Leaked Report Says Chernobyl Replacements a Hazard: Soviet-designed nuclear power reactors
at Khmelnytsky and Rivne, which are already 80 percent
complete and sit on seismic fault zones, are “highly hazardous” according to a Vienna University report for the Austrian government. Greenpeace leaked the report to the media in the week preceding the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s pending decision about funding the Ukraine’s completion of the new facilities. The Ukraine says it will not take the Chernobyl plant offline unless it gets this funding for replacement energy generating needs; Greenpeace maintains Chernobyl should be replaced by conventional, nonnuclear power generation sources.

Possible Vaccine To Fight Ebola succesfully protects laboratory monkeys, “raising doctors’ hopes of developing a means of inoculating people against the
terrifying disease.”

Search for Another Earth Quietly Underway. “After a five-year search that has turned up more than 40 giant, inhospitable planets around
other stars, the hunt is quietly underway to discover another place like home. And while no
scientist can say for sure that any such planet exists, optimism is high that another Earth will
be found within the decade, possibly much sooner.”

FBI Probed Groucho for Marxist Ties. For those of you old enough to remember, shades of the Firesign Theater.

Have you lost your sense of humor? This man knows where to find it. ABC

“Scientists should not be so scared of racism that they ignore facts”: “‘This restraint has become a massive and
unjustifiable taboo today that is both foolish and
destructive…There is an unspoken rule that says that race and science make a
deadly combination, and that the effect of “scientific racism” is always
malevolent. In his comprehensive, must-read book, The Meaning of
Race, Kenan Malik provides a detailed description of how social
Darwinism, eugenics, positivism, slavery and colonialism all used real
and pseudo-scientific theory to justify white superiority and, at times,
class superiority, too.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in the Independent.

All Creatures Great and Smart. ” Research reveals animals’ brains to
be bioengineering marvels

Nearly every important recent brain
discovery comes from the study of simpler
nervous systems in animals. But it seems
those animal brain circuits aren’t so simple
after all.

Roaches, for example, listen with their
knees.

Snakes can remember what they see.

And homing pigeons, with a brain the size
of a pecan, can sniff their way home with
such efficiency that scientists hope to copy
it in futuristic route- finding devices.

These creatures were among dozens of
species represented at the recent annual
meeting of the Society for Neuroscience,
an international research showcase that
reflected growing appreciation of the
bioengineering marvels in nature.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tillmans wins Turner Prize One of the most important modern art awards
in Britain — the Turner Prize — has been won
by the German photographer, Wolfgang
Tillmans.

It’s the first time a photographer has won the
prestigious award, which is worth
thirty-thousand dollars and honours the best
young artist working in Britain.

Tillmans, whose work includes naked bodies
and household rubbish, said he wanted to shift
the perspective about what was beautiful and
acceptable in society.

However, it’s possible that we’ve been there, done that already:

Outside the ceremony, demonstrators dressed
in clown and carnival costume protested that
the prize no longer represented genuine art.
Last year’s winner showed an un-made bed,
while the previous winner used elephant dung
on a painting of the Christian saint, the Virgin
Mary. BBC

Happy Birthday, Emmett Grogan, Digger and author.

Art and Revolution. “We emphasize politics and direct action in our work. We see activism as crucial
to meaningful arts expression. We believe that our politics suffer without creative
vision in the same way that our art suffers without political or social relevance.”

You can find out who links to any website by entering the AltaVista search phrase “link:http://%5BURL%5D”. Doing this for “link:http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html”, one of the ways to get to Follow Me Here…, came up with wood s lot, a Canadian blog with exceedingly small print and lots of interesting blinks; there’s a remarkable overlap with items I point to in FMH…

Tonga becomes the latest nation to sell its inhabitants’ genome. Wired

Sex speech by Nobel laureate shocks audience: ‘A Nobel laureate’s
provocative speech on sunshine and sex — complete
with slides of bikini-clad women — left some at the
University of California, Berkeley, aghast.

James Watson, who co-discovered DNA, dumbfounded
many at a guest lecture when he advanced his theory
about a link between skin color and sex drive.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he
said, according to people who were
there last month. “You’ve never heard
of an English lover. Only an English
patient.”

“… People were
laughing at the beginning of Watson’s lecture. But the
laughter turned nervous as he developed his theme. There was a lot of looking at the person next to you
and saying, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying this’ ” …’ Salon

I’ve removed the link I published last night to the Modestino Bee‘s report of further charges in a depraved child torture case in Wonder Valley, CA; the link has expired and clicking on it directed people to today’s top story in that paper instead. But here is the Oct. 18 News Release from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept. of the original findings. And the Oct. 17 Desert Sun coverage, for those of you hungry to follow this disturbing story further.

‘X-Men’ Top ‘Warped Toys’ List. ‘The Rev. Christopher Rose takes Christmas very seriously —
especially when it comes to kids.

For 14 years now, the minister in Hartford has released his
“warped toys” list — just as parents are heading out to stores for
Christmas shopping. ‘

This year, toys modeled on the movie “X-Men” and on the World
Wrestling Federation head his list.

Study: Teenage Ecstasy Use Up. The interesting thing about this study report is that teens report marijuana use is down; more are “turned off” than “turned on” by cannabis, fearing its use will make them behave foolishly. General Barry McCaffrey is taking the credit for this turnaround. Boston Channel

“Orpheus Emerged”, Jack Kerouac’s first book, has just been released, only as an e-book. A link here takes you to an MP3 audio clip of an excerpt.

Good Riddance Dept.: Chernobyl Reactor Shut Down, Possibly Forever. “Power
line failures forced the shutdown of the
Chernobyl nuclear power station on
Monday, raising doubts over whether
engineers would restart it less than three weeks before its final
closure. Reuters

Gulf War Syndrome Symptoms Linked to Brain Damage. New research shows cell loss (of an extent comparable to that seen in degenerative neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, ALS [Lou Gehrig’s Disease] and dementia) in three regions of the brain of Gulf War Syndrome sufferers. The extent of damage at each site correlates with the degree of specific symptom complaints or impaired functions. Involved areas include the basal ganglia in each hemisphere and various brain stem regions. I’ve discussed several pieces of evidence that there really is a Gulf War Syndrome (actually, syndromes in plural, in all likelihood) and that symptoms relate to brain dysfunction due to various toxic exposures during the war. Here’s a page of Atomz search results to my earlier references.

Court To Hear Death Penalty Appeal in the case I discussed below of the Texas man with mental incapacities placing him in the range of a seven-year-old. The Court has also agreed to decide if medical necessity for marijuana use justifies violating federal laws making its distribution illegal. The Clinton Administration has challenged a California law which has allowed a group to provide the drug to seriously ill patients for pain relief.

Bumper sticker idea: He’s Not My President!

Annals of the Erosion of Privacy (cont’d.): Software to Track E-Mail Raises Privacy Concerns. David Brake‘s blog pointed me to this New York Times piece covering the little-known fact that, if your email client can read HTML mail, senders can tell when and if you read their messages. You can route your outgoing messages through Postel Services in Korea to be alerted when someone reads your mail.

Alzheimer’s: A disease of the young? “Figures suggest that more and more young
people are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
disease…It’s a terrifying illness
even for those in their
80s – but the tragedy
can be even more
poignant for those in
their 50s, 40s, and 30s.” BBC

BBC News has an all-you-need-to-know primer on Alzeimer’s Disease here. And –backing up a moment — here‘s a good overview of memory and its dysfunction in general, from the Canadian Broadcasting Co.

Defiant Milosevic Re-elected As Leader of Socialist Party. “An official at the U.N. war crimes
tribunal Sunday expressed outrage that
Slobodan Milosevic could
flaunt himself in the public and political arena while under an
international arrest warrant. Sunday he won re-election as leader
of Serbia’s Socialist party and has appeared on state television
twice in the week leading up to the party congress.” Reuters

U.N. Climate Conference Ends, No Agreement Reached. “World economic powers hurled blame at each other
for the two-week Hague summit’s ending without a plan to
coordinate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.” The third world, which is considered at much higher risk from increased temperatures, faults the industrialized nations for squabbling over cost. The US, in particular, is criticized for thinking it can buy its way out of trouble, and, because it stands to face the greatest costs under the proposed new treaty, for a move, generally considered sleazy, to attempt to obtain credit for the CO2-removing photosynthetic effects of its forests and grasslands. (The New York Times says the US “can’t see the forest for the trees.”) The stalemate stacked up as the US, Australia, Canada and Japan against the EU. One more try is scheduled for May, 2001.

A Hangout That Caters to a Crowd From Space New York Times

Walter Dembski‘s book The Design Inference, this critic writes, is the spearhead of a new creationist attack on science, and remarkably ignorant of more than two hundred years’ of critical rejection of the argument from design dating from David Hume. BioScience

The new issue of Lingua Franca has several rewarding articles. First is a portrait of E. Fuller Torrey, an inspiring psychiatrist who has long argued that psychiatry should either just treat the most severe of brain disorders or give up its pretensions to being part of medical science. His mix of common sense and controversy has mostly been applied to schizophrenia (patients with which form the core of my professional activities as well); his 1983 book Surviving Schizophrenia is unexcelled as a guide for sufferers and their families. (In the same year, Torrey was demoted from his post at St. Elizabeth’s, the federal maximum-security psychiatric institution in Washington, DC, for publishing his findings that the hospital had colluded with Ezra Pound by declaring him insane to protect him from prosecution for treason during WWII.)

One thread of Torrey’s attention has been to the possibility that viral infection can cause schizophrenia. There has been a long, scientifically inconclusive, love affair with this theory in psychiatry, part of the agonizing search to explain such a mysterious, incurable and devastating condition. [My take on this is that the problem with explanations of schizophrenia is that it is probably a heterogeneous, “wastebasket” diagnosis for a number of different neurobiological conditions. For this reason, the effect size of any etiological theory that is researched is likely to be “washed out” by noise.]

Some of the provocative evidence includes data on the worldwide distribution of the disease; a seasonal pattern to schizophrenic births; and the discredit to the usual hereditary explanations done by the disease’s persistence in the face of its obvious adverse impact on reproductive fitness. Torrey has been fascinated by the possibility that toxoplasmosis, transmitted from housecats, could be an important key to this conundrum. Several studies under his aegis have shown that cat ownership (and, in the most recent study, specific serological evidence of toxoplasmosis exposure) is significantly more common among the parents of children who become schizophrenic, and it can be argued that there was an increase in the frequency of the illness at around the same time in the late 19th C. when cat ownership became popular.

“I’ve given talks on the cat stuff
and people’s response is almost universal: ‘I’m not surprised—I’ve
known my cat is schizophrenic for years!'” He chuckles. “One talk I
gave at a department of psychiatry, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘I
don’t want you to repeat this, but the former chairman of our
department of psychiatry was convinced that his cat was hallucinating,
so he gave him liquid Thorazine and it really seemed to help.'” Torrey
looks at me and smiles. “People find cats strange, so they don’t find
this idea so odd.”

Then there’s an interesting portrait of Richard Rorty, controversial, ambitious and erudite philosopher who arguably has best captured the era’s challenge to the concepts of truth and objectivity and who some describe as the closest thing we’ve got on this side of the Atlantic to a public, postmodern French intellectual. His work is a particular source of anxiety to conservative critics who feel it undermines the foundations of the public’s moral interity.

Like his idol John Dewey, whom he credits with breaking
through “the crust of philosophical convention,” he has pursued
twin careers as disciplinary bad boy and high-minded public
philosopher. He has set out to deflate the aspirations of his
profession—he rejects the idea of truth as an accurate reflection of
the world—while placing his own unorthodox philosophical views at
the center of an ambitious vision of social and historical hope. In
recent writings especially, he champions an unlikely brand of
“postmodern bourgeois liberalism” that has largely infuriated
postmodernists and liberals alike.

Finally, Jim Holt considers the Multiple Universes Hypothesis.

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’

Life, death and Everquest: “A virtual suicide in the popular online multiplayer game is making some
fans queasy about their favorite addiction.” Salon

Auto body and soul “He’ll fix your shocks, he’ll change your oil, and he’ll align your
wheels, but what Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad really wants to do is restore
your spirit.” Giving new meaning to full-service auto repair. Boston Phoenix

Death traps: In the aftermath of the Kitzsteinhorn ski train disaster, why are we still building tunnels with no escape routes, a New Scientist
editorial asks.

Scientist Raises New Mobile Phone Fears Children who use mobile phones risk suffering memory loss, sleeping
disorders and headaches, according to research published in the medical
journal The Lancet.

Neo-fascism watch: “Far-right demonstrators marched through central
Berlin on Saturday, openly challenging efforts by German
leaders to fight neo-Nazism and mobilizing a massive police
operation in the capital.” USA Today

How these bald, blue men make music CNN

Coney Island of the Mind. We’re still obsessed with the spectacles that defined Coney Island seventy years ago.

There
is now serious talk of redeveloping Coney — and
perhaps the possibility of its renaissance is one
reason we are currently interested in revisiting the
enormous spectacles of those bygone days.

But maybe our interest has something instead to do
with the way this kind of theme park entertainment
has developed over the past half century, with the
advent of parks like Disney World and Universal
Studios, and with new, massively themed attractions
opening in Las Vegas every year. Today, our theme
parks give us a happy world. Human beings (if you
don’t count those dressed up as Cinderella and
Mickey Mouse) are not on exhibit — the creatures on
our rides are animatronic, and the performers are
possessed of skills like juggling or tap dancing. Our
notion of spectacle has changed — not just from the
“real” sightseeing of the urban flaneur to the
“hyperreal” entertainments discussed by critics like
Umberto Eco and Ada Louise Huxtable, but also in
the kind of fake worlds our amusement parks
present. Transgressive attractions — from the freak
show to the tunnel of love (designed for stolen
kisses) — have been replaced by wholesome
“entertainment for the whole family,” at least in the
world of immersive, American attractions like theme
parks and Vegas. Feed

Top 10 best-mannered cities CNN

The Case for a Revote. “The Washington Monthly has dug up an article addressing the
invalidation of state elections, written in the New York University
Law Review in 1974. It makes the case for a revote if a close
election were violated by an ‘illegal act’ – which, the monthly
suggests, that ballot paper might be construed to be. Its author:
Judge Kenneth W. Starr.”

The Outlook for U.S. Central Europe Policy under Dubya’s Presidency is very worrisome to Central European commentators. ” Many
of his advisors are from the old Bush camp, and include
those involved in the “Chicken Kiev” fiasco in which Bush
championed the unity of the USSR; those partly responsible
for the shamefully slow reaction to the Lithuanian campaign
for freedom (which caused a well-documented near-fistfight in
the Oval Office between cabinet officials); and those who told
Bush to tell the world he ended the Cold War.

Ex-Secretary of State James Baker is still around. This is
the man who personified the shameful Baltic policies of the
Bush presidency, and he is, in fact, now the man delegated
by the new Bush camp to oversee the Florida recount.
Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft remained
an advisor of Bush on foreign affairs and has publicly
expressed opinions against NATO enlargement.

However, most worrisome is the possible Bush foreign policy
team. First of all, a likely candidate for secretary of state is
Colin Powell, the military leader from the Gulf War era.
Powell is well respected as a soldier and is liked by both
sides of the political divide, but his credentials are far more
military than diplomatic — two things, many argue, that do not
mix. Powell has been critical of various aspects of Clinton’s
policy in Europe, questioning, for example, the recognition of
the independence of some countries as, in Powell’s view, it
is often only a prelude to conflict.

Even more harrying is the possible appointment of Bush’s
main foreign policy advisor, Condoleezza Rice, as national
security advisor (and it is worthwhile noting that the post of
national security advisor does not require Senate
confirmation, unlike the secretary of state position). Rice
was a major advisor to Bush Senior on Soviet affairs, and
that policy was a dark mark in the 1990s for Washington.
Rice has gone on to make other comments that have turned
her into one of the biggest enemies of the Baltic
communities in the US, as well as others.” And given Dubya’s limited leadership capacities, the likes of Baker, Rice and Powell will be running U.S. foreign policy in earnest. Central Europe Review</small

What’s your spiritual type? Beliefnet

How to be a Whistleblower and Keep Your Job: The RIP Act in the UK gives authorities the right to “monitor any information moving about within the UK”, and gives employers extensive rights to keep tabs on their employees’ email and telephone calls. How to blow the whistle and still remain anonymous under those circumstances? The Register

Did you buy anything on National Buy-Nothing Day yesterday? Goin’ shopping today?

Hubble Telescope: Has NASA Learned Its Lessons? We learned how to maintain, upgrade and enhance the telescope over the years, increasing its productivity and decreasing the cost of Hubble science. But, from that point of view, some find disheartening recent NASA decisions to scuttle the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer.

Emerging Disease News: Researchers report West Nile Virus Will Spread Throughout U.S.. Last year New York, this year viral activity was detected in birds all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Reuters

Album of the Year? Spin Mag’s Choice Isn’t Human ‘Fittingly for an industry currently dominated by the controversy over
downloadable music technology, Spin magazine’s album of the year is “your hard drive.” ‘

On the fifth anniversary of the discovery of a Mystery Death in the Arizona Wilderness, authorities renew pleas for help identifying the victim. ‘Five years ago, a woman’s skeleton was found on a steep, rocky mountainside in a pocket of
wilderness so remote that only a dozen hikers visit it each year. The woman had been nine
months pregnant, ready to give birth. Authorities say she was certainly in no shape to handle
the exertion of what would have been a strenuous hike for even an athletic person.

… The remains were several hundred yards from the nearest trail, which itself is only
accessible by four-wheel vehicle. The terrain is rugged, made up of red rock and juniper
trees. A rescue team had to fly in by helicopter

…. “We suspect that she went hiking with her boyfriend or husband, probably the father of the
child, and he ducked out on her and left her there,” Diffendaffer said. “She didn’t have any
idea how to get out on her own and ended up getting lost, probably dying of exposure.” ‘

‘I’m No Vampire,’ Official Says ‘Taking part in a live Internet chat Tuesday, Treasury Minister Vincenzo Visco responded to an
online participant who said he looked like the legendary blood-sucking Count Dracula.

The comparison may have been prompted by Visco’s sunken eyes and teeth-baring grimace,
but the minister rebuffed it.

“There’s not that much in common,” he wrote. “Dracula was a count, I am a modest
bourgeois. He lived in a castle, I live in an apartment.

“The only thing in common may be the eyes, but Dracula’s were a sign of the times, mine
are the result of 12 to 14 hours work a day,” he quipped.’

Study Examines Wolves, Livestock. A case study shows that fears about livestock kills when wolves are reintroduced to range are overblown. The wolves spend their time away from habitation and their main food is deer, in a 61,000-acre area of northwestern Minnesota.

David Duke, still in Russia, learns of raid at his home. The FBI is investigating whether he gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars solicited from supporters of his cause. He’s in Russia promoting his new book The Ultimate Supremacism, which argues that Russia and the former Soviet bloc can save the white race from the Jews and the Mafia. The book is being published in Russian (because he can’t find a publisher closer to home?) CNN

Is Queen Elizabeth Losing It? Awhile ago, I blinked the report that she had been entertaining guests doing duets with a singing bass. Now, a day after criticism in the British press for wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant during a shoot, “The Killer Queen” (as dubbed by the Sunday Mirror) delivered a royal “up yours” by appearing in church wearing a pheasant feather in her hat. “The queen would never enter into a public
debate about whether she should be involved in
country sports, but by displaying the feathers
she has made her feelings plain without saying
anything,” a royal aide said. ABC [via Rebecca’s Pocket]

The Drunken Irish Bastard is alive and…well? Dallas Observer [via Robot Wisdom]

‘Bubble Tea’ Makes Its Way Stateside. “A popular import from Taiwan, bubble tea is a
mix of tea, milk, sugar and giant black tapioca
balls served cold, usually in a clear cup. An
added delight are gummy balls the size of small
marbles sucked up, with a little effort, through
an extra-wide straw….Boba can be a hit or miss with American tastebuds…” I think it’ll be a miss with me, but at least you heard it here first.

Mob Rule Wins for Dubya. “Texas Gov. George W. Bush appears to have sealed his claim to the
White House through a premeditated mob action that influenced the Dade
County decision to halt a crucial recount.

Egged on by Republican phone banks and heated rhetoric over Cuban-American
radio, a pro-Bush mob of about 150 people descended on the Dade County
canvassing board Wednesday as it was preparing to evaluate 10,750 disputed
ballots.” consortiumnews.com Phil Agre, in Red Rock Eaters’ Digest, agrees.

The Reason Al Gore Should Concede Time

Bach as Bach Never Intended. Or Did He? The last “Bach year”, the 300th anniversary of his birth, found us in the midst of austere early music realism. Now, at the 250th anniversary of his death, seemingly irreverent transcription is in sway. And the Wu Tang Clan’s reinterpretation of hip hop tradition continues to evolve as well. New York Times

Publishing Declares Open Season on Famous Figures. Joe
DiMaggio; Susan Sontag; Saul Bellow;
Richard M. Nixon; Diana, Princess of
Wales; and Barbara Marx Sinatra,
Frank Sinatra’s widow are among the recent public figures with bullseyes painted on their rumps. New York Times

Burning the Village in Order to Save It. The real crisis for the American electoral process is not the closeness of the election, not the delay in ascertaining the legitimate winner, not the court wrangling over recount deadlines or methods, but the Republican poisoning of the well.

In the last few days the Bush partisans have resorted to an extreme tactic:
forcefully asserting that the Gore camp is trying to “steal” the election. The
charge was replayed all over the media this weekend, and especially on the
more sensational and hyperventalating cable news networks that must stoke
the fires continuously (if only because they burn twenty-four hours a day).
This amounts to the Bush camp jumping ahead of the process and sowing
land mines, and thus ensures that whatever the outcome, voters around the
nation will never be able to have confidence in the process that yielded the
final result.

No matter who prevails in the closest presidential election in American
history, this last tactic may be the one we all remember. It elicits a memory
from the Vietnam era: “We had to burn the village in order to save it.” Tompaine.com

Joe Conason echoes the sentiments: Poisonous Rhetoric Shows Bush is Dividing the Nation. The New York Observer

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Italian research shows married men who have an affair make more attentive husbands
and fathers because their guilt drives them to devote more time to
their homes. Only in a world where cowardice, guilt and deception motivate the finer things in life… The Times of London

Happy Thanksgiving! Why Your Brain(s) Love Thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving may well be the year’s biggest bonanza for your brain — all of them. This
famous feast doesn’t just satisfy the survival instinct of your rudimentary reptilian
brainstem. The gathering of family and friends also serves up the emotional interaction
craved by your mammalian limbic brain. Brain.com

The Last Undecided Senate Race is finally certified, in an event that may prove more important to the political arc of the next few years than the outcome of the contested Presidential vote. Upstart Democrat Maria Cantwell is declared the victor over three-term Republican incumbent Slade Gorton in Washington state, and the Senate is 50-50. (However, if the Democrats win the White House and Joe Lieberman resigns his Connecticut seat, the Republican governor will appoint a Republican in his place.) New York Times

Transcript of the 1967 SF Oracle Houseboat Summit: “This is Alan Watts speaking, and I’m this evening, on my ferry boat, the host to a fascinating party sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle,
which is our new underground paper, far-outer than any far-out that has yet been seen. And we have here, members of the staff of the
Oracle. We have Allen Ginsberg, poet, and rabbinic saddhu. We have Timothy Leary, about whom nothing needs to be said. (laughs) And
Gary Snyder, also poet, Zen monk, and old friend of many years.” Ah, those were the days…Missing only Ram Dass… [via boing boing]

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf or wall

riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,

These poems, people,

lost ponies with

Dragging saddles —

and rocky sure-foot trails.

The worlds like an endless

four-dimensional

Game of Go.

ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word

a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

with torment of fire and weight

Crystal and sediment linked hot

all change, in thoughts,

As well as things.

— Gary Snyder

[via Obscure Store]: Woman left for dead by rescuers, calls 911 a second time for help after a suicide attempt. [As a psychiatrist at the receiving end of ambulance transports of suicide attempters, I can tell you that the EMTs don’t always have the highest opinion of this segment of their clientele.]

Faithless Elector Watch: NPR commentator Daniel Schorr joins the ranks of those asking Republican electors to honor the will of the majority. In fact, Citizens for True Democracy and the Coalition Coalition have posted contact information for electors, who are feeling a little besieged as a result.

Mirror-Image Elián Miami Herald

Click Here to Buy Nothing Wired

I inevitably find that the New York Times Magazine is feast or famine — there’s either nothing of interest at all on a given Sunday, or almost everything in the magazine is worth reading. [I think, but I’m not sure, there’s almost a strict alternation of the two types.] This Sunday was a bountiful one: an article about Elaine Scarry, a professor of English literature at Harvard who has devoted her analytical skills most recently to the possibility that electromagnetic interference (EMI) caused three recent high-profile airplane crashes; a grueling description of the proverbial clash of irresistible force and immovable object in the guise of a gruesome murder in a Kentucky hill town; and a portrait of Dr. Martin Kafka, a McLean Hospital psychiatrist who has, serendipitously it seems, made a career of treating sexual addictions.

Rising suicides cut a swath through Amazon’s children. “The largest tribe of Amazonian Indians, the 27,000-strong
Guarani, are being devastated by a wave of suicides among their
children, triggered by their coming into contact with the
modern world.” Telegraph

An Ally in Asia. Since the end of the war, Vietnam has been “one of China’s
major headaches. There have been border skirmishes and
battles for influence in Cambodia, and the two have settled into
a state of not-very-neighborly mutual disgruntlement.” There are hints that, despite the recent granting of more favorable trade terms, Chinese military doctrine increasingly views the U.S. as an adversary to its Asian goals, including “reunification” with Taiwan. We may need Vietnam as a more important ally in the containment of China than conventional wisdom dictates, writes Anne Applebaum in Slate.

Is that why Clinton went to Vietnam? I doubt it: According to
one cynical American diplomat, he went because he knew that,
as a former opponent of the war, he would get a hero’s
welcome. But although that may be part of the explanation for
the mobs who turned out to wave American flags at his
motorcade, I suspect it doesn’t account for all the crowds. They
were partly there, as they would be anywhere, because the
American president is just about the most famous person in the
world, after Michael Jackson. And perhaps they were partly
there because some are already beginning to see that the
United States is not Vietnam’s past but its future.

Lying Awake by Mark Salzman: A Divine Gift in Sickness Vanishes Painfully in Health. “A cloistered Carmelite nun in
Southern California
experiences a prolonged burst of
ecstatic illumination. The poems
Sister John writes as a result are
published and praised; the Vatican
invites her to Rome to read them.

One day she collapses after what
seem to be flashes of light and a
series of blinding headaches. She is
taken to a hospital, where a
neurologist diagnoses treatable
epilepsy. He removes a tiny brain
growth; the symptoms cease, and so
do the visions. So do the poems.

Were Sister John’s flashes of
divinity medical or mystical? Were
her poems the product of art or of a
raisin-sized tumor? A variation on
the mind-body problem —
God-body, in this case, or art-body
— the question goes beyond the
religious or artistic. It continues to
ferment in the centuries-old debate
over the nature of human thought
and endeavor. How free and
distinct are they from biological
mechanics?” New York Times

New issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal

A New Way to Be Mad (Caution: the referenced article has graphic details not for the squeamish) Carl Elliott, a philosopher of psychiatry, with a medical degree, writes a long reflection on the growing epidemic of apotemnophilia, a psychological malady in which people seek the amputation of one or more of their limbs without medical cause. This is done with or without the assistance of a surgeon, some of whom feel there are no humane alternatives to relieve their patients’ distress. (“It was the most satisfying operation I have ever
performed. I have no doubt that what I was doing
was the correct thing for those patients”, said one.)

I
was interested in the way that previously
little-known psychiatric disorders spread, sometimes
even reaching epidemic proportions, for reasons
that nobody seems fully to understand. But I had
never heard of apotemnophilia or acrotomophilia
before the Falkirk story broke. I wondered: Was this
a legitimate psychiatric disorder? Was there any
chance that it might spread? …I also wondered about the ethical and
legal status of surgery as a solution. Should
amputation be treated like cosmetic surgery, or like
invasive psychiatric treatment, or like a risky
research procedure?

Other interesting questions — is this a problem of sexual desire (there are certainly large numbers of “devotees” who are sexually aroused by people missing limbs, but it does not appear that the “wannabes”, those who seek amputation, are sexually motivated) or a disorder of body image or sense of self? What does it say about the nature of our self-identity? What relationship does it bear to other, less extreme, body modification techniques in our own and other cultures? What is the balance between its psychological, possible neurobiological, and sociological determinants? How deep do the homologies between amputation-by-choice and sex-reassignment surgery go? Is it adequately explained as a subset of some other existing category of psychopathology — e.g. body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, the paraphilias — or is it something distinct from all of them? More radically, is it a disorder at all? If it is, what is to be considered acceptable treatment, in light of the “extraordinary and often very destructive collaboration” between psychiatry and surgery over the past seventy-five years?

clitoridectomy for
excessive masturbation, cosmetic surgery as a
treatment for an “inferiority complex,” intersex
surgery for infants born with ambiguous genitalia,
and — most notorious — the frontal lobotomy. It is a
collaboration with few unequivocal successes. Yet
surgery continues to avoid the kind of ethical and
regulatory oversight that has become routine for
most areas of medicine.

I’ve long had professional concern about the role that popularizing faddish new diagnoses may have in spreading them. Consider for example multiple personality disorder, which I’m convinced barely exists if at all but has hordes of adherents (“wannabe” sufferers, and “devotee” clinicians). Dr. Elliott has a fine summary of the arguments of a historian of medicine, Ian Hacking, whose thoughtful work about how “transient mental illnesses” arise and take hold I’ve followed closely.

Crucial to the way this worked is what Hacking calls
the “looping effect,” by which he means how a
classification affects the thing being classified.
Unlike objects, people are conscious of the way
they are classified, and they alter their behavior
and self-conceptions in response to their
classification…In the 1970s, he
argues, therapists started asking patients they
thought might be multiples if they had been abused
as children, and patients in therapy began
remembering episodes of abuse (some of which may
not have actually occurred). These memories
reinforced the diagnosis of multiple-personality
disorder, and once they were categorized as
multiples, some patients began behaving as multiples
are expected to behave. Not intentionally, of
course, but the category “multiple-personality
disorder” gave them a new way to be mad.

Is apotemnophilia going to be a particularly malignant example of such contagion? What is the balance between the extent to which cultural and historical conditions reveal, as opposed to create, new disorders? How far do we want to go in regarding it as a psychiatric diagnosis, including it in DSM-V, the next edition of the “Bible” of officially acceptable diagnoses (and, by the way, the basis for insurance reimbursements). In essence, is this going to spread like a new meme, to which Hacking refers as “semantic contagion”? Its severity may be enhanced by the potential for connectivity among “devotees” and wannabes”. As Dr. Elliott points out, part of the motivation of apotemnophiles may be an aspiration to heroism, and of their devotees to hero worship, which the web facilitates tremendously. One discussion group on the topic has over 1400 participants. Atlantic Monthly

The LEGO Star Wars Trilogy is a series of sixty tableaux of scenes from the first Star Wars trilogy, made of LEGOs and constituting a sort of storyboard of the three films. “…My biggest project ‘LEGO Star
Wars trilogy’ was completed by autumn 1996. It consists of three series of 60 pictures each.
Most of my free time, approximately 2,500 hours, was devoted to making it. Actually, there
were several intervals due to my job. During those years I gradually added new LEGO bricks,
so the pictures that were taken later are more satisfying.”

Has the threat of bioterrorism been overestimated? Are Aum Shinrikyo-like attacks the wave of the future? Some like the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Defense Program of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins feel that today’s terrorists have less to lose by unleashing a biological or chemical threat, and raise the hue and cry about our unpreparedness. Others such as Milton Leitenberg of
the University of Maryland Center for
International
Security Studies feel such claims are alarmist, and that “only the most sophisticated
terrorist organizations could master the complicated process
of launching a biological weapons attack. Most countries
that experimented with biological warfare in the 1970s
eventually gave up because the results were discouraging. ” Economist

Cryptome “welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on cryptology,
dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence — open, secret and classified documents — but not limited to those. In
particular, now that the US Congress adopted an official secrets act on October 12, 2000, increasing penalties for disclosing
government secrets, Cryptome invites those secrets for publication here.” Follow your Echelon and Carnivore concerns here. For example, a recent wire service report claiming that “the FBI’s controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service, far more than FBI officials have said it does, a recent test of its potential sweep found, according to bureau documents” is refuted with a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation here.

BBC Says Sorry for ‘African Orphan’ Stunt. “The BBC apologized Monday after a film
crew used a child actor to pose as an African orphan and play a practical joke on a generous
housewife.

An actor playing the part of a charity collector persuaded the woman to part with one pound
($1.43) for orphaned African children. A seven-year-old posing as an African child was then
unloaded from a crate and delivered to her.”

Microsoft Office 10 beta underwhelming users. Speech recognition technology is faulty and oflimited functionality. The company had not been planning on another beta release before shipping the product in the first half of next year.

Child abuse ‘myths’ shattered: First one shibboleth, then the next. Fast on the heels of the study showing that women are underestimated as domestic abusers, a major study by the British National Council for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children shows that “children are more likely to be sexually abused
by people of their own age than by adults…Most children are sexually
abused by a brother and not their parents. “

Mary Marsh, NSPCC chief executive, said the
findings overturn traditional stereotypes.

“Modern myths about child cruelty have
emerged from the public attention given to
horrific and frightening cases of child abuse by
strangers.

“Other traditional stereotypes come from a
historical wellspring of children’s stories about
wicked adult bogey figures.

“These stereotypes have become part of
popular culture.” BBC

Chance Discovery Of “Immortal Skin” Holds Medical Promise Sciece Daily

I missed my blog‘s first birthday. I began posting on November 16, 1999 with a link to blogger.com, the discovery of which had goaded me into creating this thing. I won’t bore you with too much self-reflection here, except to say I’m grateful for your readership, support and involvement. Follow Me Here has always been a faithful reflection of what grabs me as I follow a number of interests on the web. I’m glad it interests you, and I think I’ve developed a more confident voice over the year from knowing that.

If it’s been in a low spot recently, it’s because despite myself I’ve found the drama of the election campaign more captivating than I ever thought I would; kept more in touch with the news than I ever had in previous election seasons; and started to reflect that in my postings here, despite having vowed at one point that you wouldn’t get much Presidential politics here, since I have usually found the political process bankrupt and meaningless and the outcomes of elections not to matter, or at least found it chic to maintain so.

In any case, it’ll all be over relatively soon, and Follow Me Here can get back to the usual routine:

social

commentary, criticism, cynicism,

conjunctions and conundrums.

Outrage. Recent scientific, technical

and healthcare developments.

Exciting artistic and cultural news.

Human pathos, whimsy, folly,

darkness and depravity.

I wanted to extend particular appreciation to several people for their crucial support during my first year — Abby Levine, Jorn Barger, David Brake, David Hartung, Jim Higgins, Matt Rossi and Chuck Taggart. No matter that some of you (webloggers who have found me worth pointing their readers toward) I’ve never met outside of cyberspace.

Her name was Candace. Two unlicensed Colorado therapists, their two assistants and the adoptive mother of a 10-year-old girl are charged with “child abuse resulting in death” after the troubled girl stopped breathing during a “rebirthing therapy” session.

Therapists curled Candace into the fetal position

inside a flannel sheet and pushed against her from

all sides.

She gasped for air. She begged them to stop.

She cried out that

she was dying.

They said go

ahead.

And then she did.

The Rocky Mountain News devoted an entire section to Candace’s death, including tracking down her birth mother in North Carolina six months after the tragedy to inform her of her daughter’s passing.

Why Gore (Probably) Lost. The pundits have been analyzing to death the question of why he didn’t do better. Three factors are often mentioned, to the point of becoming “received wisdom” already — his flatness of personality and discomfort with himself; his distancing himself from Clinton, crippling him in any attempt to run on his record; and his turn from centrism toward populism. In this essay, Jacob Weisberg is able to show how all of these relate to, and maybe emanate from, his complicated and ambivalent relationship with his late father (and Clinton, as a surrogate father figure). I think he’s on the mark.

Al Gore doesn’t deserve all the vilification that may be about

to be heaped on him. He has done a fine job as vice president

and really does deserve credit for many of the administration’s

accomplishments. Although the ineptitude of his campaign was

frustrating to his supporters, he tried to compensate for it by

working his heart out. Had Bush lost by so narrow a margin,

his defeat would have been attributable to laziness, a failing

Bush has far more control over than Gore has over his. And if

Gore is at fault, so are many of his aides, who we can expect

will soon be pointing the finger elsewhere. And so, too, is the

public, which failed to see through what are, in the scheme of

things, superficial faults to elect the more capable, intelligent,

and experienced man. Slate

Recycling your PC? IBM will take it. “Responding to what many see as one of

the biggest solid waste issues in decades, IBM

on Tuesday kicked off a computer recycling

program for consumers and small business. For

a $30 fee that includes shipping, buyers can

keep their old equipment — whether IBM made

them or not — out of landfills and send them

instead to a recycler. Environmentalists saw it

as a step forward, but urged IBM and other

companies to adopt free recycling.” MSNBC

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. Recent studies have shown that there is a specific ‘disgust center’ in our brains. Building on the observation that patients with Huntington’s Disease cannot recognize expressions of disgust on others’ faces and do not react with disgust to items or situations others usually find distasteful, the crucial brain locus has recently been established to be in the insular region of the cortex. Speculation is that this center originally evolved to help us recognize rotting food. ” ‘All animals have a sense of distaste,’ says psychologist Andrew

Calder. However, in humans it has been enhanced to give us a

centre for highlighting both disgusting things, and disgusting

acts. We need to be able to spot such behaviour because it

could threaten society unless rooted out quickly, he says.” Although the article does not make it clear, the crucial step in this inference by researchers has been the observation that patients in whom this brain region is damaged combine three behavioral deficits — not only do they not react to things that are repugnant but they fail to recognize the emotion of disgust in others and fail to react with the emotion of disgust to socially objectionable actions. Is this a biological basis for the sense of morality? Guardian

Men, if you value your life, stop shaving now. And other lucky escapes. Ananova

Overkill. ‘In the

morning paper, the town read disturbing allegations about a local

personality, followed in the afternoon by the news of his suicide. Readers

immediately flamed The Plain Dealer with angry phone calls, letters, and

e-mail. Rose hadn’t been charged with any crime, many noted, and by

making the investigation public, the newspaper had, in effect, killed him. The

paper had turned itself into a convenient outlet for residents to vent their

disbelief.

In response, The Plain Dealer became defensive and launched an often

harsh counterattack that at times seemed even more reflexive than its

readers’ reactions. In a series of editorials and columns, the paper reminded

readers that journalists are supposed to report facts–and that Rose was a

suspect. It is not the paper’s fault, editors said, if subjects of articles

choose to commit suicide. In answer to an e-mail message from Merle Pollis,

Rose’s best friend of 25 years, Douglas Clifton, The Plain Dealer‘s editor,

sent off a response that read, in part: “I know how I would react to a false

accusation of that sort. It would not have been to blow my brains out.” ‘Brill’s Content

Pedro the hellraising parrot squawks his last. “A hellraising parrot whose lifestyle of bars, booze and

birds caused outcry among animal welfare activists has

died after going on the wagon.

Pedro the parrot fell off his perch after being barred

from living it up at the Kiwi Spirit bar in Rotorua, New

Zealand, where he lived.” Ananova

Pedro the hellraising parrot squawks his last. “A hellraising parrot whose lifestyle of bars, booze and

birds caused outcry among animal welfare activists has

died after going on the wagon.

Pedro the parrot fell off his perch after being barred

from living it up at the Kiwi Spirit bar in Rotorua, New

Zealand, where he lived.” Ananova

Pedro the hellraising parrot squawks his last. “A hellraising parrot whose lifestyle of bars, booze and

birds caused outcry among animal welfare activists has

died after going on the wagon.

Pedro the parrot fell off his perch after being barred

from living it up at the Kiwi Spirit bar in Rotorua, New

Zealand, where he lived.” Ananova

The Nazi on the Bestseller List. “German media giant Bertelsmann, still feverishly trying to make

people forget that it once marketed Hitler to the masses, is now

selling a Vermont professor’s regurgitation of the ideas of America’s

foremost living Hitler admirer, William Pierce, author of the Turner

Diaries.

Unable to find a publisher for his 420-page labor of love, University

of Vermont education professor Robert S. Griffin is peddling The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close

Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce for $8 per download on MightyWords.com, where it has the

immediate potential to reach millions of people.

The Web site is owned jointly, through a subsidiary, by Bertelsmann and Barnes & Noble. And Griffin’s

e-book has zoomed to No. 1 on the MightyWords bestseller list.

Griffin, in an interview with the Voice, insists he’s no mere publicist for Pierce, an ex-physicist whom Jewish

activists consider America’s most intellectual—and most dangerous—anti-Semite and racist.” Village Voice

Women are more violent, says study. A new study ‘challenges the long-standing view that

women are overwhelmingly the victims of aggression,…based on an analysis of 34,000 men and women by a British

academic. Women lash out more frequently than their

husbands or boyfriends, concludes John Archer, professor of

psychology at the University of Central Lancashire and

president of the International Society for Research on

Aggression.

Male violence remains a more serious phenomenon: men

proved more likely than women to injure their partners.

Female aggression tends to involve pushing, slapping and

hurling objects. Yet men made up nearly 40 per cent of the

victims in the cases that he studied – a figure much higher

than previously reported.

… Speaking last night, he said that female aggression

was greater in westernised women because they were

“economically emancipated” and therefore not afraid of ending

a relationship.

“Feminist writers say most of the acts against men are not

important but the same people have used the same surveys

to inflate the number of women who are attacked,” he said. “In

the past it would not even have been considered that women

are violent. My view is that you must base social policy on the

whole evidence.” ‘ Independent

Death row inmate nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. Nando Times

World marvels at meteors. “Waves of fireballs brightened the skies over

the Middle East as the much-heralded Leonid

meteor shower swelled into the heaviest show

of shooting stars in 33 years.

Around the world, astronomers and amateur

stargazers gathered to watch the celestial light

show, which is unlikely to be matched for

decades.” BBC

“Wealth Porn”. “The media have almost totally overlooked the causal connections between the wealth boom and rising distress among the middle classes. The pieces that do report on middle-class financial distress often quote spokesmen for the personal responsibility movement who condemn financially-strapped middle-class families for their lack of discipline.” But, the author contends, as the rich get richer and are driven to more and more conspicuous consumption, they carry the rest of society along with them, and there are unacceptable costs to failing to spend on a par with others. Columbia Journalism Review

Main characters in the distressing but strangely appealing novels of Michel Houellebecq keep visiting shrinks and getting diagnosed with ‘Depressive Lucidity”. Life is “narrow, dark and acrid.” People barely connect, barely hold on. Suicide is ever-present. But then there’s the lucidity…. The New Republic

Pedro the hellraising parrot squawks his last. “A hellraising parrot whose lifestyle of bars, booze and

birds caused outcry among animal welfare activists has

died after going on the wagon.

Pedro the parrot fell off his perch after being barred

from living it up at the Kiwi Spirit bar in Rotorua, New

Zealand, where he lived.” Ananova

Is There a Duty to Die? Philosophers consider those controversial cases “in which a person is dying or has substantial physical or cognitive impairments and whose care is very costly or burdensome.” JAMA

Blind to change. Recent experimental psychology studies indicate that “we see far less than we think we do.” Our subjective experience of seeing a rich, full visual scene of the world at all times is just an illusion; we take in only salient details and rely on extrapolation from memory or imagination to fill in the rest. Neurological probes have recently demonstrated that the same neurons activate when viewing a scene in the mind’s eye as when viewing it outwardly, suggesting the same conclusion from a different direction. Daniel Dennett proposed this in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, observing how computationally inefficient it would be to store the entire elaborate picture in short-term memory. Instead, we log what has changed and assume the rest has remained the same. Implications of the potential for error in this model of perception include calling into question the validity of eyewitness testimony, for example. Some of the further reaches of extrapolation from these findings pose epistemological challenges about what we really know about the world “out there.”

Back in 1992, Kevin

O’Regan, an experimental psychologist at the French National

Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris put forward

what later became known as his “grand illusion” theory. He

argued that we hold no picture of the visual world in our

brains. Instead, we refer back to the external visual world as

different aspects become important. The illusion arises from

the fact that as soon as you ask yourself “am I seeing this or

that?” you turn your attention to it and see it.

According to O’Regan, it’s not just our impression of richness

that is illusory, but also the sense of having control over what

we see. “We have the illusion that when something flickers

outside the window, we notice it flickering and decide to move

our eyes and look,” says Susan Blackmore of the University of

the West of England, who supports O’Regan’s views. “That’s

balderdash.” In fact, she says, we are at the mercy of our

change detection mechanisms, which automatically drag our

attention here, there and everywhere.

At a meeting in Brussels in July this year, O’Regan and Alva

Noë of the University of California, Santa Cruz, updated the

controversial theory. Sensation, whether it be visual, auditory

or tactile, is not something that takes place in the brain, they

argue. Rather it exists in the knowledge that if you were to

perform a certain action, it would produce a certain change in

sensory input. “Sensation is not something that we feel, but

sensation is something that we do,” says O’Regan.

According to this idea, the sensation of “redness” arises from

knowing that moving your eyes onto a red patch will produce a

certain change in the pattern of stimulation in line with laws of

redness. In other words, the role of the brain is to initiate the

exploratory action and to hold the knowledge of those laws:

together this give rise to the sensation of redness.

New Scientist

Mobile phones: Can a small ring of metal cut radiation from hands-free kits?. A new British study suggests that using a hands-free headset with your cellular phone can channel more microwave radiation to your head (in contrast to most tests which have found that hands-free kits cut microwave exposure). Fitting a small ferrite ring or choke to the headset wire eradicated the extra radiation, however. New Scientist

U.S. Report Offers Steps to Fight Global Warming. Here’s hoping they can agree on some way of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the Hague talks. “The United States came under fire on

Thursday from the European Union and

environmentalists over its wish to use the world’s forests to soak

up greenhouse gases rather than cut emissions at home. And, in related news, “climate researchers are warning of a possible

link between global warming and giant waves in

the Atlantic Ocean.

They say that if the current trend towards

warmer temperatures continues, roughening

seas could threaten coastal areas in northern

Europe.

Average winter wave heights in the north-east

Atlantic have increased by about a metre

(3.28 feet) over the past 30 years. Stormy

conditions also persist longer.”

At tough 180-nation talks in The Hague on how to slow global

warming, the EU rejected a U.S. proposal to use its own forests

and farmland as ‘sinks’ to soak up greenhouse gases, dismissing

the plan as a ‘free gift’ to the world’s largest polluter.”