What has been called the “most hateful reaction to appear in print” by [Inside] was penned by Ann Coulter in the National Review:

(“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”)

She’s a friend of Barbara Olson, the conservative commentator (and wife of the US Solicitor General) who died on one of the hijacked planes after much-publicized cellphone calls to him from the air. [via Red Rock Eaters]

What Does Osama Bin Laden Want? – Nothing we have. David Plotz in Slate

A number of people, independently, seem to have hit on variants of a technological fix to stop skyjackings using off-the-shelf components and existing technologies, e.g. GPS and autopilot. Under sufficient threat, the ability to fly the plane using cockpit controls would be disabled by the press of a panic button. The plane could then only be flown remotely by a ground controller. Great, except planes are not the terrorists’ only option, of course. Let’s have panic buttons activating remote control everywhere.

WTC lease owner committed to rebuilding. “Lease owner committed to project,

though not exact replicas.” CNN

Op-Ed pages trot out the white hawks: “The morning after the worst terrorist attack in the history, the nations’

great editorial page editors have offered up the wisdom of a group of

middle-aged white men whose claim to fame is that they lost the Vietnam

War.” Tompaine.com

Someone at MetaFilter pointed to this free downloadable Koran (Holy Qur’an). How many of us have ever read it?

Sec’y of State Colin Powell is garnering much praise for the alacrity with which he has apparently hammered out a global alliance in support of US, or even joint, action in the wake of the attack. Russian and Islamic assent has been cited. But I fear we will whitewash and minimize indications that we have not really achieved consensus. The non-U.S. press will be a better indicator of what support we do and do not have. Here, from The Independent: “Despite calls from US President George Bush to Russian

President Vladimir Putin, asking for full support in the wake of

the suicide attacks, Russia is making it clear that it will not

back an American invasion of Afghanistan from bases in the

former Soviet Central Asia.”

General Anatoly Kvashnin, the Russian Chief of Staff, said it

was unlikely that the Russian army would take part in any

“acts of revenge” against the perpetrators of the attacks in the

US. “The US has powerful enough military forces that it can

cope with this task on its own,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nikolai Kovalyov, the former head of the Russian

FSB security service, warned the US that an attack on

Afghanistan would fail to capture Osama bin Laden, the alleged

mastermind of the atrocities, and would backfire on the US. “In

Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain it takes a trainload of

explosives to destroy three militants,” he said. “The chance of

hitting bin Laden is zero.”

Especially if agreements do not hold, as Anthony Lewis says in The New York Times,

Beware Unintended Results: “The danger in the current situation is that hasty, ill-targeted military action

could arouse anti-Western sentiments right across the Middle East. That

could threaten such important U.S. friends as the governments of Egypt

and Jordan — and Saudi Arabia, from which Osama bin Laden is an

angry exile and which is at the core of his grievance. He would be

delighted at a United States response that destabilized the Saudi regime.”

Do we really, for example, have Pakistan’s “unstinted cooperation,” as its military leader has been reported to say? Polite statements of support from the broad spectrum of the international community at a time of condolence may not turn into a sustained commitment. The regimes of the moderate Islamic world in particular are likely to be conciliatory at this time to deflect the specter of American impulsive wrath. But, would they be earnest participants in a world war against Islam which would threaten to erode their in many cases precarious hold over their own populaces?

If the Shrub takes a page from his father’s book (he’s already getting a war to be at the helm of, just like Daddy did… although it didn’t do much for Senior’s reelection success), he will create a coalition in name only, like the Gulf War coalition, which fell apart after a much simpler, limited military objective was readily met. And if we bully the world community into cooperation, we perpetuate the hatred for the way in which the U.S. thows its weight around.

In this light, Harry Browne asks When will we learn?:

“Our foreign policy has been insane for decades.

It was only a matter of time until Americans

would have to suffer personally for it. It is a

terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often

have to suffer for the sins of the guilty.

When will we learn that we can’t allow our

politicians to bully the world without someone

bullying back eventually?

President Bush has authorized continued

bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President

Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan,

Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush,

senior, invaded Iraq and Panama. President

Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and

invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes.

Did we think the people who lost their families

and friends and property in all that destruction

would love America for what happened?”

CIA’s Headache: How to Find bin Laden — ‘…reliable intelligence on the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden,

who was named by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a prime

suspect in the suicide attacks on Tuesday against the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been rare, despite what

one source called a “rich and active” surveillance program.’ International Herald Tribune

Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan: The first point this Afghani expatriate writer makes is that we spare the Afghani people:

“… the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of

Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997.

Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you

think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews

in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this

atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would

come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up

in their country.”

But here’s where it gets interesting:

The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people

speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having

the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about

killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is

Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through

Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any

troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The

conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see

where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did

this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would

beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam

and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s

a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view.

He’s probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war

would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for

that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?” [via Scripting News]

And, while we’re listening to Dave Winer, here’s something else he has to say which I like:

“What you can do: Renew friendships with people who

are considered enemies, but actually are not. Use the

Internet to meet people with strange last names, and ask

questions and listen to what they say. If they express

anger, try to validate it, not negate it. Have the courage

to go through your beliefs.”

Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet but Found No Way to Stop It — “During

the hour or so that American

Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of

hijackers, up to the moment it struck the

west side of the Pentagon, military officials

in a command center on the east side of

the building were urgently talking to law

enforcement and air traffic control officials

about what to do

…controllers in New England knew about

8:20 a.m. that American Airlines Flight 11,

bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had

probably been hijacked. When the first

news report was made at 8:48 a.m. that

a plane might have hit the World Trade

Center, they knew it was Flight 11. And

within a few minutes more, controllers

would have known that both United 175

(the second plane to hit the World Trade

Center) and American 77 (which hit the

Pentagon) had probably been hijacked.

But despite elaborate plans that link

civilian and military efforts to control the

nation’s airspace in defense of the country,

and despite two other jetliners’ having

already hit the World Trade Center in

New York, the fighter planes that

scrambled into protective orbits around

Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes

after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.” New York Times

Old Radio Script Praising U.S. Is a Web Hit — ‘An electronic version of “The Americans,” which was originally broadcast by the late Canadian journalist Gordon

Sinclair, was e-mailed under the guise of a recent editorial — despite the fact Sinclair died in 1984 and wrote the

script in 1973, toward the end of the Vietnam War.

“Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast… by Gordon

Sinclair,” the e-mail said in its introduction to the script.’ Reuters

New Perspective on the Issue of Cell Phone Use in Planes New York Times

Rational Fanatics: “What makes suicide bombers tick? While most of the world sees them as lone zealots, they are, in fact, pawns of large terrorist networks that wage calculated psychological warfare. Contrary to popular belief, suicide bombers can be stopped-but only if governments pay more attention to their methods and motivations.” Foreign Policy

Philadelphia Daily News and Art Bell see images of Satan in smoke billowing from decimated World Trade Center towers. [via Spike] Word of the day: pareidolia.

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,’ ” — Rev. Jerry Falwell [thanks to Looka!] Addendum: Falwell’s non-apology.

Helen Highwater writes in Unknown News “We must remember, however, that in America, all suspects are innocent until proven Muslim.”

For all the fine talk by American statesmen and women, repeating over and over that American freedom and the very American way of life has been attacked, let us not forget that the attacks of September 11 didn’t come out of nowhere. They were retaliatory attacks. Even without knowing the Top Secret specifics of recent years, anyone whose eyes are open should understand that this was retaliation.

And now, some Americans are calling for retaliation for yesterday’s retaliation. To me, that sounds like an invitation to another round of … terrorism, retaliation, or call it what you will. It’s asking for yesterday’s events to be repeated.

America will “retaliate,” Americans will feel pretty darn good about it, and the president’s approval ratings will shoot up higher than 110 stories. It all goes without saying, just like the reasons for terrorism go without saying — meaning literally that the reasons can never be seriously discussed.

The agony thousands of American families are going through this morning will be repeated — first in an Arab nation, and then, soon, in America again. What goes around comes around. Again and again and again.

It has been quite troubling to me the extent to which we have begun to use the term “war” to refer to the events of Tuesday. I commented that this cedes a power to the terrorists they do not have if they have merely committed a “terrorist act” of whatever magnitude. Our hyperbole, seemingly a way to articulate the extent to which we feel overwhelmed, blows back. Even more troubling has been our configuring our intended response as a “war on terrorism” and calling for a “declaration of war” from the Congress. Apart from the justification it provides for what is euphemistically called “collateral damage” (which I discuss below), I’m not sure it makes much sense in helping us to envision the nature, the scope or the difficulty of taking appropriate action, to speak of declaring war on the abstraction “terrorism”. (Semantic difficulty suffuses our other “wars” as well — the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on cancer even — but in a far less malignant way.) Phil Agre is concerned as well:

“Referring to the attacks on the east coast as “war” gives expression

to our emotions about them, and feels proportional to the magnitude

of the atrocity. But if the definition of “war” has shifted beneath

us, then a declaration of war is an even graver matter than it used to

be. Let us take a moment, then, to ask what we are getting ourselves

into. The Bush administration started using the language of “war”

well before they were willing to say who they thought was responsible

for the attacks. That in itself is probably not unprecedented; the

idea of something mysteriously blowing up is hardly new. What is less

precedented is the lack of any clear suspect who was either a foreign

nation state or a domestic organization…

What does it mean as a *political* matter to declare war on a network?

This, it seems to me, is the greatest danger of all. The only moral

justification for war is to preserve the conditions of democracy.

Revenge is not a sufficient motive, except insofar as it preserves

the conditions of democracy by serving as a deterrent. Otherwise the

matter should be treated as a crime and handled by the institutions

of the police and criminal courts. Are the conditions of democracy

in fact under threat? It is possible that they are, and I would

expect the government to present enough evidence of such a threat

before placing the country in a condition of war. The question of

justification is particularly important in the present case given

the dubious conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the office

of the president. His continued rule is also a significant threat

to the conditions of democracy, even though his methods were largely

nonviolent.”

Agre’s essay, Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy, does not appear to be online yet, but when and if he posts it it will probably be at the Red Rock Eater Digest site. Addendum: here.

FBI Cannot Rule Out Shootdown of Penn. Plane, It is still not clear why United Flight 93 was the only one of the four hijacked planes not to reach its target. The national consensus seems to have settled around the comforting and plausible evidence that a heroic group of passengers struggled with the terorists onboard, causing it to go down short of its objective. But it had occurred to many early on that the plane might have been intercepted and shot down by U.S. warplanes. None of the eyewitness accounts I’ve heard so far from the Pennsylvania crash site have hinted at this. But would the government tell us, just now, if they had judged that they had to bring the plane down to save, say, the White House? The flight data recorder from the plane, reportedly just found, might have the answers, but would we know?

Want to read David Horowitz’s latest inanity, reacting to 9-11? Scroll down past the Michael Klare essay. Salon

“Purge our society,” online bigots shout “Post-disaster threats and expressions of racism bubble up on the Web.” Salon

Net fails key test during clamor for information: “At a time when information-starved Americans needed it as never before, the Internet failed miserably in the hours immediately following Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.” Detroit Free Press And: America’s technology crumbles during crisis: ‘In what amounted to the first test of the hugely popular World Wide Web under wartime conditions, people found they had been sold a bill of goods when the likes of Bill Gates had pledged a future of perpetual, always-on “information at your fingertips.” ‘ SiliconValley.com

An FmH reader wrote me, in part,

I am curious and bothered by your comment that you don’t agree with the comment

that “we are the real terrorists and got what we deserved and its hypocritical to

think otherwise.” Seems to me and a lot of the radical left (Chomsky, Zinn, the

usual suspects) that there is no question that we supply more terror and

possibilities and support for terror than anyone else in the world. I don’t get how

you can say you don’t think we deserve it. I believe that the American people have

been tacitly supporting our foreign policy for decades without directly and

powerfully saying “I will not let this stand!”

I’m going to respond publicly both because I should clarify what I meant, and because the email address to which I tried to reply privately had permanent fatal errors. I realize that one should not post someone else’s private correspondence without prior permission, but at least I’m maintaining the writer’s anonymity.

I did not mean to disagree with the premise that the US is the world’s major exporter of terrorism. US officials decrying terrorism are indeed, inherently, hypocrites in this respect. The part of the syllogism which I cannot abide is that there was anything deserved about such indiscriminate civilian carnage. The tacit support shown by the American people for our policies is innocent, ignorant, pitiful or even contemptible, I’m convinced, rather than malevolent. They are inherently victims, not perpetrators, and were so long before any hijacked airliners smashed through their office windows and incinerated them or crushed them beneath tons of rubble.

Understand I’m a psychiatrist, I believe in unconscious motivations.Readers of FmH know that one of my enduring subtexts is the unmasking of covert control, and a word count of my postings would show the simple but profound word “thoughtful” to have great prominence. People largely do not know why they do the things they do without insightful introspection (“consciousness-raising”), and the manipulation of their opinions, the exploitation and cultivation of that inherent ignorance largely precludes such introspection. It is the major tool of social control in modern capitalist society, which I think (in contrast to the clumsiness of the 20th century’s experimentation with totalitarian dictatorships) has perfected social control through mind control in a transparent, Orwellian sense, brilliant for the ways in which it leaves people thinking they are agents with freedom and free will. It’s damned difficult to awaken from the cultural trance (and I’m not trying to come off with anything like the hubristic claim that I’m one of the awakened!) It’s as if, if the public were an individual criminal on trial for a heinous crime, they should be found incompetent to stand trial and not responsible for their actions. They certainly would not deserve the death sentence.

By the way, I’ve also gotten alot of mail objecting to my position that we should rein in our vengeful bloodlust. If I were not already overcome with sorrow, this would make me very sad… In like fashion to what I’ve said above, while I think the perpetrators of these acts must be hunted down, as should those who have directly, culpably harbored them, given them aid and comfort, we would be perpetuating the ascendency of terrorism and evil in the world to wage war on the civilian populace of Afghanistan or whichever people against whom we decide to vent our collective spleen. I fear this is what the dangerous incompetent in the White House, or his handlers, intend in proclaiming a policy of ‘ending states’ that sponsor terrorism.

“If there are Americans clamoring to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, they ought to know that this nation does not have so far to go. This is a post-apocalyptic place of felled cities, parched land and downtrodden people”, said Barry Bearak in yesterday’s New York Times. While I suspect the cynics will see the Taliban plea to the U.S. not to bomb Afghanistan as a self-serving attempt to exploit American bleeding-heart compassion only, we should have the courage to remain more compassionate than our enemies.

“AlterNet believes that millions of Americans, while outraged and

disgusted, are wary of the vengeful rhetoric that many politicians

and pundits have adopted. Therefore, we have put together a series

of articles to provoke thoughtful debate and healing, rather than

hasty scapegoating and revenge.” And another

Thoughtful Response to Tuesday’s Terrorism: “Tuesday’s catastrophic events in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania left the world in shock. We offer here a package of reporting, analysis, opinions, and resources designed to help you sort it all out.” Utne Reader

It just occurs to me to say: I apologize to any of you who, usually enjoying FmH’s diversity and variety, are disappointed by my one-track mind in recent days. It goes without saying, I hope — I can’t think of anything else just now…

Feds push Carnivore after attacks: ‘Federal police are reportedly increasing Internet surveillance after Tuesday’s deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Just hours after three airplanes smashed into the buildings in what some U.S. legislators have dubbed a second Pearl Harbor, FBI agents began to visit Web-based, e-mail firms and network providers, according to engineers at those companies who spoke on condition of anonymity.’ Wired

Two important, succinct points from William Pfaff, in the International Herald Tribune. Attacks Show That Political Courage Is the Only Real Defense

“The practical uselessness of revenge has repeatedly been

demonstrated, and continues to be demonstrated in the Middle

East, since those who employ terrorism are not functioning on a

pragmatic scale of reward and punishment. As the Israelis find,

making martyrs of your enemies invites further martyrdoms.”

“The second reaction will be that the United States needs even

more elaborate defenses than now exist. Yet the Pentagon,

CIA, NSA and the rest of the American apparatus of national

security proved incapable of preventing the attacks Tuesday.

They are incapable of preventing their repetition in some other

version.

There are no technological defenses, as such, against this sort of

thing. Surely, if nothing else comes out of the attacks Tuesday,

they ought to have demonstrated to Americans the irrelevance

of national missile defense.” [via Sam Smith]

Cockburn and St. Clair: Who Saw It Coming?

There may be another similarity to Pearl Harbor. The possibility of a Japanese attack in early December of 1941 was known to US Naval Intelligence and to President Roosevelt. Last Tuesday, derision at the failure of US intelligence was widespread. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed top official at the National Security Council as saying, “We don’t know anything here. We’re watching CNN too.” Are we to believe that the $30 billion annual intelligence budget, immense electronic eavesdropping capacity, thousands of agents around the world, produced nothing in the way of a warning? In fact Osama bin Laden, now prime suspect, said in an interview three weeks ago with Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, that he planned “very, very big attacks against American interests.”

Here is bin-Laden, probably the most notorious Islamic foe of America on the planet, originally trained by the CIA, planner of other successful attacks on US installations such as the embassies in East Africa, carrying a $5 million FBI bounty on his head proclaiming the imminence of another assault, and US intelligence was impotent, even though the attacks must have taken months, if not years to plan, and even though CNN has reported that bin-Laden and his coordinating group al-Qa’ida had been using an airstrip in Afghanistan to train pilots to fly 767s. CounterPunch

Helping Children After a Disaster; American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Facts For Families: “It is important to acknowledge the

frightening parts of the disaster when talking with a child about it. Falsely minimizing

the danger will not end a child’s concerns. Several factors affect a child’s response

to a disaster.” Can be printed out and used as a handout to guide and encourage parents in talking with their children about yesterday’s events. And: Talking with Children About Terrorism: “Judith Myers-Walls, a Purdue University Extension specialist in child development and family studies, has researched children’s reactions to wars and disasters and offers advice for parents and others on how to help children cope with the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Centers and Pentagon.”

Assume the kids know about it. They probably know more than you think. The reality of today’s world is that news travels far and wide. Adults and children learn about disasters and tragedies shortly after they occur, and live video footage with close-ups and interviews are part of the report. Children and youth are exposed to the events as soon as they can watch TV or interact with others who are consumers of the news. Not talking about it does not protect children. In fact, you may communicate that the subject is taboo and that you are unavailable if you remain silent.

Also: Cornell expert advises parents on how to help children cope with news of terrorist attacks: “…Parents and other adults will naturally tend to become preoccupied, anxious, and sad by the disaster, but they must guard against this where children are concerned. If adults are “psychologically unavailable,” children will suffer. This is a major issue. The message to parents is clear: Don’t become glued to the television and unavailable to your children when they need you most.”

List of World Trade Center tenants (9/11/2001), with type of business and floor where available. SiliconValley.com

The Counterterrorist Myth — “A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence.” The Atlantic

Phil Agre, who always shifts into high gear sending out tons of useful URLs to the Red Rock Eaters mailing list when a crisis of such proportion occurs, pointed to the Stratfor (Strategic Forcasting) Situation Reports. One tidbit I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else is that 9-11 is the year’s anniversary of the Camp David accords. (Recall that the Oklahoma City bombing was, deliberately, on the anniversary of the Waco conflagration.)

SiliconValley.com – Special Reports: a weblog with extensive coverage of multiple aspects of the situation. Blinked there is this disturbing observation by an unnamed former Boston FBI agent that my city is “a facilitator for terrorist activity. There have been cells here of bin Laden’s associates. They’re entrenched here. They’re able to use this area because of the proximity to New York and to fold into the local population, and they’re able to facilitate terrorist attacks.” Boston Globe So it may not have been just lax security at Logan airport. I wonder even more urgently what the civil liberties implications for Boston in particular are, and whether this city (which has its own brand of perennial racial intolerance) will be a particular setting for the outpouring of anti-Arab sentiment. [Disclaimer: just because I’m starting to post links to help us to be more conversant with bin Laden, don’t count me (yet) as among those who are rushing to judgment that this is attributable to him. While I’m hearing wire reports that U.S. listening posts have intercepted communications from his forces saying they’ve hit their targets, the verdict isn’t yet in…]

US Attacked: How You Can Help. Nice compendium all on one page, including on-click access to charities, sending condolences, discussion of “how the US should respond”. Lycos

‘Blowback’ : “In light of evidence from the recently completed US embassy bombing trials, (the authors) examine the genesis, operational methods and organisational structure of the Bin Laden network: Al-Qaeda.” A July 2001 analysis from Jane’s Defence Weekly. (As the estimable Fred Lapides points out, the term ‘blowback’ refers to a situation in which what you’ve set in motion blows up in your face. Bin Laden cut his eye teeth with the Afghani resistance to the Soviet invasion, which the U.S. trained and funded, of course.)

Engineers shocked by towers: “The structural engineer who designed the towers said as recently as last week that their steel columns could remain standing if they were hit by a 707.” Chicago Tribune However, a Salon feature discusses why the towers collapsed:

According to Gregory Fenves, a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, the planes weakened the buildings’ structures at key points. Fenves, working on information gleaned from preliminary TV reports, stressed that he was speculating. He said that if the planes had hit the structures higher, they could have merely damaged their tops; if they had hit lower, they would have been up against the enormous weight and resistance of the base of the buildings…

Once a building like a World Trade Center tower loses some of its support, the building in effect goes to work, Fenves said. “The loads are trying to redistribute,” he said. “The loads are figuring out how to get back down to the ground.” At the same time, he noted, the fires are deforming the physical properties of the support steel.

Explosions Rock Kabul. Has retaliation begun?

“The United States has denied that it is behind explosions heard near the Afghan capital of Kabul, not far from the city’s airport. Large plumes of smoke can be seen in the city.

The explosions came seconds apart, making buildings shudder in Kabul. There have been no sounds of airplanes or anti-aircraft fire.

During his Pentagon comments, Rumsfeld said the United States had nothing to do with the explosions.” The Boston Channel

Courtesy of Sam Smith (Progressive Review), here are some remarks by David McReynolds of the War Resisters’ League. There’s a fine line between these remarks, which deserve to be considered, and the position with which I don’t hold that we’re the real terrorists, got what we deserved, and are nothing but hypocrites for decrying today’s terrorist acts. Bush cedes too much power to the perpetrators of this action in his saber-rattling address to the nation tonight, when he invokes a ‘war on terrorism.’ I agree with the pundits suggesting we not aggrandize whomever did this; just call it a ‘terrorist attack’. McReynolds:

“We urge Congress and George Bush

that whatever response or policy the U.S. develops it will be clear that

this nation will no longer target civilians, or accept any policy by any

nation which targets civilians. This would mean an end to the sanctions

against Iraq, which have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of

civilians. It would mean not only a condemnation of terrorism by

Palestinians but also the policy of assassination against the Palestinian

leadership by Israel, and the ruthless repression of the Palestinian

population and the continuing occupation by Israel of the West Bank and

Gaza. The policies of militarism pursued by the United States have resulted

in millions of deaths, from the historic tragedy of the Indochina war,

through the funding of death squads in Central America and Colombia, to the

sanctions and air strikes against Iraq. This nation is the largest supplier

of “conventional weapons” in the world – and those weapons fuel the starkest

kind of terrorism from Indonesia to Africa. The early policy of support for

armed resistance in Afghanistan resulted in the victory of the Taliban – and

the creation of Osama Bin Laden.

Other nations have also engaged in these policies. We have, in years past,

condemned the actions of the Russian government in areas such as Chechnya,

the violence on both sides in the Middle East, and in the Balkans. But our

nation must take responsibility for its own actions. Up until now we have

felt safe within our borders. To wake on a clear cool day to find our

largest city under siege reminds us that in a violent world, none are safe.

Let us seek an end of the militarism which has characterized this nation for

decades. Let us seek a world in which security is gained through

disarmament, international cooperation, and social justice – not through

escalation and retaliation. We condemn without reservation attacks such as

those which occurred, which strike at thousands of civilians. May these

profound tragedies remind us of the impact U.S. policies have had on other

civilians in other lands. We are particularly aware of the fear which many

people of Middle Eastern descent, living in this country, may feel at this

time and urge special consideration for this community.

We are one world. We shall live in a state of fear and terror or we shall

move toward a future in which we seek peaceful alternatives to conflict and

a more just distribution of the world’s resources. As we mourn the many

lives lost, our hearts call out for reconciliation, not revenge.”

Just some thoughts…

Last weekend I saw Apocalypse Now Redux, and the intensity of its searing images, which indeed had been with me since first seeing the film on its release day in 1979, had a renewed presence, just in time for its phantasmagoria to fuse with current events. Apocalyptic, indeed. I’ve been going through the motions of my day at the hospital today in a sort of half-reality, after being at home this AM watching events unfold on live TV until I realized I didn’t want these images played and replayed in front of my three-year-old daughter. There’s something comforting about being in a profession like caring for urgently sick patients which has to go on no matter what else is happening in the world; most things would seem so irrelevant for now. When I was able to connect with my wife, I broke down and sobbed, barely able to catch my breath — “My God, what kind of world do we live in??” Does today mark a sudden sea change, after which the world will be forever different? On the other hand, as horrible as this attack has been, people in many parts of the world live in daily fear of terrorism no different in horror if different in magnitude and drama. Welcome to the real world, U.S.? Get used to the post-traumatic scarring of our collective psyche by the eruption of events that shred the fabric of predictability and control with which our lives have been woven.

Many of us are probably thinking similar things. In a way, I’m surprised that this didn’t happen sooner. The methodology used in this terrorist attack appears to be exactly that publicly blueprinted years ago. Pundits talk about the rude awakening from “America the safe”, “America the invulnerable”, cushioned by our enfolding oceans, but our vulnerability to domestic assault and the indiscriminacy of targeting the general population have long been expected. It should not shock us either that it was so easy to carry out four simultaneous hijackings in the face of “airline security measures” (I concede, of course, that we don’t know if further actions, beyond these four, were thwarted today…). I’ve long suspected that we treat mostly our own anxieties and discourage only threats from the frivolous or erratic unbalanced with our x-rays and metal detectors. Turnover among security personnel is amazingly high and compensation amazingly low; the airline companies give the contracts to manage their gate security to the lowest bidder. Security checks are only as good as the vigilance of those conducting them, and subject to the predictable human frailties of diffidence, wavering attention, disinvestment, burnout, and arbitrariness. Lord, I was harrassed when my son and I visited the Statue of Liberty this spring because of a folding knife in my backpack!

I fear that today’s events may not be the culmination, but only the opening volley, in fact. Can we rest assured that the organization and discipline, the zeal and the impunity of such attackers won’t translate into a CBW or suitcase-fission weapon attack? Friends of mine here in Boston cautioned me not to be too comfortable drinking from the water supply today. I dismissed that as histrionics at first, but is it really unrealistic?? And then: we’re likely to wake up in a world tomorrow in which objections to the unprecedented crackdown on our civil liberties we’re likely to face will be about as popular as pacifist conscientious objectors were after Pearl Harbor.

So what can we do, if we live in a world of such terror? If you’re in New York — or even if you’re not — think about giving blood, now if ever… Two of the hijacked flights originated here in Boston. Soon enough, I suppose, it’ll be clear whether I or my friends and immediate community knew anyone on those flights and can be of personal support. Professionally, I may also be able to be useful if there is a need for specialized disaster response counselling for the families and friends of victims here, which is something I’ve trained and volunteered to do. Nowadays, however, the airlines usually bring in their own teams rather than use those, like mine, that are community-based. Barring that, all I can think of has been to take deeper breaths, think for an extra moment before I act, cultivate my compassion and caring, work for peace and justice in small and, if ever possible, larger ways, and raise my children to do so… although with no naive illusions. I have more of a sense now than perhaps ever before of belonging to a nation, a community… of victims. But it’s a cautious, wavering sense of belonging. I can only echo the sentiments of others that, as a nation, we had better think carefully before we decide if, and how, to address our collective thirst for vengeance — especially after hearing the news of Palestinians dancing in the streets rejoicing at these events. The rabid anti-Muslim hysterics are about to begin… Did you notice how ready the news anchors were to give credibility to scurrilous reports that Islamic groups had claimed responsibility?

Readers of FmH know my feelings about B— and his minions, and it goes without saying for me that the ignorant fundamentalist ideologues ought not to be in charge of this show at a time like this. Let’s remember that they didn’t have the country’s mandate to govern in the first place. Although it is customary to say that we all must pull together behind our Administration in a show of strength and unity at such a time of national crisis, if there were ever a time to remind them, and the world, that they do not speak and act for me in perpetuating the hatred by seeking unmeasured Biblical retribution, this is it. After Gandhi, “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” Our adamant collective anger will make this an unpopular stance, I know…

I usually like to buff, finesse, and worry my public thoughts into polished form; not good at off-the-cuff ruminating. But I needed to put down some of the inchoate, complicated feelings and reactions fresh. I know my first impulse was to go offline and run and turn on CNN when I learned about this in the morning, as I said in bold type below. It doesn’t seem easy to follow fast-breaking news by point-and-click. Nevertheless, the thoughtful reflections on today’s horror of many of the webloggers I follow (see sidebar) are worth reading.

Mostly, right now, my heart is with the families of the victims of this carnage…

Turn on your TV! In an apparent terrorist act, two planes have been flown into the World Trade Towers in New York. As I just watched the coverage, news is breaking that there is a fire at the Pentagon after an apparent plane crash there. Addendum: all air traffic in US grounded. Another plane crash in western Pennsylvania.

Novel Auction Offers Chance to Buy Immortality — “A place in literary immortality is on offer to the highest bidder.

Best-selling novelists Robert Harris (Enigma), Ken Follett (Eye of the Needle), Pat Barker (The

Ghost Road) and Zadie Smith (White Teeth) are among the authors agreeing to name a

character in forthcoming books after those prepared to pay up for the privilege. Reuters The slide into literary whoredom accelerates [and I liked Zadie Smith too!].

Sacramento Slaying Suspect Kills Self. What’s crazy in Sacramento? This was the second mass killing spree there in three weeks. AP

Case Could Weaken Restraining Orders. A case currently wending its way through the Massachusetts court system challenges the restrictiveness of restraining orders, broadly used to protect victims of domestic violence.Charges have been dismissed against a man who was arrested twice for violating his restraining order by being at the same public event as his victim in their small town; the judge ruled that the prosecutors had not met the burden of proving his proximity had criminal intent. Advocates for battered women fear enforcement of restraining orders will be relaxed; others feel defendants’ rights need to be upheld in these cases. Boston Globe

Popsicle Jokes Fall Victim to Globalization

His Memory Returns, Byte by Byte This then-37 year-old former professional stuntman lost his memory and sense of identity after a violent assault in a Paris suburb three years ago. “I had absolutely no memory of who I was before the incident — I had to start again from the beginning.”

While it is the archetype we all learned from the movies*, this type of ‘total amnesia’ is very rare and is not a consequence of neurological injury to the brain but rather an extreme psychological reaction to the overwhelming emotional trauma. He embarked on a harrowing process of reinventing himself, and his knowledge of the world, from scratch, and he credits the Internet as crucial to the process. “For someone like me that was missing all his cultural references, the Internet was an extraordinary tool for filling in the gaps,” he said. “I organized my brain like a hard drive and sorted the information I found on the Internet into folders and files in my mind.” He now has a website up to provide information on memory loss. Wired

___________________________

*Here, part of a site discussing the depiction of disabilities in film, is a list of films using amnesia as a plot device. A more useful list (however, one to which I can’t give you a one-click link) results from searching the Internet Movie Database for “amnesia” in Plots (>80 hits) or Keywords (>220 hits).

Showbiz’s decline drags down critics

I find myself constantly reading favorable reviews of lousy films — “Rat Race,” “Osmosis Jones,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and the most emblematic of the situation, “American Pie 2” — written by estimable critics who have been around a long time and who, 10 or 15 years ago, wouldn’t have had any patience with any of these movies. But like everyone else, critics have been conditioned to give in and go along — or be branded a “drag” and left behind.

A critic who takes the risk of coming out against a cheap, salacious movie such as “American Pie 2” also risks being accused of being a killjoy or, worse yet, of being repressed. If you don’t laugh, see, you clearly have problems. Sacramento Bee

What’s the point of ballet? The Guardian begins a series on “difficult” art forms.

“…(D)ance seemed to demand an off-putting level of technical knowledge from the viewer. Unless the performer actually fell over, it was hard to know whether they were dancing moderately or spectacularly. The same is true of classical music and art – where only an expert can really detect a wrong note or incompetent brush stroke – but with those forms the spectator has the compensations of emotion, colour, story.”

Novel idea: the 24th annual Three-Day Novel-Writing Contest in Vancouver. Participants must come up with at least 100 typed pages over the course of a long weekend; the best will win publication. The consolation prize for everyone else is that you’re at least 100 pages closer to finishing your Great North American Novel. National Post

Nevermind: How political rock became a pose; pop politics, just a close cousin to guitar-smashing and girl-chasing?

Ultimately, the irony faced by today’s political bands is that they are themselves symptoms of the disease they set out to cure–a tendency that Rage, which agitated against globalization from within the confines of an a monolithic media company, epitomized so well. With the musical scene fissuring into a million niche markets controlled by three or four corporations, there’s no real perch from which to register one’s dissent, or reach out to others who might share the sentiment. The divide between fan and star has grown disconcertingly wide, and the concerns of one seem terribly far from the occupations of the other.

The New Republic

Google 2.0 — “People using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are now being redirected to Microsoft’s MSN when they make certain kinds of mistakes. This means that Microsoft is taking control of another part of the user experience. This article discusses how Google might be able to help users and solve a few other problems others along the way.” Webword

E-paper moving closer: “The success or otherwise of this electronic equivalent to paper will depend in part on finding what is called the killer application.

What will e-paper be used for? Taking the place of newspapers, magazines and books, or replacing shop signs? Until that question is answered, we will not be discarding the real thing quite yet.” BBC

After more than fifty years of keeping their contents secret, some say because they would undermine Christianity, the Vatican will allow changes to the Bible based on findings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The extent of the changes is not clear, but the Vatican says the new edition of the New Jerusalem Bible will take five years to complete. Many of the scrolls were bought by the Church and are under the scrutiny of Dominican scholars. Times of London

Movies the way God meant them to be seen. Says Roger Ebert: ” What do Fred Astaire’s feet, Kirk Douglas’ dimple and Willie Wonka’s hat have in common? Boneheaded studios and incompetent projectionists are cropping them out of the picture… I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all movies deserve to be seen in their original aspect ratios. Four recent events suggest that this truth is not universally evident.” Salon

If they won’t contact you, contact us! “So why wait? Why wonder if they’re ever going to come for you? Why even invest the time, trouble, and expense involved in an actual abduction when the highly trained and professional staff at Alien Abductions Incorporated can provide you with personalized, realistic memories of the alien abduction that you have been waiting for your entire life?”

Chess legend ‘plays the web’. This is being broadly linked to. A British chess grandmaster believes the anonymous chess player he has been playing — and being whipped by — over the ‘net is the elusive Bobby Fischer, who last surfaced publicly for a chess match in 1992. The speculation may drive Fischer underground again… BBC

John Ashcroft’s First Six Months at the Justice Department: The Right-Wing Dream Team Takes Over: “Six months into Ashcroft’s tenure, it is clear that many of the concerns raised by public interest groups and hundreds of thousands of Americans were well warranted.” People for the American Way

A number of interesting articles in the newest issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior, via the Spike Report, include:

Holiday at the Grocery Store: Conversations with a reformed convict

The point of running this interview, as well as Anonymous’ piece, is twofold. First, even for those who run afoul of the law, there is mundanity – trying to score drugs, casing houses, or worrying about one’s safety in a prison shower, once taken out of the media spotlight and made an everyday part of one’s reality, become mundanity.

The second point is to show how tenuous everyone’s hold on normalcy is. Cesar had a promising career in retail management before he lost it all/gave it all up and became a thief.

An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following.

The Bride, Off Duty

Great varieties of manners and ceremonies make up the legal and cultural binding called a wedding. The connecting of families, communities, religions and ethnicities is celebrated through a latticework of movements, scripts, foods, and music. Thinking of these ties, values, and communitybuilding found in traditional wedding festivities, I had a thought: what if The Bride were alone?

Anti-spin activist John Stauber Penetrates America’s Lie Machine: “When you turn on the evening news or pick up the morning paper, do you ever wonder whose opinion you’re getting, and how slanted it may be? What many people don’t realize is that much of what passes for news has usually been spun by the public relations industry.” Utne Reader

Product placement prostitution spreads from the movie biz to the book biz. LA Times [Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?]

The bum’s rush out of his Senate seat for Phil Gramm: now that the never-too-sympathetic figure has announced he’s retiring, the ugly upstarts in B—‘s Republican Party want him to resign so they can appoint a Hispanic to the seat, avoid a costly and divisive Republican primary, and advance the fiction that Latino and segregationist voters are happily in bed with each other in Shrub’s America. Joshua Marshall’s Talking Points

Roundup of Irish press coverage of the Protestant intimidation of Catholic schoolchildren.

“By far the most pressing need in Northern Ireland now is for a return to real and visible politics. The events in Ardoyne have underlined, yet again, that the only alternative to dialogue and negotiation is anarchy. Politicians in Northern Ireland have to be told, by both governments, that it is time to get back to work. Let us hope it will not take another Omagh to spur Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair into reasserting their commitment to the Good Friday agreement.” Guardian UK

Democratic Party complains about renegade GOP Web site. Recall last year when the right of a group opposed to abortion to post a webpage withthe home addresses and personal details of doctors who oppose abortion, for the obvious purpose of encouraging stalking, was upheld as a free speech right? Now an ugly New Hampshire Republican-connected webpage, similarly, posts the home addresses of members of that state’s Democratic party under the heading “Enemies of the State.” The Republican leadership, of course, disavows responsibility and says that the Democrats are using the incident for political gain. [Oh, if only it were political gain to portray your opponents as unscrupulous bigots in modern-day America!]

“eActivist.org works to encourage electronic activism and civic participation by providing a collection of simple, easy-to-use progressive electronic actions and tools for the eActivist. We partner with highly respected organizations from around the globe to deliver the best of electronic activism in a fast and effective format.”

What’s in the driver’s license bar code? To what possible uses could they put all that data?

The Economy’s ‘Dolt Factor’: ‘George W. Bush’s public relations strategy in the face of a slumping economy is to convince the American people that he’s personally ‘concerned’ about the depressed stock prices and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs… Bush’s protestations of concern may have the hollow ring of his father’s famous recitation of a talking point during the 1992 campaign, “Message: I care.” Or the younger Bush’s own garbled expression of sympathy for the average Joe in the 2000 campaign: “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” ‘ The Consortium

Revivified the template for FmH — simplified the obcenity of my deeply nested tables, removed and rearranged things abit, cleaned up. I’m still buffing it up, but the weblog should load faster. Well?

Reblogger was kicked off its server. It’s up and running elsewhere and I’ll probably get around to restoring the code for it, but for now clicking the icon will just send me an email comment on that item.

Revivified the template for FmH — simplified the obcenity of my deeply nested tables, removed and rearranged things abit, cleaned up. I’m still buffing it up, but the weblog should load faster. Well?

Reblogger was kicked off its server. It’s up and running elsewhere and I’ll probably get around to restoring the code for it, but for now clicking the icon will just send me an email comment on that item.

Annals of the Erosion of Privacy (cont’d.): Your Face Is Not a Bar Code:

Arguments Against Automatic Face Recognition in Public Places, by Phil Agre.

Napster Eclipsed by Newcomers: “Months after shutting down its file-trading service, Napster has finally been displaced by four new applications that allow users to trade music, movies and software, a new study concludes.

Four new file-sharing systems — FastTrack, Audiogalaxy, iMesh and Gnutella — were used to download 3.05 billion files during August, according to research firm Webnoize.

That’s more copyrighted material than was ever shared using Napster.” Wired

Arianna Huffington: A Blast From The Past: Nuclear Madness Sweeps White House — “To make the world safer.

That’s the justification by the Bush administration for its missile defense shield. But, as is often the case with the Bushies, once they have a goal, they let no facts or logic stand in their way, even if they contradict the original motivation. So just how far is the White House willing to go to build support across the globe for its missile defense shield obsession? Further than any sane person would imagine.”

JK Rowling praises film company as it works its magic on Harry Potter. She’s “delighted at the authenticity of the characters.” Guardian Unlimited [via RobotWisdom]

Best Glimpse Yet of Milky Way’s Monster Black Hole: Theoretical predictions that black holes lie at the center of galaxies have been so appealing that they are astrophysical gospel. Now, with the high resolution of the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, “(a)stronomers said on Wednesday they have pinpointed a tiny area at the Milky Way’s heart where a black hole with the mass of 2.6 million Suns is likely to lurk.

This does not absolutely confirm the existence of the mysterious matter-sucking drains known as black holes, but it appears to rule out any other explanations scientists can imagine for the weird cosmic behavior at our galaxy’s center.” The region, 26 million light years distant, is just 10 light minutes, or 93 million miles, across — by cosmic coincidence, in the ballpark of exactly one AU (astronomical unit), the distance from the earth to the sun. Reuters

Cory (at boing boing), you’re so right: “Researchers are creating transgenic, true-breeding mosquitos that are biologically incapable of vectoring malaria, dengue and other pest-borne, millions-slaying illnesses. The trick here is “true-breeding” — if the planned release into the wild goes as planned, the transgenic vampires will mate with their disease-prone cousins and birth non-carrying offspring. I think the next step should be breeding a skeeter whose saliva doesn’t evoke a histamine reaction.” [emphasis added. –FmH]

Virus May Help Fight HIV — GBV-C, or “hepatitis G”, discovered in 1995, infection with which does not cause any apparent ill effects, occurs in around 2% of the general public, and co-infection with it may be part of the mystery of why some HIV-infected patients can survive decades after contracting the infection. It is not clear how it has this effect. Because the longterm outcome of hepatitis-G infection is not yet known, researchers are cautioning that people not deliberately infect themselves. New York Times

UNIX Approaches Ripe Old Age of One Billion: “In the first year of the new millenium, UNIX will … be one billion seconds old. That’s right, the big One-E-Nine. The UNIX epoch dates from January 1st, 1970. Every UNIX system in the world worth its salt keeps track of time by counting every single second since the midnight just before that auspicious date.” The time is near… In fact, tomorrow 9/8 at 21:46 Eastern time.

Greycommerce – technology you shouldn’t have. A UK-based site founded after its now CEO travelled to the Far East and “found hi-tech consumer electronics and gadgets never seen in the West and never intended to be marketed in the West.”

Whatever happened to the humble home page? ‘ “On the Internet”, the pundits claimed, “everyone will be a publisher!” And for a while, everyone published.

But not necessarily very well. Thinking back, these shameless exercises in ego and HTML weren’t usually very good. Who can forget the garish magenta backgrounds? The poorly chosen font sizes? The endless photographs of Rex the Dog?’ Metro Times Detroit

Wanted: Enemy to Justify $344 Billion War Budget AlterNet

New trial shows cannabis works: “…can have a real role in reducing chronic, long-term pain, according to the first results from a hospital trial.

” This is London

The People’s Prozac. Dissenting scientists see a double standard in the vilification of MDMA (Ecstasy) and the deification of Ritalin and other stimulants for the nation’s school children. Village Voice [via AlterNet]

Winners and losers from the HP/Compaq merger

The Register

Police on alert for Bond-like phone gun — “On the outside, the weapons look like normal cell phones, although they are heavier than most modern models.

The top third of the phone’s body slides open, revealing four small holes where .22-caliber bullets can be chambered, lying flat beneath the phone’s liquid crystal display screen.

When the phone is closed, a small handle on the bottom is pulled back to draw a spring-loaded percussion mechanism into place. The gun is then fired four times in quick succession by pressing the 4, 5, 6 and 7 on the phone’s keypad–one round for each button. The bullets shoot out the top of the phone. At close range, the shots could easily be deadly, law enforcement officials said.” Chicago Sun-Times

Everyrule.com: Every Rule in the Universe-All Categories

Jonathan Franzen’s Big Book:

” In 1996, Franzen made a reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of Harper’s, in a bitter, eloquent, intensely personal essay titled “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” The big socially engaged novel was dead, he declared, killed off by TV. Serious postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo were doomed to irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted entertainment, not news, engaging stories, not ideology. This knowledge filled him with despair.

But he did more than just diagnose the problem. He implied that he could solve it…

His novel is as clever as those of the brainy postmodernists he admires but infinitely more accessible. Like DeLillo and Gaddis, he dazzles the reader with trenchant riffs on contemporary life — everything from mood-enhancing pharmaceuticals to bisexuality to cruise-ship culture. But rather than relay his thoughts about the world through chilly rhetorical pyrotechnics or plots of mind-boggling complication, Franzen embeds them in the lives of affecting human characters.”

Review and preview of The Corrections. New York Times

Bush Cabinet Takes Back Seat In Driving Policy: “Bush’s highly credentialed Cabinet members are finding themselves in an unaccustomed role: that of subordinates. As the administration took office, it was thought that Bush’s Cabinet would be unusually powerful because of its impressive lineup of talent: former governors and senators, veterans of previous Cabinets, top business executives and a popular general. But on most of the big issues, Cabinet members have discovered they have less clout than lesser-known White House aides.” Washington Post

Freedom or equality: the choice is ours. The aristocrats are out of the closet about their entitlement.

… for the past several decades, conservatives and other champions of the privileged have sternly denied that they are snobs who oppose economic equity out of the conviction that some people — they and theirs — are inherently superior to the masses.

Only the late Ayn Rand openly proclaimed that life was a “struggle between the genius and the parasite,” and that public policy should favor the innately superior genius. Other conservatives, even those who fell under her influence (Alan Greenspan, for one), insisted that they were as devoted as anyone to the proposition that down deep, everybody is jes’ folks.

No more. Emboldened by recent success, some right-wing scholars have openly declared that those who do better are better. In his book The Virtues of Prosperity, conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza argues that, “The guy who is worth little has probably produced little of value. By the same token, the guy who’s earning twice as much as you is most likely — perish the thought — twice as good as you are.” Orlando Sentinel

U.S. Concedes Some Cell Lines Are Not Ready — “Nearly

a month after President Bush

announced that he would permit federally

financed scientists to study more than 60

colonies of human embryonic stem cells, the

administration acknowledged today that

fewer than half those colonies were fully

established and ready for research.” New York Times [Is anyone surprised?]

Rock Stars Oppose Bush’s Energy Plan and Ask Fans to Join Them. In addition to reinvigorating Greenpeace (see below), the Shrub in the White House puts rock activism back in vogue, and wonderful old warhorses like David Crosby get a second wind (or a third…?) New York Times

Signs of Hope: Spotlight Turns to Undecided Sen. Thompson (R-Tenn) and Pete Domenici (R-NMex), who have yet to announce whether they will stand for their seats next year. Jesse Helms, Strom Tuurmond and now Texas Senator Phil Gramm are retiring from the Senate. So far, all 14 Democratic Senators whose seats are up for grabs are expected to stand for reelection. A total of 20 Republican seats hang in the balance as well. Reuters [Whether the Democrats take control again or not, I’m loving the prospect of a US Senate without Thurmond and Helms…]

Early School Lunch May Violate Federal Rules The first lunch period at this Boston-area high school will begin at 9:26 a.m.! School overcrowding, of course, is the culprit. Federal regulations, by the way, allow school lunch at 10:00.

Move to Criminalize All Leaks of Classified Data Hits a Snag: “A Senate hearing scheduled for

today on a proposal to make all leaks of classified information

crimes was canceled after the White House told the bill’s Republican

sponsor that it was not prepared to support the legislation.

A senior White House official said that while the administration opposed

leaks, a new law was not needed to safeguard national security.” New York Times [George B— as a card-carrying ACLU member??]

Shaking Down American Travelers. Via boing boing, this link to an article by an attorney discussing reports that Ry Cooder is being fined $25,000US for travelling to Cuba to make the Buena Vista Social Club film. It is illegal for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba — actually, it seems the crime is spending money there without the permission of the Treasury Dept. No one has yet been brought to court to enforce this blatantly unconstitutional (in my legally untutored opinion) law, but 379 Cuba travellers have voluntarily “settled” with the gov’t to the tune of a collective $2 million. Anyone protesting such a fine would be entitled to a due process review by an administrative judge within the Treasury Dept, but it has none. Indeed, a backlog of protests is waiting to be heard. Despite the fact that House has voted to stop funding enforcement and the Senate is likely to follow suit this fall, the Shrub administration is having the Treasury step up enforcement of the travel ban by sending agents to foreign airports where U.S. citizens are likely to transfer to Cuba-bound flights. I share speculation that this is “some kind of pliitical payoff to the Cuban American National Foundation”; B— is increasingly making moves on a number of fronts to increase his Hispanic voting bloc in anticipation of 2004. The author advises Ry to fight this:

“Unconstitutional regulations and laws are illegal and void and should immediately be terminated or repealed. If questionably constitutional, they should be taken to court for determination as soon as possible. They should not be kept on the books for years in order to harass selectively, or to frighten and bilk the unwary when our government (but not the traveler) knows there will be no prosecution. Last January our President took an oath to uphold our Constitution. He has plenty of good legal advice. If he truly represents us, Cuba travelers like Ry Cooder should be able to rely on his good faith in this respect.

” Common Dreams

The New York Times eulogizes Pauline Kael, 1919-2001. “Provocative and Widely Imitated Film Critic, Dies at 82. Whether dismissing auteur theory,

reviewing Robert Altman’s Nashville

(1975) before it was finished, questioning

the extent of Orson Welles’s contribution to

Citizen Kane (1941) or proclaiming

Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris

(1973) as a cultural event comparable to

the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre

du Printemps, Ms. Kael was always provocative. Her seductive writing

style bred a legion of acolytes, known as Paulettes.”

…the most quotable critic writing; but what is important and bracing is that

she relates movies to other experiences, to ideas and attitudes, to

ambition, books, money, other movies, to politics and the evolving culture,

to moods of the audience, to our sense of ourselves — to what movies do

to us, the acute and self- scrutinizing awareness of which is always at the

core of her judgment.

–Eliot Fremont-Smith

Welcome to new readers who found FmH through Rebecca Blood. Like her, I found the piece below on infrasound and hauntings one of the most fascinating items in awhile. Hope you find something else you like here… [thanks, Rebecca]

Doctors Say a Chocolate a Day Keeps Them Away: ‘Chocolate contains compounds called

flavonoids that can help maintain a healthy heart and good

circulation and reduce blood clotting — which can cause heart attacks

and strokes.

“More and more, we are finding evidence that consumption of

chocolate that is rich in flavonoids can have positive cardiovascular

effects,” Carl Keen, a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis,

told a science conference.’ Reuters

Annals of Intolerance (cont’d.): Protestants Terrorize N.Irish Girls Second Day: “Irate

Protestants hurling stones and abuse

terrorized scores of Roman Catholic girls for

a second day Tuesday as they walked to

school under massive security in Belfast.”

And: U.S. and Israel quit U.N. conference against racism. Boston Globe

Strange bedfellows. The Rainbow Warrior puts in an appearance on my local seacoast. “It was classic Greenpeace… The rabble-rousers of the environmental movement are back”, reinvigorated by the environmental dangers posed by B—. Boston.com

Gore Attends Campaign-Like Event — “Former Vice President

Al Gore attended his first

campaign-style political event since his

narrow loss in the presidential election,

brushing aside questions about whether he

would run again.” Still sporting the sinister-looking beard. AP

I previously wrote about a theory that Federal regulatory changes would result in increasing shark attacks. Now here’s another one, which has killed one swimmer and left another in critical condition in North Carolina. And those wacky folks at PETA have unveiled a billboard urging sympathy for sharks: “Would You Give Your Right Arm to Know

Why Sharks Attack, Could it be Revenge? Go Vegetarian, PETA.”

Reno Moves to Run for Fla. Governor AP

Via randomWalks, a blink to Werewolf, a mind game for a large group of people. Links to a number of variants and related games. “I really like it. But then I go to some strange parties,” says the page’s poster.

Chuck Taggart at Looka! points to the fact that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was awarded the 2001 Hugo Award for best novel. While longtime readers of FmH know of my relish for Rowling’s Harry Potter books, each of which I’ve read aloud to my son, I agree with Chuck’s consternation that this is by no stretch of the imagination a work of science fiction. By the way, has any reader noticed any recent news of when (if?) we can expect the next in the Potter series?

How to Calibrate a Television FAQ: “Most televisions have electronic service adjustments. This means that adjustments like picture

geometry, white balance, and color presets are adjusted via on screen displays (OSD), using the

remote control and the service menu.” [from jerrykindall]