to describe their health as "excellent" or "very good," and were more likely to report having difficulty with routine activities, such as walking several blocks or lifting 10 pounds. They were also more likely to report pain, drinking and psychiatric problems, and chronic problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.

Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 20, 2007; A01

As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age.

Stuff I seen:

Temple3 has been busy this morning.

Rich Lowry does the right thing and posts an email from a VT professor. You must pat them on the head when they do good; otherwise, having so little experience at it, they won't know it was good.

I been sort of avoiding Steve Gilliard's joint, not knowing what to say. His crew has been filling in and one dropped an excerpt of a work of art in the form of a review of this past Sunday morning's talk shows from Driftglass. You must read it.

Finally, on Meet the Press, an extended meditation on what happens when the Bad Thing gets caught in the light reflecting off of Dom Imus’ colossal ego.

Allow me to explain.

Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Which is about half right.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the razory maw of the beast that bores its way though the bones of every malignantly dysfunctional family has the same name.

The Bad Thing.

Curse you, ptcruiser!

People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. You throw a couple dozen talented black artists mid-level stockbroker money and they'll be ho-calling bitch-slapping modern Bojangles acts till the end of fucking time. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud.

Imus Is Out, But Whitey Execs Get the Last Laugh
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 19, 2007.

The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were.

One of the reasons I have NOT done some things recently is a series of technical problems at my web host. Feels like a hardware thing, and lord knows we don't want to be sinking any hard capital into a service business. That's why the site's been disappearing recently and there's no use starting things on an unstable platform. Problem is, this level of resources and control is a lot more expensive anywhere else. They'll do what they have to once theyh exhaust all possibilities, they just have to exhaust all possibilities.

Meanwhile the Afrospear crew is set up at wordpress.org.

Also (and for various reasons I'll take the hit for this myself) P6 is nowhere to be seen in Google. Nowhere. I haven't gotten a single Google referral all month. This does not disturb me, as traffic has not dropped off nearly as much as I thought it would...if my fucking server was stable I might be close to my pre-loss-of-Google-traffic levels and I'm not seeing the disgusting queries. Still, I have to concern myself with Google Analytics and sitemaps and shit I'd really just rather ignore as I write. It takes me out of my rhythm sometimes, all this switching back and forth.

Anyway. Right now I'm not feeling it so I'm taking the day off. I got this book, Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko, that I bought on a whim a couple of weeks ago. Subject matter derivable from the title. I like the magical realism genre. Nothing In fact, I find it scratches the same itch I used to reach with an Isaac Asimov book...an easy read of some crazy shit I don't have to take seriously.

via Boing Boing, this was written for the 9/11 WTC attack, yet the pattern is truly universal in its application.

Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics

Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.

Perhaps the reason the national conversations always sputter out is that they start off too ambitious. Rather than tackling America's fundamental problems, we could start by talking about how we should talk.

I am taking the unusual step of pretending the title and first few paragraphs of this Jonah Goldberg op-ed simply do not exist

For the right — not to mention the creators of "South Park" — political correctness can be the gift that keeps on giving. The earnest leftists of the academy who seriously use "herstory" for "history" or "ovular" instead of "seminar" make it easy to discredit the entire PC project as a lot of pretentious, even Orwellian, nonsense.

But pointing out these excesses have costs for conservatives too. Standing up to political correctness has become an unlimited warrant to be rude for its own sake. And if you catch flak for it, you can just say you were defending free thought. Ann Coulter, for example, justifies her cruder barbs and insults on the grounds that she's pushing back against the liberal thought police. Sometimes she's even right. But calling John Edwards a "faggot" is hardly a triumph of conservative principle.

Those "likely to do this . . . have a common denominator," Lavergne said. "They're very, very frustrated people who are so self-centered they feel the whole world is against them. There are many thousands, maybe millions of people, who fit that description."

With Each Shooting, Common Threads
Easy Gun Access, Deep Frustration Seen
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 17, 2007; A11

On a hot August day in 1966, a 25-year-old engineering student and ex-Marine named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin's Main Building and began firing. He killed 14 people -- he had killed his wife and mother earlier -- and wounded 31 in what, until yesterday, was the nation's worst shooting rampage on a campus.

So-called spree killings are multiple homicides that erupt for no immediately apparent reason. They are not, by definition, terrorist attacks. They're usually not political.

P6: This used to be a comment. I thought it deserved a whole post, so I promoted it.

All,

I don't know how many of y'all have seen Whitlock's column today where he basically claims that the power 'Pop Culture' is overwhelming poor ole 'mainstream' parents. I guess now that he's 'established' himself, the tough talk meter has been switched to absolving-mainstream America mode.

Myself and the local St Louis Sports columnist (Bernie Miklasz) have been have a discussion about this since Whitlock first started his 'campaign'

My post is below: (http://www.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=4500519#4500519)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can relax now.

The RealClearPolitics blog at Time Magazine posted up a couple of YouTube clips from Monday's Oprah episode.

The discussion has officially switched from powerful white guys closing ranks around a known offender to making those bad, bad negroes behave.

Just as I expected.

Okay, you want the negroes to behave, let me tell you how to do that.

See, you have to keep in mind where we are (the USofA), how we operate (caviat emptor is official recognition that corporations are free to go wilding) and what that does to your average human.

Why don't people like olive?

I'm not a primary colors kind of guy. Earth tones and achromatics, that's me.  

Of course, I'm talking like Sudan doesn't have deep political and economic ties with the folks who'd be doing the flying over. That's why nonsense like this

Sudan signaled its willingness to accept the interim force at a moment when at least two countries on the Security Council, Britain and the United States, were threatening tough new sanctions because of Sudan’s stalling tactics.

can be touted as progress. "Signaled," my ass...

Sudan Flying Arms to Darfur, Panel Reports
By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, April 17 — A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.

In one case, illustrated with close-up pictures, the report says “U.N.” has been stenciled onto the wing of a whitewashed Sudanese armed forces plane parked on a military apron at a Darfur airport. Bombs guarded by uniformed soldiers are laid out in rows by its side.

The final size and scope of the new projects will not be determined until a river-to-river rezoning plan currently in the works is passed by the City Planning Department; no date has been set for approval.

The Harlem Revival Brings in the Shops
By CLAIRE WILSON

An increasingly vigorous retail scene on Harlem’s main commercial street is likely to gain further headway in the next five years as four parcels are set for development into offices and shops geared to a residential population that is becoming more prosperous.

Via Skeptical Brother we find John Kerry still has little understanding of common folk.

Kerry: “I think that the…you know the punishment has to fit the crime so to speak. I think a long suspension, or a strong suspension met with his appropriate level, given that the team forgave him. To me it was in the hands of the young women. They made the judgment that they thought he was genuine and they felt they could forgive him. And I think it was appropriate to pay a price on the airwaves but I’m not sure that it was appropriate to say you’re off forever.”

First of all, the odds of the subject of the discussion being off forever are as close to zero as makes no difference. And I'd have let that slide but for this:

The regulation that the court upheld pre-empts state regulation of any banking activity that a national bank conducts through an operating subsidiary. The decision therefore presumably applies beyond mortgage lending to other activities that subsidiaries commonly engage in, like the sale of annuities, automobile loans, small-business lending and investment advice.

Ruling Limits State Control of Big Banks
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, April 17 — The mortgage lending subsidiaries of national banks are immune from state regulation, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in a decision that upheld a controversial regulation issued six years ago by the office of the comptroller of the currency, the chief federal bank regulator.

AARP officials insisted that its financial interests do not affect the positions it takes on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and dozens of other issues on which it lobbies and litigates.

If that's true you are unique in all the world.

AARP Says It Will Become Major Medicare Insurer While Remaining a Consumer Lobby
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, April 16 — AARP, the lobby for older Americans, announced Monday that it would become a major participant in the nation’s health insurance market, offering a health maintenance organization to Medicare recipients and several other products to people 50 to 64 years old.

It's John Stewart and Andrew Card.

McGilvray and other public safety officials declined to say why there were considering lifting the ban on familial searches or how the reassessment related to the Jan. 11 suspension of Pino.

State Police may hunt for a suspect using kin's DNA
Critics say innocent targeted
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | April 17, 2007

The State Police crime laboratory is considering expanding the use of its DNA database to search for close relatives of suspects whose DNA is recovered from crime scenes, a controversial crime-fighting technique that prosecutors say would help them solve more cases but that critics say would target innocent people, many of them members of minority groups.

Instant prejudice: Korea and Virginia Tech
The Internet explodes: Just what does the nationality of Cho Seung-hui signify?
Andrew Leonard

Apr. 17, 2007 | Conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel's first reaction to the news that an "Asian" was responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre was to declare that a "Paki" was likely responsible. After being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her nearly criminal idiocy, she amended her analysis: "Even if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students."