Looks like they're wrapping up the Being a Black Man series at the Washington Post. We got an article posed like 9:30 last night, and four scheduled for Sunday...three of which are retrospectives.

Orlando is in the mix. He's kind of playing off the two non-retrospectives that sound kind of hopeful [P6: the previous word is subject to later editing], but all you really need to know about what he says is this:

Progress or Peril?
By Orlando Patterson
Sunday, January 7, 2007; B01

Personal responsibility, or victimization?

These two themes struck me as I read The Washington Post's "Being a Black Man" series.

Spare me. That's all that EVER strikes him. He walked through the door with his preconceptions.

Yeah, I got more. I might write it up, since I intend to get to the others. But he's not saying anything he hasn't always said.

I read some more. I don't know what I'd have done if my daughter had this illness. They didn't find out right away, so they were bonded to the child.

I would hope she died. I would wish the situation never came about. But I would never even have conceived of halting her physical development. And I really don't know what I would do.

The Pillow Angel Case--Three Bioethicists Weigh In
We asked three of the country's most esteemed bioethicists to give their professional opinion--was the "Ashley Treatment" a wise decision?
By Christopher Mims

On January 3 of this year the parents of a girl with static encephalopathy, a disorder that leaves her unable to move and with the cognitive capacity of an infant, announced on a blog that they had been using hormones to stunt the growth of their daughter for medical and quality-of-life reasons. [More details are available via the original news report of the story .] The resulting, and very public, debate--much of it carried out in the comment thread of the original blog --has ranged from support for the parents to accusations of eugenics and worse.

In order to cut through the noise, we asked three bioethicists--doctors not unlike those who, as members of a medical ethics board, authorized the treatment in the first place--to relate their professional opinion of the case.

Coca-Cola asked the Supreme Court to consider whether an employer may be held liable for intentional discrimination if the person who fired an employee harbored no discriminatory bias.

Race Discrimination Case Added to Docket
Associated Press
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A03

The Supreme Court yesterday added seven cases to its docket, including a discrimination case in which a Coca-Cola bottling company fired a black employee.

The lawsuit involves allegations that a supervisor of employee Stephen Peters was motivated by racial bias and influenced a human resources manager to fire the worker. Coca-Cola fired Peters for insubordination after he refused a request to work on a weekend during his scheduled days off.

Prospective parents have long been able to select egg or sperm donors based on ethnicity, education and other traits. Couples can also "adopt" embryos left over at fertility clinics, or have embryos created for them if they need both eggs and sperm. But the new service marks the first time anyone has started turning out embryos as off-the-shelf products.

'Embryo Bank' Stirs Ethics Fears
Firm Lets Clients Pick Among Fertilized Eggs
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A01

A Texas company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about the race, education, appearance, personality and other characteristics of the egg and sperm donors.

Because only Americans will be in the force that holds the ground.

Told you I'd get back to it...

I hate terms of art. I hate the way this administration uses them to obscure the truth. So I hate this whole "surge" line of bullshit, I hate that the media promugates it and I hate that Democrats use the term when there's an honest word for the latest last chance to get it right.

When I heard Sen. McCain say this, I immediately thought, "Superdome."

The McCain/Lieberman campaign stopped off at the American Enterprise Institute this past Friday to discuss The Future of Iraq. Several interesting thing came out of that, and I think I have appropriately representative clips.

We'll start with his assessment of the situation.

"Of course we're concerned."

There's actually no reason to worry about the Iraqis holding up their end of this project...but I'll get back to that.

"Lately there has been a lot of criticism by the Shiites against [Khalilzad], saying he is pro-Sunni. A new face with this new strategy, possibly that would be more effective," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish legislator who is regarded as independent.

Iraqi Politicians Divided Over U.S. Envoy
Khalilzad's Expected Departure Pleases Shiites, Worries Sunnis
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A12

BAGHDAD, Jan. 5 -- The news of the expected departure of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad split Iraqi politicians along sectarian lines, with members of the ruling Shiite alliance voicing eagerness for him to leave and minority Sunnis expressing concern at the loss of an ally.

I am not kidding. Go to PBS.org, look up a show named "Good to Great." It's almost over on Channel 13 but it comes on again Monday at 12 am...record it.

You must watch this show. Get comfortable, clear your mind and watch the show.

I'm serious.

[LATER]

There are several reasons you should watch it, not least of which is that it's talking about maximizing collective entities. And it really sums up mainstream common sense. 

via Steve Gilliard

A whiter shade of guile
In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio is the latest in a long line of Caucasian crusaders fighting for po' black folks. Joe Queenan is once again staggered at Hollywood's sheer gall
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

Zwick would thus have us believe that in a society ravaged by a murderous civil war, where black children are routinely kidnapped and induced to murder other black children, after being shot up with heroin purchased with conflict diamonds from horrible white people from out of town, the man who will ultimately bring the villains to justice is a formally depraved Rhodesian mercenary who now prefers justice and racial harmony to wealth. Hmmm, say I to Mr Zwick. Hmmm!

Tell every farmer you pay subsides for not growing stuff that they have to grow stuff now...and buy what they grow using the subsidy money. Then tell the Republicans that's how pay as you go works.

The lower tally has led to an underestimate of the grain that would be needed for ethanol, clouding the debate over the priorities of allocating corn for food and fuel, said Lester R. Brown, who has written more than a dozen books on environmental issues and is the president of the Earth Policy Institute. “This unprecedented diversion of corn to fuel production will affect food prices everywhere,” Mr. Brown said.

As a bonus you get rid of those farm subsides for folks who don't even know what a rake looks like.

Rise in Ethanol Raises Concerns About Corn as a Food
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

CHICAGO, Jan. 4 — Renewing concerns about whether there will be enough corn to support the demand for both fuel and food, a new study has found that ethanol plants could use as much as half of America’s corn crop next year.

Yeah, yeah, I'm the Black partisan, but invisible Mexicans out to intentionally do something or other?

The groundwater has been contaminated with peyote juice. It's all I can think of to explain it. 

I just realized I'll be fifty years old in little over a week.

Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down — flash cards can survive drops from research balloons — and consume less energy.

SanDisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.

The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.

SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.

"We have done play programs in Bangladesh where the children are severely malnourished and we have produced up to a nine-point improvement in the IQ of these kids -- just with play," said author Sally McGregor of the Institute of Child Health at University College London.

Though this is important information, I have to admit I'd have been slipping the kids food.

The headline would have been "Children gain nine pounds---just with play."

Boosting intelligence among poor is child's play
Fri Jan 5, 2007 4:05 AM ET
By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Giving pre-school children toys to play with boosts their mental development even if they suffer from malnutrition, a report said on Friday.

ON FEBRUARY 6, 2007 PRESTIGE RECORDS PRESENTS ITS FIFTH EDITIONOF RVG REMASTERS

Bala Cynwyd, PA Jan 04, 2007 In an interview by Richard Seidel in the February 2006 issue of DownBeat, Rudy Van Gelder replied to the question as to why nearly a half-century after they were recorded, albums that he engineered sound so modern: “I just heard ‘The Sidewinder’ [recorded by Lee Morgan in 1963] on the local jazz station and the commentator said, ‘That sounded like it was recorded two weeks ago.’ All I do is try to recreate the musicians’ performance in the way I think they want to be heard. I try to emphasize the good parts.”

Van Gelder sounds modest in his self-assessment of how he went about meticulously engineering thousands of albums in his New Jersey studio for labels such as Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy, Impulse!, Verve and CTI. In fact, he’s considered the master of sound, who since 1954, has recorded a passel of the all-time jazz greats. As Seidel puts it, “It would be easier to mention the musicians he hasn’t recorded than the ones he did.”

Today Van Gelder’s work continues as he remasters classic sides from the Prestige catalog, which today is owned by the Concord Music Group. Initially reluctant to revisit some of the albums he originally worked on, Van Gelder was encouraged by the technological advances of recording equipment and challenged by giving these masterworks a renewed 24-bit lease on life. He says of these artists that he still “feels strongly that I am their messenger.”

In the fifth edition of the RVG Remasters series, five more classic albums are polished for February 6 release: John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio: Traneing In; Jackie McLean: 4, 5, and 6; Miles Davis Quintet: Cookin’; Pat Martino: El Hombre; and Sonny Rollins: Plus Four.

Prestige inaugurated its RVG Remasters Series in March 2006 with ten seminal titles, then continued in June, July and September with five more discs each month. Each RVG engineered album includes original and new liner notes, and some albums are augmented by alternate take bonus tracks.

...A Better Chance and similar programs, like the New York City-based Prep for Prep, can only hope to provide mobility for the few. Most of the children who seek placement will never get a spot.

THE fact, she said, is that most public middle schools serving urban youth simply are not preparing children for academically challenging high schools, public or private. Even if they were, there are not many seats available in the elite private schools, or enough scholarship money to support the students who need financial aid, she said.

“There are just not enough places,” she said in a telephone interview from her office in Englewood, N.J. “It’s like musical chairs. We simply have to come to grips with the fact that we are throwing away hundreds of thousands of talented children. We don’t even know what talent we are throwing away.”

Giving Minority Students a Push Along the Path to Leadership Roles
By CLARA HEMPHILL

On a recent cold Saturday, when most children around the city were relaxing after a week at school, 320 boys and girls, ages 10 to 13, filed into Nightingale-Bamford, a private girls’ school in a stately brick building on the Upper East Side.

The children, most black or Hispanic, were going to be interviewed for a shot at admission to a private day or boarding school, or an elite suburban public school, through A Better Chance, a nonprofit group. The boys wore jackets and neckties. The girls were in prim skirts or nicely pressed trousers. Some were confident, but many were nervous, folding and unfolding their hands, sitting up extra straight as they waited to be interviewed. The stakes, after all, were high.

Johns Hopkins University students who organized two rallies in response to a racially themed Halloween party suffered a bitter backlash, confirming their fear that speaking out would only make their alienation worse.

I thought about this, because it WILL recur.

I suggest some long-term research. There should be a whole bag of articles ready for publication in August, about the psychological significance of masking, how masks let people give vent to buried beliefs and feelings. How dressing up as Mace Windu is different than dressing up as Stepin Fetchit for white folks...nevermind shit like this:

One widely forwarded Texas A&M video shows a white student painted with shoe polish getting whipped and sexually assaulted.

Focus on the Halloween dress-up, how the incidences are increasing. To hell with any suggestion that they are only becoming more visible...frankly, since everyone knows he truth, you're not looking for understanding. Your goal is the manipulation of perception.

Campus Racism Online
Tech gives a new look at a persistent problem
By Elizabeth Weiss Green
Posted Sunday, December 31, 2006

One Saturday night this fall, two college students went to a party. At 9:22 p.m. somebody took a picture. Eventually, everyone got tired and went to bed.

That would have been that–an ordinary Whitman College frat party in ordinary Walla Walla, Wash.–had Natalie Knott, a Whitman senior who wasn't invited to the party, not discovered the 9:22 p.m. photo two weeks later on the social networking website Facebook.com. In the photo, two Sigma Chi frat brothers, both white, are smiling ear to ear. They're also covered in thick black paint, evoking a minstrel show.

Forgive the Cynicism, But This Is Change?
By Greg Craig
Friday, January 5, 2007; A17

Forgive the cynicism, Mr. President, but if you were serious about cooperating and consulting with the new Congress, you wouldn't be parading your bipartisan bona fides through the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. You wouldn't be holding news conferences in the Rose Garden telling the world how ready, willing and able you are -- we know you are not eager -- to work with the Democratic Congress. You would instead be meeting privately with Democratic leaders, identifying specific areas where progress can be made and joining with them to come up with a legislative agenda that is truly bipartisan.

To many of us, your post-November conversion to bipartisanship appears to be nothing but spin -- at least so far. You misunderestimate our capacity to remember the way you treated the Democrats when your party ran Congress. We will not soon forget your "my way or the highway" approach. You will forgive us if we pay more attention to what you do than to what you say.

But then...

Ellison Uses Thomas Jefferson's Quran
By FREDERIC J. FROMMER
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 4, 2007; 8:18 PM

Ellison approached Goode on the House floor Thursday, introducing himself and offering to meet for coffee. According to Ellison, Goode said he'd be interested in doing that. The subject of Goode's comments didn't come up, Ellison said.

"Look, we're trying to build bridges," Ellison said. "We're trying to help bring about understanding. We don't want issues of misunderstanding and division to exist if they don't have to."

Goode's office did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages for comment.

I wouldn't have done it. I would not turn down HIS offer to reconcile but Goode was the idiot here. There was no misunderstanding of his intent.

The Bush Administration supported the warlords--in violation of a UN arms embargo it helped impose on Somalia many years ago--indirectly funneling them arms and suitcases filled with dollars.

Many of these warlords were part of the Western-supported transitional "government" that had been organized in Kenya in 2004. But the "government" was so devoid of internal support that even after two years it was unable to move beyond the small western town of Baidoa, where it had settled. In the end, it was forced to turn to Somalia's archenemy Ethiopia for assistance in holding on even to Baidoa. Again in violation of the UN arms embargo, Ethiopia sent 15,000 troops to Somalia. Their arrival eroded whatever domestic credibility the government might have had.

Orlando Patterson's Myopia, Part I
by Shavar Jeffries

Patterson declares that Black folk have overcome the institutional-power dimension of the race problem, but have failed to integrate into White cultural life because of continued residential segregation.  I want to focus here on Patterson's institutional-integration claim; I'll deal in another post with his residential-segregation claim.  Patterson raves that the United States is a “global model” for the “diversity of its elite [and] the participation of blacks and other minorities in its great corporations and its public cultural life.”...I fear that Professor Patterson may be suffering from a bout of myopia.  The very methodology by which he seeks to establish his premise reveals its vacuity.

Prof. Spence went through two months of deep shit.

[T]he month of November and some of December was a wash. Not just dealing with insurance, but dealing with the fragility of life. Not my own–I didn’t see my life pass before me when I got hit or anything like that. But my kids. It tore me up that there was nothing I could have done to prevent the accident my kids were in. Bringing in the new year, particularly given how things COULD have turned out, represents a real opportunity to begin anew. What does that mean?

Reading on, I got a little surprise.

First and foremost it means that I have to slow down and say thank you. I’ve already told a number of my friends about what happened, but haven’t told anyone here. So here are the people that I’ve learned the most from reading over the past year:

You ever have a day start off pretty good, you go do some good stuff, you're feeling okay...then something that should have been fine just wasn't, and it fucked up your whole attitude and retroactively ruined your day?

"If she were smaller it would be much easier for them to continue to provide a much more personal level of care," he said.

But Agnes Fletcher of the UK's Disability Rights Commission said is was "unnecessary medical treatment to deal with what is essentially a social problem", referring to "the poverty and lack of support" faced by families with disabled children.