Congratulations to the winners of the thoughtful (I had to say that, didn’t I, being one of the 2000 medalists?) 2001 Medley Medals, including two of my ongoing favorite sites, BookNotes and wood s lot, as well as a number of others I will surely check out.
Congratulations to the winners of the thoughtful (I had to say that, didn’t I, being one of the 2000 medalists?) 2001 Medley Medals, including two of my ongoing favorite sites, BookNotes and wood s lot, as well as a number of others I will surely check out.
Congratulations to the winners of the thoughtful (I had to say that, didn’t I, being one of the 2000 medalists?) 2001 Medley Medals, including two of my ongoing favorite sites, BookNotes and wood s lot, as well as a number of others I will surely check out.
Congratulations to the winners of the thoughtful (I had to say that, didn’t I, being one of the 2000 medalists?) 2001 Medley Medals, including two of my ongoing favorite sites, BookNotes and wood s lot, as well as a number of others I will surely check out.
If you take pictures, stay close to home… or go digital.. [This Kodak advisory starts out focusing on motion picture film. but there’s no reason not to worry about still camera film as well. -FmH] “Security precautions at US airports have been significantly tightened following the tragic events of September 11th. Among precautions that travelers can expect will be the increased use of new, high-intensity x-ray scanners for checked baggage and hand-carried baggage. Passengers should be aware that these high-intensity x-ray machines will fog and ruin all unprocessed film of any speed, whether exposed or not. Kodak recommends that air travelers do not carry unexposed or unprocessed motion picture film. If it is unavoidable that film is carried, passengers should contact the airport in advance to request hand-inspection, allow additional check-in time for such procedures, and follow the advice given below.”
The Sixth Sense: “In Educating Intuition, Robin M. Hogarth tackles a fascinating topic that has until now garnered little scientific attention. This ambitious book aims not only to define and explore the strengths and limitations of humans’ “sixth sense” but also to discover how it can be improved. A professor of business, Hogarth turns primarily to research in his areas of expertise—psychology and cognitive science—for inspiration.
In an extensive literature review, Hogarth finds intuition’s footprints in many conceptual dichotomies familiar to psychologists. Intuition is aligned with—among other things—automatic, tacit and unconscious processing; implicit memory; and procedural knowledge.” American Scientist
Ellen Willis: Bringing the Holy War Home: ‘…(R)eligious and cultural reactionaries have mobilized to attack secular modernity in liberal democracies from Israel to the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe to the United States. Indeed, the culture war has been a centerpiece of American politics for thirty years or more, shaping our debates and our policies on everything from abortion, censorship and crime to race, education and social welfare. Nor, at this moment, does the government know whether foreign or domestic terrorists are responsible for the anthrax offensive. Yet we shrink from seeing the relationship between our own cultural conflicts and the logic of jihad. We are especially eager to absolve religion of any responsibility for the violence committed in its name: For that ubiquitous current cliché, “This has nothing to do with Islam,” read “Antiabortion terrorism has nothing to do with Christianity.” ‘ The Nation
Ian Walker on LoTR: Good film, shame about the book:
“…Joyce, Woolf and Fitzgerald… may be subtle, complex, difficult or entertaining, but the one thing that typifies the great works of modern literature is their power to rethink and re-present the world. They are all acts of engagement, where Tolkien’s is an act of retreat.
Retreating into your own made-up world is also a characteristic of adolescents and hippies – the two groups to whom The Lord of the Rings means most. Which is fine – as long as the book is recognised for what it is, an escapist adventure story. So it can be recommended as a good read, as long as you advise potential readers to skip the poetry and skim read any sections where the characters start banging on about their traditions.
But the greatest novel of the twentieth century? Only if you regard The Day of the Jackal as high literature and The 39 Steps as a brilliant insight into the human condition.” spiked!
A creaky theory: “One of the most popular theories doing the rounds about the West’s war in Afghanistan is that it’s a war for oil… The war on terrorism is not about what is going on in Afghanistan – whether it be the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any potential oil interests for the West. It is a war with no clear strategic aims, carried out primarily for domestic and political purposes and to galvanise audiences at home and abroad. In this sense, the oil-critical opponents have completely missed the point. The war in Afghanistan is not a sinister plot to control everything, but a response to a sense in the nervous West that everything is out of control.” spiked!
Robert Kuttner: Let’s Have Real Shared Sacrifice —
‘President Bush continues to enjoy popularity as commander-in-chief. But his critics are right to challenge his economic priorities. The theme of this strange war is turning out to be unequal sacrifice and wasted opportunity. If we are not careful, a longer-term theme could be a protracted recession.’
And Robert Reich: Back to Normal?
‘While the rest of us are trying to put our lives back to some semblance of the way they were before September 11th, that’s not true for the inhabitants of our nation’s capital. They’re not taking up where they left off. For better or worse, they’re leaving all that behind.
‘
The American Prospect
Chris Mooney: Outrage of Aquarius The Boston Phoenix and AlterNet.org fall hard for astrology. The American Prospect
Test-Tube Quantum Computer Makes History: ‘Scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center have performed the world’s most complicated quantum-computer calculation to date. They caused a billion-billion custom-designed molecules in a test tube to become a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the mathematical problem at the heart of many of today’s data-security cryptographic systems.’
Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy:
Why a Loser Gets to Run the Country — The Case for Instant Runoff Voting. tompaine.com
I’m a little late in blinking to this, but Dec. 24th was World Sousveillance Day, the second annual ‘shooting spree’ , photographing those who keep us under surveillance.
How will I know whom I should shoot?
Taking pictures of the surveillance cameras, or even just wearing a disguise, will cause models to appear very quickly for you to photograph. When you point your camera at their cameras, the officials watching their television monitors will very quickly dispatch the models for you to shoot. This is a universal phenomenon that happens in nearly any large organization where video surveillance is used. Models often carry two–way radios and wear navy blue uniforms with special badges. Most will be eager to pose close to your camera, especially the hand models. They will reach out to you. They want to get close to you. They will crave the glamour of your camera. They will reach out and touch you, or place their hands over your camera lens so you can get a closup picture of their photogenic fingerprints.
Lessons of shoe-bomb incident — ‘Groups like Al Qaeda may now be using operatives who don’t fit the police profiles.’
Experts say that the tall, lanky passenger on Flight 63 with plastic explosives in his hightops likely did not act alone. The explosives were too sophisticated for a drifter to obtain; more likely, he was a tester for a larger terrorist organization, they say.
“It’s a classic evolution of criminal organizations: When you clamp down on one kind of drug carrier or operative, they reach out to others,” says Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the US Department of Transportation.
Christian Science Monitor
Al Qaeda planning next phase: ‘From a Pakistan safehouse, the Taliban’s top intelligence chief claims bin Laden is alive and well.’
“I am personally requested by Mullah Omar and Sheikh Osama to go to Urozgan and take the command of new guerrilla war preparations, which will start as soon as possible, and you will hear the news in papers and on BBC,” he adds. “We withdrew from major cities and provinces because the ruthless bombing of Americans had killed a lot of civilians as well as our holy warriors. We took that tactical step for our safety, and we will start our guerrilla campaign against our enemies as soon as we regroup.”
Christian Science Monitor
Norman Solomon author of The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: The P.U.-Litzer Prizes for 2001: “…established a decade ago to give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year.
As each winter arrives, I confer with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group FAIR to sift through the large volume of entries. This year, the competition was especially fierce. We regret that only a few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer.” Media Beat at FAIR Also: Danny Schechter’s readers at the Media Channel note their 2001 media hits and misses.
Justice Dept. going all sensitive on us Tom the Dancing Bug @ salon [thanks, David]
Right-Wing Biological Dread:
The Subhumans are coming! The Subhumans are coming!
‘Mary Shelley, move over. Conservative intellectuals William Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and J. Bottum are spinning far darker visions than the author of Frankenstein in their frantic campaign to stop medical progress by derailing biotechnological research. In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Kristol and co-author Eric Cohen were horrified that “in trying to make human beings live indefinitely, our scientists have begun mixing our genes with those of cows, pigs, and jellyfish.”
(…) These conservative intellectuals have confused being human with merely having human DNA. They are treating human DNA as though it were sacred. But DNA is merely the chemical on which the digital code for how to make proteins is inscribed. Inserting a human gene in a pig or a petunia is not an act of sacrilege. Human DNA in a pig or petunia will make a protein, not a human being. Human beings really are more than the recipe it takes to make them.’ Reason
Legal commentary on the Mumia Abu-Jamal decision — death sentence overturned but
‘otherwise a major victory for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office because (Judge) Yohn rejected 28 of the 29 claims in Abu-Jamal’s habeas corpus petition, including claims that the prosecutor improperly used his peremptory strikes to keep blacks off the jury, and that the trial judge violated his rights by repeatedly removing him from the courtroom due to his angry outbursts.
Significantly, Yohn also refused to consider Abu-Jamal’s most recent claim — that he has “newly discovered” evidence that Faulkner was murdered by Arnold Beverly, a Mafia hit man.’ law.com
Also: Europeans Hail Abu-jamal Decision Guardian UK
War watch: Indian and Pakistani troops shelled each other in disputed Kashmir overnight, and the Indian army ordered the evacuation of dozens of border villages, raising fears of war. AP Sources tell CNN that Pakistan, saying it was only responding to India’s movements, mobilized its entire army — even calling up some recent retirees — and put it on high alert Wednesday. India has moved short-range ballistic missiles to the Pakistani border. New York Times India’s armed forces are pressing the government for permission to strike militant training camps in the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Telegraph UK Temptations on both sides to strike while the other is at a disadvantage increase risk of fullscale war. Media reports from India are indicating movement of China’s troops along Sino-Indian border just after Pakistani Pres. Musharraf returns from a state visit to China. PNS It remains unclear whether either nation actually has the capability to deliver nuclear weapons to the enemy. WorldNet
South Asia crisis hits US war on terrorism. Christian Science Monitor
“Year-End Google Zeitgeist: Search patterns, trends, and surprises.”
America the Unready — ‘Preparations against another terrorist attack range from the patchy to the poor.’ The Economist
In Sacramento, a Publisher’s Questions Draw the Wrath of the Crowd: ‘… a commencement speaker (the publisher of the Sacramento Bee)
was booed off the stage for calling for the
protection of civil liberties in the
government’s response to terrorism. (…)
“It was scary,” said Bob Buckley, a computer sciences professor and
president of the faculty senate. “For the first time in my life, I can see how
something like the Japanese internment camps could happen in our country.” (…)
“We’ve always known that if you took the Bill of Rights to the street and
asked most people to sign it, you would be unable to get a majority of
Americans to do so,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Los Angeles.’ NY Times [via Adam]
This makes some good points that hadn’t occurred to me about the design of my site. My readers who are webloggers themselves, at least, ought to be interested in this blink. And if there are any readers using audio or Braille readers to access my page (if you haven’t given up in disgust long ago), I’d love it if you would care to write me with your reactions to this article and your experiences with the accessibility of FmH. [thanks, David]
Nat Hentoff: Rescuing the Constitution: “There is insistent public opposition from civil
libertarians, both on the left and the right; but the
attorney general’s often unilateral, scorched-earth
approach to the Bill of Rights takes on new
dimensions so frequently that his critics have been
able only so far to react. There hasn’t been time to
organize pressure nationwide so that Congress will
awaken to the separation of powers that is at the
core of our system of governance.” Jewish World Review
Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy ‘Summary:
The fight for the
future is not between
the armies of leading
states, nor are its
weapons those of
traditional armed
forces. Rather, the
combatants come
from bomb-making
terrorist groups like
Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaeda, or drug
smuggling cartels like
those in Colombia and
Mexico. On the
positive side are
civil-society activists
fighting for the
environment,
democracy and
human rights. What
all have in common is
that they operate in
small, dispersed units
that can deploy
anywhere, anytime to
penetrate and
disrupt. They all
feature network
forms of organization,
doctrine, strategy,
and technology
attuned to the
information age. And,
from the Intifadah to
the drug war, they
are proving very hard
to beat.’ A report from the Rand Corp., published Nov. 2001. Each chapter is downloadable from the blinked page in .pdf format.
Brace Yourself for the Segmented Internet ” Nothing can stop the spread of the Internet—but as the influence of the Internet
spreads, governments (sometimes reflecting popular opinion) are becoming increasingly
dissatisfied with the de facto policies it brings. They will never cut
off Internet access to the outside world because they need it for commercial,
academic, and other informational reasons. But they may be tempted to form a
kind of local area network for Internet users, enforcing their own particular
policies with clearly demarcated gateways to the outside world. The result will
be reminiscent of how private organizations segment their local area networks,
so I call this possibility the segmented Internet.”WebReview
“…(C)onservative hysteria has made America all-but ungovernable
for anyone but conservatives…” ‘Objectivity’ RIP. Eric Alterman, in The Nation, meditates on Dan Rather’s abandonment of all pretense of journalistic impartiality in his Letterman appearance, ABC President David Westin’s cave-in to conswervative [sic: this was a typo but I kind of like the effect, so it remains. –FmH] attack after a brief attempt to maintain some objectivity, and other evidence that “there ain’t nobody here but us chickens” in the media.
“Most infuriating about the right’s capture of the media since the war is the fact that,
according to the Pew study, nearly three-quarters of the respondents say they want news
that includes the views of America’s enemies, and just over half say reporters should dig
hard for information rather than trust official sources. So just why are the media wimping
out exactly when tough, critical reporting is not only crucial for the functioning of
democracy but is also being demanded by their audience?” [thanks, Adam]
In Sacramento, a Publisher’s Questions Draw the Wrath of the Crowd: ‘… a commencement speaker (the publisher of the Sacramento Bee)
was booed off the stage for calling for the
protection of civil liberties in the
government’s response to terrorism. (…)
“It was scary,” said Bob Buckley, a computer sciences professor and
president of the faculty senate. “For the first time in my life, I can see how
something like the Japanese internment camps could happen in our country.” (…)
“We’ve always known that if you took the Bill of Rights to the street and
asked most people to sign it, you would be unable to get a majority of
Americans to do so,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Los Angeles.’ NY Times [via Adam]
And so at this time,
I greet you, with the prayer
that for you,
now and forever,
the day breaks
and the shadows
flee away.
-Fra Giovanni, 1562
The most joyous of holiday seasons to my readers, and all the best of the year to come. Thank you for your continued encouragement for and enthusiasm about FmH.
My family and I will be away for the next few days, so there’ll be little or no blogging until after the holiday week. In the meantime, your jones may be satisfied by some of the thoughtful folks in the orange box in the lefthand sidebar…
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrum, Yale Univ. Dept. of Philosophy, posits: ‘that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.’ [via abuddhas memes]
Missile Defense Delusion: Sen. Joe Biden argues not only that abrogating the ABM treaty to pursue NMD will trigger a new arms race and that it will squander resources on threats the Pentagon itself assesses as low-priority, but that by provoking what defense analysts estimate will be at least a tenfold increase in China’s arsenal as well as inflation of the Indian and Pakistani n-weapons stables, we vastly increase the risk of a bin Laden getting his hands on a thermonuclear device. Not to mention the continuing stupidity of unilateralism at this point in history. Not to mention the technological unfeasibility of the intercept concept. Every time I rant about NMD, I suggest that, if we are serious in asserting that NMD is in the service of peace and stability, that we are defending only against rogue threats and that the other bona fide nuclear states have nothing to fear, we should share our anti-missile technology freely and magnanimously with Russia and China. If you can point me to links that counter this argument, please do. Washington Post
Joe Conason: Whitewater Critics Quiet About Enron: The White House as an Enron branch office. The New York Observer
The clueless defector in chief
He lacks the knowledge or the motivation to acquire the knowledge necessary to do his job and we all suffer. He continues to show his ignorance even of basic geography, asking Charlotte Church recently where the city of Wales is located. He displays a knowledge of the world only a barfly would be proud of. The teachers who gave him passing grades at Andover should be ashamed.
The meritocracy completely failed in the case of Bush. Instead, the same forces of wealth and influence that got him his position continue to fabricate a complimentary image of him. Their stories of his activities during September 11 change through time and contradict each other. The American people who had their peace and prosperity ripped from them must eventually see through this charade. It takes saturation coverage of a bin Laden to make Bush look good.
This article drips with a contempt for the Shrub similar to what I continue to feel. Despite my understanding that I’m hopelessly out of tune with the times in worrying about the man’s intellectual limitations, hypocrisy a quantum level beyond that of most other politicians, and the pitiful charade that he runs anything, much less an Administration or a nation, it is viscerally necessary from time to time for me to give out with such spasms of contempt. I do, however, quibble with the following:
September 11 happened on his watch. He is to blame. If he had been at work in the Oval Office, he would have been briefed on the threat. If he took his job seriously, he would have taken the trouble to become better informed about what the government already knew of bin Laden’s plans. He should have taken steps to prevent the carnage. Instead, he relaxed at his Crawford ranch.
I quibble with it not because it ‘blames the victim’ but because it doesn’t blame the victim nearly enough. Our intelligence failure in not tracking al Qaeda or anticipating its intentions and our pursuit of swaggering neoimperialist policy guaranteed to galvanize extremist rage are far deeper and more institutionalized than one man’s stupidity and noblesse oblige no matter how profound. Online Journal [via BookNotes]
On the other hand, the Washington Post reports that the Clinton administration took far broader steps against al Qaeda than is generally understood. And, while we’re at it, Helen Hightower asks Do You Love America? Do You?
Profiles in Courage, ’01: ‘(Danny) Glover is in the headlines these days for comments he made during a speech at an anti-death-penalty forum, comments that have right-wing talk show hosts calling for a boycott of his movies because he’s “un-American.” So, in an indirect way, seeing The Royal Tennenbaums could be $8.50 spent in defense of free speech.
On November 16, the Associated Press reported that Glover had “called on the United States government to spare the life of Osama bin Laden, even if he is found guilty of being involved in terrorist acts.” Since then, a storm of controversy has been building…’ AlterNet [via Book Notes]
Taliban Chiefs Prove Elusive, Americans Say
![[Marines in night vision]](https://i0.wp.com/graphics4.nytimes.com/images/2001/12/20/international/20mili.1.jpg)
Troops May Scour Caves for Qaeda, U.S.
General Says NY Times Do they really think bin Laden is still there??
Making Light has been back to blogging for the first time since October in recent days. Welcome back.
A feel-good email making the rounds and posted at a number of web sites (e.g. here) by a retired US Army munitions and training expert, entitled ‘The “Real” Deal about Nuclear, Biological,
and Chemical Terrorist Attacks’ wants us to buck up and not be paralyzed by envisioning what devastation could lie in store if our terrorist enemies got hold of weapons of mass destruction. He makes a stab at blaming the media for exaggerating the dangers we face. The message has been lauded by many — and reviled by the US Army — for offering commonsense, empowering advice and reassurance about the aftermath of such an attack. Take This, Terrorist Boogeyman is the Washington Post‘s take on the issue, including the reaction from the US Army: “Retired SFC Red Thomas’s article offers some common sense advice for unprotected victims of a NBC [nuclear/biochemical] attack. However, his article doesn’t reflect the U.S. Army’s position for individual defense and contains an overwhelming amount of incorrect material. . . .”
Many have found a most useful aspects of Thomas’s article to be its reminders that a terrorist nuclear attack would be a low-yield weapon with limited destructive power and range.
The effects of a nuclear bomb are heat, blast, EMP, and radiation. If you see a bright flash of light like the sun, where the sun isn’t, fall to the ground!
The heat will be over in a second. Then there will be two blast waves, one outbound, and one on its way back. Don’t stand up to see what happened after the first wave; anything that’s going to happen will have happened in two full minutes.
These will be low yield devices and will not level whole cities. If you live through the heat, blast, and initial burst of radiation, you’ll probably live for a very very long time… These will be at the most 1 kiloton bombs; that’s the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.
Here’s the real deal, flying debris and radiation will kill a lot of exposed (not all!) people within a half mile of the blast. Under perfect conditions this is about a half mile circle of death and destruction, but, when it’s done it’s done. EMP stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will fry every electronic device for a good distance, it’s impossible to say what and how far but probably not over a couple of miles from ground zero is a good guess. Cars, cell phones, computers, ATMs, you name it, all will be out of order.
[He goes on to describe radiation effects, somewhat understating them IMHO.]
I was pointed to this issue by Electrolite, and PNH’s discussion there is a good starting point:
It’s an interesting issue. Thomas admits that there are errors and overgeneralizations in his original email. But his main point seems to me correct. One of the luxuries of regarding nuclear attacks as “unthinkable” is that it spares us having to think about what it would be like to be in, say, midtown Manhattan if a smallish nuclear device were detonated downtown, or in the harbor. What it would be like: it would be horrible. What would be needed immediately: lots of rational people who grasp that what’s at hand isn’t the end of the world. In such an eventuality, and let’s pray it never comes to pass, Sgt. Thomas’s common-sense attitude may turn out to have been a wholesome piece of advance planning for the imagination.
Some people always think that discussing these things amounts to an effort to play down their awfulness. It’s not. If even a small nuclear weapon (or “dirty bomb”) ever goes off in a city anywhere, it will be a ghastly calamity. It’s rational to fear such a thing. But the difference between fear and terror is specificity . Understanding the scope and likely limits of a terrorist-sponsored nuclear attack may make the difference between the unboundedness of terror and the specificity of fear.
He’s absolutely right that gristly descriptions of the effects of a nuclear attack are not in the service of inuring us to their awfulness and making them acceptable options. “Thinking the unthinkable” is not enabling but rather taking power over and countering the nuclear threat. The thrust of my work, and that of many, in the disarmament movement of the ’70’s and ’80’s was precisely to publicize in excruciating detail the biological, psychological and sociological consequences of nuclear weapons. What facilitates acquiescence to the nuclear threat has always been what Robert Jay Lifton termed “nuclear numbing,” the denial of the unprecedented terror of the effects of these weapons. And whatever graphic details drag people out of their numbed denial empowered the desperation, terror and rage giving momentum to the polity’s disarmament sentiment. That’s why reading Hersey’s Hiroshima is one of the most significant acts of conscience and courage a responsible person could do in coming to terms with the nuclear threat in the postwar period. That’s why the network broadcast of The Day After in the early ’80’s (a made-for-TV film about the aftermath of a largescale nuclear attack on the US), and the reversal on the ban on the horrific BBC documentary War Games (depicting post-nuclear Britain) were so momentous to consciousness-raising, along with such lesser measures, taken by anti-nuclear activists throughout the world, as the conference I organized as a medical student in New Haven in 1980 (with Lifton as a keynote speaker), Not Just Your Ordinary Nightmare: envisioning the effects of nuclear terror on children.
So here’s where I differ with Red Thomas. Even though it’s useful to remind people that a terrorist’s nuclear weapon smuggled into the US in a suitcase or detonated aboard a ship in a US harbor would likely be a low-yield weapon, looking at the effects in unflinching detail can empower us to face the threat realistically without defusing the terror. In many respects, terror expands to fill all the room made available for it. Indeed, I’ve commented in FmH before that part of my reaction to the WTC devastation was that I assimilated it in my mind to the nightmare of a nuclear attack on lower Manhattan. A species of the unthinkable had come to pass. A small-scale attack would have many important similarities to, as well as differences from, the massive thermonuclear devastation we forced ourselves to imagine 20-30 years ago — not the least would be the lingering and horrendous radiation effects which, as I’ve said, are Thomas’s major underestimation. The center of an attacked US city would probably be uninhabitable for years, if not decades, and we would have a generation of people not unlike the Japanese hibakusha living out a slow radiation sickness death. And a witnessing public psychologically traumatized beyond belief, no matter with what foreknowledge they had been empowered. In this sense, even after a limited attack, Khruschev’s pronouncement that “the survivors would envy the dead” might approach being true.
Thomas’s feel-good bluster that we should not let the terrorists win by giving in to irrational fears is so much whistling in the dark if the fears are not irrational. After all, they wouldn’t be terrorists if they weren’t willing — and able — to impose terror, with impunity, beyond the bounds of that to which anyone could humanly expect to be subjected. We won’t stop them from detonating a suitcase nuclear weapon by making however many loud proclamations that we’re not afraid, because they know as well as we do that it’s a bluster. Now bear in mind that I don’t make this argument to conclude that there’s nothing we can do; quite the contrary. Terror need not be paralyzing, but the denial of terror certainly is.
Boy, did I make a big mistake. It’s apparently really really politically incorrect to have appreciated the Ted Rall column in the Village Voice to which I blinked a few days ago. I should’ve known from the get-go, that with a title like “How We Lost Afghanistan” it would set the teeth of alot of the warblog set on edge. I’ve seen several polemical responses like this one that start by doing the linguistic equivalent of rolling their eyes in the first paragraph just because it’s another of his columns, and then fall flat on their faces trying to demolish his arguments. I agree, Rall is at times knee-jerking, but for the critic to say “you really have no idea what he wants” condemns the critic’s reading ability much more directly than it does Rall’s expressiveness, because if anything Rall’s expressiveness is over the top. To be fair, the critic did characterize himself, in candor, as ranting. He uses the classical “straw man” rhetorical artifice of setting up a caricature of your opponent, demolishing that, then smirking in self-satisfied hollow victory before the other shoe has dropped. Like, perhaps, we’ve done in the war on terrorism?
Yemen Said to Attack Suspected Bin Laden Supporters. The government of Yemen demanded that tribespeople sheltering suspected al Qaeda members turn them over and attacked their village with helicopter gunships when they refused. Dubya had apparently asked Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to hand over the suspects during the latter’s recent state visit to Washington. New York Times Yemen is reputed to be a terrorist haven in whose port, Aden, the USS Cole was bombed last year. As one of the poorest of the poor nations, it would be easy (especially after demonstrating our resolve to bomb regimes harboring terrorists even further back into the Stone Age than they already are) to make the Yemeni regime an offer it can’t refuse.
Judge overturns death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal: “A federal judge here upheld the murder conviction today of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former journalist and Black Panther whose case has attracted enormous international attention, but threw out the death sentence against him.
Finding problems with the instructions to the jury in the original trial, Judge William Yohn ordered that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania conduct a new sentencing hearing within 180 days or impose a sentence of life imprisonment.” New York Times
Abu-Jamal’s supporters are unhappy because the judge upheld the murder conviction despite the defense’s new evidence. I must say, from following this case for years as a death penalty opponent, the prosecution’s claim to have proven a case of coldblooded murder of a police officer seems pretty open-and-shut, and Abu-Jamal’s counterarguments pretty outlandish. But the prosecution and the police lobby are upset because the death sentence was vacated. It does violate a pretty central tenet of fairness, whether you believe in the death sentence or not, to not allow consideration of mitigating factors in the penalty phase, after a murder conviction. But, since Abu-Jamal and his supporters to this day steadfastly insist he’s innocent, would they introduce any mitigating circumstances in the first place and, in so doing, start down the slippery slope of conceding he’s responsible?
U.S. Again Placing Focus on Ousting Hussein Gotta have some place to turn next to sustain the Sisyphean war on terrorism. New York Times
Does Welfare Cause Terrorism? rc3 (congratulations, Rafe, on your nomination for weblogger of the year in the Scripting News poll) pointed to this Mickey Kaus column, calling it worth thinking about even if you don’t agree with his politics.
Well, I don’t, and it’s not. Kaus’ thesis is that alienated subcultures sustained by welfare breed terrorism. He commits several logical fallacies in his argument; I searched the column high and low in vain for evidence that I was underestimating his reasoning, but I’m not, unless I’m very very dense. First, even if you grant that terrorists tended to be on welfare (and he doesn’t even sustain this point), does that mean that those on welfare are terrorists? And second, he confuses correlation with causation — if members of the alienated underclass are both eligible for government benefits and associated with antisocial acts, that doesn’t mean that their receipt of social welfare causes their attacks.
This is a clumsy and intellectually crippled way of advancing a xenophobic and elitist anti-welfare agenda. The problem is, the Shrub administration is probably listening.
“Two paradoxes of happiness: why you can’t pursue it and why you can’t tell when you’ve found it,” some charming philosophical musings by Ronald de Sousa.
Why the paradoxes followI am a philosophical manic-depressive. As a philosopher, I want to see the world as it really is. I also believe, (and there’s now empirical research to back me on this) that I see things more clearly and truly when I am depressed. So when I’m depressed, I say: Good! Now I see things as they are! and become elated. Which of course depresses me. And so on.
This situation embodies both my paradoxes. First, I cannot pursue the clarity of depression without exposing myself to the stupidity of elation : the pursuit is therefore self-defeating. Second, the happy clarity of depression can only subsist so long as I remain unaware of it : so I can’t both be happy and know that I am. [via UFO Breakfast]
And now for a word from our sponsor:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! Omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal creams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
— Allen Ginsberg (1956)
Bipolar depression eased by pig feed. A nutritional supplement developed when a livestock products salesman noticed similarities between the behavior of a distraught neighbor’s bipolar children and aggressive pigs’ ear-and-tail-biting syndrome has proven successful in reducing medication needs in a large study of bipolar depressed patients.
For close to a century, agricultural scientists have done research on the impact of nutrients on animal behaviour. Aggressive behaviour is routinely treated with food supplements. Oddly, this body of knowledge has not made its way into human medicine. Without a blueprint to guide them, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephan concocted a mixture of vitamins and minerals.
This Globe and Mail article is being heavily blinked to. Here are some of my thoughts (in the direction of measured optimism but not over-the-top enthusiasm):
From the Guardian, a series of primers on ‘difficult’ art forms:
I got this from the newly-relocated [sub]culture . [Some of these art forms don’t seem so ‘difficult’ to me…]
A massive compendium of Social Criticism source materials, categorized very intelligently. [via William Fields, who said “Holy shamoley!” when he found this…]
Via the null device, Mayo researchers can’t prove power of prayer. No difference in outcome between cardiac patients unknowingly prayed for over six months and matched controls. “The study drew immediate criticism as an attempt to measure God’s will.” Perhaps S/He made sure not to listen to these particular entreaties in order to punish the blaspheming researchers? Duluth Tribune Naturally, if the recipient of prayer knows about it, it’s a different story. That’s called, of course, the placebo effect, an erroneously disparaging term about an erroneously discredited phenomenon that is behind a far greater proportion of the healing benefits of medical interventions than we are willing to concede…
Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft – Expert
A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network claimed that Islamic militants infiltrated Microsoft and sabotaged the company’s Windows XP operating system, according to a source close to Indian police.
Mohammad Afroze Abdul Razzak, arrested by Mumbai (Bombay) police Oct. 2, has admitted to helping plot terrorist attacks in India, Britain and Australia, India’s Hindustan Times newspaper reported Saturday.
During interrogation, Afroze, 25, also claimed that a member or members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant “trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP,” according to Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a New Delhi information systems and telecommunication consultant. NewsBytes
Further reason not to upgrade to Windows XP (which I’ve discussed before) even if you’re opting to remain in Microsoft’s grip; or to consider finally moving to Linux…
“It started last week with Jennifer Balderama’s Where Internet Promises Remain Unfulfilled article on CNET followed by Doc’s Fulfilling the Promise response and Jennifer’s guest blogger answers to Doc’s issues. After that Doc invited Jennifer to start a blog and Jennifer made it happen with her new blog on Friday….” Commentary from the Keep Trying metablog [via blogger.com]
Saudi stability on borrowed time: ‘Saudi Arabia expects a $12 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2002. Unwilling or unable to turn to outside creditors, the government is considering a path of economic and social reform that could fuel public frustration and lead to upheaval. An embattled Riyadh will impact the stability of the entire Arabian Peninsula and strain relations with Washington.’ StratFor
Planespotters to be freed on bail: “Fourteen tourists on a Greek aircraft-spotting holiday may have spent six weeks in prison thanks, in part, to a quirk of mathematics. Planespotters, like trainspotters, are obsessed with collecting the numbers of the vehicles that they see – and unfortunately this habit is indistinguishable from one form of hostile intelligence-gathering…
The Greek authorities have expressed concern over records of serial numbers from the tailplanes of helicopters at the base. A handful of such numbers can reveal a surprising amount of information about total number of pieces of equipment and even production capacity.” New Scientist
This, about the band 3 Mustaphas 3, is apparently (a part of) my earliest usenet post (the beginning of the first sentence, which explains how I got to be there, being truncated), according to the new Google groups 20-year searchable archive. This archive enhancement turns out to be moderately embarrassing. If your searches are sorted by relevance rather than date, what comes up at the top of the list of a search for me is a discussion about whether I was a “bad trader”, one of the ultimate epithets on rec.music.gdead, i.e. whether I had stiffed someone in a tape trade. I hadn’t.
David Corn: The more Bush Grows, the more he stays the same:
My, how he’s grown! That’s the cliché tossed around by pundits and politicos about George W. Bush, deployed especially by those who never fancied W.
The plot-line: smirky boy-President, in the post-9/11 crucible, becomes a man and a true leader. Bush loyalists have simultaneously pooh-poohed and encouraged such talk. They certainly cannot admit their boss was a lightweight to start, and they deny he needed maturation. But they are eager to enhance (and exploit) his image as a strong, in-charge wartime president… The surprise is not that Bush has done all this reasonably well; the surprise would have been had he, a professional politician and presidential son who (like most pols) is surrounded by image-makers and communications specialists, not been able to seize the moment. I imagine that even Al Gore would have been able to rally the nation following the horrific assaults of September 11. Perhaps Michael Dukakis, too. (It is doubtful, though, that Republicans and conservatives would have been as supportive of a Commander Gore as the Democrats have been of Bush had Gore, like Bush, waited several weeks before initiating retaliation.)
This is not a knock on Bush, whose job approval rating appears to be approaching 137 percent. Here comes the knock: his growth has not changed much. On substance, he remains the same sort of president he was prior to September 11… Arrogant unilateralism, a continuing obsession with tax cuts for the well-heeled. The newly-somber George W. Bush, having confronted the harsh realities of war, has dropped the adolescent-like smirk, but there are some things he has not grown out of.AlterNet [thanks to BookNotes]
Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK
Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK
Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK
Why I’m Not Sending Christmas Cards This Year: “As much as our leaders want us all to get back to normal, it’s time to admit that when it comes to going postal — this is not your father’s mail. Now that postal workers are suddenly on the front line of the war against terror, shouldn’t the generous spirit of Christmas dictate that we contribute not one more piece of inessential mail to their substantial load?” Arianna Huffington
Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting: “This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or Pakistani.
‘They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the perfect moment,’ said one security source. ‘It’s a masterstroke.’ ” Guardian UK [On the other hand, if the tape was disinformation and doubtful reactions began to accumulate, they could be countered neatly with the rumor that it was a CIA sting, simultaneously asserting its authenticity and explaining its fortuitously-timed appearance.]
Hate Hits the Mainstream. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says that, while everyone has bent over backwards to show tolerance for Muslims in the wake of the war on terrorism, anti-Semitism has gone mainstream across the Arab world, unacknowledged and uncountered. LA Times
The irrepressible Molly Ivins: Watch Out for Those Bush Photo-Ops
“When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, many political observers had a theory that whenever he started holding photo ops with adorable little children, it was time to grab your wallet because it meant some unconscionable giveaway to the corporations was in the wind.
I did not fully subscribe to the theory, but having noticed a number of adorable-child ops in the past few weeks, I decided to check for what might be flying under the radar…” Common Dreams
Wind may explain mystery anthrax cases New Scientist
Coming to a Mall Near You: Just War: “The phrase, ‘Just War,’ used in reference to the battle being waged in Afghanistan, is beginning to resonate. Not as a deep philosophical concept, but like the names of those specialty stores you find in shopping malls: ‘Just Lamps,’ ‘Just Bulbs,’ and ‘Just Paper.’ In fact, ‘Just War’ turns out to be an eerily accurate marquee for the little shop known as The United States of America. War, to the increasing exclusion of everything else, is the only thing that America collectively cares about anymore.” David Potorti, brother of a 9-11 attack victim, in CommonDreams
Bin Laden’s voice ‘heard in Tora Bora’ — ‘US troops apparently intercepted radio messages last week which showed that Osama Bin Laden was still commanding his forces in the area.’ BBC
W. G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57: “…(T)he profoundly elegiac and distinctive author of Austerlitz and other novels and one of the most acclaimed of contemporary writers was killed yesterday in an automobile accident in Norfolk, England, near his home in Norwich in East Anglia. He was 57.” NY Times
Tongue piercing causes brain abscess New Scientist
An Israeli company reportedly knows who calls whom in virtually every phone call made in US Fox News
Report: London Attack Plan Found: ‘A British newspaper said it has found a notebook at an al-Qaida training camp in southern Afghanistan that contained a terrorist “blueprint” for an attack on London.’ Washington Post
Don’t Throw It Away — ‘Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools (on my side of the Atlantic, at least) for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.
Those few young people who do learn it, seem to pick it up, against the odds, by instinct. Even then they’ve no template of understanding with which to correct their own writing when something goes wrong.’ The Vocabula Review
Nice Distinctions: “(A) word whose meaning is ambiguous is likely to be shunned by those who would make their meaning clear…” The Vocabula Review
The Grammar of Anthony Burgess’s The Eve of Saint Venus: “Simply to speak ill of those who truly deserve it shows a lack of imagination. All it requires is simple description. An infinitely more engaging task is merely to praise those who we think are worth our consideration — and ignore the rest. This positively dispraises the unmentioned by implication.
And, indeed, a very effective way for tenure-track literature teachers to stay on track while helping their students distinguish between sound literature and literary litter is to require that those students read good writing to learn what good writing is, and Cliff Notes to prepare for department-wide exams. Those teachers who are given tenure can then stop assigning Cliff Notes to, for instance, that recent well-seller that has a male dolphin kill the bad guy by raping him. Merely to notice such grotesqueries is to seem to elevate them beyond their proper status — that of literary litter.
Literary litter lays claim to the title of authentic literature because, among other reasons, it observes all the rules of grammar. Because grammar, if not virtue, can be taught, much of today’s literary litter exhibits good grammar along with its bad taste. But good grammar is as appropriate to literary litter as jewels and expensive cosmetics are to loathsome hags. This essay written in praise of the grammar of Anthony Burgess’s The Eve of Saint Venus addresses the difference between grammar used as drabs use jewels and lipstick, and those very same rules of grammar used as the necessary and appropriate complement to good writing. But if we are to think that a readership is correct in judging a book to be authentic literature merely because it is written following the rules of grammar, then we must conclude that grammar has the power to turn sows’ ears into silk purses. Grammar cannot do this, and the readership that thinks it can is clear neither about what a sow’s ear looks like nor what a silk purse looks like — an easily understood mistake. After all, each can be used to carry small change, and small change, whatever sort of purse is used to carry it in, is still small change.” The Vocabula Review
Dying to know the truth: visions of a dying brain, or false memories? Thoughtful commentary about out-of-body experiences during near-death events and whether they indicate consciousness without brain function, as several recent research studies have suggested. The commentator is at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London:
The nature of mind-brain relationships and the possibility of life-after-death are some of the most profound issues relating to mankind’s place in the universe. The report in today’s Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues of near-death experiences (NDEs) in survivors of a cardiac arrest provides intriguing data that are relevant to these issues. Theirs is the second prospective study of this type, the first being a smaller-scale study done in Southampton by Parnia and colleagues. Both groups of researchers think that their findings indicate a need for radical revision of current assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and brain function. van Lommel and colleagues ask, “How could a clear consciousness outside one’s body be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG?”. But the truth is that nobody knows when the NDEs reported by these patients actually occurred. Was it really during the period of flat EEG or might they have occurred as the patients rapidly entered or gradually recovered from that state? The Lancet [free acces; requires registration]
Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army’s Stocks. This is in direct contradiction to a government spokesperson’s claim that the terrorist anthrax was of a different strain than the weaponized anthrax the US has recently produced at Dugway (secretly, and in violation of the US commitment to refrain from production of biological weapons), about which I wrote below.
Genetic fingerprinting studies indicate that the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill are identical to stocks of the deadly bacteria maintained by the U.S. Army since 1980, according to scientists familiar with the most recent tests.
Although many laboratories possess the Ames strain of anthrax involved in this fall’s bioterrorist attacks, only five laboratories so far have been found to have spores with perfect genetic matches to those in the Senate letters, the scientists said. And all those labs can trace back their samples to a single U.S. military source: the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. Washington Post
The Nose Knows: How the Olfactory Influences Conduct: ‘Olfaction, says neuroscientist Cori Bargmann, University of California, San Francisco, holds a key that might unlock the different strategies involved in assembling complex behaviors. Many scientists view olfaction research as a way of gaining understanding not only about the sense of smell, but also about the biology of behavior. According to neurobiologist Stuart Firestein, Columbia University, some envision the olfactory system as a model for signal transduction, including receptor-ligand interactions, modulation by second messengers, ion channel gating, and the long-term mechanisms of adaptation and desensitization.’ The Scientist
Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment ed. Randolph Nesse:
Commitment is at the core of social life. We live in a social fabric woven from a warp of promises and a weft of threats, and we spend much of our lives deciding which commitments are credible, and trying to manage our own commitments and reputations. Classical economics and sociobiology sometimes seem to suggest that this should not be too hard, because people should generally act in ways that benefit themselves or their genes. While reciprocity and kin selection are indeed powerful principles, attempts to force all behavior into their Procrustean bed have aroused much intellectual consternation and moral indignation. This conflict has deepened the rift between biological and social sciences. Commitment offers a bridge across this chasm. In this book, some of the world’s most distinguished researchers examine the nature of commitment, and the question of whether our capacities for making, assessing and keeping commitments have been shaped by natural selection. Many commitments are fairly straightforward attempts influence others by giving up options and thereby making it worthwhile to fulfill the commitment. Examples include burning your bridges behind you or signing a contract. However many commitments are not enforced by such tangible incentives. These subjective commitments are enforced by pledges of reputation and by emotions. Some are benevolent, such as a promise of life-long love. Others are not, such as a threat to murder a straying spouse. Although some such commitments may seem irrational in the extreme, they nonetheless influence us. Commitment thus offers a possible evolutionary explanation for irrational passions that are otherwise difficult to explain, and for our moral capacities.
Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK
Connect the Enron Dots to Bush: “Enron is Whitewater in spades. This isn’t just some rinky-dink land investment like the one dredged up by right-wing enemies to haunt the Clinton White House–but rather it has the makings of the greatest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome.” The Nation [thanks, David]
On a BBC chatboard, the majority of both US and foreign contributors are skeptical about the authenticity of the bin Laden tape.
Free speech advocates are worried that a recent federal appeals decision could have a chilling effect on online journalists who use hyperlinks to direct readers to relevant, newsworthy sites that contain illegal material.
Even more troubling, the critics say, may be an emerging double standard in the way courts treat traditional print publishers and their online offshoots, especially when it concerns printing a controversial address in a newspaper vs. linking to it from a Web page.
The recent, high-level judicial guidance on the law of linking came about in a relatively overlooked part of a widely-reported decision two weeks ago in the so-called “DeCSS” case. NY Times
Bush Invokes Executive Privilege: ‘President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time Thursday to keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutors’ decision-making in cases ranging from a decades-old Boston murder to the Clinton-era fund-raising probe.
“I believe congressional access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest,” Bush wrote in a memo ordering Attorney General John Ashcroft to withhold the documents from a House investigative committee that subpoenaed them.
The decision institutes a dramatic change in the way the administration intends to deal with Congress after years in which the Justice Department, sometimes reluctantly, shared sensitive investigative documents with lawmakers.
Republicans and Democrats alike excoriated the decision, suggesting Bush was creating a “monarchy” or “imperial” presidency to keep Congress for overseeing the executive branch and guarding against corruption.
The Republican House committee chairman who sought the documents raised the possibility of taking Bush to court for contempt of Congress.’ Associated Press
Attorney General John Ashcroft has been sounding a lot like former Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for starting the “Red Scare” of the 1950’s, finding communists at every turn, especially in people who disagreed with his witch hunt.
Test your knowledge of history and the present. See if you can tell Ashcroft from McCarthy in our “who said it” test. To make it more difficult we’ve replaced words like “communist” and “terrorist” with “___”.
And The Progressive has a New McCarthyism Watch. Read what happened to a nonviolence activist who went to a post office in Chicago and asked for 4,000 stamps for a political mailing they were putting out — but didn’t want stamps with the American flag on them! And, to make matters worse, he wanted to pay cash!
Now a Third Afghan War is wrapping up its final act around Kandahar, and a laughable band of charlatans has lobbied in Bonn, Germany, for the right to rule the unruly. Somehow, if the Bushalopes and the Annanites are to be believed, a New Democratic Afghanistan will be cobbled together from the Hekmatyars and Dostums and Rabbanis, all united under the banner of an 87-year-old king who owes more to Fellini than to Shah Mohammed. And get this: After the Afghan parliament gets together, the burkas will come off, the Fairway will open up next to the main gate of the Kabul bazaar, and that Internet-famous Unocal pipeline project, dormant for far too long, will begin sucking Kazakh crude out from under the Caspian and into the Pakistani port of Karachi. Next mission: bombing Iraq into capitalism.
The networks aired maps turning from Taliban red to Northern Alliance blue, but here on the ground, as people who prefer to remain anywhere-but like to say, no such thing occurred. Dasht-e Qaleh and Taloqan and Kunduz all “fell,” but 99 percent of the conquerors were Taliban troops who shed their beards and turbans and picked up Shah Masood’s hip hat for a buck. There were, before September 11, a mere 6000 to 20,000 Northern Alliance soldiers holding the eastern portion of Takhar province and the extremely mountainous Badakhshan and Wakhan corridor, an inland peninsula created as a buffer zone between imperial Russia and British India during the 19th century.
When your taxpayer-funded $75,000 bombs began pounding frontline Taliban positions and the not-so-occasional farming village, the age-old Afghan tradition of ideological flexibility and self-preservation led thousands of Taliban to cross the lines to “defect.” “I am so sorry,” a Taliban commander cried in the welcoming arms of his Northern Alliance counterpart a day before Kunduz “fell.” “We are brothers and should not have fought.”
Finally, a rare truth in a land of lies—both men had fought together in the Taliban and before that against the Soviets. The vast majority of “Northern Alliance” fighters now were Taliban a few weeks ago; welcome to the first fashion war of the new millennium. Village Voice
Farewell Message from Azzam Publications – for Jihad and Mujahideen. It’s about war between Islam and the West, stupid… [via Red Rock Eaters]
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Islam: ‘Because representative government is a concept that originated in the West in accordance with a non-Muslim worldview, the question of the suitability of democracy for governing Islamic states and peoples has long been up for debate. A number of Atlantic articles from the early to the late twentieth century have addressed the issue from a variety of perspectives.’ The Atlantic
Khaled Abou El Fadl, Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law at UCLA and author of Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law: The Place of Tolerance in Islam On reading the Qur’an — and misreading it. Boston Review
A Setback for Missile Shield as Booster Rocket Fails Test: ‘A test of a prototype booster rocket for missile defense failed today when the rocket veered off course seconds after liftoff and had to be destroyed over the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said.’ Unfortunately, test failures probably won’t prevent deployment, now the ABM Treaty is abrogated. NY Times
Making a MEMRI — ‘Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute spreads hate speech, baseless conspiracy theories and vicious calumny in a blatant effort to discredit Arabs and stir up malice toward Muslims. And they’re providing a pretty valuable service in the process.’ Online Journalism Review (OJR)
My son is prescient. Longtime FmH readers will know he was way ahead of the curve in his fondness for Harry Potter, which entire series we read aloud (admittedly not from the time of publication of the first book, but from slightly before the second book came out). In recent months, we’ve been devouring this series together; it’s starting to be touted as The Next Big Thing A.P. (after Potter). The books are enthralling, but the bulge in the author’s cheek from his tongue and his obfuscation about his identity are abit precious for my taste. Reading increasingly common portraits of the “Who is Lemony Snicket?” ilk tempts one to say “Oh, come off it already” if not something far more rude. Oh, and the series is published by HarperCollins (see below). Guardian UK
The world’s new look: ‘Globalisation creates the conditions for such things. Arguably, it will lead tomorrow to the development of the company-state which, just like Bin Laden, will take over countries that are empty, unstructured and prey to endemic disorder, to use them for its own ends. In this respect Bin Laden may be a terrifying precursor.’ Le Monde Diplomatique
U.S. Recently Produced Anthrax in a Highly Lethal Powder Form. The significance of this revelation is not that Dugway might be the source of the purified anthrax used in the Daschle and Leahy letters — spokespeople say that it is of a different strain, and that none of it has gone missing — but that this is the first disclosure of US biological weapons production since our supposed 1969 renunciation of biological warfare and destruction of our arsenal of germ agents. NY Times
Racism Not Hardwired, Scientists Say
In recent years a number of studies have reached the same thorny conclusion about human cognition: when encountering a person for the first time, our brains automatically make note of the individual’s race. But new research indicates that this is not necessarily the case. Findings reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicate that even brief exposure to an alternative social world can markedly diminish the extent to which people categorize others by race. The results suggest that racism may be an erasable by-product of cognitive adaptations that evolved to detect coalitions and alliances. Scientific American
Michael Moore’s publisher tells him his forthcoming book Stupid White Men and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation will not be distributed, and the print run will be destroyed, because the content is offensive and he is intellectually dishonest for not saying that the President has done a “good job” in recent months. The copyright and publishing rights revert to him in six months; meanwhile, his attorneys are trying to rectify the situation. He told the public gathering where he announced this, however, that he doesn’t want a public outcry because people have more important things about which to take action. IMHO, however, it doesn’t take too much time to write a shaming letter to HarperCollins, if Moore’s version of things is accurate… Update: Two readers comment:
Reading the transcript of the bin Laden video tape, one wonders how the obvious embarrassment to the Saudis will affect the “alliance against terror”. Speaking of the devil, US ties to Saudi elite may be hurting war on terrorism, reports the Boston Herald.
U.S. Considers Restricting Cellphone Use in Disasters. “Federal officials are working on a plan to close cellphone networks to almost everyone but government officials in the event of another major emergency like the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.
The move is intended to prevent the networks from being so clogged with calls that emergency workers cannot communicate. But there is some concern among cellphone companies about the costs and the possible public outcry if people cannot contact loved ones in an emergency.” NY Times
Rotten in the state of Denmark? Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist has received sensational coverage in proclaiming that we don’t need to fear ecological disaster. In a special issue of Grist magazine, a panel of acknowledged authorities on various environmental topics subjects the book to rigorous scrutiny and finds its thesis seriously wanting. Lomborg is a political scientist and has not published one paper in the areas on which he declaims in the book, they note. tompaine.com
A Long, Strange Trip to the Taliban. Long, typical Newsweek portrait of John Walker, with this interesting, central paragraph about his conversion:
Walker discovered his passion for Islam online, after sampling other possibilities. At the age of 14, under the handle “doodoo,” he was visiting Web sites for hip-hop music with particularly crude raps on sex and violence. In one e-mail posting, he scorned a critic of hip-hop as a “worthless d—krider.” In one e-mail at the height of his fascination with hip-hop, he appeared to pose as an African-American, writing, “Our blackness should not make white people hate us.” But as he got older, he veered to a very different direction. He began visiting Islamic Web sites, asking questions like “Is it all right to watch cartoons on TV or in the movies?” His family says the turning point may have come at the age of 16 when he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which describes the conversion to Islam of the famous black militant. Some Internet postings examined by NEWSWEEK show that young Walker soon became pretty militant himself. In a 1997 message to a hip-hop site, he demanded to know why a rapper named Nas “is indeed a ‘God’? If this is so,” Walker indignantly asks, “then why does he smoke blunts, drink Moet, fornicate, and make dukey music? That’s a rather pathetic ‘god’, if you ask me.” He quizzes an online correspondent about the Five Percent Nation of Islam—a small North American sect—about its adherents’ vision of bliss and how to pursue it. “I have never seen happiness myself,” writes Walker. “Perhaps you can enlighten me … where I can go to sneak a peek at it.” Selling off his hip-hop CD collection on a rap-music message board, he converted to Islam.
Bombing Raises Question of Al Qaeda Fate. “If the United States does in the last phase of the Afghan war wage a campaign of extermination against the network’s leaders — for example, by refusing to accept surrenders so it can continue bombing the Tora Bora caves where some al Qaeda members are holed up — it may lose international support by appearing overly vengeful and, some legal experts say, could even find itself accused of war crimes.” Washington Post
