Happy Mardi Gras!

Spike pointed out how depressing the Times of London‘s obituary of Princess Margaret is.

The 74th Annual Academy Award nominations are out, for those who think they mean anything.

Nicholas Confessore: Beat the Press “Does the White House have a blacklist?” The answer appears to be yes. For instance, even before his inauguration, Dubya’s axe man Karl Rove came out swinging, calling the Washington Post in an unsuccessful effort to have them not give the consistently dirt-digging Dana Millbank the White House beat. And they haven’t stopped swinging. The American Prospect

Michael Kinsley Is Logging Off As Editor Of Online Slate

Two months after telling the world that he’s battling Parkinson’s disease, Michael Kinsley said yesterday that he was stepping down as editor of Slate.

The 50-year-old columnist, who moved to Seattle six years ago to launch the online magazine for Microsoft, said he’s resigning mainly because he needs a change. “I was feeling a little bit stale, and I didn’t want the magazine to seem stale,” said Kinsley, who will continue to write a weekly column and contribute to other Slate projects. Washington Post

Although I don’t like Slate much, and can’t get over the taint of its Micro$oft kinship, Kinsley has a knack of writing “emperor-has-no-clothes” pieces that often make alot of sense. I hope he’ll keep up with his writing, and hope he does well with his Parkinson’s Disease.

ACLU Action Alert: Oppose Backdoor Attempts to Institute a National ID! One-click generation of letters to your representatives.

Gimme Shelter: Review of Doris Lessing’s The Sweetest Dream: “…picks up where the previous memoir left off, in the early ’60s. Lessing apparently wrote this in place of a third volume of autobiography, to protect the living.

Freed of the necessity to spare anyone’s feelings, Lessing lets rip, savaging the ’60s and ’70s with a portrait of the era so jaundiced it could only have come from the pen of a lapsed believer. Her memoirs documented the rapture of political commitment, people with “hearts permanently swollen with compassion for the world.” The Sweetest Dream is about the aftermath of that fervor, when gangrenous disappointment sets in. It’s a wildly uneven book, veering between a satire of the left and a contemporary family saga, but Lessing’s unsentimental eye provides an unexpected, rather poignant view of the late 20th century.” Village Voice

Village Voice: Pazz & Jop 2001 poll results.

Toys R Unusually Lame at Fair — ‘Growth in the toy industry is anemic. Big toy retailers like Toys R Us and KMart are closing stores. Perhaps worst of all, there is only a trickle of major new products coming out of the American International Toy Fair, the toy business’ biggest, most important showcase of upcoming playthings.

Instead, toymakers are rolling out a combination of movie licenses, retreads and brand extensions to the more than 20,000 people attending the trade show, which began Sunday.’ Wired

Bush’s Nonwar Budget: Hide and Sneak. Jonthan Chait:

As he went about crafting last year’s budget, President Bush had a problem. He wanted a big tax cut more than anything else, but polls showed the public was more interested in social spending. So Bush set out to obscure the trade-off between these objectives. His method? Hide his priorities behind the supposedly huge budget surplus. “We have increased our budget at a responsible four percent, we have funded our priorities, we have paid down all the available debt, we have prepared for contingencies–and we still have money left over,” he announced in his 2001 budget speech to Congress.

As he goes about promoting this year’s budget, released on Monday, Bush still has the same problem: He remains wedded to tax cuts uber alles, and, while his personal ratings remain stratospheric, poll after poll shows (by a wide margin) that the public would rather scale back the tax cut than run a deficit. And, since the surplus has evaporated, he can no longer hide behind the fiction of limitless resources. Fortunately for him, he has two new concealments: a war and a Democratic Congress. This year’s plan is to hide behind both. The New Republic

Part of me is celebrating as the Hague Tribunal begins the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. But it raises troubling questions as well, some of which are touched upon in this NY Times piece by Ian Fisher — e.g. whether it will be possible to directly implicate Milosevic in the crimes that occurred; whether, in the eyes of the world, this looks like “victors’ justice”; and how you draw the line in culpability between a head of state and the citizens, ‘willing executioners’, who back him.

Other important questions may remain unasked. Whose opinion sets the ethical standards for which heads of state will be held accountable for the war crimes of their time in office? Should Sharon be tried for crimes against the Palestinian people? Will a Russian chief of state come to trial for Chechnya? Kissinger or his henchmen for Vietnam?

And what about the fact that, after losing, oh probably around 3,000 on 9-11, the US is pursuing a multibillion-dollar, flag-waving War-on-Terrorism® while, despite our freely chosen peacekeeping role in the Balkans, we have not expended any resources or political will on bringing at-large Bosnian Serb ‘terrorists’ (they are, aren’t they?) Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karajic (who were personally responsible for at least twice that number of deaths in Srebenica alone) to justice?

“Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking and expanding the Balkan wars,” suggest Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai in an LA Times op-ed piece. Even confining ourselves to the Balkans, the moral ambiguities are mind-boggling. Most recently, we witnessed a US-European military intervention to protect the Kosovo Albanians against Serbian ethnic cleansing, only to see the victorious Albanians terrorizing Kosovo Serbs in an identical way.

While we’re at it, The New Republic reviews God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson:

‘Genocide, alas, is a common practice across the globe and across historical eras. But it has now come to haunt Western consciousness in an especially unsettling way, for the obvious reason that on European soil in the twentieth century it was implemented with a systematic rigor and an ideological dedication that had not been seen before or elsewhere. In his important new book, Claude Rawson argues that whereas atrocities of this kind had not been seen, they had in fact been strongly imagined; and he argues also that there may be a disturbing connection, though by no means a simple causal one, between the imagining and the enactment. His book, as he succinctly remarks at the outset, “is concerned with the spectrum of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech [about exterminating certain groups of people] and the implementation.” ‘

Why This Link Patent Case Is Weak: “It may be a long time before British Telecom knows whether it lucked out or lost big in the legal sweepstakes. But even if it wins its court battle, experts said the British telephone company has already lost the war…

Even if BT wins, it’s hard to see what the payoff would be. Programmers insist it would be a trivial task to code an entirely new way to link Web pages. And legal experts believe that BT will never be awarded any retroactive royalties on hyperlinks.” Wired

Sept. 11 has scrambled our concept of war: “The already fragile distinction between war and crime disappeared last September. We are now trying to fight terrorism with traditional weapons of war. But terrorism is not war; it is crime on a mass scale.” Boston Globe editorial

$75 Million of Stuff: ‘We know what happened to the cash donated to the victims of 9-11. But what about the boots, dog food, prom dresses and teddy bears?’ MSNBC

Never Have So Many Missed the Forest: “The biggest news out of 10 Congressional hearings on Enron last week was the claim on Thursday — sharply contradicted by others — by Jeffrey K. Skilling, the company’s former chief executive, that he had known nothing about the company’s questionable partnerships.” NY Times [Great headline… -FmH]

Mental Difficulties Can Persist Long After Chemo. Cognitive dysfunction, long recognized as a sequela of cancer chemotherapy, persists, perhaps indefinitely. It is difficult to sort out to what extent it is a toxic effect of the chemotherapy agents and to what extent an effect of other medications, the cancer patient’s emotional state, sleep disturbance or age-related changes. A decline may be attributed to the chemo by patient or caregivers even if this is not accurate. Reuters Health

Does marijuana withdrawal syndrome exist?

The question of whether a clinically significant marijuana (cannabis) withdrawal syndrome exists remains controversial. In spite of the mounting clinical and preclinical evidence suggesting that such a syndrome exists, the DSM-IV does not include marijuana withdrawal as a diagnostic category. The clinical syndrome has been characterized by restlessness, anorexia, irritability and insomnia that begin less than 24 hours after discontinuation of marijuana, peak in intensity on days 2 to 4, and last for seven to 10 days.

The question of whether this syndrome is clinically significant is important, not only because marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States, but also because marijuana has been shown to produce dependence at rates comparable to other drugs of abuse and because relapse rates among individuals seeking treatment for marijuana dependence are similar to those with other drugs of abuse… Psychiatric Times

“Some forms of illegal hacking would be punished by life imprisonment under a proposal that Congress will debate on Tuesday.” Wired

Moira Redmond: The travesty of elementary-school valentines. Slate

Studios Assail ReplayTV Technology — ‘The lawsuits, which were brought by the largest TV networks and all seven major Hollywood movie companies, say the ReplayTV recorders violate copyrights by enabling users to send videos to other ReplayTV boxes over the Internet and skip commercials automatically.’ LA Times

Gene Experiment Comes Close to Crossing Ethicists’ Line

The trial, conducted by Avigen Inc. of Alameda, Calif., is designed to insert a corrective gene into the liver of patients with hemophilia B, the less common of two forms of hemophilia.

Two federal agencies that monitor gene therapy trials, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, wish to ensure that corrective genes are not allowed to enter patients’ eggs or sperm, known as germline cells.

Even though the genes might prevent the patients’ disease from recurring in the next generation, the agencies consider alteration of the human germline so profound a step that it should not be tried without further public discussion. NY Times

The Mind Made Flesh: “Nicholas Humphrey’s writings about the evolution of the mind have done much to set the agenda for contemporary psychology. Here, in a series of essays, he invites us to “take another look” at a variety of the central and not-so-central issues, including: the evolution of consciousness, the nature of the self, multiple personality disorder, the placebo effect, cave art, religious miracles, medieval animal trials, and the seductions of dictatorship.” amazon.co.uk

Richard Dawkins: The word made flesh — “Today we can read human and ape genetic legacies. In 50 years, we could resurrect the past…” Guardian UK

La. asks PayPal to halt service in state: ‘In a letter sent last week, Louisiana asked the online payments company to cease offering its service to the state’s residents until PayPal receives a license from the state, the company said in a regulatory document filed Monday. Although Louisiana residents account for a small fraction of the money sent through PayPal, the state’s move could presage other governmental attempts to regulate PayPal’s service.’ CNET