It's that damn rap music, no one wants the classics anymore because of that damn rap music.

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare's plays, "The Great Gatsby" and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah's Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

Oprah?

OPRAH??

Say it ain't so...but then Oprah is part of Black culture. We can still blame Black culture.

Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway?
With Shelf Space Prized, Fairfax Libraries Cull Collections
By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 2, 2007; A01

You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.

It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.

Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us. Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.

“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.

“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”

In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said. “You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t
By DENNIS OVERBYE

I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.

There's a lot more at play than just wanting or not wanting to be around white folks. But there's always been a lot of projection in Black Conservative-speak. 

Because neighborhoods are racially segregated, African Americans' homes do not grow in value as fast as whites' homes do. Shapiro calculates that housing segregation costs African Americans tens of thousands of dollars in home equity. Homebuyers look for amenities commonly found in predominantly white neighborhoods. They pay extra for parks, convenient shopping and attractive views. Parents pay huge premiums for what they perceive to be good schools. Few parents can judge schools objectively. Instead, they use easy-to-observe markers, including the race of the students. These preferences raise the costs that first-time homebuyers face when they attempt to buy houses in those mostly white neighborhoods. Economic theory implies that if whites continue to waste money on irrational prejudices like this, market forces will eventually undo the racial disparity in wealth. But the experience of the last 50 years suggests otherwise. Inequality has grown because each new generation has been willing to pay a higher premium for these amenities. The market doesn't punish discrimination; it rewards it.

Whites fail to see any injustice in these differences. Shapiro's interviews convinced him that whites hide their privilege from themselves and, accordingly, feel no guilt for the hidden costs they impose on African Americans. People who inherited tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars nonetheless told Shapiro that they were self-made and self-reliant. They proudly told him how the assets they inherited grew under their stewardship. White parents use wealth to send their children to private schools or to give their adult children down payments for homes. They do not see how such practices hand today's inequalities on to the next generation.

Shapiro argues convincingly that these private matters spill over into public investment, too. He interviewed one upper-middle-class woman who told him that she was unconcerned with troubles in the local public school because she never intended to send her children there. Shapiro points out that her indifference -- and that of others like her -- is just one more obstacle in the path of people trying to improve local public education.

The Hidden Cost of Being African American
Reviewed by Michael Hout
From The Washington Post's Book World

African Americans often seem cut off from the economic mainstream. They face higher risks of poverty, joblessness and incarceration than their fellow citizens do. Community organizing, civil rights legislation, landmark court decisions and rising education have advanced the cause of racial equality. Overt bigotry has been banished from public places, and polls show that whites harbor fewer prejudices than they used to. But these improvements have not been enough.

How can disadvantage persist so long after most laws, minds and practices have changed? Thomas M. Shapiro argues in this sober and authoritative book that we should look to disparities of wealth for the answer. Whites are wealthier than African Americans, and whites' wealth advantage is much bigger than their advantages in either income or education (the point of Shapiro's earlier study, Black Wealth/White Wealth, co-authored with Melvin Oliver). Whites start out ahead because they inherit more from their parents, and America's racially segregated housing markets boost whites' home equities, while depressing those of African-American families. Shapiro, a professor of sociology at Brandeis, takes readers through the implications of these inequities and concludes that African Americans will not gain significant ground in the wealth divide until inheritance and housing policies change.

Cool looks instinctive, but growing up with three brothers and raising three sons taught me something surprising:

Cool is learned.

The Hard Core Of Cool
Confidence, Grace And Underneath It All, the Need to Be Recognized
Donna Britt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 30, 2006; C01

Years ago on a summer day, I was driving along the Detroit riverfront and saw a black man strolling down a wide downtown sidewalk.

Long, lithe and fluid as the river by his side, the man seemed to be gliding. Bareheaded, he wore a white, ankle-skimming djellaba from some sultry, equatorial nation. Yet something whispered that he was African American, something about his utter nonchalance as his garment whipped in the breeze and insinuated itself around his calves. Trust me:

He couldn't have been hotter -- or have seemed more chilled out.

Cool.

Over the years, I've seen plenty of striking men. But when someone mentions "cool," I hearken back to that strolling stranger. It wasn't his distinctive garb that burned his image into memory but his confidence. Flanked by skyscrapers and businessmen, he wore his exotic ensemble with such authority, the sweating corporate types around him seemed out of place.

Confidence is cool's most essential element. Perhaps that's why black men -- for whom the appearance of assurance can be a matter of life or death -- so often radiate it. Perhaps that's why in the United States, where men as different as Frank Sinatra, Joe Namath, Bruce Lee, Sean Connery, Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp have been deemed cool, black men remain cool's most imitated, consistent arbiters. I mean, there's cool -- and then there's brothercool.

Atkinson High might seem an unlikely laboratory for ethnic mixing. The school, which opened in 1955, barred blacks until 1970. In 1994, it was only 4 percent Hispanic, state statistics show, while now the population of 514 students is 50 percent white, 26 percent Hispanic and 22 percent black. Hispanic and black students wear their school colors, red and white, as proudly as their white classmates do.

Faculty members at Atkinson High, which is led by Paul Daniel, the principal, marvel at the changes.

“I’ve never taught at a school where Hispanics were on the football team or the cheerleading squad,” said Edwin Collins, a Spanish teacher.

“I have girls with Hispanic boyfriends and boys who wish they had Hispanic girlfriends,” said Mr. Collins, who has taught for nearly 20 years. “It’s different from anything I’ve ever seen.”

Hispanic Teenagers Join Southern Mainstream
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

PEARSON, Ga. — The buzzer blares and the students pour into the hallways — bubble gum snapping, locker doors slamming — as the young man of the moment saunters through the admiring crowd at Atkinson County High School.

He is thin and wiry with a whisper of a mustache and a taste for enormous Hollywood-style sunglasses. Like most popular boys, he receives flurries of party invitations and whispered confidences from pretty girls. Like other students, he juggles homework and dreams of becoming a singing sensation. In fact, in this tiny town, the most remarkable thing about him is his name, Frankie Ruiz.

In October, Frankie and a classmate, Kristen Galarza, made local history when they were named homecoming king and queen, the first time Hispanics won both titles in the same year. The coronation stirred astonishment, jubilation and some outrage in this Southern town, which is being transformed by Latino migration and is still struggling to adapt to its evolving ethnic identity.

I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.

Middle School Girls Gone Wild
By LAWRENCE DOWNES

It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

I saw this headline

Nanny Hunt Can Be a ‘Slap in the Face’ for Blacks

...and thought, "yeah."  And it's not just immigrants with wrong ideas. Black folks, in general, do not like to serve Black folks.

Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa's ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.

"Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas," said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, "they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa's outfits came from Coca-Cola's paintings."

Christians Claimed It First, but Businesses Made Christmas Their Own
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, December 25, 2006; A02

Fifty-five years ago yesterday, priests at the Dijon Cathedral in eastern France enacted a rather unusual Christmas pageant for the benefit of several hundred schoolchildren: They hanged and burned Santa Claus.

You've been worried about the wrong celebration.

Festivus is a much greater threat to the Christmas traditions than Kwanzaa.

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Assn., said he was delighted with the revenue from "War on Christmas" merchandise, which supplemented the ministry's $13-million annual budget. All 500,000 buttons and 125,000 magnets were sold out by early December. "It was very successful for us," Wildmon said.

'War on Christmas' has a new jingle: money
Christian groups raise funds as they sell items to counter a perceived assault on the holiday. By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer
4:16 AM PST, December 23, 2006

The "War on Christmas" has never been so profitable.

Yup. Just like there have been gay folks ever since folks existed at all, them hormones be kicking folks into action as soon as they hit the bloodstream. Not a lot you can do about it.

For example, 48 percent of women born between 1939 and 1948 reported having had premarital intercourse by age 20.

And this

The experience of men in those years isn't known. The government's National Survey of Family Growth didn't include men until 2002.

...is both fascinating. and funny. I'll leave it to the feminists to explain why. 

Wait Until Marriage? 'Extremely Challenging'
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; A02

Everybody is doing it, and has been for quite a while.

That's the conclusion of a study of trends in premarital intercourse over the past half-century.

Pot is called biggest cash crop
The $35-billion market value of U.S.-grown cannabis tops that of such heartland staples as corn and hay, a marijuana activist says.
By Eric Bailey
Times Staff Writer
December 18, 2006

SACRAMENTO — For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America's biggest cash crop. Now they're citing government statistics to prove it.

A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.

California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state's grapes, vegetables and hay combined — and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states.

The report estimates that marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past quarter century despite an exhaustive anti-drug effort by law enforcement.

Jon Gettman, the report's author, is a public policy consultant and leading proponent of the push to drop marijuana from the federal list of hard-core Schedule 1 drugs — which are deemed to have no medicinal value and a high likelihood of abuse — such as heroin and LSD.

He argues that the data support his push to begin treating cannabis like tobacco and alcohol by legalizing and reaping a tax windfall from it, while controlling production and distribution to better restrict use by teenagers.

"Despite years of effort by law enforcement, they're not getting rid of it," Gettman said. "Not only is the problem worse in terms of magnitude of cultivation, but production has spread all around the country. To say the genie is out of the bottle is a profound understatement."

"I think there is an appropriateness one needs to have, and if that's the policy of the police department, then one has to come in compliance," Dixon said.

Then change the policy, at least for sisters. I'm not feeling a high probability of a lot of brothers wearing locks or cornrows applying to be cops. It should not be a big deal.

Police Appearance Policy Raises Racial Sensitivity Issues

BALTIMORE - The WBAL TV 11 News I-Team has obtained a new professional appearance policy for the Baltimore Police Department intended to promote a professional image, but it's also raising questions of racial insensitivity. The new policy is more specific than the old one. For example, tattoos must now be kept covered.

I was joking, man...

Where the 'Angry Young Men' Are
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, December 16, 2006; A19

"Now listen to this," he continued: " 'As Iraq descends further into violence and disarray, the Pentagon is turning to a weapon some believe should have been used years ago: jobs.' "

Mr. Carl reminded the barbers that the Bush administration prefers to let unemployed Americans fend for themselves, relying on the free market. Not so in Iraq, he said. Mr. Carl stated that Pentagon planners intend to -- reading again -- "bring life to nearly 200 state-owned factories." Continuing, he read: "Their goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis in coming months, part of a plan to reduce soaring unemployment and lessen the violence that has crippled progress."

It's obviously time to move on because hip-hop is dead.

This is not really about the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation. It is somewhat inspired by the committee, though.

I've been reading their interim report. I usually read the suggestions in such reports first. I've noticed the case built to establish a problem is incidental to the suggestions being made. The suggestion are things the suggesters intended to do all along...the dispute then becomes whether or how the solve the presented problem. You prove your case by saying the second or third derivative result of each step applies to the problem. Usually no one notices those derivative steps don't happen in the temporal sequence that would bring about the claimed goal, and the suggesters got their suggestions in so no one complains. They just try to figure out why they didn't get what they expect.

"Science and technology have advanced so much; a blind person can hunt right now. But they need someone to tell them, 'The duck is at 28 degrees, aim a little to the left,' things like that," he added. "This is just going to make the goal easier to accomplish." 

Vision-impaired hunters in Texas may get to use lasers to improve cues from their guides and hence their aim.
By Miguel Bustillo
Times Staff Writer
December 12, 2006

HOUSTON — In this gun-loving state, nearly everyone can enjoy the pleasure of the hunt — even those who can't see what they're shooting at.

But now, a Texas legislator is proposing to give legally blind hunters more of a fighting chance by allowing them to use laser sights to target their prey.

And no, Vice President Dick Cheney is not a beneficiary of the legislation, though plenty of bloggers and amateur comedians are having a good time joking that he is.

Rep. Edmund Kuempel, a Republican from Seguin, about 30 miles east of San Antonio, has introduced a bill to exempt legally blind people from a Texas law that prohibits hunters from using laser sights or lights in hunting. Critics of the practice say the laser lights make the animals freeze in place, which diminishes the sport of the kill.

No wonder the concepts of clear thought and expression have died. 

In college tournaments, the longtime weapon of choice is speed-talking. The idea is to cram so many arguments into a speech that rival teams run out of time to rebut everything. To untrained ears, the rapid-fire verbiage sounds like an auctioneer on amphetamines.

Does this debase debate?
College forensics once stuck strictly to words. Now it can come off the page -- way off.
By Roy Rivenburg
Times Staff Writer
December 12, 200

IMAGINE a presidential debate in which John McCain answers Hillary Clinton's arguments by stripping down to his underwear or breaking into a rap song.

Patrick said that the house must be saved. "This is a gem, that it be preserved, restored, and sustained," he said.

"We have this diverse story to tell," said Beverly Morgan-Welch, executive director of the museum.

"They were not just a group of black abolitionists," Morgan-Welch said. ". . . They determined they'd change the nation. These are fabulous stories."

Meeting house fetes 200 years of service to black community
By Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff  |  December 7, 2006

The words belonged to Frederick Douglass, who spoke them almost a century and a half ago as he rallied abolitionists in Boston after an antislavery meeting was broken up: "After all the arguments for liberty to which Boston has listened for more than a quarter of a century, has she yet to learn that the time to assert a right is a time when the right itself is called into question?"

Yesterday, it was the incoming governor, the first black to be elected to the office, who spoke. Reading excerpts of Douglass speeches, Deval L. Patrick helped to launch a 200th anniversary celebration of Boston's African Meeting House.

Poverty shifts to the suburbs
Suburban poor outnumber their inner-city counterparts for the first time
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:02 a.m. ET Dec 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - As Americans flee the cities for the suburbs, many are failing to leave poverty behind.

The suburban poor outnumbered their inner-city counterparts for the first time last year, with more than 12 million suburban residents living in poverty, according to a study of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas released Thursday.

Okay, that looks interesting...

Berube said several factors are contributing to an increase in suburban poverty:

• Suburbs are adding people much faster than cities, making it inevitable that the number of poor people living in suburbs would eventually surpass those living in cities.
• The poverty rate in large cities (18.8 percent) is still higher than it is in the suburbs (9.4 percent). But the overall number of people living in poverty is higher in the suburbs in part because of population growth.
• America’s suburbs are becoming more diverse, racially and economically. “There’s poverty really everywhere in metropolitan areas because there are low-wage jobs everywhere,” Berube said.
• Recent immigrants are increasingly bypassing cities and moving directly to suburbs, especially in the South and West. Those immigrants, on average, have lower incomes than people born in the United States.

He said that? The first two points are the same...more people means more poor people. That 'racially' in 'more diverse, racially and economically" seems stuck in there sideways. REALLY sounds like, "All the new poor folks are un-white." And this is coming out of The Brookings Institution?

IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable
By Daniel Terdiman
Story last modified Mon Dec 04 13:06:19 PST 2006

NEW YORK--If you are a hard-core player of virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, Second Life, EverQuest or There, IRS form 1099 may someday soon take on a new meaning for you.

That's because game publishers may well in the not-too-distant future have to send the forms--which individuals receive when earning nonemployee income from companies or institutions--to virtual world players engaging in transactions for valuable items like Ultima Online castles, EverQuest weapons or Second Life currency, even when those players don't convert the assets into cash.

The Lessons of History
by JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

Meanwhile, in the decades following World War I, the status of African Americans deteriorated to the point that it would be difficult to describe the United States as approaching or even moving clearly in the direction of an egalitarian existence. Lynching abounded; and everywhere there was racial discrimination in employment, housing, education, and political participation. Even as Hitler sought to create an Aryan race in Germany, there were those in the United States who competed with him in the search for racial purity. They did so by seeking to define the blood composition of a Negro. Sixty years after the end of slavery and thirty years into the twentieth century the state of Virginia defined a Negro as any person in whom there is ascertainable "any quantum whatever of Negro blood." In a country where the interest in the blood content of human beings would serve as the basis for privilege and equality its people could hardly have been seriously interested in democracy.

I must keep an eye on this...The Civil Rights Project at Harvard is a major resource.

Professor Edley, reached at Berkeley yesterday, said that Harvard had been “at best, indifferent” to the project’s mission.

“The best that can be said was that they left us alone, and didn’t charge us more than market rates to rent office space,” Professor Edley said. “They didn’t provide any direct material assistance or even access to Harvard donors — although once we had a track record, they were happy to brag about us.”

U.C.L.A. has agreed to provide start-up financing, some research assistants, and university office space at no cost to the project, said Aimée Dorr, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, which will house the project.

Please, please, please make sure all the currently available stuff remains available...I don't mind having to search for them on your new site as long as they are there.

New Home and Issues for Civil Rights Project
By SAM DILLON

One of the nation’s most prominent research efforts focused on race and society, the Civil Rights Project, is moving from Harvard University to the University of California, Los Angeles, the universities said yesterday. The project’s director and co-founder, Gary Orfield, will join the U.C.L.A. faculty.

U.C.L.A. hailed the project’s move to Los Angeles, with a planned expansion of its work on immigration and other issues of concern to California’s huge Hispanic population, as an academic triumph.

The loss to Harvard follows a period in which the university has seen the attrition of prestigious minority faculty, including Christopher Edley Jr., a law professor who co-founded the Civil Rights Project in 1996. Professor Edley left Harvard in 2004 to become dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

The project has commissioned some 400 reports and produced a dozen books on topics including affirmative action, school segregation and the academic achievement gap. The Supreme Court cited its work in the 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in college admissions.

From the interesting-people mailing list, back in the day 

the rhetoric of violence and the Oklahoma City bombing (fwd)
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 16:21:31 -0700

Pathologists and forensic experts are relying heavily on medical records that might mention special conditions, like deviated septums, that might distinguish people.

"I've always preferred to work with bones because they're so much neater", [forensic anthropologist] Dr. [Clyde Collins] Snow once said.

But the remains of the bombing victims that arrive at the morgue include much more than bones.  There are fragments of disembodied flesh that may never be reunited with the bodies from which they were ripped by the explosion yesterday at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building here.

So far, no rescue workers have been harmed.  But they seem to emerge from the blast site changed and sobered by what they have seen.

The worst scene, perhaps, is the day-care center that crumpled on the second floor.  "There is nothing in there that anyone would ever want to see," [construction manager] Mr. [Rex D.] Paine said.  "I don't even want to think about it."
    -- New York Times, April 22nd

But we have to think about it.

When I learned this morning that the bombing in Oklahoma City was the work of conservative extremists opposed to gun controls, my only surprise was how accurate my original guess had been.  I had kept my guess quiet because the world did not need any more irresponsible speculation.  But it made all kinds of sense to me because I take these folks seriously and believe that they mean the things they say.

The initial suspicions, reverberated through the national sounding-chamber of CNN during the initial hours after the explosion, centered on Muslims, given the similarity in methods between the Oklahoma City bombing and the bombing at the World Trade Center.  Even aside from the complete lack of evidence for it, though, that hypothesis did not make sense because the Egyptian terrorists who tried toppling the World Trade Center were clearly after targets that symbolize the United States as a nation -- which the federal office building in Oklahoma City surely does not.  This did not prevent the local Muslim center in San Diego from receiving a whole series of death threats, nor the publication in newspapers of a veritable census of Muslims living anywhere near Oklahoma.  Nor did it prevent immediate assertions in Congress that legislation to (among many other unreasonable things) deprive immigrants of their Constitutional due process protections would now certainly become hard to stop.

Some speculation also settled on the survivors of the government's assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas precisely two years earlier.  But this did not make sense, either, given that the surviving Davidians have far too high a profile to be able to carry out such a large-scale attack.

The informational vacuum after a sudden mysterious event is a social ink blot, just as telling for the fantasies it does not produce as the ones it does.  Nobody, for example, made the link between this bombing and the industrial agriculture system that makes dangerous chemicals widely available in very large amounts.  Nor did anyone associate it with the recent Washington "discovery" of CIA death squad activities in Guatemala. Connecting the Oklahoma bombing to these other things would not have made much less sense than the speculations that did arise.

What was harder to imagine than any of these possibilities, apparently, was the reality: home-grown terrorism from within the now extensive subculture that believes that gun-control laws are the opening round in a violent government war against the citizens of the country.  These people have not kept their beliefs or their organizing a secret.  Dozens of self-styled "militias" now recruit across the country, openly training with a wide variety of weapons and communicating amongst themselves with an array of desktop-published newsletters, fax trees, and electronic mail.  They have asserted plainly that the government's criminally idiotic assault on the Branch Davidians in Texas portends a generalized pattern of repression that requires preparation for large-scale armed conflict. These people are not a joke.  Yet until now I have seen little comment on them in the mainstream press.

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution
November 28, 2006 | Issue 42•48

TOPEKA, KS—In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.

"From now on, the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution, and species will be able to procreate without deviating from God's intended design," said Bob Bethell, a member of the state House of Representatives. "This is about protecting the integrity of all creation."

Behold the fruit of a TimesSelect subscription: permalinks to their archives that work.

Journal; The 'Rambo' Culture
By FRANK RICH

When American liberals woke up to a Republican Congress last fall, they were equally stunned to discover that a whole other American culture was thriving -- the so-called non-mainstream media in which the news is dispensed by Rush Limbaugh rather than Peter Jennings and in which William Bennett, not Quentin Tarantino, rules. But given what we know after Oklahoma City, the geological fault between the new media and the old now looks like relatively tame stuff: However much conservatives and liberals may battle, they are still engaged in the same, albeit angry, conversation.

The far-right America brought into the light since the bombing is something else -- a true counterculture that slipped under the mainstream's radar and talks mainly to itself. It has its own talk-radio and Internet stars, theology, publications and political heroes. You can wallow in its literature for days without encountering the O. J. Simpson trial or the Contract With America. It is so far out of the loop that when Ted Koppel held a "Nightline" town meeting in the militia stronghold of Decter, Mich., after the bombing, the language barrier was so pronounced he seemed to have stumbled into "Village of the Damned."

Where did this culture come from? Everyone is searching frantically for roots in other paranoid movements in American history in which fundamentalism, white supremacism, anti-Semitism and crackpot conspiracy theories produced toxic explosions of anti-government rage. But easily the most cogent explanation had been written (and ignored) before Oklahoma City, in a well-documented, scholarly 1994 book Hill & Wang is now rushing back into print: "Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America," by James William Gibson, a sociologist at California State University.

Scroll down a bit from where the link lands you. Or better still, go to the top of the page and read straight through, using that 20/20 hindsight that we all have.

As a seperate issue, the joint is cool enough to be the Serendipitous Link...and so it shall be.

The Militia Connection

The bombing in Oklahoma and its investigation brought to national attention the existence of the so-called militia movement. Allegations arose that McVeigh had contact with the Michigan Militia Corps, a group that claims 12,000 members. Group representatives say that McVeigh was not a member, and McVeigh denies having attended meetings. For their part, the Michigan militia and other groups deny any connection to the bombing. Still, the defendants and the militia seem to share many similar ideas.

Experts claim that militia groups can be found in more than 30 states and may involve up to 100,000 Americans. Many of the groups hold paramilitary exercises and practice with firearms. Some groups, like the Aryan Nations, the Order, and the Ku Klux Klan, believe in white supremacy and sow hatred against minorities. Others, like the Michigan militia and a larger group called the Unorganized Militia of the United States, disavow racism and anti-semitism.

This is from this morning's Washington Journal...audio only because I don't have the memory on this machine to do smooth audio AND video captures (you may have actually noticed that before) and I don't want you to miss a single word.

These guys are sounding exactly...exactly...like the militia movement prior to the Oklahoma City bombing.

That time they were overexcited by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. This time it was done by the mainstream Republican party. And I think some of y'all need a reminder of how dangerous them mofos are.

Couple days back I linked to a NY Times piece on Beyond Belief 2006.

Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements - some violent in the extreme - are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?

This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.

Seems the whole thing was recorded and can be downloaded freely. Interesting stuff.

"A lot of people think of teenagers and unmarried mothers synonymously, but they are not driving this," said Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, a co-author of the report.

Nearly 40 Percent of Births in U.S. Now Out of Wedlock
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2006
By: Mike Stobbe, AP Medical Writer

ATLANTA (AP) - Out-of-wedlock births in the United States have climbed to an all-time high, accounting for nearly four in 10 babies born last year, government health officials said Tuesday.

While out-of-wedlock births have long been associated with teen mothers, the teen birth rate actually dropped last year to the lowest level on record. Instead, births among unwed mothers rose most dramatically among women in their 20s.