Prometheus 6

The original is a cleaner copy, though.

“It’s like when Tony Bennett suddenly became hip again after the kids discovered him,” observed Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist and former Kennedy aide who attended the rally. “It’s the same thing with Kennedy. He’s MTV now. And instead of jazz clubs, he’s doing the Hollywood Bowl.”

Kennedy Revels in Limelight as He Stumps for Obama
By MARK LEIBOVICH

SANTA FE, N.M. — “Are you glad to see me, Santa Fe?” Edward M. Kennedy roared.

“Yes!” Santa Fe roared back. There were whoops and “Viva Kennedy” chants from the overflow crowd at a community college. A man in the back held an “Obama 2008, Kennedy 2016” sign. “Estoy muy contento estar aquí en Santa Fe con usted,” Mr. Kennedy said in perfectly accented Spanish — that is, perfectly Boston-accented Spanish. (“I am very happy to be here in Santa Fe with you, ” he was trying to say, somewhat imperfectly.)

Bob Herbert is so on point with this

There is a surge of excitement running through Democratic voters and public officials in this election cycle that has seldom been seen in recent decades.

This is the stuff of which overconfidence is made.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats are a lock to win in November has somehow forgotten about Karl Rove, the right-wing radio network, the hanging chads of 2000, the Swift boat debacle, the intimidation of black voters in Florida, the long lines of Democratic voters standing forlornly in the rain in Ohio, and on and on.

Those who may think that a woman named Clinton or a black man named Obama will have an easy time winning the White House this year should switch to something less disorienting than whatever it is they’re smoking.

Maybe the blogosphere has actually won, and it just can’t take “yes” for an answer. A final possibility is that the blogosphere’s preferred candidates have had trouble getting traction because the other candidates have moved in the blogosphere’s direction. This is most especially true on the Iraq war, where Senator Clinton — who took the most grief from the blogging left for her 2002 vote for the war — came to a position on the war that differed only modestly from that of Mr. Edwards.

Speaking Truth Without Power
By Ron Klain

Obama may have the best chance to win big in November and receive a broad mandate. But if he were to make mistakes, he may also be more likely than the others to lose big.

Electronic Village linked to the NAACP Presidential Candidate Questionnaire.

The questionnaire contains questions and answers from Clinton and Obama on issues of crucial importance to African Americans. In each case, the NAACP asked the candidates to limit their responses to 200 words or less.

via The Unbound Movement and African-American Opinion.

The last time the United States had an open election was 1952. My grandfather was pursued by both political parties and eventually became the Republican nominee. Despite being a charismatic war hero, he did not have an easy ride to the nomination. He went on to win the presidency -- with the indispensable help of a "Democrats for Eisenhower" movement. These crossover voters were attracted by his pledge to bring change to Washington and by the prospect that he would unify the nation.

It is in this great tradition of crossover voters that I support Barack Obama's candidacy for president. If the Democratic Party chooses Obama as its candidate, this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected and encourage him to seek strategic solutions to meet America's greatest challenges. To be successful, our president will need bipartisan help.

Given Obama's support among young people, I believe that he will be most invested in defending the interests of these rising generations and, therefore, the long-term interests of this nation as a whole. Without his leadership, our children and grandchildren are at risk of growing older in a marginalized country that is left to its anger and divisions. Such an outcome would be an unacceptable legacy for any great nation.

Why I'm Backing Obama
By Susan Eisenhower
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A15

Forty-seven years ago, my grandfather Dwight D. Eisenhower bid farewell to a nation he had served for more than five decades. In his televised address, Ike famously coined the term "military-industrial complex," and he offered advice that is still relevant today. "As we peer into society's future," he said, we "must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

Today we are engaged in a debate about these very issues. Deep in America's heart, I believe, is the nagging fear that our best years as a nation may be over. We are disliked overseas and feel insecure at home. We watch as our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil liberties are eroded. Crises in energy, health care and education threaten our way of life and our ability to compete internationally. There are also the issues of a costly, unpopular war; a long-neglected infrastructure; and an aging and increasingly needy population.

I am not alone in worrying that my generation will fail to do what my grandfather's did so well: Leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found.

Media coverage of race in the campaign has been heavy to the point of being ridiculous, but it has also prompted many Americans -- at least those outside the media-political bubble of Washington -- to have more honest conversations about race among themselves and with themselves. This can't be bad....

The "Race doesn't matter" crowd would probably disagree....It would be more accurate, however, if they simply added "to me" at the end of the phrase: "Race doesn't matter to me."...

It's a profound sentiment that meets head-on the question of why race should matter at all. In principle it should not, and that's why the young people who don't believe it matters are so admirable. Imagine their mantra sweeping the country on Super Tuesday and riding a wave until Election Day.

But neither their collective energy nor a million continuous chants could make their mantra true. Their candidate is neither "post-racial" nor "race neutral" or "colorless." He has not transcended race: The matter of whether such a thing is even possible is a question for another day. He is just an extraordinary black man, but a black man nonetheless, who happens to be running for president. The young, white people who support him happen to love him regardless of his race, much as many black people love him because of it.

Race Matters. So Does Hope.
By Marjorie Valbrun
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A15

Let's be honest. Race does matter. Everyone knows it. Yes, in a perfect world it wouldn't matter, but ours is far from perfect, and the current American political climate is even more so.

Nevertheless, the recent images of college students, most of them white, chanting "Race doesn't matter" at Barack Obama campaign rallies have been heartwarming. The young people have embraced this mantra and buoyed their candidate's vote tallies in the primaries with earnest and youthful idealism. By doing so, they've signaled that they are looking beyond race and choosing a standard-bearer who can redefine and realign the country's political-racial landscape.

Admirable? Yes. Impressive? Absolutely. Moving? How could it not be? Racially transcendent? Not a chance.

via Racism Review

In Depth: David Levering Lewis

Upcoming Schedule

• Sunday, February 3, at 12:00 PM
• Monday, February 4, at 12:00 AM
• Saturday, February 9, at 9:00 AM
• Monday, February 11, at 3:00 AM

About the Program

David Levering Lewis joins Book TV for a live, In Depth interview on Sunday, February 3. Mr. Levering Lewis is the author of two biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois, "W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race" and "W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963" that have each won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. He is the author and editor of several other books, including "King: A  Biography," "The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader," "When Harlem Was in Vogue" and his most recently published title "God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215." David Levering Lewis is currently a history professor at New York University.

Social Search
A new website will offer personalized search results based on the user's social network.
By Erica Naone

People are flocking to online social networks. Facebook, for example, claims an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make these networks more useful--and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users' online contacts (see "Building onto Facebook's Platform"), and Yahoo announced plans for an e-mail service that shares data with social-networking sites. (See "Yahoo's Plan for a Smarter In-Box.") Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

I didn't lift the whole post this time, but I feel the need to establish that not all Black women in interracial relationships are batshit crazy...not even most. In fact, I'll be discussing this post this weekend, I think.

Are White Men Saviors?

It seems in the BW/WM IR blogosphere, white men are this:

and black men are this:

I have been going to a black of pro BW/WM IR and black female empowerment blogs as of late and I have noticed this trend. The obsession with DBR black men. DBR= Damaged Beyond Repair. Why are we not concerned about avoiding DBR men whether they are white, black, asian, and anything in between? Why is it on pro IR sites we are even discussing black men? Why do we feel BM are the downfall of BW?

The most challenging goal, says Romesberg, will be to incorporate unnatural base pairs into the genetic code of organisms. "We want to import these into a cell, study RNA trafficking, and in the longest term, expand the genetic code and 'evolvability' of an organism."...

"It requires a long effort by multiple laboratories, but I think ultimately it will lead to some important tools," [Eric Kool] says. "The ability to encode amino acids with unnatural base pairs will be quite powerful when it comes." 

Artificial letters added to life's alphabet
13:07 30 January 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Robert Adler

Two artificial DNA "letters" that are accurately and efficiently replicated by a natural enzyme have been created by US researchers. Adding the two artificial building blocks to the four that naturally comprise DNA could allow wildly different kinds of genetic engineering, they say.

Eventually, the researchers say, they may be able to add them into the genetic code of living organisms.

Dallas South interviews Barbara Trepagnier author of ‘Silent Racism’

Part Two of Dallas South interview with Barbara Trepagnier, author of Silent Racism

You know what?

Hillary-Hating Uber Alles: Karl Rove's Wet-Dream Come True At Last!!!

That shit ain't any more convincing than Imus' Wet-Dream Comes True would be. I happened to think Hillary was a fine Senator.

But Billary went divisive and put me and mine on the far side of the divide. NONE of the other candidates did the same to women. If we're not to judge based on race or gender, all that is left is policy and tactics. And on tactics, Billary fails.

Got some spam posted to the comments today; I traced it back to India...damn near block the whole subcontinent my own self...

Faulty cable blacks out internet for millions
Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
The Guardian,
Thursday January 31 2008

Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.

The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.

Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.

“It starts with friendship and loyalty,” Mr. Dinkins said. “The Clintons helped me and they have been supportive of me. She has been an outstanding United States senator. To be honest, I don’t know Obama. I’ve met him just once, when he made that great speech at the convention. He is a bright young man. I’m not against him — I’m for Hillary.”

This is a legitimate reason to support The Clintons. I'm not mad at you about this, either.

Mr. Dinkins, who served from 1990 through 1993, is running to be a delegate for Senator Clinton.

But this...

He said he periodically laments how the race for the Democratic nomination has been viewed by some voters purely through the prism of race and gender.

...I wish you hadn't said. As it it too late, I'd really like to ask you if it could have been otherwise, given Billary's purposeful racialization of the South Carolina primary. 

Ethnic Press Covers the Race With Gusto
By Fernanda Santos

Will Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama sway Irish-Americans? What about The Irish Voice’s endorsement of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? Could Mr. Obama become a household name among Chinese-American voters? Will American relations with Russia and Pakistan affect immigrant voters here? And can any Republican contender distance himself from Bush administration policies in the eyes of Arab-Americans?

These questions have not figured high — or figured at all — on televised debates and in the mainstream media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. But they are being asked in New York City, which is not only a media capital, but also the ethnic media capital, host to about 200 periodicals and broadcast outlets in dozens of languages — including Bengali, Tagalog, Dari, Latvian, Yiddish, Malayalam and Hungarian.

The story of the Net began with ultimate anonymity and the unfettered id liberation it catalyzed: A desire for anything — pet sex, pewter figurines, the Reform Party — could be discreetly indulged in the company of like-minded, faceless lurkers. Then came chapter two, the death, or rather the suicide, of privacy

How Facebook Exposed Us All as Freaks
By Scott Brown
01.18.08 | 6:00 PM

So you're celebrating Valentine's Day in the traditional fashion — bucket of chicken, webcam, gorilla mask — and thinking, "Good thing I'm wearing this gorilla mask! Otherwise, my new pal fortyishhooffetishist might recognize me from Facebook!"

Luckily, that sort of antiquated situational irony happens only in meatspace (and bad sitcoms), never online. The Internet permits the happy fracture of our messy selves into more acceptable (or at least internally consistent) personae: the perky, polo-knit front we put up on Facebook, the literate sexologist we keep meaning to delete from Nerve. Sure, the self-segmentation has its risks: We all know the cyburban myths about unwitting father-daughter flirtations on MySpace, and only the most brazen craigslist cruiser hasn't considered the possibility that anon-24563674 is, in fact, Ted from sales. But these are random outliers, News of the Weird, the comedy of probability. To paraphrase Walt Whitman's famous Casual Encounters post: The Web is large. It contains multitudes. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well, then, we contradict ourselves. It's an awfully big Web. What are the odds we'll cross paths?

Getting better every day — and not due to random probability. As social networking challenges pay-dating and anonymous trolling as the dominant mode of Web interaction, our schizoid chickens are coming home to roost. 

Prockter noted "there are some features we haven't been able to explain yet."

Example No. 1 is what scientists are calling "the spider." It is in the middle of a basin formed billions of years ago when space junk bombarded an infant Mercury.

Mariner had only seen part of the crater. When Messenger took a look with sharper cameras and a better angle, it photographed this odd central plateau jutting up, about half a mile high with dozens of tiny ridges radiating out.

It is as if "something is pushed up," said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber, who is part of the science team. 

NASA Photos Reveal Mercury Is Shrinking
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet with scars from volcanic eruptions and a birthmark shaped like a spider.

Some of the 1,213 photos taken by NASA's Messenger probe and unveiled Wednesday help support the case that ancient volcanoes dot Mercury and that it is shrinking as it gets older, forming wrinkle-like ridges. But other images are surprising and puzzling.

The spidery shape captured in a photo is "unlike anything we've seen anywhere in the solar system," said mission chief scientist Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The image shows what looks like a large crater with faint lines radiating out from it.

Feds accuse NYPD detective of conspiring with drug dealers
By TOM HAYS
Associated Press Writer

In the latest case, internal affairs and federal investigators say they unearthed evidence that Batista was part of a drug-dealing operation run by old friends. His attorney, James Moschella, admitted his client knew the dealers and sometimes used them as informants, but said he never committed crimes with them.

On Wednesday, Detective Wayne Taylor and a woman accused of working as his partner pleaded not guilty in Queens to kidnapping, promoting prostitution, assault and endangering the welfare of a child. Prosecutors allege the pair took their 13-year-old victim to parties throughout the city, where about 20 men paid to have sex with her before she escaped to her family.

Microsoft views Yahoo as its best chance to thwart Google, which has leveraged its leadership in Internet search and advertising to emerge as an increasingly serious threat to the world's largest software maker's persuasive influence on how people interact with computers....

Despite an aggressive push in recent years, Microsoft's online advertising expansion hasn't paid off. Last week, the Redmond, Wash.-based company reported a 79 percent jump in its overall profit, but its online division's loss widened to $245 million.

And Yahoo has been struggling to attract more advertising even though its Web site attracts one of the biggest audiences. The Sunnyvale-based company's profit has declined for five consecutive quarters, prompting plans to cut 1,000 jobs later this month, a 7 percent reduction of its 14,300-employee work force.

Besides helping to boost its online ad revenue, Microsoft believes it could mine more profit from Yahoo by jettisoning workers and eliminating overlapping operations....

The fate of Yahoo's brand also is unclear if Microsoft takes over. Both Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, hailed Yahoo's strong brand value but didn't commit to keeping the name alive.

Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo
Friday February 1, 10:40 am ET
By Michael Liedtke, AP Business Writer
Microsoft Makes Unexpected $44.6B Bid for Yahoo; Internet Icon Is Studying It

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.'s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets. The Justice Department says it is interested in reviewing antitrust issues associated with it.

The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, seizes on Yahoo's weakness while Microsoft tries to muscle up in a high-stakes battle with Google likely to define the technology landscape for years to come.

In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will "carefully and promptly" study Microsoft's bid.

Diabetes sucks because it won't sit still. I'm compelled to adjust my insulin levels this year, and I woke up at 7 am with the second lowest blood sugar level I ever recorded. How low? I ate breakfast, took no insulin, wen't back to bed (although low didn't feel half as bad as it would have last year) and woke up with a blood sugar level on the low side of normal...five points less and it would STILL have been low.

This is going to be a light day, Black History Month not withstanding. I got two things I want to write, a couple of links I may get to, and the intention of going to ringShout's open house tonight. I was supposed to meet Eisa Ulen last News and Notes appearance but I phoned that one in...

Nasty weather today, though...my fault, I pulled some strings for tomorrow and forgot the open house today...