Baptist Planet writes in Post-marital about Tom Ackerman’s instructive head game.

              

Eager for another pseudoranking of their social networking cred, large numbers of twitter users have sheepishly filled in their passwords when requested, apparently with no thought of security.

              

Osama bin Laden may have disappeared from public view for the same reason that rich dilettantes withdraw, computer in hand and young writing assistant in tow, to well-appointed seaside or mountain retreats.

Yes, he is rumored to be writing a book. With the help of a younger writer.

              

Think Progess collected the numbers. During the week following the debate I believe calls for a recourse to a fair, third party -- specifically the League of Women Voters -- NBC news beat ABC news by some 600,000 viewers. And yes, according to TVNewser, that is an unusually wide margin.

              

Last night, performer/journalists went after audience emotional reaction, passed on questions all of us need answered and the result was an uninformative train wreck.

Whatever the effect on this presidential campaign, the impaneled questioners demonstrated conclusively the overarching need for nonprofit, nonpartisan League of Women Voters oversight of political campaign debates.

That's the only approach proven to restrain the otherwise commercially irresistible drive of full-time performer/journalists to use presidential debates the same way they use other forums -- by doing whatever they feel they can get away with to build their own audience numbers and so better pay the bills.

Only the oversight of an impartial gatekeeper who has the authority to bar them from participation can restrain the impulse to ask eyebrow-raising questions which consume time better-used for questions about the issues which will actually preoccupy the time of whoever is actually elected president.

              

Marian Wright Edelman pulled me from my slumber in comfortable memories to the present, where nonviolence is still a moral discipline which permits good people to overcome evil without becoming it, and there is much to do.

Writing on April 4 in the Root, the Children's Defense Fund president said:

Too many of us would rather celebrate than follow Dr. King. Some of us have enshrined Dr. King the dreamer, but have ignored Dr. King the disturber of all unjust peace. Many celebrate King the orator, but ignore his words and warnings about the need for reordering the misguided values and priorities he believed to be the seeds of America's downfall. Many remember King the vocal opponent of violence, but not King who called for massive nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the stockpiling of weapons of death and the wars they fuel.

Ms. Edelman gently provoked me to the thought that a living Martin Luther King would have recast yesterday's civil spectacle over his death into action against poverty and war.

No abstraction-preoccupied dreamer wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

He had been imprisoned for defying a 1963 court injunction forbidding the peaceful protests with which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) confronted segregation there, and was responding to a published statement by "eight Alabama clergymen."

While in agreement with the SCLC's goals, they called the Birmingham demonstrations "unwise and untimely."

His reply, scribbled in the margins of a newspaper and smuggled out by an aide, is a gentle, philosophically complex call to action against injustice.

For me the letter's core is his argument that oppressed and oppressor are bound together, so that both are harmed by evil done one by the other:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

I was still in high school when I first read those words. My response was then and is now that there is much work to do; everyone's work. Without exception.

              

Gunfire silenced and stilled one man 40 years ago, without ever fully arresting the progress of his cause.

He and his lessons are remembered while the violent who sought to repress the Civil Rights Movement tend to be forgotten, as if their names were being somehow borne away by the nature of their deeds.

As I write, I cannot recall who burned a small cross in front of North Carolina State University's Lee dormitory that night -- only the words and faces of other students who strove for peace and reconciliation then and afterward.

The courage of peacemakers has always been brought back to me by the muffled, never quite inaudible footfalls punctuating the loud ascendancy of the American right which followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Those gentle taps and rustlings are Americans stepping forward without fanfare, choosing to emerge from the darkness Dr. King sought to dispel by faith, reason and nonviolent spiritual example.

Were he alive, Dr. King would, I suspect, hear the movement of their feet as the subtle melody of nonviolence.

Nonviolence is by nature surpassingly patient. It speaks to the fragment of our Creator which mirrors within all of us something of the original Craftsman. Nonviolence invites, and will not compel us to turn toward and follow the good in ourselves to the greater good we can embrace.

The faith-driven strategy of spirit-led inner reform, helped along from time to time by nonviolent civil disobedience, was our collective inoculation against the rise of a persistent American terrorism. As a result, there has never been a living rationalization for the false logic of repression which has stalked us these past four decades.

Instead, the nonviolence he lived and taught has been amplified by the response of Americans to it as their fellow citizens strove to live and through example teach the change for which they yearned.

Much as I love the song, it is not precisely speaking true that "We shall overcome." We are in our various ways deciding to be comfortably side by side, opening our eyes to see one another with new egalitarian clarity and conversing more freely.

The Americans of whom I write, who were once secure in their racism and other, related prejudice, were not exhausted and at last overcome.The persistent footfall I have heard these forty years is the sound of individuals freely answering the call of the good within them to the good offered them by Dr. King and his spiritual heirs.

Conscience by conscience, we have become a nation which willfully accepts a black man and a woman and an old man as presidential candidates and which is learning to reject the jingoism which distracted earlier generations.

Our ongoing change is I believe the highest honor we can offer the memory one who was assassinated when, knowing the risk, he stepped forward to speak to the needs of underpaid sanitation workers.

              

Brought to you by individual courage, the First Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an honest judge: DaTruthSquad, still by anonymous. In a civil society it is easy to forget that our freedom is often as fragile as our willingness to stand our ground, our success in finding help when we lack the resources to do so alone, by the integrity of the courts and by our own painstaking self-protection.

              

Spider Robinson has a podcast that will set your jazz, literary, analytical and outrage juices afire in a most civilized manner.

Given the sociable, hard-drinking history of the Frink men, I thought I had come home in 1973 when read the first of the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon stories in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

None of the Callahan's characters would have been altogether out of place at a family dinner, especially not the talking dog and the ethical vampire. I wish there had also been a computer-programming jackass, but I forgive Spider for the omission.

Of course all of that says something about my birth-family life, but don't prejudge what it says.

Get the entire collection.

Read it right through.

You'll have trouble putting it down, and it isn't a thick volume in any regard, so why try?

When you finish, think a moment and then tell me whether you found any of your own living or deceased family members at Callahan's. Or yourself. Even if you don't, you will probably wish you had.

Meanwhile, I recommend the gentle, respectful irreverence of his podcast to you.

              

While Facebook privacy-erasure issues remained in part unexplored, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in its Deeplinks blog noted;

One of the paradoxes of current social software is how many of your closely-guarded secrets you are obliged to entrust to a third party.
Take the social blogging site LiveJournal: its centralized server allows you to set blog posts to "friends only" or "private".
To use this feature, you post these semi-confidential journal entries to LiveJournal's server, and rely on it to hide your thoughts from the most of the world using its centrally-maintained list of friends to control access.
LiveJournal holds your secret data in trust, as much as you trust it to keep your public data available.

They go on to gently detail how foolish we have been in huge numbers as we burned our gleeful way into the social software revolution, and quite probably incinerated great swathes of the landscape of our privacy as we went.

Incinerated because most of us are unaware of what we are throwing away, or how.

Gently, the EFF counsels both greater caution and movement toward a world in which we individually control outright our data which social software companies now collect and market.

As it is, some deem that collection process turned off, not when data collection ends, but rather when publication of the collected data to our friends is halted.

Should we not individually exercise greater caution, for our own sake please, now.

Flesh calculated readability for this blog post

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.42
Flesch Reading Ease Level: 46.01

              

Rosa: Thanks for not moving to the back of the bus

              

Claymation is put to a most enlightening use at CreatureComforts.org.

I owe this link to an angry Joe Clark, who was castigating Google for accessibility stumbles.

If you are among those who snort at "accessibility" as a namby-pamby issue for the imagination-challenged, I have several suggestions for you, and one I can publish without being arrested.

Try living in a wheelchair for a week, just to get the flavor of it.

Please make videos of your experience as you go, or attempt to, and post them at YouTube.

Keep us up to date, here.

So we can applaude.

              

You don't have to sing along with Vicki Lawrence to wonder whose digital lights the Georgia Baptist Convention is trying to turn out.

Last week the GBC adopted a resolution which exercises great circumlocutional care in avoiding a headlong collision with blogs in general, while demanding that "personal attacks" cease immediately.

I'm not sure who persuaded the Rev. Wayne Bray and Rev. William Harrell Beulah Baptist Church, Douglasville, Georgia, to lug that bucketful of gasoline into the GBC gathering, but IMHO it won't put the fire out. In fact, it has already attracted outside-Georgia attention.

Unless I'm way south of them, they're complaining about ministerial blogs.

The bloggers being told to hush up knew when they raised their voices to a roar that the targets of their criticism had the will and means to answer.

You don't have to have served time on an aggressive daily newspaper's editorial page to know that if you start swinging the hammer, somebody's going to start swinging back. You do hope they'll swing wild, the way the GBC did, rather than fire for effect right at the key points and maybe demolish your most cogent arguments. Love of truth and so on not withstanding, no one really wants to lose a public fight.

Surely some of those attending the GBC knew that an answer which failed to address the issues being debated would be an invitation to more blows from the same hammer.

Not that anyone on earth cares what I think of decisions by the Georgia Baptist Convention, but I'm just a trifle baffled.

Good luck with those bruises, folks. They're gonna hurt.

              

"What are you doing," twitter asks, with so many replies centering on technological innovation.

Today I could have answered "at work" -- a convenient, businesslike lie.

Instead I chose to tell the truth:

"Comforting a friend who is losing her father."

Even it not present at their creation, you will recall that pen and ink were new technologies once.

Our ancestors found ways to make pen and ink serve us well in times of celebration and in times of consuming sorrow.

Social networking technologies and services can also be made to help do for us what pen and ink have done so well for so long.

In my view, it is an imperative, for written communication and the formalities which attended it are being abandoned. Our technological wonders will now help us better express the concerns of our humanity, or they will debase us by encouraging us to numb them.

So I throw aside some elements of caution and speak in twitter's abbreviated manner of my private grief and of the freely given comfort of one old friend to another.

It can be done better. We should create an etiquette for the socially networked expression of grief, just as we crafted well-accepted ways to mourn and comfort using pen and ink.

I do not proposed creation of an ANSI committee to standardized that etiquette.

It is IMHO up to us who care.

All of us, and I do see others here trying.

By striving to appropriately express our fundamental concerns, we will engineer together the well-accepted means to remain erect and thoughtful when the force of well-felt emotion could drive us to the ground. Yet feeling all the while, rather than attempting to become like the emotionless digital machines we have created to serve us.

              

An early childhood educator's analysis of Democratic Presidential candidates' stands on Children and Education is nearby at BlueNC. Icloud's analysis is IMHO detailed, fair and reminiscent of the kind of work one once found in good newspapers. [link]

              

Tough Love was the setting for another teenager's death while belated debate over the largely unregulated, unaccountable residential treatment industry for teenagers proceeded.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Omega Leach, the Philadelphia teen killed in June after the city sent him to a Tennessee treatment center, died of strangulation after a fight with a staff member there, according to the Tennessee medical examiner.
The death has been ruled a homicide, the autopsy report says.
Bruce P. Levy found that Leach had "multiple hemorrhages" of his neck muscles from a clash June 2 with two staffers at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center outside Nashville. ...

What is that on my hands? And yours.

              

Codependency, Enabling and Tough Love are the damning trinity of the residential addiction treatment industry to which we Americans frequently consign our most troubled offspring.

All three are so thoroughly wrong-headed and scientifically upside down that they won a Psychology Today Loose Screw Award in January of 2005.

Yes, two years ago, and there had been evidence for years before that all three ideas were or had become little more than profitably well-marketed quakery.

All three partake of the view that young people and adults alike who are suffering from addiction or some other disorder are best-served by receiving less family support, less love and perhaps regular doses of meanness.

Yet the evidence indicates that abandoning a substance abuser in the name of "Tough Love" can result in a relapse (and death). Likewise, abandoning someone who suffering from acute depression in order to end and alleged co-dependent relationship with them can result in suicide.

"Enabling" is of course refusing to be mean (withholding "Tough Love" -- the solution which should never be applied) or refusing to abandon someone who is suffering (thus remaining "co-dependent" and perhaps keeping them alive so that they can recover). Altogether, (in a fit of paradoxical logic) the result is said to make it possible for the afflicted to remain afflicted.

Thanks to the Governmental Accountability Office we have seen in recent weeks that applying the wrong-headed idea of Tough Love within the misconceived setting of some form of "boot camp" results with alarming frequency in a form of treatment failure called death.

In light of the evidence, it is gullible to accept National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs claims that boot camps and their offspring, wilderness residential treatment for teenagers, have done so much good for so many.

Psychology Today was by no means the first to report a National Institutes of Health panel evaluation of "get tough" programs which concluded that "All the evaluations have shown [the programs] don't work."

Boot camps were already well-known as non-solutions abroad when they were profitably imported from Great Britain in the 1990s.

Because the evidence was clear, allowing American teenagers to be brutalized, traumatized and in some cases killed in them could be seen as an act of collective criminality -- one we are all obligated to move forcefully to correct.

              

"Tough love" is a poorly defined article of faith from the addiction-treatment community, where maps of the path to recovery often fail to resemble one another.

When reports surfaced that some paths for troubled young people led to unrehabilitative pain and sometimes death, groups including the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs called it all “the noisy complaints of a few individuals.”

They were and are brutally wrong.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated and "found thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death, at residential treatment programs across the country and in American-owned and American-operated facilities abroad between the years 1990 and 2007," and a lack of appropriate regulatory oversight. In its report, the GAO wrote:

For example, during 2005 alone, 33 states reported 1,619 staff members involved in incidents of abuse in residential programs. GAO could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data. and emotional problems. This testimony concerns programs across the country referring to themselves as wilderness therapy

Although the GAO focused on 10 deaths during "wilderness therapy" residential treatment, the full report (pdf) makes it clear that lack of appropriate oversight is characteristic of the entire industry. Residential drug rehabilitation treatment for young people is, "with the exception of financial services" simply "not regulated by the federal government" and by state government in a number of states effectively regulated only for programs that accept public funds.

The result is a sweeping lack of accountability which conceals great harm and many varieties of treatment failure.

We can do far better for our addicted young people and their families.

It is a matter of collective national shame that we have not done better.

              

Saturday before Thanksgiving and Princess Leia is on Saint Mary's Street, talking to C3P0 with quiet intensity.

Patrolling Storm Troopers are preoccupied with the legions of baton-twirling dancing girls, only casting an occasional eye at the tall men in red fez and flowing red silk capes who eddy around a line of parked VW convertibles.

Something pleases the children. Waves of happy shrieks rise above the cacaphony of marching music and wash down the the blocks-long ranks of curb-sitting youngsters and standing adults, holding children.

Once more, the Raleigh Christmas Parade has martialed three stories beneath my bedroom window

The trees outside my living room again conspired to shed their golden leaves at just the hour to give me a streetside view from the couch.

Someone raps Merry Christmas to keep his pink-beretted platoon of lightly clad marching girls in high spirits for the coming stroll up Hillsboro Street.

Ancient martial drum tattoos and their musical descendants, sounds to which centuries of men have marched off to slay one another, mark the passage of high school bands.

Laughing children chase one another up and down the sidewalk while the smiles of watchful, refugee grandparents gleam up at me. Mothers pursue impatient toddlers. Daydreams of better times with my own sons bear me away.

"We're next!" the Merry Christmas rapper declares, baratone fading, and his charges sqeal to join the marching line.

Princess Leia, C3P0, R2D2, Luke and a unit of Storm Troopers lead them.

Too late, my eyes search for the Falcon. There's a pulse rifle muzzle in my ribs. Darth knows what will induce me to march, today. I fumble for my light saber. Santa emerges from nowhere to stay my hand. I'm in a front yard in Fayetteville, the night before Christmas years ago, using a steel-tined rake to dig reindeer hoof marks into the winter grass. Christ's forgiving laughter rings in my ears.

"You're next!"