Hijacking the Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine — in search of the neural basis of the unconscious:

“…(T)he brain systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside of conscious awareness. In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.

The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists, challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the neuroscientists say, much of what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.” NY Times

Want a Fight? Pick One Book for All New Yorkers:

‘An ad hoc group of librarians, bookstore owners, educators and others has quietly hatched a plan to turn New York City into a giant reading group. Over the last few weeks, the committee has convened to select a single book that the organizers hope to see assigned in city schools, discussed in groups at public libraries, promoted in local bookstores and read by millions of New Yorkers.

Plenty of other cities have read books together. Last year, Chicago drew national attention with a campaign to read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and since then, dozens of towns have followed suit, usually by selecting novels that impart a civic-minded message of cultural tolerance and racial harmony.

But just what book to recommend to a city of eight million souls where more than 100 languages are spoken has already turned out to be a ticklish question, one about politics as much as about literature. And some say the difficulty of picking a single book suggests that New Yorkers may not be receptive to literary direction.’ NY Times

In search of extra dimensions: Hang on — a new reality may be around the corner.

‘ “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one,” according to the late Albert Einstein. But, “if everything is an illusion and nothing exists,” humorist Woody Allen has observed, “I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

Hang onto your carpet receipts:

Our understanding of reality – that is, a world where events happen over time within a three-dimensional space – may be turned on its head by the year 2005, scientist Maria Spiropulu said today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting.

“The way we think about things is about to change completely,” said Spiropulu. “This is truly a revolution in the way we understand our world.”

And: more coverage from the annual meeting of the AAAS is here. EurekAlerts

“I can’t quite imagine what he thinks he’s up to. Although he wasn’t ever brilliant, he used to be an average poet and now he’s turning out twaddle.” — AN Wilson. Is Motion any good? “The poet laureate has written lyrics for a hymn to mark the Queen’s golden jubilee. But do they stand up to critical scrutiny? And what about his recent poems on Princess Margaret and the census? We ask poets, critics, a royal expert and a random 80s pop star for their verdicts.” Guardian UK

Big Brother is watching you read. “Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased.” Salon

The ideas factory: “You might not know much about the films, but you probably recognise the titles – and storylines – of a slate of forthcoming releases: Charlotte Gray, About a Boy, Killing Me Softly. Why the sudden rash of British bestsellers hitting our screens?” Guardian UK

One man’s explanation of the report of the Times’ scrubbing the 9-9 bin Laden warning article. [pointer from Rebecca Blood]

The Secret Life of Numbers: “The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.”

Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog — blogging gets mentioned on NPR, and Wired covers it. I’m warning you, I’m going to get nervous if blogging goes much further mainstream…

Public Financing Is Key…: “If you want a government by the people and for the people, then the people have to pay the bill. Otherwise, the favors will flow right back to those who’ve actually picked up the tab.”Newsday Most cynicism about campaign finance reform cites the loopholes that will remain to be exploited, the likely cash flow from state party coffers to the national organizations, or the replacement of ‘soft money’ by ‘hard money’ at double the limit. Public financing will solve some or all of this but I think it misses the boat. We have to focus not on where the money comes from but where it goes. A political system in which campaign finance goes to hire consultants to tell the candidates how to read the public’s desires and then buy TV time to present themselves as that flavor-of-the-day is what’s bankrupt, however the money is raised. Oh, and an endlesly gullible electorate that eats it up uncritically no matter how much evidence there is that they’re being fooled again and again by the unreality industry.

To Protect Top Bureaucrats, NY Times SCRUBS Its OWN Osama Bin Laden Warning That It Published on 9-9-01

On 9-9-01 – just two days before Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the US – the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article that Burns wrote on 9-12. Both articles discuss a 2-hour videotape by Bin Laden that intelligence agencies first saw in June 2001, but ignored until September. Why was the 9-9 article scrubbed? Read it yourself – we’ve UNSCRUBBED it. We believe it demonstrates the GROSS NEGLIGENCE of the CIA, NSA, Justice Department, and the White House in the events leading to 9-11. These agencies had MANY warnings, but the people at the top IGNORED them, at a cost of over 3,000 lives and billions of dollars. ALL OF THESE SCREWUPS REMAIN IN THEIR JOBS!!! We demand a Blue Ribbon Commission on 9-11 and a thorough housecleaning – not a Congressional Coverup! democrats.com

State Department rejects portions of MTV profile of Powell “that depicts him as the sole dove and moderate in an administration of unreasonable hard-line unilateralist hawks”, reports Yahoo! . But was it that the Administration wants to persuade the public that there are other moderates?? Noooo, it appears rather that they wanted to make it clear that Powell is in line with the rest of the unreasonable hawks instead…

W-o-T® Me Worry? According to a report in a Lebanese daily as related by Ha’aretz, CIA director George Tenet reportedly asked President Mubarak not to oppose a US attack on Iraq, reportedly stating during his visit to Egypt Saturday that the US has already decided to take this next step. The scenario reportedly involves the US demanding that Iraq allow the return of arms inspectors, fully expecting Iraq to defy the ultimatum and open itself to a massive attack The Guardian ‘But former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes that Iraq has already called Bush’s bluff, by showing a willingness to discuss the issue of inspectors, and raising the question as to whether a U.S. call for them “has been merely rhetorical”.’ CommonDreams [via Cursor, as are many of these links] The New York Times yesterday had Colin Powell rejecting Iraqi assurances on arms inspectors as, well, rhetoric.

“…let’s find Osama bin Laden, together. If alive, he is certainly not in Baghdad,” Michael Naumann, former German Minister of Culture and editor of Die Zeit, writes in a NY Times op-ed piece. Why Europe Is Wary of War in Iraq:

“…While American patriotism proudly celebrates its armed forces’ power and victories, Europe’s diverse loyalties and identities are formed by a war-weary pessimism thoroughly grounded in our history: Wars can be just, certainly those fought in self- defense can; but they can be bloody useless, too. This pessimism may shade, potentially, into appeasement, yet its roots are real. They explain European reluctance to intervene quickly in Bosnia — a deplorable reluctance, in hindsight — and the present refusal to join arms with the United States against Iraq.

This time, however, the powder keg is not the Balkans but the highly armed, explosive Mideast. Too many guns are drawn, too many fingers are on the triggers, and some of them could be on nuclear bombs. This should be the hour of forceful diplomacy, not to be mistaken for appeasement.

The distance between Europe’s leaders and the Bush administration continues to grow. The existence of a new threat — global terrorism — is undisputed. But Washington’s unilateralism, from here, looks like simply a form of America’s longstanding isolationism, which is to say that the distance is created by America, not by Europe. Perhaps North Atlantic Treaty Organization members should not whine so much about being left out of Pentagon planning sessions. But the United States might benefit from recalling the late Senator J. William Fulbright’s diatribes against “arrogance of power.” Europe’s liberal and conservative pundits already are.”

However, what this argument does not explain is why the US after Vietnam should not be as war-weary and -wary as Europe. A European FmH reader wrote to suggest that this is because wars have been fought on European but not US soil; could that really be the difference, when most of the living European adult population is as remote in time from the last pan-European ground war in 1945 as the US is in space? I’m convinced one has to turn instead to temperamental differences. The cowboy strain in American psychology — both rugged individualism and cocky adventurism — born of having had a frontier to push against for most of our history, has been an important difference, especially when the yahoos off the ranch are the same people managing the interests of Big Oil.

Indeed, European warnings about the rift in the Atlantic alliance that would be caused by an attack on Iraq don’t seem to give Dubya pause. Neither does criticism of an Afghan-style intervention by even a key Iraqi resistance leader, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, ‘President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr. Bush’s determination to expand his battle against what he calls “evil” regimes’, suggested yesterday’s New York Times. Bush relishes his dark, struggle-against-evil worldview, says this Washington Post foreign policy analyst who found that Bush had picked the brains of grim foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan months before 9-11.

‘Many Republicans criticized the Clinton administration for entering peacekeeping operations without having an exit strategy. It’s ironic, perhaps, that this administration seems to be waging war without any exit strategy other than moving to the next battlefield. The war could become, as in the Orwell novel 1984, a permanent state of being. “War is Peace,” the Ministry of Truth slogan read in the novel.

Or, as Kaplan has argued, war becomes a condition no longer distinctly separate from peace. Bush has embraced that view, at least for now. As he declared in his State of Union address, “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather.” He has seen a grim landscape, to paraphrase Kaplan, and seems determined to confront it.’

The administration jackasses are so enamored of their grandiose anti-axis-of-evil mission that a set of new campaign ads will suggest, in essence, that supporting Democrats aids the terrorists. ABC via MetaFilter

Meanwhile, David Corn asks in The Nation, US mis-strikes: mistakes or war crimes?

That’s a provocative question, the sort of query that few, if any, reporters at the Pentagon briefing room are going to toss at Rummy. Nevertheless, it’s a question that may bear consideration as new details emerge about the latest US mis-strikes.

Over the past week, two US military operations originally touted as successes have turned into PR nightmares for the Defense Department and the CIA First, the Pentagon had to acknowledge (sort of) that a January 24 commando raid that attacked two small compounds in Hazar Qadam–resulting in the deaths of 21 or so Afghans and the capture of 27 others–had been a mistake. Those people killed or grabbed were not, as the Pentagon first announced, Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, but troops and local officials loyal to the current government. Then The Washington Post reported on Monday that the three men killed on February 4 in the remote village of Zhawar by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone were not Al Qaeda leaders, as the Pentagon had suggested. They were Afghan peasants foraging for scrap metal, and the group did not include Osama bin Laden. Media reports following the attack raised the possibility the Al Qaeda chief had been one of the dead.

Corn and others in the progressive/alternative press have, of course, been raising such questions all along. But now the mainstream press, as well, is revisiting ‘collateral damage’ as war coverage takes a negative turn, reports the Washington Post

“I was screaming inside my helmet…” Skeleton Plunges Face-First Back Into Winter Games —

“Picture riding the lid of a turkey roaster pan down a roller coaster rail after an ice storm.

Picture it at almost 80 miles an hour, with wicked turns, at G-forces so powerful that you cannot raise your helmet from the ice, which glitters just an inch away.

Now picture making that ride face first.” NY Times

Taliban Minister Predicts Revival of His Movement: “A senior member of Afghanistan’s defeated Taliban derided the interim government Monday for failing to stem rising lawlessness and said the people would soon demand the return of his hard-line movement.

Mullah Abdul Razzak, fugitive Taliban interior minister and a former key military commander in northern Afghanistan, told Reuters in an interview that supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was still in Afghanistan but he did not know where.” Reuters via Yahoo!

The fundamentalist question: “Three young British Muslim men from Luton and Crawley were reportedly killed fighting with the Taliban; a man from Bromley in London tried to blow up an aeroplane mid-Atlantic; an American youth crashed a plane into a Florida skyscraper in the name of Osama bin Laden; a man from California was picked up with the Taliban; two men from Tipton, West Midlands, and one man from Croydon, south London, are being held as al-Qaeda suspects in Camp X-Ray.

To lose one citizen may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose at least nine looks like carelessness. Why is it that these men, born and brought up in Britain and the USA, are gripped to fight for an irrational, religious dogma – and seemingly possessed with an absolutist hatred for the infidel West? Why does their experience of living in the West not imbue them with a respect for the virtues of democracy, rational debate and secularism? Why don’t they feel like they belong?” sp!ked

Scientists: Ocean depths being destroyed: ‘In recent years, sturdier winches, stronger cable and more powerful engines have allowed fishing trawlers to extend their reach to depths of 3,000 feet and beyond, biologist Callum Roberts said in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At those depths, growth is so slow that harvested fish can take decades to be replaced and damaged coral may require centuries or more to grow back.

“The pace of life in the deep sea is virtually glacial,” said Roberts, a professor of environment at the University of York in Britain. “What we are destroying now will take centuries to recover.” ‘ Salon

The Illusion of Conscious Will: “Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles.” amazon.co.uk

Afghans’ mental health services badly outdated: “Killings, executions, massive persecution, forced internal displacement, fear from living with hidden land mines, long-term unemployment and security concerns have left an indelible mark on Afghans’ psychological health. People complain of depression, anxiety and insomnia.

But mental health services are outdated and practically nonexistent.” Miami Herald There is a strain of thought that dismisses such concerns in this way — “Well, of course, you’d be depressed or anxious too if…” — erroneously suggesting that a population ravaged by war is not worthy of mental health intervention. And the profession as a whole has not risen to the challenge of dealing with the terror of the 20th and now the early 21st century as a massive public mental health problem. Reconstruction governments in troublespots throughout the world should be inviting in teams of mental health experts to consult on designing nationwide public mental health interventions; and training in dealing globally with a war-torn populace and individually with victims of war trauma, refugees, and asylum-seekers should become commonplace in mental health training programs, since it appears this human problem is not only not going away but growing in magnitude…

The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Debate: Fallacies and Confusions. Freelance editor and writer Mark Halpern writes in the new issue of The Vocabula Review: “The Eskimo snow vocabulary (ESV) debate concerns the number of words Eskimo languages have for snow and ice in their various forms and situations, compared with other languages. The debate was set off a decade ago by an essay, “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,” by Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Pullum there ridiculed the idea that the Eskimo languages used significantly more words for snow than did English, for example. He was motivated to do so, he explained, partly by a wish to correct a specific popular misconception, but much more by a wish to use this canard as a cautionary example of human gullibility, shoddy scholarship, and even latent racism.”

Also in the new VR are quibbles about computer spellchecking, the replacement of “you’re welcome” by “no problem”, of “forgo” by “forego”, and the use of “hey” for “hi” or “hello” (‘Perhaps the best way to discourage people from using hey is to respond with a hearty diddle, diddle?’), as well as numerous other goodies for those who believe in precision, elegance and — yes — an element of tradition in their language…

Scores of Bodies Found Outside U.S. Crematory —

“Officials had counted 80 bodies so far and there could be hundreds, according to the media reports. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted officials as saying the bodies could date back as far as two decades. Authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Some (bodies) had been there just days, still dressed in their funeral clothes. Others were so old they had become mummies,” the Journal-Constitution said. Some of the bodies were found in long-rotted coffins.

The operator of the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, about 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Atlanta, told police the bodies were not cremated because the incinerator was not working, according to the media reports, which said the operator was charged with five counts of theft by deception for allegedly charging relatives for cremations that were not performed.” Reuters via Yahoo!

Estimates of Mentally Ill Too High, Study Says: “A new study suggests that mental disorders may be less prevalent among adults in the United States than was thought.” The profession’s most reliable estimates of the prevalence of mental illnesses have been based on an extraordinary study, the Epidemiological Catchment Area Program of 1980-85, and another similar study five years later. Door-to-door interview surveys tallied how many people had taken medication, consulted professionals, or reported a degree of emotional distress sufficient to interfere with their functioning. But many mental health professionals, including myself, felt intuitively that the resulting finding that over 30% of the study sample qualified for a diagnosis of a mental disorder was implausible, calling into question the study methodology, the reliability of the surveyors’ conclusions and the prevalent definitions for various diagnoses. Readers have often heard me observe that the profession has a vested interest in maintaining “market niche” in an increasingly competitive field, and I wondered if the discipline’s unconscious biases were contributing to inflation of the estimates. The new study agrees.

Thomas Friedman: An Intriguing Signal From the Saudi Crown Prince

Earlier this month, I wrote a column suggesting that the 22 members of the Arab League, at their summit in Beirut on March 27 and 28, make a simple, clear-cut proposal to Israel to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: In return for a total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967, lines, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, the 22 members of the Arab League would offer Israel full diplomatic relations, normalized trade and security guarantees. Full withdrawal, in accord with U.N. Resolution 242, for full peace between Israel and the entire Arab world. Why not?

I am currently in Saudi Arabia on a visit — part of the Saudi opening to try to explain themselves better to the world in light of the fact that 15 Saudis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. So I took the opportunity of a dinner with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, and de facto ruler, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, to try out the idea of this Arab League proposal. I knew that Jordan, Morocco and some key Arab League officials had been talking about this idea in private but had not dared to broach it publicly until one of the “big boys” — Saudi Arabia or Egypt — took the lead.

After I laid out this idea, the crown prince looked at me with mock astonishment and said, “Have you broken into my desk?” NY Times op-ed

It appears, disappointingly however, that the Crown Prince has decided against making this proposal given heigghtened Israeli violence in recent days. He’s been advised by other Arab League members that it would appear, unacceptably to them, as if Sharon’s hard line had successfully won Arab concessions.

Emerging Disease News: Strange Rash Baffles Medical Sleuths

Hundreds of youngsters in at least seven states have broken out in mysterious rashes, and some health investigators suspect it might be caused by a new or yet-to-be-identified virus.

The red, itchy rash appears to be more an annoyance than a serious health threat, but it has managed to temporarily close schools, worry parents and frustrate school administrators, for whom answers have been elusive.

Students in Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Washington state have complained about rashes on the face, arms, legs and body. For the most part, the rash goes away when the students leave school.

“For something like this to occur almost simultaneously in different parts of the country is, to my knowledge, unprecedented,” said Dr. Norman Sykes, who examined about 30 suburban Philadelphia students who came down with the rash this month.

Scores of Bodies Found Outside U.S. Crematory —

“Officials had counted 80 bodies so far and there could be hundreds, according to the media reports. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted officials as saying the bodies could date back as far as two decades. Authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Some (bodies) had been there just days, still dressed in their funeral clothes. Others were so old they had become mummies,” the Journal-Constitution said. Some of the bodies were found in long-rotted coffins.

The operator of the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, about 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Atlanta, told police the bodies were not cremated because the incinerator was not working, according to the media reports, which said the operator was charged with five counts of theft by deception for allegedly charging relatives for cremations that were not performed.” Reuters via Yahoo!

A feature earlier this week on NPR led me to this coverage of the Aryan Nations’ plans to set up headquarters in remote Potter County PA, including a paramilitary training camp, under the direction of virulent racist August Kreis. Kreis may have wrested leadership of the far-right group from Richard Butler, 83-year-old Aryan Nations leader who lost the group’s former headquarters in Idaho in a court case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center which the SPLC’s Morris Dees predicted had broken the back of the Aryan Nations. In radio and print interviews, Kreis is both brazen and savvy, stressing the importance of forging links with other far-right groups such as the World Church of the Creator. With cocky self-assurance, he states that the new degree of interconnectivity and fusion among far-right hate groups will push their activities to a new level. There are suggestions that recruitment to the Aryan Nations is once again on the rise.

Grassroots opposition groups such as the Education and Vigilance Network, to whose site the above link points, and Community Action Against Racism are raising the hue and cry. As readers of FmH know, I think there’s no more urgent cause than combatting virulent racist hatred from the far right. Consider supporting the Southern Poverty Law Center, which regularly litigates important anti-hate victories with courage and conviction. Disclaimer: I have no financial ties with the SPLC; just an interested contributor myself.

In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend: “Frantically, I started scrolling back, then back further. Finally, I realized that in the two hours I had been away from my desk, three years of saved e-mail messages had either disintegrated into babble or disappeared altogether. A chunk of my life had floated away before my eyes.” So she consults psychologist Sherry Turkle to understand how she’s feeling about it… NY Times

Lab-built bladders on the way “A leading surgeon in the US has told BBC News that he is ready to perform the world’s first transplant of an artificially grown organ.” BBC

Baby with selected gene born in Britain:

A joyful couple were celebrating at home in Britain yesterday with the country’s first – and the world’s second – baby to be born with a desired genetic characteristic known in advance.

The family say that their baby girl, who was born at 8pm on Thursday night in a British hospital, is not a “designer baby”, but a much longed-for child who brings with her into the world, as an extra gift, cells capable of saving her older brother if he suffers a relapse into leukaemia. Guardian UK

French Judge Gives Taliban Victory: ‘Despite making what most observers agreed were “obvious technical errors,” such as surrendering, the Taliban were awarded victory in the Afghanistan war last night after the French judge said they won on presentation.’ SatireWire [via David]

Can the US be defeated?

“Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had “better get their house in order” or face what he called the “justice of this nation”, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.

Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the “full spectrum dominance” the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.” Guardian UK [again, thanks, David]

PCs Are Incorrect on TV: Good guys use Macs, villains PCs. Wired

Humans may not be as aggressive and competitive as thought: “Is it human nature to be competitive? Aggressive? Violent? Popular and scientific literature says yes. An anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies primate behavior says no.

Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and a colleague found that affiliated behavior — or friendly behavior like grooming and playing — is probably a hundred times more frequent than aggressive behavior in primates, and that aggressive behavior constitutes less than 1 percent of primates’ activities.” [But, oh, that 1%… -FmH]

I occasionally read Outside Counsel– Notes on a Glamor Profession, a stimulating weblog by a New York attorney. I noticed this there today:

I have written before on the topic of physicians unionizing, (scroll down to the second letter) but it seems to be a bad idea whose time has come. Doctors want to practice medicine, and they keep thinking that the way to do this is by giving away control of their profession. We have accountants deciding whether an MRI is necessary today because the docs liked the idea of HMOs (mostly because HMOs looked like a good way to universalize health insurance, maximizing the profitability of medical practice). Now they are in businesses, and they don’t like it. Quite right, too, since one of the hallmarks of being a “professional” is being independent. Unionizing amounts to conceding that they have lost control of their profession, however, and merely substitutes one group of nonprofessionals for another. I look at this, and I marvel that there are lawyers who favor multidisciplinary practice. Accountants are the natural enemies of independent professionals– and the group-think paradigm which unionization represents is likewise no way for a professional to operate. It is frustrating that the American health care system is so disfunctional that its doctors are starting to believe they are disenfranchised– where does that leave the patients?

From my perspective as a practicing physician, I agree that it would’ve been misguided if true, but it is a gross misrepresentation to claim that the profession has willingly given up its autonomy. The managed care approach to cost containment was externally imposed; the species of HMOs that dominates today comprises ‘products’ essentially generated by the health insurance industry, not MDs. I don’t think any physicians felt it would maximize profitability in comparison with fee-for-service paradigms, and by and large MDs employed by HMOs are salaried employees, making less, and under the gun with productivity demands, working harder, than their colleagues in other sectors of medical care. Business incentives are inherently incompatible with taking adequate care of patients, and physicians have always known it (except those ‘businessmen in white coats’ whose interest has always been entrepreneurial rather than patient-care-oriented!).

I agree, the impetus to unionization is an essential acknowledgement of a loss of autonomy, but the labor movement has always represented empowerment of exploited and alienated labor. If there is a problem with doctors unionizing, it is that it does not have any ‘bite’ without the threat of a strike, and I’m not sure a work stoppage is compatible with a service profession, not that my friends who are nurses agree. I also agree that we have to be concerned about the fate of patients in a healthcare system where physicians are disenfranchised. There are some indications that the public realizes they are getting a raw deal from the healthcare bean counters. For example, see this, from the Boston Globe, regarding the mental health sector.

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick: “…an interesting graphic interpretation [by R. Crumb! -FmH] of a series of events which happened to Dick in March of 1974. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what happened in those fateful months.

You will find all 8 pages of this story here. The file sizes are rather large (120-140K each) so that the text was readable and the detail visible.

. …In typical Dick fashion, you will find that it raises more questions than it answers.” [via metascene]

Brain activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex correlates with individual differences in negative affect: Overactivity in this brain region can be the source of chronic ‘bad moods’, i.e. increased intensity of negative affect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Hivelogic Email Address Encoder: “Win the Spam Arms Race:

As most of you know, posting your email address on your website is a sure-fire way to guarantee a healthy portion of spam delivered to your Inbox for years to come.

This web-based tool encodes the email address using Numerical Equivalents and wraps that in JavaScript. The result will be rendered correctly by your browser, but will be undecipherable by most spambots.”

How to Fake a Passport NY Times Magazine

Working with the CIA, from Parameters, the US Army War College Quarterly:

In 1993, I had the privilege of being a CIA student at the US Army War College. During the academic year, I had some frank exchanges with my military colleagues about the intelligence community and how those military leaders viewed it, rightly or wrongly. The two principal conclusions I came away with were: (a) the intelligence community does not know enough about the military and its operations, and (b) the military does not know enough about the intelligence community and its operations.

Immediately upon graduation from the War College, I was selected as the CIA Chief in Mogadishu, Somalia. Within 30 days, I was on the ground there, trying to come to grips with the quickly evolving crisis.

This article will not be about the policy disaster that took place in Somalia, however. Rather, it will seek to illuminate the working relationship between the military and the CIA, offering some of the knowledge I gained in Mogadishu and over a career. In a way, it is the incoming brief I wish I could have given to the Ranger Task Force commander and his senior staff when they arrived in Somalia.

Also in Parameters: Caution, Children at War: “As we enter the 21st century, a new phenomenon of warfare has emerged, one quite different from the technical revolution in military affairs. While not a formal doctrine, it similarly represents a body of fundamental principles, deliberate instrumental choices, and transferred teachings. In this case, it prescribes the methods and circumstances of employing children in battle.”

E does not equal mc2: review of Who Rules In Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

by James Robert Brown:

Few terms, when uttered in academic circles, are so instantly polarizing as the phrase “social construction.” Taken at face value, the notion is innocuous enough: some things that we come to know, like the rules of baseball and the letters of the alphabet, are not objective truths about the universe but products of social convention. The problem is that “constructivists,” whose ranks now include many—if not most—scholars of the humanities, are not content to stop there. From their point of view, all knowledge is subjective and all facts are arbitrary; in baseball, for example, we “construct” not only what counts as a strike, but also the trajectory of a pitch and the physiology of a batter’s swing.

For postmodern humanists, the constructivist enterprise is exciting and subversive, liberating them from the supposedly racist and sexist shackles of Western thought. For many scientists and philosophers, on the other hand, whose business it is to describe the world as it exists, the idea is confusing and absurd; in the words of the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, it “menaces rational thought.” And not only that. To the extent that postmodernists have come to dominate the study of literature and the arts, their way of thinking has had a corrosive effect on the academy, giving rise to intellectual balkanization and a general decline of standards. Commentary

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus: “an exploration of sense relationships within the English language. By clicking on words, you follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations. The Visual Thesaurus was built using Thinkmap™, a data-animation technology developed by Plumb Design.”

Utah Olympic Peace Project

“You are invited to take a stand for peace by adding your name to the growing list of individuals who have signed our Declaration of Peace. We believe that the Winter Olympics are an ideal time to make a public stand for world peace. During the Olympics, individuals from all over the world will converge upon Salt Lake City. We are using this opportunity to spread our message of peace and global justice to the world as we publicly reveal the names of those who have signed the Declaration of Peace. By signing, you are joining people from around the world who believe that there are alternatives to war as well as people who are committed to working for peace and justice in their lives and communities.” Utah Indymedia

‘I Have a Middle East Dream’: James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, calls for Palestinian nonviolence in the mold of Dr. King. workingforchange.

Akilah Monifa: Abolish the Farce of Black History Month: “Black History Month has grown into an excuse to sell commercial goods and ignore African Americans 11 months out of the year.” Alternet

Molly Ivins: Play-by-play on campaign reform: “The U.S. House of Representatives is debating campaign finance reform, and it’s one of those days when all citizens should be political junkies. It doesn’t get better than this — the stakes couldn’t be higher, the tension couldn’t be thicker, the theater is superb. Passion, drama, comedy, hypocrisy, devious plot devices, splendid villains, noble heroes … this is just the best. The casting director has a spectacular imagination: Tom DeLay and Dick Armey alternating in the role of Iago — wow.” workingforchange Also: David Corn at tompaine.com asks: Is Pseudo Reform Better Than None?: “Shays-Meehan opens as many loopholes as it closes.” John Nichols writes in The Nation: “The debate on the Shays-Meehan bill provided an all-too-rare display of what an engaged Congress might look like.”

Geov Parrish: Welcome to the American Olympics: “The Olympics are supposed to be about international peace

and understanding. NBC makes it look more like a Fourth of

July parade.

” AlterNet And: Olympic Farce: ” Once upon a time, the Olympics were about patriotism and the celebration of virtue. Now they’re a multi-culti festival.” The Weekly Standard

Two papers from the Journal of Research in Personality bear on earlier discussions about the overrated value of self-esteem, as per Lauren Slater’s New York Times Magazine article of last week:

• Are Happy People Healthier? The Specific Role of Positive Affect in Predicting Self-Reported Health Symptoms by Jeremy Pettit et al
• Personality Correlates of Self-Esteem by Richard Robins et al

Thanks to Adam for pointing me to today’s SF Gate front page, where this item appears:

Spann Family: Lindh Is a ‘Traitor’

They showed up, unannounced, to call John Walker Lindh a traitor. The mother, father and widow of slain CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann have a score to settle — and no hesitation about saying so.

“John Walker is a traitor because of the way he lived,” Spann’s mother, Gail, said Wednesday. “If you go back from the time he was 16 years old and just go through his history, you know, what more could I say? It’s so simple and I hope that all Americans will feel the same way that I do.” AP via Yahoo! News

Sorry for their loss, but it is shameful, idiotic misguided vindictiveness to claim that Lindh was responsible in any sense for Spann’s death.

Suspect Tells Court He Thinks Pearl Is Dead: “The chief suspect in the kidnapping of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl told an anti-terrorism court in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi Thursday he thought the U.S. reporter was dead.

The Pakistan government dismissed the statement as untrustworthy while Pearl’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, said it remained confident Pearl was alive.” Reuters

Beyond a Bid to Change Lies an Uncertain Future: “Both the financing and the tone of American politics could change profoundly if the campaign finance bill passed by the House this morning becomes law.

Yet, for all the certainty expressed during a long, bitter debate, neither its advocates nor its foes can be sure which party would be helped or hurt by the bill. The history of legislation to curb the influence of money and politics, including the election laws passed after the Watergate scandal, suggests that short-term effects may not last as politicians and donors figure their way around new laws.” NY Times

Well there's one kind of favor I'll ask for you 

Well there's one kind of favor I'll ask for you 

There's just one kind of favor I'll ask for you

You can see that my grave is kept clean.



And there's two white horses following me

And there's two white horses following me

I got two white horses following me 

Waiting on my burying ground.



Did you ever hear that coffin sound 

Did you ever hear that coffin sound

Did you ever hear that coffin sound

Means another poor boy is under the ground.



Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Means another poor boy is dead and gone.



my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold 

my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold

my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold 

And I believe what the father told.



And there's one last favor I'll ask for you 

And there's one last favor I'll ask for you 

And just one last favor I'll ask for you

You can see that my grave is kept clean. 

Is action against Iraq imminent? Bush Keeps Iraq Options Open, but Secret. ‘President Bush, speaking as his administration considered ways to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, said on Wednesday he reserved all his options to act but he would not disclose them at this time.

“I will reserve whatever options I have. I’ll keep them close to my vest.

…” ‘ Close to my vest??? Reuters via Yahoo! News

“Heinz launches chocolate fries; Food firm also plans to tempt kids with cinnamon, sky blue Funky Fries.” CNNmoney

How Many Blonds Mess Up a Nash Equilibrium? “The film A Beautiful Mind is the first to deal with a profound social issue that touches everyone but that few people understand–a Nash equilibrium.” LA Times

“Please release my friend Daniel Pearl” Independent UK

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

…Said to Match Quality of Film: “If Carver Mead is right, photographic film is an endangered species.

Dr. Mead, who is 67, was a pioneer of the modern computer chip industry in the 1970’s. But he has never stopped inventing. And on Monday his Silicon Valley start-up, Foveon, plans to begin shipping a new type of digital image sensor that outside experts agree is the first to match or surpass the photographic capabilities of 35-millimeter film.” NY Times

Dashboard surfing for the masses

Philips Semiconductors has introduced an integrated microprocessor it says will take the emerging niche of dashboard electronics beyond the realm of the luxury car.

Philips, a division of Dutch technology giant Royal Philips Electronics, claims to be the first to bring to market a fully integrated “telematics”–or dashboard electronics–processor combining all key hardware blocks onto one chip. The SAF3100 telematics processor is less expensive and smaller than many other back-end telematics bundles. CNET

Disgust, Morality, and Human Identity: Heather Looy:

“Theologically, the Judeo-Christian tradition uses disgust and related concepts of abomination and impurity in conjunction with moral codes designed to preserve communal identity as the people of God. Psychosocial research reveals disgust as a universal emotion that enables evaluation and regulation of one class of moral behaviors, and serves to express and preserve cultural identity. Neurobiology is beginning to trace the neural circuitry involved in disgust and morality, suggesting emotions are the basis for moral judgement, and revealing intriguing relationships between disgust, morality, and other aspects of the psyche.” Metanexus

Men Overestimate Women’s Sexual Interest: Study. ‘The phenomenon seems connected to a kind of psychological self-projection, according to researcher Robyn LeBoeuf of Princeton University in New Jersey. “They say, ‘Well, if I were to smile at a woman, I would be interested in having sex with her. So if she’s smiling at me, then she’s probably interested in having sex with me as well.”‘ ‘ Yahoo! News

Schizophrenia linked to mother’s lack of sunlight. I blinked to speculation about this link last summer, based on the observation that there is more of a disparity between winter and summer birth rates of schizophrenics in higher latitudes than nearer the equator, and an increasing likelihood with darker skin. Speculation was that the mediating factor is vitamin D, which the body needs sunlight to produce and which requires more sunlight in darker-skinned individuals than light-skinned. Now experiments with rats show that vitamin D deprivation produces neurobiological and behavioral changes which might be analogues to those seen in human schizophrenia. Because vitamin D can cause birth defects, pregnant women should not respond to this news by starting to take large amounts of it, but plenty of time outdoors on sunny days wouldn’t hurt. New Scientist

Spiral galaxy spins the wrong way: This beautiful spiral in Centaurus is puzzling astronomers who have determined that its spiral arms do not trail but rather lead the direction of rotation. It appears that the galaxy has swallowed another which was spinning in the opposite direction. New Scientist

Spike wrote to point out that the NY Post article about the Terry Gross-Gene Simmons interchange has been discredited. Dan Mitchell, an NPR producer/editor, wrote Jim Romenesko after Media News highlighted the Post article on the 6th:

‘ “NPR won’t post audio of Gross’s ‘Fresh Air’ spat with Simmons” is based on an erroneous New York Post story written by Michael Starr claiming that the interview with Gene Simmons of Kiss was “so controversial that NPR declined to make it available on its Website.” This is simply false. NPR aired the interview on a nationwide radio network, after all — it didn’t have to. The audio was not posted online because Simmons refused to grant permission for Internet rights to the interview, a step that is treated as routine by the overwhelming majority of guests. This fact could have been ascertained in about 30 seconds by merely picking up a phone.’

I didn’t do my homework either, it’s clear, since this added detail is covered in several of the sites I read frequently. Others have written to point out that an .mp3 of the entire conversation between Gross and Simmons is available for download, although it’s a 25-megabyte file.

Woman Sees USA In Single Cab Ride SF Chronicle

Budget Battle Turns Personal:

Tensions between Congress and the White House over the president’s budget exploded into the open yesterday when a debate over congressional prerogatives turned into an unusually bitter and personal exchange involving two of Washington’s most powerful figures: Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.

The spat rocked an otherwise routine Senate Budget Committee hearing, where the normal dance of senatorial courtesy — and polite groveling by administration witnesses — suddenly vanished. O’Neill, telling Byrd he wouldn’t “cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch,” struggled with his emotions by taking deep breaths.

Byrd, 84, chairs the Appropriations Committee and is arguably the fiercest defender of Congress’s interests. He spent 15 minutes berating O’Neill, a blunt former corporate executive, for a speech O’Neill made last year asserting that congressional rules “created by just ordinary people” are “like the Lilliputians tying us to the ground.”

Byrd noted that the administration’s glossy new budget document includes a cartoon of Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians. He denounced the cartoon — one of several illustrations of White House sentiments and criticisms — as “nonsense” that belittled how Congress represents the interests of Americans.

Since Monday’s release of the president’s budget plan, which vividly poked fun at alleged congressional pork, lawmakers from both parties have bristled at the administration’s rhetoric. Washington Post

Terrorism ‘expert’ takes on his critics: ‘In recent years, Emerson’s media presence has dimmed—perhaps because, as he has claimed, pro-Arab groups in the U.S. tried to blacklist him, or perhaps because he’s the type to see a terrorist under every kaffiyeh. In 1995, The Nation accused him of promoting anti-Arab “hysteria,” and in 1998, NPR dropped him as a commentator after he made what an NPR ombudsman called “unsubstantiated allegations,” such as linking the Oklahoma City blast to Arab terrorists. These days, Horowitz can only name one publication that Emerson writes for—The Wall Street Journal. According to one journalist, he has been “bounced from the mainstream” and spends his time “raising money from wealthy Jews.” ‘ Village Voice

A Safe Place for a War: Nicholas Kristof, reporting from the Phillippines, reinforces my speculation of yesterday that there is no hard evidence of recent links between Islamic insurgency there and al Qaeda. “If the Philippines can get $100 million because of a gang of 60 crooks, think how much New York City is entitled to!” NY Times But sustaining Dubya’s rantings and ratings requires an ongoing war against a global terrorist conspiracy no matter how implausible…

Arrogance and fear: the American paradox — Anatole Kaletsky: “The greatest danger to America’s dominant position today is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is the arrogance of American power.” The Times of London

“The quiet and high-minded National Public Radio airwaves were shattered earlier this week by a name-calling confrontation between – of all people – tongue-waggling KISS frontman Gene Simmons and soft-spoken interviewer Terry Gross…The interview was apparently so controversial that NPR has declined to make it available on its Website where it posts at least portions of nearly all other interviews that appear on “Fresh Air,” one of its most popular daily shows.” NY Post [via fimoculous]

Saudi Leader’s Anger Revealed Shaky Ties; Bush’s Response Eased a Deep Rift On Mideast Policy; Then Came Sept. 11 Washington Post

1,300 People May Sue NYC Over Handling of WTC Aftermath. ‘From rescue workers who say they have lung problems to business owners who say their shops were damaged, 1,300 people have given notice they may sue the city for a total of $7.18 billion over the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. The claims involve injuries or damage caused not by the attack itself but by the alleged negligence of the city during the recovery and cleanup.’ Yahoo! News

This is a particularly outrageous, blatant example of how pharmaceutical company sponsorship of medical research and scholarship is done: ‘It said the drug was the best thing since sliced bread. I don’t think it is’ — David Healy, director of the north Wales department of psychological medicine Guardian UK

A reflection on Camille Paglia, penises, vulvas and dumb punditry from UFO Breakfast

Critical IP sucks.

How To Marry a High-Quality Woman — I hope this is a send-up to lampoon the Aryan ethic, but unfortunately I think it’s a for-real Neonazi guide to propagating the master race by finding true love, romance and domination over your Nazi dream goddess. For example:

‘State Openly that You Want to Be a Patriarch. Say things like, “I want to have at least four kids, and I want my wife to stay home while they’re young,” or “I’m looking for a High-Grade Woman to have my kids, none of this messing around stuff; I don’t play the dating game.” Say it simply and definitely, in a way that closes the door to questions. If a feminazi starts yelling, who cares. Extremely good-looking men actually have a disadvantage dating high-quality women because they’re assumed to be promiscuous or carrying a disease. She’s seen the Jew values on TeeVee and the phony “sexual double standard” myth is burned into her head, so it’s only reasonable of her to be suspicious of you.’ [via the null device]

Full of a pitiful and horrifying blend of xenophobia, grandiosity and whining inferiority complex.