Sobering thought: “Rowdy drinkers can’t blame their violent behaviour on alcohol,
say Canadian researchers who have found that drinkers can
‘sober up’ if offered a small reward. The findings suggest that
being intoxicated is no defence if someone commits a crime.” But, on the other hand, even water makes you stupid. New Scientist

G. Gordon Liddy, on trial for defamation of Ida Wells, a Democratic National Committee secretary, advances the theory that John Dean masterminded the Watergate break-in to retrieve photos of his future wife Maureen. He claims her pictures were part of a packet of photos of call-girls used to set up liaisons in nearby apartments for visitors to the DNC, and were kept in Wells’ desk. Liddy claims he committed the break-in under the misconception that it was, as has been commonly understood, about bugging the DNC in support of the Nixon re-election effort, and that he only found out the true rationale for the break-in years later when he was told about the photographs by “a disbarred attorney and convicted felon with a history of mental illness,” Phillip Mackin Bailley.

‘ “I know he hates my husband but I know on some level he’s
trying to lessen his culpability and stupidity for the Watergate
break-in and to get even with my husband for exposing all of
the criminal acts in the Nixon White House,” (Maureen) Dean said
in what she described as her first interview on the subject in
10 years.’ Boston Globe

This is a bizarre theory from one of the strangest characters on the American scene, but is it really any more implausible than the commonly accepted theory of the break-in? Coverage of this defamation trial is the first I’ve heard of this zaniness but he and Dean have apparently been battling it out for awhile now. Here’s a Google search on “Liddy AND ‘Maureen Dean’ AND call-girl”.

Salon.com Radio launches March 1 on Public Radio International affiliates. “Each week, Salon.com Radio will take the
wry, opinionated personality of Salon.com
to the airwaves. Hosted by Stephan Cox,
the one-hour program will feature stories,
interviews and commentary on current
events, technology, arts and culture, with
reporting and interviews by Salon.com‘s
writers and editors.” How will it differ from, say, All Things Considered on NPR (except insofar as it is only one hour a week)?

“When You Get an Email Petition, Think Delete“. I’ve usually just signed them and passed them on if I agree with them, but this columnist makes a coherent argument that it’s largely a waste of your time. Chicago Tribune

Peggy Kamuf, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at USC, describes the witchhunt by a freelance reporter for Salon and, subsequently, a US News and World Reports columnist, who couldn’t even begin to understand the line of argument she was making in her lecture ‘The End of Reading.’ In the lecture, she tried to describe the contributions literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory could make to the neurologically-based science of reading and reading disorders, expanding our perspective on the interiority of the reading experience rather than just focusing on its externals. She was described by her detractors as making a 45-minute rant about the violence done by parents’ reading aloud to their children. She links to the text of her lecture, the Salon article and the USN&WR writeup, and her responses to both. Here, admittedly taken out of context, is the offending passage of her lecture:

The common notion of reading
as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is,
reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of
reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s
reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where
this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the
letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted.
With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all
possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we
have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of
the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all
supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading.

Some might suggest that, with prose like that, Prof. Kamuf set herself up for a hysterical misreading! But it’s no more lurid than much to be found in the psychoanalytic literature, for example, and far more comprehensible than much contemporary literary criticism, IMHO.

Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold: “The growing power and brutality of Colombia’s paramilitary forces have become the chief concern of international human rights groups
and, increasingly, Colombian and U.S. officials who say the 8,000-member private army might pose the biggest obstacle to peace in the
country’s decades-old civil conflict.

This massacre, the largest of 23 mass killings attributed to the paramilitaries this month, comes as international human rights groups push
for the suspension of U.S. aid to the Colombian armed forces until the military shows progress on human rights. The armed forces, the
chief beneficiary of the $1.3 billion U.S. anti-drug assistance package known as Plan Colombia, deny using the paramilitaries as a shadow
army against leftist guerrillas, turning a blind eye to their crimes or supporting them with equipment, intelligence and troops.” Washington Post

A Phoenix New Times reporter scores An Exclusive Interview With the Preserves Arsonist, and an Arizona Republic editorial is roundly critical, asking Where’s The Outcry Over These Arsons?