By any objective measure, American Indians have caught some 10% more grief than American Blacks have. I see the trouble some of them have on the reservations and I look at that the way white folks ought to be looking at Black folks: as the canary in the coal mine.

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — For generations the Noland family has led a troubled life on the Lummi Indian reservation here. The Nolands have struggled with alcohol, painkillers and, more recently, crack. Seven family members are now jailed, several for dealing drugs, on and off tribal land.

Their experience has been repeated hundreds of times on this sprawling, desperately poor reservation of 2,000 Lummi, where addiction and crime have become pervasive. It is the reason that the Lummi tribe has turned as a last resort to a severe and bygone punishment, seeking to banish five of the young men in jail and another recently released. It is also the reason for evicting Yevonne Noland, 48, the matriarch of the Noland clan, from her modest blue house on the reservation, because her son, a convicted drug dealer, was listed on the lease.

Banishment once turned unwanted members of a tribe into a caste of the "walking dead," and some people criticize it as excessive and inhumane, more extreme than the punishments meted out by the world outside and a betrayal of an already fragile culture.

But a growing number of tribes across the country, desperate to slow the wounds of drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, poverty and violence, have used banishment in varying forms in the last decade. Tribal leaders see this ancient response, which reflects Indian respect for community, as a painful but necessary deterrent.

"We need to go back to our old ways," said Darrell Hillaire, chairman of the Lummi Tribal Council, shortly before an early morning meeting on the reservation recently about the tribe's new campaign against drugs. "We had to say enough is enough."

While the Lummi use banishment to root out drug dealers, other tribes, like the Chippewa of Grand Portage, Minn., are using it to rid the reservation of the worst troublemakers and to preserve what they say is a shared set of core values. The Grand Portage banishments, which can be imposed on Indians and non-Indians who visit the reservation, may last as long as the tribal council deems fit, even for life.

Being banished can mean losing health, housing and education benefits, tribal rights to fishing and hunting, burial rights, even the cash payments made to members of tribes earning hefty casino profits.

N.H. Couple Sentenced for Forced Labor
By Associated Press

January 16, 2004, 4:57 PM EST

CONCORD, N.H. -- A couple were sentenced to six years in prison Friday for forcing Jamaican laborers to work in their tree-cutting business.

Timothy Bradley, 43, and Kathleen O'Dell, 48, of Litchfield, were convicted in August of taking the workers' passports and visas, lying to them and reneging on promises about pay and housing.

"Luring foreigners to our shores with false promises, impressing them into labor, and withholding even the most basic of services is nothing short of modern-day slavery," said federal prosecutor R. Alexander Acosta.

The couple's lawyers portrayed the Jamaicans as disgruntled workers.

Isis Latham, O'Dell's daughter, said the couple never kept workers against their will.

"My mother is nothing like a slave trader," she said. "We shouldn't get sent to prison for our judgment calls."

I wish TV One much success.

I wish TV One were available here.

There may be hundreds of channels on cable television, but Johnathan Rodgers says there's still something missing for black viewers.

Sure, there are networks for men, women, animal lovers, game show fans and even people nostalgic for old soap operas. But what typical black viewers don't see, said the president of a new network geared toward blacks, is many people who look like them.

"If you want to see a makeover show where your hair and skin happens to be a different texture or color, what do you watch? If you want to see a horror movie where the first person killed isn't black, where do you go?" Rodgers asks.

The answer, he hopes, is the upstart TV One network, debuting on Martin Luther King Day in several metropolitan markets across the country.

With a mixture of lifestyle shows, documentaries and reruns of old sitcoms and dramas, TV One hopes to woo an audience that Rodgers says is starved for black-oriented programming.

TV One and its corporate backers, Comcast Corp. and urban radio company Radio One, are taking on the dominant and largely unchallenged leader of the urban television market -- Viacom's BET.

TV One claims it targets a different demographic, saying it will go for viewers aged 24 to 54 who might not be interested in the hip-hop and other youth-oriented programming on BET.

However, industry analysts say the two will likely compete for viewers and advertising money, although they note that on cable systems with so many different choices, there is probably enough room for both.

"There should be more than two cable channels that aggressively target African-Americans in a universe of more 200 channels," said Jason Helfstein, a media analyst with CIBC World Markets Corp.

Last I'll ask out loud, anyway:

I still have all the old archives, and I can just copy them over here such that any links that are floating around out there. Should I?

The first release candidate of MTClient version 1.0 is ready.

LATER: Now links to the second release candidate

MTClient is a Windows-based desktop blogging client designed for Movable Type weblogs. It has several advantages over the web interface for entering posts:

• Intuitive, easy-to-use interface is close enough to the web interface as to be immediately familiar
• Easy text and paragraph markup. Add bold, links, blockquotes, and paragraph alignment quickly and easily.
• Support for Movable Type all entry fields including:
  • Title
  • Body
  • Extended Entry
  • Excerpt
  • Keywords
  • Multiple categories
  • Comment Status
  • Send TrackBack pings
  • Edit entry date
• Spell checking (including the title)
• Edit previously-published entries
• Offline operation
• Save posts on your hard drive
• Manage multiple blogs on multiple sites
• It correctly converts between the high ASCII characters that choke most other desktop clients and HTML entities. In fact, it has a pop-up (Ctrl-Alt-E) that pastes Latin-1 entities into a message for you
• File uploads (Ctrl-Alt-U) copies the URL of the uploaded file to the clipboard

MTClient can be downloaded as an installation file or as a zip file. The installation file creates an uninstall. Installation of the zip file can be done by simply extracting it into a directory, and uninstallation can be done by deleting it.

The annual SOTU ritual is almost upon us. And given that we know the address is 30% theater and 65% politics, we know if we really want to know the state of the union we have to dig it out ourselves.

Here's a couple of starting points.

This graph comes from Estimates and Projections Underlying the Joint Statement of September 29, 2003 issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Concord Coalition. The full sized graph can be see by clicking the thumbnail and the full pdf of the report (it's just 19 pages) can be gotten here.

What these good people have done is take the CBO's projections and factor in all the things the CBO didn't but recognized it should have, The results?

This is an important aspect of the state of the union, but there are many others to consider.

African food appeal 'exaggerated'

A group of leading charities in the UK overstated the seriousness of southern African food shortages in 2002 and 2003, an audit has said.

Auditors Valid International said some fund-raising campaigns had talked of famine or a crisis of biblical proportions, which was an exaggeration.

The audit said this approach could lessen credibility in future appeals.

A spokesman for the charities said most of the report had been positive, but they would learn from any mistakes.

The charities raised $29m, and the report says their work saved lives and eased suffering.

Wrong pump

As well as using misleading or emotive language, the audit said some groups had not consulted local people enough and did not fully understand their needs.

For example, one charity provided an expensive diesel pump to irrigate a small field where a foot pump would have been sufficient.

And the report said there was not enough understanding of how the Aids epidemic affects the ability to cope with food shortages.

Richard Miller, a spokesperson for the charities' umbrella Disasters Emergency Committee, said the charities would in future pay more attention to whether people wanted money rather than food and what kind of seeds are usually grown in each area.

The BBC's Stephanie Irvine says the report does not question the validity of charities running campaigns for disaster prevention, but rather suggests ways in which those campaigns could work more effectively.

I'd like to write something clever about this, but I don't think I'm up to it this early. So:

• "Latino," in this context, is more of a political alliance than an ethnicity.
• When people say there's no single Black community, I consider the Latino case (which is ironic in a way).
• Blacks and Latinos should NOT let this type of discussion divide us more than our natural differences require.

Blacks and Latinos Try to Find Balance in Touchy New Math

By MIREYA NAVARRO

The Web site for Black Entertainment Television put the question bluntly: "Does it bother you that Hispanics now outnumber African-Americans in the U.S.?"

The response has been torrential. One visitor to the site wrote, "Blacks are beginning to experience another wave of racial bias and favoritism not in our favor." The writer complained that employers now have a preference for bilingual applicants, and bemoaned "attempts to replace our threatening stance against discrimination with a Hispanic vote."

But another cautioned: "Sounds like the same old trick to me. `Divide and conquer.' Are we really going to let some numbers dictate how we treat one another?"

The BET.com message board is only one forum, but it has evoked some of the emotions, worries, hopes and even awkwardness that have been felt nationwide over a singular moment in American demographics. Last summer, the Census Bureau announced that Latinos had surpassed blacks as the country's largest minority, with blacks making up 13.1 percent of the population in 2002, and Hispanics 13.4 percent.

That statistical shift, years in the making, hardly came as a surprise. Yet it has captured the attention of both Latinos and blacks, who have been grappling with its meaning in meeting rooms, on radio shows and on the Internet.

Those conversations have raised hard questions: Does the ascendance of Hispanics mean a decline in the influence of blacks? Does it doom, or encourage, alliances between the two groups? Does the old formula for those alliances — shared grievances — have much meaning given the diversity of income and status even within each group?

US to lift HMO rates
Insurers plan to cut premiums of seniors

By Christopher Rowland, Globe Staff, 1/17/2004

The federal government said yesterday it will pay an average of 10.6 percent more to health insurance companies that operate private Medicare HMO plans, welcome news to Massachusetts insurers that were losing customers.

The size of the rate increases will vary from plan to plan, but Tufts Health Plan, for example, said it would receive an average of 10 percent more in 2004 for the 60,000 Massachusetts patients it has in its Secure Horizons program.

Tufts said it would roll most of the new money into premium reductions, effective March 1, and put the remainder into higher payments for doctors and hospitals. Tufts has not yet calculated the size of the reductions or payment increases, said spokeswoman Julie Rosen. Reductions would follow several years of hefty increases. "We're hopeful that we'll see an increase in membership," she said. "We're trying to make this as affordable as possible."

Congress approved the additional funds as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit law signed by President Bush in December. The increase was criticized by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who released a Senate report claiming the money wouldn't help senior citizens but instead would increase HMO revenues by $189 billion annually by 2010, and profits as much as $26 billion annually.

"This mandate is symptomatic of the flaws in the Republican plan. Long before senior citizens see a dime in coverage, the HMOs will get billions of dollars in extra payments," Kennedy said in a statement.

The No Child Left Behind thing is going to be a problem for a while yet.

The landmark No Child Left Behind Act was born of rare bipartisan frustration over poor and minority children stuck in subpar schools.

Legislators' ire was focused on the billions of federal dollars that had flowed to low- income students since passage of the 1965 Title I Education Act, without any apparent effect.

The thinking behind the new law, which just marked its second anniversary, was that schools must use Title I money to raise children's skills and ambitions, not just to hire poorly trained classroom aides in what critics derided as a job-creation boondoggle.

Now that the law and its sanctions against supposedly failing schools are in place, the reality is more jarring.

Schools that are making progress are too often ranked as failures. Children with severe learning disabilities are forced into tests they can't comprehend. States define marginal teachers as highly qualified.

Bipartisan support has devolved into political rancor, with some Democrats pushing a legislative agenda to weaken the law's accountability measures, and the law's advocates rejecting any change no matter how badly parts of it are working.

This won't do. The law will fail unless its problems are fixed; children will fail if the law's basic premise — improving the achievement of all students — is gutted.

White House Meeting on Plan to Restore Self-Rule in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 16, 2004
Filed at 8:31 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States will revise its plan to create self-rule in Iraq, the U.S. administrator said Friday after consultations with President Bush, but he rejected postponement of a June 30 deadline for ending the occupation and handing over power.

"The Iraqi people are anxious to get sovereignty back, and we are not anxious to extend our period of occupation,'' the administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said after conferring at the White House with Bush and senior U.S. officials.

That says it all, I think.

Bush to Revive Social Security Tax Plan
By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press Writer

January 16, 2004, 12:09 PM EST

WASHINGTON -- President Bush will use next week's State of the Union address to try to revive a proposal that would allow younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, the White House said Friday.

His election-year agenda also calls for pressing Congress to make already-enacted tax cuts permanent, such as the elimination of inheritances taxes and reductions in capital gains taxes. Bush is likely to renew his push for a new kind of tax-preferred savings accounts that could be used for retirement, college, health care or other purposes.

In the Dropping Knowledge section is a link to the Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.

It seems Ms. Hurston registered a number of unpublished plays on which the copyright has expired. They've made scans of them available for viewing online.

About the Collection

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress received eight of the ten Zora Neale Hurston plays that appear in The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress in the late 1980s as transfers from the United States Copyright Office. At that time, these plays were dispersed among the approximate 250,000 transferred scripts registered as unpublished, which were arranged roughly chronologically, 1901-77, by registration numbers. The other two Hurston plays had been previously transferred when curators selected them for custody by other Library of Congress divisions, probably following their registrations in 1925 and 1944.

The Copyright Deposit Drama Collection from which the Hurston plays were selected is a rich source of twentieth-century theatrical and cultural history. It includes scripts for early silent film and vaudeville; radio and television plays; and dramas by unknown as well as famous writers, many forgotten, many unproduced, many remaining unpublished. The entire mega-collection is being microfilmed, and selected scripts, such as the Hurston plays, will be retained in their original paper format.

…Visually, the digitized images presented online in this collection are very rough, at times running into margins and off the bottom of a page. That is because they were scanned from typescript copies made on old-fashioned manual typewriters imprinting through carbon paper, with a few original typescript pages included. Hurston appears to have typed some pages herself and dictated others to clearly non-professional typists. Authorial changes on some pages are in pencil or ink, with occasional original typescript inserts. In one case, Hurston has drawn a scene's stage set (Spunk, act 1, scene 2).

So many scholars have asked to copy these play texts in the years since 1997 that the Library of Congress has decided put them online for the world to examine, enjoy, and produce. Hurston showed great foresight in depositing the scripts with the Copyright Office. She knew of its close connection to the Library of Congress, which preserves cultural-history documents. She had worked with Alan Lomax and corresponded with Benjamin Botkin, both of the Library's Archive of Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center). Many Hurston productions failed during her life--due, perhaps, to her strong personality, the prevailing prejudices, bad luck, or bad timing. Now her plays may be studied and staged on into a new century.

Alice L. Birney
American Literature Specialist
Manuscript Division
Library of Congress

Bullwhip Days transcribes a lot of the material these recordings were drawn from. It's good they've taken steps to preserve the recorded interviews, and just as good that they've made accessing some of them easy.

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page C01

Deep, resonant like coming thunder is the voice of Bob Ledbetter as he remembers his life as a slave -- singing to pass the time, learning to read and write, joining the church and getting married.

"Well, how have you got along so well in life?" the interviewer asks Ledbetter in a 1940 conversation in Louisiana. "What's been your principles?"

In his rumbling tone, Ledbetter replies: "I know what's right and I tried my best to do what's right in everything I do."

Beginning today people the world over will be able to listen to interviews with Ledbetter and other former slaves through the online presentation "Voices From the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories" on the Library of Congress's American Memory Web site (www.memory.loc.gov).

One of the most amazing encounters is with Wallace Quarterman, who was interviewed in the mid-1930s. At age 87, he is sometimes difficult to understand when he speaks. He says at one point that he remembers being told that the Yankees were coming and he should run down to the field and let all the slaves go free.

But he is eerily clear when he sings "Jesus Is a Rock in a Weary Land."

He and others, in intricate harmony, sing: "My God is the rock in the weary land. Shelter in the time of storm."

The words are comforting when you read them; chilling when you hear them.

Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) bypassed Congress and installed Charles Pickering on the federal appeals court Friday in an election-year slap at Democrats who had blocked the nomination for more than two years.

Bush installed Pickering by a recess appointment, which avoids the confirmation process. Such appointments are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.

Pickering, a federal trial judge whom Bush nominated for a seat on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in New Orleans, has been waiting for a confirmation vote in the Senate.

"I'm grateful to the president for his continued confidence and support," Pickering told The Associated Press from his home in Mississippi. "I look forward to serving on the 5th Circuit."

Democrats have accused Pickering of supporting segregation as a young man, and promoting anti-abortion and anti-voting rights views as a state lawmaker.

I think my import problem comes down to insufficient patience on my part. Importing more the 2750 posts is apparently no joke.

I'm just gonna take it from here.

Cookies aren't working right now because MT isn't running under the same domain name as the site.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund Chief Retires
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

ASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — Elaine R. Jones, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., told her staff on Thursday that she planned to step down, leaving the post she had held for 11 years and the organization she had been a part of for 32 years. Her last day with the organization, she said, will be May 1.

Ms. Jones, who has spent her career defending equal rights in education, criminal justice, employment, political representation and voting rights, said she refused to call her move a retirement.

"Retire, to me, means you are dropping out, and I'm not dropping out," said Ms. Jones, 59, the first woman to lead the organization. "These issues are still a part of me, and I'm still going to find ways of impacting them. I'm just going to find ways of doing it that don't have me flying 150,000 miles a year."

As only the fourth person to head the organization since it was established in 1940 under Thurgood Marshall, Ms. Jones took the helm at a time when conservatives were challenging many achievements and objectives of the civil rights movement, sometimes with success before increasingly sympathetic courts.

I suppose I'll be less smug when California closes its border to immigration from the other 49 states.

Published: January 16, 2004

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 15 — The state Democratic Party convention was conceived months ago as a victory celebration for a party that was dominating California's electoral politics as it had not since the late 19th century.

But when the convention opens here on Friday there will be considerably more gloom than glory, as Democrats from across the state meet for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, became governor two months ago.

Advertisement

Being a Democrat in Mr. Schwarzenegger's California is taking some getting used to, and there is growing consternation about how the party can distinguish itself in the celebrity glare of the new governor. A poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California showed Mr. Schwarzenegger with a 59 percent approval rating, while the Democratic-controlled Legislature received just 36 percent.

Even as the Democratic convention opens here, Mr. Schwarzenegger is likely to steal the political limelight by endorsing Bill Jones, a former California secretary of state, who is running in the Republican primary for the United States Senate seat occupied by Barbara Boxer, a Democrat.

"After every defeat there is always a struggle within the losing party," said former Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, who was removed from office in an October recall election. "When you lose an election, it is time for introspection and to redefine the goals of the party. That process clearly will begin at this convention."

A Republican official in the Schwarzenegger administration suggested that the state's Democrats were in a particular quandary because a past strategy of vilifying Republican governors as right-wing extremists, as happened with Gov. Pete Wilson in the 1990's, would not work this time.

"He is the perfect California moderate," the official said of Mr. Schwarzenegger. "He has a bipartisan administration, his wife comes from a Democratic iconoclastic family, and he has developed relationships with Democratic leaders already."

U.S. Insurer of Pensions Says Its Deficit Has Soared
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: January 16, 2004

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit had grown from $3.6 billion to $11.2 billion in just a year and that it would try to deal with the escalating problem by overhauling its own investments, among other measures.

The agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, said that two consecutive years of record failures by corporate pension plans and continuing adverse market conditions left it with a shortfall much greater than a year earlier, which had been the previous low point in the agency's 30-year history.

People briefed on the new investment plan say the agency intends to reduce its risk in the stock market by investing in assets - including bonds and stock-like instruments - that will mature when it must make payments to retirees. Steven A. Kandarian, the executive director who will soon leave the agency, said that the board had recently voted to change the investment policy but declined to provide details. [P6: Diversification? What a revolutionary idea!]

U.S. Joins Iraqis to Seek U.N. Role in Interim Rule
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 — The Bush administration, trying to rescue its troubled plan to restore sovereignty to Iraq, is joining Iraqi leaders to press the United Nations to play a role in choosing an interim government in Baghdad, administration officials said Thursday.

L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, and an Iraqi delegation led by Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, will make an urgent appeal on Monday for greater United Nations involvement, the officials said.

In Iraq on Thursday, tens of thousands of demonstrators put pressure on the United States to change its plans, marching in Basra to support calls by Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for direct elections.

The new move involved yet another change in strategy for an administration under pressure from shifting events in Iraq. From the start of planning the war to oust Saddam Hussein, the administration has had an ambivalent attitude toward the United Nations.

As it begins to reach out for help, and as European nations indicate that they may provide some, the administration is also considering reversing itself and allowing businesses in countries that opposed the war, including France, Germany and Russia, to bid on contracts to rebuild Iraq, officials said.

I promised myself not to make this prediction in 2004 because it's close enough to the nominating convention that folks will remember if I'm wrong. But even with Dean's lead in the polls I still feel no one will lock it down before the the convention. And if that does happen, a Draft Gore movement will be hard to resist.

Gore's presentation skills have apparently improved. His early endorsement of Dean positions him favorably in the eyes of Dean supporters (Dean/Gore '04? nahhh…). And Clark as VP would lock down the Clinton Camp. Dean could stump all over the South and take all the heat over Confederate flags and such.

Race Tightens in Final Days of Iowa Battle
By CARL HULSE

DES MOINES, Jan. 15 — The Democratic presidential field shrank by one on Thursday, but the race for the Iowa caucuses appeared unusually wide open going into the final weekend.

Pollsters, aides to the rival campaigns and one of the candidates said that Howard Dean, Richard A. Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards were all in contention and that the race was volatile.

"It's a four-way tie," Dr. Dean said in a call to CNN's "Larry King Live." "We can't tell who's going to win. All we can do now is work our you-know-whats off."

Ben Foecke, caucus director for the Iowa Democratic Party, said, "This thing is absolutely up for grabs."

As you see, the site is back, and with the new design in place.

Still have a few kinks to work out: my "Best Of" articles have to be put back where they can be gotten at, I need to set up a Google site search so I can search my old stuff (the import of old articles did not go well, and though I intend to understand why I'm not getting crazy about it). I need to adjust my info at TTBL, Technorati and Sitemeter. I'm probably set up another place or two that slips my mind... Most of that will be done today so I can get back to MTClient which is a mere week behind schedule.

I'd appreciate it if you folks would tell me about any problems you may encounter. And now, without further ado, we return to bitching about world affairs.

1- I turned 47 years old.
2- Somehow I let slip the specific significance of the day aroundEJ Flavors, who sent me a novel, "daughter," by asha bandele...I know enough artsy types to recognize the lack of capital letters is intentional.
3- Partner of mine, a Rastafarian, put me onto a Chinese herbalist. I'm making an appointment by the end of the month.
4- I wasted the whole day fighting with the very concept of moving posts from one MT installation to another. Probably because I've generated an absurd amount of text. I think I understand why most people just leave their old archives intact.
5- All manner of news items were mentioned on TV and in the papers, and I didn't blog a single one of them.
6- Got through the sixth hour of "24." Will probably watch another two hours tonight.
7- Heard from everyone who should have heard from me earlier.
8- Put off the birthday celebration until it gets warmer 'round these parts. Since time is an illusion, I can do that.
9- Convinced my daughter to put down the Frontpage installation in favor of hand-coding CSS and HTML by building a page design she wanted but couldn't get Frontpage to create.
10-Decided to schedule some stuff: two hours before bed, grab a book and read for an hour, then meditation, then sleep. This assumes I don't get so focused on something I fall asleep at the keyboard.

I have strong suspicions about the nature of my technical difficulties here. And without going into any unprovable suspicions, I think it's over for now. However, I've already committed, submitted DNS changes and such. So I'll try a couple more things tonight since there's no sense trying to keep P6-Gray here updated. Soon it will only be accessible by IP number.

I really hadn't planned to relocate yet. I'm tuning the new site at http://www.niggerati.net/prometheus6/. www.prometheus6.org will be a valid address to reach the blog soon enough The other URL is gone. I'd been fooling around setting up subdomains, databases and otherwise getting accustomed to the web-based control panel on my web hosting account.

I ran across considerable grief trying to move stuff from this site to the alternate one. I can export my entries and it looks like they are imported but the site won't rebuild. That means I lose the conversations and native MT search capabilities for those entries.

At any rate, don't confuse my temporary dormancy for anything permanent. In fact, I'm very tempted to start blogging at http://www.niggerati.net/prometheus6/ immediately.

I have no problem setting up MovableType. I have no problems with page design and all that.

I have no idea why I can't import the entries from P6-Gray into P6-Green.

I tried using the export file function. Eight megs of posts and comments. I imported then posts into the new site here, and it looks like it works…but site rebuilding function hangs. I tried SQL dumps, but that restores the blog settings (root path on the server and all that)…you have no idea how badly you can screw up an MT installation that way.

Finally, I decided to wipe the whole damn thing and start over.

The individual entries from the P6-Gray are gone. The weekly archives have been moved over here.

If this works, I'm going to cut my losses

I'm getting database errors, too many connections. What this means is, I can't always post or make comments when I want to. I can save my posts locally and upload them when everything clears up, but that affects my timeliness and is a general annoyance.

This being the case, I need to accelerate a couple of changes. P6 may become unavailable for a while in the next day or two.

This is not what I had in mind for the REAL New Years Day, but it's too cold to hang out anyway.

I decided to watch episode 4 of the first season of "24" tonight. Watching it on DVD without commercials means it runs faster than real-time. It's like drinking from a firehose. Damn fine show… tell you, if Fox could get their entertainment head out of their news/propaganda ass I could enjoy some of their stuff. Anyway, I'm watching some more "24" tonight.

But before I do, I want to waste a bit of time.

There's a blog call Properwinston whose author tries to get my attention periodically. Today's effort links me to the word "racialist," asks a bunch of rhetorical questions and compares me to Cobb, The Mulatto Advocate and an article about Randall Kennedy by Derrick Bell.

In keeping with my tradition of not linking to those whose thought processes I have no respect for, I provide links to Cobb and the article, though the article link is approval of Professor Bell, not Professor Kennedy.