Reintroducing Ursus arctos horribilis: parts of the West are bracing for a second coming as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to return endangered grizzlies to the Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana. This is becoming the latest touchstone in that particular brand of political polarization endemic to the American West, characterized as a struggle over “who owns the land”. The Atlantic

Background piece on Spain’s longstanding Basque conflict and dimming hopes for a resolution after a long hot summer of conflict between ETA and Spanish authorities. Chicago Tribune

“Any time now, the Internet will start demanding information…or else. Shouldn’t you be afraid?” New Scientist

Paddling with Supertankers: latest dispatch from two Britons travelling from London to Sydney via bicycle and sea kayak. Now crossing to Sumatra. Adventure-mag.com

Russia’s interesting strategy for cash infusion. AP

2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been enjoined by the court from posting links to places where you can get DeCSS. But they say: “Looking for a copy of DeCSS?

The easiest way is to go to Disney’s search engine and search

for DeCSS. They will then LINK you to thousands of sites,

something we’re no longer allowed to do. It’s possible we may

not even be allowed to tell you this! You can still access our old

list of mirror sites sans the links.”

Berlin outlaws neo-Nazi rock music company. “The sinister Blood and Honour group, Europe’s largest distributor of neo-Nazi rock music, was outlawed by the German

Government yesterday in its latest attack on underground far-right culture.” The Times of London

Satellite Catholics enter world of Fantasy. “A mistake at a satellite television company in Luxembourg led to two hours of the soundtrack from The Fantasy Channel,

broadcaster of pornographic films, being broadcast over pictures from a Vatican celebration of the year 2000.

In an equally confusing switch, viewers of The Fantasy Channel, expecting to hear Stacey doing her best, were treated to the

sounds coming from The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.” The Times of London

‘Ego-Surfing’ derides valid, prudent activity. In defense of searching the web for your own online presence. Online Journalism Review And egosurf.com, which facilitates the process.

The Sorrow, the Pity, and the Angry Professor: The essay considers a “Chomskyite leftist” who rails against what he considers the devil’s pact between the U.S. government and a “cadre of Jewish spokespeople” to exploit the public’s lurid fascination with the Holocaust for personal and political advantage, whether it is the enormous fees garnered by reparations lawyers or the State Dept’s justification of a double standard in foreign policy.

Flap over gay male blood donation. The FDA defeated a proposal to loosen the ban on blood donation by gay men by only one vote. An opinion piece by the editor of the reactionary Washington Times shrilly spins the kneejerk reaction that even considering the proposal was playing election year politics, pandering to the self-esteem of the gay constituency at the expense of the safety of the nation’s blood supply. What do others think?

Feed Daily: More about the subliminal campaigning flap.”The gag’s only good ’til the

next PR blunder in the Bush campaign sweeps

it aside, but, oddly enough, it touches upon

issues that have gotten a lot of play recently

among cognitive scientists. In fact, W’s

apparent inability to pronounce “subliminal” —

he garbled the word four times during a news

conference this week, adding an “able” at the

end — hasn’t prevented the candidate from

straying into murky waters in regards to the

science behind subliminal advertising.”

One Man’s Rage Against Bad Thinking. Recently-noticed late Australian philosopher of science David Stove said we lost faith in science because of our revulsion at the cocky certainty of 19th century Victorian scientific triumphalism, and because we have never been able to metabolize the quantum mechanical impeachment of Newtonian physics. Rationalist Stove intended to heal the plague of scientific relativism that has ensued. He was particularly concerned with what he considered the deplorable inconsistencies of modern evolutionary science and what he called the “slander on our race” of assuming that natural selection explains anything about the human race.

According to Stove, theories of helplessness gain a

hearing because the “human race is mad.” But Stove

is no defender of an intellectual elite. He exhibits his

greatest antipathy toward the allegedly learned few.

In a volume called The Plato Cult (three pieces

from which are included among Roger Kimball’s

selections), Stove cites a host of philosophers, from

Plato to Foucault, to illustrate the “spectacle of

nightmare irrationality” that is characteristic of our

intellectual heritage. The “cult of Plato,” which was

an integral part of the Renaissance revival,

encapsulates the tendency to treat great minds with

religious reverence. What we need is a “nosology”

of intellectual error, a classification of the diseases

that have afflicted the human mind at least since

Plato.

Stove does not hope to uncover the single root of all

these diseases, which are too numerous and varied

even to list exhaustively. And he has no hope for the

ultimate victory of reason: Irrationality will always

win out, because there are simply too many ways to

go wrong.

The Weekly Standard

“There’s (an) aspect of the Gore

candidacy that has gotten me thinking. If elected, the Vice President will be the first

Harvard graduate since J.F.K. to be sworn in as Chief Magistrate, a circumstance

that gives rise to reflections on Harvard then versus Harvard now …The spectacle of the national brow being lowered and lowered, to the point of

near-Neanderthalism, thanks to the ministrations and calculations of three decades’

worth of graduates of its elitest educational institution is a sorry sight indeed.” New York Observer

Monty Python’s Terry Jones: “Gladiatorial shows were not an aberration.

Gladiators were right at the centre of Roman

civilisation. Brutal murders, put on in public arenas

at public expense, were not seen as decadent – on

the contrary, they were staged as an antidote to decadence.

The Romans believed that it was beneficial to

watch people being killed. Not just good

entertainment, but morally valuable. It made

people into better Romans.” The Times of London