Desire/Knowledge: Towards a Libidinal Epistemology for the Earth — ‘Though the leaders of industrial society increasingly appropriate human sexual energy and divert it into production, the power and potential of the erotic is much greater than that. The authors propose that averting the pending global ecological catastrophe — a crisis fuelled in great part by the orgy of production and consumption in the metropolitan cores of the industrialized world — may well require an orgy of an altogether different order. They call for “joyful affirmation” of the erotic in all environmental pursuits, be they academic or cultural. ‘ Alternatives: Eros/Nature

Thought Police Peek Into Brains: ‘U.S. investigators are facing the daunting task of sorting through more than 700 suspects in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. A neuroscientist from Iowa says he’s got the perfect tool to help them do it.

Lawrence Farwell says he has devised a test that will ascertain whether the suspects have criminal knowledge of the terrorist attack by measuring their brainwaves. He calls it “brain fingerprinting.” ‘ Wired

Addendum: A reader asks why suspects wouldn’t be protected against submitting to this procedure by their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Any thoughts?

PBS’s American Field Guide: “Immerse yourself in the great outdoors

without ever leaving your desk. Tap into the sights and sounds from a wide variety of environments throughout America. We’ve collected over 1200 video clips that enable you to experience America’s wilderness firsthand.” [via Red Rock Eaters]

History, Memory, Trauma: Problems in Representing the Extreme. Exploration of an essential and untrivial question: “how do extreme events function as traumas?” –Michael Roth, Getty Institute for the History of Art and Humanities. [via Red Rock Eaters]

Debka (“we start where the media stops”) reports that the US and Russia have agreed to allow one another to deploy tactical nuclear weapons; the US in the Afghani action and the Russians in Chechnya, and that the weapons are already being deployed in their respective theatres. Wired reports that this “freewheeling Israeli news site… is beating out big-name American and international news sources” on key storiees related to terrorism and counter-terrorism. Caveat: “Like the Drudge Report, which it resembles, Debkafile clearly reports with a point of view; the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli politics and has partnered with the far-right news site WorldNetDaily… That slant, combined with Debkafile’s breakneck pace ­– its eight-person staff updates the site as often as 5 or 6 times per day with terse, one-line tips and sparse news briefs — means it often airs unfounded, inaccurate rumors while breaking legitimate news.” It’s some solace that, if correct, such Debka stories as this or their report that China is bringing Muslim troops into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, will appear in the mainstream press in a matter of days.

In a related story, the Washington Post reports: U.S. pressed on nuclear response.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York have invigorated national security strategists inside and outside the government who favor using nuclear arms to deter and respond to chemical or biological attacks.

Conservatives outside the administration have been calling on the administration to make an explicit threat to use nuclear weapons to respond to a biological or chemical attack. This would change a long-standing U.S. policy of refusing to rule in or rule out use of nuclear weapons in the event of such an attack.

In echoing several links from wood s lot yesterday, I forgot to congratulate Mark on the first anniversary of his deep-excellence blog.

En Banc 9th Circuit to Review Abortion Speech Case — ‘The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Wednesday to rehear en banc a case that could outline the limits of provocative speech under the First Amendment.

The case was brought by abortion providers who were depicted by anti-abortion activists on “Wanted”-style posters and a “Nuremberg Files” Web site that accused them of crimes against humanity. The key issue is whether context can be used to judge whether such speech crosses the line from provocative into a threat. In light of a climate of violence over the abortion issue, the abortion providers charge the Web site and posters are an incitement not protected by the Constitution.’

<img src=”http://www.warresisters.org/images/grief_rifle.jpg&#8221; border=”0″ alt=”our grief is not a cry for war!” title=”courtesy of War Resisters League”>

Lord help us; Lord help Afghanistan…

Carried out under a clear sky lit brightly by a three-quarters moon, the strikes involved single heavy bombs thunderously detonating on individual targets. Each impact lit up small sections of the plain and sent concussions echoing off the surrounding mountains for a full 15 seconds.

American jets could not be seen or heard here. The bombs fell silently from the sky, appearing with no warning. New York Times

Becoming What We Detest: Bush Says ‘Time Is Running Out’ as Forces Move Into Place. Rapid action is necessary both for reasons of logistics, with the proverbial harsh Afghan winter approaching, and for U.S. credibility. The Times quite correctly discerns that behind the words about consensus and coalition is the U.S.’s momentum toward acting alone. Rumsfeld’s trip this week resulted in no public permission from five “friendly” nations for us to use their territory to launch attacks, but the U.S. “insisted that it had what it needed —

overflight rights, limited basing rights and open political support…” Unnamed sources concede that one reason for unilateral action is “that the United States is determined

to avoid the limitations on its targets that were imposed by NATO allies

during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the hesitance to topple a leader that

members of the Persian Gulf war coalition felt in 1991… A senior administration official put it more bluntly: ‘The fewer people you

have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get.’

A sign of Washington’s insistence that its hands not be tied was its rejection

of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s entreaties that any

American military action be subject to Security Council approval,

administration officials said. At the same time, the Bush administration

decided it was not necessary to make public its evidence against Mr. bin

Laden. .

At first, the Pentagon was even unwilling to have NATO invoke the

alliance’s mutual defense clause requiring members to defend one other

against an armed attack, senior administration and European officials

said. “The allies were desperately trying to give us political cover and the

Pentagon was resisting it,” one senior administration official said. “It was

insane. Eventually Rumsfeld understood it was a plus, not a minus, and

was able to accept it.” “

It seems clearer that, despite the legitimizing ‘spin’, the U.S. is embarking alone on as irresponsible and dangerous a path as some of us have been dreading all along. From 9-11 onward, we eschewed mechanisms that might have legitimated and framed bringing the perpetrators and their backers to justice as police actions under the rule of international law. Even granting that we take a military rather than a law enforcement approach, we have ignored legitimate vehicles for international action such as the U.N., utilizing which could have strengthened existing mechanisms for world peace and security that instead we scoff at. The much-vaunted international consensus we claimed to build for U.S.-led action now sounds like so much smoke and mirrors. (My speculation is that, in its injured entitlement after the attack, the administration expected other nations’ full cooperation out of the goodness of their hearts. Now that it is clear that, instead, almost every nation expects something in return, we are unwilling to accept the demands of mutuality.) We have made a travesty of establishing the credibility of our accusations before the court of world opinion. We seem to be intent on evading rules of engagement on which the civilized world agrees. In essence, we become after all the rogue state we claim to detest…

Orwell Was Right: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance:

“What Britain’s surveillance experiment can teach us about our coming security state.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”] Alarming description of the complacent acceptance of pervasive surveillance even coupled with the recognition that it directly shapes public behavior in chilling ways. Rationalized as a response to Britain’s terrorist threat, the slippery slope of surveillance has been quite a swift ride downhill into monitoring a multiplicity of more prosaic social activities. The article estimates that the average Briton appears on a surveillance camera no lesss than three hundred times a day. Apparently, not one terrorist has been caught yet by the system, authorities concede, although it has identified a handful of scofflaws and petty thieves. There has been no control over whose data gets into the authorities’ databases; and the profiteer of an entrepreneur who has developed the predominant face recognition system they are using (seen here sewing seeds of public panic about terrorist threats with no scruples) attempts to assure the reporter that Britain could not abuse the database without going through him first. The essay suggests that because the British, in contrast to Americans, have traits such as a greater degree of craving for social class distinction and thus classification, and less litigiousness, we might not accept such surveillance as readily as they do. And, oh yes, we should feel reassured because those sitting in front of the monitors have a tendency to turn their cameras on large-breasted women. Whistling in the dark, I fear…

As we embark on the latest war to “protect our freedoms”, we should be careful what freedoms we are protecting. They include, apparently, the freedom to be unresisting subjects in the greatest experiment in the perfection of subtle transparent unrecognizable social control in the history of the world, all the while convinced we are fighting against the authoritarian regimes.

Countries Lag in Treating Mental Illness, W.H.O. Says — “Globally, countries do a poor

job of treating depression and other mental and

brain disorders, leaving most of the 450 million people

afflicted without even basic help, the World Health

Organization says in a new study.

Governments devote paltry sums — less than 1 percent

of their health budgets in 66 percent of the countries

surveyed — to mental illness and brain disorders,

according to the report, Mental Health: New

Understanding, New Hope.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

Becoming What We Detest: Bush Says ‘Time Is Running Out’ as Forces Move Into Place. Rapid action is necessary both for reasons of logistics, with the proverbial harsh Afghan winter approaching, and for U.S. credibility. The Times quite correctly discerns that behind the words about consensus and coalition is the U.S.’s momentum toward acting alone. Rumsfeld’s trip this week resulted in no public permission from five “friendly” nations for us to use their territory to launch attacks, but the U.S. “insisted that it had what it needed —

overflight rights, limited basing rights and open political support…” Unnamed sources concede that one reason for unilateral action is “that the United States is determined

to avoid the limitations on its targets that were imposed by NATO allies

during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the hesitance to topple a leader that

members of the Persian Gulf war coalition felt in 1991… A senior administration official put it more bluntly: ‘The fewer people you

have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get.’

A sign of Washington’s insistence that its hands not be tied was its rejection

of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s entreaties that any

American military action be subject to Security Council approval,

administration officials said. At the same time, the Bush administration

decided it was not necessary to make public its evidence against Mr. bin

Laden. .

At first, the Pentagon was even unwilling to have NATO invoke the

alliance’s mutual defense clause requiring members to defend one other

against an armed attack, senior administration and European officials

said. “The allies were desperately trying to give us political cover and the

Pentagon was resisting it,” one senior administration official said. “It was

insane. Eventually Rumsfeld understood it was a plus, not a minus, and

was able to accept it.” “

It seems clearer that, despite the legitimizing ‘spin’, the U.S. is embarking alone on as irresponsible and dangerous a path as some of us have been dreading all along. From 9-11 onward, we eschewed mechanisms that might have legitimated and framed bringing the perpetrators and their backers to justice as police actions under the rule of international law. Even granting that we take a military rather than a law enforcement approach, we have ignored legitimate vehicles for international action such as the U.N., utilizing which could have strengthened existing mechanisms for world peace and security that instead we scoff at. The much-vaunted international consensus we claimed to build for U.S.-led action now sounds like so much smoke and mirrors. (My speculation is that, in its injured entitlement after the attack, the administration expected other nations’ full cooperation out of the goodness of their hearts. Now that it is clear that, instead, almost every nation expects something in return, we are unwilling to accept the demands of mutuality.) We have made a travesty of establishing the credibility of our accusations before the court of world opinion. We seem to be intent on evading rules of engagement on which the civilized world agrees. In essence, we become after all the rogue state we claim to detest…