We actually met with the officers and a few higher-ups, about a week or so later. We requested the meeting, because we were a bit shaken that the officers came in as they did. What the officers explained was their protocol in such a situation, which included searching the house to “make sure that parents were not tied up in a closet.”

So here’s the big question: What if we had been tied up in a closet? Was the behavior of Mr. Shirtless, the circumstance of Mr. Shirtless leading the officers to a house with non-adult-age babysitters and two children, was all that enough to warrant the officers “checking out the house”?

I see their point. I saw it then and I see it now.

All of our young people kept it cool. I’m proud of them for that. My neighbor called me while the officers were still on my property. That was great. Neighbors watching out for neighbors. And the officers have a tough job to do, especially on nights that are rumored to be pregnant with gang violence. In the end they were courteous and respectful.

… no hay de que…

Google Docs, Slowly Morphing into Google Drive

Gmail offers to automatically unsubscribe you from mailing lists

Christian donors in Britain keep giving, despite recession

Here’s the July 22 e-news of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance.

From PEW Hispanic: How many Mexican immigrants come, and how many leave?

David Weinberger: Transparency is the new objectivity. Here’s why:

You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

Weinberger has a good point.

MUST BE ON FAMILY SABBATICAL: This weekend, Kafi and I watched three good and great movies together. Vantage Point was good, very good, and gripping. Madea Goes To Jail was hilarious; I can’t get enough of the main character, who takes crazy and peculiar to a whole new level. Then we finally got around to seeing Slumdog Millionaire. Lord have mercy. Words can’t describe. It isn’t just that it’s a great movie and deserved the Best Picture Oscar. Slumdog portrays the grim circumstances of hundreds of millions of children around the globe, not just in India. I kept thinking about Mexico and its two great cities, Tijuana and Mexico City. I thought of the little gangster kids trying to man up in the hood. Plus they used the credits to go Bollywood - a nice touch.

ROUND-UP:

• Go to Drudge for recovery.com federal spending tonterias.
• Minneapolis struggles with rise of Somali gangs.
• India rejects US carbon demands.
• LAX parking lot is home away from home for airline workers.

• Hire your kids. No joke. Child labor laws do not apply to your own children, according to the writer.
• Write off the car, especially if you work from home. Interesting details, in case you didn’t konw.
• Write off your house: “Dedicate a room in your house for a consulting business and you’ve opened up a whole world of write-offs.”
• Expense the supplies. A whole bunch of them.

Careful, though: If you show a loss for three years running, the IRS will consider your consultancy a “hobby” and hit you between the eyes.

…way more stuff…

What Phones Do People Dump For iPhone? A lot of Motorola RAZRs. Myself, I dropped a Sidekick.

Filipino developer comes up big on initial foray with iPhone platform. I love the “sudden success” stories coming out of the iPhone platform world. Talk about creating a marketplace and generating wealth “out of thin air.” We need more of this type of innovation in our inner cities.

It’s a Mancession. I’ve seen a bunch of articles describing how the recession has disproportionately impacted men. This is just the latest I’ve come across.

Is AT&T a big, steaming heap of failure? I’m having AT&T trouble IN MY OWN HOUSE. That’s a total drag. Here’s hoping they strengthen the signal here in Eastown - but from reading this article, I shouldn’t hold my breath.

Great sermon this morning by Pastor Denise over at City Hope.

Still settling in:

This article says that Michigan has “one of the most lucrative tax credit/rebate programs in the industry. The state gives you 40% of every qualified dollar that you spend in the state…. Other states have tax incentives, but none come close to these numbers.”

The union described in the article, IATSE, has apparently pulled off a rate change that will add half a million bucks to the cost of production in the state. The writer surmises that film producers will run to Louisiana, South Carolina, and other states that adhere to the Area Standards rate (as opposed to the Maryland rate).

Incentives that attract business are exactly what places like Michigan need to weather the economic storm and changes wrought by globalization and, well, change in general. (Evolving incentives are how you roll with creative destruction.) This is a giant step backward. I know some folks in the film industry and have been looking forward to learning how the industry is blossoming here. Looks like I’ve got exactly 13 days to study the model before it shifts.

more stuff…

The Honduran Coup that wasn’t: “The far bigger story is the disgrace of the world’s major international political and economic organizations.”

…the OAS, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and others were all shooting from the hip into the dark. These leaders had nothing to inform their decisions but fuzzy idealism, ideological prejudices, assorted self-interests and profound ignorance of realities on the ground in Honduras.

In Jakarta, a new terrorist tactic is revealed:

The new question, which needs urgent attention in the wake of the Jakarta blasts, is how to prevent fabrication and assembly of explosive material by attackers already inside.

Dog Yoga

Moyo: “I strongly believe that my critics are the ones being incredibly myopic, and perhaps even disingenuous, to the extent that they actually have almost no belief in the African continent and the fact that Africa can emerge from this situation.”

It’s an excellent interview all around, with Wehmeyer posing the tough questions that are being posed by the foreign aid and NGO communities, and Moyo succinctly and clearly answering and casting vision for a developed Africa that is not dependent on aid.

y otras cosas

Fetuses found to have memories

Brazilian Teahupoo

my confidence
since my youth

God got to me when I was ten years old. What He revealed then is what I believe now, 31 years later.

Interesting how that happens.

y mas…

Las Vegas as a Lesson in Basic Economics - Any article that throws around terms like “creative destruction,” “sin city,” and “80,000 Mexican immigrants had left Nevada” is worth a close read in my book.

Here are a few words on the health care bill from the only Vietnamese-American in the U.S. Congress.

Not an Upgrade - an Upheaval: On funding journalism in the future:

Finally, there’s patronage, either of the “one rich person” model, as with Richard Mellon Scaife’s subsidy of conservative journals, or the NPR Fund Drive model, where the small core of highly involved users makes above-market-price donations to provision a universally accessible good run for revenue but not for profit. These models have always existed alongside the for-profit press, but they were always viewed as oddities, their ability to continue to function being regarded more as a kind of perverse outcome than evidence of continued viability.

In an age where the cost of making things public has fallen precipitously, patronage models suddenly look not just viable but eminently reproducible.

Past warming shows gaps in climate knowledge:

During an event called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius within several thousand years. The world at that time was already warmer than now with no surface ice.

“We now believe that the CO2 did not cause all the warming, that there were additional factors,” said Richard Zeebe, an oceanographer with the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Donors (private foundations, etc.) focus on new ways to approach giving.

y otras cosas…

OBAMA IN GHANA: Regular Obama critic Ralph Peters thought it was a great speech and hopes it reflects a new Obama: O channels W

PALIN’S WAPO OP-ED: She’s right - cap and trade will be a disaster. I don’t think Palin will ever win a national election, because you’ve got to draw lots of swing voters, and at the moment that’s not happening, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. But she can definitely advance key policy initiatives, such as this “stop cap-and-trade” mission she’s on at the moment.

BROADBAND VIA U-VERSE: What’s up with AT&T’s internet access via U-Verse? The service is very fast, except when it’s quicksand slow. Is it just a Grand Rapids thing, or do other U-Verse customers have the same problem?

BUT WILL THIS SATISFY THE ROSWELL CONSPIRACY CROWD? New film of first men to walk on the Moon to be released

even more…

Hemingway revealed as failed KGB spy

The 0% Tax Rate Solution

Not that there is anything wrong with that: North Dakota could have a huge new oil field

Hybrid owners are not as smug as they’re painted

From the dumb criminals log: Pasadena police arrest teen in botched carjacking: The cops think the thief could not drive a stick shift, and so couldn’t carry out the deed.

Teens don’t Twitter? This could be true. I never hear teens talk about twittering. They talk about sending text messages.

Here’s some hot mess…

GLENN REYNOLDS: Here’s the Hidden Cost of National Health Care:

The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that’s certainly a valid critique. I’m sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.

The key point, though, is that these treatments didn’t just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

But under a national healthcare plan, the “market” will consist of whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. That means treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but otherwise the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments, to bureaucrats, mean more costs.

L.A. TIMES: Los Angeles-area teenage girl flies single-engine Cessna cross-country. She did it to inspire her peers and to honor of the Tuskegee Airmen. Awesome. Congratulations, Kimberly Anyadike.