Author George Saunders defends like. ‘There’s an Orwell essay that I love, called “Politics

and the English Language,” in which he says that

language is inherently political. So something like

“like” is a sort of indicator of a larger societal

dysfunction. What “like” does is allow you to join

two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but

associatively linked, without having to go to great

lengths to make the connection. It’s kind of an

impressionistic device. You can say, “The truck was

going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down,

jerk?” I’m sure we stumbled across that sort of

device because we needed it. It’s meaningful.’ [Atlantic]

Public Citizen: did you think the high price of gasoline at the pump was just higher costs being passed on to the consumer??

A plea to let corporations accelerate efforts to buy the rights to attach their names to public edifices and institutions.

One third of Eritreans face humanitarian crisis – UN. “I believe nobody is entirely ready to deal with this scale of disaster, which has grew dramatically in the last 30 to 45 days,” says Carol Bellamy, head of the UN’s children’s agency.

Navy sends agents into gay bars. Washington Post: “Navy investigators are routinely

sending informants and undercover agents into

Washington area gay bars to identify military

personnel among the clients, and then using

sting operations to catch some of them in drug

trafficking, according to Navy officials and

testimony in a recent military court proceeding.”

Number of US Nuclear Targets Has Grown Since 1993. Like I said, if you think the arms race is over, think again. [Manchester Guardian via Common Dreams]

Sovereign Bank Coming To Massachusetts. Thirty years ago I opened a bank account at Harvard Trust Co. when I moved to the Boston area. When it conglomerated with other Massachusetts banks, I had a “Bay Bank Harvard Trust” account. Then they dropped the affiliates’ autonomy and it became a “Bay Bank” account. About two or three years ago, the Bank of Boston bought Bay Bank and my new cards and checks said “BankBoston.” Last month, after Fleet bought BankBoston, they gave me Fleet accounts and cards. And now it appears that, to avoid anti-trust implications, they’re forcing me to become a Sovereign Bank customer. All this without lifting a finger in thirty years.

The sniffing detective. The effort to develop an “electronic nose” that could hone in on the time of death of a decomposing body (by analyzing the chemicals it produces over time) includes getting a graduate student to spend successive nights in a morgue taking vapor samples near corpses. A forensic entomologist objects, saying his approach — analyzing developmental stage of the insect populations that populate a decomposing body — is more accurate. [New Scientist]

Medical Records Sent To Wrong Place. This is probably so common it shouldn’t even be a news item anymore, unfortunately.

RadioShack to Co-Sponsor Moon Mission. “With a new age of commercial space exploration on the horizon, U.S. electronics

retailer RadioShack Corp. hopes to bolster its image and sales by going to the moon.

RadioShack said on Thursday it will co-sponsor the first commercial lunar landing, a robot probe for ancient

ice… “

Neurosurgeons ‘fear risky surgery’. Patients are losing out as neurosurgeons, faced with burgeoning numbers of lawsuits, curtail chancy practices.

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Why didn’t the NYPD stop the Central Park wolf pack? “With Amadou Diallo, the

cops went too far. In

Central Park, not far enough. But guess what? It’s the same

problem.” The author makes a case that the problem is the NYPD’s contempt for the people of the city, leading it to be both tough on suspected ‘perps’ and soft on victims; and that this attitude trickels down from above, ultimately from Giuliani. There’s also the possibility that this is payback for recent protests of police brutality including, of course, the flap over the new Springsteen song “American Skin (41 Shots)”. [Salon] But let’s get more basic — is why the police didn’t stop this even the right question to ask? Giuliani actually tried to softpeddle the events (until the rising tide of public outcry against the police flipped him to a get-tough ‘spin’) by saying that there wasn’t any more violence at this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade than there was last year, and one of his police spokespeople said something along the lines of: what’s the big deal, this happens in New Orleans every year at Mardi Gras? It’s unbelievable to me that we have come to the point of living in the kind of world where bystanders are going to be savaged at a public celebration unless they have police protection.

Software that can spy on you.

“Why did Mattel include technology that can encrypt and send data to and from your PC in its children’s CD-ROMs?” [Salon, via Robot Wisdom]

Complete list: “100 Funniest Films” as chosen by a panel of 1,800 people in the

industry for the American Film Institute. Here are the top ten:

1. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959

2. “Tootsie,” 1982

3. “Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

the Bomb,” 1964

4. “Annie Hall,” 1977

5. “Duck Soup,” 1933

6. “Blazing Saddles,” 1974

7. “M*A*S*H,” 1970

8. “It Happened One Night,” 1934

9. “The Graduate,” 1967

10. “Airplane!,” 1980

The Y2K MacArthur Fellowship winners announced. Links to biographical sketches of the award winners.

[American Prospect]: Harvey Blume, “Neuro-Narrative,” May 22, 2000. I thought it was only because of my own involvement with neuroscience that I’ve been noticing fiction pivoting around characters with such conditions as Tourette’s disorder, autism, and temporal lobe epilepsy. But this essayist argues that, reflective of an emerging new worldview, “neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development

has been written off as only another example of our

culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood.”

Review of Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture:

The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and

between what people are considered to be suffering from and

what they claim to be suffering from – has made the history of

medicine, in its broadest sense, of so much recent interest. Part

of the fascination (so to speak) of mesmerism and hypnosis –

and of the history that is so well told in Svengali’s Web – is that,

as potential cures for a wide range of miseries, they were so

quickly seen to be at once remarkable breakthroughs, and

disreputable, if not criminal activities.

The reviewer wonders what it is about psychoanalysis that keeps it from being another form of hypnosis, if indeed it is not; and whether hypnosis shows that seducing and being seduced are the only things we are truly free to do, “making a mockery of our ideas of freedom.”

The impossible world of DI John Rebus. A London Review of Books essay surveys Ian Rankin’s appealing, encyclopedic series of crime novels featuring a gritty Scottish detective.

The sheer

range of subjects treated in the novels is one of the keys to their

interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of

the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing

and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge

any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is

no ludic or ironic component to the series, just as there is none

to Rebus himself; the books do not experiment with the

crime-novel form, and do not make any kind of distancing or

Post-Modern gestures towards it. A writer who began by trying

to write a book his father might want to read found himself, after

the publication of Dead Souls, occupying eight of the top ten

positions in the Scottish bestseller list.

Memorable journalistic bloopers submitted by readers to Jim Romenesko’s Media News.

Two-faced kitten dies unexpectedly in Pennsylvania. “Image, the…kitten that received

a good prognosis for survival even though he

was born with two sets of eyes, two mouths

and two noses, died yesterday morning in his

quilt-lined bed…Aside from his

facial features, the rest of the kitten seemed

normal. The two mouths opened in unison but

were attached to one esophagus. Image has one

head, two ears and one set of lungs.” The kitten was too young for its four eyes to have yet opened, rendering moot the fascinating question of how it would have seen the world.

Flawed process leads to executions in Texas despite Bush’s vows of confidence in the system. The Chicago Tribune conducted the first comprehensive investigation of all 131 executions in Texas under Bush’s tenure and concludes that scandalous flaws undermine the process of capital convictions there. As a psychiatrist, I’m particularly appalled by the abuse of psychiatric expert testimony:

In at least 29 cases, the prosecution presented

damaging testimony from a psychiatrist who,

based upon a hypothetical question describing

the defendant’s past, predicted the defendant

would commit future violence. In most of

these cases, the psychiatrist offered this

opinion without ever examining the

defendant. Although this kind of testimony is

sometimes used in other states, the American

Psychiatric Association has condemned it as

unethical and untrustworthy.

Other failings included representation in one-third of the cases by an attorney later disbarred, suspended or otherwise sanctioned; and the frequent use of jailhouse informants (“a form of testimony so unreliable

that some states warn jurors to view it with

skepticism. The prevalent use of jailhouse

informants in capital cases was one of the

central problems Gov. George Ryan cited when

he declared the moratorium in Illinois”). Witnesses, experts and lawyers on whose contributions capital convictions have turned have included

a forensic scientist who was

temporarily released from a psychiatric ward

to provide incriminating testimony in a capital

case; a pathologist who has admitted faking

autopsies; a psychiatrist, nicknamed “Dr.

Death,” who was expelled from the American

Psychiatric Association; a judge on the state’s

highest criminal court who has been

reprimanded for lying about his background;

and a defense attorney infamous for sleeping

during trials.

This all ought to be disturbing regardless of whether one supports the death penalty or not in the abstract. Let’s elect George W. to the presidency just to get him out of the role of signing death warrants in Texas, for God’s sake!

New heights of intrusiveness from the Census Bureau.

“I work for the federal government and I’ll do what I have to do to do my job,” says arrested census worker.

Controlled infection “A live HIV vaccine that can’t infect the people it’s supposed to protect may be possible after all. A team based in

California has created a hybrid of HIV and another virus that can enter cells, but can’t replicate once it’s there. ” Not really a vaccine as much as immunotherapy for those already HIV-infected; introduced to the patient through an arduous process, to prime the patient’s cell-mediated immune response. [New Scientist]

Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were dedicated carnivores; was this related to their demise? [BBC]

Seattle’s Purple Haze. Frank Gehry (who prefers Haydn) meets Jimi Hendrix. [Newsweek.com]

Behind Enemy Lines – Premier Services Exposed. Hacking into a spammer’s computer. [via Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eaters News Service]

Secret Nuclear Weapons Data Missing From Los Alamos Lab. As if it weren’t already bad enough, hard drives containing sensitive data had disappeared from inside locked containers which were inside a locked vault when officials went to check for them after the lab had been evacuated in the brush fires last week.

The material, stored in the vault of

the laboratory’s X Division, where

nuclear weapons are designed,

contained what officials described

as nuclear weapons data used by the

government’s Nuclear Emergency

Search Team, or NEST, which

responds to nuclear accidents and

nuclear-related threats from

terrorists. The material includes all

the data on American nuclear

weapons that the team needs to

render nuclear devices safe in

emergencies.

In addition, the missing material

included intelligence information concerning the Russian

nuclear weapons program, law enforcement officials said.

The article contains many links to older stories in the continuing saga of security leaks from the U.S. Nuclear Lab.[New York Times]

Radio-Frequency Tags Could Pierce Some of the Fog of War. Other applications for transponders of the sort I use to whiz through a toll booth without stopping are being pioneered by the military.

Call me old-fashioned, but: I hadn’t realized that there’s already, apparently, a brisk trade in digitized pirated hit films on the web. [Washington Post]

Screams haunt town. Bloodcurdling cries in a wooded area of a Quebec town prompt large scale search. Rescuers continue to hear the screams, increasing their urgency to find the source, but the cries fall silent by dawn and the searchers turn up nothing. Eventually written off as coyotes, but residents see they’ve never seen any around…

The first chapter of British philosopher Colin McGinn’s Mysterious Flame, which argues that not only do we not presently understand how consciousness arises out of the physical brain in which it is rooted, but that the intellect we have is ill-equipped to ever understand this essential mystery.

…the bond between the mind and the brain is a deep mystery. Moreover, it is an ultimate

mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel. Consciousness indubitably exists, and it is connected

to the brain in some intelligible way, but the nature of this connection necessarily eludes us. The full import of this

thesis will take some time to unfold. I am especially concerned to examine the reasons for this mystery. I am not

just throwing my hands up in despair; I am interested in uncovering the deep reasons for our bafflement and

examining the consequences of our constitutional ignorance. Socrates was concerned to show people that they

know less than they think they do. I too am concerned with the nature and source of human not-knowing; I want to

know why some things are so hard to know. What is it about consciousness that makes it so elusive to theoretical

understanding? And what is it about the knowing mind that makes it founder here?

Slate: The End of Mystery – The encroachment of science on fantasy’s last redoubts. Charles Paul Freund takes the occasion of the Church’s revealing the Third Mystery of Fatima to say that science is taking all the mystery out of life:

Comes science with its DNA and its bioarchaeology,

its mummy CAT scans, its satellite imaging, its sonar, its

computer analysis, and soon lost cities are found, dead

royalty turns out really to be dead, pretenders to be but

pretenders. The past must then reveal itself in fantasy’s

ashes.

But I say pity anyone whose mystery is so petty that it can be cast aside by the results of DNA analysis and the the like! There’s still plenty to truly, unassailably enchant us.

Not Your Average Bear. Reinhold Messner, first to climb Mt Everest solo (and without oxygen) claims to have solved the yeti mystery, determining it to be a species of bear, in a frustratingly colorless book that never explains why no one else pondering the mysteries of the abominable snowman had ever noticed the similarities before.

Personalized computer program increases smokers chances for successfully quitting by more than 50 percent.

Who Gets to Tell a Black Story? The behind-the-scenes racial politics of the fascinating HBO miniseries The Corner, from the book by a white Baltimore reporter who says he’s colorblind, directed by the complicated and mercurial Charles Dutton, one angry African-American man who himself comes from these very corners, has been there, done that. An unflinching look at ghetto life and especially the way heroin is interwoven through its fabric, but would it be too humiliating to blacks to be that real? [New York Times]

Slate: The Myth of Russian Reform by Anne Applebaum

This is why Western newspaper analysis of Russia is so often

wrong or at least misplaced: To date, the writing about Putin’s

Cabinet and entourage has generally focused on how

well-known a given Putin appointee or adviser is in the

West—and therefore how “reformist” he is likely to be.

Russian analysts, on the other hand, focus on which particular

business clan supports the man in question (they are all men)

and whose interests he is therefore likely to favor. Likewise,

the most important political battle in Russia over the past year,

that between the interests grouped around Putin and the

interests grouped around Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and

former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, had nothing to do

with “Left vs. Right” or “Reform vs. Nasty,” but is better

characterized by the Leninist phrase “Who Whom?” In that

context, calling one group more or less “democratic” or

“internationalist” or “pro-Western” makes no sense.

Finding New Audiences for Alienation. New York Times status report on the Beckett Film Project, bringing all nineteen of his plays to celluloid with impressive personnel by the end of this year. Can you imagine seeing them all in one sitting??

Texas Lawyer’s Death Row Record a Concern. You don’t have to be legally well-versed to recognize the incompetence of the Texas attorney portrayed here. He believes he’s had more clients sentenced to death than any attorney in the US and the jurisdiction in which he practices has the third-highest number of executions in the country; he boasts that he failed criminal law in law school; he’s been reprimanded multiple times for professional misconduct; it appears he conducts professional business with the smell of alcohol detectable on his breath; and listen to how he handled the defense of Gary Graham, scheduled for execution in Texas on June 22. It is contended that he assumed throughout his defense that his client was guilty. “There’s nothing I could have done that would have changed the result,” he said. Sounds true enough; as his new attorneys handling his appeal point out, this is a textbook case of how poor representation sends poor people to death row throughout the nation.

The Nation‘s Deathrow Rollcall site keeps a running tally of the year’s executions by state, and has a calendar of upcoming executions. You can click on an inmate’s name to send an email to the governor of her/his state requesting a stay of execution for the inmate and a moratorium on executions on the whole. The source of The Nation‘s information is Rick Halperin’s Death Penalty News & Updates.

Mysterious deadly disease surfaces among drug users. Almost sixty cases, in Glasgow, Dublin and English sites, involving local inflammation at the IV injection sites, dropping blood pressure, elevated white blood cell counts, and frequently progressing to heart failure. More than half of affected patients have died, usually within about two days and despite aggressive treatment with antibiotics. Reports last week suggested it might be anthrax, but this has not been borne out. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, called in by British health officials to help with the investigation, says “the emergence of a new disease is possible…Right now, though, the greatest likelihood is that it is an organism previously known and described and showing itself in a new way.” Multiple organisms are cultured out of blood and tissues of victims, but none so far is a likely culprit. Surveillance in the UK and the US (where no cases have yet been seen) is being tightened. Global dissemination of overwhelming infection is just a plane ride away, as AIDS taught us, but AIDS also taught us that the urgency about a disease depends on the constituency it affects. Press releases from health officials so far are attempting to reassure the public that this disease, whatever it may be, appears intrinsically associated with IV drug use.

CIA, FBI Say Iran Defector Is Impostor –Washington Post. Below, I took note of this man’s claim that Iran had been behind the Lockerbie bombing. CIA says no. This might signal U.S. wishes for a warming of relations with Iran, it would seem, otherwise wouldn’t we let the suggestions stand even if they were misinformation?

Testing the claims for Gingko. The NIH’s fledgling National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine initiates its largest project yet — a prospective study of whether ginkgo biloba extract halts cognitive decline in the aged.

Last year’s massive mosquito extermination didn’t work.

Fort Collins man gets approval to adopt sister.

Half fish, half robot. An “artificial animal” using part of the brain of the sea lamprey to control an off-the-shelf mechanical body exhibits complex behavior in response to external stimuli.

Pat Metheny on Kenny G’s musical necrophilia.

since that record came out – in protest, as

insigificant as it may be, i encourage

everyone to boycott kenny g recordings,

concerts and anything he is associated

with. if asked about kenny g, i will diss

him and his music with the same passion

that is in evidence in this little essay.

normally, i feel that musicians all have a

hard enough time, regardless of their

level, just trying to play good and don’t

really benefit from public criticism,

particularly from their fellow players. but,

this is different.

Thanks for Nothing A master’s degree candidate is denied his degree for adding a postscript (after his thesis committee signed off on it) telling his institution and advisors what he really thinks of them. He says it’s a free speech issue; they say it’s…well, it’s not.

V.S. Ramachandran: “The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of

monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain

evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the

single most important “unreported” (or at least,

unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror

neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for

biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help

explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto

remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.” To my read, an intriguing but overreaching theory. Good to see they intend to empirically test some elements. [Edge]

Scientists boost power of morphine. The opioid receptor, site of action of morphine and like analgesics,desensitizes with continuing exposure to opiate drugs. It appears now that scientists have isolated the mechanism of that down-regulation, provoking hopes that they can figure out how to defeat desensitization and produce more sustained opiate effects. In other pain control news, researchers have found a way to make kappa-opioids, a class of painkilling substances thought effective only in women, work in men too, and more effective in both.

Nader Picks Up Speed In New Bid For Election. This time around he’ll be campaigning in all fifty states rather than just “standing still for President” as he did in 1996. The reason he’s fired up, even though he knows he can’t win? If the Green Party gets 5% of the popular vote, it’ll qualify for federal election matching funds for 2004. Sounds like a reason voting Green would not be a waste if you can’t bring yourself to vote Republicratic.

An op-ed piece in the St Louis Post-Dispatch says nothing changes until some forbidden topics get discussed.

We should have such problems: Who’s Spoiled? Forbes columnist’s advice for dealing with the angst of raising children of affluence.

NATO’s shame: our morals are right, everybody else’s are wrong, and international law be damned.

War Hero Sent To Prison For Protesting US Army’s ‘School of Assassins’. Former medal of honor winner given one-year sentence for civil disobedience at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, which trains Latin American military officers. “I consider it an honor to be going to prison as a result of an act of conscience in response

to a moral imperative that impelled and obligated me to speak for voices silenced by

graduates of the School of the Americas, a military institution that has brought shame to

our country and the U.S. Army.”

Man says he doesn’t remember leaving waitress $10,000 tip

“A British man who left a Chicago waitress a $10,000 tip later rejected by his credit card company claims he was drunk and doesn’t remember

leaving the huge amount on a $9 bar tab…But Leg Room owner Fred Hoffmann said (the man) seemed to be thinking clearly at the time, noting that the bar’s manager photocopied his

passport and had him sign a statement agreeing to the tip….The bar’s owners have pledged to give (the waitress) the money themselves because of the publicity generated by the incident.”

BBC: Cannabis found in Palace kitchen “…Furious

Queen has demanded a full search for the

culprit. ” But what were police doing raiding Buckingham Palace??

Foreskin Cells May Assist HIV Transmission. Compelling evidence accumulates that circumcised males are far less likely to contract HIV with HIV-positive sexual contacts.

WebBrain.com. I do like this search interface.

Success of Christian Thriller Reflects Rising Interest in Religious Fiction. “Pre-millennial dispensationalism,” a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, drives potboiler fiction. “The books read like artifacts of a time

machine sent to retrieve pulp science fiction — and our

morality — from the 50s,” said one critic.

No, I’m Not Talking to You. The New York Times takes the proliferation of those little earbud-and-mic-bud hands-free cellular phone accessories as an opportunity to take another well-deserved potshot at all the people seemingly talking to themselves on city streets and in other public places. [Curmudgeon that I am, I love the approach to this constant barrage of people’s personal business in my aural space that someone once suggested — feel free to join into their personal conversations, offering observations and suggestions, since they’ve already been so kind as to include you. At best, it’ll chasten them and may change some behavior; at worst, at least you’ll have some fun.]

November 17 group: Small but deadly. ‘A Greek politician who survived a November 17

attack remarked that “Greece is the only

country where it has been impossible to not

only smoke out terrorism, but even to make a

single substantial strike against it.”

But some commentators believe that because

the group emerged from the same resistance

movement that gave rise to today’s political

establishment, there may be influential figures

in Greece who do not want its members

brought to book.’ [BBC]

A Data Sanctuary is Born. This Wired article has alot more color and background on the goings-on at Sealand than the Times coverage I logged below.

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): “Mixing obscenity with retail is nothing new. That’s what porn is, right? But the way Betty Ray does it, the

product is almost literary…In episodes to come, the group will stumble on Fuckertown and its

shady lady leader, Natasha Strap. The products the characters use and see are all for sale

to Fuckertown viewers.”

Small Bookstores Get Booksense, finally a unified web presence to compete with amazon and barnesandnoble. “A publisher pays Barnes and Noble $10,000 to feature a certain title…But the

titles on our front tables are there simply because we’ve read them and loved them. This

marketing effort will make the public to understand that our opinions haven’t been bought.” [Wired]

Bedside terror. “18,391 people like me — fresh from medical school —

will be unleashed on the patients of this country on July 1.

We will infiltrate local hospitals, clinics and medical centers

near you. Despite the four years we spent memorizing

textbooks and not sleeping, many will feel, like I did on that

day, completely ill-prepared to be a doctor.” [Salon] And even after several years of residency training, this doctor didn’t know what he was doing… or on the other hand, maybe he knew exactly.

Mugged by a serpent? [Salon]

Famed pianist Glenn Gould seen as autistic.

“I’ve lost all respect for beavers. I never would have imagined this from a beaver.”

Charges and counter-charges over Montenegran assassination. Whom to believe? CIA spokesman or senior Milosevic aide?? Remember Sergio Aragones’ Spy vs. Spy? [Nando Times]

Big Brother is coming [Brill’s Content]

A reader commented on something that is painfully obvious to me — how slow this enormous blog page has been to load, especially for those of you who may well still have a dial-up connection as I do. I’m probably losing readers who are more impatient than you are about waiting for the page to come up. How frequently do you read Follow Me Here? Instead of ten days’ worth of my posts, I’ve just whittled it down to five days on the main page. Go back to the archives (link at the bottom) for older posts if you like. Let me know if this seems okay, and if it seems faster to download…

The Sunday Times: novelist James Delingpole is Young, Successful, Prosperous: I Could Just Kill Myself.

“How our ancestors would have laughed if we had mentioned

any of these perils to them. Rightly so, for such things could

be taken seriously only in an age so pampered and decadent

that it has to invent illusory dangers in order to replace real

ones that no longer exist. You do not agonise about animal

rights and gluten allergies when your family is starving; you do

not worry about Lyme disease in times of rampant

tuberculosis, typhus or bubonic plague; you have no urge to go

bungee jumping or white-water rafting when you are about to

be blown up on the western front.

We have all been spoilt rotten, that’s our problem.”

Salon: Billy and the bullies. I seem to have missed out. This is about a dispute between Billy Collins’ humble university press and blockbuster Random House over publication rights to some of his poetry. But Collins is supposed to be America’s most popular poet?? Oh, that’s it, sales figures had soared after two appearances on A Prairie Home Companion in 1998, and his poems are described as “funny and accessible.”

Feed: Legal rights for apes.

“Chimpanzees are our

closest biological relatives, sharing 98.4 percent of our DNA…

Because the similarities between us are so compelling, there is

no ethical justification for the difference in legal status.”

A FAQ from the Guardian about the National Missile Defense plan, “son of Star Wars.” Learn more about this issue! Major problems with the plan: (1) it’s made to deal with a nonexistent threat, nuclear attacks by “rogue states”. It could legitimately be perceived, therefore, as a stalking horse for a more large-scale program directed against other nuclear powers.(2) It will utterly destabilize hard-won arms control measures that have kept the real danger of the strategic arms race at bay. (3) Technologically, it won’t work. (4) If funded, it would be a massive windfall for the ailing aerospace corporations which can’t afford it to be found unnecessary or unfeasible. (5) It looks like the Administration is pushing us towards implementation at least partially to position Gore better against his more hawkish opponent. (6) There’s little effective public opposition because most people have been lulled into complacency about the continuing dangers of the arms race by the “end of the Cold War”, most people think it’s a non-issue because they think we already have a Star Wars defense system (since the Reagan years), and most people don’t make foreign policy issues a factor in their voting decisions. [By the way, here’s a wonderful resource, the entire archive of FAQs, which the Guardian calls “The Issue Explained”, on a range of topics in the news deserving further explanation.]

Before leaving the issue, read why Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal disarmament tract The Fate of the Earth and, most recently, of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, calls today The Second Age of Nuclear Danger:

In short, the post-Cold War period has turned out to be less hospitable to nuclear arms control than the Cold War. Why has the end of

the great global conflict in whose name almost all nuclear weapons were built been followed by the near-collapse across the board of the

world’s efforts to control these weapons? Why has peace been worse for nuclear disarmament than cold war?

[Boston Review]

[Slate]: Timothy Noah notices something funny about Bayer. As part of the IG Farben German industrial conglomerate, the pharmaceutical giant was a key

player in the Final Solution (“it manufactured the Zyklon B used to

gas Jews in the death chambers; it designed ovens used to

incinerate the corpses; and it used as slave laborers those Jews

at Auschwitz who were still alive”) and has recently just barely, in a sense, acknowledged its role by conceding massive financial reparations to Holocaust survivors. Best known for Bayer aspirin, it has just decided that the next product for which it will create brand-name recognition is Bayer Advanced Home, a highly efficient poison to kill household pests. “Bayer, though dunderheaded enough to trumpet its valuable

brand name in a TV commercial that will remind people of this

history, was, sadly, just smart enough to deny Chatterbox’s

request to view the ad in question (and to instruct its ad firm to

do the same).”

Rethinking Tactics in War on Drugs. After 30 years of fervent support by the church-at-large for the war on drugs since

the Nixon administration declared war on

drugs in the late 1960s–a war pressed by each succeeding

administration–growing numbers of religious leaders are breaking

ranks.

Not only are they questioning the war’s effectiveness and its

burgeoning costs–they also charge that its execution violates

biblical imperatives of justice and mercy.

Rather than reducing the threat to society posed by illegal

narcotics trafficking, the war is making orphans of tens of thousands

of children by unnecessarily jailing their parents and

disproportionately targeting people of color, religious critics charge.

A new group, Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy, counts many of the U.S.’s most influential religious leaders among its founding members. They focus on disparities in policing drug offenses by race and class; the decreasing opportunities for prosecutorial or judicial discretion in sentencing in face of “get-tough” policy pressures; and the lack of rehabilitative efforts in the penal system. (Update: Human Rights Watch report cites disparity in race-based drug offense sentencing in the U.S. [New York Times]) “When it comes to addiction, the rich go to Betty Ford, the poor

go to county jail,” the Rev. Scott Richardson, of All Saints

Episcopal Church in Pasadena, said recently.

A Rand Corp. study in 1997 found that treatment reduces 15

times more serious crime than mandatory minimum sentences and

that residential treatment programs cost a little more than half of the

$30,000 annual cost of housing a prisoner, Richardson notes.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, “czar” of the White House Office of National Drug Policy, warns that if the public begins to think the war on drugs is unfair, it will lose crucial momentum and support. [LA Times]

In other WoD (War on Drugs) news, powerful U.S. anti-drug forces in Congress and the corporation supplying the raw goods are compelling Colombia to apply fusarium, a fungus that acts as an herbicide, to the coca crop in their country. Trouble is, it can destroy other crops and farm animals and may cause overwhelming infection to immune-compromised humans. Years of U.S.-backed aerial spraying of other herbicides has been at best useless against the coca and opium crops, and at worst harmful. “The New York Times reported in early May that US-funded

spraying of the herbicide glyphosate (marketed as Roundup by

Monsanto Company) may have exposed scores of Colombian

villagers to harmful toxins and damaged nondrug crops. But the

proposed Fusarium program, experts say, could unleash far

worse consequences.” [The Guardian]

David Brake just pointed me to his blog, with a worldview quite consonant with mine.

Stuffing Yer Holes: Feasting Black Hole Blows Bubbles.

“A monstrous black hole’s rude table manners include blowing huge bubbles of hot gas into space. At least,

that’s the gustatory practice followed by the supermassive black hole residing in the hub of the nearby

galaxy NGC 4438. These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the galaxy’s central region clearly show

one of the bubbles rising from a dark band of dust.” And: Black Holes Shed Light on Galaxy Formation. “Astronomers are concluding that monstrous black holes weren’t

simply born big but instead grew on a measured diet of gas and stars

controlled by their host galaxies in the early formative years of the

universe. These results, gleaned from a NASA Hubble Space Telescope

census of more than 30 galaxies, are painting a broad picture of a

galaxy’s evolution and its long and intimate relationship with its central

giant black hole. Though much more analysis remains, an initial look at

Hubble evidence favors the idea that titanic black holes did not precede

a galaxy’s birth but instead co-evolved with the galaxy by trapping a

surprisingly exact percentage of the mass of the central hub of stars

and gas in a galaxy.”

www.sticker.com

American ‘Culture,’ Cooked by the Melting Pot. In the strict (anthropological) sense of the word, culture no longer exists; we live in a post-cultural world, says Christopher Clausen, whose book Faded Mosaic is reviewed here by Jonathan Yardley. And the distinction is not merely a semantic one [Washington Post]:

“The truth is that “the connection with an ancestral culture is now so vestigial that whether to assert or deny it has become entirely a matter of choice.” The greatest influences on us are not ethnic or religious or racial (though this last, for African Americans, remains a powerful and unavoidable consideration) but “the expanding reach of a homogenizing federal government, universal access to the same products and television programs, interstate highways and a restlessly mobile population.” Today, Clausen argues, “what most ordinary people who call for multiculturalism want is something more like post-culturalism: no conflict based on cultural factors, none of the sharp edges that cause bleeding.” The idea of the melting pot may no longer be fashionable, but a melting pot is where we live.

Instead of a crazy quilt of conflicting cultures with specific rules, demands and expectations, we inhabit a mass society that claims to value individuals and that places “extreme emphasis on personal feelings and self-gratification” yet is in fact a society of “mass individualism, an individualism without much individuality.” We are “oriented to pleasure–the desires of the self, not its duties,” yet because we all worship at the same altars–most notably, or notoriously, mass entertainment and the cult of personality, or celebrity–the result is “a mass individualism that encourages people to assert themselves in nearly identical ways.”

New Statesman: Scott Lucas, a University of Birmingham cultural historian, asserts that George Orwell was not a socialist, despite usually being held up as having impeccable “English socialist” credentials. For one thing, he apparently “named names” in the British equivalent of the McCarthy witchhunt; for another, Lucas says, his values were not particularly socialist.

Praise, if you will, Orwell’s fighting spirit, praise his

generous anger, praise his free intelligence. Just

remember that, no matter how smelly the

orthodoxies, 19th-century liberalism and 20th-century

anti-communism did not, and still do not, constitute

socialism.

New Statesman: After a long preamble on Ted Hughes’ gatekeeping on Sylvia Plath’s posthumous legacy, Ian Hamilton decries the stranglehold T.S.Eliot’s widow has on his reputation.

So, one day, one day. In the meantime, let us hope

that, by the time an Eliot biography gets nodded

through, he won’t be consigned to the popular

histories as an anti-Semite who wrote amusingly

about pussy cats and had his first wife locked away

for keeps in an asylum – a first wife who may have

written certain of his best-known lines. Eliot’s

posterity, one feels, will always need an extra

measure of protection from the philistines, and

maybe, in his case, disclosure will serve his

reputation more effectively than reticence.

A Dangerous Masquerade

“Anyone watching the hostage

crisis in Luxembourg last week

would applaud the release of nursery

school children and their caregivers

after a crazed gunman was shot by

local police. But by using a camera crew as camouflage for

their gun and by shooting the suspect who thought he was

getting ready to give a television interview, the Luxembourg

police have now made it more dangerous for other

journalists to do their jobs and thus harder for them to get

news of critical importance.” [New York Times]

The Guardian: Iranian link to bomb on Pan Am 103. CNS News last night reported that an Iranian defector (who reportedly controlled his country’s terrorist operations for a decade and is being debriefed by the CIA) has proof that Iran planned and financed the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Blair gets tough with doctors, comes back from his paternity leave ready to move British medicine away from professional self-regulation and the “consultant is king” culture of the National Health Service.

GoodBye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries, “an opinionated bimonthly magazine which chronicles the dead – famous, infamous and non-famous.”

A science writer I like very much, Matt Ridley, summarizes the evidence for a controversial theory that AIDS was caused when thousands of Africans were given a live polio vaccine grown on chimpanzee kidney tissue in the ’50’s. “(A) particular type of live polio vaccine called Chat may have been grown in the 1950s in cells

derived from chimpanzee kidneys. Chimpanzees are the probable animal source of the AIDS virus; live

vaccines could have been contaminated if an infected animal was used. Chat was tested on more than 1 million Africans in 1957-60, in the very areas where AIDS subsequently became epidemic for the first time.

Two other, less serious forms of AIDS developed in parts of west Africa at about the same time, each epidemic closely associated with an

area in which similar live polio vaccines may have been tested.

Stated thus, the theory seems purely circumstantial. It boils down to seven assertions, all of which must be tested to destruction….”

‘The descent into scumdom is a slippery slope, as

(Harry) Stein notes in his charming new memoir, How I

Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing

Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)…His

fellow converts from the pre-fab liberalism of their

youth will know what he means. One day you get

an inkling that maybe affirmative action isn’t very

fair; the next thing you know, you’re joining the

NRA, even though you hate guns…Like the good conservative he now is, he

blames it all on a woman…’

Philospoher Ian Hacking is tired of “the social construction of…”

Joey Skaggs is at it again: cemetery theme parks. [Salon]

New Scientist reviewer says frothy book deserves cult status.

The Punch Lines: ‘Although the literati like to think they’re

superior to the millions of simple folk who tune

into Jerry Springer and Who Wants to Be a

Millionaire, their savage attacks on each other

are often as ugly, tacky, and phony as any

World Wrestling Federation bout. Still, a quick

breeze through last month’s Manhattan

publications proves that literary fuck-you fests

are alive and kicking, along with our

fascination for them.’ [The Voice Literary Supplement]

Salon: If code is free, why not me?

“Some open-source geeks are as open-minded about sex

as they are about hacking,” says reporter Annalee Newitz from a rapturous position “at the feet of three charming naked men…” in a state of partial undress.

The New York Times calls it a Rebel Outpost on the Fringes of Cyberspace. It’s going to be interesting to see how this shakes out. A group of libertarians has struck a financial deal with Roy Bates (a British businessman and former army major who has maintained that the abandoned antiaircraft bunker in international waters six miles off the coast of England of which he took possession in 1968 is the independent Principality of Sealand, and that he and his wife are its regents) to allow them to establish a “data haven” there for “a diverse

clientele that may wish to operate beyond the reach of large

nations for reasons of privacy or financial necessity. They

expect their customers to include people who wish to keep

their e-mail safe from government subpoenas as well as

other businesses seeking to avoid regulation, like

international electronic commerce, banking and gambling.” In other Sealand news, purported representatives of the principality “tried to

acquire arms worth at least $50 million from Russia, Spanish

authorities said Friday.” The investigation also revealed that Bates has commissioned a tailor to design battle uniforms for Sealand, “reserving one with the rank of Colonel for himself”, and that a vigorous trade in driver’s licenses, university degrees and passports from Sealand goes on. When investigated, those pursuing these activities have claimed diplomatic immunity for their actions.

How U.S. Left Sierra Leone Tangled in a Curious Web. 1998: Clinton goes to Africa, promising an African Renaissance and greater U.S. involvement in the continent. 1999: U.S. brokers peace accord empowering rebels. 2000: U.S. invisible in the faltering peacekeeping effort. “When the Rev. Jesse Jackson, President Clinton’s special

envoy for democracy in Africa, came to West Africa to help

defuse the crisis, he was forced to cancel a stop in Sierra

Leone because he was not welcome.

Mr. Jackson was given the role of special envoy to Africa

after helping to keep the black vote solidly behind Mr.

Clinton in 1996. He is a vocal proponent of intervening in

Africa’s conflicts.

In May last year, Mr. Jackson criticized the administration for

protecting Kosovo Albanians but leaving Africans to defend

themselves so that Sierra Leone’s war was “fought in the

dark” for seven years.” [New York Times]

Matan Has Two Mommies, and Israel Is Talking. ‘A classic Israeli idiom, which means to proclaim that there’s

no one like mom, says, “There is only one mother.” And the

government felt that the catch phrase should be taken

literally: it was biologically impossible, the government

insisted, for anyone to have more than one.’ [New York Times]

Nymphet at the Net: skin-deep still counts. [New York Times]

Living in the Shadow of Chernobyl’s Reactors. A current status report from the site of the 1986 disaster. There’s continuing thyroid cancer downwind; the concrete “sarcophagus” is on shifting ground, admitting rainwater to corrode pipes and girders and increase the risk of collapse; President Kuchma has promised to close the remaining operating reactor at Chernobyl but international wrangling about the costs of decommissioning it and replacing its electricity generating capacity has stalled implementation; the “forbidden zone” turns into a post-industrial resurgent wilderness tempting poachers in search of burgeoning deer populations; and — this is just nuts — employees of the plant wearing surgical masks stir up the radioactive soil with hoes to till the earth to plant flowers. Someone with post-apocalyptic credentials — Lewis Shiner, Jack Womack or Samuel Delaney come to mind off the top of my head — should write a novel set there.

Hate Sites Bad Recruiting Tools. Several hate-watchers say that, contrary to public concerns, the aggressive and expanding web-presence of right-wing hate groups has not paid off in terms of recruitment. Moreover, increased public scrutiny may be harmful to them. [Wired]

“This isn’t just a

decent film or a good film. If everything comes together right, this could stand as a beloved film, something that not only honors the memory of Dr. Seuss, but actually adds to the luster of his name.” [via Robot Wisdom]