Prometheus 6

Redlasso Shuts Down In Response To Fox/NBC Lawsuit
Jason Kincaid

Redlasso, the video site that allows bloggers to post clips of television content, has shut down its beta in response to a recently filed lawsuit by Hulu-backers Fox and NBC.

Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly.
“It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said.

“I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

Companies all over the place watch the web for bad press...why should cable companies be different. I have no doubt The "Time Warner Cable on Staten Island wants me to dump their ass" Open Thread got my service fixed with the quickness.

Take advantage of it. Don't be such a punk.

Comcast communicated by blog
Iain Thomson | Jul 26, 2008 3:52 PM

We are watching you…. A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog.

Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site.

Comments to this thread are unmoderated...anonymous comments post immediately.

This is from not-quite the Tao Te Ching.

Can you hold the door to your tent
Wide open to the firmament?
Can you, with the simple stature
Of a child, breathing nature,
Become, notwithstanding,
A man?
Can you continue befriendinn
With no prejudice, no ban?
Can you, mating with heaven,
Serve as the female part?
Can your learned head take leaven
From the wisdom of your heart?

If you can bear issue and nourish its growing
If you can guide without claim or strife
If you can stay in the lead of men without their knowing
You are at the core of life.

CNN to offer a glimpse of black life in America
Les Payne
July 21, 2008

As the world's window on the United States, CNN is offering its second documentary on black life in the republic, as Barack Obama is visiting Europe and the Middle East, with the three TV network anchors in global tracking mode.

Dick Parsons, board chairman of the cable network parent company, Time Warner Inc., wondered aloud why he was invited to launch the two-part series, "Black in America," that starts Wednesday. "It may have something to do with the fact that I'm black in America." Gilding the lily, as CEOs are well paid to do, he said that the documentary illustrates a "new paradigm."

Soledad O'Brien, the CNN host of the show, however, kept her feet on ground and was closer to the point of the 18-month production. "We did not have a desired outcome," she said, "what we wanted to do was to tell stories; not to pull punches. We wanted to tell stories through human beings ... who have to make choices; some are personal, others are influenced by policy."

The Time Warner honcho seemed intent on nudging the CNN series away from its journalistic moorings toward the open sea of politics. "Things have changed," said Parsons, sliming African-Americans' struggle to achieve parity as a "paradigm of victimization." "It's time to stop thinking in the old way and start thinking in the new way. Barack Obama is trying to get us to converse through this new paradigm."...

The new racial "paradigm" that Parsons preaches and Obama campaigns upon is, unfortunately, quite a ways off.

Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s Pioneering Vision Leaves a Cultural Legacy

Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, Founder, Visionary and CEO of the National Black Theatre Inc, made her transition peacefully at home Monday, July 21, 2008. Dr. Teer was an icon in the healing art of Black Theatre. Leaving behind a lucrative show business career in 1967, she came to Harlem in 1968 and founded the National Black Theatre (NBT). This began a 40-year passion that changed the cultural landscape of the theatrical world. She created a new cultural art form by blending cultural appreciation, performing arts and community advocacy. In 1983, she expanded that vision with the purchase of a 64,000 sq ft building located at 125 Street & Fifth Avenue. There she created a thriving cultural and business complex housing the largest New Sacred Yoruba Art collection in the western hemisphere. Through a commitment to her vision and purpose, the National Black Theatre is a world-class institution that inspires cultural transformation, social change, human re-development, historic relevance, and futuristic innovation.

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed. [P6: Busted politicians not withstanding...]

The Other Home Equity Crisis

In the early 1990s, she was called the “New Traditionalist.”

In the early 2000s, she led the charge of the “Opt-Out Revolution.” Educated and affluent, happily employed full-time with the care of her kids, she was said to be the standard-bearer for a generation that had discovered, after decades of blindly Seeking It All, that the road to true happiness lay in throwing in the towel and heading home.

It has happened like clockwork. In the past two economic downturns, as job losses have forced women out of the workplace, a sort of angel has appeared to guide their way and re-label their unfortunate circumstances as virtuous “choice.”

The title:

Black History: The First Klan

The creation, growth and and superceding of the Klan is a major American story, one that literally shaped the history of the nation. Yet the only discussion of it isolates it from the mainstream, and ensconces it in Black history where it can be safely ignored.

How is anything about the development of the Klan "Black History"? It was totally within the white communities that the Klan developed each and every time its ugliness erupted.

So Now Obama is Hitler?

First we had some idiot on National Review suggesting that Barack Obama was a Jewish communist, and now it's Ben Stein making a ridiculous comparison to Hitler which any German ought to find deeply insulting. Will the right-wing lunatics please make up their minds? Is Obama a Judeo-communist, a Nazi, an atheist, a Muslim, or all of the above? Nothing better displays the ideological bankruptcy of the GOP today than this relentless resort to outrageous slanders and absurd innuendos: such nonsense is the first and last resort of those who cannot talk of ideas and have no policies of any coherence to offer.

Americans Move to the Middle
By CHARLES M. BLOW

So, in these relative calm days of summer, with Barack Obama on his way back from a rock-star tour of the other side of the pond and John McCain shadowboxing the media stateside, let’s pause and recognize that Americans overwhelmingly agree on many of the big issues and are changing their minds on others. It’s just that those shifting views, when taken as a whole, don’t neatly line up with either party’s platform.

Here are a few examples, according to Gallup polls taken over the last eight years:

Nearly half of the jail's officers have been on the job for less than five years, according to a Post analysis. The jail reported that officers used force against inmates 100 times in 2006, more than twice as often as in 2003. This year alone, one corrections officer was arrested on suspicion of supplying cellphones to inmates and another was charged with armed robbery and assault. Several inmates were also found with handcuff keys. The director of corrections was fired on June 4 after four of the jail's handguns were found to be missing.

Problem Guards
Revelations about lax hiring at the Prince George's County jail underscore the need for reform.
Saturday, July 26, 2008; A14

More important than these endless gaffes are matters that give us glimpses of the fundamental makeup of the man. A celebrated warrior as a young man, he has always believed that the war in Iraq can (and must) be won. As the author Elizabeth Drew has written: “He didn’t seem to seriously consider the huge costs of the war: financial, personal, diplomatic and to the reputation of the United States around the world.”

Getting to Know You
By BOB HERBERT

The conventional wisdom in this radically unconventional presidential race is that the voters have to get to know Barack Obama better. That’s what this week’s overseas trip was about: to showcase the senator as a potential commander in chief and leader of U.S. foreign policy.

According to this way of thinking, as voters see more of Mr. Obama and become more comfortable with him (assuming no major foul-ups along the way), his chances of getting elected will be enhanced.

Y'all gonna have to check Blog-Her for her posts going forward.

Let's Talk
by Michelle Obama

Hi everybody,

I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer. Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to; but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country.

Over the course of this campaign, I’ve been hosting roundtable discussions with working women all across America. I’m there to talk about my husband, of course – but more importantly, I’m there to listen. We talk about what it’s like to play multiple roles at once and what it’s like to feel stretched thin between the demands of a career and family.

I didn't make that up. It's like the last thing he says in this video.

In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.

A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes, especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to Poitiers, in southwestern France.

With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991 record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.

Saxophonist Johnny Griffin Dies at 80
By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

I got email looking for "ambassadors" (read: volunteers/free help) for an upcoming museum tour titled America I AM.

Calm down, Colbert...they didn't say "And So Can You."

The tour tour started July 4, the little button to express interest in volunteering (i.e. the Ambasador program) is at the bottom of the exhibition preview, complete with a map and schedule. Just ignore that bit about being 21 and enrolled in college. The email says the limit is 18 years old now.

You can get an idea of what they have in mind by checking the supporting site (which promises interactivity some day). The exhibition preview looks kind of like it was set up in Second Life. And I tell you, that truck better be the hotness because the website is no help at all.

Go get some. You got 'till Sunday.

“There is not a day that transpires that I don’t think about this case,” the judge said. “This case is profoundly upsetting to me because I gave you every chance I could.”

A ‘Good Kid’ Gets a Day in Court, Again and Again
By JOHN ELIGON

By the cold math of his police record, Yiskar Caceres already had at least three strikes against him. In seven months, he had been arrested three times on cocaine charges and had pleaded guilty to each one. And that came after four arrests for marijuana.

But the judge saw something different when he looked over Mr. Caceres’s school transcripts and read the letters praising him as an intelligent, promising, family-oriented young man ready to change his ways.

The judge told Mr. Caceres that if he completed a rehabilitation program and stayed out of trouble for six months, he would avoid prison and his record would be virtually wiped clean.

Boys not better than girls at maths, study finds

"The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors," Sapienza said. "The gap doesn't exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities."

Researchers analysed data from more than 276,000 children in 40 countries who took the 2003 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) - the internationally standardised test of maths, reading, science and problem-solving ability.

Globally, boys tend to outperform girls in maths (on average girls score 10.5 points lower than boys) but in more "gender equal societies" such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway, girls scored as well as boys or better.

Adia Harvey at racism review

Lastly, I felt that the July 24 story about race and education overstated, as mainstream media outlets frequently do, the “acting white” phenomenon among Black Americans. The show reported that for many Black Americans, school success is perceived as “acting white,” which leads African Americans to shun it in favor of pursuing other routes to popularity. The “acting white” argument, first introduced in academic circles by Signathia Fordham and John Ogbu “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of ‘Acting White,’” has been retested and analyzed among many other researchers who find little empirical support for this theory. In short, Fordham and Ogbu state that Black students don’t perform well academically in part because they see it as “acting white,” and because they recognize that in a racially unequal society, there will be little reward for their educational efforts. Yet numerous other scholars have performed more empirically sophisticated tests of this theory and have gleaned different results. In several articles, Jim Ainsworth and Douglas Downey have argued that Black students who earn high grades are very popular among their peers and believe that their educational gains will earn them occupational rewards down the line. Sociologist Karolyn Tyson has also argued that Black students with high grades are popular among peers, and that their academic achievement is met with positive regard rather than negative sanction. This is not to say that Black children never taunt others with “acting white,” but that a well-documented body of research suggests that this label may be given for reasons other than academic success, and that it is likely not the deterrent to academic achievement that Fordham and Ogbu initially suggested. It is rather unfortunate that CNN ignored a body of social science literature that challenges this theory in order to perpetuate what cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has referred to as “the academic equivalent of an urban legend.”

There are two questions here--how are we going to fix the race chasm, and how far are we really willing to go to do it? People like to focus on the former, because the truly frightening one is the latter. We're forever trying to achieve equality by not negatively impacting white people. You can look back at the War on Poverty and see how desperate folks were to make it look color-blind. How'd that work out? I think one of the reasons Affirmative Action was extended to basically everyone by white males, was likely, so it wouldn't be reparations.

Nope. It was a conscious effort to undermine the whole process. The thought was that by including women they defined a majority of the country as minorities, which is kind of absurd.

See, the South has had to hide its hand as far a race goes for so long, they just lie automatically now. That's why

"If they decide to strip me of my status, they decide to do something un-American," Bartoshevich said. "It’s not democracy. It doesn’t stand for unity, which the party wants."

Oh, and you endorsing the opposing party stands for unity? Hell no...in fact, throwing your monkey ass out is the strongest party unity move thy can make.

Democrat supporting McCain expected to be stripped of her delegate status
By Lindsay Fiori
Journal Times
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 3:02 PM CDT

UPDATE: Debra Bartoshevich received e-mail notification Monday evening about a conference call to decide her fate as a delegate. Rachel Strauch-Nelson, communications director for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said the group also tried to reach Bartoshevich by phone Monday afternoon.

The conference call will take place Friday and Bartoshevich will have an opportunity to explain why she should remain a delegate despite her reported endorsement for Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

ORIGINAL STORY: Members of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party will vote Friday on the delegate status of Debra Bartoshevich, a Democratic National Convention delegate from Waterford who has publicly supported Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Bartoshevich is expected to lose her delegate credentials, said Marilyn Nemeth, a representative from Mount Pleasant who serves on the committee that will cast the deciding votes.

The Politico published a three page article on something I tossed off two years ago.

I had some kind of informal panels on blogging at the ASALH convention last week. I explained the difference between the Conservative and Progressive subnets is that the Progressive side is about gathering ideas while the Conservative side is a command structure.

DLC not withstanding...

It's a good article, though. Interestingly enough, the difference between it and my little pronouncement is pretty much the one they point out between liberal and conservative new media...reporting vs. opinion. I opined, they reported, so I got three sentences and they got three pages.

I still opine, though...

Missing 'spam king' kills self, family
By Kieran Nicholson, Howard Pankratz and Carlos Illescas
The Denver Post

BENNETT — Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, "Spam King" Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself.

Sheriff's deputies responded to a report of gunfire in the small plains town of Bennett at about 11:15 a.m. today and found Davidson, 29-year-old Amy Lee Ann Hill and their 3-year-old daughter shot to death.

Davidson's most recent spam business, Power Promoters, was based in Bennett.

Arapahoe County Undersheriff Mark Campbell said the bodies were found laying near a Toyota Sequoia SUV in the driveway. Davidson's body was beside the driver's door, a pistol nearby, and his wife's body fell near the passenger side.

Yessenia Lara, an 18-year-old student who witnessed the shooting, said the gunman was one of two men who had been fighting in the computer building.

"I saw someone get punched and then I heard three shots after that. Everybody basically ducked, and the shooter got away," Lara said, adding that the victims were yelling in pain.

Arrest made in Ariz. community college shooting

PHOENIX (AP) — A former student shot three people Thursday in a computer room at a Phoenix community college, injuring one of them critically, authorities said. The gunman fled but a suspect was arrested nearby.

The shooting at South Mountain Community College was part of a running dispute between the suspect and one of the victims, said Sgt. Andy Hill, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department.

"This was not a random shooter going around the campus shooting," Hill said, noting that two of the injured people were struck by stray bullets.