“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