I did one of those “vanity searches” for the past few weeks’ of references to Follow Me Here in other weblogs. Here’s the list that came up. Some of them are of course my — and perhaps your — tried-and-true favorites that can be found in the sidebar to this page. But there are some new discoveries too. Someone who takes note of FmH stands a good chance of being like-minded enough to warrant the attention of FmH readers; see what you think:

Ethel the Blog

M E D L E Y

Entropy… Green

at Nineteen and Grey at Twenty-Two.

wood s lot

BrianKaneOnline – Home

Wordforge a weblog

randomWalks

Le Blogeur

Blather

Hobbsblog: That is stupendous in its

evil

Looka! 

Metafilter | Community Weblog

Daze Reader – Sex Web Log

& Portal

blogjam: /usr/bin/bloke

Ed Portal’s net.Headlines

jimhart3000

Electrolite

Breaching the Web — katstyle

social commentary

Waterloo Wide Web

Unknown News: “The news you need,

whether you know it or not…

… rivervision…

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful

Things

shikencho/weblog

what’s in rebecca’s pocket?

J I M W I C h

JPButler.com: Jason Butler’s Home On

The Web

LinkMachineGo: This

is Lima Mike Golf. Shall we blog?

Ribbit! News?

abuddhas memes

dangerous monkey!

blog.org from David Brake, UK-based Internet

journalist…

KIPLOG

The web log without a name

The Evil Twin Theory

lake effect: a weblog

Alive and kicking

Left back: “(O)n campuses and electronic bulletin boards across the country, large swaths of the anti-globalization movement are turning into an antiwar movement. The transformation is unlikely to alter U.S. foreign policy dramatically. But it might just unravel the anti-globalization movement itself.

One of the anti-globalization movement’s primary goals–and primary successes–in its short life has been repairing the generation-old gulf between intellectuals and labor… Now, with one awful attack, that alliance is splitting at the seams. The hard hats and the hippies are on opposite sides of the barricades once again. At the teach-in at MIT, activists seemed to be gearing up for their generation’s Vietnam–a chance to take on U.S. militarism and imperialism in their own time. They seemed to have forgotten that until last week, that was precisely the debate the American left was trying to avoid.” The New Republic

“If they’ve got him, it makes their guilt and collusion even more clear,” says a US official.Taliban Says Bin Laden Is in Its Control. They say they are moving him around for his safety and encourage him to comply voluntarily with clerics’ request that he leave, but won’t hand him over. “In a meeting with a small group of reporters Sunday, (the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan) said the Taliban has been constantly guarding and protecting Bin Laden for more than two years, since the United Nations called for his hand-over after the U.S. indicted him in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa.” Prospects for avoidance of a US frontal assault on the Taliban regime, if there ever were any, would appear to fade with this news… LA Times

Saddam has germ warfare arsenal, says defecting physicist Telegraph UK; Fugitive says 14 terrorist pilots still on the loose Times of London; ‘Clear and present danger’ — “Attorney General John Ashcroft said Sunday that terrorist activity against the United States may increase once this country responds to this month’s attacks in New York and suburban Washington.” CNN; Intelligence Suggests Terrorists May Be Plotting, Particularly in Asia: “(T)he U.S. has intelligence that American tourists overseas, particularly in Asia, could be targeted for kidnappings or assassinations.” ABC News

A molecular biologist and former NIH and FDA official asserts that biowar is ‘not the end of the world’: “Biological weapons have an apocalyptic reputation. But they are often ineffective in spreading disease.”

The US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which tracks such incidents, recorded 109 laboratory-associated infections during 1947-73 but not a single secondary case – that is, the infection of a patient’s family member or community contact. Similarly, the medical literature reveals only a handful of persons secondarily infected.

It is also instructive to look at the occurrence of anthrax in industrial settings. Historically, workers involved with certain animal products were at the highest risk but only 18 cases of inhalational anthrax were reported in the US from 1900 to 1978. Human-to-human transmission of anthrax has never been reported. As a public health threat, most biological agents act much like a toxic chemical such as the sarin released in the Tokyo subway by terrorists, with injury limited primarily to those exposed initially.

The Financial Times

If this is true, it’s the first reassuring thing I can believe about the specter of biological terrorism. In contrast, my longstanding habit of being unable to trust either the candor or the adequacy of the assessment behind statements from our government has never before distressed me as much as my current lack of confidence in reassurances such as these: ‘Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson believes the United States is prepared to take care of any kind of biological attack. In an interview with 60 Minutes‘ Mike Wallace, Thompson said, “We’ve got to make sure that people understand that they’re safe.” Thompson said eight staging areas around America are each stocked with 50 tons of medical supplies that can be moved within hours to the site of any bioterrorist attack.’ CBS News

Somehow I’d missed this. Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, “Agence France-Presse reports that composer Karlheinz Stockhausen causes outrage in Germany when he describes Sept 11 terrorist attacks in US as ‘the greatest work of art ever’; retracts remark at once and asks that it not be reported…” The New York Times today reiterates the issue:

In disjointed comments that were taped by a German radio station and reported internationally, Mr. Stockhausen, 73, called the attack on the World Trade Center “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” Extending the analogy, he spoke of human minds achieving “something in one act” that “we couldn’t even dream of in music,” in which “people practice like crazy for 10 years, totally fanatically, for a concert, and then die.” Just imagine, he added: “You have people who are so concentrated on one performance, and then 5,000 people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. In comparison with that, we’re nothing as composers.”

When he realized how the reporters were reacting, he backtracked and asked that his words not be quoted. “Where has he brought me, that Lucifer?” he asked, referring to one of three invented characters, along with Eve and Michael, who regularly figure in his works.

Stockhausen’s own website claims that he is being misrepresented and slandered.

Osama Bin Laden: Man or Meme? by Robert Wright ‘On Sept. 12, Colin Powell framed America’s impending military response to the previous day’s attack as part of a campaign to “go after terrorism and get it by its branch and its root.” Here is an alternative horticultural metaphor that I came across a few days ago: “Military action to destroy terror ? will be like hitting a fully mature dandelion with a golf club.” ‘ Slate

Unlikely Doves: Counter-terrorism Experts: “The threat of terrorism cannot be effectively countered unless the United States changes its arrogant, me-first global ways and faces up to the fact that many people in other lands are — rightly or wrongly — damn angry at it. This proposition has become something of a mantra among progressives who counsel restraint in response to the horrific attacks of September 11. But it also is a sentiment popular within a subset of the national security establishment: counter-terrorism experts.” AlterNet

The secret war: “A matrix of terrorist cells – allied to bin Laden but often more extreme than him – planned mayhem across the continent from bases in Britain, Spain, Germany and France. Only now are the links between these shadowy groups coming to light as intelligence services realise that, unknown to them, the battle had started long before 11 September.” Guardian UK

Now on John Brockman’s The Edge: ‘I believe that the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the “Edgies” can bring to the subjects.

So how about a new Edge question:

What Now??‘

Responses so far from (the usual Edge gang and more): Esther Dyson, David Berreby, Syvia Paull, Julian Brown, Jordan Pollack, Cliff Barney, Jay Ogilvy, Timothy Taylor, The Editors of Nature, Mary Catherine Bateson, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod, David Farber, Geoffrey Miller, Freeman Dyson. Robert Provine, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Taylor, Joel Garreau. George Dyson, John McCarthy, Chris Stringer, Steve Grand, Robert Aunger, David G. Myers, Piet Hut, John Maddox, Keith Devlin, Frank Schirrmacher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Todd Feinberg, M.D., Martin Rees, Douglas Rushkoff, Michael Nesmith, Tor Nørretranders, Bruce Sterling, George Lakoff, Nicholas Humphrey Peter Von Sivers, Cliff Pickover, James P. O’Donnell, Colin Tudge, Karl Sabbagh, Luyen Chou, Yossi Vardi, Todd Siler, Roger C. Schank…

Phil Agre reconsiders: “Having covered the attack and war encyclopedically for two weeks,

I said I’d give it up. For a day I ruthlessly deleted the great

majority of the war-related URL’s that came in. But at last it

began to dawn on me that (1) nothing much is happening right now

except the war, and (2) nothing much except the war seems important.

So despite my deleting, most of this batch of URL’s ends up being

about the war anyway. I’m still trying to reconstruct a sense of

normalcy, though. We shall see.” Red Rock Eaters

Robert Fisk, Mideast correspondent for The Independent UK, raises some curious questions about the document the FBI says it has recovered from among the effects of several of the hijackers. Read the questions he raises, based on his familiarity with Islam. I have had my doubts too, based not on an analysis of the religious doctrine it espouses but the fact that it seems abit too convenient that one copy each of these notes was found in Atta’s baggage (which never made it onto one of the WTC-bound planes), a car at Dulles airport (left behind by one of the Pentagon-bound hijackers), and at the crash site in Pennsylvania, neatly linking together the three endeavors. Fisk notes an “almost-Christian view” of what the hijackers might have felt” and notes that Maronite Christian translators to whom the CIA has turned in the past may have a distorted understanding of Islam. Or could something more sinister be going on?

November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.

You go, guy: Wil Wheaton wrote to Rep. John Cooksey in response to his infamous ‘diaper’ comment. My sentiments exactly, Wil. Thanks.

Primer on Raising Your International Literacy, from rc3 [via Medley]: “Rather than just complaining about the lack of literacy among Americans when it comes to international issues, I’ve decided to provide a short list of ways people can learn more about what’s going on in the world beyond our borders. Not only is it crucial to understand what’s going on around the world, but it’s also pretty interesting. Why follow the 100th day of 24 hour Gary Condit coverage when you can read about things like the Prime Minister of Papua-New Guinea being deposed because he hired South African mercenaries to put down a rebellion on the island of Bougainville? Here’s the list…”

I’m adding Electrolite to the list of weblogs I’ll try to keep up with (and steal links from…?).

In Defense of Freedom: “On September 20, 2001 at the National Press Club in Washington, more than 150 organizations, 300 law professors, and 40 computer scientists expressed support for (this) declaration.” Consider endorsing…

Kids: ‘Help us name this war!’ from Spin On This (“news minus spin equals comedy”). Lots more here too.

Deja vu? Powerful photos document the similarities between scenes from the US bombardment of Belgrade in 1999 and the 9-11-01 attacks. Dedicated “to the innocent,” and entitled “Death on a Very Small Planet.”

November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.