“They are unique and frightening…” Found: 2 Planetary Systems. Result: Astronomers Stunned. “Astronomers
have discovered two more
planetary systems in the universe, and
they appear to bear little or no
resemblance to each other or to the
solar system.

In one of the systems, a Sun-like star is
accompanied by a massive planet and an even larger object
17 times as massive as Jupiter. If this whopper is a planet, it
is the largest ever detected, defying current theory.
Scientists suspect that it could be a dim failed star or a type
of astronomical object that has never been observed before.

In the other system, two planets of more normal size are
orbiting a small star. But their orbits are anything but normal.
The pair of planets are locked in resonant orbits, moving in
synchrony around the star with orbital periods of 61 and 30
days; the inner planet goes around twice for each orbit of
the outer one.” New York Times

“What Questions Have Disappeared?” John Brockman, a New York literary agent and writer who runs The Edge, the stimulating online intellectual salon (“To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves”) poses his annual question to a wide group of distinguished respondents.

Thank you to R Mark Woods (of the excellent weblog Wood’s Lot) who let me know that the Galbraith article is from The American Prospect and can be found here. Too new to have been indexed by the search engines, I suppose, although I don’t really understand all the arcana of what they do and don’t discern.

As it turns out, the article is not by John Kenneth Galbraith but by James K. Galbraith. Information about the author is here; he’s a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. I recall somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory that this may be John Kenneth’s son “Jamie”; does anyone know? In any case, nice to have someone so feisty on Dubya’s home turf.

I’m going back and editing the original blink to correct the misattribution and also to remove the full text of the article from my weblog in favor of the link, as the usual (“This article may not be resold,
reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind
without prior written permission from the author.”) copyright notice appears at the bottom.

The Kumbh Mela starts today in Allahabad. This confluence of religious pilgrims, which occurs in each of four places in India (Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik) every 12 years or so (on a schedule determined by the position of the planet Jupiter in the sky), is expected to draw more than 30 million souls, the largest gathering of humanity ever seen on the planet. As one weblogger put it, “Eat your heart out, Burning Man.” Heck, eat your heart out, Woodstock! I was at the last-but-one Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, at the headwaters of the Ganges River, in 1975. That had a mere 10 million attendees, I’d venture to say 99.99% of them from the Indian subcontinent (back before the days of “ecotravel”) and most of those renunciant sadhus. However, material souls plan to seek salvation as well at the upcoming gathering. A British tour agency confirms that it is bringing in <a href=”http://www.timesofindia.com/today/09home3.htm
“>some of the biggest showbiz stars [Times of India, via Robot Wisdom]
for the experience, including the ubiquitous Madonna. Indian tour operators are making the most of the festival, selling it to international travellers as the quintessence of the mystical East. Plan now for 2013.

NSA abandons wondrous stuff. This is being widely blogged, because it’s fascinating. What a group of astronomers found after they took occupancy of an abandoned National Security Agency listening post in backcountry North Carolina.

I’m too proud and aloof to suggest that you nominate me for the 2001 Bloggies, but consider nominating some of the nice folks in the black box over in the lefthand column…

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Eminem’s latest outrage: ‘Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers LP” was
“probably the most repugnant record of the year.” So says
Michael Greene, president of the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences, home of the Grammy.

Yet Greene can hardly contain his glee over the fact that the
gay-bashing, misogynist rapper was nominated last week for
four Grammys, including the prestigious album of the year
award…. Now, with the hand-picked selection of
Eminem’s hate-filled record as album of
the year, …the
once-respectable albeit feckless Grammy has transformed
itself into just another trend-chasing music awards show.

The predictable outcry accompanying Eminem’s
nominations virtually guarantees the Grammy telecast —
undoubtedly featuring a performance by the rapper — will be
another ratings hit.’ Salon

The crime of my life: Salon contributor Charles Taylor dissects the modern mystery scene and tells us which books got him through a particularly tough year (and not just because of election and recessionary fears). His tastes run to both the genteel British genre and the hard-boiled American writers.

Corporate Democracy; Civic Disrespect: More incisive thinking on the meaning of the theft of the election, the peculiar perils of American “forgetting,” why Dubya is not the “President-elect”, the tribalism of American politics, and a potential viable agenda for the Democratic Party in the new, post-2000 Americn political landscape from James K. Galbraith, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. He lays out important priorities progressive-thinking people should have, to prevent Dubya’s co-optation of the political process from having an enduring impact. This was originally sent to me by email and misattributed to John Kenneth Galbraith, now 92, who I seem to recall may be James K.’s father (anybody know?). The American Prospect

“…Some of Paul W. Ewald’s best thinking started with an attack of
diarrhea on a field trip to Kansas.” Biologist says germs, not genes, to blame for most human ailments. The time may be ripe for a renascence of infectious disease approaches to many ‘unsolved’ illnesses, after several decades in which the field has been eclipsed by advances in other specialties in medicine. Cervical cancer, Burkitt’s lymphoma and peptic ulcer disease have all been accepted as having associations with infectious agents, and Ewald says in his new book, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments (2000) that the ‘best’ is yet to come. In my own field, I’ve recently cited E. Fulller Torrey’s speculation on the infectious etiology of schizophrenia. Nando Times

<a href=”
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32//”>Photoshop for free? Not quite— but getting closer: GIMP — the GNU
Image Manipulation Program — is a freely distributed piece of open source
software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image
composition and image authoring. Recently ported to Windows; it’s to the Windows download which clicking on the link above will send you.

<a href=”
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32//”>Photoshop for free? Not quite— but getting closer: GIMP — the GNU
Image Manipulation Program — is a freely distributed piece of open source
software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image
composition and image authoring. Recently ported to Windows; it’s to the Windows download which clicking on the link above will send you.

<a href=”
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32//”>Photoshop for free? Not quite— but getting closer: GIMP — the GNU
Image Manipulation Program — is a freely distributed piece of open source
software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image
composition and image authoring. Recently ported to Windows; it’s to the Windows download which clicking on the link above will send you.

Sex: The Annabel Chong Story “Annabel Chong (is) a porn star who
infamously took part in a film in which she had sex with 251
men. She later took part in a documentary about the
experience: it turns out she was gang-raped years before she
made the film. A disturbing read, and not for the easily offended”, says the Guardian weblog in pointing to this portrait. “Sex is a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film,
whose subject comes across as a complicated
young woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful,
damaged and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one
of the least erotic things you’ll ever see,” says the Spike article.

American Memory Deficit Disorder “Why are Americans so quick to forget even the most
egregious political outrages, when the rest of the world
seems to have no trouble holding grudges for centuries?” Abuse of the political process — most recently the Supreme Court’s underhandedness in giving the election to the illegitimate son, or Dubya’s lies about his drunk driving conviction or his military service, which lost him not one percentage point in popularity — seems predicated on the confidence that the public will forget soon enough and ‘get over it.’ “When no one remembers what you did wrong, being American means never having to say you’re sorry.” Mother Jones

Dear Mr. Bush: An open letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to the President-elect cautions that U.S. bullishness is bad for American and world security. “…the post-Cold War period ushered in hopes that are now faded. Over the course of the past decade, the United States has continued to operate along an ideological track identical to the one it followed during the Cold War — but now without a cold war…Isn’t is amazing that disarmament move further along during the last phase of the Cold War than during the period after its end? And isn’t that because U.S. leadership has been unable to adjust to the new European reality…(which) has placed Europe on the world scene as a new, independent and powerful player(?)” Washington Post

And some further advice about Losing before you start: “George Bush is undoubtedly about to embark on a stupid and
disastrous war in Latin America.” Guardian

<a href=”
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32//”>Photoshop for free? Not quite— but getting closer: GIMP — the GNU
Image Manipulation Program — is a freely distributed piece of open source
software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image
composition and image authoring. Recently ported to Windows; it’s to the Windows download which clicking on the link above will send you.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs may prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Here’s a Google search on the generic name of one of the most popular and effective, atorvastatin, AND (dementia OR cognition OR cognitive OR Alzheimer).

Israeli critics join Palestinians and human rights groups in condemning pinpoint killings [via Robot Wisdom]

Baudrillard Sees Dead People: “No one ages less gracefully than a hipster
past his prime — unless it’s a prophet of
technological revolution, once his vision reaches
the sell-by date. Roll them into one, and it’s a
miserable spectacle all around. The books Jean
Baudrillard started publishing in France about
thirty years ago ran selected concepts from Marx
and Freud on an operating system cobbled
together from Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler.” Feed

Autoimmunity May Come From Confluence Of Normal Events. A new study elucidates the process of autoimmune disease, in which components of the immune system meant to defend against invaders turn on our own tissues.

Honey May Prevent Recurring Tumors AP

What Controls Nerve Growth?. “Impelled by the tragic plight of
paralyzed victims of spinal-cord
injuries, scientists move ever
closer to unlocking the mysteries
of nerve development and
regeneration.” The molecular mechanisms that guide axon growth are remarkably preserved throughout the animal world, so that research on simple species can bear enormous fruit with regard to humans.

Generation Statistics: ‘Trademarks have become so ingrained in our psyches that we
need hear only a few notes of a jingle or see the colourful swirl
of a logo and we are automatically drawn into their world,
reminded of how thirsty we really aren’t or how necessary a new
shirt is what we wear or drink defines us, as people. We are
whoring and de-valuing ourselves, but in exchange we get to be
a walking advertisement. But that’s okay because, hey, it’s
SHINY while we maintain that we have the ultimate decision, as
far as they’re concerned, they’ve already sold the shirt.’ Spark

A reporter’s coverage of the Pagan Federation Conference 2000 in Croydon (UK) in November found the witches, warlocks, druids and vampires “frighteningly clean and well-behaved.” Fortean Times

Blather: The Alan Moore Interview. In-depth musings of the master of the “graphic novel.”

America’s Tribes: ” In the past 40 years, the Democratic and Republican parties in the US have almost
entirely switched places. But a longer-lasting contest underlies this strange
history,” says Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation in Washington
“—a struggle between two tribal coalitions, the socially-minded Puritans of the
north and the colonial gentlemen of the south.” Ethnography, not ideology, is the way to understand American politican partisanship in this fascinating incisive essay. Prospect

The Bastardization of the ‘Masterpiece’: “…(I)f there are no ahistorical standards and no objective
criteria for assessing superior achievement, then every form
of cultural activity can claim masterpieces, which then
freely proliferate. All that can be done is to display those
varied tastes with appreciative acclaim. This can lead to
expanded horizons but also contracted perspective.” New York Times

The French Paradox. “They eat all the
butter, cream, foie gras, pastry and cheese that their hearts desire, and yet
their rates of obesity and heart disease are much lower than ours. The French
eat three times as much saturated animal fat as Americans do, and only a third
as many die of heart attacks.” All sorts of hypotheses have been proposed. Curiosity about this is stimulating a sort of culture war. Salon

Scooby-Doo, How Could You? The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) laments the transformation of the Scooby-Doo crew from skeptical debunking to credulity. The writer is “stunned, shocked and appalled” as a new episode of the show actually portrays paranormal events as real!

No longer do the intrepid investigators
prove that the paranormal is all a ruse. In their latest
incarnation, Daphne is now a TV reporter for an
Entertainment Tonight-type show. She goes to New Orleans to look into reported
hauntings, bringing her old friends along. She and the other members are once
again beset by a ghost of a pirate, as well as assorted zombies, werewolves and
vampires. But this time, when Fred and Velma present possible rational
explanations for the weird events, they are pooh-poohed by Daphne, who goes so
far as to tell Fred “you’re not a skeptic, you’re in denial.” When Velma suggests
that these horrifying apparitions are really humans behind masks, she is ridiculed.
Obviously the new storywriters are parodying the show’s past, but at what
expense? At the end, we see that there really are ghosts, zombies, werewolves
and vampires running amok. It’s all such a sad betrayal of the original show’s
glorious skeptical tradition.

Mood Menders. Recent research on the molecular mechanisms of antidepressants begins to circle around the first advance in understanding the nerobiology of depression and its treatment since the “low-serotonin” theory of the last decade and a half, linking it to the leaps and bounds being made in the understanding of the neurobiology of memory and the effects of trauma as well.

‘In the 1970s and 1980s, the German Democratic Republic’s
secret police – the Stasi – frequently labelled suspected
dissidents with highly radioactive chemicals so that agents
wearing concealed Geiger counters could keep tabs on them,
according to a paper by Klaus Becker, a leading radiation
protection expert.

It has long been suspected that the Stasi used radiation as a
weapon. Becker reports that “unusual non-medical X-ray
machines” in former political prisons could have been used for
covertly irradiating inmates.

Large doses of X-rays are thought to be behind the deaths
from cancer of a number of prominent dissidents.’ New Scientist

Is ozone responsible for the asthma epidemic in children? The evidence mounts that smog damages the lungs of growing infants and causes asthma. A recent study from UCDavis confirms a widely suspected correlation. The increasing incidence of asthma has been a troubling and puzzling phenomenon of public health. New Scientist

Happy perihelion! The earth was at its annual closest point to the sun this morning at 5:00 EST. The sunlight falling on the earth’s surface was around 7% more intense than it is at the height of the summer.

Microsoft, Starbucks in wireless venture. Their coffee shops around the world will be endowed with wireless network links allowing customers to access local arts, entertainment and shopping information. Starbucks is also launching a system to let customers pre-order via cellphone on the way in to their coffee bar. Infoworld

Accidental e-mail violates 12,000 patients’ confidentiality. California insurer sends the names of patients receiving treatment for mental conditions to the wrong doctors, blames “computer glitch.” San Jose Mercury

Celebrities: Enough, already “After a year of
tales of their addictions, affairs and (optional) clothing choices, the rest of us need a break.” Philadelphia Inquirer

Ashcroft is pro-privacy, defied FBI on encryption export restrictions and opposed FBI-supported 1997 bill that would have mandated a “key-recovery” scheme. “Working for him is what made me realize I could be a [Republican
Party] civil libertarian,” said one former advisor. The Register

As if you hadn’t noticed: The Net is a commercial failure: study. “In spite of heroic efforts by vast armies of e-merchants to pervert the
Net into some commercial Valhalla, it remains primarily a tool for
research (albeit commercial in many cases) and for socializing,
according to a recent study by the Pew Internet Project.” The Register

Girl sues friend for $5m after saving her life. The 17-year-old was severely injured at 11 when she pushed her friend out of the path of an oncoming truck. Now she blames her friend’s parents for failing to “supervise (their daughter) properly, or instruct her on how to cross a road safely.” National Post

Reducing the entire universe to the level of the complete idiot? Washington Post

Complete List of Grammy Nominations for the 43rd annual awards ceremony to take place in LA on 2-21-01. AP

Elephant Tramples Man And Keeps the Corpse. The animal pulled the man from a tree after he had climbed up to escape a rampaging herd, breaking the man’s legs. Enraged by villagers trying to extricate the man from its grasp, the elephant trampled him to death and has refused to part with the corpse for more than two weeks. Reuters

[via Slashdot]: Does 2001 mean monoliths to you? Apparently it does to someone in Seattle, joining a gleeful tradition of anonymous art in that city. Seattle Times

Alarm over NATO uranium deaths. The cancer deaths of six Italian soldiers who served with the NATO peacekeeping force in the Balkans raises concern about the use of depleted uranium weapons, valued for their armor-piercing capabilities, in that theater. A heavy metal almost twice the density of lead and only mildly radioactive in its native state, it turns on impact with a solid object into a burning vapor creating radioactive dust. US and British military officials have always denied the level of alarm about DU, which began with suspicions it was implicated in Gulf War Syndrome.

“We’ve always known
that it was a danger
only in absolutely
exceptional
circumstances like, for
example, picking up a
fragment with a hand
on which there was an
open wound, while in
normal circumstances it
isn’t dangerous at all.

But now we’re starting
to have a justified fear
that things aren’t that
simple,” worries Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. BBC

Arafat ‘accepts’ US peace plan. One more upswing on the roller-coaster-ride to hopes for Middle East peace. Arafat reserves the right for his approval to be subject to his own “interpretations and principles.” Ehud Barak, briefed on Arafat’s response, has gone on record to state his doubts that Clinton can make progress in brokering a peace before the end of his term of office. Barak called an urgent meeting of his top ministers, whose rhetoric has been increasingly confrontational. The Israeli deputy defense minister states Israel will continue its policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders involved in attacks on Israelis.

The Typing of the Dead: I’m not a gamer but this still caught my attention: ‘If you think you’ve seen everything there is to
see in gaming, you’re wrong – if you haven’t
tried out The Typing of the Dead, that is.
Sega has created possibly the weirdest game
ever, a title that’s so unexpected it defies logic
when one tries and figure out the frame of
mind of the individual at Sega of Japan who
said “Hey, we’ll make a typing game, and
make it fun.” The Typing of the Dead is the
kind of game that, like Dance Dance
Revolution and Beatmania makes people
look on as you play, and with good reason:
you’re killing zombies with precise key
strokes! Who wouldn’t be intrigued at the
prospect.’

Capitol Hill Blue: Civil Rights Groups Challenge Ashcroft
Selection, “demanding that Democratic senators abandon the tradition of supporting former colleagues
and vote against the nomination.” Ashcroft (whose recent distinction, you’ll recall, was to lose his
reelection bid for his Missouri Senate seat to an opponent who had been killed in a plane crash before
the election) “has drawn opposition for his anti-abortion views and for leading a drive to defeat the
nomination of a black Missouri Supreme Court judge, Ronnie White, to the federal bench.”

In a
related story, a researcher in Ashcroft’s home state finds that he has “…actively cultivated <a href=”
http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm”>ties to white supremacists and extreme hate groups.” John Hickey,
executive director of the Missouri Citizen Education Fund, singles out Ashcroft’s praise of the quarterly
Southern Partisan, which the New Republic characterizes as the “leading journal of the neo-
Confederacy movement,” for over 20 years serving up “a gumbo of racist apologies.”

To each their own: Russia looks for funding to build a tunnel link to the U.S., while France seeks financial backing to allow President Jospin to roll the workweek back to 35 hours.

Passersby may have ignored dead woman. “Commuters may have stepped over a woman killed by an escalator in Calgary after assuming she was intoxicated…. An anonymous caller had told police a woman had passed out there.

The paramedics found Ms. Turning Robe’s scarf and hair snarled in the escalator. Police believe she died of strangulation
and head injuries. National Post

Researcher Challenges a Host of Psychological Studies. “If scientists do not know whether they are dealing with
elephants or mice, …it becomes anyone’s
guess what small and large really mean.” New York Times

Dysfunction in the brain’s ‘hub’ in the earliest stages of schizophrenia: “A new brain imaging study from the Institute of Psychiatry shows for the first time that the thalamus, the brain’s main sensory filter
or ‘hub’, is smaller than normal from the earliest stages of schizophrenia. The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry
in January, may explain why people with schizophrenia experience confusion during their illness.

The thalamus is the area where information is received and relayed to other areas of the brain. It is of particular interest in
schizophrenia because of the role it plays in processing information. The thalamus receives information via the senses, which is then
filtered and passed to the correct regions of the brain for processing. People with schizophrenia often have difficulties in processing
information properly and as a result may end up with an information overload in some areas of the brain.” EurekAlert

As people who have read some of my earlier comments know, I think some schizophrenia involves a primary information processing deficit…since I think it’s really a wastebasket term for a collection of disparate diseases. Because the study populations are, from this point of view, heterogeneous, it’s been difficult to find any important defining characteristics in most studies of “schizophrenics.” There will be “brain findings” in a subset of any schizophrenic population, I’m fond of saying. And it’s a further obfuscating factor that it’s difficult to find medication-naive schizophrenics in this day and age, and the medications used to treat psychosis have been such heavy-hitters that the brain may take a hit from them. If this finding about the thalamus is as universal as claimed, it could prove very important. The abstract of the article, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, is here.

Obscene Interiors: “Amateur porn photography is one of the rare instances where
everyday people expose their naked bodies to the public. Seeing your
neighbors nude my be shocking, I, however, am more frequently disturbed by
the gross display of amateur interior design found in these photos.

‘Oh my God! How could they do that? Those curtains are so wrong, I
can’t believe this stuff is allowed on the net.’ Yes, it can be pretty
hardcore stuff. I’ve gathered a random selection of male amateur porn and
personal ad photographs and asked a professional interior designer to join me
in a lively critique of these truly obscene Interiors. (No need to shield your
virginal eyes, the nude figures have been laboriously obscured.)”

New York’s Great Outdoors: “Since 1998, billboards covering entire buildings
have sprung up all over Manhattan, transforming
the Big Apple into something out of Blade
Runner. So last fall, about 35 volunteers
scouted out Manhattan’s major thru-ways, taking
notes on the outdoor advertising. Thus was
born New York’s Great Outdoors, our rough guide
to Manhattan ad creep.” For New York culture jammers, and an inspiration to others to organize against ad creep everywhere. Stay Free!

New Year’s Day History, Traditions, and Customs. Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a January 1st article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article; especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond watching the bowl games and making resolutions. A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point:

“Traditionally, it was thought that one
could affect the luck they would have
throughout the coming year by what they
did or ate on the first day of the year. For
that reason, it has become common for
folks to celebrate the first few minutes of
a brand new year in the company of
family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night
after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the
first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or
bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor
happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also
thought to bring luck. Many cultures
believe that anything in the shape of a ring
is good luck, because it symbolizes
“coming full circle,” completing a year’s
cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe
that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will
bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming
black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by
either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes
have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and
thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes
prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is
consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also
considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper
currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on
New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called
hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones.
After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors.
First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat,
dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also
performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage
proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Ray Bruman’s List of Weird and Disgusting Foods. “I have a theory that many (all?) cultures invent a food that is weird or disgusting to
non-initiates as a sort of a ‘marker. ‘ The kids start out hating it, but at some point they cross
over and perpetuate it (perpetrate it) on the next generation. Then they nudge each other when
foreigners gasp.” Listed geographically, with a glossary of explanations attached.

NYPD Faces Challenges as Cops Leave. Police are demoralized about the pressure to maintain the crime rates at their low ebb and the blame they will garner as statistics inevitably rise again. Leaving the force in demoralization will hasten the upswing. AP

9 Million Gaining Upgraded Benefit for Mental Care. In a significant victory for mental health advocates, President Clinton acted by executive order to give federal employees improved mental health benefits in parity with those for physical ills. Both Bush and Gore endorsed the concept of parity, currently enacted in the laws of 32 of the 50 states. But the laws include so many restrictions and loopholes that equal coverage is illusory. A thorough, long analysis of the issues. New York Times

“The statistics are mind-boggling…Don’t expect any drastic changes…” Addicted to Guns. New York Times op-ed page commentator Bob Herbert finds the outpouring of outrage and grief over the Wakefield rampage abit incongruous with our societal fascination with and marketing of gun violence. “…a society hopelessly addicted to gun violence, and in deep denial about its hideous consequences.”

U.S. Signs Treaty for World Court to Try Atrocities. Powerful American endorsement of the treaty establishing a permanent international criminal tribunal by President Clinton, despite its not being legally binding without unlikely Senate ratification, comes in defiance of the Pentagon and Republicans and poses a diplomatic challenge for the incoming administration. The US’ signing, as well as a last-minute decision of Israel to add its approval (seen as a testament to Clinton’s influence), brings the number of signatories to 139. 27 have already ratified the treaty, of the 60 necessary to bring the tribunal into existence.

Senior advisers to Mr. Bush, like many Republicans in
Congress, have strongly opposed the treaty. One of them is
Mr. Bush’s selection for secretary of defense, Donald H.
Rumsfeld, who joined 11 other prominent retired policy
makers last month in signing a letter warning that “American
leadership in the world could be the first casualty” of the
tribunal.

New York Times