US to give Israel another week for attacks: paper
Sat Jul 22, 2006 10:34 PM ET

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli officials believe they have approval from the United States to keep up attacks on Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon for at least another week, an Israeli newspaper said on Sunday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to leave for the Middle East on Sunday for talks on resolving the crisis, but Israel's main ally has resisted growing calls for a ceasefire.

"Senior officials believe Israel has an American nod to continue operations against Hizbollah at least until next Sunday," the Haaretz newspaper said on its Web site.

The date: October 17, 2000
The place: The Third Gore-Bush Presidential Debate

MODERATOR: Speaking of keepers of the score card, that's what I'm trying to do here Mr. Vice President and Governor Bush. We're gonna move on. We're gonna have to move on. All right, there were 12 questions on foreign and military matters, and the first one that we're going to ask will be directed to you, Governor Bush. And David Norwood is going to ask it. Mr. Norwood, where are you? There you are.

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: What would you make -- what would make you the best candidate in office during the Middle East crisis?

BUSH: I've been a leader. I've been a person who has to set a clear vision and convince people to follow. I've got a strategy for the Middle East. And first let me say that our nation now needs to speak with one voice during this time, and I applaud the president for working hard to diffuse tensions. Our nation needs to be credible and strong. When we say we're somebody's friend, everybody has got to believe it. Israel is our friend and we'll stand by Israel. We need to reach out to modern Arab nations as well. To build coalitions to keep the peace. I also need -- the next leader needs to be patient. We can't put the Middle East peace process on our timetable. It's got to be on the timetable of the people that we're trying to bring to the peace table. We can't dictate the terms of peace, which means that you have to be steady. You can't worry about polls or focus groups. You've got to have a clear vision. That's what a leader does. A leader also understands that the United States must be strong to keep the peace. Saddam Hussein still is a threat in the Middle East. Our coalition against Saddam is unraveling. Sanctions are loosened. The man who may be developing weapons of mass destruction, we don't know because inspectors aren't in. So to answer your question, it requires a clear vision, a willingness to stand by our friends, and the credibility for people both friend and foe to understand when America says something, we mean it.

Between colonialists and China: Africa needs to forge a new path

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem (2006-07-20)

Governments, research and policy centres, NGOs and the private sector are abuzz with speculation over China’s influence in Africa. The tone of much Western discourse has been to warn Africa about China, with much emphasis placed on China’s poor human rights record, its disregard for the environment and its tendency to act only in its own interests. But aren’t these the very attributes of Western engagement with Africa? Who is the West to lecture Africa on the dangers represented by China? Tajudeen Abdul Raheem addresses the challenge of how to engage the Chinese.

Who is Afraid of China? It is difficult to read western papers these days or watch their televisions and listen to their radios without some Chinese feature, news, information, disinformation and mis information. Western policy makers are training future generations to learn Mandarin. Chinese studies is booming. Intelligence services are in a frenzy recruiting anyone who can help decipher the Chinese mind. Even retired old China hands are being recalled from their retirement back into active service.

China is being discussed in the West as a threat. A threat to Western hegemony across the world mostly in economic terms. Nowhere is this threat more orchestrated than in Africa. If China is a threat to the West, should we worry when the West has always been a threat to our very existence for centuries?

the show with zefrank

Nigerian Entangled In Jefferson Investigation
By Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 22, 2006; A01

The corruption investigation of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) has taken many strange twists: an FBI sting that caught the lawmaker on videotape accepting a large payoff; a subsequent raid that turned up $90,000 of that cash in his apartment freezer; and a weekend FBI search of his congressional office that triggered a constitutional uproar.

But one of the most puzzling and intriguing facets of the case is Jefferson's ties to Atiku Abubakar, the vice president of Nigeria. Abubakar, a wealthy businessman and one of the leading candidates in next year's race for president of Nigeria, divides his time between his homeland and Potomac, Md., where he and one of his four wives maintain a $2.2 million mansion.

"They" being our the members of our proto-fascist administration. Military didn't forget a damn thing...I remember the suggestions that were made before people started getting reassigned and retired behind making them. 

there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

In Iraq, Military Forgot the Lessons of Vietnam
Early Missteps by U.S. Left Troops Unprepared for Guerrilla Warfare
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; A13

...and not that's I'll ever do it.

But RedState.org's Swannblog thinks he unfairly jacks Lynn Swann's gubernatorial campaign. Reminds me of girl-fights in junior high school.

More Iraqis Fleeing Strife and Segregating by Sect
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 20 — Relentless sectarian violence is forcing Iraqi families to flee their homes in ever larger numbers, according to figures released Thursday by the Iraqi government.

Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, said 1,117 families abandoned mixed areas for Shiite or Sunni strongholds in the last week alone, an increase since March that analysts described as a conservative snapshot of internal migration.

In all, he said, nearly 27,000 families, about 162,000 people, had registered for relocation aid since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, which set off waves of killings, kidnappings and reprisals.

Carl Jung had an interesting approach to studying spirituality. He recognized he couldn't approach the supernatural stuff directly but he could study the impact people's beliefs had on their personal psychology and behavior. I've tried to take a similar approach in my observations of folks and I've developed a number of ways to model people's behavior. In one of the models I use, a person's world/self view is a narrative. The narrative is 'run' like a program, with current or speculative data as 'inputs,' to make decisions. The narrative develops from each person's interaction with their environment. This model is as bare-bones as a weather model consisting of nothing but the daily temperature plotted on an X-Y grid...but that bare-bones model does display broad but useful patterns. In particular, it models my understanding of Black folks' reaction to Dr. Cosby well.

More Troops to Be Deployed in Baghdad, General Says
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, July 21 — The top American commander for the Middle East said Friday that the escalating sectarian violence in Baghdad had become a greater worry than the insurgency and that plans were being drawn up to move additional forces to the Iraqi capital.

“The situation with sectarian violence in Baghdad is very serious,” Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, the head of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Friday. “The country can deal with the insurgency better than it can with the sectarian violence, and it needs to move decisively against the sectarian violence now.”

In ‘Separate and Unequal,’ Tom Brokaw Presents a Sadly Familiar Picture of Life in the Deep South
By ANITA GATES

“Separate and Unequal” has very little new to say. It notes that when school integration came to Jackson in the 1960’s, resistant whites created private schools for their children and fled to the suburbs, and that many black households don’t include a father, setting an example of irresponsibility for boys.

Mr. Brokaw talks with Randy Agnew, the black executive editor of a local newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger; a white daughter of the segregationist Governor Ross Barnett, Ouida Barnett Atkins, who taught at Lanier; Charles Norton, a white teacher who came to Lanier young and idealistic and has stayed for 36 years (he blames hip-hop for the young people’s problems); and other concerned adults. All agree the situation is dire.

That's the whole show right there.

But several other senior public broadcasting executives said “The War” was likely to become a test case for PBS and the F.C.C.

The series includes language for which the F.C.C. has previously issued fines, said a PBS spokeswoman, Lea Sloan. “At this point, the only thing we can do, and fit the guidelines as they are laid out, is to make sure the series airs after 10 p.m,” outside the F.C.C.’s “safe harbor” zone of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., when children are most likely to be watching, Ms. Sloan said.

Soldiers’ Words May Test PBS Language Rules
By ELIZABETH JENSEN

The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.

What viewers will see and hear when the series is broadcast in September 2007 is an open question.

The sources said that forces at the CIA have been lobbying for the new NIE for about six months. Not only is one overdue, but there's also a fear that if the Democrats win control of at least one chamber of Congress this November, the agency is going to get hammered for not having produced an NIE for so long.

Sources: Negroponte Blocks CIA Analysis of Iraq “Civil War”
Posted on Friday, July 21, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.

I reported in May that despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced on that country since the summer of 2004. The last NIE, a classified document that the CIA describes as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue,” was rejected by the Bush Administration (after being leaked to the New York Times) as being too negative, though its grim assessment subsequently proved to be highly accurate.

What happened to day 4? It's the day I lifted for a previous post. Since there were no comments left the first time around I decided to just post up the last day of the series.

---

This has actually been a pretty productive series of posts as far as I'm concerned. See, I've been in reparations discussions before, and they've never been pretty. This is the first time I've seen the discussion proceed rationally. I don't know if people are just respecting that it's my blog and therefore giving me that last word at times, or if they genuinely see the overwhelming superiority of my analysis.

I was going to sum up the week in this post, but figured, nah. Maybe I'll post links to all the Startin' Stuff posts at the end of this one. I'll figure that out by the time I get to the bottom of the page.

I started typing up what "we" have learned from the discussion, then said to myself, nah. The fact is most folks who've visited P6 this week haven't expressed an opinion at all. That's the norm in online discussions, and to talk about what "we" have learned under those circumstances is one of the more hubristic gestures I can think of, especially since the discussion took place in the comments and a significant fraction of readers in the BlogNet don't click links.

So I started thinking about what I saw. I mean, since that's all I could write in any summary anyway. And I'm not limiting it to what happened here on P6…I'm including the couple few things I linked to in the process of writing the series. I'm also slipping in a few thoughts that sort of hang over the edges of the discussion.

"While the government wants to say that this was somehow a planned event, it's clearly the result of a tremendously stressful environment where soldiers are subjected to the most horrendous acts of violence by the insurgency," Sheldon said, describing a unit that was in disarray, with leadership problems and outside threats. "They were extremely young soldiers who suffered repeated traumatic attacks and saw unimaginable carnage. This was not a crime of opportunity but the result of extreme pressure."

Soldiers Plan to Argue Rape Tied to Distress
Iraq Checkpoint Among 'Most Stressful'
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006; A10

In fact, after the Katrina experience, I venture to say the percentage of Black folks willing to defy those evacuation orders is considerably less than 25%

1 in 4 surveyed would defy evacuation orders
By Mike Stobbe, Associated Press  |  July 21, 2006

ATLANTA -- One in 4 people in Southern coastal states said they would ignore government hurricane evacuation orders, according to a Harvard University survey conducted earlier this month.

The most common reasons respondents gave for not evacuating were confidence that their houses are well built, belief that roads would be too crowded, and concern that evacuating would be dangerous.

Excellent article. In fact, I have to send a link to my daughter...she's always found those twins studies more convincing than I have.

And don't think this quote is all the good stuff on the other side of the link.

After the Bell Curve
By DAVID L. KIRP

When quantitative geneticists estimate the heritability of I.Q., they are generally relying on studies of twins. Identical twins are in effect clones who share all their genes; fraternal twins are siblings born together — just half of their genes are identical. If heredity explains most of the difference in intelligence, the logic goes, the I.Q. scores of identical twins will be far more similar than the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. And this is what the research has typically shown. Only when children have spent their earliest years in the most wretched of circumstances, as in the infamous case of the Romanian orphans, treated like animals during the misrule of Nicolae Ceausescu, has it been thought that the environment makes a notable difference. Otherwise, genes rule.

Then along came Eric Turkheimer to shake things up. Turkheimer, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is the kind of irreverent academic who gives his papers user-friendly titles like “Spinach and Ice Cream” and “Mobiles.” He also has a reputation as a methodologist’s methodologist. In combing through the research, he noticed that the twins being studied had middle-class backgrounds. The explanation was simple — poor people don’t volunteer for research projects — but he wondered whether this omission mattered.

'Apartheid' slashed Celtic genes in early England
00:01 19 July 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Gaia Vince

A system of racial segregation imposed by early Anglo-Saxon invaders in England may have massively boosted the breeding of the Germanic interlopers, much to the detriment of the native Celtic race, researchers claim in a new study.

Genetic analysis of men in modern-day central England shows that more than half of them possess a Y-chromosome that can be traced to a Germanic region – what is now Germany, Holland and Denmark.

Historians argue that fewer than 200,000 Anglo-Saxons invaded the population of about 2 million Celtic Britons during the 5^th century. All things being equal, this number should account for just 10% of the gene pool being Anglo-Saxon.

Ethiopian Troops Enter Somali Government Base
By REUTERS

MOGADISHU, Somalia, July 20 (Reuters) — Ethiopian soldiers entered the Somali town of Baidoa on Thursday, witnesses said, a day after an Islamist militia advanced within 22 miles of the government’s temporary base there.

The Ethiopian government threatened to “crush” any attack on the Somali government, while the Islamists vowed a “holy war’’ against the Ethiopian forces.

The exchange of threats, with the military moves this week, has raised fears of a new war in Somalia, which has not had a fully functioning government since the ouster of the dictator Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

Stephen Colbert on Bush speaking to the N.A.A.C.P. has more credibility than Bush speaking to the N.A.A.C.P.

For five years in a row, Bush had declined invitations to address the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the nation. This year, he said yes, knowing that he would be facing a tough crowd.

According to AP-Ipsos polling conducted in June and July, 86 percent of blacks disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job, compared with 56 percent of whites who disapprove.

Huge news - Judge refuses to dismiss NSA lawsuit

The Bush adminstration suffered an enormous defeat today, as a federal district court denied its motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, which alleges that the administration's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (and AT&T's cooperation with it) is illegal. Most significantly, the district court, which is in the Northern District of California, rejected the administration's claim that allowing the litigation to proceed would jeopardize the disclosure of "state secrets," a doctrine which the administration has repeatedly exploited to prevent judicial review of its conduct. Traditionally, courts almost always defer to the executive's invocation of that claim and accept the President's claim that national security requires dismissal of the case. But this time, the court rejected that claim.

The court's decision is 72 pages long and is online here (.pdf).

EYES ON THE PRIZE, PRODUCED BY BLACKSIDE, RETURNS TO PBS ON AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

First airing of acclaimed civil rights documentary series since 1993
PBS Press Tour, Pasadena, CA, January 14, 2006 – PBS, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, and Blackside today announced the return of the award-winning "Eyes on the Prize," a landmark series documenting the history of the civil rights movement. Originally broadcast on PBS in 1987, "Eyes on the Prize" will air on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE in fall 2006 as part of the series' 19th season. Three, two-hour programs will be presented this fall, with an additional eight hours made available at a later date.

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete author: William C. Rhoden asin: 0609601202 binding: Hardcover list price: $23.95 USD amazon price: $16.29 USD

Rhoden's tender evocation of his childhood and college years — and his love for the history of sports — make this book a powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.

Otherwise, he writes, the system wins. "[T]he heart of the dilemma, I eventually came to understand, is the quest for power, power as illustrated by on-the-field representation, power as demonstrated in off-the-field control, power as symbolized by physical domination, power articulated as political revolution. The plantation is the enduring metaphor because that quest for power began with the attempt to assert control over our individual lives and freedom in the hellish years of literal bondage."

'Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete'
William C. Rhoden
By Susan Straight
July 9, 2006

So did you check out Dr. Cosby's appearance at The Kaiser Family Foundation's Paths to Success forum? You should...most of the good stuff happens in the first half hour. See, it's hard to get a real reading of things if all you do is read...though Richard Prince does a good job here.

Cosby Challenges Washington Post
July 19, 2006
Activists Say "Black Man" Portrayals Ignore a Crisis

Bill Cosby, the star speaker on a panel of experts, lambasted the Washington Post Tuesday for its continuing "Being a Black Man" series as painting too upbeat a picture.

I generally don't address straw men, but this is from that ridiculousness I pointed to yesterday:

We all know there is so much white guilt floating around that if you could only transform it into electrical power, America would be freed of its dependence on fossil fuels. But, come on now. Reparations?!

Every time someone talks about white guilt over the past, I have to wonder: just who's making them feel guilty? It's not like anyone is lying about what happened…

And I also wonder, is guilt the only possible response?

See, I don't want white guilt. Guilt and gratitude are both like shirts. Fine and comfy while new, but wear them too long and they get all stank.

But I'm not letting anyone forget the realities of what brought us all to this pass. Especially since I can think of an alternative to guilt.

As it happened, poverty's turn in the presidential limelight was brief. Bush has talked little about the issue since the immediate crisis passed, while pursuing policies that his liberal critics say will hurt the poor. He has publicly mentioned domestic poverty six times since giving back-to-back speeches on the issue in September. Domestic poverty did not come up in his State of the Union address in January, and his most recent budget included no new initiatives directed at the poor [P6:...well, other than burying them].

Bush's Poverty Talk Is Now All but Silent
Aiding Poor Was Brief Priority After Katrina
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 20, 2006; A04

I don't feel like thinking too much about this one, so this is the sidebar from the Chicago Sun-Times.

THE BURGE REPORT

Jon Burge in 1992.

Suspects tortured but it's too late for charges
Yes, Chicago Police tortured suspects, but it happened too long ago to charge the officers. And Mayor Daley, who was state's attorney at the time, did nothing "prosecutable" by handing off a request from then-Police Supt. Richard Brzeczek to investigate a murder suspect's torture allegations.

• Brzeczek says he's scapegoat
• Allegations hurt re-election bid, black leaders say
• Burge works for ex-cop's security firm
• Victims's reactions: Lack of charges no surprise
• The players: Many familiar names crop up
• What's next?: Federal charges still a possibility
• The cases: 3 instances worth prosecuting
• Brown: Common thread in Burge, Board news
• The report: Special state's attorney's report (PDF)

C-SPAN2, alias BookTV, is covering the Harlem Book Fair

Description: Join Book TV for live coverage of the 8th annual Harlem Book Fair in New York City. From the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, Book TV covers panels on Black media, fair elections, literacy, and memoir. Featured authors include Rev. Al Sharpton, Dick Gregory, John McWhorter, Paul Robeson, Jr., Juan Williams, Greg Palast, Jill Nelson, Thulani Davis, and Salome Thomas-El,.

...panels out da yin-yang.

"We were uncovering the examples of the way our division contributed to national civil rights, and some of the outstanding examples were in Wichita and Oklahoma City," said Stefanie Brown, the division's director . In social movements ``it's oftentimes been young people who have been those foot soldiers who've gone out to do some of the hardest work. But they were not getting the credit they deserved."

Narrative shifts on civil rights chapter
NAACP hails leaders of overlooked sit-ins
By Erin Texeira, Associated Press  |  July 20, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Years before desegregation sit-ins made national headlines in 1960, college students in Wichita, Kan., and Oklahoma City refused to leave whites-only lunch counters.

They were threatened with beatings, but held fast and won their battles, laying the groundwork for a movement that would spread across the country.

The often overlooked demonstrators, all former NAACP youth members, were honored yesterday -- nearly 50 years later -- at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.