New York Times Videos

http://vook.tumblr.com A New York Times Editorial claims "at-risk youth" need mentors. It's idealistic. Reality is another animal. As someone who mentors "at-risk" youth, I can tell you for a fact that not too many men want to put themselves in a vulnerable position where their sexuality will be questioned, their sense of morality will be questioned, their manhood will be questioned, and their humanity will become stretched tight as a motorcycle tie-down day one. You will be pushed up against a wall a dozen times a day and called a faggot every time you turn around, and you will ask yourself: why am I here. You will note that the other mentors around you -- your peers -- are there because they were one of these "at-risk youth" one time, too. Chances are, you are in the same tenuous boat. No man stays in any of these jobs too long. Not if you want to feed your family, and not if your own sons are in any way tempted to experiment with being the kind of kid Daddy spends most of his time with. Your motives will be questioned by every single person who looks at you juxtaposed against the scene the "at-risk youth" lives in; particularly if that "at-risk" mentor is male. Gender is an explosive issue. I would have to be out of my mind to be alone in a room engaged in any kind of communication with a female where simply keeping a door open is not enough. You want a reliable witness who was there who can verify nothing exploitive happened. Any male who works in a situation with "at-risk youth" where they find themselves in a locker room or any other setting involving nudity has to have his head examined. The New York Times editorial goes, as it should go, to funding issues. But funding issues are ephemeral. You won't find too many programs where mentors are offered retirement because no one stays that long. Two years is considered an eternity. One is more the norm. If you are mentoring a kid who is fourteen, and you leave him when he's fifteen, you simply become part of the problem especially when this is going to be a child with grief and abandonment issues. Grief over being left to twist in the wind by men all his life. To see this as a funding problem is to miss the forest for the trees and these programs are ALL underfunded anyway. Get used to being somebody who is going to confront a world of options limited to the military. You are going to become painfully aware real fast that keeping the kid in a street environment that consists of gang warfare, drug dealing, drug use, prostitution (which will have a direct impact on how he perceives and deals with women), abandonment, no male role models, and where educational success is considered to be a liability, is simply reinventing the sociological wheel because that kid is not going to pull himself up by his bootstraps -- the kid has no bootstraps, and probably no boots. You are going to look at the military as the only option in a place where options are almost nonexistent. Society has never been serious about any of this. It covers up the leaks with Bandaids before the blood spills anywhere near the middle class which has problems now of its own. Who do you think fights our wars. Although I am a child of the counter culture, almost sixty, I say: bring back the draft. As we bring back the draft, let's make sure that we eliminate the current overtly reluctant attitude of the military to take soldiers with criminal records. "At-risk youth" doesn't get into the military if the kid is a habitual criminal because the military doesn't want them. Then what. I say: bring back the draft and get serious about it. Allow the young man from the streets of Compton to serve beside the young man from Yale. We all know this will never happen. It has never happened. Bring back the draft and your wars will end tomorrow. The future of the "at-risk youth" is a vacuum filled by HIV/AIDS, intravenous drug use, hopelessness, suicide, prison. Once in prison, the issue becomes rape depending on how young he (or she) is. Where do you think the hot pockets of HIV exist. Once in prison he can learn how to become a better drug dealer. The military for this kid is no longer an option and never was one. Idealism is one thing. But it never seems to be based in any form of reality whatsoever. Mentoring involves such issues as "Manhood Means We Don't Kill Women." Domestic abuse is ordinary. Turf and the marketplace (drugs rule) are the only concepts he gets because he's ultimately so intimately exposed to them day after day, month after month, year after year. His own life expectancy harkens back not to the post-industrial days of Charles Dickens, but to serfdom and the Middle Ages where you died at thirty from disease. Drugs are the economic engine that drives this culture on the fringes of a culture. Let's not simply bring back the draft but let's legalize the pharmaceuticals and remove the rush from the economics of foreclosure. Foreclosed from Any Way Out of Here. We all know it will never happen. It is morally disingenuous for the knee-jerk liberal to recommend a dribble of funding for the kind of job description -- that as mentor with "at-risk youth" -- when it's not a job description any never-at-risk-for-anything graduate of Yale would take for more than one year of abuse from the inside and the outside of what amounts to a gun-infested nightmare of terror and despair. There's your America. If I had no way out of there, I would probably own as many guns as I could afford, and the kids know it. They're not stupid. "You gotta gun, what kind?" Is the very first thing you will be asked. Not because they don't want to rob you (they do) but because they want to see how invested you really are in the reality of where they live. Tim Barrus lucian.daemon@gmail.com

New York TImes NewsToday's News of November the 4th 2009

Author: expandedbooks Added: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:33:09 -0800 Duration: 0When a brain tumor threatens Caterina Shaw's life she risks it all on a new gene therapy. But soon Caterina is something other than human and finds herself accused of a savage murder and shes on the run.

Author: expandedbooks Added: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:33:09 -0800 Duration: 0When a brain tumor threatens Caterina Shaw's life she risks it all on a new gene therapy. But soon Caterina is something other than human and finds herself accused of a savage murder and shes on the run.

Author: expandedbooks Added: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:33:09 -0800 Duration: 0When a brain tumor threatens Caterina Shaw's life she risks it all on a new gene therapy. But soon Caterina is something other than human and finds herself accused of a savage murder and shes on the run.

NYT's Jodi Kanto shares her close-up view of the Obama marriage.

Author: expandedbooks Added: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:33:09 -0800 Duration: 0When a brain tumor threatens Caterina Shaw's life she risks it all on a new gene therapy. But soon Caterina is something other than human and finds herself accused of a savage murder and shes on the run.

Under George W. Bush, the Pentagon used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage. The story was broken by the New York Times, and reporter David Barstow won a Pulitzer for his work. Brad Jacobson, investigative journalist with The Raw Story, has discovered that a key figure in that Bush administration program remains in the same position, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations, under Obama. Jacobson found his name in over 500 emails and transcripts, and has written a series of stories that uncovered evidence "that directly exposes this stealth media project and the activities of its participants as matching the US government?s own definition of psychological operations, or PSYOPS." Jacobson joins us in the studio to discuss his reporting and the way the Obama administration has continued certain Bush policies.