“They digitize, we scrutinize”: Fox comes up for contemptuous reactions after its broadcast coverage of the World Series included the insertion of “virtual billboards”, set against the backstop, advertising the network’s other fare.

London’s Harry Potter world debut, two weeks ahead of the US opening, through the eyes of the Washington Post‘s TR Reid, who reserves special praise for Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid. I just found Coltrane a memorable presence in From Hell (to which, unlike Harry, I did not take my children, needless to say…) as well. [via randomWalks]

Great media news tidbits courtesy of the null device. First, the New York Daily News gossips about a doomsday tape Ted Turner reportedly had made for CNN to show if it was ever determined the world was about to end.

Turner, it seems, has been a doom-and-gloom kind of guy from the very day in June 1980 when he launched the cable network. He said then, as only he could, “We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we’ll cover it, play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and sign off.”

Keeping with the eschatological theme, when Disney recently acquired Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Family cable to add to its ABC family, along with the deal came a contractual obligation to air Pat Robertson’s 700 Club in perpetuity “(or until the Rapture, whichever comes first)”, as MarketWatch puts it.

Murdoch could well be included on Robertson’s blacklist of people who pollute popular culture, but he didn’t often pop up by name.

Disney, on the other hand, has been publicly blasted from Robertson’s electronic pulpit on various occasions. Among its sins, he believes, are its gay-friendly employment policies and its tolerance of gay and lesbian celebrations at its Orlando theme park. The latter were even supposed to bring down fires, floods and pestilence (or at least butterfly ballots) on the good people of Florida.

Straw’s diagnosis is subjected to re-examination. Letters to the editor of the

Guardian take exception to the British foreign secretary’s characterization of ObL yesterday as a “psychotic and paranoid.” No joke, from my perspective as a psychiatrist, to say that this is insulting to my patients.

“Oprah Winfrey recently withdrew her selection of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club. What did Franzen do to get dropped?” The Onion

Is there anyone left who doesn’t believe that the US bungled the Oct. 20th commando raid in Kandahar, the first highly touted ground assault of the “war”? [Or that Pentagon spokes lie through their teeth in their briefings about this? About other aspects of the military effort?] Read Seymour Hersh’s account here The New Yorker He’s been all over the media following up on this story — interviewed on CNN on Monday and NPR’s Morning Edition today. The Guardian corroborates Hersh’s findings (largely based on his American military informants) from Pakistani sources:

The debacle, which saw US Delta Force soldiers come under intense fire from the Taliban, prompted a review of special forces operations in Afghanistan and seems to have led to a delay in similar behind-the-lines operations.

The ferocity of the Taliban resistance caught US commandos unawares and showed that 13 days of bombing had failed to break the Taliban’s morale. It sparked a debate in the Pentagon on the advisability of such missions in the absence of clear intelligence.

Soon after the October 20 raid, the US switched its military strategy, throwing its weight behind the opposition Northern Alliance and relying on it to provide ground troops for the campaign.

The day after the raid the Pentagon hailed the operation a success that proved that US forces could strike anywhere at any time, in the manner of their choosing.

But, in fact, no one in American command counted upon the speed and intensity of the Taliban response. Both Hersh and the Guardian suggest the leadership of Gen. Tommy Franks, an artillery officer apparently enamored of the doctrine of warfighting via overwhelming force who commands the US war effort, is in question. Or will he be a convenient fall guy for a more pervasive failure of American military doctrine? like the same one we made in losing the Vietnam War a generation ago? It should be noted that US military spokespeople, e.g. on Sunday’s Meet the Press, dispute this account, insisting there was only “light resistance” and a “planned extraction” instead of a “hasty retreat”.

Cheryl Seal: Bush nominees may spell beginning of the end for the Environmental Protection Agency: ‘This past week, Bush quietly nominated two people to EPA posts — so quietly in fact that the only place you’ll probably see it is here. And with good reason. These two nominees make it painfully obvious that Bush wants to convert the agency into a big hollow barrel he can fill with corporate pork.’ Unknown News [via Booknotes]

“…the fact that Ecstasy is a hot commodity among some teen-agers should not impede research.” FDA approves first clinical test of Ecstasy since drug was criminalized: ‘Researchers have gained government approval to test the drug “Ecstasy” as a treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder for the first time since the drug was criminalized in 1985.

The decision was made this week by the Food and Drug Administration and marks a shift for the agency, which has virtually banned the drug from researchers for more than a decade.’ San Francisco Chronicle A proposed study at the Medical College of South Carolina is being funded by MAPS (the Medical Association for Psychedelic Studies), which advocates therapeutic use of hallucinogens (More properly, Ecstasy or MDMA has been described as an “entheogen”.) Alan Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, responds, “I know of no evidence in the scientific literature that demonstrates the efficacy of Ecstasy for any clinical indication.” [Uhhh, could it be, Mr. Leshner, that the research would have to be done before the results would appear in the literature?]

Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking. ‘BBC News Online has been shown just how lax security is on wireless networks used in London’s financial centre.

On one short trip, two-thirds of the networks we discovered using a laptop and free software tools were found to be wide open.

Any maliciously minded hacker could easily join these networks and piggy back on their fast net links, steal documents or subvert other machines on the systems to do their bidding.’

I was sent this link to the AndGor Toy Company, which will make your own personalized action figure from your photo, by a reader who says he thinks of it as the “analogue equivalent” of yesterday’s ‘Phizzheads’ post. [thanks, Miguel]

The Mathworld site is back after a year in which Eric Weisstein’s consummate mathematical resource was kept offline by an intellectual property dispute with his erstwhile publisher. [thanks, Abby]

An FmH reader says I’m wrong about what I called “moral relativism” in my post yesterday about torture:

I don’t think this constitues moral relativism. Relativism is a doctrine

that rejects the possibility of mediation between competing moral

frameworks, a doctrine that often leaves its proponent with an ‘to each,

his own’ blandness. To the relativist, there is no such thing as the Right

for any given situation. However, the above-referenced discussion about

torture proceeds from a distinct moral framework, a crude

pragmatism, which holds that morality (Rightness) is not a feature

of acts but a feature of the consequences of those acts. A

consequentialist says that it’s Right, absolutely, to kill one to save

many, a relativist says that there is no such thing as absolute Right and

Wrong. The philosophical term for the system you wish for, one in which

there are acts that are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of their

consequences, is called deontologism or imperativism. If you’ve got a

four-man lifeboat with five people, the consequentialist says it’s right

to kill one to save four, the deontologist says it’s wrong to kill,

period, and the relativist says that there is no trustworthy way to judge

Right and Wrong.

In related news, Alan Dershowitz says that consideration of unthinkables such as “truth serum and turture warrants” ought to be on the table at this juncture.