“A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.
The shocking assertion is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax which killed five people.” BBC
Jerry Westerby (a pseudonym, he tells us, invoking the venerable John Le Carré and, in so doing, growing even more in my esteem) makes a public announcement of his conversion to Catholicism. Somehow his recent preparation for this is tied in with his decreased weblogging proclivity of late, and he says his conversion “may or may not” bear on his productivity in the future. I for one hope it will not hamper his online activity, since he promises us that,
“…when this report continues, its politics will remain unchanged. On that I confidently swear. Actually the politics will probably be more vigorously leftist and the rhetoric much more shrill, maybe even apocalyptic, now that God is on my side and He will smite morally corrupt governments collaborating with evildoing capitalists to enslave our brothers born with Adam….”
Let’s rock and roll, Jerry!
[Sorry; too many complaints; back to the old, slower-loading table-based template until I can get it right…
–FmH]
Boston Archdiocese’s newspaper questions celibacy: “In a special issue on the priest sex abuse scandal, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese said the Roman Catholic Church must confront the question of whether to continue to require priests to be celibate.
In its lead editorial published Thursday, The Pilot newspaper said the celibacy issue raises tough questions such as whether there would be fewer scandals if celibacy were optional for priests and whether the priesthood attracts an unusually high number of homosexual men.” The Nando Times
Johan Söderberg: Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique: “At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information.” First Monday
Leaked Document Ignites Heated Debate: “This has ignited a healthy public debate over nuclear policy in a post 9/11 world. It’s all reminiscent of the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times. We aren’t telling who the Daniel Ellsberg is in the Nuclear-Posture leak, but conscientious government employees who are willing to risk their careers by leaking classified documents may be the only check on government excesses carried out behind the screen of national security.” What’s New
Two Americans Among Five Killed at Pakistan Church by a grenade-wielding attacker. In October, 16 were massacred at a Sunday service at a Christian church in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur.
Official: Al-Qaida Moving Money Again: “Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network has stepped up its financial activity markedly in recent weeks, suggesting some leaders are reasserting control and may be seeking to finance more attacks against American interests, a U.S. official says.
The increased flow of money corresponds with a recent increase in communications between surviving al-Qaida members, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.”
The Bearable Lightness of Healing: “This is the single biggest breakthrough in healthcare I’ve seen in 30 years.” Wired
In its continuing quest to court a more youthful audience, The New York Times Magazine this week is a special issue on Music 2002. Do you want to know:
Exploitationware detection — “If you are using Internet Explorer for Windows, and you haven’t turned JavaScript or ActiveX off, your browser has just been checked for parasites. If there’s a red box with warnings in just above this text, you should check it out!
If there are no warnings, you are probably clean. (But there are unfortunately other parasites about which the script cannot detect, so don’t feel too complacent!)”
‘ “Hello” is such a characteristic American greeting that, back when I was a child in Korea, it was our name for Americans. It was, after all, the first sound out of the GIs’ mouths when they saw anyone. Now that I am a professor with twenty years of academic inquiry behind me, I turn again to the question of why Americans say “Hello” and not “Good day” or its many counterparts — “Bon jour,” “Guten Tag,” “Buon giorno,” “G’day” — to greet each other; and I do this because my inquiry into the origins of symbols and folk meanings seems constantly to skirt around the profound meanings of the utterly mundane.’ Vocabula Review
The Defense Rests — Permanently: “Innovations like mandatory sentencing and the plea bargaining it engenders are stacking the criminal-justice system against defendants while beginning to make superstar defense lawyers obsolete. No one feels sorry for the lawyers, of course. But is something valuable — like, say, the presumption of innocence — in danger of being lost?” New York Magazine
No Tower Can Withstand Attack as Jets Get Bigger, Expert Says: ‘As commercial jets grow larger, faster and carry ever-greater amounts of fuel, no skyscraper can be built to withstand a terrorist attack of the kind that destroyed the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, the chief structural engineer for the trade center project said last night.
“We have to conclude, we cannot fail to conclude, that it’s not practical to design buildings as we know them — buildings that we’d want to live and work in — to resist the impact of these jet aircraft,” the engineer, Leslie E. Robertson, said in his most extensive public comments to date about the trade center disaster. “It is not possible or sensible to do that.” ‘ NY Times
Free AOL use sparks new worries: “Free Web access may be a bygone perk of the dot-com bubble, but it appears to be alive and well at the world’s largest Internet service provider, America Online.
AOL offers a battery of free promotion and retention programs, but it refuses to disclose how many of its subscribers pay nothing for the service. Now, Wall Street is zeroing in on some financial details that it believes offer a guide to this elusive number–and it doesn’t like what it sees.” CNet
ani difranco’s 9/11-inspired as-yet-untitled work-in-progress reads in part:
yes,
us people are just poems
we're 90% metaphor
with a leanness of meaning
approaching hyper-distillation
and once upon a time
we were moonshine
rushing down the throat of a giraffe
yes, rushing down the long hallway
despite what the p.a. announcement says
yes, rushing down the long stairs
with the whiskey of eternity
fermented and distilled
to eighteen minutes
burning down our throats
down the hall
down the stairs
in a building so tall
that it will always be there
yes, it's part of a pair
there on the bow of noah's ark
the most prestigious couple
just kickin back parked
against a perfectly blue sky
on a morning beatific
in its indian summer breeze
on the day that america
fell to its knees
after strutting around for a century
without saying thank you
or please
[thanks, Adam]
Al Qaeda’s Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing: The Mew York Times analyzes over 5,000 pages of documents its reporters collected from abandoned safe houses and training camps where they had been left behind by fleeing Taliban and al Qaeda fighters last fall at sites across Afghanistan. Among other details, the writers conclude that “the training camps, which the Bush administration has described as factories churning out terrorists, were instead focused largely on creating an army to support the Taliban, which was waging a long ground war against the Northern Alliance.” NY Times
[I’m sorry, still having trouble with the page layout in CSS. It works fine in Internet Explorer under Windows, but users of Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and Mac-IE are reporting either (a) an overlap between the sidebar and main content; (b) the absence of the sidebar text; (c) or that the sidebar text is pushed down so it starts below, rather than parallel with, the main content. It sounds like it’s something wrong with the parameters controlling the placement and size of the sidebar, doesn’t it? I’m struggling with it, learning CSS-based layout as I go. Given that it loads so much faster than a table-based layout, I’d like to stick with it until I can get it right. What do you think? Should I go back to the old table-based template in the meanwhile? Any CSS wizards out there who can (along with David Gagne who’s been such an enormous help already) take a look at my template and stylesheet and tell me what I’m doing wrong? –FmH]
Boston Archdiocese’s newspaper questions celibacy: “In a special issue on the priest sex abuse scandal, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese said the Roman Catholic Church must confront the question of whether to continue to require priests to be celibate.
In its lead editorial published Thursday, The Pilot newspaper said the celibacy issue raises tough questions such as whether there would be fewer scandals if celibacy were optional for priests and whether the priesthood attracts an unusually high number of homosexual men.” The Nando Times
