Prometheus 6

Under the heading, "HOW TO PRAY," he listed all 31 verses of Psalm 109, in which King David appeals to divine justice. Drake provided his congregation the King James Version of the psalm, including Verse 9, which says: Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

On the advice of his attorneys, Drake has since declined to be interviewed.

Prayer for opponent's misfortune finds little support
Responding to pastor's controversial statement, authorities on various faiths see little justification for wishing harm to befall enemies.
By K. Connie Kang
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 25, 2007 

Until last week, "imprecatory prayer" was not in many people's vocabularies.

But then the Rev. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, urged his supporters to use Psalm 109 to focus prayers directed at the "enemies of God" -- including the leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Drake was urging the use of imprecatory prayer -- prayers for another's misfortune or for vengeance against God's enemies. Now such prayer is the talk of blogs and letters to the editor.

Southeast Queens Is Split Over Makeover Proposal
By ELLEN BARRY

When Gloria Black looks into Jamaica’s future, she sees a grand restoration: Department stores will move into spaces where discount jewelers sell removable gold teeth; vacant storefronts, their windows taped up with yellowing newspaper, will fill one by one. The prosperous downtown of the 1960s — the one that drew families from Harlem and Brooklyn and South Carolina — will return to southeast Queens.

Crystal Ervin sees something different. If Jamaica is reshaped by the city’s rezoning, she fears, the single-family home her parents bought in 1953 will be jammed up against a six-story building. Parking, already a headache, will become a nightmare. And the modest middle-class dream of her mother, who is now 85, will be taken away.

That's all that need be said. 

Booker responded immediately. "We do not want people coming into our community and exploiting our pain for political advantage," he said.

Giuliani Boasts of Surplus; Reality Is More Complex
By MICHAEL COOPER

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been broadcasting radio advertisements in Iowa and other states far from the city he once led stating that as mayor of New York, he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.”

The assertion, which Mr. Giuliani has repeated on the trail as he has promoted his fiscal conservatism, is somewhat misleading, independent fiscal monitors said. In fact, Mr. Giuliani left his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, with a bigger deficit than the one Mr. Giuliani had to deal with when he arrived in 1994. And that deficit would have been large even if the city had not been attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He inherited a gap, and he left a gap for his successor,” Ronnie Lowenstein, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that monitors the city budget, said of Mr. Giuliani. “The city was budgeting as though the good times were not going to end, but sooner or later they always do.”

"The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Njeri.

While it was not unusual for the monkeys to harass the women and be less afraid of them than they are of the men, according to the Kenyan Wildlife Service, the service had never before heard of monkeys making sexually explicit gestures as a form of communication to humans.

Wild Vervet Monkeys Wreak Havoc in Kenya
Posted on: August 24, 2007 12:43 PM, by "GrrlScientist"

But what if, instead of choking the economy, the no-match blitz only drives more of it underground? Some companies will fire their illegal workers and downsize or move. Others will fire and then rehire them -- more deviously or completely off the books. Shady labor contractors will proliferate. Identity theft will skyrocket. Employers who have tried to play by the rules -- asking to see workers' papers, filling out the required forms -- will suffer, while those who deliberately flout the law will thrive and multiply.

The unintended consequences: more underground hiring, more sub-market wages, more mistreatment of immigrants, less tax revenue (most immigrants with fake papers pay taxes -- $5 billion to $10 billion a year in Social Security taxes) and a less regulated, more dangerous workplace for everyone.

California without a Mexican
Workplace enforcement without immigration reform will cripple the economy -- and it will be Joe Public's fault.
By Tamar Jacoby
August 25, 2007 

The 2004 film "A Day Without a Mexican" was a political satire: an exaggerated fantasy about what would happen in California if all the immigrant workers suddenly disappeared. But now it seems that life may imitate art. Federal immigration authorities are readying a new enforcement tool that could indeed, if applied effectively, all but cripple the California economy.

A new fence? A massive influx of Border Patrol agents? A fleet of airborne drones? No. The new weapon is a simple two-page letter that will go out next month to companies whose employees' names and Social Security numbers do not match those on record at the Social Security Administration.

Race: Studies have found that the maternal death rate for black women is at least three times greater than is it is for whites. Black women are more susceptible to complications such as high blood pressure and are more likely to get inadequate prenatal care.

Quality of care: Three studies indicate that at least 40 percent of maternal deaths could have been prevented.

US childbirth mortality rate increases
Obesity, rise in caesareans eyed as factors
By Mike Stobbe, Associated Press  |  August 25, 2007

ATLANTA -- US women are dying in childbirth at the highest rate in decades, new government figures show. Though the risk of death is very small, specialists say increasing maternal obesity and a jump in caesarean sections are partly to blame.

Some number crunchers said a change in how such deaths are reported may also be a factor.

"Those of us who look at this a lot say it's probably a little bit of both," said Dr. Jeffrey King, an obstetrician who led a recent New York state review of maternal deaths.

...HIV/AIDS isn't killing as many people as it did back then because of advances in treatment and public awareness about the spread of the disease.

One interesting similarity between the two studies is that Latinos in San Francisco are healthier than would be predicted by their socioeconomic status, Aragon said.

"It's something that's observed and true, but nobody's actually figured out why," he said. "It may be stronger family and social networks and, in general, a better diet."

Aragon said that another fact that jumped out at him is that African Americans lose more years of life to just about all the top causes of death - including heart disease, strokes, various cancers, drug overdoses, alcohol abuse disorders and diabetes - than city residents of other races. White residents lose more years of life to suicide and colon cancer than African Americans.

 

San Francisco tracks biggest killers of its ethnic groups
Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 24, 2007

African Americans living in San Francisco lose more years of life to just about every possible cause of death than city residents of other racial backgrounds, and violence robs African American men of more years of life than any other cause of death.

"We're receiving disturbing reports that there may have been some conscious human error involved. There may have been some malfeasance," said Raymond B. Seed, a civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley who was then heading an inquiry financed by the National Science Foundation. "We're pursuing evidence of those stories."

"Conscious human error"? What the fuck kind of Economic Correctness is that?

Ex-Army Corps official pleads guilty to rigging New Orleans bid
By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Times Staff Writer
8:43 PM PDT, August 23, 2007 

A former employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pleaded guilty Thursday to rigging a bid on repairs to levees in the New Orleans area, part of a broader Justice Department investigation into procurement fraud in levee reconstruction.

Clinton: Terrorist attack would help GOP
By Alexander Mooney
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- She says she is the Democrat best equipped to fight terrorists, but White House hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton told New Hampshire voters Thursday that another attack on the United States would likely help Republican candidates at the polls.

"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' " Clinton, a New York Democrat, told a house party in Concord, according to the New York Post and The Associated Press and confirmed by her campaign.

"But, if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world."

Clinton added that if such a scenario occurred, she is the best Democratic presidential candidate "to deal with that."

Wingate agreed to assign Seale to a prison where his health needs can be met. He has cancer, bone spurs and other health problems.

Reputed Klansman sentenced in 1964 Miss. case
From the Associated Press
11:25 AM PDT, August 24, 2007 

JACKSON, Miss. — James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was sentenced toay to three life terms for his role in the 1964 abduction and murder of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi.

Seale, 72, was convicted in June on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-olds who disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964.

The young men's bodies were found more than two months later in a backwater of the Mississippi River.

Seale showed no emotion as U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate read his sentence.

I feel the appeal of this model

(via The Fishbowl, and the guy whose actual decision process it represents)

On the other hand

The purpose of this diagram is not to be mean, not to be a bringdown. We're not trying to make sensitive little girls depressed. The purpose of this diagram is to convince you earnestly and in all sincerity that there is NO HOPE so that you will be transformed by the cold hard truth. Once you accept the reality of NO HOPE you can begin to approach your life in a new way. Now you can take your head out of the clouds, quit looking to some illusion of a perfect future [P6: or past], and start living in the present [P6: keeping in mind the edges of now are contextual, and a little blurry at best]. Knowing that there is, in fact, NO HOPE, and feeling this great realization wioth your whole being will slam you back to the real world like you've never been before. Come on! You can handle it!

(linked because posting one big enough to examine would screw up the layout , and both via Boing Boing )

Though my physics metaphor looks more like cosmology than quantum mechanics (which, because he'll be dealing in probabilities, is what he's drifting toward).

What's the idea? Think pattterns, not people

Can we can ever learn to understand people and societies, businesses and other groups of all sorts, the same way we do atoms and molecules and the physical matter they make up? Are we ever going to have something like "social physics"? For centuries, philosophers and social scientists of all stripes have come up with thousands of explanations as to why we cannot; why people are essentially different and somehow stand apart from the rest of nature. The very idea of social physics, they say, is an absurdity and that's all there is to it.

Everyone Agrees
An oft-heard opinion seems popular even if it comes from only one person
By Melinda Wenner

With the 2008 presidential election only a year away, the merits of each candidate are becoming a common topic of conversation. But how do our brains, after hearing so many different opinions, gauge the popularity of each one? New research findings suggest that we judge a viewpoint’s prevalence by how familiar it is—regardless of whether we have heard it five times from one person or once each from five different people.

Unspoken Accents
Nonverbal language reveals your roots
By Siri Carpenter

Just as an Irish brogue or a Minnesota lilt betrays one’s background, facial expressions and body language can also reveal our cultural origins. According to new research, such “nonverbal accents” also provoke stereotyped perceptions of others’ ­personalities.

Many researchers regard nonverbal behavior to be a universal language—wherever you go, a smile looks like a smile. But a growing body of research suggests that where we hang or hats shapes both how we display emotion and how we receive it.

The Hidden Power of Culture
The society in which we live influences the way our brain perceives the world
By Corey Binns

In one study, psychologists showed people 200 complex scenes, such as an elephant in a jungle or an airplane flying over a city, while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The team, led by Denise C. Park of the University of Illinois, studied young and elderly subjects from the U.S. and Singapore. For Westerners of all ages, the images triggered activity in a part of the brain asso­ciated with object recognition called the lateral occipital region, whereas the same object-associated areas were not activated in the older Asians’ brains.

I have felt hatred for someone only once in my life. I'm not talking anger or jealousy...I'm talking about hatred detached from any other emotion. Cool, detached, factually supported hatred. Looking back on it, it was kind of empowering but I felt a lot better once I was away from the situation and I'm really not looking forward to feeling that way again.

Being human, however, I can feel that way again. And one sure way to take me there is to inundate me with your hostility toward everything you think I am. When every analysis you make has "Black people have done something bad" and "Black people's benefit means my loss" and I hear it from you daily, I will probably come to hate you.

So I don't listen to right wing talk radio.

He also cautioned that reports of people going back to their homes were overstated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful owners back.

“They were reporting that people went back, but they didn’t report that people left again,” Mr. Tschannen said. He added that Iraqis “hear things are better, go back to collect remuneration and pick up an additional suitcase and leave again. It is not a permanent return in most cases.”

More Iraqis Are Said to Flee Since Troop Increase
By JAMES GLANZ and STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 — The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist once put it, is to get America back to the way it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over,” getting rid of “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party’s electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity....

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.

[TS] Seeking Willie Horton
By PAUL KRUGMAN

So now Mitt Romney is trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And thereby hangs a tale — the tale, in fact, of American politics past and future, and the ultimate reason Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority was a foolish fantasy.

Willie Horton, for those who don’t remember the 1988 election, was a convict from Massachusetts who committed armed robbery and rape after being released from prison on a weekend furlough program. He was made famous by an attack ad, featuring a menacing mugshot, that played into racial fears. Many believe that the ad played an important role in George H.W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis.

Now some Republicans are trying to make similar use of the recent murder of three college students in Newark, a crime in which two of the suspects are Hispanic illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo flew into Newark to accuse the city’s leaders of inviting the crime by failing to enforce immigration laws, while Newt Gingrich declared that the “war here at home” against illegal immigrants is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Civil Rights Division Head Resigning at Justice Dept.
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — The head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division announced Thursday that he was resigning, the latest in a long string of departures from the department in the midst of a furor over the leadership of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The department said that the resignation of the official, Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim, had nothing to do with the recent controversies over Mr. Gonzales’s performance, and that Mr. Kim had been planning his departure for months.

Baptists for Brownback

Making Black Girls “Ladylike”

Humor me for a moment, if we think about this factory model of education seriously, is it possible that schools are a site of (re)production? Do schools try to make certain type of students? What are the implications of this process? A new Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) report found that teachers tend to view the behavior of black girls as not “ladylike” and therefore focus disciplinary action on encouraging behaviors like passivity, deference, and bodily control at the expense of curiosity, outspokenness, and assertiveness.

Based on two years’ observation at a Texas middle school, the Ohio University study found that teachers’ class-and-race-based assumptions of black femininity made them more likely to discourage behaviors and characteristics that lead to class involvement and educational success.

The three-study series also found that one in four engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder. Foreign nationals residing in the United States were named as inventors or co-inventors in 26 percent of international patent applications filed in America last year. That compares with 8 percent in 1998.

A Solution to the High-Tech Immigrant Challenge
By Steve Lohr

No one really doubts the “immigrant dividend” to America’s high-tech economy. But a new academic study — the third in a series — details the benefits and the threat of a “reverse brain drain.”

Yet one of the authors of the new study has a solution that is not in step with the high-tech lobby. He advocates getting rid of the H-1B visa, the temporary work permit for skilled workers.

Asked if ADL could still work with her on other projects, the group’s national director Abraham Foxman replied, “Absolutely. She gave herself a body blow making her unacceptable as principal of Khalil Gibran, but she continues to be an important person in interfaith relations. She still has her credentials.”

But Kaplan, director of JCRC’s community coalition building initiative, was circumspect. “We’ve had a long relationship, and we’ve been able to work together,” he said. “I imagine we will find opportunities to work together in the future.”

Asked if his constituency might have problems accepting her now, he replied, “That’s a possibility.”

Jewish Shootout Over Arab School
Fall of Jewish-supported principal exposes bitter fault line on approach to Muslims.
Larry Cohler-Esses - Editor At Large

It was, exulted Middle East Forum executive director Daniel Pipes, a “clarion call” that had gotten “national attention.” 

No, protested Rabbi Michael Paley: “This was a high-tech lynching.”

When Debbie Almontaser resigned under duress last week as principal of a new middle school in Brooklyn emphasizing Arabic language and culture, her departure was, among many things, a victory for a faction of the Jewish community that had waged a months-long battle against the school, its purpose and Almontaser herself.

This week, with the Khalil Gibran International Academy still on track to open next month, they were already planning the next stage of their battle — to persuade the New York City Department of Education to derail the school as Almontaser shuffled off stage, to be replaced by a Jewish woman.