Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life, a Memoir asin: 0883782618 binding: Hardcover list price: $22.95 USD amazon price: $15.61 USD availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

I got a heads-up about this interview a couple of days ago...it took a while to find a linkable copy. I think it came up because I mentioned how my mom is as color-concious as Dr. Price Cobb's mom.

An Interview With Haki Madhubuti
BY Jonathan Tilove

Haki R. Madhubuti is a poet and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Chicago State University, the founder and publisher of Third World Press and the co-founder of four schools in Chicago. He is the author of 27 books, most recently "Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life: A Memoir," about his growing up in Detroit's Blackbottom and Chicago's West Side, and has just published "The Covenant With Black America," a project with broadcaster Tavis Smiley.

Q: On the cover of your book is a photo of your mother, Helen Maxine Graves Lee. The title is "Yellow Black." Why?

Quote of note:

"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break."

"But you would have to be an idiot to believe that," Scalia said.

...and FISA isn't even THAT old.

Scalia: People who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change with society are 'idiots'
By Jonathan Ewing
ASSOCIATED PRESS

6:58 a.m. February 14, 2006

PONCE, Puerto Rico – People who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change with society are “idiots,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says.

The God Genome
Review by LEON WIESELTIER

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Thus begins the savaging of Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Wieseltier is so relentless it's an amusing sight.

I like the two cartoons that accompany the review a lot. Here's my favorite:

Whoa. Serious statement.

FEMA Raps!

Seriously.

By giving this report some visibility, David Broder has just earned the benefit of the doubt as to his honesty. Cutting to the chase:

It involves the treatment in the budget of the Bush tax cuts passed by Congress in 2001 and 2003.

Those rate reductions, when enacted, had expiration dates of 2010, designed to keep their long-term costs within the limits set by the budget resolutions of which they were a part. The president is urging Congress to make those tax cuts permanent, but his proposal is controversial and has not yet passed.

This year, however, the budget the president submitted on Feb. 6 simply assumes that the tax cuts have been made permanent -- and thus includes them in the "baseline" for all future years.

The effect, according to the center's analysis, is that "legislation to make these tax cuts permanent will be scored as having no cost whatsoever."

So as not to further damage Mr. Broder's standing as a conservative, further discussion will reference the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities's report he was kind enough to highlight.

You know the GOP in Ohio is in bad shape when, after decades of Republican race baiting their fortunes depend on a really big  Black guy. Mr. Will's column is as much about the decreptude of the Republican Party in Ohio as an introduction to Ken Blackwell.

In 1998 party elders pressured Blackwell into stepping aside to clear the path to the governorship for Bob Taft -- great-great-grandson of a U.S. attorney general, great-grandson of a president, grandson and son of U.S. senators. Today, Taft's job approval rating has plunged to 18 percent among Republican voters . The rest of the electorate is more hostile. Republicans hold 12 of 18 U.S. House seats and both Senate seats. Unfortunately for Ohio Republicans, they also control both elected branches of the state government, and their record of scandals and un-Republican governance -- substantial tax and spending increases -- have Blackwell, a 6-foot-5, 255-pound former college football player (Xavier University in Cincinnati), running against his party's record.

Also noticed something  can use to make a useful point; Mr. Will says it's a "conservative axiom":

Why Congress Has Not Declared War Since World War II

February 16, 2006: The current war on terror often raises the issue of why war has not officially been declared against the enemy. Most people don't realize that the United States has not declared war since World War II (when a number of countries, not just Japan and Germany, were so named.) And there's a reason for that, one that is rarely discussed.

Seems that after World War II, Congress wrote into law a lot of the wartime measures used during World War II. These included price controls, censorship and greater police powers. This was done with the possibility of nuclear war in mind, where there would be massive damage done to the U.S. in a short period of time. To deal with this,  a lot of these regulations would kick in the minute Congress votes to declare war. No one wants to be the first to suggest repealing these laws and regulations, and no one wants to see them go into action. So whenever anyone in Congress starts talking about declaring war, they are pulled aside by some senior staffers and filled in on the consequences.

Good to know OpinionJournal has a sense of humor.

But I have a better solution, one that's even more radical but allows you to stay in your American suburb, work within the old-fashioned American free market and avoid religious vows. How about banding together with some other students to hire tutors?

There are thousands of under-employed Ph.D.s in America who could be paid to offer college-level courses in your living room. If 10 students banded together and put up $10,000 each--students who, say, couldn't care less about football, don't need a Women's Center and have no urge to join Delta Delta Delta--they could hire two high-end intellectuals, pay them $50,000 each and get personal instruction.

Higher Learning, a Tutorial
Pop quiz: Is the cost of a college education worth it? (No.) Is there an alternative? (Yes.)

BY MARK OPPENHEIMER
Friday, February 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

New Orleans Hospital Staff Discussed Mercy Killings

by Carrie Kahn

All Things Considered, February 16, 2006 · Soon after Hurricane Katrina struck, the first unconfirmed reports surfaced of "mercy killings" -- euthanasia of patients -- at New Orleans hospitals. For months, the Louisiana attorney general has been investigating these charges. That investigation has centered on the actions of doctors and nurses at the city's Memorial Medical Center.

NPR has reviewed secret court documents related to the investigation and not yet released to the public. The documents reveal chilling details about events at Memorial hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses. The witnesses also heard staff discussing the agonizing decision to end patients' lives.

Rule of thumb: when your age is an integral multiple of hers, your lusty references are probably offensive.

"That's so goddamn dumb I can't believe it," said Schaefer, a former governor and mayor of Baltimore who is seeking reelection this year. "I look at one of the girls as she walked out. Big deal. . . . I look at the girls every time they walk out. The day I don't look at pretty girls, I die."

That's not quite the way it was. Silent admiration of geometry is fine.

Greenland's Glaciers: Melting and On The Move

The glaciers in southern Greenland are melting and moving. In fact, Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier went from standing still in 1996 to flowing at a rate of 14 kilometers a year by 2005, making it one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world. According to a new study, all of Greenland's coastal glaciers are already experiencing or may soon experience such speedups, meaning that Greenland's ice will contribute even more than expected to the world's rising seas.
"It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes," notes Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Greenland is probably going to contribute more and faster to sea level rise than predicted by current models."

It seems the primary response to George Will on the conservative side of things comes from Captain's Quarters.

George Will, Misrepresenting

Normally I enjoy George Will's columns; he isn't exactly a hard-line conservative, but he usually covers the center-right well enough.

The other day Glen Greenwald wrote a post about how the definition of "conservative" nowadays is "agrees with everything George Bush says or does." Conservatives nationwide were greatly offended.

I got this from Reuters.

Brazil, which heads a peacekeeping force of 9,000 U.N. troops and police, brokered the deal to distribute 85,000 "blank" votes, which showed no choice for president out of the 33 candidates, proportionately among the contenders.

The blanks, amounting to 4.7 percent of the total, had been included in accordance with the law and reduced the final percentage allocated to each candidate.

With 90 percent of the ballots counted, Preval had been at 48.7 percent -- below the simple majority he needed to avoid a March 19 runoff and outraging his supporters.

Many Haitians were suspicious of the large number of blank votes, saying they could not imagine people trekking miles (km) to polling stations simply to leave their ballots unmarked.

The U.N. mission sent to maintain the peace in Haiti has also acknowledged that partisan election workers could have stuffed ballot boxes with blank ballots.

The agreement over the blank votes lifted Preval's share to 50.9 percent.

You have a busy day and miss the opportunity to agree with George Will. These opportunities are rare as hen's teeth; more precious than pearls.

Anyway, the argument that the AUMF contained a completely unexpressed congressional intent to empower the president to disregard the FISA regime is risible coming from this administration. It famously opposes those who discover unstated meanings in the Constitution's text and do not strictly construe the language of statutes.

Thank you. Though it's so obvious all you conservative pundit types should have noticed it immediately.

The administration's argument about the legality of the NSA program also has been discordant with its argument about the urgency of extending the USA Patriot Act. Many provisions of that act are superfluous if a president's wartime powers are as far-reaching as today's president says they are.

I missed Dave Chappelle's appearance on Oprah.

Professor Kim got some links that told me all the good stuff, though.

The second noteworthy item was his charge that black male comic actors are being pressured to masquerade as women in order to strike box-office gold:

"I am a conspiracy theorist to a degree. I connect dots that maybe shouldn't be connected. But certain dots, like when I see they put every black man in the movies in a dress at some point in their career. ... I am like, 'Why these brothers got to wear a dress?'"

Abortions at home are safe - pilot study
Polly Curtis, health correspondent
Thursday February 16, 2006
The Guardian

Women who are less than nine weeks pregnant can safely have medical abortions at home, according to the head of a government-backed pilot project.

Abortion services for the 20,000 women who seek a chemically induced abortion every year could be transformed should the Department of Health's official evaluation of the pilot confirm initial findings. But it is also likely to provoke controversy from anti-abortion campaigners who will claim that home abortions would make the procedure easier and therefore lead to more women having terminations.

I forgot who suggested it, but the simple solution to ex-Congressmen taking advantage of their privileges as ex-Congressmen in their new role as a lobbyist is to remove those privileges while they are lobbyists. They can have them back when they get a job that doesn't involve directly influencing the government.

Lobbyist Attends Private GOP Meeting
By ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republicans may change the rules allowing former senators to attend weekly GOP luncheon meetings after retired Sen. Lauch Faircloth attended a session while lobbying a bill pending on the floor.

Faircloth, R-N.C., is a registered lobbyist for companies such as Honeywell and the Dow Chemical Co., which are advocating passage of a bill to limit the liability of companies facing asbestos-related claims.

I discuss this

Haiti president gets new chance to prove mettle
Thu Feb 16, 2006 07:38 AM ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - Given Haiti's history of dictatorship, violence and perpetual political chaos, it could be seen as high praise that Rene Preval's first term as president was relatively peaceful.

Preval was declared the country's next president on Thursday after a deal was reached over charges of vote fraud. The deal gives Preval 50.9 percent of the vote and averts a runoff.

...at Intrapolitics.org.

Still no sign of concern about the police force with power to arrest anyone on mere suspicion.

...virtually every senator who had stood with Feingold last year to kill a House-Senate agreement abandoned the effort this month after two of them, both Republicans, struck a deal with the White House to add more privacy protections.

..."Sometimes cosmetics will make a beauty out of a beast and provide enough cover for senators to change their vote," Specter told reporters Wednesday.

Patriot Act Moves Ahead Despite Opposition
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer
Thu Feb 16, 4:45 AM ET

Rove is actually jealous...

Waving the burned ballot papers and ballot boxes found in the garbage dump, the protesters chanted, "Look what they did with our votes," as they marched past the U.S., Canadian and French embassies.

Haiti vote count grinds to halt with fraud probe
Wed Feb 15, 2006 01:11 PM ET
By Joseph Guyler Delva and Jim Loney

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - The counting of ballots in Haiti's presidential election ground to a halt more than a week after the vote as electoral authorities on Wednesday bowed to a demand by the leading candidate for a fraud inquiry.

Thousands protested after charred and still smoldering ballots were found on a garbage dump in Port-au-Prince, reinforcing the claims of fraud leveled by Rene Preval, a former president opposed by the same wealthy elite who helped drive Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile two years ago.

Here.

Man, when I say I love my computer this is NOT what I'm talking about.
Quote of note:

Fifty-one percent of respondents were female and 49 percent were male. Of these, 53 percent of students had sex over instant messenger while 44 percent made love to a partner via webcam or telephone.

Young Canadians prefer 'virtual sex': survey
Feb 14 3:41 PM US/Eastern

Young Canadians are digitizing their sex lives, embracing computer screens and touching keyboards ever so gently in lieu of person to person contact, according to a new survey.

Some 87 percent of 2,484 students polled at 150 colleges and universities across Canada reported having "virtual sex" over instant messenger, webcams or the telephone.

Willie Nelson Releases Gay Cowboy Song

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Country music outlaw Willie Nelson sang "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" and "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" more than 25 years ago. He released a very different sort of cowboy anthem this Valentine's Day.

"Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)" may be the first gay cowboy song by a major recording artist. But it was written long before this year's Oscar-nominated "Brokeback Mountain" made gay cowboys a hot topic.

Available exclusively through iTunes, the song features choppy Tex-Mex style guitar runs and Nelson's deadpan delivery of lines like, "What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?" and "Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."

Quote of note:

He sees it as scientific proof that racism has no rational basis. "You can be 99 percent confident that there was recurrent genetic interchange between African and Eurasian populations," he says. "So the idea of pure, distinct races in humans does not exist. We humans don't have a tree relationship, but rather a trellis. We're intertwined."

It's good to remember that for every scientist who wants to prove that Africans are genetically distinct from Europeans, there's one who wants to prove they aren't.

Um...race has no rational basis...but you really can't use the relationships between two non-human species as proof.

Now you may be saying, sure, humans could have been raping Homo erectus, but that doesn't mean any of them made babies -- that's like saying humans who rape chimps are interbreeding. And you'd be right if it turned out to be true that there was only one migration out of Africa 100,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens had diverged enough from its fellow hominids that matings were likely to be sterile. But if Templeton's findings are accurate, there were migrations out of Africa 1.5 million years ago and 700,000 years ago, as well as the familiar one we all know and love, 100,000 years ago.

The multiple migration theory IS the standard anti-African "interpretation" of the evidence. But who gives a damn what happened 700,000 years ago when our species developed 300,000 years after that? And can you find any species (not traits) other than humans for which people are arguing for the emergence of multiple appearances of genetically identical species?

Interbreeders
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
Posted on February 14, 2006

These are the guys that said Alito and Roberts were "highly qualified," right?

Lawyers Group Says Bush Exceeds His Powers
Tuesday February 14, 2006 2:46 AM
By ANNA JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - The American Bar Association denounced President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program Monday, accusing him of exceeding his powers under the Constitution.

The program has prompted a heated debate about presidential powers in the war on terror since it was disclosed in December.

The nation's largest organization of lawyers adopted a policy opposing any future government use of electronic surveillance in the United States for foreign intelligence purposes without first obtaining warrants from a special court set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Ms Barber, in a post consisting of naked assertions of Black biologically based inferiority of intelligence, promised two additional posts in the series: there was to be a discussion of "research" which purports to support her naked assertions (they were non-peer reviewed white papers, not research). And

In the third post, I’ll consider your responses and the general conclusions of the studies. I’ll blog about possible solutions to the problem, how to raise test scores, and anything new and interesting I uncover from additional studies and your comments.

This third post hasn't shown up yet.

What has shown up was this:

I assume many of you know immigrants who came to America with very little but managed to achieve the American dream. And I’m sure many of you are as baffled as I am that people born and raised in this great country really believe their skin color prevents them from doing the same.

No one believes their skin color prevents them from doing a damn thing.

People know other folks respond to their skin color in ways that handicap the person under consideration. People know those responses are invalid, and they want protection from thos invalid reactions.

Again. No one...

NO one...

...believes their skin color makes them less capable in the slightest.

As we watch Senator Obama, I find myself wondering how a (quite possibly) successful Mfume for Senator campaign will affect him. I wonder how he will impact the Mfume campaign.

Obama Speaks
The rising-star Democrat on religion, blogs, John McCain and more
By PERRY BACON/WASHINGTON

There's a lot of reasons you could be jealous of Barack Obama: he's a great public speaker, so handsome that after every public event long lines of mostly women rush to get a picture with him, and counts Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Warren Buffett among his admirers. And he just won a spoken-word Grammy for for the audio version of his memoir, "Dreams from My Father." But here's the killer: He doesn't really gain weight. People who've met with him note he's endlessly snacking on nuts or whatever is at hand, and yet his 6'2'' frame remains as trim as ever. "At one point in the campaign, he said if he doesn't work out, he loses weight,' says Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman. "And I was like 'you really shouldn't say that anymore."

I watch all this coverage of Cheney's gun accident and ask why the media doesn't jump all over the Bushistas when they do something foolish of real significance?

Seconds later: Okay, i just heard on PBS's The News Hour the guy has buckshot "in or near his heart."

That, people, is not "peppering."

I'm going to go find something authoritative to link to.

Sounds like it was around the time Clarence Thomas was dismantling the EEOC.

Known as the Pigford case, the settlement affected farmers who were denied credit by the USDA during the Reagan Administration when the civil rights arm of the agency was eliminated.

BLACK FARMERS: Why They Can't Wait
Feb. 9, 2006 -- An Alabama Congressman seeks to re-open a case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, hoping more black farmers can finally claim their portion of a billion-dollar settlement.
By Camille Jackson | Staff Writer, Tolerance.org

"I've farmed all my life," Berniece Atchison said, cradling a stack of manila envelopes. "Vegetables mostly. I have 59 acres of land. My husband is a farmer. His father and his grandfather were farmers. My children were raised on a farm. It's embedded in me."

My American Life : From Rage to Entitlement asin: 0743496191 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $16.47 USD availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

I don't generally read memoirs. I decided to review this one when I caught an appearance by Dr. Cobbs on C-SPAN's Book TV while flipping channels. I stopped to see what was up, and wasn't but so interested until he mentioned he co-authored Black Rage. I read Black Rage years ago and was impressed, though it was at a depth I wasn't ready for at the time...it's an exploration where Ellis Cose's The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Do Prosperous Blacks Still Have the Blues? is a popularization. I found the idea of a peek into his life interesting.

Quote of note:

Mr. Hackett said he was unwilling to run for the Congressional seat because he had given his word to three Democratic candidates that he would not enter that race.

"The party keeps saying for me not to worry about those promises because in politics they are broken all the time," said Mr. Hackett, who plans to return to his practice as a lawyer in the Cincinnati area. "I don't work that way. My word is my bond."

Popular Ohio Democrat Drops Out of Race, and Perhaps Politics
By IAN URBINA

Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and popular Democratic candidate in Ohio's closely watched Senate contest, said yesterday that he was dropping out of the race and leaving politics altogether as a result of pressure from party leaders.

Quote of note:

Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.

In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free.

That's just more balls than ten guys can walk with. And your Congressmen are helpless...if they pass a law correcting this nonsense, the oil companies will just fund their opponent's primary campaigns

Corporate interests will rule.

Haitians Angry Over Election Take to Streets
Mobs Paralyze Cities, Block Major Roads
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 14, 2006; A01

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 13 -- Haiti's hopes for a peaceful presidential election exploded Monday in a torrent of violence as mobs overturned cars, set piles of tires ablaze and built elaborate roadblocks across major highways, protesting delays in the vote count and alleged fraud in last Tuesday's balloting.

Demonstrators paralyzed cities across the country, from Cap-Haitien in the north to this impoverished seaside capital, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand that Rene Preval -- a former president and favorite of this city's poor -- be named president.

One of the posts I lost related to Elliot Spitzer's choice of David A. Paterson as a running mate. The reactions form the local Black political establishment was muted.

"When Eliot Spitzer, the world's smartest man, is telling me that he has picked his candidate and knows that his candidate can win, who am I to question the world's smartest man?" said Mr. Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation.

"I like to think that the world's smartest man has counted all the support he has for his candidate," he continued. "I don't remember David Paterson asking any of us for his support, but if Eliot has picked a candidate, who am I to deny him that decision?"

Mr. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, said he was troubled that the Spitzer camp might pit two black candidates, Ms. Eve and Mr. Paterson, who might end up dividing the black vote and losing to a third candidate.

"We're very surprised to hear the attorney general prefers David to her; this news came out of nowhere," Mr. Sutton said. "But like Charlie Rangel says, I'm not smart like Eliot Spitzer is."

I meant to hold back my opinion but it came out in the equally lost comments that I felt the gesture was meant to say "you're a valued, but junior, partner in all this."

I believe the second message is being delivered, which may be loosly translated as, "We need you guys but not you specific guys."

In Cuomo Campaign, Shadow of '02 Race
By JONATHAN P. HICKS

Quote of note:

...White House aides, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, faulted the New Orleans political community for failing to face hard choices about race and geography.

...White House officials have said they see no merit in re-creating failing schools and flawed public housing in New Orleans. Still, they reject conspiracy theories about racial engineering.

...Isaacson, a New Orleans native and former Time Inc. editor appointed by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to the panel overseeing the state's recovery plans, estimates that $3 billion, plus about $5 billion already in the pipeline, will bail out the owners of the roughly 220,000 homes destroyed by Katrina. Given that Congress has already agreed to spend $85 billion on Katrina relief, the cost does not seem insurmountable. But first, the White House and Louisiana pols will have to overcome bitter partisan sniping and racially charged gamesmanship.

A Katrina Brownout
Local pols think the White House blew off rebuilding New Orleans. Behind the latest battle to get it right.
By Evan Thomas and Holly Bailey
Newsweek

Feb. 20, 2006 issue - In America, there are always second acts. One of the most breathtaking was on display last week on Capitol Hill, where former FEMA director Michael Brown—the much-ridiculed goat of the federal government's sorry response to Hurricane Katrina—was magically resurrecting himself as a heroic whistle-blower. Testifying before a Senate committee, Brown declared that he had informed the White House and the Department of Homeland Security of a levee breech on the day of the storm and warned that "we were realizing our worst nightmare." He scoffed at statements by administration officials, including President George W. Bush, that they had been left in the dark by FEMA and only learned of the severe damage the day after the storm passed. "Baloney," Brown said.

First they decide schools don't get to call religion science and get credit for it. Now they're addressing grade point inflation via AP courses.

In 1999, the UC faculty admissions committee recommended reducing the credit that students receive for taking AP classes, citing studies that found AP courses were a mediocre predictor of UC success. It also was growing increasingly obvious that reliance on AP courses discriminated against low-income and rural students, who attended schools that offered few, if any, AP courses. Despite these solid arguments, the regents tabled the matter.

Since then, an effort to bring more AP courses to low-income and rural schools has made some inroads, although it fell back during bad budget times. And last year, a UC task force found many of the same problems with the AP policy, and pointed out that other elite universities seldom award extra AP credit to applicants.

Now the UC faculty admissions committee is preparing to recommend that the system drop the AP credit entirely. Instead, the idea is to look more comprehensively at whether students took some of the more rigorous courses available at their schools. This time, the regents should listen.

February 13, 2006

ADVANCED PLACEMENT COURSES have long held a kind of magical allure for high school students of a certain clique. What other classes offer the chance to earn college credits? But now, 50 years after the first AP test was offered, AP courses are raising concerns familiar to the College Board, which also administers the exam's older cousin, the SAT. And after an almost inexcusable delay, the University of California is asking a lot of the right questions.

Since the first AP exam in 1956, the industry has become a force unto itself. More than 15,000 U.S. schools offer at least one of the 35 AP courses, according to the College Board, which last week issued a 94-page "Advanced Placement Report to the Nation" detailing how many more students are taking and passing the courses. President Bush has even made AP courses a part of his education policy.

AP courses, however, are now less about students seeking out deeper knowledge than about kids racking up points to impress college admissions committees. Academics are increasingly concerned that, although the courses are more rigorous than average classes, their quality has grown uneven. Too many such classes emphasize memorization over research, analysis and writing. About a dozen elite high schools have stopped offering them, and some top universities have made it harder to get college credit for them.

Now the University of California, which for nearly a quarter of a century has given an extra grade point to applicants who take AP and certain honors courses, is reconsidering its AP policy.

Quote of note:

Biracial men have been banned from the South Korean military, although the Defense Ministry announced Friday, in a move that some attributed to the Hines Ward phenomenon, that the policy is being changed.

"If he had grown up here instead of the United States, he would have had a hard time," said Park Mi Na, a 17-year-old mixed-race high school student. Park, who bears a strong resemblance to the African American father she hasn't seen since she was 2, said she has been taunted by children her entire life and stared at strangely by adults "as if I were an alien from outer space."

S. Koreans Reclaim Biracial Football Champion as One of Them
Super Bowl star Hines Ward moved to the U.S. as a toddler. His fame is spurring people to reexamine old prejudices.
By Barbara Demick
Times Staff Writer
February 13, 2006

Quote of note:

Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its 'antigravity beam' becomes.

Felber's calculations show how to use the repulsion of a body speeding through space to provide the enormous energy needed to accelerate massive payloads quickly with negligible stress. The new solution of Einstein's field equation shows that the payload would 'fall weightlessly' in an antigravity beam even as it was accelerated close to the speed of light.

Physicist to Present New Exact Solution of Einstein's Gravitational Field Equation
New antigravity solution will enable space travel near speed of light by the end of this century, he predicts.

Forgive me while I geek out a little this morning.

Check out this little tiny Transformers©-like dude.

Company requires RFID injection
Peter Laborge 2006-02-10
Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Mind Control by Parasites
Bill Christensen
Sat Feb 11, 8:00 AM ET

Half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, parasites in the body—and the brain. Remember that.

Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite found in the guts of cats; it sheds eggs that are picked up by rats and other animals that are eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts in the bodies of the intermediate rat hosts, including in the brain.

Since cats don't want to eat dead, decaying prey, Toxoplasma takes the evolutionarily sound course of being a "good" parasite, leaving the rats perfectly healthy. Or are they?

Oxford scientists discovered that the minds of the infected rats have been subtly altered. In a series of experiments, they demonstrated that healthy rats will prudently avoid areas that have been doused with cat urine. In fact, when scientists test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to induce neurochemical panic.

However, it turns out that Toxoplasma-ridden rats show no such reaction. In fact, some of the infected rats actually seek out the cat urine-marked areas again and again. The parasite alters the mind (and thus the behavior) of the rat for its own benefit.

If the parasite can alter rat behavior, does it have any effect on humans?

Tom DeLay on the House Appropriations committee. Filling Randy Cunningham's spot.

Tom DeLay on the committee investigating Jack Abramoff.

That is absolutely insulting.

DeLay Lands Coveted Appropriations Spot
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press WriterWed Feb 8, 5:39 PM ET

Indicted Rep. Tom DeLay, forced to step down as the No. 2 Republican in the House, scored a soft landing Wednesday as GOP leaders rewarded him with a coveted seat on the Appropriations Committee.

DeLay, R-Texas, also claimed a seat on the subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is currently investigating an influence-peddling scandal involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his dealings with lawmakers. The subcommittee also has responsibility over NASA — a top priority for DeLay, since the Johnson Space Center is located in his Houston-area district.

I commend you, seriously.

Agencies Join Forces to Aid Older Tenants
By JANELLE NANOS

To reach Dorothy Reid's Brooklyn home last month, a visitor first had to walk past the gutted ground floor, whose boarded-up windows bore a sign reminding residents of police surveillance. Then it was up three flights of stairs, past a door secured by a huge lock and chain, to the two-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant where she has lived for 25 years.

My Muslim Students Speak about the Danish Boycott

As is well known to regular readers of this blog, I left the US last summer to begin teaching at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. This semester I teach three sections of strategic management courses. Each student in those classes is required to maintain his or her own blog.

...Each week I recommend up th three articles that the students may blog about. They are free, however, to choose any article or any topic beside those. This past week, one of the articles I recommended was one entitled "Effect of Danish Boycott Patchy" that appeared in the Saudi English daily, Arab News, on January 29th. As one might imagine, several students decided to write on this topic.

Some folks would rather see folks starve than challenge  the illusion that we do not have just as managed an economy as the Soviet Union ever did.

They are, of course, the folks who have no need to concern themselves with work.

New York Times on full employment:

...does globalization mean that for full employment to exist, there must be legislation that mandates it? A great majority of economists and politicians — liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans — resist this view. They count on the markets to bring back full employment, with a smattering of tax breaks, subsidies and low interest rates to help the process. But not government as the employer of last resort.

That faith in markets, on the other hand, has not yet produced full employment. A famous British economist, William Beveridge, argued in the 1930's that full employment exists when the number of job vacancies exceeds the number of people seeking them. Only then is everyone who wants a job likely to land one, at a good wage.

Glen Greenwald:

It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.

Curiously, new monkey movie lands in middle of cultural battle - Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006

For the politically correct Bay Area parent, the "Curious George" children's books are a minefield of cultural horrors through which to tiptoe. Imperialism. Animal abuse. Bad parenting.

Puh-leeeeze, George's defenders say. They're children's books, whose charm has not dimmed -- 25 million books and countless swag sold -- even if ideas about political correctness have evolved since the first George adventure was published in 1941. Sometimes a speechless, mischievous monkey is just that -- a monkey, not a metaphor. Besides, George's tales are no more un-PC than those of that royalist warmonger, Babar.

Iraq War’s Virtues May Be Debatable. The Profits Aren’t.
By HUBERT B. HERRING

In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush called for the nation to back the war in Iraq and to "stand behind the American military in this vital mission."

No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers — on both sides. There's the human toll, of course, which Mr. Bush acknowledged. Whether democracy and freedom will, over all, be winners, only history will divulge.

But some indisputable winners are clear now: military contractors. Suppose an investor were endowed with that golden instinct for spotting bargains and bought 100 shares of each of the top six military contractors at their lows of the last six years — lows reached by four of them in March 2000, before the election, before Sept. 11 and before any hint of war. That basket of shares would have cost $12,731.50. On Friday, it would have been worth three and a half times that: $44,417.

Little wonder. Just look at the money machines these contractors have become as the war drags on.