Measuring brain activity in people eating chocolate offers new clues about how the body becomes addicted: “Using positron emission tomography scans to measure brain activity in people eating chocolate, a team of U.S. and Canadian neuroscientists

believe they have identified areas of the brain that may underlie addiction and eating disorders.

…(I)ndividuals’ ratings of the pleasantness of

eating chocolate were associated with increased blood flow in areas of the brain, particularly in the orbital frontal cortex and midbrain, that are also activated by

addictive drugs such as cocaine.

…(T)he brain regions activated

by eating chocolate when it is rewarding are quite different from those areas that are activated by eating chocolate when it is perceived as aversive (as a result of

having eaten too much chocolate).” EurekAlert!

Parents May Influence How Child Relates to Peers: “Despite recent claims that peers are

more important than parents in youth development, a parent’s

involvement with a teenage son or daughter still influences how the

adolescent relates to his or her friends and peer group, researchers

report.” You may find this self-evident, but the idea of parental influence on the development of personality has been under siege in academic psychology.

Chicagoans Are Reading the Same Book at the Same Time: “In a radical

effort to pull an entire city away

from video screens and into the pages of

literature, Chicago officials are asking

every adult and adolescent in the city to

read the same book at the same time.

The book they have chosen is Harper Lee’s

powerfully anti-racist novel, To Kill a

Mockingbird, which won a Pulitzer Prize in

1961.” New York Times

“Palm and Handspring have both had their wireless PDA plans made

public. Details of Palm’s i705 – the successor to the VII family – and

Handspring’s Treo k180 and g180 have been posted on the Federal

Communications Commission’s Web site as part of the process

both companies must undertake to get their devices approved for

wireless use.” The Register

ACLU Action Alerts:

Oppose expanded government secrecy:

“Last year, with little debate and no public hearings, Congress

adopted an intelligence authorization bill that contained a

provision to criminalize all leaks of classified information. A

firestorm of criticism from civil libertarians, major news

organizations, academics and librarians resulted and President

Bill Clinton vetoed the bill. Unfortunately, at the request of

Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), this year’s intelligence

authorization bill may include the identical provision.

…The media often plays the crucial role of exposing

governmental misdeeds and the need for reform. To accomplish

this task, most major news outlets base many stories on classified

information.

…This provision would essentially eliminate the check

on government power that public scrutiny of government action

provides.”

Support the right to travel freely:

On July 25, 2001, the House of Representatives approved an

amendment to this year’s Treasury Appropriations Bill (H.R.

2590), offered by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), that would stop the

government from prohibiting travel to Cuba. The Senate is

expected take up a similar measure this fall. In both houses, bills

are pending to repeal the travel ban altogether – the “Bridges

to the Cuban People Act of 2001,” (S. 1017/H.R. 2138)

sponsored by Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Lincoln

Chafee (R-RI) and Reps. Jose Serrano (D-NY) and Jim Leach

(R-IA).

One-click faxing of your opinion to your representatives from ACLU’s site.

Guerrilla Ad Banner Battle Looms: “A showdown over a new piece of software that plasters unauthorized ad banners onto

websites has intensified after the company running the service, Gator.com, sued a major online trade group

that threatens to block the practice.” Wired

“If the music industry thinks it can make money charging for digital

music downloads, it can think again – punters just aren’t interested in

paying for music online.

So concludes G2, yet another subsidiary of research colossus

Gartner Group, after surveying the purchasing plans and habits of

4000 online adults.” Most just don’t use their PCs as hi-fi’s, preferring to listen to music from the comfort of their living rooms than hunched over a computer desk. No surprises there, IMHO. The Register

Court ruling puts Internet on notice:

An Australian judge yesterday threw out arguments by high-flying

London barrister Geoffrey Robertson in a decision with major

implications for publishing on the Internet.

Justice John Hedigan ruled businessman Joe Gutnick can sue US

publishing giant Dow Jones for defamation in Victoria over

money-laundering allegations.

Justice Hedigan threw out a claim that because the allegations were

published by Dow Jones on the Internet, Gutnick’s lawsuit should be

heard in the US. He ruled defamation takes place on the Internet

when a person “downloads” the offending words on their computer,

not when they are “uploaded” on the other side of the world. news.com.au

Emperor-Without-Clothes Dept. (cont’d.): Critic savages ‘pretentious’ US literati

Is the United States a nation of “gullible morons” unable to tell the difference between good literature and pretentious nonsense? Do many literary bestsellers remain unread because they are too “intellectually intimidating”, or because they are unreadable?

These are the questions prompted by a row in the literary pages of American newspapers on what constitutes good writing and whether reviewers are deliberately ignoring readable literature in favour of fashionable pretension.

Among the writers attacked are Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, E Annie Proulx and David Guterson.

The row started with the publication in the latest Atlantic Monthly of “A Reader’s Manifesto”, by Brian Myers. Subtitled “An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose”, the essay described much of the canon of modern American literature as over-praised and, in some cases, meaningless. Guardian UK

Unsettling Rapatronic Photographs, once you realize what the subject matter is. [broadly blinked]

William Buckley reframed as a liberal? Boston Globe

Review of Gareth Medway’s Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism, skeptical [as am I] of this modern ‘epidemic’: “An alternative explanation is that, by the end of the 20th century, we had supped so full of extraordinary horrors that any evil was regarded as possible, and none could be ruled out of court. Contrary to what Mr Medway states, it is not the unknown that modern believers in Satan fear, but the known. They fear that science has removed Divine purpose and meaning from the universe. Better that Satan should exist than that life should be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Telegraph UK

Principia Mathematica III: “Stephen Wolfram says he has created a new kind of science based on simple computer programs rather than equations.” The author of Mathematica now thinks we ought to scrap equation-based modelling of physical processes as inadequate to the task. Since nature apparently uses simple processes to create complexity, we can describe it with simple computer programs.

And, while we’re considering novel computer descriptions of the real world, “an international set of specifications for writing non-verbal human

communications in computer code is being drawn up by a US web

standards group… HumanMarkup Language (HumanML) will allow software engineers

to write abstract, non-verbal human communications in computer

code. This will give computer users the power to communicate their

emotions and gestures to other computer users over the internet… With HumanML, web pages could be used to express meaning to

someone who speaks an entirely different language.” New Scientist

Review of Dreaming of Cockaigne: medieval fantasies of the perfect life by Herman Pleij. Cockaigne “… is the name that people in the middle ages gave to an imagined land filled with all the things that their own lives lacked.

It is the focus of literature in many of the languages of medieval Europe; it is also the subject of a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, part of which is reproduced on the cover of Pleij’s book. Three men lie beneath a tree, one of them fast asleep, the second stretched out on his side and the third gazing beatifically into the air. Round him parade such objects as a pig with a knife in its back and an egg on legs, heading straight for the dreamer. This may have nothing to do with drugs, but the bizarreness of Bruegel’s painting seems easily worthy of them.

” Guardian UK

“I’ll be damned if I let a psychiatrist near my son”, says this Wall Street Journal editor. Shrinking to Excess: “I have a confession to make: I have a mental illness, and it is called Psychobabble Defiance Disorder. Since at this moment I am also afflicted with Ranter’s Syndrome, I intend to have my say on a topic that troubles me. No, let me put that more strongly, a topic that makes me flood the room with rage.”

A Spot of Firm Government “Criticism is becoming a minor offshoot of science fiction, even if it presents the exotic and outlandish only to upbraid such notions as imperialist. ‘We are obsessed with “barbarians”,’ Claude Rawson remarks in this erudite, passionate book”, God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945. London Review of Books

Interview with UIUC professor of “subjective well-being” New Scientist

Kyoto begins at home: ‘Although the US government refuses to endorse the Kyoto protocol, people could sign up to the treaty at an individual level, a UK environmental scientist suggests.

David Reay of the University of Edinburgh has calculated that simple lifestyle changes and home improvements could go a long way towards achieving one’s “own private Kyoto”. ‘ Nature

Body simulator keeps human kidney alive: “A research team successfully kept a human kidney alive in a machine that simulates a warm human body this weekend, a medical first that could revolutionize organ transplantation.” Nando Times

‘A trendy henna “tattoo” could cause you months of pain and discomfort, and even a lifelong allergy to a common chemical found in dyes, doctors are warning.

Numerous cases of people developing severe skin reactions days or weeks after having a temporary tattoo have been reported.’ New Scientist

Powell Will Not Attend United Nations Meeting on Racism in an official expression of our displeasure about the so-called ‘Zionism-racism equation’. In doing so, the US continues its recent trend of isolating itself from the world community. New York Times And “(r)acism only happens in the little nations”, says Tara Mack in The Guardian.

Sean Penn attacks Hollywood system: “…Penn, 41, who was at the Edinburgh Film Festival for a screening of his new film ‘The Pledge, said anyone was now capable of making a studio movie.

He told reporters he had decided to concentrate on working behind the camera after becoming dismayed at the standard of many of the directors he had worked with.

‘Truly, half the people in this room could work on that level. It takes enormous pressure off to know that if you put two thoughts into your movie, you’re already well up on them. I actually wish I had started sooner’ .” CNN

[Damning himself with faint praise, isn’t he?]

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Rush-hour traffic tied up for hours by I-5 jumper. The 26-year old woman is in critical condition in a Seattle hospital after jumping into the Lake Washington ship canal after a three-hour bridge railing dialogue with police. Interestingly, this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article does not mention that she was apparently persuaded to jump by the irate suggestions of motorists stalled by the standoff. .

This was apparently one of the most notable events while I was away from the media for the past two weeks, say the weblogs. I apologize if it’s already old, boring news to you. “A presidential milestone passed almost unnoticed Friday. For the first time in the history of televised news conferences, a president of the United States made fun of a bald person.

Ribbing the young Texas reporter for his thinning hair fits with a long pattern of Bush making others the butt of his jokes. Sometimes the comments seem playful, such as giving reporters slightly demeaning nicknames. Other times, they have a touch of malice…

Much like this prince taunting the beggars, Bush asserts a privilege to speak condescendingly to commoners in his presence. He puts them down with little jokes that they feel they have no choice but to accept.” Consortium News

“Surfing in Sagittarius — not for the fainthearted! Hubble observations have revealed huge waves sculpted in the

Red Spider Nebula. This warm and windy planetary nebula harbours one

of the hottest stars in the Universe and its powerful stellar winds generate

waves 100 billion kilometres high…” ESAIC

Dialtones (A Telesymphony) — members of the audience register their mobile phone numbers as they enter the venue. The musicians upload new ringtones to participants’ phones, and the entire symphony is played by ringing these phones. The debut is this Sunday in Linz, Austria, and I wish I were there. Downloadable .mp3 samples at this page. [via boing boing]

McDonald’s-Museum Deal Draws Mixed Reaction. Oh, but it’ll be a “nontraditional MacDonald’s.” Washington Post

Mysterious Maddening Buzzing Probed in Southwest Germany: “Hundreds of people in Germany’s southwest are being driven to distraction by a mysterious nocturnal buzzing noise — seriously enough for the local authorities to decide to investigate the matter scientifically.

Many have been complaining of racing pulse and fatigue along with a sense of excitation and uncontrollable muscle quivering during their resulting insomnia… If one were to believe the authors of the German website http://www.raum-und-zeit.de, the source of the mysterious buzzing sound in the ears of afflicted citizens is a US military project named HAARP based in Alaska.” Common Dreams via WebToday

Black Holes “It is a curious thing about the English language, that although it has a vast

vocabulary and rich idiomatic variations, it lacks words for some common and

useful ideas… The presence in English of an unnaturalized foreign word is a fair indicator of a

black hole in the language. The presence of a convenient foreign word very likely

prevents the emergence of an English equivalent.” The Vocabula Review via Abby

“Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory are on a roll.

Last week, an international team of scientists working with one of the lab’s particle accelerators announced

they had made a batch of “doubly strange” particles. Just weeks earlier, another group said it is very close to recreating the conditions of the

earliest universe.” Wired

“The Greens have got it wrong.” Matt Ridley considers Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist to be ‘probably the most

important book on the environment ever written’:

The Big Green organisations will not like it. They will accuse

Lomborg of defending Big Business, no doubt, as they did Julian

Simon. But the charge cannot stick. He has an impeccably Leftish

background and a transparent independence of mind. And he is not

complacent: “By far the majority of indicators show that mankind’s

lot has vastly improved. This does not, however, mean that

everything is good enough”. Telegraph UK

Desert Dust Kills Florida Fish: ‘New research links huge African dust clouds with the “red

tides” that kill millions of fish along the Florida coast each

year.’

Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities: “(T)he artists have gone coy. Their

dealer, who witnesses say watched the

event from a hotel suite, now claims it never happened. Either the balcony

was an elaborate hoax meant to look real, or the inverse is true: it really

happened, and the closer it comes to being found out, the more those

involved would prefer for everyone to think it was a hoax.” New York Times via Abby [Thanks, Abby, watching for interesting links for me in my absence…]

Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities: “(T)he artists have gone coy. Their

dealer, who witnesses say watched the

event from a hotel suite, now claims it never happened. Either the balcony

was an elaborate hoax meant to look real, or the inverse is true: it really

happened, and the closer it comes to being found out, the more those

involved would prefer for everyone to think it was a hoax.” New York Times via Abby [Thanks, Abby, watching for interesting links for me in my absence…]

Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities: “(T)he artists have gone coy. Their

dealer, who witnesses say watched the

event from a hotel suite, now claims it never happened. Either the balcony

was an elaborate hoax meant to look real, or the inverse is true: it really

happened, and the closer it comes to being found out, the more those

involved would prefer for everyone to think it was a hoax.” New York Times via Abby [Thanks, Abby, watching for interesting links for me in my absence…]

This guy has 50 by 30. I’ve got 47 by 49.

As pointed out at MetaFilter, if you used to have repetitive strain disorder, you won’t for long, in the world according to the shrub. American Prospect

Israel Kills Palestinian Activist

Israeli forces firing a pair of missiles with pinpoint accuracy assassinated a senior Palestinian leader today as he sat at his desk in an apartment building inhabited by several Palestinian American families…

“Pinpoint accuracy” indeed:

The U.S.-made missiles, launched from helicopters, knifed through two windows at midday and obliterated the third-floor corner office where Zibri was at work. Neighboring apartments full of Palestinian American families were splattered with shards that sprayed from windows shattered by the blast, but none of their inhabitants was reported injured. Washington Post

Breaking the language barrier: ” ‘Words you can’t say’ will be heard

more than ever on network shows as

cable lowers the bar.”

F**king with those who sit at the other end of the surveillance cameras.

“Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras.”

— NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, 27 July 1999.

[via Rebecca]

Wow! As Dan Hartung discusses at Lake Effect (he’s fully back, BTW…), the change in Google’s indexing paradigm gives precedence to weblogs. But I never expected that a Google Search on “follow” would show FmH first!

Delhi children make play of the net: “The results were startling, showing how much

children with little or no English and no

computer training at all could achieve.” BBC via RobotWisdom

A special spring ’01 issue of The Kenyon Review celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize. In addition to the dialogue between Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein discussed in this New York Times article, the issue has contributions from Seamus Heaney, Patrick White, Yeats, Beckett, Naguib Mafouz, Czeslaw Milosz… You can download a .pdf of the entire issue.

Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds: “…the basic laws of nature as understood

today may be changing slightly as the

universe ages, a surprising finding that

could rewrite physics textbooks and challenge fundamental assumptions

about the workings of the cosmos…” New York Times via Abby

Tombs Found in Mongolia Might Hold Genghis Khan — “A team searching for Genghis Khan’s elusive grave site said this week it has

discovered a walled burial ground 200 miles northeast of the Mongolian capital that may contain

the 13th century conqueror’s remains along with priceless artifacts.” Yahoo! via Abby

Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities: “(T)he artists have gone coy. Their

dealer, who witnesses say watched the

event from a hotel suite, now claims it never happened. Either the balcony

was an elaborate hoax meant to look real, or the inverse is true: it really

happened, and the closer it comes to being found out, the more those

involved would prefer for everyone to think it was a hoax.” New York Times via Abby [Thanks, Abby, watching for interesting links for me in my absence…]

Follow Me Here will be on vacation until Labor Day weekend as my family and I set off for parts unknown. Please frequent your favorite independent content provider in the meanwhile. Consider the sites in my sidebar to the left. Enjoy the rest of your summer and thanks for your continued support.

Men Cut Off Fingers in Protest

Twenty South Korean men chopped off their little fingers on Monday in a macabre public protest hours before Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited a Tokyo shrine to war dead.

Standing in pouring rain in front of the Independence Gate in Seoul, the men took it in turns to chop off their fingers with small guillotines laid on the ground after shouting slogans against Koizumi’s plan to visit the Yasukuni Shrine.

The burly men, wearing black tee-shirts and headbands declaring they were “prepared to die to save the country,” laid their severed digits in a South Korean flag which was wrapped and then tied in a knot.

Their maimed hands tended to and bandaged — each man cut off one finger — the men again shouted slogans without showing any sign of pain.

A reporter for South Korea’s YTN television said the men identified themselves as members of a martial arts group.

But Korean martial arts authorities said they had not heard of the group and local news photographers who witnessed the incident told Reuters the men appeared to be gangsters, identifiable by their short-cropped hair and language.

Cutting off a little finger is a method Japan’s “yakuza” mobsters use to atone for mistakes.

The protest, triggered by Japan’s war-time atrocities in occupied Korea, failed to stop Koizumi from paying homage at Yasukuni. The shrine honors Japanese war dead, including convicted war criminals from World War Two. excitenews

Maker Chose Not to Act to Reduce Abuse of OxyContin: “The maker of the widely abused

narcotic painkiller OxyContin knew

that other companies had used a chemical

safeguard to reduce misuse of their products but decided not to take

similar steps before marketing the drug, company officials said

yesterday.” New York Times

Quintessential cool: “In the world of music, here’s what it is, who’s got it and who needs it.” SF Chronicle

“Independents’ Day is a concept. ID is a goal. We plan to promote, support, and increase public awareness of independent content and design through live events, digital events, and crass, unashamed manipulation of the mainstream media.”

Mark Twain’s Covert War with His Maker — “When Mark Twain died in 1910, he was an international superstar and an American institution. He was cheered at home and abroad for his droll wit, frontier bluffness, and corn-pone wisdom. ..

Only a handful of intimates knew this revered creator of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn had died a bilious adversary of the Almighty.” unquiet mind [via wood s lot]

Riot fears force IMF to cut meeting short — “Anti-globalisation campaigners have scored a considerable victory by forcing the World Bank and the IMF to shorten drastically their annual meeting in Washington next month.

In a joint statement, the organisations said they were cutting the meeting from a week to just two days to try to avoid the sort of chaos and disruption that erupted at the G8 summit in Genoa last month.” Independent UK

Medical journals hit back at the drug companies.

“Leading medical journals have formed an alliance to block publication of the results of drug trials that they believe have been distorted by pressure from pharmaceutical companies.

From next month, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal and 25 other specialist magazines will demand that authors give written guarantees that their scientific research was independent.

The editors of the journals are said to have evidence that drug manufacturers are using sponsorship to persuade scientists and doctors to write favourably about their products. The agreement follows several recent cases involving allegations that drug companies tried to withhold research results or present them in a biased manner.” Telegraph UK

Do unhappy mice give bad information? “Poor housing and extreme

inbreeding is taking a toll on the

value of mice in biomedical

research, say ethologists at this

week’s meeting of the

International Society of Applied

Ethology in Davis, California.

Most lab mice are housed in

shoebox-sized containers with

sawdust bedding and plenty of food and water. When they are

allowed companions, these are usually of the same sex.” BioMedNet

Great expectations: “Expectation can be an

effective drug. A placebo

stimulates the brain in the

same way as drug treatment

in Parkinson’s disease,

shows a Canadian study.

Both increase the release of

the brain chemical

dopamine, fuelling recent

controversy over whether the

placebo effect exists at all.

Thought to affect around

30% of patients, the placebo

effect, in which patients

benefit from treatment

because of expectation

alone, is a long-standing

medical conundrum. Drugs

are generally approved on

the basis of their

effectiveness over placebos.” Nature It is unclear to me what is so astounding about this paper, widely blinked as mindboggling. Of course the placebo effect must accomplish the same physiological and biochemical effects as the ‘real’ treatment, to the extent that it works. The mystery is how the mind’s belief mobilizes the physiological reactions, not that it does. Actually, given the intimate relationship between dopamine and cognition, I’m not surprised there is a robust placebo effect in Parkinson’s Disease. Perhaps the question should be turned on its head — how much of the effect of the active treatment too is mobilized by belief? Physicians have always known that the hopeful attitude they bring toward the treatments they propose to their afflicted patients makes a great deal of difference to the outcome.

Cultural habits of chimps:

“Primate experts have found more evidence

that chimpanzees, like humans, show cultural

diversity.

They say chimps living

in different parts of

Africa have developed

distinct customs.

Habits such as

grooming, and the use

of stone and wooden

tools, vary among nine

populations in the wild.

Some chimps inspect

each other for parasites, flick the bugs on to

leaves, then inspect or kill them. However their

neighbours show quite different behaviour,

simply squashing the parasites on their

forearms.” BBC

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Hunger Site Seeks Sustenance. While it wasn’t a very good business model, it was a boon for charities. A deal may be imminent with new, socially-conscious investors. Wired

Genehack is back and, if I never read another blink there I’ll die happy now that he’s pointed me to this explanation of cricket by an American, for Americans. Anglophile that I am, I’ve been searching for years for a way to understand this game so baffling to most of us [not that I’m ever likely to play it].

October 21, 2001 is Jam Echelon Day.

Follow Me Here, now appearing on ScreenShotStart.

“People with bone wasting conditions could do with a good shaking, according to US scientists. They found that sheep that spent time standing on a vibrating plate developed much stronger bones than those that did not.” New Scientist Addendum: Rebecca writes to remind me of a related story to which she linked a few months ago. “Wounded cats – wild and domestic – purr

because it helps their bones and organs to heal

and grow stronger, say researchers who have

analysed the purring of different feline species.

This, they say, explains why cats survive falls

from high buildings and why they are said to

have ‘nine lives’. Exposure to similar sound

frequencies is known to improve bone density in

humans.” Telegraph UK [If you have osteoporosis, sleep with your cat.]

Outbreak of new flesh-eating bacterial infection baffles health officials in Australia. The Age

Kitten survives 70C tumble wash “A kitten has survived being washed at 70C (158F) for 20 minutes after he jumped into the machine just before it was switched on. Owner Bianca Marten said 12-week-old Sylvester was dizzy, blue and screaming with fear when she got him out.

Sylvester was treated in Herning, Denmark, but has not learned his lesson. He climbed into the machine again on his return home.” Ananova While communicating with this cat was not very successful, communicating with your dog is about to become alot easier. CNN

Paint the Moon: “a collaborative work of celestial art. The goal: To unite millions of people in an effort to ‘paint’ a red spot on the dark portion of a first-quarter moon using common laser pointers during a five-minute period this autumn.” And: “An ambitious three-year mission to catch a piece of the sun and safely return that sample to Earth was successfully

hurled on its way into deep space Wednesday atop a Delta 2 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.”

The next two stories are courtesy of Spike:

The nologo faction of the anti-corporate movement gains considerable steam as the Denver Post refuses to refer to the city’s new stadium by its whore-name. The Rocky Mountain News is disdainful of its competitor.

I crave your distinguished indulgence (and all your cash). When I got one of these hilarious “419” fraud scheme letters a few months ago, I posted it here in its entirety for its entertainment value. Some gullible Americans are not entertained; ‘the

U.S. State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for African affairs claimed that

“Americans lose $2 billion annually to white collar crime syndicates based in Nigeria.” ‘ And some people, like Salon essayist Douglas Cruikshank, get several of these missives per week, he says. Here he analyzes their literary merits.

Disputes Imperil U.N. Racism Forum: “In a statement to the preparatory committee in Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner Mary Robinson urged Arab and Jewish organizations to find common ground on the Palestinian issue, and African and European groups to come to a consensus on the issue of slavery and reparations.

…Days before the preparatory meetings began two weeks ago, President Bush said his administration would not attend the conference, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 31 in Durban, South Africa, if its agenda included language equating Zionism with racism and calling for reparations to African nations for colonialism and slavery.” Washington Post

Are the feds to blame for increased numbers of shark attacks?? ” In a curious juxtaposition of trends, shark attacks last year reached record levels in the world (79), in the U.S. (49), and in Florida (34 documented cases) ? even as scientists and government officials are claiming that the animals are being chased toward extinction by fishermen looking for thrill kills. And shark attacks in the U.S. have increased dramatically since 1993 ? which is when the federal government began mandating deep cuts in the number of sharks that could be caught for sport or profit.” National Review

BushBlog: George W. Bush’s weblog

An End to Self-Defeating Rhetoric: “It’s a myth that conservatives support free markets and progressives want government solutions.” Tompaine.com

Danny Schechter, “the news dissector,” says that ‘ “blogging” is the real worm threatening web “security” ‘: ‘Don’t tell anyone: There’s a virus you can help spread on the Web, a virus promising real information, free expression and political debate. You can get into the act by joining the “bloggertariat,” the growing number of people who want interaction instead of propaganda.’ mediachannel.org

‘Igniting Fear With Flying Metal’: “…(W)hat

has consistently gotten Pauline in trouble over his 23-year career is his penchant for creating large, potentially lethal

robots under the guise of modern performance art.” Wired

Bush Approves Limited Stem Cell Test Funding. Federal funding will only support experiments with the sixty or so existing cell lines derived from already-destroyed embryos; no new ones would be allowed to be grown and destroyed for the purpose of extracting further stem cell lines. New York Times [What does Jeremy Rifkin have to say, I wonder?]

Some scientists consider the crow to be as intelligent, in some ways, as a primate. Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, referred to the magpie (a close relative) as “a bird whose thievish disposition suggested to some one that he might be taught to talk.” The intelligence of crows [thanks, Heron] has led to an uneasy relationship with humans. The crow is a shape-shifter, a trickster-god, and an omen of untimely and violent death. Consider: a flock of crows is known as a murder. Ian Frazier’s been working for them recently, and finds them to be the coming thing.

Continuing in the series of improbable interviews (see Fortean Times’ talk with Iain Sinclair to which I blinked below), The Onion interviews Samuel Delaney, another of my cultural heroes, on the occasion of the reissue of his 1974 masterpiece Dhalgren.

O: Should readers be trying to solve it?

SRD: No, no. I want people to… What do I want? I don’t really want people to do anything. People can read the book any

way they want. If they want to look for answers, fine. I have no idea whether they’ll find them. I assume they’ll find some,

and probably won’t find others. Dhalgren is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried

to put as much into it as I could at the time.

Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong: “Expanding its use of torture and high-pressure indoctrination, China’s Communist Party has gained the upper hand in its protracted battle against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to government sources and Falun Gong practitioners. As a result, they say, large numbers of people are abandoning the group that presented the party with its most serious challenge since the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square.” Washington Post

Is the addition of ReBlogger (discussion functionality) making FmH slower-to-load on a regular basis (I know I’ve gotten sporadic feedback to that effect)? Looking down at the last week of items, there’s a steady stream of ‘[0]’ comments. I’m of two minds. Take it out, and give up on commenting capacity, or simply leave it in no matter how little use it gets. The ‘[0]’s don’t clutter up the landscape very much, after all…

The Spike Report might just as well be doing an addiction-and-psychopathology special edition today, given these three items:

A physician and reformed righteous eater has coined the term Orthorexia Nervosa ‘as a label for those who push itnerest in normal healthy food to dangerous extremes.’ From a strict psychodiagnostic perspective, I’m not sure the term is necessary, since other psychopathological labels already exist to capture this obsessive compulsive condition well. But I’m glad someone is getting the word out!

And while we’re on the topic of addiction, oh man, I couldn’t believe this blink.

‘Mainline Lady, a new Dutch glossy magazine for female drug addicts, is

perhaps the ultimate in heroin chic.

Stuffed with tips on fashion, sex, beauty and health, the stockintrade of women’s journals the

world over, the new magazine bears a passing resemblance to its more staid sisters.

But Mainline Lady, financed by the Dutch Health Ministry, is no mainstream publication.

Its fashion model is Shauna, a tattooed recovering addict. The sex section recounts recollections of

a junkie prostitute. The beauty rubric counsels on countering druginduced dry skin, and “Dear

Doctor” deals with HIV hazards for syringe users.

Wijnie, a 38-year-old cocaine and heroin addict from Amsterdam, gets a hair and face

makeover. An HIV-positive former convict talks about her experiences in prison.

The magazine is the brainchild of the Mainline foundation, a 10-year-old, non-governmental

organisation that works to improve the health and quality of life of drug users. “Female users are

not just skinny hags. They have lots of interests, and that’s what we wanted to reflect in the

magazine,” says editor-in-chief, Jasperine Schupp.’ The Age

Finally, Spike pointed me toward this.

“Boomers’ Newest Fad: Self-Loathing.

At the Big Five-Oh, the Woodstock Generation Changes Its

Tune.” International Herald Tribune

Hidden Wheat Fields Spark Outrage: “Canadian farmers are upset that they have no way of knowing whether neighboring

fields are full of genetically-modified wheat that could potentially cross-pollinate with their conventional

crops.” Wired

New Yorker Annals of Medicine (link from David Brake): As Good As Dead:

“Confusion about the concept of brain death is not

unusual, even among the transplant professionals,

surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple

with it regularly. Brain death is confusing because

it’s an artificial distinction constructed, more than

thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is

unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to

suggest that brain-dead patients aren’t really dead at

all—that the concept is just the medical profession’s

way of dodging ethical questions about a practice

that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year.”

In essence, the paradox is this. Most people think it would be unethical to kill a person for their organs, even if they are irreversibly moribund. So they have to die of some other cause before their organs can be harvested. Yet, it is physiologically ideal that the organs still be perfused and oxygenated right up to the time of harvest and transplant, i.e. come from a living body. The solution? The concept of brain death, when it is asserted that, no matter what other functions remain, the neocortex or seat of consciousness is irreversibly defunct.

Critics say this is “conceptual gerrymandering”, in reality a quality-of-life judgment and places us on an ethical slippery slope — would some profound degree of impaired self-awareness, e.g. in extremely brain-injured patients or the senile elderly, qualify? Can someone become “so

devastated that they had lost their claim on

existence”? Persuading the family of a dying person that ‘brain death’ is ‘death’, to obtain their consent for organ donation, is a matter of semantic niceties. But if, as extreme critics insist, someone ‘brain dead’ is not ‘dead’, where does that leave us? Are they ‘alive’? Are they, philosophically, a ‘body’ or a ‘person’?

Even proponents of the ‘brain death’ concept are known to express anxiety that “the public” not know what doctors have come to know about the practice. Critics suggest that, in the interest of ethical explicitness and scientific rigor, we begin to say we are harvesting organs from patients who are “as good as dead.” Then we can start to discuss the overwhelming ethical dilemmas that would bring up.

[I have always carried an organ donor card. Now my head is spinning with degrees of the complexity of my decision I had not even considered, and I am a physician! For the sake of the position my wife or children might have to be in to carry out this wish of mine, I will have to rethink my preferences carefully in light of this article.]

Team plans to clone up to 200 humans: “A

team of reproductive specialists is

expected to announce plans Tuesday

to clone up to 200 human beings.

The announcement will be made at a

cloning conference held by the National

Academy of Sciences in Washington,

Panos Zavos told CNN Monday. Zavos

is a retired professor and head of a

Lexington-based private corporation that

markets infertility products and

technologies.

He said his team is working with 200

couples who are infertile and the aim of

the ‘attempt’ is to help them have a

baby.” Meanwhile, critics warn of cloning risks. CNN Several months ago, scientists reported in Human Genetics that early gene processing in cloned embryos frequently goes haywire, resulting in out-of-control growth or premature death.

London novelist and psychohistorian Iain Sinclair interviewed: “After Lights out for The Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He’d superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city.” Fortean Times And: The long birth of psychohistory: “Welcome to the discipline

of psychohistory, a discipline

that concerns itself with

collective psychology, a field

that, surprisingly, has never

garnered much interest in

both popular culture and the

academic world.” Spark The web presence of The Institute for Psychohistory (“the science of historical motivation combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences

to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present”) is here.

Pills gave Plath suicidal feelings, says an AP wire story describing the contents of some of Ted Hughes’ letters recently made public after their acquisition by the British Library.

According to the published extracts, Hughes (said) “the key factor” in Plath’s death was that she mistakenly swallowed the wrong kind of pills, which gave her suicidal feelings.

Hughes did not name the drug, but wrote that Plath had taken it once before while living in America and had suffered an adverse reaction, the newspaper said.

Don’t get me started again on the vilification of antidepressants as the cause of suicide among the severely and, unfortunately sometimes fatally, depressed, about which I wrote most recently when the manufacturer of paroxetine (Paxil) was successfully sued by the family of a depressed murderer taking that medication. As you know, it is usually more accurate to point the finger at the way in which these medications are prescribed and monitored. In fact, in this case “the anti-depressant was sold under a different brand name in Britain and prescribed for Plath by her doctor, who did not know the effect they would have on her, the Sunday Telegraph said.” More to the point, could Hughes be rationalizing about the fact that Plath ended her life within months of his leaving her? Salon

“If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you are undeniably a left wing wacko, completely out of touch with mainstream thought in this country. The rest of you are normal Americans. Congratulations. And God help us all.” Salon

“George W. Bush Isn’t Stupid…” “To call Bush stupid is to imply that his harsh conservative policy initiatives are being carried out in ignorance. Whereas in truth, Bush is an ideologue. He knows exactly what he is doing.

To call Bush stupid is to engender sympathy for a man whose policies threaten the safety, the prosperity, and the future of the United States of America. The man doesn’t need our sympathy, he needs our opposition.

To call Bush stupid is to create in Bush a Forrest Gump presidency. Many Americans loved Forrest Gump the movie and they loved its false saccharine message that it didn’t matter how smart or stupid one was as long as one had a good heart. Bush is no Forrest Gump.” Liberal Arts Mafia Juicy Bits

Ten People Who Decide What America Reads: a rogue’s gallery? Book [via wood s lot]

Thanks to Higgy for this blink: Overdue book’s return priceless; we’ re talking here about an 1859 first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species borrowed from the Boston Public Library at least 80 years ago. The woman who returned it had found in her great-aunt’s attic. On examination, the book bore signs of efforts to erase evidence of its ownership by the Library. But, as the BPL’s rare books curator lovingly put it, “Paper has such a long memory. It doesn’t forget.” The maximum late fee for overdue books, as of a campaign last year to encourage their return, is $1.25. Boston Mayor Menino offered to waive the fee in this instance. Boston Globe

An Unrepentant Nader Unveils a New Grass-Roots Project Some of the placards outside read: “Right-wing freaks coalition for Nader.” “Back-alley abortionists for Nader.” “Defense contractors for Nader.” “Citizens against tundra.” “Unelectable at any speed.” New York Times

Boston Globe editorial: Bad choice for Peace Corps. Another contemptible Shrub appointment.

Darkest Hour May Be Just Before the Dawn: I.R.A. Agrees to Arms Pact in Move Hailed as Significant. ‘The Irish Republican Army has agreed to a method of destroying its arsenal of weapons that is provable and permanent, the commission responsible for the disarming of paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland said today.

Britain and Ireland termed the statement “significant” and “historic” and said it represented the long-sought breakthrough needed to push forward with the stalled peace accord for the embattled province.’ New York Times

In the Airport Fast Lane, With Your Eyes as a Passport Trial of iris-scanning technology may allow some arriving Heathrow passengers to bypass passport control as soon as this fall. New York Times

He shoulda just let it go and ordered a replacement from FmH…

Japanese Woman Has Baby at 60: “A 60-year-old Japanese woman became the nation’s oldest new mother last month when she gave birth to a healthy baby after undergoing in-vitro fertilization in the United States.” Washington Post

New Look Gore Back From Exile. “You disappear for months, avoiding more cameras than Gary Condit.

And you resurface with a scruffy beard?

No wonder some Democrats don’t want the guy to run again.” Washington Post

Braddock Gaskill: How to anonymously get root access on a quarter million machines overnight: “This analysis describes a means through which a complete list of the estimated 250,000 CodeRed II infected and backdoor compromised hosts can be easily obtained by any individual who has been keeping a web server log of attempts on his machine, by using the backdoors on the machines that have attacked him to obtain the the web logs of the infected attacking IIS web servers to learn of new infected hosts.”