Lynne Cheney’s Free Speech Blacklist: ‘Largely lost in the recent mountain of domestic and international news was the release of a report by a conservative academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the vice-president’s wife. Quoting professors and university officials, the report calls them “the weak link in America’s response to the attack.” This accusation arises in part, according to the report, because some faculty “refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil.” TomPaine.com‘s Sharon Basco interviewed Hugh Gusterson, one of the professors quoted in the report.’ Phil Agre reports that, after the existence of Cheney’s broadside was publicized, it disappeared from the site at which it had originally been posted and then reappeared with the names of the more than a hundred ‘offending’ university faculty removed. Here’s a place where the original report has been mirrored and is available as a .pdf.

Are right-wing hate groups behind anthrax terror? “Nobody knows, because the Justice Department isn’t investigating violent militants on the right the way it’s monitoring Muslims, critics say.

.. Right-wing hate-group watchers say there’s been no dragnet pulling in the members of militant anti-abortion, white supremacist, Christian right or militia groups for questioning, let alone detention.

Abortion providers in particular have been calling on Attorney General John Ashcroft to condemn anti-abortion terrorists who have sent anthrax hoax letters to clinics – terror that began a few years ago, and returned in the wake of the deadly anthrax letters sent last month. But so far he has not.

Ashcroft’s opponents say the Justice Department’s reluctance to directly take on right wing groups confirms what they’ve been saying all along: that the conservative attorney general, a staunch abortion opponent and friend of the Christian right, is unable or unwilling to separate his personal beliefs from his responsibilities as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.” Salon Premium [subscription required]

Message ahead of its time

What would happen if a lone terrorist, driven by unexplained hatred, were to target a specific group of people using simple means available over the Internet and to attack them with the anthrax virus?

Scottish director Kenny Glenaan posed this question a year before the answer became all-too-clear across the world.

The director of “Gas Attack” – a suddenly prophetic film that competed in the international category of the Thessaloniki Film Festival after winning the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh Festival last August – said in an interview in Thessaloniki with Kathimerini’s English Edition, “I wanted to make a film about the things that concern us: racism, epidemics from genetically modified foods like foot-and-mouth, extremism and the inability of the authorities to deal with these crises.” eKathimerini

Harold Hongju Koh (professor of international law at Yale and former assistant

secretary of state for human rights in the Clinton administration): We Have the Right Courts for Bin Laden — ‘I hope never to see Osama bin Laden alive in the dock. As Mohammed

Atef’s recent death shows, international law entitles us to redress the killing

of thousands by direct armed attack upon Osama bin Laden and other Al

Qaeda perpetrators responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11. But if they

surrender, we should not lynch them, but rather try them, to promote

values that must stand higher than vengeance: to hold them accountable

for their crimes against humanity, to tell the world the true facts of those

crimes and to demonstrate that civilized societies can provide justice for

even the most heinous outlaws. Israel tried Adolf Eichmann. We can try

Osama bin Laden, and without revealing secret information, making him a

martyr or violating our own principles. President Bush’s order for secret

military trials undermines these values.’ NY Times

A World Not Neatly Divided — ‘To talk about “the Islamic world” or “the

Western world” is already to adopt an impoverished vision of humanity

as unalterably divided. In fact, civilizations are hard to partition in this

way, given the diversities within each society as well as the linkages

among different countries and cultures.’ NY Times

In praise of bad habits — Dr Peter Marsh:

In the Western world we live in an age that is, by all objective criteria, the safest that our species has ever experienced in its evolution and its history. We are healthier than any of our predecessors have been. We live on average considerably longer than even our immediate progenitors. Today, the infant death rate is less than 6 per 1000 live births. Just 100 years ago the figure was 150. Even in the late 1950s four times as many children died in their first year of life than they do today.

Our diet, contrary to all the ‘anti-junk food propaganda’, is not only the most nutritious but also the most free from potentially dangerous contaminants and bacteria that we have ever consumed. Despite the class divisions which remain within our society, and which reflect themselves in the health gap between the rich and the poor, we have, as Harold Macmillan once famously said, ‘never had it so good’ when it comes to a lack of objective risks to our lives and to our wellbeing.

At the same time we have, ironically, come to fear the world around us as never before. In the absence of real risks, we invent new and often quite fanciful ones. The better off in our society, who have the least to really worry about, are most prone to this novel neurosis of our age – fearing instant death from the contents of their dinner plates, unless chosen with obsessive care, and ‘unacceptable’ physical decline from failure to follow every faddist trend recommended by their personal fitness trainers. We fear that our children are constantly in danger from strangers – despite the fact that the vast majority of child abuse occurs within the family – and feel compelled to ensure their safe arrival at school by transporting them in people carriers – while at the same time decrying the depletion of fossil fuels and ‘unacceptable’ levels of environmental pollution – and we wonder why our children are getting fat.

In this constant state of irrational fretfulness we start to lose our faith in anything that looks like science – preferring to put our faith in the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ of homeopathic and other forms of complementary medicine, while withdrawing children from rational and safe vaccination programmes aimed at preventing an epidemic of measles following irresponsible scare-mongering in our newspapers. spiked

In the house of anthrax: The Economist is worried that the US will too readily dismiss the idea that al Qaeda was behind the anthrax scare. A Pakistani NGO in Kabul with links to the Taliban is run by one of Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientists and, evidence sugggests, has been working to develop an anthrax bomb.

John Dean:
The Problems With Bush’s Executive Order Burying Presidential Records: ‘More troubling than the Order’s throwing a monkey wrench into the process of releasing Presidential papers, however, is the President’s penchant for secrecy. Secrecy provokes the question of what is being hidden and why.

If President Bush continues with his Nixon-style secrecy, I suspect voters will give him a Nixon-style vote of no confidence come 2004. While secrecy is necessary to fight a war, it is not necessary to run the country. I can assure you from firsthand experience that a President acting secretly usually does not have the best interest of Americans in mind. It is his own personal interest that is on his mind instead.’ FindLaw

Star Trek Tech Is Not So Bold: 23rd century technology according to Star Trek doesn’t hold a candle to some of the things being dreamed up in today’s labs. Wired

Soo\ciety of snitches? WSJ [viaMSNBC]
Also see: Confidentialty: Breaking Law or Principles to Give Information to U.S. NY Times

Independent Media Center: “An occasional poster to this web-site was questioned about his political affiliations by intelligence officers upon entering the United States. Materials he had posted on Indymedia were mentioned.” Indeed, he had posted pseudonymously.

The rumor [via The Sideshow] is that Rush Limbaugh wants you to boycott newspapers that carry Doonesbury because of this strip. Pretty good credentials, if you ask me: go, Gary! The truth hurts?

Happy Thanksgiving, in gratitude and grace, to you and yours.

Saudi Sees No bin Laden-Iraq Link. The former intelligence chief in Riyadh says his govt will not support making Iraq a target of the war on terrorism. NY Times

New Sensors Report, ‘I Know They’re in There, I Can See Them Breathing’

Something Missing in Fragile Cloud Forest: The Clouds: ‘Bathed in a curtain of life-giving fog and mist, the Monteverde cloud forest in the mountains of Costa Rica is a profusion of dripping green that

stands as an international model of conservation gone right. But despite Monteverde’s tens of thousands of protected acres, scientists say this

tropical luxuriance, beloved by biologists and eco-tourists alike, may be at risk: the clouds that bathe the mountains seem to be disappearing.

The problem, scientists say, is deforestation, but not within Monteverde’s vast network of reserves. Instead, in a new study in Science, researchers report

evidence that deforestation in the lowlands is lifting the mountains’ curtain of life-giving fog and mist out of the forest’s reach, leaving more and more of

what had been cloud forest without clouds.’ NY Times

Intensive ACLU opposition to use of facial recognition software targets Fresno and other airports, including Logan in my own city, that plan to implement it. Intrusiveness is only justified by the security benefits it brings, but “…it is abundantly clear that the security benefits of such an approach would be minimal to non-existent, for a very simple reason: the technology doesn’t work.” Links to ACLU’s FAQ abut facial recognition and facts on airport security.

Suppose we won the war but lost our freedom:

‘…Every commentator on this conflict – and I write as one who supports it – seems to have got it wrong. What’s frightening isn’t the prospect of the Americans becoming bogged down, as in Vietnam; what’s frightening is the almost contemptuous ease with which they are winning it.

And what can be done on the battlefield can be done with equal efficiency on the home front. I do not mean that David Blunkett intends to have Predators cruising up and down above British motorways (although I wouldn’t put it past him), but rather that the new technologies have the potential to destroy human privacy, and the Government now means to exploit the situation under cover of fighting terrorism….’Telegraph UK

Phil Agre:
Understanding Jargon

Americans are upset at the blizzard of irrational jargon that now substitutes for political discourse in the United States, and they increasingly recognize that it isn’t going away until it is named and confronted. To that end, I have enclosed a short list of books about propaganda, public relations, ideology, and related topics. (I sent out another list on the topic last year, and for convenience I’ve attached that list to the end of this one.) I’ve included books from several perspectives, including manuals for practitioners.

If you want a single starting-place for your reading, I recommend the works of Robert Jackall. Jackall is an ethicist who does field studies and writes powerful books about the ethical nightmares he finds. I recommend his book Moral Mazes to students who are about to start working in the real world, and he has a recent book about the world of issue advocacy. Otherwise, there’s something for everyone. People on the left will enjoy Alex Carey’s excellent Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, people on the right will enjoy Marvin Olasky’s history of the public relations department at AT&T, those seeking a blood-curdling PR manual will enjoy Philip Lesly’s Overcoming Opposition, those wishing a more analytical approach to PR might consult James Grunig and Todd Hunt’s Managing Public Relations (I’ve used it in teaching the subject myself — it’s a little dated but still useful), those seeking pure scandal will enjoy the works of Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, and those wishing to understand conservative policy campaigns might consult Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado’s No Mercy.

Also, here is a page that contains my own informal articles about the currently fashionable political jargon. Red Rock Eater Digest

Michael Kinsley:
Consuming Gets Complicated: ‘My first thought was: What a deal!

My second thought was: Have I been overpaying all along? Are we supposed to negotiate now?’ Slate

An excursion into Context, ‘a forum for literary arts and culture.’ To begin with, reading guides:

• the most influential critical works of the 20th century
  

• the most influential novels of the 20th century
  

• the pre-20th-century novels that most influenced the 20th century novel
  

• the 20th century novels students most like
  

• novels that will be considered the most important literary works of the 20th century in the year 2100

Curtis White: All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real: Wherein lies the greatness of the great books? Does Harold Bloom (The Western Canon etc.) in particular have anything of worth to say about this?

“…Unfortunately, … Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole, just like any Reagan-era hack, called variously the School of Resentment or simply (when he’s feeling very mean-spirited, the well-paid champion of right wing pundits everywhere) cheerleaders. He also strongly implies, just as Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, George Will, Lynne Cheney, et al, have done, that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author, to suit his own polemical purpose.”

And in the second part of the essay, he points to places we may get help with alternate aesthetics. Context

Curtis White: Whatever, Dude: the author is troubled that all too often his reactions to a serious film, like those of so many others, come down to whether he “liked” it or not, whether it “sucks” or “rocks”, perhaps not surprising in a “culture that thrives on thoughtless and ephemeral enthusiasms.” He struggles to articulate a more sophisticated way in which, essentially, a film can be a work of art embodying an aesthetic. Case in point — his favorite cowboy movie. Context

Gertrude Stein:

What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them:

“… I was going to talk to you but actually it is impossible to talk about master-pieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation. I talk a lot I like to talk and I talk even more than that I may say I talk most of the time and I listen a fair amount too and as I have said the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation. What are master-pieces and why after all are there so few of them. You may say after all there are a good many of them but in any kind of proportion with everything that anybody who does anything is doing there are really very few of them. All this summer I meditated and wrote about this subject and it finally came to be a discussion of the relation of human nature and the human mind and identity. The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.” Context

William Carlos Williams: The Work of Gertrude Stein:

“…Let it be granted that whatever is new in literature the germ of it will be found somewhere in the writings of other times; only the modern emphasis gives work a present distinction.

The necessity for this modern focus and the meaning of the changes involved are, however, another matter, the everlasting stumbling block to criticism. Here is a theme worth development in the case of Gertrude Stein–yet signally neglected.

Why in fact have we not heard more generally from American scholars upon the writings of Miss Stein? Is it lack of heart or ability or just that theirs is an enthusiasm which fades rapidly of its own nature before the risks of today?” Context

Curtis White: The Middle Mind

I have suspected for some time that there is something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D’Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Berube, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I’ve been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?

And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon (as dear Harold Bloom might put it) was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic then the academic Left or ideological Right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon. Context

Now, out of context:

Human sweat packs a germ-killing punch “People working up a lather at the gym may be doing more than shedding a few pounds. They could be protecting their skin from infection.

In an upcoming Nature Immunology, German researchers report that human sweat contains a novel microbe-killing molecule, which they’ve dubbed dermicidin. Further study of this small protein, or peptide, may lead to new ways of defeating disease-causing germs, the scientists suggest. The peptide may even explain how sweat glands originally arose in animals, adds another biologist.” Science News

Maureen Dowd:
Blessings and Bombings:

In “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

So now we know for sure that George W. Bush has a first-rate intelligence.

The president, his team and the rest of us have been juggling a lot of contradictory notions since Sept. 11. NY Times

In Utah, a Government Hater Sells a Germ-Warfare Book: ‘Next to the Indian handicraft booth, Timothy W. Tobiason was selling printed and CD copies of his book, Scientific Principles of Improvised Warfare and Home Defense Volume 6-1: Advanced Biological Weapons Design and Manufacture, a germ-warfare cookbook that bioterrorism experts say is accurate enough to be dangerous.’ NY Times

FBI software cracks encryption wall

The FBI is developing software capable of inserting a computer virus onto a suspect?s machine and obtaining encryption keys, a source familiar with the project told MSNBC.com. The software, known as “Magic Lantern“, enables agents to read data that had been scrambled, a tactic often employed by criminals to hide information and evade law enforcement. The best snooping technology that the FBI currently uses, the controversial software called Carnivore, has been useless against suspects clever enough to encrypt their files. MSNBC

Photoshop: It’s All the Rage… “(D)octoring images — or Photoshopping, as its practitioners call it — is a booming online pastime for hobbyists and graphic designers whose altered documents have taken up residence in the popular imagination alongside political cartoons and satirical text, like that published by The Onion.” Wired

Is it ‘Monsters, Inc.’ or ‘Shrek’ for new Academy Award for best animated feature?

97th anniversary of the birth of late tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Read about his life in the link, which is to his 1969 New York Times obituary.

A Police Force Rebuffs F.B.I. on Querying Mideast Men

The Portland, Ore., police will not

cooperate with the Federal Bureau

of Investigation in its efforts to interview

5,000 young Middle Eastern men

nationwide because such questioning

violates state law, the department’s acting

police chief, Andrew Kirkland, said

yesterday.

The decision is the first known case of a

city’s refusing to go along with the

antiterrorism effort, which was announced

last week by Attorney General John

Ashcroft.

But top police officials in several other cities have also said that Mr.

Ashcroft’s plan raises troubling questions about racial profiling — an issue

that has brought endless grief to police departments nationwide — and

may violate local and state laws about issues like intelligence gathering

for political purposes. NY Times

94 year-old Connecticut woman diagnosed with and dies of inhalation anthrax. No obvious source of the infection.

“Mrs. Lundgren lived in the rural part of Oxford, a postage-stamp of a

town in Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley. A niece told The Hartford

Courant that Mrs. Lundgren gave up her driver’s license a year ago, and

Mr. Rowland said her travels were mostly limited to local shops and

activities. “

NY Times I’m wondering if this, as well as the Kathy Nguyen case in the Bronx, aren’t sporadic cases which, before the era of heightened vigilance, would have been diagnosed as atypical pneumonia with few further qeustions.

Direction of Global War on Terror Raises Unsettling Questions

One great task of wartime leadership, said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of

strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, “is not only to communicate

resolve and determination and will, but to explain what you are doing

and why you are doing it.”

“I think thus far that is not quite what we have seen,” he said. “We have

seen a tremendous pulse of staunchness, but we have not seen the more

intellectual side of war leadership, making the case for what we are

doing and laying out the arguments for what we do next.” NY Times

A new magazine from RU Sirius: The Thresher-Flailing at Current Events: ‘Welcome to The Thresher, a print political journal available through Disticor and Last Gasp. When we started working on The Thresher, we expressed our intentions to potential writers thusly; “Everybody knows that the next political paradigm is post- ideological, an unpredictable hybrid of all the influences on human thought and behavior. The smartest among us are looking for interesting ways to crossbreed left, right and center; mainstream and subculture; individual liberty and community; straight and queer; spirituality and critical intelligence; high technology and zero emissions; speed and permanence; rebellion and problem-solving; Caucasian and everybody else; ad infinitum. We’re not talking dialectics. We’re talking complexity. The Thresher will attempt to navigate its way through the tangled mess that is early 21st Century politics.”

Well, things have changed. For the moment, the only realistic goal seems to be to preserve the freedom to dissent, to question authority, to express even a bit of skepticism. In the words of George Clinton (the only Clinton that matters); “Think. It ain?t illegal yet.” We hope y’all find a few things here worth thinking on.’ [via boing boing]

In War, It’s Power to the President:

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan have dramatically accelerated a push by the Bush administration to strengthen presidential powers, giving President Bush a dominance over American government exceeding that of other post-Watergate presidents and rivaling even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s command…

David Walker, a Republican who is director of the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said: “There’s a feeling of some in the current administration that they want to draw a line in a different spot than previously has been drawn in the separation of powers. As a result of Watergate and the challenges [President Bill] Clinton had, Congress has been much more involved in a range of areas they don’t believe are appropriate.”

…Some in the legislative branch, particularly in the opposition party, detect a striking departure in public policy. “There’s just a philosophy in the administration that the public doesn’t have a right to know, which is counter to the trend of the last 30 years,” said Phil Schiliro, staff chief to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee. “Now they can justify it with national security, but that’s more for convenience.” Washington Post

Supercourse – Epidemiology, the Internet and Global Health: a worldwide academic faculty in epidemiology and public health has created a freely shared online library of more than five hundred lectures “with quality control and cutting edge cognitive design” using an open source model.

The compiler of the supercourse has submitted an NIH grant proposal to create a new supercourse applying the epidemiological paradigm to disaster and terrorism response.

Amazing mindless entertainment. Don’t miss clicking on ‘duo’ along the bottom.

Painkillers show Alzheimer’s promise: NSAIDs like ibuprofen — albeit in much largeer doses than tolerable for humans — stops the production of harmful amyloid protein whose clumping in brain cells is considered one of the pathogenic processes in Alzheimer’s Disease. The finding presents promise that anti-plaque drugs without toxic side effects might utilize this mechanism. Nature [There has long been interest in anti-Alzheimer’s effects of NSAIDs as a result of the observation that seniors taking high doses of the medications for conditions like arthritis show amelioration of dementia symptoms. However, this is not likely to be due to the anti-clumping effect of the NSAIDs, which only ‘kicks in’ at higher doses. Instead, the medications may quell inflammation in the brain caused by already-formed plaques.]

“A somewhat motley crew of test pilots, dot-com dropouts, dreamers and others will change space travel as we know it. Or not.” Rocket Men: ‘The only real reason to put rockets on an aircraft these days, explains (XCOR Aerospace president Jeff) Greason… is to go into space. Jet engines can’t do it. Propellers can’t do it. And once you’re 50 miles or so in the air, or what’s called suborbital space, there’s business to be done: low-gravity experiments, satellite missions, military research and–here’s the sexy stuff–tourism.’ LA Times

Pope to give Net his blessing: his World Communication Day homily will be “Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel.” ‘The Pope’s aides make no secret of the fact that he is a technological Luddite. He still writes his speeches and documents by hand or dictates them to aides.’ ZDNet

All Aboard In Afghanistan:

‘America’s allies did not have to be hectored into committing national assets and their soldiers’ lives to this American-led battle. The Pentagon would have preferred to fight alone, with a little help from Britain. But for their own reasons, other European allies have chased after military roles in the Afghan campaign.

While the State Department emphasizes how much the United States needs coalition partners — and ladles out economic aid and political bribes to support this view — the Pentagon has been showing how much coalition partners need the United States in developing effective countermeasures to global terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction…

In contrast to Kosovo, where 19 NATO nations coordinated air targeting and argued inconclusively over the use of ground troops, European participation in this war is on a bilateral basis and undertaken under clear U.S. command authority. This is no accident.

The Europeans have clambered aboard because they (correctly) sense that the long campaign begun in Afghanistan represents a watershed in alliance management as well as world politics.’ Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria: Arabs on Our Side:

“While the events of last week have transformed the situation in Afghanistan, their effects in Washington have been more comical. Gen. Tommy Franks, who 10 days earlier was facing a barrage of criticism, is now being showered with praise. Commentators who had been thundering about Washington’s feeble war plans now extol the suppleness of our strategy. The Northern Alliance, once scorned as a ragtag bunch of misfits, is now spoken of with awe and affection. We should not have been so surprised that the Afghans switched to the winning side so quickly. People in Washington do it all the time.

So one great myth about the war against the Taliban — that we were losing on the ground — has exploded. But another still stays strong. We hear daily that even as it is vanquishing the foe, America is losing the propaganda war. Tensions are bubbling over as we enter the month of Ramadan. The Arab street is angry. But is it?” Washington Post

Mystery surrounds Indian child deaths. Fifteen deaths so far and over 3000 taken ill in Assam eight days after UNICEF-sponsored administration of vitamin A supplements in anti-blindness campaign. Incorrect dosing? reaction to co-administered polio vaccine? Contamination of the vitamin supplements? No one is sure, and charges and countercharges are flying. New Scientist

Bush ranch in Crawford cursed? Washington Post

“HIV patients who take cholesterol-lowering drugs may be able to slow the advance of the virus, say researchers…

This suggestion follows more discoveries about the way that the virus manages to get in and out of human cells.

It turns out that the virus may need patches of cholesterol on the surface of the cell in order to make this happen.” BBC

Particle physics telescope explodes: “The underground Super-Kamiokande Observatory in Japan detects elusive neutrino particles from space by using photomultiplier tubes to register the flashes of light they produce when they pass through a huge tank of water.

On 12 November, one of the photomultiplier tubes exploded causing a chain reaction that resulted in most of the other 11,200 light detectors also blowing up.

Scientists say the accident is a major setback, as Super-Kamiokande has produced spectacular results, helping to answer long-standing questions about the Universe. Super-Kamiokande was the very first detector to establish that neutrinos can change into different types.” BBC

UK denies rift over Afghan troops: ‘Downing Street has denied any rift with the US and the Northern Alliance over deployment of troops in Afghanistan.

There have been reports that Tony Blair wants to commit a significant number of troops to establish order in the country, while President Bush favours a smaller force.

But the prime minister’s official spokesman said such reports were “simply not true”. ‘ BBC

Taliban offer up Kunduz, rebels say — “The Taliban offered on Sunday to surrender their last northern stronghold if Arab and other foreign fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden in the city are spared, an anti-Taliban commander said. The northern alliance, meanwhile, agreed to a conference on neutral ground to plan a multiethnic government.

The offer to surrender Kunduz came after U.S. bombers unleashed their heaviest strikes so far on the city. Warplanes were also reported in action near the Taliban southern stronghold of Kandahar and areas of eastern Afghanistan where bin Laden is believed to maintain camps and hide-outs.” AP [Salon]

The way we thought we were: ‘Two months ago, ground zero was the beginning of a new world. Now a volunteer looks back and finds we’ve returned to the old one.’ Salon

“The sky was dancing”, as Hal Rager puts it at blivet. Up on a cold, silent dark hillside with a 360-degree horizon, crystal-clear night sky, largely free from light pollution, no need to be doing anything except letting my eyes dark-adapt, no point in directing my gaze to any special spot in the sky. I’m guessing I was seeing 10-15 per minute. At one moment, I was lucky enough to see one of these, exploding, just where I was looking. The meteor-viewing experience of a lifetime, I’m guessing… If you’re reading this early enough, go out tonight for one last chance.

Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is no easy way for the West to sort this out

.

‘Afghanistan — as the armies of the West are about to realise — is not a country. You can’t “occupy” or even “control” Afghanistan because it is neither a state nor a nation.

Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the clichés now being honed by our journalists. We may want a “broad-based” government, but do the Afghans? We may regard cities as “strategic” — especially if reporters are about to enter them — but the Afghans have a different perspective on their land.

As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips proudly off the lips of cognoscenti, it just means “big meeting”. Even more disturbingly, it is a uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus represents the tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan society.’ Independent UK

Marylaine Block: The Game of the Name:

‘One of the things that makes me despair of the Democratic party is that its leaders don’t understand why their own issues are always discussed on terms set by Republicans. They simply do not grasp the power of naming: those who name a problem define it, decide which field the game will be played on, and set the rules of play. Because Republicans have been so good at naming issues, Democrats have found themselves voting to keep the death tax, not the estate tax. Since Republicans also have an uncanny ability to get there first with a catchy name for any issue, and to get all of their members to use that name and spout the party line, they constantly force Democratic leaders to react to Republican definitions rather than to define their own issues.

Democrats haven’t grasped the fact that the name game can be played by more than one side…’ Vocabula Review

How Not To Find The Neural Correlate of Consciousness

There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H2O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searle?s reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wrong because he conflates the two senses. And Francis Crick and Christof Koch fall afoul of the ambiguity in arguing that visual area V1 is not part of the neural correlate of consciousness. Crick and Koch?s work raises issues that suggest that these two concepts of consciousness may have different (though overlapping) neural correlates–despite Crick and Koch?s implicit rejection of this idea.

“People tried to donate blood, and they were turned away. Then they tried to donate supplies, but after a short while that wasn’t really needed. What they were left to do was contribute their words and their pictures.”

History Is Impatient to Embrace Sept. 11

“New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers,” an exhibition that opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, … is one of the first museum shows about the terrorist attacks that are already up or in the works. It’s also the first of at least six exhibitions on the events of Sept. 11 that the historical society plans to present in the next few years in what it calls its History Responds Project.

“We don’t want to become the World Trade Center Museum,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, director of the society. “But we do want to respond.”

They are not alone. Last month, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History gathered representatives of 33 museums and other institutions for a meeting to discuss how to collect and preserve the countless artifacts and images that have documented the event. “We are all trying to grope our way through an event that is still painful,” said Robert Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York.

If there is agreement about an urgent need to preserve the materials, there seems to be little about when to display them. Some people think the right time is now.

‘The Pentagon yesterday denied that it had deliberately targeted al-Jazeera, but said it could not explain why the office was hit.’ Al-Jazeera suggests US bombing of its Kabul office was deliberate:

‘(An al-Jazeera spokesperson) said he believed that al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul had been on the Pentagon’s list of targets since the beginning of the conflict but the US did not want to bomb it while the broadcaster was the only one based in Kabul.

By this week, however, the BBC had reopened its Kabul office under Taliban supervision, with the correspondents William Reeve and Rageh Omar.’ Guardian UK

Upgraded version of Alltheweb.com search engine offers near real-time searches in over 3,000 online news sources. Sure, it’s just a press release in the guise of a news story, but sounds like it may be worth a look, as searching for breaking news is not one of the Web’s strong suits:

‘Entering “Anthrax,” for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages. The advanced search allows a user to set language preferences and also to pick what sections of the news to search.

Fast has added a new search “vertical,” allowing specific news searches. However, the most recent results from the news vertical are also displayed in a gray box on top of the general search results page.

“We want to show our customers that we can crawl fast, this is a subsecond index,” said Rob Rubin, executive vice president and general manager of Fast’s Internet division. “We are now continuously spidering and indexing over 3,000 news sources.” ‘

Here, for a start, is an Alltheweb search on “alltheweb”. I haven’t added any filtering options so it comes up with hits in many languages.

Evidence on engines puzzling in crash probe — ‘The White House and the safety board said Monday the crash appeared to be an accident, but the spread of aircraft parts – and the inability to blame the crash on an engine explosion immediately – raised some doubts about that conclusion.

”It’s a very mysterious and disturbing turn of events,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain the investigators’ confidence.

In presenting the news to the public, the NTSB chairwoman, Marion Blakey, put on a positive face. The investigation is her first; she was sworn into office on Sept. 26.’ Boston Globe

“People tried to donate blood, and they were turned away. Then they tried to donate supplies, but after a short while that wasn’t really needed. What they were left to do was contribute their words and their pictures.”

History Is Impatient to Embrace Sept. 11

“New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers,” an exhibition that opens on Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society, … is one of the first museum shows about the terrorist attacks that are already up or in the works. It’s also the first of at least six exhibitions on the events of Sept. 11 that the historical society plans to present in the next few years in what it calls its History Responds Project.

“We don’t want to become the World Trade Center Museum,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, director of the society. “But we do want to respond.”

They are not alone. Last month, the Museum of the City of New York and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History gathered representatives of 33 museums and other institutions for a meeting to discuss how to collect and preserve the countless artifacts and images that have documented the event. “We are all trying to grope our way through an event that is still painful,” said Robert Macdonald, director of the Museum of the City of New York.

If there is agreement about an urgent need to preserve the materials, there seems to be little about when to display them. Some people think the right time is now.

Literary quotations for nine-eleven The Sun

Astonishing conclusion from conservative columnist Cal Thomas: George McGovern Was Right

A staggering 58,000 Americans are dead because Johnson would not listen to his inner voice, revealed on the tapes, or the voices of McGovern, Hatfield, Gruening and Morse, who many conservatives at the time labeled un-American.

Among the many lessons of Vietnam, which, as Beschloss notes, can teach us something about present and future conflicts, is that no president should have exclusive power when it comes to committing so many American lives and resources to a war.

The Johnson tapes should also teach conservatives a lesson. Many anti-war activists love this country as much as those who supported the Vietnam War. Just because someone is of a different party or persuasion does not necessarily mean they are wrong.

The Private Business of Public Radio

: “NPR’s Ratings, Revenue and Reputation Are All Surging. But with Rate Hikes Coming and Foes in Congress, Management Is Touchy about NPR’s Being Seen for What It Really Is: A Pretty Darn Good Business… The fact is that underneath its quirky, bohemian image, NPR – which by its own estimation is the biggest producer of news, information and cultural programming in radio – subtly has evolved into something that in many ways resembles a well-run, aggressively entrepreneurial company.” Washington Business Forward

“This is the year for people to go out and see the event…” Coming Soon: Prime View of a Meteor Shower — ‘On Sunday morning, well before sunrise, astronomers expect the skies to be streaked with light in what could be the most impressive Leonid meteor shower in three and a half decades.

The ebb and flow of this year’s Leonid shower will offer a multi- part spectacle across the globe. The opening act is predicted to peak around 5 a.m. Eastern time on Nov. 18, with the East Coast of North America getting the prime view.’ NY Times

The Road to Baghdad: ‘In 1998, a group of 40 conservatives wrote an open letter to President Clinton calling for the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Today many of the signers of that letter hold important government posts, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his chief deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Together with right-wing activists in the private sector, they see the post-September 11 military campaign as the perfect opportunity to achieve their goal of toppling the Iraqi leader.’ The American Prospect

Bioterrorism-Related Inhalational Anthrax: The First 10 Cases Reported in the United States CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases

Are ObL nuclear weapons fears a hoax? Declan McCullagh, in his mailing list, has done alot of footwork on this issue; I’m retracing his steps:

As I noted below, The Times of London reported last week that partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned

safe house indicated that al Qaeda could have nuclear weapons.

Quite bizarrely, rotten.com after analysis of photos of the documents claims that at least one is a well-known geek-driven spoof which originally appeared in 1979 in the wonderful, and now defunct (but succeeded by the Annals of Improbable Research) Journal of Irreproducible Results:

The project will cost between $5,000 and $30,000, depending on how

fancy you want the final product to be. Since last week’s column,

“Let’s Make a Time Machine”, was received so well in the new

step-by-step format, this month’s column will follow the same

format.

Did al Qaeda not recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of the article? Did they recognize it and think they could deceive US intelligence? Did someone else plant the documents in order to attribute them falsely to the terrorists?

US Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge conceded the information could

have been found on the internet but administration sources remain concerned. Among those who follow the nuclear threat, there’s pretty much a consensus that your average college physics major could make a bomb, given the materials.

Interestingly enough, the United States government conducted a

controlled experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how

much effort was actually required to develop a viable fission weapon

design starting from nothing. In this experiment, which ended on 10

April 1967, three newly graduated physics students were given the task

of developing a detailed weapon design using only public domain

information. The project reached a successful conclusion, that is,

they did develop a viable design (detailed in the classified report

UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-years of effort over two

and a half calendar years. In the years since, much more information

has entered the public domain so that the level of effort required has

obviously dropped further.

Fun with spammers and more fun with spammers, as the situation escalates. Michael Fraase

Software to connect iPod to PCs Wired

Taliban: Bin Laden Has Left Afghanistan

Taliban: Bin Laden is Still in Afghanistan The Boston Channel

A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions: “The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions in a recent tirade against the United States. Critics of US policy in Iraq claim that sanctions have killed more than a million people, many of them children. Saddam Hussein puts the death toll at one and a half million. The actual numbers are lower than that, although still horrifying.

Changing American policy in Iraq is an urgent priority, both for humanitarian reasons and as a means of addressing an intensely felt political grievance against the United States. An opportunity for such a change may come soon, as the UN Security Council considers a “smart sanctions” plan to ease civilian sanctions. As we work to change US policy and relieve the pain of the Iraqi people, it is important that we use accurate figures and acknowledge the shifting pattern of responsibility for the continuing crisis.” The Nation

Kennedy historian Joseph Palermo: A new twist on editing history: conservatives are now touting R.F.K. Tompaine.com [“Senator…, I knew RFK. RFK was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no RFK.”]

What will become of freedom? Dave Winer starts a new directory to track the erosion of liberty in these United States, and hopes it won’t keep growing [ the naif… ].

Urban Legend Machine: make your own urban legend. “When you’re finished, e-mail it to everyone you know and see how long it takes to come back to you. Remember, when you’re connected to the Internet it’s important to believe everything that you read.”

From reading & writing:

‘…a reaction to my reading of the news about the “American aid workers” who have escaped from the Taliban. I’m glad they were not harmed. That said, the Taliban were right about them–they were whacko Christians from Waco, Texas who were caught with video & audio tapes that could have only one purpose: to convert Afghans to Christianity… I grew up among people like this, people who believe A) that there is a literal hell & B) You are going there if you don’t accept their religious beliefs. (Remind you of certain other people in the news recently?) Missionaries have done as much damage in the world in the last 200 years as armies–indeed, they are often the thin end of the wedge, the fat end of the wedge being colonial armies of occupation. So I have no sympathy for these “young women” & even less for their sanctimonious pastor in Waco who said on NPR this evening that they “were not afraid of death” because they believed in Jesus. Last night on NPR there was a story that quoted a young Muslim man as saying that his friend, who had died while on jihad in Afghanistan, was “already in Paradise with seventy black-eyed virgins.” He hadn’t been afraid of death either, nor was the speaker, unless it was mere bravado. I don’t see much of a difference between these two world views myself. None of these people have an irony organ. How about a crack team of secular humanists for Afghanistan? Ah, that wouldn’t work either, even with irony, as we should have learned in Vietnam & Iran with our self-serving attempts at “nation building.” ‘

Magical Thinking is forthcoming poetry from reading & writing‘s Joseph Duemer. An example:

Abandoned Bluetick Bitch



Numbed with self-loathing,

we abandon the emissaries

of grace. Chained to a tree



beside the empty rental

she hollowed out a den

for herself & her young.



By the time we found her

the water they'd left her

was a couple of days gone.



When it was gone she would have

slept, not dreaming, letting the pups

nurse her sparse milk



& when the smallest died

she ate it to keep

her strength & cleanse the den,



depriving coy dogs & foxes

an expedient scent.

It's likely there were two more



before we found her.

Ribs covered by a tissue of dry skin,

she was nothing -- a shadow



on the dirt & was just able

to raise her head & take

a little water from my hand



before turning to nose

her three live pups awake.

Reader, it is true, there is



horror everywhere worse

than this & cruelty that beggars

imagination, but this



is my horror, local & particular;

these were my neighbors did this,

who, without even the excuse



of racial or religious psychosis,

committed this wrong. Who live

in this same light & shadow I live in.



Let us kill one another

with heedless abandon -- we deserve it --

but not these poor relations



whose lives are without malice

& whose motives are transparent.

Let us kill one another.

Christopher Hitchens: Ha ha ha to the pacifists Guardian UK

Report: Al-Qaida Had Poison Formula: ‘Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network had a formula for making ricin, one of the deadliest known poisons, The Times newspaper reported Friday.

The Times said it found instructions for making the biological chemical ricin ? an untraceable poison that is twice as deadly as cobra venom ? in an al-Qaida safehouse in Kabul.’

Washington Post

Further into Ferlinghetti: gordon.coale was thinking about Lawrence Ferlinghetti when he noticed the snippet I used in my anniversary epistle below. So he dives in.

In observance of this site’s second birthday, I just checked in on my Bloghop account. To date, 34 people have rated me. Of those, nine think FmH either “sucks” or “hate it.” Now this may be a little like the joke in which I ask you to let me know if you don’t get this message; it’s not likely you’re still reading here. I sincerely hope not — life seems too short to waste your surfing time on something you revile. But on the other hand, there are some people who love to hate, and you fascinate me. So if you, or anyone else like you, is out there, why not write me and let me know what it is you don’t like about Follow Me Here. Is it my choice of subject matter? my manner and tone? my politics? my muddled thinking? my tortured language? my design sense? the slow load time of the page? or what? As an enticement, I’ll publish your comments here if you request me to. Use some choice adjectives…

Is there going to be an America left worth defending? From the westerby report, on the occasion of govt contemplation of the revocation of Posse Comitatus:

“I cannot name a single enumerated liberty that following September 11 has not been brutally interrogated and tortured either in that sham of democracy known as Congress or by the jibbering appartchiks of the op-ed pages. There has always been a huge gulf between the promise of America and its reality, but since September 11, the already rickety bridge between the two, is being burned. If the attack on freedom continues, America will come to exist simply as a morally empty, morally indefensible land mass between two oceans. I cannot send my children to die for that.”

Idiocy Watch: Readers’ Poll Results; the most inane things said about The Current Situation. The New Republic

Now, how much can US tighten the vise?: ‘…the Soviet Union controlled many Afghan cities and much of the country for years, yet came to grief in the mountainous redoubts to which the Taliban is now retreating.

But in their glory years, the mujahideen had both the civilian population and large stocks of US weapons behind them. Today, the fighting men in the caves have neither. Their adversaries include not only US special-operations groups, but also local warlords who sense that history is no longer on the Taliban’s side.’ Christian Science Monitor

Why Congress is quiet on Bush-Ashcroft domestic power grab Christian Science Monitor

RAWA’s appeal to the UN and World community: ‘The people of Afghanistan do not accept domination of the Northern Alliance!

Now it is confirmed that the Taliban have left Kabul and the Northern Alliance has entered the city.

The world should understand that the Northern Alliance is composed of some bands who did show their real criminal and inhuman nature when they were ruling Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996.

The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive development, but entering of the rapist and looter NA in the city is nothing but a dreadful and shocking news for about 2 million residents of Kabul whose wounds of the years 1992-96 have not healed yet.’

Demanding to Be Heard: ‘Advocates for Afghanistan’s women are pushing to ensure that women’s freedoms are protected under a post-Taliban government.

…As they have seized territory across northern Afghanistan, Northern Alliance officials have announced that women would no longer be forced to live under such severe limitations. Women, they announced, are free to return to work and girls would be allowed to attend schools once more. Still, it remains unclear whether the Alliance will actively protect and ensure women’s freedoms.

Given that most women’s groups have little if any political clout, their political concerns may be largely ignored by foreign diplomats and Afghan politicians alike.’ Mother Jones

Meanwhile, Dan Hartung, at lake effect, opines:

“Signs of defeatism: The defeatists will not recognize that there were Afghans who appreciated our intervention (however self-serving it was in ultimate purpose); who will play down Afghans’ newly reacquired freedoms to play music, watch television, fly kites (a reminder: not child’s play, but a traditional Afghan sport), discard burqas, or to use a soccer stadium for soccer instead of public stonings and executions; who will not celebrate the release of the aid workers (perhaps even legitimizing the nonsense “preaching” charges, which should be offensive to anyone who believes in liberal, secular democracy); who will not recognize the dramatically changed nature of the military operations; who will emphasize that the Taliban executed a “strategic retreat”, a trap into which we are walking (always possible; if so, bring it on); who will scoff at the notion that we are pursuing al Qaeda, even as we target them ever more precisely; who will attribute our strategy to secret plans and motives; who continue to demand “evidence” even as admissions and threats emanate from the cabal.

These people are insane, and the compassionate approach should be to get them help immediately.”

I’m partly with you Dan, but, oh, at least half defeatist. You have clearly chosen sides, but keep your eyes open! Only time, not strength of fervency, will tell.

More defeatist news:

Victorious Alliance says: ‘We don’t want your peacekeepers’:

‘The victorious Northern Alliance provided a foretaste of trouble by insisting yesterday that it would take care of security in Afghanistan and that an international peacekeeping force was unnecessary.

Within the last 48 hours, the alliance has defied the US by capturing Kabul and has rejected calls from America, Britain and the United Nations to create a broad-based government that would include moderate elements of the Taliban.

The latest alliance rebuff and the re-emergence of feudal warlords in the south of the country dampened celebrations in Washington and London over the ease with which Kabul fell on Tuesday.’ Guardian UK

Massacre threat to Taleban’s foreigners:

‘Northern Alliance forces have threatened to massacre up to 6,000 foreigners fighting with the Taleban in the besieged province of Konduz.

Local fighters would be given a chance to surrender, but Alliance commanders said they had given their troops explicit orders to shoot every foreign fundamentalist ? including a handful of British Muslims ? among the enemy ranks.’ Times of London

Afghans Returning Home, Vindicated and Vengeful

:

‘Drenched with joy, shadowed by bloodlust, the self-repatriation of Iran’s huge Afghan population is under way. This border town, about 10 miles from Afghanistan, has for years been a way station for Afghans coming to Iran to work or escape persecution. Now the traffic is flowing the other way….

(Some) made clear that the war was far from over, and that it could continue on a disturbingly intimate scale. Some said they were going home to finish off the Taliban for good, and suggested that neighbors who had not sufficiently opposed the Taliban would also be called to account.

After their relatives had been killed, their property taken, their dignity assaulted, some returnees said it was impossible to simply go home and pick up their plows, pretending nothing had happened.’ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Peres backs Palestinian state as tanks raid Gaza

Independent UK

ACLU Action Alert: Bush Administration Plans Threaten Protections Guaranteed by the Constitution — ‘Congress has already given the Administration virtually everything it asked for to fight terrorism. But in the days since a sweeping new anti-terrorism bill was signed into law, the Administration has continued to announce questionable policy after questionable policy. Congress must take action now to ensure that the President preserves the constitutionally guaranteed checks and balances that are so central to our democracy.’ One-click messaging to your Congressional delegation to oppose the military tribunals.

Stallone Interested in Reviving Rambo: “Watch out Osama, John Rambo is headed your way.” ABC

Feeling our way to democracy: review of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s ‘cognitive’ theory of emotions as embodied in her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions.

In Nussbaum’s view, our emotions are not mere inner forces that buffet us about, constantly threatening to unseat reason. They are themselves modes of responsive intelligence that express our conscious and unconscious judgments of what we value and what we believe will promote the flourishing of our lives.

All the evaluative judgments implicit in emotions, she is careful to say, connect to specific historical, social and individual life circumstances. San Francisco Chronicle

Without being Freudian, Nussbaum has an essentially psychoanalytic notion of emotion, viz. that it is essentially narrative in structure — “The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete until its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on present response.” She also apparently makes a great case for compassion, discussed at length, dismantling conservative critiques which regard it as politically irrelevant.

Bruce Jay Friedman: Some Thoughts on Clint Eastwood and Heidegger: ‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s more alienated than the whole pack of them. I think he’s as every bit as alienated as Beckett himself; what do you think of that?’ From a witty essay that originally appeared in 1976 and now resurfaces in Friedman’s recent collection of nonfiction pieces, Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos.

Leader of the pack

In the American reportage of Afghanistan one byline stands out in the fog of war: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. In one scoop after another, the 64-year-old Hersh has thrashed his colleagues, including his old rival Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post and Watergate. Hersh led the pack on the intelligence failure on the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre; he had the best insider account of disarray at the CIA; he revealed US wiretaps on the ugly shenanigans within the Saudi royal family, he reported US contingency plans to disarm Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and, most controversially, he reported that a raid behind Taliban lines by US elite commandos was far from the “flawless” operation the Pentagon claimed. It was an “outrage” that left several US troops wounded, a military officer told Hersh. And all this from the freelance Hersh’s tiny, cramped Washington office. Guardian UK

Happy birthday to Ghost in the Machine, which celebrates its second birthday today too.

Happy birthday everyone — Follow Me Here, and following me here and there, are two years old today.

From The Daily Brew: “The really scary part isn’t the military courts, the wiretapping of lawyers, or the arrests without charges. We expected that. After all, the Republicans had sent a mob, hired and paid for with American taxpayer dollars, to seize power in the first place. If the GOP was willing to stage a riot in broad daylight to deny Americans their right to vote in Florida, it is hardly surprising they would use Executive Orders to deny Americans their right to a fair trial back in D.C.



No, the scary part is the almost complete silence that has greeted these actions! Americans, understandably shell shocked by one disaster after another, seem unable to as much as complain as one after another of their freedoms are stripped away.” [emphasis added]

Bin Laden’s nuclear secrets found: “Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network held detailed plans for nuclear devices and other terrorist bombs in one of its Kabul headquarters.

The Times discovered the partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned safe house in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city. Written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English, the notes give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons.” The Times of London

Seizing Dictatorial Power: ‘Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.’ NY Times William Safire, bless his heart, adds his conservative spleen to the rising hue and cry about what it has occurred to some for the past several weeks to call the Bush Dictatorship.

Brain scans can reveal liars — ‘Brain scans can reveal whether someone is lying or telling the truth, US researchers have discovered. When people lied, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans revealed significant increases in activity in several brain regions.

Daniel Langleben and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania hope fMRI could be used for more accurate forensic lie detection.’

“The fact that deception requires extra work in a number of brain regions may indicate that the deception involves inhibition of the ‘default’ response – truth,” adds Langleben. “Interestingly, this agrees with the traditional definition of deception dating back to Saint Augustine: ‘Deception is denial of truth’.”

New Scientist

A particularly bad time for the development of such an intrusive technology, with the massive abrogation of rights underway in the US. And a saintly notion that there is nothing between total candor and outright deception, demonizing the private spaces between, won’t help.

Nuclear warhead reduction could leave plutonium at risk: ‘The US and Russia may have promised to take 9000 nuclear warheads out of service but they have no idea of how to dispose of the plutonium they contain, experts say.

Programmes for locking the plutonium into radioactive waste or burning it in nuclear reactors are being abandoned by the Bush administration because of their high cost. The default option, storage, could leave the plutonium more vulnerable to being stolen and made into bombs by terrorists.’ New Scientist

Jim Crace’s Being Dead was one of the most disturbing novels I’d read in a long time, unflinchingly looking at (literally) death and decay. Now his The Devil’s Larder, here reviewed in the London Review of Books by Ian Sansom, promises more of the same on the tip of the tongue.

Jubilation at the fall of Kabul and apparent collapse of the Taliban all over Afghanistan is rampant. It’s obligatory to mention Kabuli men’s headlong rush to the barber for a shave. But, hey folks, the war’s not over by a longshot, and it gets dicier from here, as the Taliban retreat to the Pashtun areas of the south where they have enjoyed popular support; and to the mountains and caves. On the other hand, there is word of indigenous uprising against the Taliban even in Kandahar, euphemistically referred to as their “stronghold” in just about every news report I’ve read; anti-Taliban sentiment may be widespread, and the Taliban may be fleeing population centers in general. However, this may not be a rout but rather a strategic regrouping either for a counterattack or the kind of protracted guerrilla war that defeated the Russians. Analysts caution about the perils of assuming things are as they seem. Northern Alliance capture of Kabul accompanied by atrocities and looting; Robert Fisk comments that we ought not be surprised, and Simon Jenkins wonders if we ought to regret having this tiger by the tail, reminding us that it was factional fighting among these same people, when they were the mujahideen fighting the Russians, that gave the Taliban their ‘in’ seven years ago. Here’s an interview with foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan, whose travels with the mujahideen in 1990 were chronicled in his Soldiers of God. International stabilization may be necessary in post-Taliban areas. ObL, of course, is nowhere to be found; perhaps it would be a good idea to ask the ‘remote viewers’ US intelligence is reportedly using to predict future terrorist attacks to tell us what cave he’s in? In fact, why not let the remote viewers act as spotters for US bombing runs? The US and the Northern Alliance seem to have it out for al-Jazeera, whose Kabul office was hit by two American bombs (it seems, because its coverage has been seen in some circles as pro-terrorist) and whose Kabul correspondent fled after threats that he would be killed if found in Kabul when the Northern Alliance arrived. I’d been wondering, but some undisputable good news is that the Western aid workers imprisoned by the Taliban in Kabul have been freed.