The OpenSource Metaverse Project is actually the sort of thing I wanted to do when I started programming. Only in my case it would have been a text based MUD...

I'm neither a C++ nor Python programmer and can't even begin to think about the outside possibility of messing with this. I'm not even a gamer. But I can think of a lot of "Snow Crash-ish " possibilities and geeks are crazy enough to do it. I mean people are already buying virtual property.

Seriously, I look at this project and get the same sort of feeling I got when I saw the first ad for a Timex-Sinclair computer. I knew it was useless, but...

The OpenSource Metaverse Project

The Metaverse project provides an OpenSource Metaverse engine along the lines of the commercial metaverse engines Second Life, There and ActiveWorlds.

Keying in on an op-ed that makes the remarkable complaint that increasing the number of women applying for college increases the competition between women for those seats, Mr. Tierney makes his case for Affirmative Action for White Boys.

I am amused.

The admissions director at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, published an Op-Ed article this week revealing an awkward truth about her job: affirmative action for boys. As the share of the boys in the applicant pool keeps shrinking — it will soon be down to 40 percent nationally — colleges are admitting less-qualified boys in order to keep the gender ratio balanced on campus.

Let's take a look at what Ms. Britz said.

I like being wrong sometimes

I expected to be annoyed when I read the title of Joy Jones' editorial: Marriage Is for White People. I kept waiting for the twist that "proves" Black people are harlots by nature.

Most single black women over the age of 30 whom I know would not mind getting married, but acknowledge that the kind of man and the quality of marriage they would like to have may not be likely, and they are not desperate enough to simply accept any situation just to have a man. A number of my married friends complain that taking care of their husbands feels like having an additional child to raise. Then there's the fact that marriage apparently can be hazardous to the health of black women. A recent study by the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank in New York City, indicates that married African American women are less healthy than their single sisters.

Uncle Sam's Desperation -- and a Recruit's
By Brian Ford
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A19

"Can you give a psychological clearance for someone who wants to go into the military?" asked the caller, in a crisp, authoritative voice.

Having heard so much about the military's recent recruiting difficulties, I was intrigued. "Sure, assuming the person's okay."

"Now, I'm only authorized to pay for one session, but we don't want you to do psychoanalysis. You just need to say that this kid is okay to rejoin the Army."

"Rejoin?"

"He signed up three years ago, but then he got homesick and depressed, didn't feel comfortable handling weapons or with all the violence. He was generally discharged."

I think I've figured out a way to explain to your average Republican why warrantless wiretapping is a threat.

Suppose we really, truly decided to crack down on violent racists. We have a real good idea of who and where they are.

Now, I would like you to seriously consider: if the FBI decided these guys will be enough trouble that they need to be controlled (and if a guest worker program is implemented, that's a serious possibility), they could easily get a warrant to oversee the communications of these groups. After all, they openly espouse the violent transformation of the current government. If the government chose to get them, they could.

They should get the known nest of terrorists that executed this attack. The full power of the NSA...

Oh. These guys aren't foreigners. My bad.

(And don't get it twisted...it's about no efforts to get bastards like these guys out of circulation...the NSA isn't needed but SOMETHING is.)

Hate Crime by a Neo-Nazi Is Suspected in Stabbings
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla., March 24 — In what the authorities described as a possible Nazi hate crime, a man wearing a gas mask broke into a woman's mobile home in this Tampa suburb early Thursday morning, slashed her face and arms, and fatally wounded a friend of her son by stabbing him in the neck.

You know everyone got in those Matrix pods voluntarily, right?

When Virtual Worlds Collide
Grand Theft Auto crashes through EverQuest into The Sims! The walls dividing the game universe are coming down.
By Steven Johnson

Sometimes futurists get the future right. Millions of us now commute to mass­ively multiplayer online games in worlds much like the metaverse predicted by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and the Wachowski brothers. We live vicariously through our digital avatars in lushly rendered virtual environments, building and bartering, chatting and flirting, even falling in love. The population of the computer-generated universe is increasing at a rate that rivals email's growth 15 years ago. A decade hence, you'll drop a reference to your virtual doppelgängers just as casually as you give out your email address today.

You know I could make such an assertion stick, rhetorically speaking.

Just a thought...

Police Charge Pastor's Wife in His Slaying in Tennessee
By THEO EMERY

SELMER, Tenn., March 24 — The wife of a slain Tennessee minister was charged with first-degree murder on Friday after confessing to shooting him, the police said.

The defendant, Mary Winkler, 32, was arrested in Orange Beach, Ala., where the police discovered the family minivan on Thursday night pulled over on a roadside hundreds of miles from Selmer, where the family lived. She was found with the couple's three young daughters, who were unharmed.

The killing has roiled the town of Selmer, a southwestern Tennessee community about 80 miles east of Memphis where Matthew Winkler, 31, was known as an energetic and vibrant preacher at the Fourth Street Church of Christ, as well as a loving father and husband.

The first problem relates to the organization of the hiring (admissions) process. Since race and gender are more or less objective, and quality is not, the former tend to move quickly from being a partial factor in hiring decisions to being the only factor that really counts...One can well ask whether this procedure produces the best candidates: but the point is that no one will believe they are the best candidates, even if they are, so that the process tends to degenerate into a "perpetual first wave" rather than any genuine progress to a more balanced faculty. (In almost twenty years of such policy there has been virtually no change in the female component of our faculty, and the percentage of minorities is actually lower than it was a decade ago.)

There's some buzz about a harsh critique of "diversity hiring of faculty" by Michael J. Livingston, a Professor of Law at the Rutgers-Camden School of Law.

I don't think it's a harsh critique so much as a bunch of harsh complaints, and frankly they stem from a misunderstanding of what's going on in his field. Prof. David B. Wilkins of Harvard Law School gave a nice rundown in his Harvard Law Review article,  From 'Separate is Inherently Unequal' to 'Diversity is Good for Business': The Rise of Market-Based Diversity Arguments and the Fate of the Black Corporate Bar. Here's the requisite part of Prof. Wilkins' paper...I'll be back to comment on Prof. Livingston's post in a little bit.

Quote of note:

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement
In addendum to law, he says oversight rules are not binding
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  March 24, 2006

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

Black Republican candidates for the United States Senate
By Paul M. Weyrich
web posted March 20, 2006

Republican National Chairman Kenneth B. Mehlman has gone out of his way to tell the Black community that it should not be taken for granted by Democrats but should give Republicans a second look. He cites various Republican initiatives, such as school choice, the No Child Left Behind measure and President George W. Bush's ownership society, as reasons for Black reconsideration.

I am convinced that Mehlman is sincere in not only wanting to see Blacks vote for Republicans but to see Black Republican candidates elected as well.

There's pictures of the damn thing on the other side of the link.

The monument also acknowledges the pop-diva’s pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear’s ears with ‘water-retentive’ hands.

Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston
Show Dates - April 7 through April 23
Opening night reception with the artist: Friday, April 7th 6-9pm
Capla Kesting Fine Art is located at:
121 Roebling St, 7-8 - Brooklyn, NY 11211
phone: 917-650-3760
Bedford Ave L Train at the corner of North 5th and Roebling.

DEDICATION HONORS NUDE BRITNEY SPEARS GIVING BIRTH
Pop-Star’s Pregnancy Idealized In Brooklyn ‘Monument to Pro-Life’

BROOKLYN (March 22, 2006) --- A nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a ‘first’ for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the “ideal” model for Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April.

There's an interesting interview with Lani Guinier at Alternet about her upcoming book "Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich," which will be published in 2007.

Rebecca Parrish: What is meritocracy? What is the difference between the conventional understanding and the way you are using the term in "Meritocracy Inc."?

Lani Guinier: The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Here's another quote that caught my eye.

LG: Harvard University did a study based on 30 Harvard graduates over a 30-year period. They wanted to know which students were most likely to exemplify the things that Harvard values most: doing well financially, having a satisfying career and contributing to society (especially in the form of donating to Harvard). The two variables that most predicted which students would achieve these criteria were low SAT scores and a blue-collar background.

That study was followed by one at the University of Michigan Law School that found that those most likely to do well financially, maintain a satisfying career and contribute to society were black and Latino students who were admitted pursuant to affirmative action. Conversely, those with the highest LSAT scores were the least likely to mentor younger attorneys, do pro-bono work, sit on community boards, etc. So, the use of these so called "measures of merit" like standardized tests is backfiring on our institutions of higher learning and blocking the road to a more democratic society.

Quote of note:

The three new papers, by researchers at the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvard's Joslin Clinic are published today in Science. In every case, the investigators followed Dr. Faustman's procedures, injecting diabetic mice with Freund's Complete Adjuvant, a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead bacteria. It overstimulates the immune system cells that are attacking the pancreas, making those white blood cells self-destruct, effectively stopping the attack and allowing the pancreas to cure itself.

A Controversial Therapy for Diabetes Is Verified
By GINA KOLATA

Quote:

The guest worker plan has some advantages for growers: legal workers are more dependable than illegal ones, they say. And it relieves them of any lingering fears that their harvest might be in jeopardy if immigration authorities conduct raids that disrupt the supply of illegal workers.

Yet growers have so many other complaints about the program that many are simply dropping out. To be entitled to use guest workers, they must certify to the Labor Department that they cannot find American workers for the job, a process that they say is overly onerous.

And once non-H-2A immigrant workers are brought out of the shadows, farmers who employ legal guest workers often find themselves being sued over working conditions by immigrants' rights groups and other foes of the program.

Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Farm Workers Justice Fund in Washington, which has brought lawsuits against farmers, says there are good reasons for such lawsuits.

"Farmers under the H-2A program are being sued when they violate the law," Mr. Goldstein said. "They frequently violate the law. And employers have tremendous bargaining power over workers who are too fearful to challenge unfair or illegal conduct."

Who Will Work the Farms?
By EDUARDO PORTER

KILLEEN, Texas --A Fort Hood soldier and his wife have been accused of injury to a child for allegedly forcing their 3-year-old daughter to beat up an older boy as they videotaped it, Killeen police said.

Dennis Michael Bittinger, 22, was arrested Wednesday and his wife, Rhonda Nicole Bittinger, 23, was taken into custody Thursday, police said.

The fight allegedly occurred Saturday while the couple babysat for the 5-year-old son of a friend, police said. When the boy's mother arrived to pick him up, she turned on the couple's video camera, which had previously been used to tape the children playing.

I'm just acknowleging guns are a integral part of middle American culture. The weapons training is the critical part, though I like the background check too.

The law allows Kansas residents over 21 years old to carry hidden guns into a variety of public places, although concealed weapons would be banned in schools, bars, courtrooms, churches and some other locations. To receive a permit, gun owners would have to pass a background check and receive weapons training.

See? That didn't hurt much, did it? Now we need to get the supply side rationalized.

Kansas lawmakers override veto on concealed guns
Thu Mar 23, 2006 12:40 PM ET

OVERLAND PARK, Kansas (Reuters) - Kansas lawmakers on Thursday overrode a veto by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, making Kansas the 47th U.S. state to allow people to carry concealed handguns in public.

Again..

We have arrived at, and long passed, the juncture in Black politics when we can afford a false unanimity. Although there does exist an overwhelming consensus of progressive opinion among African Americans at-large, there is a deep and widening chasm between the people and those who purport to represent the masses - such as has not been seen since the mid-Sixties, when distinct strains of divergent Black political opinion gave motion to various oppositional movements. These movements were not opposed to each other, but were joined in opposition to racial oppression.

Wear a fucking condom.

A 25-year-old computer programmer in Michigan, Dubay wants to know why it is only women who have "reproductive rights." He is upset about having to pay child support for a baby he never wanted. Not only did his former girlfriend know he didn't want children, says Dubay, she had told him she was infertile. When she got pregnant nonetheless, he asked her to get an abortion or place the baby for adoption. She decided instead to keep her child and secured a court order requiring him to pay $500 a month in support.

Not fair, Dubay complains. His ex-girlfriend chose to become a mother. It was her choice not to have an abortion, her choice to carry the baby to term, her choice not to have the child adopted. She even had the option, under the "baby safe haven" laws most states have enacted, to simply leave her newborn at a hospital or police station. Roe v. Wade gives her and all women the right - the constitutional right! - to avoid parenthood and its responsibilities. Dubay argues that he should have the same right, and has filed a federal lawsuit that his supporters are calling "Roe v. Wade for men." Drafted by the National Center for Men, it contends that as a matter of equal rights, men who don't want a child should be permitted, early in pregnancy, to get "a financial abortion" releasing them from any future responsibility to the baby.

Quote of note:

"I'm not sure any recent governor ever has really acknowledged that we're part of Appalachia, even though it's been that way for decades," said William L. Parment, a Democratic assemblyman from Chautauqua County, in the southwest corner of the state. "It's as if they think we'll all be associated with poor people in the mountains, even though that's clearly not what all of Appalachia is."

After thinking for a moment, Mr. Parment offered a political truism: "I suppose it's all about appearances."

Is Upstate 'Like Appalachia'? Well, Part of It Is Appalachia