Prometheus 6

Paris Hilton & White Privilege ends with

It ain't white privilege that busted Paris Hilton out of jail, it was citizenship privilege. If it weren't for all those illegal immigrants crowding up the California penal system, we would have plenty more room for petty offenders like Paris Hilton, and the the 'war on at-risk black youth' aka those named 'Shaniqua' who are otherwise presumed not to get a break because they're not blonde, rich and hot crotched.

I say deport all the illegals so we can throw more Americans in jail. Starting with everyone on Sharpton's side on this melodrama. They can't blog from jail can they?

My initial response.

The Republican Convention in New York has nothing on the G-8 summit in Germany.

For instance, police and prosecutors have surreptitiously acquired scent samples of some protest organizers to make it easier for police dogs to locate them in a crowd, authorities have acknowledged. The technique was pioneered by the Stasi, the East German secret police.

Now I know this is just snatching a piece of dirty laundry but it just sounds nasty.

Dr. Rice gave a speech inaugurating a new term of art on Thursday. Don't know how I missed that.

Rice used the term "American realism" 16 times in her remarks, an apparent effort to coin a phrase that would resonate long after the administration leaves office in 19 months. It was the first time that Rice has offered an overriding label for the administration's foreign policy since 2000, when, as an adviser to then-Gov. George W. Bush, she wrote an article for Foreign Affairs stressing that a new Republican administration would focus on promoting "the national interest" rather than the interests of the international community.

Interestingly, she not only tried to justify Bushism with the connotations the phrase conjures, she further seperated this policy from the Republican base.

Gotta do it, though. Ray Gaurraud pointed this out and everyone that defended Bruce Gordon when he resigned from the N.A.A.C.P. needs to pickup on this.

Which isn't what the video is about...

In the book "The Strategy Paradox" Michael Raynor brilliantly argues that great strategy is not a guarantee of success. The strategy paradox proposes the theory that great strategies can in fact be the cause of total failure. The book is well researched and argued, insightful, brutally honest and devoid of quick solutions to today's complex strategy problems. In the video below Michael talks about his books and about innovation strategy and frameworks.

The strategies presented are business strategies but in the video...I will see if the book is the same...it's presented in a general enough way to suggest really broad applicability.

And you really need to understand: corporate capitalism is the dominant form of social organization in the USofA. If you want to be a player this is the sort of thing you need to study. It's the rules of chess vs. the moves of a specific gambit.

It's about a half hour, but you'll know if it's something you want to continue with about 5 minutes in, so give it a taste.

The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it) author: Michael E. Raynor asin: 0385516223

That includes abstinence-only pseudo sex education .

After making noise about finally ending “abstinence-only” funding just weeks ago, after recently voting to continue funding “abstinence-only” the Democrats have proved they’re all bark and no bite.

While yesterday the House Foreign Operations subcommittee approved legislation that enables global HIV prevention programs to determine at the country level the most effective and relevant mix of services needed by individuals there, the word is that the House Labor-Health and Human Services subcommittee is planning on spending $27 million more than last year (a total of $150 million) on abstinence-only programs (specifically for CBAE–Community Based Abstinence Education program–as early as tomorrow). Yes, the same programs that time and again have been proven to have NO impact on changing the sexual behaviors of young people–but can create increased risk because they are refused a breadth of knowledge on the subject.

Cutting a School Contract Down to Size
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, June 9, 2007; A17

The story of EdBuild, a Washington nonprofit start-up organization that was awarded a $57.6 million sole-source contract by the soon-to-be-out-of-business D.C. Board of Education, continues this week.

To recap: EdBuild was put together 20 months ago by a group of well-wired civic leaders and was funded generously with venture capital, for the purpose of forming a partnership with the superintendent to transform District public schools.

The speed with which EdBuild got off the ground and lined up at the D.C. treasury's door is breathtaking.

...Black folks get upset when Black kids are abused by the system, yet don't care when a white kid is punished for punching a teacher in the face.

A 2006 report on disciplinary practices in Florida schools showed that a middle school student in Palm Beach County who was caught throwing rocks at a soda can was arrested and charged with a felony — hurling a “deadly missile.”

We need to get a grip.

The quote for the sane among us is:

Behavior that was once considered a normal part of growing up is now resulting in arrest and incarceration....

School to Prison Pipeline
By BOB HERBERT

The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She’s in! She’s out! She’s — whatever.

Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

This is an aspect of the justice system that is seldom seen. But the consequences of ushering young people into the bowels of police precincts and jail cells without a good reason for doing so are profound.

For example, an eighth grader in Missouri would need the equivalent of a 311 on the national math test to be judged proficient. That is actually more rigorous than the national test. In Tennessee, however, a student can meet the state’s proficiency standard with a 230, a score well below even the basic level on the national exam.

And while a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the equivalent of a 234, or just below the proficiency mark on the national test, to be judged as proficient by the state, a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test.

Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels.

States Found to Vary Widely on Education
By TAMAR LEWIN

Academic standards vary so drastically from state to state that a fourth grader judged proficient in reading in Mississippi or Tennessee would fall far short of that mark in Massachusetts and South Carolina, the United States Department of Education said yesterday in a report that, for the first time, measured the extent of the differences.

The wide variation raises questions about whether the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature education initiative, which is up for renewal this year, has allowed a patchwork of educational inequities around the country, with no common yardstick to determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.

Not that I don't appreciate the thought. I do. Yet I can't help but find this

It is shameful that the Cherokee have to be pressured into restoring the rights of their own black citizens. But that clearly is what is needed.

let's see...how do I phrase this...

...starkly contrasts...no...

...is a wee bit hypocritical when...hm...

...got it.

I can't help but wonder how you can focus past the log in America's eye.

Mr. Schlozman fits neatly into the larger picture. Prosecutors who refused to use their offices to help Republicans win elections, like John McKay in Washington State, and David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired. Prosecutors who used their offices to help Republicans did well.

It’s Subpoena Time

For months, senators have listened to a parade of well-coached Justice Department witnesses claiming to know nothing about how nine prosecutors were chosen for firing. This week, it was the turn of Bradley Schlozman, a former federal attorney in Missouri, to be uninformative and not credible. It is time for Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to deliver subpoenas that have been approved for Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and their top aides, and to make them testify in public and under oath.

Let me say I really like YouTube's new flash viewer. This video came up in the Related Video list in the player, and I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

It is 10 minutes of a lecture by Roland Fryer, whose work has been discussed here in the past.

The immigration debate is now taking an interesting turn. Black folks have been saying lower-to-middle class white folks have more common cause with Black folks than they do upper class white folks.

Check the common theme in these three callers to Washington Journal.

Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come
By BRENT STAPLES

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

My favorite Philip K. Dick book was Valis. The kid Horselover Fat found when he searched for God was my favorite character because of the way he handled the test question Horselover's friend asked.

But the special counsel's office, which protects whistle-blowers, concluded that Frazier illegally demoted two subordinates who were witnesses in an investigation. The counsel urged Bush to punish Frazier.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said there was no immediate comment. The House Commerce Committee said it is expanding its investigation to other managers.

Commerce Inspector General Quits
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 8, 2007; A06

Commerce Department Inspector General Johnnie E. Frazier retired yesterday in the face of multiple investigations and a formal report recommending that President Bush punish him for violating the whistle-blower protection law.

Frazier, who since 1999 has served as the department's chief watchdog responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse, told the administration that he is retiring effective June 29, congressional and White House officials said.

This has something of an "I told you so" flavor. 

NAACP Will Cut Staffing, Close Offices
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 8, 2007; A09

In an attempt to overcome years of budget shortfalls, the NAACP announced that it will temporarily close its regional offices and cut its national staff by 40 percent.

Dennis C. Hayes, the interim president and chief executive, said the organization will use layoffs and attrition to reduce its staff to 70 from the current 119. The seven regional offices will be cut. On its Web site, the group lists offices in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, among others.

The announcement came weeks after the organization revealed that it has delayed plans to move its headquarters from Baltimore to Washington, and three months after the organization's president, Bruce S. Gordon, abruptly resigned over sharp conflicts with the executive board and Chairman Julian Bond.

And where the hell did THIS come from?

Putin's gesture came as leaders from European countries and Japan backed down from proposals that the summit endorse specific cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. They embraced Bush's proposal to instead put in motion a process toward unspecified "substantial cuts" in emissions that scientists blame for global warming.

The agreement says the G-8 countries will "seriously" consider cutting emissions in half by 2050, but it sets no mandatory goals for all. Under the plan, nonbinding goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions would be determined by meetings of officials from the world's top 15 polluting nations by the end of next year.

Putin Offers to Join Missile Shield Effort
G-8 Leaders Back Bush Plan on Emissions
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 8, 2007; A01

I was just saying I wish some Black journalists would speak up about how Bob Lewis of the Associated Press took one word and wrote a story as though that was all Sen. Obama said.

Obama's 'quiet riots' are for real
By Roland S. Martin
CNN contributor
Roland S. Martin is a CNN contributor and a talk-show host for WVON-AM in Chicago.

(CNN) -- Conservative critics have been lighting up the airwaves and blogs for the last 48 hours after Sen. Barack Obama's speech to the Hampton University Annual Ministers' Conference raised the combustible topic of the burning anger among the nation's poor African Americans.

Much of this was the result of a terrible story written by Bob Lewis of The Associated Press, who wrote in his lead that "Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a 'quiet riot' among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago."

After seeing the story I was stunned to read such a thing, and immediately sought the transcript of Obama's speech. In reading it, Obama used the word riot nine times; the phrase "quiet riot" three times; and never suggested that America was on the verge of seeing African Americans lash out like they did during the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

But what he did try to do was give the 8,000 attendees, and anyone else watching, an understanding of what is a real problem in America's inner cities. And more importantly, his blueprint for fixing the problem.

I still haven't committed to a candidate but if all the media idiots that just echo the Associated Press' mangling of reality continue you may think I'm being paid by the Obama camp for a couple of weeks.

Now. That speech.

The first half of it was all smooze and introduction like all political speeches so you have to ignore it to get to the point he's making. That's where the "quiet riot" line came from (an ebonics lesson for white folks who ain't really down: "quiet" modifies "riot" in a way similar to the way it modifies "storm" in "quiet storm"). But let's assume I'm an asshole like the AP writer and everyone that ran with it without checking to see what was said.

Let's see what Senator Obama says will remove that threat.

Small Business Administration to provide more capital minority-owned businesses.

This is deep.

More than 1,100 fans, some of whom wait for more than eight hours, wind through the aisles of the Borders State Street store in Chicago. They can hardly believe their good fortune to be in the presence of Al Gore.

“Al Gore is like a rock star,” a woman in line gushes. “He’s the new Obama.”

New presidential candidate Barack Obama might not be finished being the current Obama, but these rabid Gore fans would prefer old Obama get out of Super Al’s way.

“I’m with Obama up until Gore announces, and then Obama gets bumped one notch down,” says 28-year-old college student Cris Nolan of Mundelein, pointing to his “Gore-Obama 2008” button. “That’s the ticket we’re rooting for. All he has to do is say the word.”

“Considering this is the first time he’s testing his political leadership, I think he did pretty well,” said Ingrid W. Reed, an analyst at Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. “But insiders might read the results differently.”

A few campaign strategists who worked for the Booker slate said they underestimated the senator’s appeal and overestimated the mayor’s prowess. “Maybe he hasn’t paid enough dues yet; maybe the foundation isn’t there yet,” one worker said. “And maybe, based on the landslide he had last year, he thought he was bigger than he really is.”

After the Fight, Booker’s Top Antagonist Is Still Standing
By ANDREW JACOBS

NEWARK, June 6 — It was the kind of triumph that would fill any up-and-coming political force with glee. Mayor Cory A. Booker, who took City Hall in a landslide here last year, threw his newfound heft behind six legislative candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and found himself celebrating victory with five of them.

“Five out of six ain’t bad,” Mr. Booker crowed as he swept through the Robert Treat Hotel lobby to a ballroom full of flushed and exhausted campaign workers. “We went from having zero people supporting our agenda in Trenton to having five, which makes this a tremendous day.”

But even as supporters bounced to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” and emptied the complimentary bowls of Fritos, there was quiet hand-wringing over that sixth race, which was for the seat occupied by State Senator Ronald L. Rice, a 20-year incumbent who has long been one of the mayor’s most well-placed and vocal opponents.

According to Ben-Jacob, previous attempts to trigger the cells to create a repeating pattern of signals sent from neuron to neuron in a population—which neuroscientists believe constitutes the formation of a memory in the context of performing a task—focused on excitatory neurons. These experiments were flawed because they resulted in randomly escalated activity that does not mimic what occurs when new information is learned.

A Step Toward a Living, Learning Memory Chip
Israeli scientists imprint multiple, persistent memories on a culture of neurons, paving the way to cyborg-type machines

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others.

Not just the post, the comment thread too.

Reinventing Black Leadership
by Shavar Jeffries

The executive directorships of two of the most significant advocacy organizations in the Black community -- the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund -- are now occupied by interim directors. These organizations have a proud history; their work has been simply indispensable to advancing the political, social, and legal status of African-Americans in the Twentieth Century. The Black community could never thank them, or their outgoing directors, enough for their work to make real the rhetoric of American freedom.

But while acknowledging the successes of the past, we must confront the challenges of the present. The problems Black folk face today are different, in kind and degree, than those we faced even 25 years ago. We therefore need to reinvent our leadership class in response to the complexity of the problems we now confront. I fear, however, that our leadership too often pursues goals and strategies that are ill-suited to the contemporary challenges the masses of Black folk face. I'm reminded of the old adage that everything looks like a nail when all one has is a hammer. We thus need to aggressively re-imagine the kind of leadership the Black community requires in light of the current challenges we face. And while the specific content of that leadership, certainly, will vary depending on context, I think a reinvented Black leadership rests irreducibly on the following principles:

L.A. Unified: the school bully
A teacher's inside look at the district's aggressive campaign to keep Locke High School from going charter.
By Bruce William Smith
BRUCE WILLIAM SMITH teaches English at Locke High School.
June 7, 2007

I AM ONE OF THE LEADERS of the teacher revolt at Locke High School. Locke was, for many years, the ashcan of the Los Angeles Unified School District, mismanaged in every way. Things have improved here, but not enough, and efforts to do more have been frustrated by district interference.

Now, after a majority of teachers expressed a desire to break away from the LAUSD, the district has revealed to everyone how little regard it has for teachers, majority rule or state law.

The technique was believed to be in wide use by corporations that have substantial profits offshore and are also buying back large amounts of their own shares to return value to investors. I.B.M. appears to be the only company that publicly disclosed its use of the tax shelter....

On May 31, the Internal Revenue Service issued a notice declaring that the technique could not be used to eliminate taxes. The notice said it would disallow any transactions beginning on that day.

I.B.M.’s transaction, and any others, would be vulnerable in an audit because of a principle known as economic substance. Transactions that do nothing but eliminate taxes are disregarded if tax auditors discover them....

I.R.S. Moves to Close Tax Shelter Shortly After I.B.M. Uses It to Save $1.6 Billion
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

For the second time in 12 months, the government has moved to block a tax shelter that had been aimed at converting billions of dollars of corporate profits, on which taxes have yet to be paid, into profits that will never be taxed.

The move by the Internal Revenue Service came two days after International Business Machines said that it used the technique to avoid paying $1.6 billion in income taxes.