Prometheus 6

The real reason I left my career in tech  

The real reason I left my marketing career in tech is because I got fed up with feeling like a sexual target every time I went to work, and especially at tradeshows and conferences where you add to the picture booze, partying, and “what happens on the road stays on the road” mentality. Since geeks like PowerPoint slides, here is a slide I did that illustrates just one example of how many times an attractive young woman working during one day or week at a technology tradeshow can get hit on, sexualized, and gawked at.

My own memoir, "That Mean Old Yesterday," actually mirrors some scenes that Seltzer described in her bogus book -- being sexually and physically abused, carrying my possessions in trash bags from foster home to foster home, enduring painful hair-braiding rituals, handling illegal guns.

But unlike hers, my book was scrupulously vetted by my publisher. I was asked to provide police reports, medical records, witness statements and the names of social workers and foster parents. And unlike Seltzer, I actually had to sit down and meet my editor in person. Nothing I wrote was taken at face value. 

The Rap on Whites Who Try to Act Black
By Stacey P. Patton
Sunday, March 16, 2008; B02

It was a tale of sex, violence and a young girl crossing the color line. It was raw, gripping, sad and triumphant, tracing the heroine's successful escape from an environment of abandonment, abuse, poverty and gangs. It was supposed to be true.

Not a word of it was.

The recent media frenzy over Margaret Seltzer's "Love and Consequences," yet another hoax memoir published by yet another respectable publishing house, has subsided, but the perplexing questions remain: Why would a writer take the huge risk of publishing an easily discredited story, and what enticed a respectable publishing house to buy and promote it?

As a former foster child who actually lived the reality of some of the kinds of black dysfunction that Seltzer put forth as her own experience, I find the answer in a long history of white Americans' voyeuristic fascination with -- and perhaps sometimes even envy of -- black people.

"We're on a knife's edge," said Eugene White, an economics professor at Rutgers University who studies financial crises. "The danger is if people's confidence is lost in a place like Bear Stearns, no one will lend to anybody."

But while the Fed may have contained the immediate crisis, the move reinforced widening anxiety over the health of other banks and investment funds exposed to the credit meltdown. Markets tumbled in the hours after the funding plan was announced, with the Dow Jones industrial average finishing the day down 1.60 percent, or nearly 195 points. 

Fed Comes To Rescue As Wall St. Giant Slips
Bear Stearns Gets Emergency Funds Via J.P. Morgan
By Neil Irwin and Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 15, 2008; A01

The Federal Reserve took the extraordinary step yesterday of providing emergency funding to one of Wall Street's venerable firms, Bear Stearns, after it ran out of cash to repay its lenders.

The Fed used a little-known power it last exercised in the 1960s to stem a run on Bear Stearns that could have sent multibillion-dollar losses cascading across the world financial system, causing more failures on Wall Street and threatening to choke off global economic growth.

The Fed's action, arranged in a series of pre-dawn deliberations yesterday, is one of the most significant government efforts to save a private firm in modern times. The nearest parallels are the New York Fed-engineered buyout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the bailout of Continental Illinois Bank in 1984.

Critics characterized the Fed's move as a bailout that inappropriately intrudes on the free market and could lead banks to keep taking risks like those that imperiled Bear Stearns. Other analysts said the action was necessary, given the precarious state of world financial markets.

A New Economic Order
Why the Downturn Had to Happen
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2008; D01

Retail sales plummeting. The dollar at a new low against other world currencies. A 60 percent jump in U.S. home foreclosures. A major investment fund going kaput.

This is what a reordering of the world economy looks like in real time.

Don't think of yesterday's economic news as discrete events. They are small pieces of a much bigger reversal in a series of imbalances that made Americans feel richer than they were and created unsustainable distortions in the world economy that are now righting themselves.

Americans are consuming less, and their houses and other assets are becoming less valuable. Painful as they may be, in the long run, both trends must happen to restore sustainable growth. But in the short run, they are wrenching changes that are probably causing a recession.

FBI Probes Va. Company's Workers in House Swindle
Lawsuits Outline Scheme to Forge Deeds to Steal Vacant Properties
By Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13, 2008; D01

The FBI is investigating whether employees of a now-defunct Northern Virginia mortgage company were involved in what several lawsuits allege was a scheme to steal vacant houses by forging deeds, according to people familiar with the probe.

The people under investigation worked for 1st American Mortgage of Vienna, which boasted that it delivered "honest expert advice." The company, which operated about half a dozen satellite offices in the Washington area, went out of business last fall after eight years. The former chief executive's $2 million house in a gated community in McLean has been foreclosed upon.

As federal investigators step up efforts to crack down on irregularities in the real estate industry, the lawsuits and FBI probe provide a glimpse into some of the practices that flourished before the housing boom dissolved.

Senator Clinton Isn't A Republican, As Far As I Know 

What's more shocking than the psychonaut tenacity of the whisper pandemic about Senator Obama is that it's far more plausible that Senator Clinton is a Republican Manchurian Candidate.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Senator Clinton is really a Republican. As far as I know, and I take her at her word.

But just for the hell of it, let's read the record.

The lawyer for the call girl linked to the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer lashed out at the media on Friday for thrusting the 22-year-old woman into the "public glare" without her consent and publishing revealing photos.

Since her identity was disclosed, newspapers and Web sites have splashed photos of Ashley Alexandra Dupre in suggestive poses on front and inside pages. Dupre was known as "Kristen" in court documents accusing Spitzer of paying thousands for prostitutes' services.

When jobs disappear, workers are supposed to be able to collect unemployment compensation, a program begun in the New Deal era and a critical part of the social safety net. But over the last thirty-five years, unemployment compensation programs have been cut back and made more inaccessible. At this point, only 35 percent of unemployed workers actually collect these benefits. 

The War and the Working Class
by MICHAEL ZWEIG

[from the March 31, 2008 issue]

Click here to see the trade-offs the war has imposed on one working-class city alongside the bounty the war has bestowed on the CEOs of the top military contracting companies.

The government treats its soldiers the way most corporations treat their workforce--as an invisible, disrespected, disposable means to an end that is contrary to workers' interests. Members of the armed forces come mainly and disproportionately from the working class and from small-town and rural America, where opportunities are hard to come by. The "economic draft" operates, in effect, to recruit young people from these communities as they sign up to gain job skills, experience and educational opportunities absent from their civilian lives.

A number of parallel experiences link the lives of soldiers with those of working-class civilians, going well beyond their common discipline of following orders. Consider "stop-loss" as an example. The military reserves the right to extend the deployment time and active-duty status of every soldier beyond the service dates prescribed in their enlistment contracts and mobilization papers. Most soldiers were unaware of this as the Iraq War intensified, but by the start of 2006 the military had enforced its stop-loss provision on 50,000 of them. Outraged soldiers and their families challenged these extensions in court, but they were upheld.

Meanwhile, in the civilian economy, one out of every five full-time hourly employees worked mandatory overtime--the requirement by management that the worker stay on the job beyond the normal quitting time. Many workers want overtime for the money, but they generally resent being forced into it, especially when it disrupts family plans or taxes their physical or mental strength. While the consequences of stop-loss are more far-reaching, the principle is the same. Both disregard the needs of the workforce and abrogate the expectations working people have of a life outside the control of their employers.

Swarm robotics work hundreds of robots into one
By Liz Tay
15 March 2008 10:12AM
Hardware

Forget the conventional notion of human-like androids; researchers are investigating large swarms of up to 10,000 miniature robots which can work together to form a single, artificial life form.

I kept thinking of poor John Stuart Mill, the original early applicant, whose father home-schooled him from the age of 3, teaching him Greek and Latin and the theories of Jeremy Bentham, but not how to feel. At the age of 20, Mill suffered a breakdown; already one of the most brilliant polemicists in England, he couldn’t say anymore what the point of it was. As he later wrote, “The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

Admission Impossible
By KEITH GESSEN

At the end of our freshman year at Harvard, my roommates and I, having done so well so far in the lottery of life, did badly in the housing lottery. We were sent to live in the Quad, a group of dorms half a mile northwest of the main campus. This was in the mid-’90s, before global warming, so on cold winter days, while our classmates rolled out of bed and into lecture with a steaming hot coffee and a warm apple fritter, we trudged through snow and wind to sit there for an hour in our wet socks. On the other hand, cut off from civilization, we had a lot of time to think. We thought about modernity, the Renaissance, etc.; we played a lot of Ping-Pong; and we considered our lives, thus far, and what Harvard meant to them. One of my friends formulated an idea. “We’ve done the hardest thing,” he said, meaning getting into Harvard. He came to be fond of this statement, and in lulls in dining hall conversation he’d return to it. “We’re 19 years old and we’ve done the hardest thing there is to do,” he’d say, and then we’d sit there, looking stupidly at one another.

In the years since, as I learned from Joie Jager-Hyman’s FAT ENVELOPE FRENZY: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize (Harper, paper, $14.95), it’s only gotten harder. A former Dartmouth admissions officer, Jager-Hyman follows five high school high-achievers trying to get into Harvard.

And it is scary.

The racist card is textbook strawmanship. As opposed to having to address whether her comments were, as Obama said, "wrongheaded" and "absurd," Ferraro gets to debate something that only she can truly judge—the contents of her heart.

It's a clever and unassailable move: How would you actually prove that Ferraro is definitively a racist?

By being clear on what racism is.

Why do U-People always think everyone is a racist?
Well, everything in America is looked at through, measured in terms of, categorized and stored by race. So we know you have thoughts and opinions about us. Then we look at everything the society produces that depicts us. We consider that to be tangible evidence of the collective attitude. So now we know that the collective opinion of our race is negative.

This is a competitive disadvantage, and when our abilities are immediately discounted to the degree that we can be made to fit people's preconceptions as a tactic, we feel the tactitician and the one who executes the tactic is racist. When the tactic succeeds, we feel those who hold the preconceptions that were played on are racist.

I didn't make this up for Gerry. And that last paragraph precisely describes what she did...and what Robert Johnson did...and what Bill Shaheen did...and what "Pig" Penn did...in fact, it's what Mrs. Bill ("To the best of my knowledge") Clinton did.

I feel totally free to refer to them as racists. They passed my preexisting test with flying colors.

Playing the Racist Card
Ferraro's comments about Obama were racist. Why can't we say that?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Posted Friday, March 14, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET

There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they're called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.

via M at Problem Chylde

There are multiple narratives of sexism and racism. Stereotypes are malleable. They can be hybridized, coded, shifted across demographics, conjoined with other isms like class or ethnic prejudice, foregrounded or backgrounded. The "trumped white woman" version of sexism, for example, ignores the degree to which Michelle Obama is often described in terms depressingly similar to those of Hillary Clinton: she's too outspoken, not domestic enough, going to tank her husband's candidacy by not knowing her place. Similarly, if few are openly hurling the N-word at Obama, what to make of Bill O'Reilly's hankering to "lynch" the missus instead? And why would anyone think that Barack Hussein "Osama--oops, I mean Obama" is getting a free pass from our new-age profiles in prejudice? There's also the complication of how we inject class into narratives of race and sex. Any black person not categorizable as "underclass" has historically been sorted into one of two categories: (a) an upper-class person whose blackness is eliminated or (b) an uppity black whose personhood is eliminated. A large shadow of that anxiety-provoking split hangs over Obama: he's the "articulate, clean" exception washed of all relation to race. And he's also the daring "race man," the opener-of-doors for whose physical safety the community prays.

Along with the increased doubts about Bill Clinton, the former president also is viewed negatively by slightly more voters than the number that have positive feelings, by 45% to 42%. That is the first time in six years that Clinton’s “negatives” have exceeded his “positives” in the poll. 

Bill Clinton Gives More Voters Doubts About Electing His Wife

Jackie Calmes reports on the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Bill Clinton plainly has had an impact on his wife’s campaign — just not the one the couple intended.

A plurality of 44% of registered voters say the fact that Hillary Clinton is married to the former president gives them reservations or makes them “very uncomfortable” about electing her, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That is up by double digits from 33% who expressed reservations or discomfiture in a Journal/NBC poll last November, just as the 2008 nominating races were about to get underway.

Been a while since I payed a lot of attention to Washington Journal. Today they opened with "Is Rev. Jeremiah Wright a legitimate Presidential campaign topic?" So many newspaper articles on him hit today, they couldn't avoid it.

A lot of Black folks made it through and I'm pretty damn pleased by most of their answers. Folks are not ducking. Many said "no" because McCain's connection to Hagee isn't challenged, because the Rev. is doing damn good work, because he not Obama...and many said yes because we need to look at this white supremacy thing, because we should look at Hagee too.

There was even a non-Black guy (I think) that was fed up with the discussion.

But this guy was far more typical of the Republican reaction.

I'll be honest...I understand why what is being presented of Rev. Wright scares a lot of white folks. That bothers me, but not for the reason you'd like it to. I invite the people who are disturbed or frightened by those fractional sermons to compare Rev. Wright's teaching to any other putatively racist teachings. I particularly invite comparison to white supremacists.

You know who they are, stop fronting.

Spence was right!

As Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett later revealed, the Republican oppo researchers knew much that Mondale evidently didn't about Ferraro and her family's connections with organized crime, dating back at least two generations, and how she had personally profited from those unsavory bonds. (Barrett and William Bastone continued to report on those links for the Voice when Ferraro ran for the Senate in 1992, discovering literally dozens of contributions and deals that involved the worst thugs in New York.)

To Ferraro, reports of her husband's criminal associations proved only the "anti-Italian" bias of the press. Her claims of ignorance about her husband's real estate business -- he rented space in lower Manhattan to a Mob porn operation and a Chinese sweatshop, among many other questionable deals -- were not entirely plausible, since she was an officer of his company and shared office space with him. There were tax problems, too, and despite a spirited performance at a press conference where she evaded as many questions as she answered, her image never quite recovered before Election Day. 

Seems Gerry is the Democratic Party's own Bernie Kerik. 

Geraldine Ferraro still needs to apologize
To fully grasp why her remarks about Obama were so outrageous, take another look at her record in Congress.
By Joe Conason

Mar. 14, 2008 | Can we please, please hear no more from Geraldine Ferraro? Unless, of course, she opens her mouth to offer an abject apology to Barack Obama, which doesn't seem to be forthcoming.

After her recent excursions into political commentary, which have so badly embarrassed her and her preferred presidential candidate, a period of discreet reflection might be advised. Unfortunately, the very first line of her embittered letter of resignation to Hillary Clinton hinted otherwise: "I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself ..."

That is fair warning, but also an opportunity to examine a living historical relic with candor instead of mere courtesy.

It is not Geraldine Ferraro's era of politics. She was the bright star in 1984 when Walter Mondale asked her to be his running mate, and the pair went on to lose 49 states to Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Ferraro has said if her name was Gerard instead of Geraldine, she never would have been given that opportunity. Of all the Americans who want to see a woman sworn in as president, Ferraro might be one of the most eager. Now that Hillary Clinton has a chance to become the Democratic nominee, Ferraro has said she gets emotional at the prospect. She doesn't want Barack Obama to ruin her thrill....

Georgetown law professor Emma Coleman Jordan, an Obama supporter who sat on the fence for a long time because she so admired Hillary Clinton, sees the Ferraro episode as "part of a systematic project" to raise Obama's negatives. "It is so sad that we've come to this," she said, "that a Democratic Party liberal [Clinton] has chosen to pick up the dirtiest tool in the political box to win. I'm sad. You can put that in a quote. But it's no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that this string of events is not an accident."

Race Tangled in the Race
Geraldine Ferraro's Pointed Campaign Discourse
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2008; C01

The debate about racial preference vs. equal opportunity has coursed through society for decades, and not smoothly. We've argued passionately about who gets admitted to college and why, who gets a job promotion and why, which company gets awarded a contract and why.

But affirmative action in pursuit of the presidency? Now, that's a new one.

According to the findings by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, the FBI tried to work around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine spying in the United States, after it twice rejected an FBI request in 2006 to obtain certain records. The court had concluded "the 'facts' were too thin" and the "request implicated the target's First Amendment rights," the report said.

But the FBI went ahead and got the records anyway by using a national security letter. The FBI's general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, told investigators it was appropriate to issue the letters in such cases because she disagreed with the court's conclusions. 

FBI Found to Misuse Security Letters
2003-06 Audit Cites Probes of Citizens
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2008; A03

The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a special intelligence-gathering court had deemed protected by the First Amendment, according to two government audits released yesterday.

The episode was outlined in a Justice Department report that concluded the FBI had abused its intelligence-gathering privileges by issuing inadequately documented "national security letters" from 2003 to 2006, after which changes were put in place that the report called sound.

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

Not enough? Let's get rid of the evidence.

Under the plan, EPA closed physical access to three regional office libraries in Chicago, Kansas City and Dallas, and to the headquarters library and the Chemical Library in Washington. Operating hours were reduced at libraries in Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Boston.

It's like the environment is a Black woman and Bush is Ward Connerly. 

EPA Closure of Libraries Faulted For Curbing Access to Key Data
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 14, 2008; A15

A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to close several of its 26 research libraries did not fully account for the impact on government staffers and the public, who rely on the libraries for hard-to-find environmental data, congressional investigators reported yesterday.

The report by the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA effort, begun in 2006 to comply with a $2 million funding cut sought by the White House, may have hurt access to materials and services in the 37-year-old library network.

Adventures In Identity Politics
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 14, 2008; A17

Elections can be about policy, personality or identity. The race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is surely not about policy. The differences between the two are microscopic.

Well, there the major difference that one needs to inflame racial divisions to "win"...that would be the Clintons...and one needs to dampen those divisions to win.

That's huge.

Petraeus: Iraqi Leaders Not Making 'Sufficient Progress'
By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 14, 2008; A10

BAGHDAD, March 13 -- Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

Courtesy of NPR I bring you a bit of Clintonista propaganda, as annotated by the Obama campaign.

I'd have just linked it, but I like it so I want it on my site.

To: Interested Parties
From: Clinton Campaign
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Re: Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground [Get ready for a good one.]

The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania so if Barack Obama can't win there, how will he win the general election?

[Answer: I suppose by holding obviously Democratic states like California and New York, and beating McCain in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin where Clinton lost to Obama by mostly crushing margins. But good question.]

After setbacks in Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he can win the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far -- every state except his home state of Illinois.

[If you define "setback" as netting enough delegates out of our 20-plus-point wins in Mississippi and Wyoming to completely erase any delegate advantage the Clinton campaign earned out of March 4th, then yeah, we feel pretty setback.]

Oliver Willis spotted this one.

She brings the experience of watching ships.

Every summer we have Fleet Week here in New York. We get to see all manner of military ships...they even dock a few on Staten Island, let folks take tours. I've probably seen as many ships as she has. 

Tech that's just wrong

Every now and again, we'll come across a piece of technology that works just fine, does exactly what it's supposed to, and yet, and yet... Something about it just isn't right. We can't put our finger on why, but even thinking about it makes us feel a bit funny. This is technology that's just... wrong.

We've highlighted, in no particular order, some of the inventions that we could happily live without, and would in fact prefer if they'd never been invented. We've placed each wrongosity onto our patented 'Scale of Wrong' to show where they fit into the grand scheme of wrongness -- are they more Steve McQueen looking icey-cool or Steve Ballmer dancing like a loon?

Scientists find 'master' breast cancer gene
by Marlowe Hood
Thu Mar 13, 4:47 AM ET