A very happy new year to all of my readers and all those close to you.

Hey, this eGroups thing is great. Participate in a reader survey, if you please, by following this link: When I read Follow Me Here, I prefer:

Jorn Barger’s provocative post on his Robot Wisdom weblog — he headlined a link to an article claiming that assassinating unarmed Palestinian freedom fighters is official Israeli government policy “Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?” — has been roundly condemned in a discussion forum he set up for responses. The consensus seems to be that Barger had blurred the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism, between Israel and Jews, and was doing the kind of generalizing and stereotyping we associate with bigotry. By and large, the responses were civil despite the posters’ perception that Barger had been way out of line, and by and large they have commented on their surprise at how uncharacteristic they considered this of Barger, as well-respected and widely-read as his weblog is. But Barger has pushed the issue further by asking, “Are Jews incapable of polite discourse?”

In separate incidents today, the son of rabid anti-Arab Jewish leader Meir Kahane — himself assassinated a decade ago — and his wife were ambushed and killed in the West Bank by Palestininan gunmen; and a Fatah official was shot dead leaving his West Bank home in what Palestinian officials described as an assassination. Israel claimed he had been killed in firefight between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli security forces. Draw your own conclusions about the continuing cycle of violence and murder.

Allergies to MSG May Not Exist. Although IMHO the study’s methodology is flawed, it claims to show that people don’t react negatively to MSG as they believe they do.

Bush Appoints Leader of Health And Human Services. Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson is pro-life, in favor of school vouchers and spearheaded the welfare-to-work reform movement. But he has no significant experience in the health arena and had made no secret of his desire to be given the Dept. of Transportation. I’m excited at the prospect that at least people may end up with better arrangements for their rides to doctors’ appointments! (unless they’re going to a women’s health clinic…)

Rare Baby Elephant Delights Seattle. “The
answers to the three
most commonly asked
questions at the Woodland
Park Zoo in Seattle these
days are: one, 235 pounds;
two, 22 months (the longest
pregnancy of any mammal in
the world); three, natural
insemination, after her
8,800-pound mother was
transported 2,000 miles for a
tryst in Missouri.” New York Times

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

He’s a nurtural Calculational prodigies use different brain regions than we do when performing the same mental activities.

I’ve just set up a Follow Me Here mailing list through eGoups. Feel free to join. FmH posts generate a trickle of feedback and reactions from readers, sent to me 1:1 as direct email.
Why not generate some discussion with other similarly gregarious FmH readers through this mailing list instead? This will be an unmoderated list and, in fact, I expect I will
participate more as a lurker than a poster, as I’m letting you get to know how I think with my weblog
postings in the first place. When you post to the mailing list, it’s set up so that the subject line of your contributions begin with
“[FmH]” so that recipients of the mailings can readily identify them in our email inboxes. If you
want to talk to me “offlist” about this list, you can email me directly about it.

Addresses:

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Dan Hartung’s weblogger’s manifestito: “I don’t feel the need to turn my personal weblog into a
community, any more than I do to turn it into a diary. As it is,
though, what I get out of it is clearly informed by the larger
coummunity of webloggers. I steal links from them, to be sure, but
I also respond to their comments, learn from them, and get ideas
from this interplay. I can safely say that a year plus of doing this
has excited me intellectually as nearly no other undertaking has
done.”

Better Living Through Snoezelan. More about the background and details of the sensory stimulation treatment of dementia (Alzheimer’s Disease etc.) — to an account of which I blinked earlier. New York Press

Sham summit promised little for the
Palestinians. “The result? The world believes
that Mr Arafat turned down what he had always demanded, and the
cancellation of the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was entirely his fault.

Having claimed in the past that Israel was offering 92 per cent of the
West Bank – and then 94 per cent – to the Palestinians, the Americans
insisted that the latest Clinton proposals would give Mr Arafat 95 per
cent. But a careful reading of the Clinton document proves this to be
untrue. With the Dead Sea waters that would become Palestinian
‘territory’, with the Israeli army ‘buffer zones’, with the ‘rental’ of the
Kiryat Arba settlement land, with the exclusion of the West Bank land
illegally annexed into Jerusalem by the Israelis (including the massive
Male Adumim settlement), Arafat was still likely to get no more than 64
or 65 per cent.” The Independent

UCSF study of HIV patients identifies interleukin-7 as a key factor in controlling T-cells. “Researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology have learned how T-cell levels may be maintained in
people. The study has important implications for developing treatment strategies for patients who have diseases like HIV and
cancer where the immune system is destroyed and for patients whose immune system is suppressed by chemotherapy or who
are undergoing a bone marrow transplant, the researchers said.” EurekAlert

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth
can stand by itself.”

–Thomas Jefferson

While I was away, many weblogs linked to Michael Kinsley’s essay in Slate on whether reasonable people can differ; I just noticed the pointers and got around to it. The issues he raises are must reading for progressives, who are inherently in danger of respecting the unthinking positions of those who don’t think as they do, because of their embrace of relativism and respect for difference. At the cost of a great deal of “epistemological vertigo,” Kinsley concludes he doesn’t need to trouble himself about people who differ with the reasonable position and, quite rightly to my thinking, raises a call to arms against “this great national reconciliation everyone is so gung-ho about.”

Some of the pundits are glib about how soon the nation will forget the vote-counting debacle, but Dubya will remain the “illegitimate son” for me, “not my President-elect”, “not my President”. It’s been that way before; Ronald Reagan was never my President, nor his toady, George Bush. There’s no “epistemological vertigo” in not thinking like the majority for me, especially since — as you can glean from reading FmH — I have always paid alot of attention to the myriad of ways in which we are in the modern world, but particularly in the US, victims of “cultural entrancement”. As I did in the ’80’s, I think I’m going to be walking around in an America that feels alien and alienating for at least the next four years.

The ire and frustration are wearying, and thence the temptation to yield to reconciliation and ecumenism. But right-thinking people would be sold down the river by that, it seems to me. So onward to hoe the tougher row.

“I
might be one of these misguided people. I don’t think so—but
then I wouldn’t, would I? And it’s also a puzzle what one
should do about this possibility. On the one hand, it’s
important to keep the danger in mind, to take the competition
out for a mental road test before you buy an opinion on some
issue, and to trade it in at any time if you’re persuaded it’s a
lemon. On the other hand, deriving your specific opinions
from a framework of beliefs is a good thing, not a bad one,
and excessive self-doubt can be paralyzing and even
dishonest in its own way. If you can’t decide, maybe you
should try harder. And if you’re sure you’re right … well,
you’re sure you’re right, aren’t you?” — Kinsley

[via Medley]: If you’ve recently upgraded to a new cellphone, have you wondered what to do with the old one? Call to Protect is an agency that will have it refurbished, programmed with emergency numbers and given to a victim of domestic violence. Visit their site for information on the program.

Five Signs of Domestic Violence:

Does his or her
partner:

Embarass or
ridicule him/her
in public?

Use intimidation
or threats to get
him/her to go
along with
something?

Physically
abuse him/her
with pushing,
shoving or
hitting?

Attempt to
control or
restrict his/her
activities?

Z

Blame him/her
for the way
he/she feels or
acts?

Dirty Pig Slaughter Report Hits Gourmets. “Another food scandal hit France Friday, and with it the
announcement that one of the country’s top restaurants was shunning meat for good.”

Classical Music Joins Fight Against Crime. City officials in Vallejo, California hope that playing classical music at a downtown transit station will keep the criminal element at bay…or at least away.

The New York Times weblogging article (see below) stimulated some lively jabbering among webloggers at Metafilter.

‘Historically speaking, the “ancient” rituals of the
Goddess movement are almost certainly bunk.’

In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is
true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly
new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as
Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with
the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions
informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed.
Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no
indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that
any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal
goddess — a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan
belief. The Atlantic

Cribbed from Jimwich: this spectacular photograph of an F/A-18C Hornet at the exact moment it breaks the sound barrier, passing through a gorgeous momentary egg-shaped cloud it creates in the process. A commentary on the photo explains how it was taken and what’s happening.

The Dubious Data 2000 Awards, “the ten silliest, most misleading stories of the New Millennium” from the Statistical Assessment Service. “…at least, we think it’s ten, and we’re pretty sure that the Millennium has already started…”

One of the giants, W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92 New York Times

Frequently Asked Questions about the “tetanizing beam weapon”, a nonlethal anti-personnel weapon. I collect rare weapons.

May I buy one of yours?

There are no finished units available now and will not be for about two years. Then you should ask one of our
licensed manufacturers rather than us, as we are exclusively a research corporation. Even then you could not
purchase a functional weapon because they will be sold only to law enforcement and military organizations.
However, in a few years you should be able to buy a design model.

[via Red Rock Eaters’ News Service]

A study comparing three decades of Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas speeches highlights the decline and fall of the Queen’s cut-glass accent, as The Times of London puts it. Her accent has “drifted down market towards the speech patterns of her subjects,” and marks the general blurring of British social class accent distinctions.

Choice of Rumsfeld Creates Solid Team for Missile Shield. Dubya’s choice for Pentagon chief shows me two things — that he’s fully committed to that dangerous and costly boondoggle, and that he continues to look to his father’s generation to compensate for his apparent self-preceived inadequacies as a leader. New York Times

Verizon to Face Tumor Suits? “… (A) U.S. lawyer who recently helped win $4.2 billion in damages
from the tobacco industry was planning to launch 10 claims against handset manufacturers, mobile
network operators and fixed-line phone companies” on behalf of brain tumor victims. Wired

A Millen(n)ial Mix-up. As New Year’s Eve approaches, Wired ponders not only the pervasive confusion about when the new millennium begins but the widespread misspelling of the word millennium. Take for example, the Hilton Millenium in New York City, a spokesperson for which says the use of the single ‘n’ was a deliberate attempt at visibility. Uh-huh. (The writer, searching the Wired News archives, found 11 articles where millennium was spelled at least once with a single ‘n’ in his own publication.) Some versions of the Microsoft Word spellchecker accept both versions. A spokesperson for the company denied that this was a bug, making motions instead in the direction of “captur(ing) cultural nuances in word use.”

Free Links, Only $50 Apiece. Some news sources have begun to charge a fee for others to link to their online articles; another fundamental challenge to the premise of the hyperlinked Web. Moreover, the online service these sites use to limit unapproved linking — iCopyright.com — also attempts to control what can be said about the online content in your link to it. And not only can you not say anything derogatory about the author or the publication in which the linked-to article appears; you cannot say anything derogatory about “any person…depicted in the content.” Plain and simple, if I linked for example to an Albuquerque Journal article about Dubya, I would have to fork over $50 for the privilege of remaining respectful about the illegitimate son — uh, I mean the President-elect. It appears that iCopyright.com started out to handle collecting licensing fres for reprinting and photocopying in return for a portion of these licensing revenues, but decided to tack on the HTML linkage fee arrangement as well. An Albuquerque Journal spokesperson denied being aware of the linkage fee arrangement and did not know if the newspaper would be enforcing it or if people who linked to their content without paying a fee would be in legal trouble. iCopyright.com, which says it represents more than 70 publishers and more than 300 publications, referred inquiries to its attorneys.

Legal commentators suggest that attempts to charge for linkage to online content would not stand up in court, not to mention the free speech restrictions of this particular arrangement. Although obtaining permission, and even paying a licensing fee, for the reuse of printed material (through photocopying) is an established precedent, it has been difficult to enforce restrictions on, say, academic redistribution of articles for a long time. I know from personal experience that that has been the mainstay of, for example, medical education for decades. In the hyperlinked world, let’s hope it’s even more difficult to enforce. And in this era of dot-com startups going belly-up with regularity, perhaps iCopyright.com will turn out to be an ill-planned scheme that efficiently founders even before putting someone through an expensive and time-consuming legal test case. Information just wants to be freer and freer, to paraphrase someone… Wired

New York Times review by Stephen Holden:‘Traffic’: Teeming Mural of a War Fought and Lost. ‘Hollywood has saved the best for last. On the last weekend
of the year comes what may turn out to be the most acclaimed
movie of the year: Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, an
updated, Americanized version of a 1989 British television
mini-series, Traffik. Soderbergh’s film, which has already
been named best picture of the year by the New York Film
Critics Circle, tackles the subject of America’s losing war
on drugs through multiple story lines and a multitude of
characters…

… “several,
interwoven thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and
explosive payoff. What these stories add up to is something
grander and deeper than a virtuosic adventure film.” ‘

NY Gov. Makes Unusual Remark on Bush’s Drunk Driving. When his nominee for Motor Vehicle Commissioner admitted that he had DWI and speeding convictions on his record, Gov. Pataki replied, “I guess that qualifies you to be President of the United States then. “

Clues to why every snowflake is different are revealed in a California “snowstorm in a can.” New Scientist And, while we’re on the snowy subject, consider Frosty the sexist snowman: the snowman figure reinforces gender stereotypes and male domination of life outside the home, says a British art historian who studies popular imagery. White, invariably male, rotund, with a jolly countenance, he is said to represent carnal enjoyment and lusty fulfillment. National Post

Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good. A long Atlantic exposé on the flavor industry and its manipulation of our palate for profit.

People usually buy a food
item the first time because of its packaging or appearance.
Taste usually determines whether they buy it again. About 90
percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes
to buy processed food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating
techniques used in processing destroy most of food’s flavor —
and so a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make
processed food palatable. Without this flavor industry today’s
fast food would not exist…

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies
will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the
identities of clients. The secrecy is deemed essential for
protecting the reputations of beloved brands. The fast-food
chains, understandably, would like the public to believe that the
flavors of the food they sell somehow originate in their
restaurant kitchens, not in distant factories run by other firms. A
McDonald’s french fry is one of countless foods whose flavor
is just a component in a complex manufacturing process. The
look and the taste of what we eat now are frequently deceiving
— by design.

Jeanette Winterson reads porn: “Feminism seems to have had no effect on pornography. There is
much more of it than in the 60s and 70s, and it has become
both mainstream and acceptable. I travel a lot, here and abroad,
and at airports and railway stations, I have noticed the old top
shelf is often double the size and halfway down. What does this
signify? That more men buy porn than ever before? That men are
shorter than they used to be? That women want it in their face?
That pornography is just a lifestyle magazine?

Reading the message is not easy. In the white corner are the
likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon who have
argued, with varying degrees of success, in the American courts
and media, that all pornography is violence against women. In
the red corner are the good-time guys, such as Hugh Hefner,
Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond, who claim it’s just business
as usual and the girls enjoy it. Desmond has recently bought
the Express, further blurring the line between business and
exploitation. When a porn baron takes over a national
newspaper, how do we read the signs?” Books Unlimited

This looks a nice place to stop… “Motels are places for assignations and
illicit sex, for planning crimes and dividing
the spoils, for insecure people in transit or
desperate people on the run. There’s
always the chance that you’ll wake up
alone, robbed after a night of passion, or
that the place will be surrounded by cops…” Reflections on the place of the motel in the American psyche, and particularly Hollywood’s, on the 75th anniversary of their advent on the scene. The Observer

Phone flirts. New sociobiological research conducted over four months in a Liverpool pub suggests that men flaunt their cell phones in public as if they were “lekking” — a term I just learned from the article, from animal behavior terminology, referring to competitive mating displays. The degree to which the subjects showed off their toys was proportional to the density of the male audience. From other aspects of their research, the investigatorsconclude that women would be more attracted to the flaunters, but this last seemed an inferential stretch to me. New Scientist And Lionel Tiger explores the sociobiological significance of the visit to the nail salons that seem so ubiquitous. New York Press

“The Census Bureau releases congressional reapportionment figures from the 2000 census, and the
results are good news for Republicans …. Add these numbers up, and they mean that if Bush wins the same states in 2004 that he carried in
2000, he will win by 18 electoral votes, 278-260, instead of four.” WSJ Opinion Journal

Bigfoot’s Buttocks: I’m among those who wonder if there’s a serious chance an unknown, large hairy hominid roams the most remote wilderness areas of the far west and northwest. Most accounts are scoffed at as hoaxes or misidentifications. It’s a pity that serious inquiry into the possibliities of unknown species is thwarted not so much by innocent credulity as by the deliberate play upon others’ credulity of sensation-seeking hoaxers. There have been numerous findings and castings of supposed footprints, but now a Bigfoot-hunting party has found the imprints of forearm, hip, thigh and heel in a muddy bank where the night before they had placed some tempting apples. The impression appears to be from a hairy hominid at least 2.5 meters (8 ft.) tall, according to an involved anthropologist. The team feels this is the strongest hint that Bigfoot exists. New Scientist

Invasion of the ‘Blog’: A Parallel Web of Personal Journals. The New York Times takes a snapshot of the phenomenon. Welcome to new readers pointed here from the article, which mentions FmH (“wide-ranging articles and links compiled by a psychiatrist”). [Do I now qualify as a ‘partner’ of the Times, able to post links to its registration-free URL partners.nytimes.com??] I quibble with one of the piece’s themes, which is that any fool can now produce a weblog without knowing any HTML, given how easy it’s been made by Blogger etc. I beg to differ; I think any fool still needs to know some HTML to pretty up their blog enough to keep it readable.

Outlook Not So Good: “… it was a curious
convergence of events that saw the National
Intelligence Council issue its soothsaying report
on America’s role in the New World Order, Global
Trends 2015, just as a president-elect who has
never traveled across the Atlantic set about
appointing a cabinet disinclined to cast the
world’s only superpower as a leader of new global
consensus…

At such moments, you can sense the growing
desperation in the precincts of high spookery:
There just has to be an enemy out there,
mastering the conventions of ‘nonmateriel’
combat subterfuge. Then again, this particular
judgment call may well prove inadvertently
prophetic, after all: There probably is every
reason in the world to think that a Bush-led
America, however extravagantly armed, runs a
much greater risk of being simply outwitted.” Feed

The boy with the (really) magnetic personality Ananova [via Abby]

“People say that birth and death are lonely events as you are the only one experiencing them at that
very moment. But music can be a birth or death companion. We asked a range of contributors which
music they would choose at either end of life.” British Medical Journal [via Abby]

Rebecca Blood sent me this for my continuing Annals of the Age of Depravity series (thanks?). It also has a flavor (no pun intended) of Life Imitating Art… if you think, for instance, Thomas Harris is “art”.

I’ve always liked Dan Hartung’s Lake Effect from Chicago. Having just driven into Chicago for Christmas with family, I now understand the reference. Travelling west across Michigan Thursday night (after being treated to an awe-inspiring display of the aurora borealis in the crisp clear dark sky of the longest night of the year) we suddenly ran into whiteout conditions and had to pull off the highway. Rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan into Chicago, there had not even been any fresh snow.

By the way, I’m borrowing someone’s computer for a moment to post this, because my laptop’s hard disk has crashed since yesterday — probably unrelated to the lake effect. So, contrary to expectations, I don’t think I’ll be posting anything more until I’m back on my home machine in Boston next Wednesday night or Thursday. A very happy holiday to you all, and may the warmth and joy of the season be yours for all the year to come.

I’ve always liked Dan Hartung’s Lake Effect from Chicago. Having just driven into Chicago for Christmas with family, I now understand the reference. Travelling west across Michigan Thursday night (after being treated to an awe-inspiring display of the aurora borealis in the crisp clear dark sky of the longest night of the year) we suddenly ran into whiteout conditions and had to pull off the highway. Rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan into Chicago, there had not even been any fresh snow.

By the way, I’m borrowing someone’s computer for a moment to post this, because my laptop’s hard disk has crashed since yesterday — probably unrelated to the lake effect. So, contrary to expectations, I don’t think I’ll be posting anything more until I’m back on my home machine in Boston next Wednesday night or Thursday. A very happy holiday to you all, and may the warmth and joy of the season be yours for all the year to come.

R. I. P. Kirsty MacColl, a musician’s musician who never topped the charts but never failed to bring a smile to my face. Rolling Stone

The Oops List “The air force has never officially admitted that nuclear weapons were involved in this accident” — a phrase that can be said over and over again, as the author of this article has assembled evidence from a variety of sources that there have been many more accidents involving our nuclear weapons than the U.S. has let on. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Call for men to get HRT. “Middle-aged men should receive hormone
therapy to treat the andropause – the male
equivalent of the menopause, say doctors.

The Andropause Society has been formed to
raise awareness of the problem amongst
doctors and their patients.

But there is debate amongst the medical
profession over whether the male menopause
actually exists.” BBC

New proof of Timothy McVeigh’s innocence and an explanation for his silence to date. “The truth must be told! I’m sorry, Timothy, but I can’t be quiet anymore! The reason Timothy has been quiet for so long is because the day he was arrested, A microscopic chip was inserted into the lower part of his left
ear! This chip not only tortured him by playing death metal and christmas classics but it made him unable to speak. Then thin slices of razor blades were inserted between his liver and urapoopilikeno causing sharp pains to
travel through his hands every time he was near paper!
Timothy is really the son of God! Jesus was actually his twin brother caused by an accident that resulted from the virgin mary doing jumping jacks in gym class when she was in 7th grade. She was pregnant since she
was born and The gym class injury tore her right ovary in half resulting in the dividing of Gods’ yet to be born son.” There’s alot more to chew on here…

Why the Fuss Over Condi Rice? by Anne Applebaum This issue has nagged at me too. The American self-congratulation about the appointment of minorities and women does not so much speak to how far we’ve come against racism and sexism as it does to how far we have to go. “Why is it, in fact, that the appointment of women and
minorities to high office is such a big deal in the United
States? It isn’t necessarily such a big deal everywhere else.” And, lest this appears to be about Dubya alone, recall how big a deal a Jewish vice-presidential candidate was. Pitiful. Slate

Here’s some background on Powell and Rice, also from Slate:

Last weekend President-elect George W. Bush appointed
Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state
and national security adviser, respectively. To read an
“Assessment” of Powell, click here; for one of Rice, click
here. In 1997 Slate’s Franklin Foer argued that the
“affirmative action” that produced Gen. Powell was a
laudable type of reverse discrimination. (Click here to read
the article.) Last summer Slate’s Jacob Weisberg praised
Powell for “calling the GOP’s bluff” at their “minority
extravaganza” of a convention. (To read the article, click
here. Earlier this year Slate’s David Greenberg argued that
the GOP’s treatment of blacks has declined since the days
of Lincoln. (Click here to read the article.)

Meanwhile, the mainstream press, including Time magazine in declaring Dubya its “Person of the Year”, is really doing an awful lot of damning with faint praise. Or is it praising with faint damns as they did throughout the campaign coverage? Slate

And, by the way, did you notice how much “the lady (and the illegitimate son’s other appointments as well) doth protest too much”? They all take pains to tell us how Bush, far from being an intellectual lightweight overshadowed by his appointments and unprepared for the rigors of the Presidency, will really be leading us. Ah, yes, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Can you say “figurehead?” I predict the next administration will be fertile ground for the resurrection of conspiracy theory. Palace intrigues will make for some entertaining reading…

By the way, has anyone resurrected this old chestnut which has been on my mind recently with Dubya’s election? For almost two centuries, the U.S. President elected every twentieth year has died in office. (Ronald Reagan broke the mold only if you don’t believe he was brain-dead before the end of his second term. As a young psychiatric resident, I was interviewed by the press during his second election campaign in 1983-84 about my concerns that he was already showing signs of the Alzheimer’s dementia with which he would not be diagnosed officially until after he left office years later.) JFK, elected in 1960; FDR in 1940; Harding (1920), the other three assassination victims McKinley (1900), Garfield (1880), and Lincoln (1860); and William H. Harrison (1840). Here‘s an almanac listing of the Presidents’ terms if you want to verify this. Should we prepare for a President Cheney? If he doesn’t succomb to his cardiac disease before the illegitimate son’s projected demise?

But enough morbidity and dread, and enough of U.S. Presidential politics for awhile already…

404 Research Lab: “404 is your friend!” The 404 of the week; a tutorial on making 404 pages for webmasters; random 404’s, and more. If you don’t know what a ‘404’ is… then you haven’t been websurfing, really.

The destruction of Lhasa. Much of the old center of the city, which is the capital of Tibet, is roped off. Although unconfirmed, it appears that it is being readied for demolition. The Chinese seem to have stepped up their war on Tibetan separatism to include its cultural heritage. The Tibet Heritage Fund, an NGO dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan architecture, was expelled from Lhasa this summer. The Fund had collaborated in the restoration of 76 buildings as old as the seventh century AD, using traditional materials and keeping endangered skills alive by utilizing local artisans. All of this seems a response to the humiliation China suffered with the January 2000 defection of the Karmapa Lama to join the Dalai Lama ‘s expatriate Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India. Up until that time, China had been using preservation and restoration of Tibetan monasteries (destroyed during the Cultural Revolution) as an apparent means of ingratiating itself with pro-Tibet foreign opinion.

The strategy had been to make Tibet a touristic showcase while turning Tibetans
themselves into a deracinated minority—similar to what the US, for example, did
to Hawaii. But all signs indicate Beijing’s policy, oppressive at the best of times. is
moving towards forced assimilation.

I’d never run across The Art Newspaper, the visual arts publication covering this issue, either online or in print before.

Whitbread celebs oust ‘real critics’. The Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize are apparently in a war of words over the latter’s growing inclusion of celebrities, as oppposed to literary types, on its judges’ panel. Maximizing the TV audience for the awards ceremonies, which are broadcast live, seems to be a preoccupation. The Whitbread emphasizes that it “is not a literary prize in any
way. It is about good books that are
enjoyed. These judges provide a very
useful ordinary perspective”. The Guardian

Just when you thought it was safe to leave your computer desk: The Museum of Television and Radio will make some
of the greatest programs of all time available on the
Internet starting next year.

The collection features almost every radio and TV
broadcast ever aired. “We’re going to begin with a couple hundred, and then we’re going to add on a weekly basis. Over
time, we eventually hope to have a clip for every
program in our collection,” said a spokesperson. NY Post

Cleaned-Up CDs Don’t Clean Up. Music manufacturers have been producing sanitized versions of recordings with “explicit content” (as it’s called in this post-Tipper-Gore cultural univese) for sale in the likes of Walmart and K-Mart, who said they wouldn’t put CDs with advisory labels on their shelves, mindful as they were of their Mom-‘n’-apple pie heartland image. But, thankfully, consumers don’t seem to be flocking to buy the cleaned-up models. Hey, Walmart, get the message: the fans are looking for the ones with the warning labels! LA Times

A special section on vitriol in the art world! First, Getting a bum rap in court of public opinion: Often, there’s no rhyme, reason why hip-hop musicians are suspect, writes an African American music critic in the Boston Herald. Recent events suggest to some — populist black activist leader Al Sharpton and former O.J. Simpson attorney [will he ever live it down? does he want to?] Johnnie Cochran among them — that there is a ‘hip-hop profiling’ subgenre of ‘racial profiling’ abroad in the land, and that

we should expect people, especially police, to
distinguish between fantasy and reality. Just because someone poses
with guns on an album cover, brags about taking drugs, puffs up what
they would do to their enemies if given the chance, or mercilessly
harangues “soft” rappers as fake does not make them a criminal.

No one, for example, ever strip-searched country singer Johnny Cash
just because he sang, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”
Cash has, in fact, sung so many songs about offing people that a
recent compilation of his music includes an entire CD of murder songs.

We’ve also seen a huge public outpouring of sympathy for Robert
Downey Jr. – a gifted but drug-addled white actor. Yet no one rushed
to the defense of Ol’ Dirty Bastard – a gifted but drug-addled black
rapper with essentially the same problems – when he was rearrested
after fleeing court-ordered rehabilitation.

Next, the New York Press‘s Godfrey Cheshire rakes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane over the coals for his review of the attention-getting film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “As a piece of prose, Lane’s polite
rave for Ang Lee’s film is competent enough, if typically gaseous and cute. But as film criticism it’s
something far less innocuous, a riot of errors and absurdities that would make the shoddiest
webzine blush. What’s at issue here has nothing to do with ‘opinion,’ or whether one likes or dislikes Crouching
Tiger. It has to do with the critic’s basic grasp of his subject…” Cheshire apparently had alot of fun writing this one. Our rootless, decontextualized, global-market entertainment industry provides fertile ground for this kind of thing, with the multiple layers of cultural dissonance arising when a reviewer trying to import London sensibilities to the New Yorker writes about a hybrid of an art film and the Chinese martial arts genre by an expatriate Asian director working in the American film industry but eschewing Hollywood…

Turning from music and film to the literary world — “McGill failed me — I was mad as hell”…mad enough to kill, apparently. Nega Mezlekia is a prize-winning author of the memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: memories of my Ethiopian Boyhood.Affter a highly visible ugly falling-out with the Vancouver writer who had worked as an editor for him and claimed that she had helped write most of the book, McGill University officials last week approached her for a copy of I Can’t Recognize Myself Anymore, the partially completed subsequent volume of his memoirs on which she had worked as well until they parted company. The University is particularly interested in passages describing a carefully researched plan to hunt down and kill “six people in the department and all higher university officials I could find” in the wake of a bitter academic dispute with a thesis advisor he accused of trying to take credit for his PhD thesis on the behavior of reinforced concrete. Mr Mezlekia apparently went so far as to cross the border to Detroit to purchase the firepower he needed, at which point he describes a spiritual conversion which led him to abandon the plan and return to Montreal to finish his thesis in peace.

The inventory of hardware that I needed for the task consisted of two Colt-45 hand guns
with ten-round magazines; a Heckler and Koch SP89 machine gun with a 30-shot magazine,
four hand grenades, a bulletproof vest, and a half a dozen pair of handcuffs. As
well, I had to purchase high mass bullets with reliable four or five-petal expansion ribs for
maximum stopping power, and a few additional attachments for the Heckler and Koch SP89.
No thought frustrated the imagination more than the thought that someone you had left for
dead recovered, while you served time for your crime, or worse. That had happened to Dr.
Valeri Fabrikant [an academic who killed four people at Concordia University in 1992], and I
would be stupid to repeat his mistake. The National Post

Would it help if theory informed artistic creation? The stifling effect of the new academy: The art of the late 20th century has been long on pseudo-profundity and short on popular audience. But no matter, it still sells.

For a number of reasons, art had given up
the ghost under the weight of theory. The
breakdown of distinctions between high
and popular culture led to all manner of
cultural produce and effluent being sifted
and read as text. We were top heavy with
theorists (not to mention curators), who
needed scant visual stimulus to write the
work into the flat ergo of post-modernist
irony: in short, what we had was
nominalism. Artworks merely had to ring
the appropriate bell to set the Pavlovian
critics slavering for interpretation…

NB: some advice on deconstructing
current critical terminology: simply
replace “not” for “post”, so that
post-modern, post-conceptual and
post-ironic become not new, not clever
and not funny. The Guardian

Finally, art buyers are not spared. Art Auction World Under a Shadow. A contemptuous book apparently written under a pseudonym by a renowned Italian art dealer says that the art and antiques world is rife with fakery and is dominated by rip-off artists having their way with gullible collectors. The author is able to explain methods of fakery in a manner which experts say is accurate and shows the sophisticated familiarity he claims. Continental art dealers, in a state of shock, have either offered unconvincing rebuttals or refused to comment. The Times of London

Morten Kringelbach, a Danish neuroscientist researching emotions with functional MRI scanning (a topic of which I have tried to keep abreast here in FmH) at Oxford, keeps a bilingual website in Danish and English including a weblog and a compilation of his own science writing. He’s just mentioned FmH in an article about weblogging, “Journey to the Center of the Web,” in today’s
Information, which he describes as “a highly
respected national newspaper founded in 1945 and read today primarily by
Danish academics and decisionmakers. Information is probably best
described as a cross between Le Monde and Liberation. ” Unfortunately, the article is in Danish. Is anyone aware of a web-based translation site, a la Babelfish, that handles Danish?

Life beyond 2001: “Now 83, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of the visionary
2001: A Space Odyssey, has a new forecast for the
coming century: holiday domes on the Moon; the
end of agriculture – and swimmers bred with webbed
feet and built-in snorkels. He speaks to Gyles
Brandreth.” The Telegraph

Soldier AWOL in Teenage Girl’s Closet. “A 15-year-old girl hid an AWOL
soldier in her closet for 3 weeks in an Internet-born romance kept secret from her mother
with whom she lived, the Columbus Dispatch reported.”

Call it
This Year’s Models: “Rockers Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett
are teaming with scribe-producer John Mankiewicz (Level Nine
) to
create an hourlong WB dramedy about four fashionistas turned rock stars.

Imagine Television and 20th Century Fox Television will produce the
skein, which revolves around a band of former models who, in their new
careers as musicians, find themselves getting into a variety of sticky
situations. Costello will write an original song for each episode.” Variety

Bush spells trouble for economy, tech policy . ‘Bush’s fiscal proposals would abandon responsibility and exacerbate class
divisions. His technology policy — which amounts to asking “How high?”
when some tech executives say “Jump” — ignores a host of deeply
troubling issues that will be at the core of the future economy and society.’ San Jose Mercury News

Bush spells trouble for economy, tech policy . ‘Bush’s fiscal proposals would abandon responsibility and exacerbate class
divisions. His technology policy — which amounts to asking “How high?”
when some tech executives say “Jump” — ignores a host of deeply
troubling issues that will be at the core of the future economy and society.’ San Jose Mercury News

Bush spells trouble for economy, tech policy . ‘Bush’s fiscal proposals would abandon responsibility and exacerbate class
divisions. His technology policy — which amounts to asking “How high?”
when some tech executives say “Jump” — ignores a host of deeply
troubling issues that will be at the core of the future economy and society.’ San Jose Mercury News

The future, according to Palm Computing Geek.com

The right to bear arms?? Soldiers arrested for robbing McDonalds commando-style

“A Parkman (Maine) man pleaded guilty Wednesday in
Piscataquis County Superior Court to trying to kill his son because
of the man’s sexual preference for animals.” Bangor News

Bush spells trouble for economy, tech policy . ‘Bush’s fiscal proposals would abandon responsibility and exacerbate class
divisions. His technology policy — which amounts to asking “How high?”
when some tech executives say “Jump” — ignores a host of deeply
troubling issues that will be at the core of the future economy and society.’ San Jose Mercury News

Psychedelic Room Helps Dementia Patients. “…Psychologists are reaching back to the psychedelic and ‘mind expanding’
1960s and updating research on sensory deprivation with the hope of offering relief to
people suffering from this type of dementia.

What looks like a modern art exhibit is in fact a room that enhances mental stimulation for
people with dementia. Colored lights, a giant butterfly, and a tube filled with bubbles are just
some of the objects that fill the space.” brain.com

Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking – Culture Chemistry and Consequences. “Alcohol is a symbolic vehicle
for identifying, describing, constructing and manipulating cultural
systems, values, interpersonal relationships, behavioural norms and
expectations. Choice of beverage is rarely a matter of personal taste.” The ethnography of the “shared chemical daydream.”

We need a Constitutional Right to Vote in Presidential Elections . Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University Michael Dorf proposes we begin to seek a constitutional amendment. Recall you didn’t vote for President, you voted for a slate of electors pledged to vote for the candidate of your choice. If you live in Florida, and likely in many other places as well, you may not have even done that, even if you think you cast a vote. [via Looka!]

She’ll “Go Down” in History; or: “Yours Was Yum”: “The famous British tabloid press has tracked down a London woman whose lewd e-mail exchange with a
boyfriend was circulated to millions around the world like a virus.” Wired Some dismissed it as a grand hoax but then ate their words (no pun intended). The Register. And the admiration quotient is running high.

One writer’s opinion of The Best Science Books of the Year The Times of London And another’s. The Independent

Neural basis for self-control found?

Study Reveals How Antidepressants Work… in rats, at least: “In a study conducted in rats, regular use of antidepressants

promoted the growth of new cells in the hippocampus, an area

of the brain where cells are known to waste away in people

who are depressed. The hippocampus plays a role in learning,

memory and mood.” It’s a well-kept secret, but we’ve been using medications to treat mood disorders for half a century or more, and we don’t know how they work. I’m not sure this study changes that.

2 Killed by Violence Counselor on Midtown Street, Police Say. “A domestic violence counselor walked up to his estranged
girlfriend on a crowded Midtown street yesterday,
fatally shot the man she was with and then opened fire on
her, killing her with a point-blank shot to her forehead as
she lay wounded, the police said.” New York Times Addendum: a friend from New York writes me that the shooter walked up to two policemen, announced he would shoot himself and did so before they could act. He is in critical condition.

Wonder weed: “The first complete DNA sequence for a plant
could have more impact than its human
equivalent… Its genome is tiny – the human genome is thirty
times larger – but contains the genetic secrets of all flowering
plants.” New Scientist

The Real Thing: Democracy as a Contact Sport “Why
are you using a public library to promote a junk food product?” Common Dreams [via Robot Wisdom]

Explorers Determine Source of Amazon high in Peruvian Andes. The origins of the mighty river have been sought for centuries. As explorational feats become fewer and far between, they nonetheless remain exciting…

U.S. Approves PET Scans for Wide Range of Cancers. Great news. HCFA’s move essentially moves PET scanning from an investigational to a therapeutic tool. By allowing Medicare reimbursement for its use, a new era in medical imaging opens.

Panel Says Estrogen a Cancer Agent. “Estrogen, the so-called female
hormone, should be listed as a known cancer-causing agent, government advisers said on
Friday.”

Solar Tantrums Could Last Two More Years; Space Telescopes Feel Pain. “An 11-year cycle of solar tantrums expected to peak during the summer of 2000 has so far
been weaker than anticipated, but forecasters cautioned that the worst could still be ahead
— way ahead.

Meanwhile, scientists operating space telescopes have been puzzled by unexpected gusts of
solar radiation. But scientists are seizing the opportunity to use the orbiting observatories’
science instruments to study the brief, mysterious waves of energy that have buffeted the
crafts without warning.” space.com

Can Hubble’s Replacement Succeed? “NASA’s Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) is being revamped as
engineers wrestle with cost and technology issues to keep the $1 billion observatory on track
for launch before 2010.

The overhaul includes shrinking the NGST’s primary mirror diameter.” space.com

Report: Hillary Clinton Agrees to $8 Million Book Deal. More double standard in action. We just got finished raking Newt Gingrich over the coals for something similar, but the Senate, unlike the House, is not bound by the same ethical guidelines, and even if it were, Ms Clinton would not be subject to them until her Jan. 3 arrival on the Senate floor. For Simon & Schuster to make back this investment, the book would have to sell considerably better than, say, the last Harry Potter volume. Smacks of corporate charity to me.

Ten Passed Technologies: the elegance and beauty of technologies gone by. MIT Tech Review

Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne. Pooh and his fellow adventurers are rife with unrecognized neurodevelopmental and psychospcial problems. Many could benefit from mental health treatment. Canadian Medical Association Journal

Researchers Document Brain Damage Linked to Child Abuse And Neglect. One theory of the host of symptoms that follow an early history of abuse gives primacy to the idea that traumatic, as opposed to nontraumatic, memories are encoded and stored differently. Now, a spate of research shows direct effects on the developing brain of the trauma victim.

U. Illinois professor finds correlation between soup and personality

Who owns fandom? “Independent Web
sites devoted to
pop culture icons
like “The X-Files”
and “Star Trek”
used to flourish on
the Net. Now
they’re an
endangered
species.” Salon

Thanks to David Brake for pointing me to this: Cancer diary man dies. “In China, a cancer sufferer who became a
literary sensation after publishing a
controversial diary of his last months on the
Internet, has died in a Shanghai hospital.

The death of Lu Youqing, 37, was reported on
the same Shanghai-based website which had
chronicled the last months of his life.” BBC

The Journal of the American Medical Association receives a letter from jail. Boston Globe

Double chip speed: The inventor of the world’s smallest transistor suggests that Moore’s Law may not be dead yet. Many were claiming we were nearing the limits of increasing chip power achieved by shrinking components. New Scientist

Gene mutation could increase life span in humans. It’s been done in fruit flies, and we have the same gene, whimsically named “I’m not dead yet.” It works by restricting calorie absorption on a cellular level. Better news yet: the fruit flies upheld their quality of life to the end, maintaining their enthusiasm for the fruit fly’s complex courtship rituals. Nando Times

Another reason to eat your sushi (as if we needed one…)

Why some people just can’t seem to pay attention.

Chronic alcoholism has long been associated with neuropsychological deficits.

These deficits include an inability to maintain attention.

A recent study examined the cerebral basis of involuntary attention shifting in alcoholics and social drinkers.

Alcoholics seem to be more sensitive to task-irrelevant stimuli.

Alcoholics that begin to drink heavily in their teens seem to be particularly susceptible. Eurekalert