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 follow

I 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):

• The psychiatric treatments the patients in the vignettes described had had before trying the nutritional supplement sound like caricatures of bad treatment. Prescribing nine medications together, exploding at patient and family when one’s expertise is questioned, etc. A subset of people will improve when just removed from such adverse treatment conditions. The nutritional supplement might be a red herring in these cases.
  

• The study was not double blinded and not placebo controlled. Time and again, apparent treatment success in preliminary studies is not replicated with rigorous study designs that remove hidden experimenter and subject biases.
• The idea that a simple nutritional supplement could replace medication — and its corollary, that a devastating disease can be reduced to an overlooked dietary factor or factors — often represents a sort of magical thinking — yearning for a ‘quick fix’ — on the part of sufferers and families faced with a difficulty accepting a disease recovery from (or stabilization with)which requires instead a long patient and courageous commitment on their part. You know the old saying — if a breakthrough sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The degree of skepticism required in reacting to a claim is in direct proportion to its momentousness…
  

• Remaining with the too-good-to-be-true theme, you’ll see a series of case reports on the website of the company set up to distribute the supplements claiming efficacy in almost the entire spectrum of psychiatric ailments (anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue, Tourette’s Syndrome, ADHD, depression and schizophrenia).
  

• One of the longest-running subthreads in psychiatric treatment controversy is that of nutritional treatments. I’ll mention just two prominent ones, mega-vitamin therapy for schizophrenia (a la Linus Pauling et al) and the Feingold Diet for children with attention deficit disorder. They never pan out. And there’s an entire subgenre of alternative medicine called clinical ecology which focuses on allergies, environmental and dietary influences on emotional and physical health, which I’ve looked into at depth and find remarkable for its conceptual confusion and pseudoscience.
  

• I’m not, however, saying that there are no dietary influences on mood. If you’re serious about this area, you have to be familiar with the groundbreaking lifelong commitment of Dr Judith Wurtman at MIT to reputable research in this area. And well-designed clinical trials have shown beneficial effects of a nutritional supplement, omega three fatty acids, in treatment-resistant bipolar disorder. While the components of the Hardy-Stephan supplements are a proprietary secret, it contains “only non-prescription nutrients”. It seems likely that only one or two components of this “shotgun approach” supplementation are the crucial factors. It would be nice to get the cost down below the certainly excessive $250 a month desperate families are paying. I was reassured to hear that the company distributing the product is non-profit, at least.
  

• Improvement in “bipolar depression” over a six-month followup period might be expected just from the natural history of the disorder, which tends to be cyclical and sometimes seasonal, relapsing and remitting. And dietary effects might be nonspecific, i.e. enhancing overall wellbeing rather than exerting a specific stabilizing effect on a clinical disorder.

From the Guardian, a series of primers on ‘difficult’ art forms:

• Jonathan Freedland on minimalism
  

• Stuart Jeffries on installation art
  

• Stephen Poole on sound art
  

• Adam Sweeting on soap operas
  

• Gary Younge on country music
  

• Libby Brooks on performance art
  

• Giles Foden on pottery
  

• Claire Armistead on video art
  

• Simon Hattenstone on electronic music
  

• Stephen Moss on modern architecture
  

• Jonathan Jones on jazz
  

• John Sutherland on surrealism
  

• Mark Lawson on ballet
  

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…