Prometheus 6

LATER: Okay, a little explanation. I don't like looking back, not really. It rarely turns out well...things just don't look the same when you're looking back at them. It's like the view through the windshield of your car is different than the view through your rear window (or the mirror), even though you are looking at the same things. Looking back you can say, damn, there's bear behind that tree, but you get hit in the back of the head by things folks looking forward can often avoid.

But there are songs, and artists that grab me and hurl me bodily into my past.

Welcome to SwarmSketch.

Welcome to SwarmSketch: Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.

SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. A new sketch begins after one week, or after the previous sketch reaches one thousand lines, whichever comes first.

Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.

This is going to be about Black folks.

I want you to hold a specific statement Ms. Slavin made in mind: "The last time I checked, Iran was not threatening to attack the United States but there were many people inside the United States threatening to attack Iran." Keep that in mind as you read this

But the black nationalist in me gets pissed at the implicit message of the hard-core black left--that the only change worth discussing is changes in the law.

...because in my experience it is white folks who insist we cannot speak of racial justice until Black behavior is perfect. Not only that, if ANY Black person misbehaves that's seen as validation of their suspicions about us.

Spence dropped a link to a discussion of, let's see what's the title...Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson and Political Expectations, on KCRW (which is one of those NPR joints). He was on Friday with Amiri Baraka, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Joe Hicks and Peniel E. Joseph.

You will note there's no link in this post. It's in the comment Spence left. I'm linking that because if you choose to comment on it, I'd like it to be in a single thread.

Lobbying on all sides has been intense. The New England Promotional Products Association even punctuated its appeal to lawmakers with a gift.

"We don't feel making a pen or coffee mug illegal is going to accomplish their goals," said Stephen Monahan, the products association's president.

The mugs handed out to Massachusetts lawmakers, he said, were not intended to influence their opinions, just to remind them that more than 3,500 of the association's members are Massachusetts voters who depend on this industry for a livelihood.

I feel your pain, but the fact that Big Pharma is modifying their voluntary code means they know their ass is exposed. And we know that voluntary code will go right out the window as soon as it impinges on profitability...which is to say, no more than 48 hours after its announcement. After all, there's no penalty for ignoring a voluntary measure.

I'm hoping we can toss voluntary "regulation" on E.J. Dionne's pile of collapsed conservative concepts.

Drug industry tightens rules on gift-giving
Trade group is opposing Mass. effort to ban practice
By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff  |  July 11, 2008

The trade association for drug companies announced yesterday a tightening of its voluntary code restricting industry gifts to doctors, even as the association has been forcefully lobbying against a tougher ban that is likely to be debated in the Massachusetts House next week.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said its guidelines prohibit drug company sales representatives from handing out pens, mugs, and other tokens emblazoned with company or product logos, and also disallow restaurant meals. But the rules still allow salespeople to cater free lunches in doctors' offices and hospitals, which they use to get access to doctors and make their sales pitches. Companies would still be able to pay doctors consulting and speaking fees, which industry critics say is the fastest-growing category of drug marketing. And the code relies on the industry to police itself.

The proposed state law, already unanimously ap proved in the Senate, would ban any gifts of value to doctors. That includes entertainment, meals, travel, and subscriptions. Drug and medical-device companies would have to report to the Department of Public Health any payments to doctors for speaking and consulting, and that information would be posted on the agency's website.

Fewer S. Florida couples divorcing
BY TAYLOR BARNES

As the national economy takes a downturn and homes become harder to sell, another measure of American life is on the decline in South Florida.

In Miami-Dade County, almost 1,300 fewer divorces were filed from January through May this year than in the same time period in 2007, a decrease of about 18 percent, according to Zoila Miranda, the court operations officer in charge of family filings.

The drop comes after five years in which the number of divorces each year was relatively constant. Filings for divorce ranged from 15,622 to 16,868 in the years from 2003 to 2007. From January through May 2008, 5,956 dissolutions were filed in Dade.

In Broward County, the trend is similar, though the decrease is smaller. Clerks saw 390 fewer divorces filed from January to May, about 9 percent below last year's count. Total divorces in recent years were less consistent than in Dade, rising from 2005 to 2006 and then dropping in 2007, according to data from Kris Mazzeo, chief director of court services in Broward.

Yes, I said Taliban.

In theory, Pakistan's security forces are in opposition to the Taliban, who are now firmly entrenched across the country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas and encroaching on the adjacent region in the North West Frontier Province, known as the "settled" areas. In reality, the government has ceded large swathes of territory to the extremists.

Pakistan Wants 'Partnership' With U.S., Official Says
Foreign Minister, on D.C. Visit, Conveys Interest in Moving Beyond Security-Based Ties
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2008; A09

The new government of Pakistan is seeking a "partnership" with the United States and wants tangible signs that the Bush administration will increase aid and embrace Pakistani democracy, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said yesterday.

"We want to be positive, we want to cooperate, we want a long-term relationship, we want a partnership. So how serious are you in broadening that relationship -- that is what we want to know," Qureshi said in a wide-ranging interview with Washington Post editors and reporters.

Like this guy, whose op-ed exists, not to add information or even subtlety to the conversation, but to piss on Jesse Jackson's head. Thank you, New York Times for once again bringing smoke and noise to a situation requiring air and light.

In recent months, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's role in underpinning the housing market has grown as other financial institutions have fled the credit markets. The companies, chartered by the federal government to keep funds flowing to mortgage lenders, pool mortgages into securities for sale to investors. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pledge they will cover the payments if borrowers default, and they also buy and hold their own mortgage investments.

Together, they bought about two-thirds of the single-family-home mortgages that originated from January to March of this year, according to their regulator, the Office Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. ...

But the companies face questions from investors about whether they have enough capital to cover their obligations, and a loss of faith in them could make it impossible to raise more money.

U.S. Weighs Rescue of Mortgage Giants
After Allaying Anxiety About Fannie and Freddie, Officials Stop Short of Action
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 12, 2008; A01

Senior government officials prepared emergency steps yesterday to rescue troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but stopped short after a campaign of public statements eased immediate concerns about the stability of the institutions.

But federal regulators were forced yesterday to seize California-based IndyMac Bancorp after a run by depositors led to the second-largest failure ever of a U.S. financial institution. The bank, which was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., became the first major bank to shutter its doors since the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s. One of the country's largest home lenders, IndyMac saw its holdings battered by the downturn in the housing market.

That's why it'll never happen

Too Many Prisoners
States should stop warehousing nonviolent offenders.
Friday, July 11, 2008; A16

TWO REPORTS by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the rate of growth in the prison and jail populations of the United States has slowed slightly but that the country still has the dubious distinction of being the largest jailer in the world. As of June 30, 2007, the country held roughly 2.3 million people behind bars, either in local or state jails or in federal prisons.

The Subprime Swindle
By Kai Wright

"Yup," confirms his youngest daughter, Chandra Chavis. "I was trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at the time." She points out the living room window to the small, sloping front yard and drive. "There was no address on the house, so I had to stop doing that to get the ambulance to come in." But Lillian's heart had seized, and Chandra knows there's not much she could have done anyway. She figures if even the trauma team at Atlanta's century-old public hospital couldn't revive her mom, she must have been long gone. "Nobody can bring you back if the Lord calls you," concludes an older daughter, Gwen Russell.

It was Lillian's tenacity that led the Mitchell family to Atlanta's Westwood neighborhood, in 1968. "She was determined," Chandra explains, "not to have her children in an apartment--I know the story; I've heard it a million times--so she found somebody, a real estate agent, and they came out and they looked in this neighborhood. I don't know what brought them to this part of town, 'cause at the time they were living in Dixon Hills"--then an up-and-coming black neighborhood--"but she decided she wanted a house, and this is where she found it."

"All I did was sign the paper," says George with a shrug.

That made the Mitchells one of the first African-American families to move into Westwood. Atlanta has long been known as the "black Mecca," a place where African-Americans have been able to claw up the socioeconomic ladder and plunge into America's consumer culture. Nowhere is that striving more visible than in the massive subdivisions of large, new homes that Atlanta's black bourgeoisie have erected, reaching far into the suburbs. But the process began generations ago in a cluster of inside-the-beltway neighborhoods wedged into the city's southwestern corner, including Westwood. Today that area is reeling, having been one of the nation's communities hardest hit by the one-two punch of subprime lending and home foreclosures. The Mitchells have not been spared. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, they are scrambling to keep the house Lillian found for them.

Fannie and Freddie Shares Slide, Dragging Down Markets
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares plummeted again on Friday — and the broader stock market followed suit — as concern mounted that the government will be forced to take over the beleaguered mortgage finance companies, which some investors fear are at risk of default.

Even after a week of unprecedented losses, the companies’ declines on Friday were the sharpest yet: Freddie Mac shares were down 24 percent from Thursday’s closing price, to $6.08 a share, and Fannie Mae stock fell 28 percent to $9.51 a share, in midday trading after opening sharply lower.

Less than an hour after the markets opened, Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, said a government bailout was not an immediate possibility.

“Our primary focus is supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form,” Mr. Paulson said in a statement. “We are maintaining a dialogue with regulators and with the companies.”

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

Capitalism's Reality Check
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 11, 2008; A17

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite.

via Pharyngula

Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.

This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. It is just a cracker!

Catholics worldwide became furious.

If there is any doubt, Governor Paterson and other politicians in Albany should review the data on recidivism. About 80 percent of the young men who are placed in juvenile facilities in New York end up committing more crimes within three years of their release. Preliminary data from New York City suggests that the recidivism rate for the new community-based programs might be as low as 35 percent. 

Help Closer to Home

One proven way to prevent borderline young offenders from becoming serious criminals is to treat them — and their families — in community-based counseling programs instead of shipping them off to juvenile facilities that are often hundreds of miles away from home. Early data suggests that New York City’s alternative-placement programs are cutting recidivism rates.

Living by Ethiopia's sewage canal
By Ernest Waititu
BBC Focus On Africa magazine

Sanitation in Ethiopia's capital city leaves a lot to be desired - and it is the poor who are most vulnerable as a result.

In a small shack made of iron sheets and pieces of clothing in the slums of Addis Ababa live the Alemu family - Abiy, Marasit Bishaw, and the couple's three-year-old son and 25-day-old baby daughter Yanit.

And just a few metres from their one-room home is a mass of sewage and garbage, mixed with the carcasses of dead chickens and cow and goat skulls.

The Alemus live near the gully where the Kabena river used to meander gracefully through the Ethiopian capital.

But the river is now full of the city's waste, and a stench of sewage is the first thing that hits.

“I had a little money in the bank and I had to think of something to invest in that might give me some returns,” Mr. Kyalo said.  Sporting a pressed polo shirt and crisp jeans, Mr. Kyalo thinks of himself as providing a service.  Even though he charges 150 times his cost, he said he thinks he is being reasonable. Some sellers, he said, demand far more during shortages. 

The Business of Water In An East African Shanty Town
By Sarah Stuteville

NAIROBI, Kenya--As day breaks over the rusty tin roofs and makeshift homes of the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi, the water sellers are already at their water tanks, waiting for their first customers.

Selling water in one of the world’s largest slums is a good business. On most days the vendors charge 5 cents for five gallons, 100 times the cost of piped water provided by the city. But the city does not send water to the residents of Kibera--at any price.

No, it's not goth...or gangster.

Obama gave a speech similar to his Father's Day address in 2006, before he was running for president. Early in his presidential run, he complained in speeches to black audiences of blacks disenfranchising themselves by not voting, took rappers to task for their language, and decried "anti-intellectualism" in the black community, including black children telling peers who get good grades that they are "acting white."

Bunch said he wants the site "to sing" as well as respect its prominent location and enhance the Mall. "It also must help us to remember those often left out of history, such as an enslaved woman . . . who refused to let slavery strip her of her humanity, her humor and her family," he said. "Yet this museum must also let our audiences find the joy, the strength and the creativity that is at the heart of this community. . . . This is not an African American museum created to tell the African American story; rather, it is created to tell the quintessential American story."

Designer Sought for African American Museum
By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 11, 2008; C03

The National Museum of African American History and Culture began the formal process of designing a building yesterday, one that will include a slave cabin and a Jim Crow railroad car.

The museum is not scheduled to open until 2015. But there is a certain urgency to identifying large artifacts that are likely to influence the shape of the exhibit space, said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of what will be the Smithsonian's 19th museum.

"Ocampo is playing with fire," Mohamad said. "If the United Nations is serious about its engagement with Sudan, it should tell this man to suspend what he is doing with this so-called indictment. There will be grave repercussions."

Sudan Leader To Be Charged With Genocide
Peace Efforts in Darfur Could Be Hampered, Some U.N. Officials Fear
By Colum Lynch and Nora Boustany
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 11, 2008; A01

UNITED NATIONS, July 10 -- The chief prosecutor of the Internationals Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nation's Darfur region during the past five years, according to U.N. officials and diplomats.

The action by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will mark the first time that the tribunal in The Hague charges a sitting head of state with such crimes, and represents a major step by the court to implicate the highest levels of the Sudanese government for the atrocities in Darfur.

Officials have also been concerned that the difficulties of the two companies, if not fixed, could damage economies worldwide. The securities of Fannie and Freddie are held by numerous overseas financial institutions, central banks and investors.

Under a 1992 law, Fannie or Freddie could be put into conservatorship if their top regulator found that either one is “critically undercapitalized.” A conservator would have sweeping powers to overhaul them, but would not have the authority to close them.

U.S. Considers Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants
By STEPHEN LABATON and STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — Alarmed by the growing financial stress at the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, senior Bush administration officials are considering a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, people briefed about the plan said on Thursday.

The companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Their shares are plummeting and their borrowing costs are rising as investors worry that the companies will suffer losses far larger than the $11 billion they have already lost in recent months. Now, as housing prices decline further and foreclosures grow, the markets are worried that Fannie and Freddie themselves may default on their debt.

I don't THINK so.

Rangel Rents Apartments at Bargain Rates
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.

Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence.

Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records, paid a total rent of $3,894 monthly in 2007 for the four apartments at Lenox Terrace, a 1,700-unit luxury development of six towers, with doormen, that is described in real estate publications as Harlem’s most prestigious address.

The Newshour had a little explanation of that. Short form seems to be they had a history of the AMA prepared and what came out of the files was something they want to close the door on.