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*Will the Congo be the next Rwanda?

Body and Soul's Jeanne d'arc foresees another tragedy like the Hutu massacre of the Tutus in Rwanda nearly a decade ago in the Congo.

. . .To put it in perspective, the UN mission in Sierra Leone started with 6,000 military personnel and ended up with 17,500. In fact, there are still more than 14,000 troops there. And Sierra Leone is a little smaller than South Carolina and has a population of about five and a half million. The Congo is almost a quarter as large as the entire United States, and has ten times the population of Sierra Leone. Salih Booker, the executive director of Africa Action, recently pointed out that the small number of troops "can help stop the fighting in Ituri, but it's not going to be adequate to implement a successful peace plan in a country that's the size of the United States east of the Mississippi." And stopping a portion of the fighting may not even be in the plan. The force's mandate -- "to protect the airport at Bunia and nearby refugee camps, and if the situation requires it, to contribute to the safety of the civilian population, UN troops and staff and humanitarian workers in the town" -- makes its limitations pretty clear. Far from stopping another Rwanda, it looks like a repeat of that tragedy. In fact, 2,500 UN troops were sent to Rwanda in April, 1994. It wasn't enough, and they weren't well equipped or trained. They couldn't do anything to stop or even slow down the genocide.

I can only speculate about why insufficient peacekeeping forces are being sent. Perhaps, United Nations brass are too discouraged about being ignored by the U.S. in regard to the invasion of Iraq to react strongly about the Congo. If so, they need to pull up their socks and move on. The focus of the forces which are being sent is on keeping an airport open, presumably to evacuate Westerners. That suggests a decision not to really try to stop the violence has already been made to me.

*Big media focuses on absence of WMD

Crow Girl of Magpie has something positive to say about Big Media.

Magpie is being very pleasantly surprised to see that the mainstream media are not letting the fact that no significant quantities of banned weapons have turned up in Iraq slip by unnoticed. As current and former members of US intelligence agencies talk to the press, more details of why Iraq's supposedly immense weapon capabilities were chosen as the main reason for the war are emerging.

This report from Reuters describes how the adminstration 'massaged' intelligence reports into the desired shape:

This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.

The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy.

After the shameful made for the movies treatments of the Pfc. Jessica Lynch and 'Mohammad' episodes, some actual reporting instead of acting as conduits for propaganda is definitely due. Here's hoping Big Media doesn't buckle under the punishment from the Bush administration that is sure to come for doing their jobs.

*Building museum of slavery will be a challenge

Mac-a-ro-nies reader Brian says, in an email, that he favors Doug Wilder's plan to build a National Museum of Slavery, but wonders if the support necessary to make the project a reality exists.

I read with interest your post on the neo-Confederate soft-pedaling of slavery and Douglas Wilder's proposal for a National Museum of Slavery.

Personally, I think such a museum is worth pursuing. I wonder, though, if this idea is seriously pursued that there will be enough political pressure brought to bear to sink it. I'd point to the Enola Gay exhibit controversy at the Smithsonian in the mid 1990s as a cautionary tale. I don't know if you're familiar with it (I suspect you are), but the original idea for the exhibit was pulled from the museum after military and veterans' groups protested what they believed to be the unbalanced and "politically correct" nature of the exhibit's treatment of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, it's possible that because far more Americans acknowledge the evils of slavery than are willing to contemplate the moral ambiguities of dropping the atomic bomb, public reception of a slavery museum will be more favorable. I can, however, hear the accusations of "moralizing" and "political correctness" in history already and many of those who might actually go to the museum will simply abandon the effort as too much trouble.

Just a thought.

A very insightful thought.

I agree building such a museum will be a challenge, especially in these times, when the mythology of Pax Americana/Perfect America has been invigorated by the invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration, a beneficiary of the Southern strategy of winking at racism, will do nothing to help. In fact, just this year, the National Park Service succumbed to conservative pressure to change its film on Abraham Lincoln to blunt the suggestion he might have supported later struggles for civil rights in America.

*Erosion is good

At Electrolite, Patrick Nielsen Hayden tells us about writer Jo Walton's take on eroding keyboard letters.

I pretend to be puzzled by this, but secretly I love it. Keyboard letters contain vital nutrients for my metabolism. They are where I get my ideas from, they keep my creativity flowing. They go in and out through my fingers and leave the keyboard burnished and empty.

It's clearly magic realism, because it ought to work like that. It's not in the least remarkable. One would only need to remark on it if it didn't happen.

The keyboard on my TiBook still looks new. (Come to think of it, I can't recall wear away on any of my Mac's keyboards.) However, I've worn a very ugly black metal area on the right side of the bezel of the palm rest. I'm right-handed, and the space is the same size as my wrist, about one and a half inches. I have no excuse. There is an unopened mouse around here I've had since manufacturers started making mice that actually have OS X drivers. Yes, I know about Ti Paint, but being a bit of a klutz, I am afraid to try to spray over the paint erosion myself.

Jo Walton has given me a graceful out when people mention the problem. Instead of looking embarassed, I can rhapsodize about magic realism and erosion of the paint on writers' computers.

*Southern discomfort

What can a famous Southern white fellow who likes Tyra Banks and dislikes contemporary uses of the Confederate flag expect from some of his brethren? Trouble.

Blogospherics

*Darth v. a 'fascist'

A conflict arose between Lawrence Lessig and Richard 'Darth' Bennett this week. Bennett believed a comment he left on Lessig's blog had been purposely deleted. He responded aggressively.

Latent fascism

Oftentimes, the folks who scream the loudest about commercial interests trampling their free speech don't respect the concept when it applies to those with whom they disagree. Lessig proved himself to be one such person. Of course, the boy has no obligation to let me disagree with him on his blog, but if he wants to be taken seriously as a First Amendment champion he should at least try and confine his rants to the general neighborhood of the facts.

Lessig denies having deleted Bennett's comments or anyone else's.

Mr. Richard Bennett accuses me of "latent fascism" for deleting a comment from a post. In fact, I have never deleted any comment from any post, his included. I should think, rather than calling someone a fascist, the decent thing to do when one suspects such a thing is to simply ask.

After reconsidering the situation, Bennett has apologized.

I was wrong

A couple of days ago, I claimed Lawrence Lessig had censored a comment I left on his blog. He protested that he'd done no such thing, and in fact allowed me to leave the comment. So I do believe Prof. Lessig is telling the truth and I misconstrued a software or network problem as censorship.

I was wrong to impugn Prof. Lessig's honor, and I apologize.

Some of us liberals find little flattering to say about 'Darth'. However, considering the perverse proclivities of so many in the Right blogosphere, I don't consider him all that bad. Many of them would have refused to issue a deserved apology.

*An ass and advertising

Eschaton, Jr. has been thinking about advertising, specifically bloggers who advertise on other bloggers' sites.

In the "look at me!" category, by way of paid advertising for a blog, Marduk's Babylonian Musings is by far the biggest offender. Not only by just his sheer inability to stop himself from buying adspace on other blogs (9, count 'em, 9), but also the content of his site is quite contrary to some of those who he pays for ad space. . .

First, the price of the ad space alone. Here's a list of the blogs he advertises on, and how much they cost per month...shall we?

BlogCritics -- $60/month
Jane Galt -- $30/month
The Truth Laid Bear -- $25/month
Daily Pundit -- $30/month
Ken Layne -- $40/month
Amish Tech Support -- $36/month
Matt Welch -- $40/month
Cold Fury -- $15/month
and of course... Eschaton -- $100/month

Now, that comes to $376 a month for paid advertising for a blog. Granted, some of the prices may have gone up slightly since he signed up (I know big daddy Atrios' have almost doubled since the start), but this is nothing short of overkill.

If I had any money to spare, which I do not, my first priority would be to upgrade Mac-a-ro-nies to Blogger Pro or move it to another, more reliable weblogs provider. If I had the kind of bling bling a certain cretin does, which I do not, I would buy myself a new laptop. Spending $376 per month on advertising a blog, especially a sorry ass excuse for a blog, seems just plain wasteful to me.

Update

Eschaton, Jr. points out either my headline or my use of subjects and direct objects is confusing in the entry above. To clarify, it is the creature trying to buy his way into the blogosphere whom I consider an ass, not E.Jr.

And, no, I don't know who Eschaton, Jr., is, though he could be Sidney Blumenthal.

*My poor fingers

A perennial problem for bloggers who prefer Macintoshes is finding API clients to use with them. API clients automate the blogging process by providing key stroke short-cuts for formatting, creating links and uploading to the blog's home. For eight of the nine weeks Mac-a-ro-nies has existed, I have laboriously typed and formatted every single character you've seen on it. I had a week's reprieve from that process when I discovered Chronicle Lite v1.1. It is an API client that works on all platforms, including Mac OS 9 and Jaguar (OS X).

But, Chronicle stopped working over the holiday weekend. I don't know why. It could have been something wrong with the program, something wrong with my TiBook or, most likely, something wrong with Blogger Basic. Chronicle began working again yesterday. Again, I don't know why. In the interim I upgraded Jaguar, including Java, to the very cutting edge, FSCKed and reinstalled a couple problem applications. But, I can't say with certainty that is why Chronicle is working now.

Lago at Errant has compiled a fairly comprehensive list of API clients that may work with a Macintosh. 'May' because some have additional requirements, such as specific blogging software. His list includes Lifli's iBlog (there is a second product with the same name from SoapDog Productions), Kung-Log, Archipelago and others. (The two I noticed he missed are Chronicle and the fore-mentioned second iBlog client.)

I will review the API clients I've tried in a future entry. Other bloggers are invited to comment on the topic, as well.

*How far Right?

I've said before that the blogosphere's conservatives are more conservative than I believe the average conservative to be. Examples of why I think that include their positions on choice, gun control and race relations. A discussion of about to be born fetuses can lead a blogosphere conservative into a gory description of late term abortions, which are almost always second trimester, not third. The Right blogosphere even has its defenders of Charles Pickering of Mississippi, the Lying Judge. Read about these people and their positions at Silver Rights.

Whose space is it anyhow?
Part I: Starbucks, the mall and 'third places'

Dustin at One Man's Opinion has been thinking, rather lengthily, about a topic I have given some thought to myself -- space. Not outer space, though that is an interesting subject, too. The use of public space, whether it is publicly or privately owned, can be fascinating.

Dustin is interested in a concept he calls "third-placeness."

So what's a third place? The rise of industrialized labour (including the service sector) over the course of the 19th century was paralleled by a new focus on the division of space into public and private spheres. Against the pressures of the "public" world of politics and commerce, the family and home were constructed as an asylum of sorts, a place where even the lowliest working man and we are speaking here, for the most part, of men, despite the large numbers of women in the workforce) could escape the dramas of workaday life. Likewise, the home as a site of consumption was opposed to the workplace as site of production: at home, a man was free to enjoy the fruits of his labour.

The first time I recall focusing on the uses of public space was when we were studying the seminal Supreme Court case Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1972,) and its precedents and progeny in law school. (When I first visited Lloyd Center, which is here in Portland, I found myself looking at it through that lens, though the network of buildings has changed substantially in the 31 years since the case was decided.) Lloyd considered whether political protesters have a right to distribute handbills on private property.

Respondents sought to distribute handbills in the interior mall area of petitioner's large privately owned shopping center. Petitioner had a strict no-handbilling rule. Petitioner's security guards requested respondents under threat of arrest to stop the handbilling, suggesting that they could resume their activities on the public streets and sidewalks adjacent to but outside the center, which respondents did. Respondents, claiming that petitioner's action violated their First Amendment rights, thereafter brought this action for injunctive and declaratory relief.

In two previous cases involving uses of public spaces, SCOTUS had ruled in favor of the public, pamphleteers and labor picketers. Lloyd was the first of a series of cases to allow private owners of public spaces to implement more control over them.

Held: There has been no dedication of petitioner's privately owned and operated shopping center to public use so as to entitle respondents to exercise First Amendment rights therein that are unrelated to the center's operations; and petitioner's property did not lose its private character and its right to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment merely because the public is generally invited to use it for the purpose of doing business with petitioner's tenants. The facts in this case are significantly different from those in Marsh[v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946) found here], supra, which involved a company town with "all the attributes" of a municipality, and [Food Employees v.] Logan Valley, [391 U.S. 308 (1968) found here] supra, which involved labor picketing designed to convey a message to patrons of a particular store, so located in the center of a large private enclave as to preclude other reasonable access to store patrons. Under the circumstances present in this case, where the handbilling was unrelated to any activity within the center and where respondents had adequate alternative means of communication, the courts below erred in holding those decisions controlling. Pp. 556-570.

We discussed an outcome of current policy, the arrest of a man wearing an anti-war tee shirt at a mall, at several blogs earlier this year.

According to Dustin, third places became gathering places for small groups and a kind of midground between private (the home) and public (the workplace). He also says third places disappeared after World War II, a position I find dubious. Changed? Yes. Disappeared? I don't think so. Dustin identifies the Internet as a modern version of the third place. I am more inclined to think of it as an adjunct. Real third places, or privately owned public spaces as I've usually described them, include shopping malls, bars, restaurants, cafes. bowling alleys, amusement parks, the movies . . . even the gym, in my opinion.

The late '80s began to see an upsurge in coffee houses, wine bars, brew pubs, and other post-Yuppie third places. At the same time, marketeers began more consciously exploiting the sociality of such places as part of corporate branding efforts. Among the most successful of these establishments was Starbucks, at the same time fueling and exploiting a newly-developed taste for gourmet specialty coffees. ALthough a number of factors played into Starbucks' success--most notably the disaggregation of the American mass market into an ever-multiplying array of micro-niche markets), among them is their self-conscious efforts at creating third places where coffee-drinking would provide the focus for social existence.

Dustin asserts that the commercialization of privately owned public spaces such as Starbucks limits their usage by allowing the owner to control what can occur within them. He cites Starbucks' policy against allowing patrons to take pictures inside its cafes as an example. (I discussed that unreasonable policy briefly last week, here.)

I agree that some aspects of owners' control of third places are detrimental to the idealized use of such places Dustin entertains visions of. However, as someone someone who has studied property law I know there have always been restrictions on how people can use space, both public and private. The halcyon gathering places he envisions probably never really existed.

Blogger William Slawski of Bragadocchio decided to challenge a local Starbuck's about barring the taking of photographs in its coffee houses.

Well, I brought my camera. I snapped a picture of the barrista and then gave her an order for a chai. It wasn't until after she took my order, and my money, and made my drink that she informed me that I was to not take any pictures inside Starbucks.

There are almost a dozen or so places in town that are within a three minute drive which I could stop at for a cup of java. There's only one where I think they would get upset if I took a picture inside. I understand Starbucks' need and desire to protect their corporate secrets. I hope they understand my need to go some place where people are more important than corporate policies.

He could confront the Starbucks Corp. more aggressively. However, I doubt any individual challenging the policy will make much progress.

Another epiphany about public spaces occurred for me one day at the Seattle Public Library. I had use of office space there as part of the city's program to support its writers. Our niches were quite nice. Set apart from the rest of the library in a spacious glass and cedar enclosure, they consisted of carrels with full-size desks, lockable drawers, file cabinets and outlets for our laptops and modems. The writers who used the office spaces each received his or her own set af keys. We could go there anytime we wanted during library hours. I considered the program to be an excellent use of public space.

But, outside of our island of peace and order, the library had become a mess. A significant population of Seattle's homeless used it as a flop house, spending their entire day there. In some areas of the stacks, the smell alone was enough to keep anyone from seeking out a book. Library patrons increasingly stopped using the library, preferring to order books to be sent to their homes for a small fee, or picking them up at the desk after library workers had gathered them. Whatever it took to avoid being inside the library for long. The situation came to a head when a homeless man was discovered to have been molesting children behind bookshelves.

This anecdote demonstrates why it is necessary to have some authority police third places. Since various kinds of abuses are so common to human nature, someone has to decide what is an isn't acceptable behavior. My position in regard to the public library is it should be used by people who go there to do library-oriented things -- read, research, check out books, surf the Web and, of course, write. It is not a homeless shelter and Seattle's should not have been allowed to turn into a de facto gathering place for the homeless. Some people are going to respond that the homeless are also citizens, so they have a right to use any sort of public space. I agree. Everyone has a right to use a public facility for its purpose. Libraries as libraries, but not as bathrooms. City parks as parks, but not as camping grounds. It is when behavior exceeds the boundaries of the purpose for which a space exists that problems arise. Seattle had set up a network of drop-in centers for the homeless. They were the proper place for that population to gather, not the public library.

Those are examples of uses of publicly owned public spaces. The legal distinction to be made is that the government is held to a higher standard when it owns and operates a public space than the private sector is. However, in the real world, the same rules apply to public and privately owned public spaces most of the time, in my opinion.

I don't have a problem with private owners barring behavior that is beyond the purpose of the site. For example, Portland reportedly has more topless bars per capita than any other city in the United States. There must be a lot of topless dancers here. However, if one of them were to remove her blouse and perform at Starbucks, I believe management would be justified in asking her to leave. Dustin, a rather idealistic sort, may disagree on the grounds an impromptu dance performance is just the kind of thing to break up the monotony of a 'commercialized' environment.

I am not giving Starbucks carte blanc for excluding any activity it chooses, however. The no photographs policy is unacceptable because it is capricious, serving no goal that furthers the purpose of Starbucks as either a business of a privately owned public gathering place. (I don't accept Starbucks' alleged reason for barring picture taking -- to prevent spying on its environment by competitors, decades after it began doing business. Anything anyone wants to know about its setup is known by now.) The shopper should not have been excluded from the mall for wearing his anti-war tee shirt for the same reason. And, I would say the same about a pro-war tee shirt. As long as the person is not causing a disruption or otherwise breaking the law in the mall, I don't think there is a rational basis for excluding him.

I believe there will always be tensions between the public and the owners or operators of third spaces, both public and private. The way to decide who should prevail is to ask if the activity in question is somehow at odds with the purpose of the site.

A forbidden photograph

A happy Starbucks barista smiles for the camera.

Update

I've added Part I to the title of this entry because there will be at least two entries on the topic.

Neo-Confederates promote happy slave myth. . .
Wilder plans alternative

Until March of 2002, the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, seemed about to catch up with reality. The director, Robin Reed, had begun to treat slavery, the Civil War and related issues in a way that was inching toward matching the historical record instead of promoting a romanticized view of the slave-holding South. However, that ended when the neo-Confederate movement succeeded in having a director of its choice installed. The flag that symbolizes racist terror was hung in front of the museum. The museum's literature began to call the Civil War the War Between the States. The little steps toward modernity took a giant step back.

Now, Salon reports, in a three page article by Louise Witt, the museum is presenting an exhibit heralding one of the tropes of the neo-Confederate movement -- that the slaves were happy. That claim is important because it recasts a history that ended only 138 years ago and paves the way for a return to if not chattel slavery, limitations on the rights of African-Americans. Right after the 'slaves were happy people' assertions in neo-Confederate discussions comes 'Blacks are unhappy now. They had it better back then.'

Salon has been to Richmond.

It's a complex exhibit and one that does not gloss over the existence of slavery. But its underlying narrative on that disgraced institution is simple: Yes, many slaves opposed slavery and fled North at the first chance, but other slaves, whose voices have been lost to history, did not. They included "some black Confederates, and not just slave laborers, but men who actually through their own free will supported the Confederate cause," says John Coski, the museum's historian.

The mainstream historical record says otherwise. The men some of the neo-Confederates began presenting as black Confederate soldiers about five years ago were actually slaves who acted as valets to their soldier masters, cooks, musicians and laborers for the Confederate Army. They had no choice in the matter.

A Virginia historian doubts any black men actually served as soldiers for the Confederacy in its capitol state :

"If you can show me that quotation where these units went into action, I'm sure I and the other historians throughout this country, throughout the world, will be very interested in it, because nobody's ever seen it," says author, educator and historian Doctor E. Curtis Alexander.

When a window of opportunity opened many of the slaves working for the Confederates fled to the Union Army. They became the backbone of black units that helped defeat the South.

Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder is disgusted with the neo-Confederates' efforts to rewrite history to serve their racist aims.

It [the claim of slaves happy with their condition] is the kind of observation certain to leave many people incredulous. Among them is former Gov. Doug Wilder, a Democrat who at 71 is old enough to be the grandson of slaves. When Wilder hears such sentiments -- and they are not entirely rare in modern Richmond, the capital of the Old South -- it reinforces his conviction that Virginia, and the entire nation, need a museum of American slavery to fully comprehend the institution's complexities.

Wilder would like to counter the neo-Confederate's misrepresentation of slavery by building a museum that will present American slavery as it actually occurred. The succesful establishment of a National Museum of Slavery would be an antidote to the influence of the neo-Confederate movement's impact.

It has been an eventful, and largely losing, year for the neo-Confederate movement. Their senator, Trent Lott, who narrates the recruitment video for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was removed as majority leader after expressing rote neo-Confederate views in public in December. A leader in the SCV and the League of the South, neo-Nazi associate Kirk Lyons, was linked to espionage. A memorial to Abraham Lincoln, the president they revile, opened in Richmond despite their best efforts to prevent it.

Wilder spoke to reporters about them after the unveiling of the Lincoln statue.

"Time marches on and leaves many in its wake," said Wilder, one of the guest speakers at the statue unveiling. "And fortunately, the wake lessens with the passing of the years. There are not many people who will continue to live in the past."

The latest blow to the neo-Confederates is that Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, elected as a result of appealing to neo-Confederate sentiments, was unable to bring back the Confederate battle flag insignia on Georgia's flag as they believe he had promised.

The city of Richmond has also changed in ways they don't like. Many of them drive in from the suburbs or bordering states for their various protests rather than live there.

Richmond has seen dramatic changes since the Civil War. More than half of the city's 197,790 residents are black. Richmonders have elected majority black City Councils with black mayors and vice mayors. And Wilder became the first and only black governor elected in the United States, while he was living in Richmond.

The opening of the exhibit celebrating slavery gives the neo-Confederates both something to crow about and an opportunity to poke the opposition in the eye.

Wilder has lived half the time since slavery ended. His grandparents were slaves. He hopes his latest plan will bring people to consider the meaning of human bondage in America and its continuing contemporary effects.

Wilder's idea, somewhere between a dream and a firm plan at this point, is to help resolve the still open wounds of slavery by confronting them head-on and at a $200 million National Slavery Museum on the banks of the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Sitting in his office at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he's a professor of public policy, Wilder talks about how he believes such a museum will do more than preserve the artifacts of the slave trade. It will show the grim facts of how slavery shaped the nation -- and how it haunts the American dream.

"The slavery museum, in brief, should be able to cause people to reassess their attitudes about human beings, particularly about human beings of color," Wilder says. "If it does not, then perhaps nothing will."

Witt says that Wilder, a canny politician with a penetrating intelligence, knows his plan for a National Museum of Slavery will discomfit some people, and not only latter day Rebels.

Wilder recognizes some Americans may not want to unearth slavery's past. The sad truth is that the United States, to a large extent, was built by slave labor and its history as a nation was shaped by slavery. A convincing case can be made that, if not for slavery, the U.S. might not be the world power it is today. In that sense, slavery has indisputably shaped and influenced every American's life. Yet, because it affronts our sense of our country's idealistic precepts that "all men are created equal," and because it creates in both blacks and whites a deep sense of shame, we're reluctant to talk about it, let alone build a museum that commemorates the enslavement of other human beings.

Some folks will doubtlessly argue that building a comprehensive museum of slavery will reopen old wounds. However, the wounds have never closed. The American legal system's efforts to apply sutures has been sporadic and plodding. The proof of that is the long list of inequities between black and white Americans, ranging from infant mortality to health and age at death. Until the vestiges of slavery that plague black Americans are honestly assessed and addressed, talk of closed wounds and color-blindness is empty rhetoric. The museum Wilder may live to see open would be a significant step in binding up our wounds.

Around the Web

*Jayson Blair, great white hope

Via Blah3, Dennis Hans wonders if Jayson Blair hasn't been misrepresented. He asks 'What if Jayson Blair were black?' A good question.

This is not a matter of who is or is not "authentic." I consider everyone authentic, from Pat Boone to Eminem, from Clarence Thomas to Malcolm X. I'm authentic and so is Blair. But Blair is an authentic black man who grew up in an upscale white neighborhood with upscale white friends, doing things that white kids do in white settings, going to school with white classmates and learning from white teachers.

In other words, Blair's perspective and values were shaped by middle-class white people. Answers a question I've been wondering about: Where did Blair get his entitlement complex from?

I also have a related one. I am identifiably mixed-race. Why do so many white people who consider me brainy credit it to my white ancestry?

Hans' full article, at Take Back the Media, deserves reading.

*People are strange

The upright Gen. J.C. Christian informs of us a good and fitting mascot for a high school -- the bomb.

In 1945, the people of Richland, Washington finally learned what their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons had been working on for the last two years. It wasn't poison gas or jellied gasoline bombs after all. It was something better, it was Fat Man, the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, or more accurately, the plutonium which gave Fat Man the power to vaporize thousands.

The people were so proud of what their labor accomplished that they changed the name of their high school mascot. No longer would they be known as the Beavers, they were now the Richland Bombers. Their new logo featured a mushroom cloud, the new symbol of American potency.

Boggles the mind. What victory song do they play at football games? Let me guess.

That's right, come on, sing the song
That's right, everybody say
Got a lion in my pocket mama, say!
Ah, and he's ready 2 roar!
Yeah!
Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?
Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?

You do remember the lyrics to Prince's 1999?

Read the rest of the general's entry at Jesus' General and laugh . . . or perhaps, cry.

*You can't get there from here

Crow Girl at Magpie can tell Ever Quest from reality. She is not remotely swayed by the Middle East peace plan that would give the Palestinians less than a third of a loaf. Via Haaretz she explains why.

In the current political circumstances that prevail on the Palestinian side and on the Israeli side, there is apparently no possibility of implementing the road map either. The Israeli government is building an extensive system of fences, roadblocks and roads in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that allow more or less normal life for the 200,000 Israelis there.

But this system in effect prevents any kind of normal life for nearly 3 million Palestinians. To put it more simply, in order to ensure what are perceived as Israel's security needs on both sides of the Green Line (1967 borders), the state of Israel is making life hell for the Palestinians.

Danny Rubenstein's article notes the latest fantasy is part of a pattern of let's pretend about resolving the conflict. To bring about real change, he suggests the Israelis end the policies of exclusion and using foreign workers that have resulted in half of Palestinians who need jobs being unemployed.

*And fun was had by all

I know you've spent a night out with friends, hanging out together a bar with good music, knocking back imports or microbrews. Telling lies. Laughing. And, afterward, you should have gone out and burned a cross or two. That's according to Judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi, who believes the activities involved in hanging out lead to carpentry and pyromania. Nuff said.

SARS: Understanding an epidemic

Part II: A daunting disease and its foes

•SARS infection, incubation, death data changing

The World Health Organization intially underestimated the death toll from SARS, especially in regard to older patients. Also, the estimated incubation period may be too short.

The estimated overall death rate for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is approximately 15 percent, announced officials with the World Health Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations. Earlier WHO estimates of the overall death rate were as low as 2 percent. WHO officials also announced that the SARS death rate for patients over 60 years old in Hong Kong hospitals runs as high as 55 percent. WHO maintained its estimate that the SARS incubation period is 10 days, but a study involving only 57 cases that was recently published in the British medical journal The Lancet led some researchers to conclude that the incubation period may be as long as 14 days. Incubation time has major implications for control of the epidemic, including longer isolation and quarantine periods. A longer incubation would also require public health officials to trace an additional four days of patient contacts.

Diarmid of the Anti-Colonial Agitator observes SARS could grow from an epidemic to a pandemic and directs us to the research that explains why and how.

In a separate development, two new epidemiological studies have concluded that SARS is contagious enough to cause a global pandemic if it was not controlled. The researchers tried to calculate how fast SARS spreads, and what might stop it, by analysing data from Hong Kong, Singapore and other outbreaks. Both studies found that in the absence of isolation and other control measures, each SARS case causes on average two to four more cases. In a commentary on the research, the WHO's Chris Dye and Nigel Gay note that a few people, dubbed super-spreaders, shed large amounts of virus and have been known to infect up to 300 people by themselves. That results in a different type of epidemic from one caused by people who infect only two to four others.

The sample populations for making decisions about SARS are still small, but this information could be useful in managing future outbreaks.

•Successfully probing SARS

Insights into SARS have occurred almost as rapidly as the disease has spread and killed. Denise Grady and Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times have written an article tracing the emergence of the disease and the invesigation of it.

SARS first came to the world's attention in mid-March, and only a week later, scientists isolated the virus that appeared to be causing it. A few weeks after that, two teams decoded the viral genome, providing information that could help to develop diagnostic tests, vaccines and antiviral drugs and to find out where the virus came from. Last week, scientists pinpointed a possible source of SARS — civets, badgers and raccoon dogs being sold for meat in China's Guangdong Province — and were able to compare the gene sequence of the animal virus with the one found in people.

Medical sleuths had difficulty obtaining samples of the virus because of cultural traditions in the impacted areas. They worked with very small samples of tissue, sputum or blood. Still, on March 21, an electron microscope specialist at the CDC, Cynthia Goldsmith, made a surprising discovery -- SARS appeared to be a coronavirus.

Although coronaviruses made animals very sick, in people they were known to cause only colds and gut trouble, not serious diseases like pneumonia. They had not even been mentioned as a possible culprit in SARS. And most did not even grow in Vero cells.

The clearest match via antibodies was to cats -- felines, that is. But, additional research revealed other animals had similar antibodies to the coronavirus.

By mid-April, two laboratories had mapped the genome of the SARS virus. First to finish was the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver followed by the C.D.C. The findings confirmed what initial studies had suggested: the virus was different from any known coronavirus, different enough, in fact, to become the first member of a new grouping of coronaviruses.

. . .Before SARS, few researchers studied coronaviruses. Known for making chickens cough and giving pigs diarrhea, coronaviruses were not seen as a path to scientific glory. In people they were thought to cause only mild diseases, and many researchers found them unexciting, difficult to grow and generally not worth the bother. Before SARS, one scientist said, coronaviruses were a "sleepy little corner of virology."

The leading researcher of coronaviruses, Dr. Kathryn V. Holmes, a professor of microbiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver is focusing her attention on several inquiries, as are other experts in the field:

•How do coronaviruses get into cells?

•"Why is there a coronavirus of chickens, and one of dogs, and one of rats, and why don't they infect each other?"

•The virus to lock on to a molecule on the cell surface called a receptor. What is the receptor for the SARS virus?

•Is the burglary tool of the coronavirus, a protein spike, a mutation? (If so, that would explain the transfer to another species.)

However, the implications of this research reach farther than SARS.

Finding the origin of SARS, whether it is the civets and other animals or some other host, may also help researchers figure out how the virus evolved and how it found its way into people, Dr. Holmes said. That question extends far beyond SARS, to the larger problem of emerging infectious diseases, a category that includes scores of infections like West Nile encephalitis, hantavirus, Lyme disease and AIDS.

A process that may have begun when someone in Asia ate civet cat meat for dinner could end with breakthroughs in understanding and treating several of the most resistant diseases known.

Blogospherics

•The mystery of the missing template

The template of Mac-a-ro-nies has disappeared. Yes, I said disappeared. I look in the Template space and it is blank. That means I can't make any changes to my template. Has anyone else ever experienced this problem? If so, how did you fix it?

•Blogger New

I would like to hear from people who have transferred to the new Blogger release aboout the experiences they are having.

•Still undecided about upgrading

I'm still trying to decide whether to upgrade to Blogger Pro. I keep going back and forth in regard to the issue. I get annoyed with Blogger Basic so much that more Blogger seems like a bad idea. However, upgrading from the Blogger software I already use would be the easiest thing to do. To further complicate matters, Chronicle Lite v1.2, the API client I had been using for a week, saving myself some typing, stopped working with Blogger Friday. However, I don't know whether it would work with BlogStudio or BlogCity. Decisions. Decisons. I need to make one.

People are saying

•The colored customer

One night at CompUSA I chatted with another customer, a young Hispanic woman. I bought my Kensington saddlebag for my TiBook during that trip. She tried to buy a laptop. They took her credit card into a back room used as the security office. The clerks, who consider me an old friend, told me the police had been called. Sensing something awry, the woman and her companions, two men, left the store without her card, hopped into their vehicle which was waiting with a driver outside, and sped off with a loud screech of the tires. I don't know whether Vancouver police ever caught up with them or not. From the looks of things, I had watched a fraudulent attempt to purchase a $1,700 item (it was a Windows laptop) fail. The suspicions of store personnel had been right.

However, there did not have to be any basis for a customer of color to be treated shabbily in that store. I know because I was followed by security and even had them check the validity of my credit card when I first began shopping there. (The then manager made it up to me with a gift card and free digital camera lessions after we had a discussion.) They may have forgotten, but I haven't. Today, at Silver Rights, there is a discussion of the assumptions that the determine why some people are likely to be suspected of or accused of breaking the law and others aren't.

•When libertarians party. . .

•Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings and some other bloggers we virtually know attended a blogger bash May 23. The conversation sounds, um, interesting to liberal ears.

Blogarama After-Action - Enjoyable if somewhat sparsely attended time last night at the blog party. Much time talking with Julian Sanchez and Brink Lindsey. (Brink: "Am I still a neolibertarian, Jim?" Jim: "I don't know. Have you changed your mind about things?" But the conversation went uphill from there.) Marie Gryphon tried, with some success, to convince me that school vouchers were not simply the State's nose under a tent it hadn't managed to enter yet. Julian and I talked about Two Different Types of Libertarian (no, not pragmatic versus principled or paleo versus neo - a different schema I'll come back to.

I wonder if they discussed John Lott.

•Democrat does not mean dove

Simon at To the point has suspicions that some Democratic Congress people are succumbing to invasion fever.

In case you thought the Democrats were a brake on power in DC, the AP reminds us that Dems can be as nuttily hawkish as the GOP. The article, "Lawmakers say Iran's Rulers Should be Removed", quotes our Dems in power:

Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on Goss' committee, said she considered Iran ``more of a clear and present danger than Iraq last year'' but wants a diplomatic focus.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., a Democratic presidential hopeful who strongly backed the Iraq war, said ``regime change'' is the answer in Iran. He said he was not suggesting U.S. military action because of the pro-American attitudes of many Iranians.

Though those remarks are carefully phrased, Simon believes some Democratic politicians can be persuaded to support another invasion -- too easily. I agree.

•Medicaid cap will have wide impact

Most middle-class people will benefit, albeit nominally, from the tax cut package just passed. But, what about the low-income and the poor? They won't. Many fall within the 10 percent tax bracket. Others don't make enough money to owe taxes. But, the Bush administration has a gift for them -- a cap on Medicaid. They will no longer be eligibile for health benefits for their children in some cases. However, this is the kind of present that can be shared. Many middle-class people rely on Medicaid for care of elderly relatives in nursing homes. This could effect you. Read about the administration's proposal to cap Medicaid here.

SARS: Understanding an epidemic

Part I: The 'cat' who may cause SARS

•Hong Kong researchers finger civet

Another possible vector for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), has been identified.

The coronavirus which causes SARS has been traced to the civet cat, a wild animal that is considered a delicacy in southern China, researchers said here yesterday hailing the finding as a major breakthrough.

Hong Kong University biologist Yuen Kwok-yuen told reporters that researchers from HKU and health officials in southern China "had successfully isolated the coronavirus causing SARS from civet cats."

"From a special type of civet cat, we were able to isolate a coronavirus. And the coronavirus, after genomic analysis, was found to be very, very similar to the coronavirus causing SARS in humans," said Yuen. "Looking at genetic information it looks as if this coronavirus has been jumping from the civet cat to humans."

The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and other medical researchers are considering the link. Previously, attention had focused on cats and chickens.

The civet cat is eaten in China and other parts of Asia. In addition, an estimated 80,000 of the animals roam Singapore alone.

Civet cats are considered a culinary delicacy in China's Guangdong province, where the killer virus first surfaced in November of 2002. The disease spread rapidly across the globe, and has now caused over 8100 infections and nearly 700 deaths.

Hong Kong has begun efforts to control how the animals are reared for slaughter, Diarmid of the Anti-Colonial Agitator reports.

A statement from the University of Hong Kong says that to prevent any further jumps of SARS from civets to humans, the animals should be reared on farms that regularly test the animals and use a vaccine as soon as one is developed.

Other reports say officials in some Asian countries are rounding up the animals for elimination and may stop importing civet cat meat. •Meet the civet cat

One of the first things you will notice about him is he is not a cat.

Civet, pronounced SIHV iht, is a furry mammal that looks somewhat like a long, slender cat. But a civet has a more pointed snout, a fluffier tail, and shorter legs than a cat. Civets live in Asia from India to Indonesia, and in Africa.

The masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), as the blogger at FortBoise points out, the genus implicated in the SARS epidemic, is found only in Asia. Though civets are omnivorous, that variety eats mainly plants.

The striking feature of the civet cat is its tail, which is as long as its body, 13 to 38 inches. The tail is used for climbing trees and grasping. Since most civets live in trees, it is essential to the species.

Filipino blogger Willie Galang, who may have actually seen a civic cat or two, observes the the name is creating confusion. (A perusal of web logs reveals people are confusing civets, shown here in a picture from World Book Encyclopedia OS X Edition, with felines.)

Another interesting feature of the cat which isn't a cat is the ability to mark territory with musk. That aspect of its physique got the mammal its last international attention. The musk is used in perfumes and it was said some producers abused the animals to get them to produce it.

Civet cats are nocturnal and individualistic, usually living alone.

They are classified as members of the family Viverridae.

SCOTUS, spam and commercial speech

I post my email address on my blog. As a result, my already too high ratio of spam to fiber has increased significantly during the last two months. My email account needs to go on a diet. However, I don't believe a plan to convince spammers to keep it in the can proposed by the California legislature will pass constitutional scrutiny.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- The California State Senate this week approved a bill that would make it illegal to send unsolicited e-mail advertising and allows people to sue so-called spammers for $500 per unwanted message.

...The measure, which was approved Thursday by a vote of 21-to-12, would require Internet marketers to get advance approval from e-mail recipients if they did not already have a business relationship with them.

Though commercial speech does not have the same high status as political speech in American jurisprudence, there will be problems for a law that treats email from like situated parties differently and restrains spammers before they have acted.

A business one purchased an item from, say the Good Guys, a particularly egregious spammer, may be no more welcome in one's mailbox than a business one has never used. Nor is it fair to penalize a business one doesn't know about yet for making contact while allowing a nuisance one once purchased from entry. A California legislator says an approach of that type was tried and failed. Perhaps fine tuning it would make it more effective.

The proposal would be more logical if it penalized spammers after they have sent unwanted email, perhaps with a certain volume triggering scrutiny, to recipients who complained, likely to a state consumer affairs office.

War Liberal Mac Thomason says "it sounds good to me," though he has doubts about enforcement of the proposed law. I foresee a conflict between it and the courts.

The Supreme Court's first in a series of rulings altering the scrutiny of commercial speech was in Virginia State Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976). The focus was on consumers' right to receive information without the state interrupting its free flow.

. . .the Court voided a statute declaring it unprofessional conduct for a licensed pharmacist to advertise the prices of prescription drugs. Accepting a suit brought by consumers to protect their right to receive information, the Court held that speech that does no more than propose a commercial transaction is nonetheless of such social value as to be entitled to protection. Consumers' interests in receiving factual information about prices may even be of greater value than political debate, but in any event price competition and access to information about it is in the public interest.

The same concern is implicated in regard to spam. For all the lack of interest I have in offers of Viagra and penile enlargement, I can't say there are not citizens who are interested in receiving such information.

The fact situation that most resembles a ban on spam is the challenge of a law banning distribution of handbills because of ensuing clutter. In the email context, spam causes similar clutter. SCOTUS rejected the city's claim that it was acceptable to distribute some printed material on its property, but other similar material should be barred in City of Cincinnati v. Discovery Network, Inc., 507 U.S. 410, 417 (1993). In the context of spam, the state is attempting to prevent clutter in the mailboxes of its citizens, but the rationale is the same. Furthermore, how is this different from the state seeking to prevent clutter in our real mailboxes?

The Court has also given weight to the interest of advertisers in commercial speech.

Turning from the interests of consumers to receive information to the asserted right of advertisers to communicate, the Court voided several restrictions. The Court voided a municipal ordinance which barred the display of ''For sale'' and ''Sold'' signs on residential lawns, purportedly so as to limit ''white flight'' resulting from a ''fear psychology'' that developed among white residents following sale of homes to nonwhites. The right of owners to communicate their intention to sell a commodity and the right of potential buyers to receive the message was protected, the Court determined; the community interest could have been achieved by less restrictive means and in any event could not be achieved by restricting the free flow of truthful information.

In addition, I don't see how a good argument can be made that spam purveyors are different from those who advertise the same or similar products through other means.

SCOTUS has developed a four-part test for analyzing commercial speech cases.

•Under the first prong of the test as originally formulated, certain commercial speech is not entitled to protection; the informational function of advertising is the First Amendment concern and if it does not accurately inform the public about lawful activity, it can be suppressed.

•Second, if the speech is protected, the interest of the government in regulating and limiting it must be assessed. The State must assert a substantial interest to be achieved by restrictions on commercial speech.

•Third, the restriction cannot be sustained if it provides only ineffective or remote support for the asserted purpose. Instead, the regulation must ''directly advance'' the governmental interest. The Court resolves this issue with reference to aggregate effects, and does not limit its consideration to effects on the challenging litigant. •Fourth, if the governmental interest could be served as well by a more limited restriction on commercial speech, the excessive restriction cannot survive. The Court has rejected the idea that a ''least restrictive means'' test is required. Instead, what is now required is a ''reasonable fit'' between means and ends, with the means ''narrowly tailored to achieve the desired objective.''

It is that analytical framework that was used to reach the result in Discovery Network.

The ``reasonable fit'' standard has some teeth, the Court made clear in City of Cincinnati v. Discovery Network, Inc., [supra] striking down a city's prohibition on distribution of ``commercial handbills'' through freestanding newsracks located on city property. The city's aesthetic interest in reducing visual clutter was furthered by reducing the total number of newsracks, but the distinction between prohibited ``commercial'' publications and permitted ``newspapers'' bore ``no relationship whatsoever'' to this legitimate interest. The city could not, the Court ruled, single out commercial speech to bear the full onus when ``all newsracks, regardless of whether they contain commercial or noncommercial publications, are equally at fault.''

Again, what is spam and what is fiber is in the eye of the beholder at least some of the time.

The California proposal is vulnerable under parts three and four of reasonable fit analysis.

I don't have an alternative idea about how to regulate spammers. But, I believe Californians, and people in other states who are given hope by the proposed law, will be disappointed once it is subjected to judicial scrutiny.

•Mac-a-ro-nies is moving up

I want to thank my readers and fellow bloggers for their support of this blog, again. The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem is now often crediting it with 150 or more details. Today's rating is 165. The first public post to it occurred March 25, 2003. I don't have any specific target for Mac-a-ro-nies in regard to ecosystem ranking. However, watching it rise is an excellent incentive to keep on blogging.

Tech Talk

•Big Media: Technical difficulties

I'm beginning to wonder if The Washington Post and the New York Times have enough money to run their operations properly. Friday, a WaPo story I had linked to became unavailable. Today, the NYT is generating this message in regard to a story I want to read.

Server Error

We're sorry, but we are temporarily experiencing a server error. Our systems administrators have been notified and are working to fix the problem. Please wait a few moments, then press Reload or Refresh in your Web browser. If the problem persists, please exit your Web browser and try again. We regret the inconvenience.

Now it is one thing for Blogger Basic to constantly produce server errors. But, I expect Big Media to own enough servers and have the most qualified of techs. These situations should not be occurring as often as they are.

•Could it be the caffeine?

When a barista at a Starbucks told me not to take photographs with my digicam I thought she was just being silly. Turns out there is a policy forbidding patrons from taking pictures inside Starbucks' coffee shops. Via Dan Gillmor's eJounral, a link to Lawrence Lessig.

Story one: Last month while visiting Charleston, three women went into a Starbucks. They were spending the weekend together and one of them had a disposable camera with her. To commemorate their time with one and other they decided to take round robin pictures while sitting around communing. The manager evidently careened out of control, screaming at them, 'Didn't they know it was illegal to take photographs in a Starbucks. She insisted that she had to have the disposable camera because this was an absolute violation of Starbucks' copyright of their entire environment -- that everything in the place is protected and cannot be used with[out] Starbucks' express permission.'

That description mirrors my experience except the barista was not rude per se. Nor did she demand my camera. Not that I would have given it to her if she had.

Law prof Lessig suggests we break the law by taking pictures inside a Starbucks this weekend. I'm game.

•Get with wireless

An article at Wired makes what I've been thinking for a while official: Wireless in, wired out. Not that I'm really free of cable and cord confusion yet, but like millions of other Internet users, I'm heading in that direction.

Wireless is quickly becoming the de facto standard for surfing the Internet and creating home computer networks, according to research released this week by Parks Associates.

The market research firm in Dallas, Texas, found that nearly 2 million American households added a wireless component to their home Internet networks between late 2001 and early 2003. A quarter of all households that have Internet service at home can also tap into the network wirelessly through Wi-Fi technology, Parks Associates researchers said.

...Indeed, wireless technology has become so prevalent in the home that it is now the "driving force" in the adoption of home networking, [Kurt] Scherf said. Wireless gear will account for 40 percent of all devices connected on home Internet networks by the end of 2007, he said.

Laptop purchases are being credited with bringing the wireless market home. As a laptop owner since the 1995, I can attest to the difference not having to connect to several peripherals via wires, thereby undermining the computer's portability, makes.

•Bluetooth makes him blue

Bluetooth is a technology for connecting computers, peripherals and other devices wirelessly over short distances. Think of it as WiFi's little brother. I don't own any BlueTooth devices yet, but have been looking forward to buying some when I upgrade to a new laptop. But, David Coursey of Anchordesk at ZDNet says BlueTooth is broken.

RIGHT NOW, I have a Bluetooth printer and a Bluetooth-enabled PDA sitting on my desk. I also have a Bluetooth cellular telephone. I used to have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And my Apple iMac is Bluetooth-equipped, thanks to a tiny USB adapter I'm now sorry I bought.

All of this stuff works, mind you. It's just that every time I install something new, the old stuff breaks. I used to be able to use the Bluetooth keyboard or the printer, but not both. The iPaq once synced wirelessly just fine, but stopped when I installed the printer or the keyboard. And, in the great tradition of Apple promoting technologies it doesn't quite support, the iMac will talk to the phone just fine but knows nothing at all about the printer.

Coursey wants to solve the problem through the eight hundred pound gorilla, instead of the development group. He says Microsoft should include Bluetooth management software in a service pack for Windows XP, thereby setting the standard for the technology. That, of course, would be up to Microsoft.

Blogger Charles Hudson says he is satisfied with the Bluetooth headphones he has been using, but the lack of user interfaces for Bluetooth products is a headache.

Problem #2:

WPAN has no UI - One of the most suprising things that I realized was that the lack of UI for WPAN has a very significant impact on how you use the devices. In addition to my t68i, I also have a Bluetooth enabled Toshiba e740. I would have liked to use my headset to dial a phone call using the address book in my PDA (that's what WPAN is supposed to be about, right?), but I hadn't a clue how to do it.

Hudson discusses the technology indepth in an entry he called "Is Bluetooth still relevant?"

Coursey ends his column on a glum note.

Me, I'm not counting on Bluetooth ever amounting to anything, although I retain hope that it will rise above its misspent youth and actually do something useful someday...

If you had high hopes for the technology, as I did, this is disappointing news.

More than an ugly word:
Giving 'nigger' its due

A recent story with legs among bloggers who focus on human rights issues has been the saga of Brian Emanuels, a Seattle schoolteacher who entered the public eye in a troubling way. Prometheus 6 describes him as "that brilliant teacher that called the kid 'nigger' twice to teach him not to use 'gay' as a synonym for 'uncool.'" Yes, the controversy is about the n-word, and to a lesser extent, the g-word, but it is also about a whole lot more.

There has been a plethora of excellent entries from a variety of bloggers about the Emanuels episode. Several of them are collected here. However, the blogger I want you to focus your attention on now is Trish Wilson. She has written an entry that considers the situation in many of its permutations, explains her reasoning with a special clarity and offers new insights.

She begins by asking herself who Brian Emanuels is.

Emanuels is a white and solidly middle class. He had worked for fifteen years in computer product development and management for Microsoft. Two years ago, he gave up his lucrative career to teach computer science to poor high school kids. He has never been at the receiving end of the N-word, nor can he appreciate the full impact of what it means. He does not comprehend the power imbalance that already exists in comparing his life to his student's lives. He is the Great White Savior placating the savages that has its roots in Albert Schweitzer's patronizing attitude towards his patients in Africa, as described by J. at Silver Rights.

A typical response to a blogger focusing on the use of the n-word in the exchange has been to criticize him or her for not treating the use of 'gay' as equally offensive. My response is that they are not equally offensive. Trish addresses the argument with additional insight.

I don't agree with Frank at I Protest that "gay" is "hardly worth consideration, let alone punishment." By his own admission, he's not around adolescents at all. I am. I've seen how they use that term, and I find it offensive. One thing critics of the slur "gay" do not always consider is that the word debases the feminine. Not only is it offensive to gays, it negatively impacts girls. Anything "girly" is also likely to be viewed as "gay," and not in a good way. I believe the use of that word encourages those who use it (and those who suffer at the receiving end of it) to devalue girls and women. That said, I agree with Frank that using "nigger" was a disproportionate response. "Nigger" it offensive and racist beyond par, and most inappropriate to use in a classroom regardless of the intent Emanuels had in using it.

Some of the discussion, albeit a minority, became unpleasant as some gay men, or sympathizers with some gay men, either dismissed the racism inherent in the situation or expressed approval of it. The only explanation I can think of is that groups tend to view themselves in hierarchical terms. I believe the persons who responded that way think of homosexuals as a group as ranking higher than blacks as a group in the societal hierarchy because most homosexuals are white. Therefore, they are asserting their white privilege. (Be sure to read the views of Ronn of A Burst of Light, who is black and gay, in the roundup entry cited above.)

I hadn't thought of the use of 'gay' by teenagers as a partial replacement for 'sissy,' but it makes sense to me. So, does Trish's point about being sissified and being female being perceived as related, meaning females are also being put down by the usage.

She also directs our attention to a public discussion of an episode of the television show Boston Public in which a white teacher used the word 'nigger.' An African-American studies professor comments:

"It seemed as if the teacher was being established as the "hero" of the episode against the principal who was trying to get in his way of teaching it. You have this exchange set up between the teacher and the principal whereby it seemed the teacher's positions were based on reason and logic, and the principal's position was based on emotion. And the episode never really resolved it, because we don't get to see how the discussion unfolds. Unfortunately, this juxtaposition between reason, logic vs. emotion echoes a longstanding "understanding" between fundamental differences between whites and blacks. Where whites represent the intellectual and Blacks the emotional."

That take on the situation is very much present in commentary from the Right about Brian Emanuels, who is being deemed a hero wronged by blacks. In browsing the Right Wing blog where the discussion began, I found only one comment that did not blame the students or the NAACP for the situation. Some had a definite tone of 'why not call them what they are?' However, since that site is maintained by a participant in the 'scientific' racism blog Gene Expression, I won't go so far as to say the views reflected there are those of most conservatives.

I have not done Trish's entry justice and urge you to take time to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Brian Emanuels has resigned from the Seattle public school system rather than accept a letter of reprimand. His parting remarks are consistent with his stance all along. Instead of admitting wrongdoing, he expresses regret that some people fail to comprehend the wisdom of what he has done.

Blogospherics

•Going through changes

Traffic. Drumroll. . . My first ever traffic report. Mac-a-ro-nies has had more than 12,000 visitors.

RSS.This blog now has an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. The advantage of RSS is that it lets aggregators pick up blog entries. That enhances the possibility someone will read an item on the blog or link to it.

I have no idea whether the syndicator I am using, BlogMatrix, is considered good, bad or in-between. My one complaint after three days of use is the need to remember to 'ping' BlogMatrix to submit updates manually.

Farewell, wretched box. Mac-a-ro-nies no longer has a 'check this box to open new windows' function. That is because the box rarely worked. I've run into the same problem at other blogs and found it frustrating. I like the idea of the check box. It allows a reader to look at an embedded source or another blog without losing his place in the blog he is currently viewing. However, the function needs to actually work to be useful.

Half a Google. On a related note, I am not pleased with the Google search functions for Mac-a-ro-nies. It brings up fewer than half of my blog entries. I don't know why. Perhaps this is because the archives are chronically damaged, like those of most bloggers who use Blogger Basic. Or, perhaps there is a registration feature I am not aware of.

•Ruffini revisited

Ater giving the matter more thought, I realized I had overlooked a likely motivation for Patrick's entry. I explained my belated insight in an email to another blogger.

I think Patrick's intention may have been merely to brown-nose Right Wing Higher Beings. But, even for that purpose his entry doesn't make sense. If someone tells me I look 18, I know two things. That person wants to flatter me and that person is lying. I suspect some of the people Patrick set out to flatter know they don't write particularly well. So, it was a blunder for him to attempt to score points with that entry.

As that blogger pointed out, the ploy did work to an extent. Glenn Reynolds, he of the insatiable ego, gave Patrick the much sought after link from the InstaPundit.

Joseph Deumer is swifter than I am. He spelled a rat right after reading Ruffini, seeing an equally unsavory motivation in the fellow's effort to spend gold from straw.

Look, I don't read Den Beste or LGF, though I have looked at both of these blogs from time to time. Some writers you read for beauty, some for sense: so I don't read either Clueless or LGF. How many times do you have to step in dog shit before you learn to look out for it & keep your shoes clean? I hadn't been aware of Ruffini before this week & I find the the sort of broad sociological generalizations he spins completely useless. Ruffini is engaging in an act of public self-congratulation.

Rick Heller of Smart Genes, who tries not to favor one blogging hemisphere over the other, picked up the same odor.

Patrick Ruffini's rant that the top conservative bloggers are beautiful prose stylists and otherwise superior to the lefties reminds me of the Dale Carnegie truism that the sweetest sound in the English language is the sound of one's own name. In a similar vein, the echo of one's own words are deep, insightful, and stirring.

I believe there is a lesson in this episode for myself and other new bloggers. Yes, one wants links to larger blogs. But, if one reveals oneself as a sycophant other bloggers notice. In my experience, people don't really like sycophants, so one is probably doing oneself a disservice if one chooses that route.

I've always had a problem with not respecting authority figures as much as they think I should. So, I don't expect to score brownie points with flattery in the blogosphere. If I say something about someone it is because I think it is true. I realize the examples of good analytical writers I cited below are mainly small to mid-size blogs. Perhaps I would have ingratiated myself by saying all of the liberal Higher Beings are "beautiful prose stylists," but if I had, I would not be Mac Diva.

•Beware of Blogger New

Fellow users of Blogger, I have saved you considerable irritation by tesing Blogger New. Thought everything about Blogger was kind of old and cranky, didn't you? They say it ain't so and are offering a new version of the popular but imperfect program to prove it.

Monday, April 21, 2003

The Dano [Blogger New] Rollout Plan consists of three phases. Starting today, select users will be able to create a Dano blog. Current BloggerPro users will have Pro features enabled in their Dano blogs. The next phase, to start in a week to ten days, will allow users to migrate their existing blogs over to Dano. Finally, in about a month's time, all blogs will be transitioned to Dano. This includes the blogs, their posts and templates. For more information on everything Dano, please see the FAQ.

Blogger recently announced it had ended the preview period and will begin messing with our blogs.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Nearing the End of Preview : Thanks to your bug reports we are now nearing the end of the preview phase. We have some remaining issues to fix and will then begin the migration of blogs to the new version. This will happen in stages so don't worry if your blog is still using the old Blogger. There will still be updates here as to our progress. Also, as part of the road to final release, we've stopped the opt-in migration process.

My experiences with Blogger New were less than wonderful. It does not work with the blog writing tool I've been using for about a week, Chronicle Lite v1.2, and may not work with yours either. Efforts to post to Blogger New were often fruitless when I tortuously typed everything into the Blogger window. Unless this changes, I predict an increase in lost entries. Several features, including The View Blog tab, were disabled, making my attempt to use Blogger New even more awkward.

It does not appear we have a choice about being migrated to Blogger New. Considering the problems with archives and links that are the norm for those of using the current Blogger Basic, I hope the move is an improvement instead of more of the same.

Reading and writing

I have been thinking about writing styles and content yesterday and today. Part of the reason was that I finished Walter Mosley's short story collection, Walking the Dog. It is not Mosley's use of language that makes him such a good writer. In fact, his literary fiction is somewhat marred by awkward phrasing and repetitious use of descriptions. These shortcomings may occur because he did not start out as a writer of literary fiction, but as a mystery writer. He has gradually graduated to speculative fiction and domestic realism.

What makes Mosley's work memorable is the characterization. The hero of Walking the Dog, Socrates Fortlow, is a killer and a philosopher. This daunting combination would frighten most writers away. Mosley revels in it. Fortlow is both Everyman and the Other. He must attempt to make a living in contemporary Los Angeles while battling an array of domestic difficulties, poverty and racism every day. And, he must learn to do so without killing. Since the crime of passion double murder that sent him to prison for 27 years, Fortlow has killed other people and murders an assailant during the course of the book, which consists of interrelated short stories. His life embodies all three of the conflicts fiction writers mine -- man against society, man against man, and man against himself.

An intriguing aspect of this is the contrast between Mosley's life and those of many of the characters he writes about, including Socrates Fortlow. The writer has been a middle-class African-American more familiar with writers conferences and film sets than ghetto diners and jail cells for most of his life. Yet, he is still able to write about the lives of people deprived of such options without making them caricatures. That is a welcome relief in a time when so many writers of literary fiction write only about themselves and other people just like them.

Another reason I'm thinking of reading and writing is blogger Patrick Ruffini and his recent pronouncement about the superiority of bloggers of the Right in regard to writing ability, content and independent thinking.

Part of the disparity also seems to lie in subject matter. The four top lefty bloggers focus pretty exclusively on political or Administration (sic) news. The six top "righties" ? InstaPundit (France, nanotech, "crushing of dissent"), Sullivan (The New York Times, gay rights), Volokh (law), LGF (Arafat), Lileks (life), and Den Beste (general global strategy) are all beautiful prose stylists but tend to be more over-the-board and are sometimes lacking in the hardcore political coverage we all crave from time to time.

I don't know enough about Ruffini to say whether he is too ignorant of good writing to recognize it when he sees it, though that is my suspicion. How else could someone believe the puerile reportage of Andrew Sullivan or the shameful to a gifted six grader verbal grappling of Steven Den Beste are exquisite? As for the InstaPundit, he mainly produces a list of links, hardly something subject to the devices of good writing at all.

After reading Ruffini's false and self-serving critique of writers in the blogosphere, I immediately sought the counsel of writer and editor Joseph Duemer, who named his blog Reading and Writing. Alas, Duemer has not fisked Ruffini yet. But, perhaps he can be persuaded. (He can be reached at: duemer@clarkson.edu)

Of course Ruffini's claim that Right Wing bloggers are independent is equally fatuous.

But going down the line, it's probably true that, advocacy-wise, lefty bloggers make the most of their limited traffic by being very party line on Bush and most domestic issues. The "righties" aren't. About the only things they've been consistent on is France and Saddam, and both issues are declining in importance. While the liberal bloggers tend to be good liberals, the conservative bloggers don't tend to be good conservatives [That's because they're libertarians! -ed.]. Tacitus always seems somehow apologetic about linking to FR; the Left isn't similarly concerned about linking to DU or quoting it authoritatively.

How can someone who calls himself a political theorist not know the 'issue' of France's opposition to the invasion of Iraq was a non-issue to any thinking person all along?

Often, Right Wing bloggers seem to be writing from Karl Rove's latest talking points memo, which they have placed right next to their computers. In fact, if anything, many of them, especially the Southerners, are even more steeped in backward thinking than other conservatives. Where else online would one find people who regularly declare the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, insist the Second Amendment applies to the individual's right to own weaponry and long for the gold standard? FreeRepublic, you say. And, you're right. Most of the Right blogosphere is FreeRepublic for people who read blogs. Anyone who believes FreeRepublic represents the best in thinking or writing is either unlearned or out of touch with reality. Ruffini may be both.

Calpundit Kevin Drum, a post-Agonist scandal Higher Being himself and thus one of the people being disrespected, goes easy on the vacuous looking and thinking Ruffini.

This kind of stuff is always a bit silly, I suppose, but when you include Little Green Footballs and Steven Den Beste as examples of cosmopolitan flexibility, haven't you gone beyond silly and entered some kind of parallel universe?

Now, we can argue about whether or not Atrios is a beautiful prose stylist, but the idea that the famously fractious left is some kind of disciplined monolith well, we can only dream about such things, can't we? So if you want some entertainment, click on the link to Patrick's post above, read the hilarious, almost self-parodic procession of comments, and then leave one of your own. You'll feel better after you do.

Since that required spending extended time at Ruffini's extremely creative to a Young Republican red, white and blue site, I didn't.

Did I say Walter Mosley's writing isn't as smooth as that of some other contemporary writers of literary fiction? Well, Mosley could teach the Patrick Ruffinis of the world a thing or a thousand about both writing and thinking. It is unfortunate they would not read Mosley, even if they read literature, because his works humanize black people, something folks like that avoid like the plague. And, therein, is part of their problem in my opinion. They are so busy congratulating themselves on a presumed superiority to everyone else, they live, as Kevin said, in a parallel universe. In their world, people like Mosley don't exist.

There are bloggers who are fine thinkers and writers. An excellent specimen from among the Higher Beings is Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Though his prose style is more journalistic than literary, he writes the occasional essay as well as anyone who has appeared in the yearly Best American Essays collection. Jeanne d'arc of Body and Soul, Bb at Burningbird, Avedon Carol of The Sideshow and Digby of Hullaboo are among bloggers who give words and analysis their just do.

What of the other liberal Higher Beings? Kevin strives to be clear and concise about an array of topics while eschewing the short-cuts of Glenn Reynolds and succeeds. Atrios' main interest is in being timely and prolific. He likes to be the first blogger to write about a topic. Sometimes, that means being quick and dirty, as we say in journalism. One then goes back and explains the material more thoroughly in a subsequent entry or entries. The follow-up is usually better written, too. DailyKos' subject matter determines his style most of the time. He is a purveyor of political information and of analysis of that material. Kos, who has been a print journalist, has a good nose for news and the ability to make the complexities of the electoral systems in the states and nationally comprehendible by regular folks. None of these bloggers strike me as inferior to the Right Wing bloggers they were compared to in The Truth Laid Bear's ecosystem at all. Au contraire. I believe they are better, if one has a standard for blog writing that is above FreeRepublic.

The Real Majority

Another writer I've been thinking about is James Joyce. Specificaly, I was musing about one of my favorite short stories, "The Dead." In the story, we are reminded they are the real majority because dead people far outnumber the living. I was wondering by how much. Have researchers come up with a reliable estimate of how many people have lived and died in the world? If so, how did they reach their conclusions? An inquiring mind wants to know.

Around the Web

•The wacky world of blog statistics

Looking at blog statistics can be revealing. It can also be gratifying. . . or disgusting. I get people doing searches such as: "Jessica Lynch+ naked+ rape." There's even one for "amputee+ devotee+ fingers." Guess the latter example is what I deserve for writing about sometimes arcane subjects.

The one that gave me pause today was someone searching for DailyKos' identity. I don't believe it is a big secret, though it doesn't strike me as something a blog reader really needs to know. When I see someone doing something by subterfuge, I suspect he is going to use the results in an ugly way. If the person's intentions are honorable, why doesn't he just ask Kos?

•Kieran turns one

Kieran Healy announced his blog is now one year old. I gave him props and you should, too.

Congratulations, Kieran. I hope Mac-a-ro-nies does so well. One of the things I've discovered in my two months as a blogger is that the bodies of abandoned blogs litter the landscape. Staying the course is the minority position. Those who do it and have good blogs deserve praise.

One report I read said only about 20 percent of the blogs ever founded are still in existence. I see it every day, especially when I am looking for intelligent blog entries on a topic I'm writing about. I will find one or two or three, only to discover the blogger either mothballed his blog officially, the polite exit strategy, or just left it one day and never returned.

Some of these blogs are atrocious in regard to design and content. In my opinion, the conversations with God, of which there are way too many, are the most embarassing. However, other abandoned blogs look and read just fine. I believe the bloggers just became discouraged.

•Brian Emanuels: Hero or a zero?

The talk in civil rights blogging circles is about the Seattle teacher who called a student a 'nigger,' twice, to 'teach him a lesson.' Silver Rights has three entries about the controversy, which also involves the use of the word 'gay.' Read them here, here and here. The entries round up much of what other bloggers have had to say on the topic. They include the thoughts of Barry of Alas, A Blog, Fred of Rantavation and Earl of Prometheus 6.

•General Christian isn't at ease

General J.C. Christian, the fellow who believes Colin Powell has 'purty lips,' is having problems with feminism. Who would've thunk it? He asks:

How can a man resist assaulting a woman who's flaunting her body by wearing shorts, a tank top, or even a nun's habit? It's almost as bad as seeing a bulge in a man's jeans. We have no ability to restrain ourselves. The Lord made us that way.

The General's consternation doesn't stop there. He is concerned about his, and possibly Colin's, golf outings.

Like many Americans, I'm pretty upset about this here foreign Annika Sorenstam woman trying to play in a PGA tournament. She's going to ruin golf. It'll become some kind of sissified girlie game.

Can you imagine being forced to golf with a woman? You wouldn't be able to partake in one of life's greatest pleasures, taking a leak on the green. Where's all that beer going to go?

Pay the general a visit and try not to laugh out loud.

•Speaking truth to the Right

Avedon is calling the Righties out over at The Sideshow.

. . .Aside from the aristos and theofascists, there is no one who is actually benefiting from the way Bush is running the country, and most of us are endangered by it. If you belong to the first two categories, you are utterly anti-American and worthy of no intellectual defense; if you belong to the latter category and still think there is any defense of Bush, you're deluded. It's pretty simple, really. There are certain things that sensible people do not do. We do not set our houses on fire, we do not seek out winos in the park for sex, and we don't support the Bush administration.

Bravo! Avedon is right. Some of us liberals are so determined not to be considered unpleasant we turn ourselves into pretzels trying not to confront the Right Wing in regard to the absurd policies of the Bush administration. In doing so, we unwittingly help them sell the bill of goods they've brought to market, which in most cases will harm them as much as it does us. Read Avedon's entire entry. She has said what needed to be said.