Forced Drugging Upheld By Eigth Circuit: “Defendants can be forcibly drugged even though they haven’t been convicted of any charges and pose no danger to themselves or others.

That’s the ruling issued March 7, 2002 by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in the case of United States v. Charles Thomas Sell. The 2 – 1 split decision establishes government power to forcibly medicate a person with mind altering drugs even before trial.” This site, the Alchemind Society, “the international association for cognitive liberty,” is a provocative and interesting resource, it appears.

Lying to the public is all right, says Washington’s chief liar, errr, lawyer. Roundly criticized during pre-confirmation public debate as dishonest and unethical, Solicitor-General Theodore Olsen didn’t take long after appointment to show his true stripes, ‘…telling the US Supreme Court that misleading statements are sometimes needed to protect foreign policy interests.

“It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information…” Olson was arguing in the Jennifer Harbury case. Harbury is a US attorney whose Guatemalan rebel leader husband died in 1993 after a year in Guatemalan army custody during which US officials lied to her to conceal CIA involvement in his torture and murder. Sydney Morning Herald Although the events occurred years before, the court case’s most immediate relevance is to current dysadministration arguments regarding how much they can conceal from the American public in the interest of the War-on-Terrorism®.

Adam [thanks…] scanned in and sent me an excerpt from a recent New Yorker review of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right which bears similarly on Olson’s bona fides:

[Brock needs an authoritative voice to keep R. Emmett

Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator, from

publishing lies about the death of Vincent Foster, a

Clinton White House aide who committed suicide]

…”For help, Brock turned to Ted Olson, an informal

but influential adviser to the Spectator. Olson had

been Reagan’s private lawyer; he was a sachem of the

Federalist Society, an association of conservative

lawyers and jurists whose membership included future

Justices of the Supreme Court; and he was a close

friend and former law partner of Kenneth Starr’s.

Olson, Brock thought, was ‘the model of a sober,

careful lawyer with impeccable judgment.’ Brock faxed

him the piece. Olson’s response was evidently not

what he was expecting. Olson, Brock writes, “told me

bluntly, in a tone of voice that I had never heard him

use before, that while he believed, as Starr

apparently did, that Foster had committed suicide,

raising questions about the death was a way of turning

up the heat on the administration until another

scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator‘s

mission.”

Pull Up a Chair: Thomas Friedman writes an imaginary dialogue with his readers around an incendiary proposition: “There is no way that America will be able to sustain a successful Middle East policy unless the U.S. is prepared to station American troops on the ground, indefinitely, around both Afghanistan and Israel.

…Israelis and Palestinians do not have the resources, or mutual trust, ever to find their way out of this problem alone — not after the collapse of Oslo. And the U.S. can no longer afford to just let them go on killing each other. It will undermine America’s whole position in the Middle East, as more and more Muslims will blame us for what Israel does to protect itself. It will spin off more and more suicide craziness that will land at our door. And it will make it impossible for the U.S. to take on Saddam.” NY Times

Review of The Haunting of L by Howard Norman: “…Norman’s novels are hard to like. Starting in 1987 with The Northern Lights, each novel has featured a taciturn, antisocial male protagonist, as disconnected from his own inner life as he is from the people around him. Norman’s landscapes mirror the emptiness of the characters who inhabit them: this American writer is unique in setting his books in the bleakest regions of Canada, from the expanses of northern Manitoba to turn-of-thecentury Newfoundland. And his prose is as inhospitable as the terrain. Bumpy in pace and flat in texture, it goes down awkwardly, like something hard to chew.” The New Republic

The Media and European Identity — “Even greater media concentration, writes Juan Luis Cebrián, could save Europe from homogenised cultural globalisation.”

Just a few years from now, less than a dozen companies will be able to control the majority of the contents of communications in the European continent. These groups will be British, German, French and, maybe, Italian. Smaller, but more advanced countries, such as Holland, may be able to defend themselves in this territory. But many of the so-called national cultures and local identities will submit their balance sheet to foreign boards of directors.

I am not criticising the phenomenon, merely describing it. On the other hand, this will be the only way of protecting ourselves (if we want to be protected) against the American invasion. The plurality of Europe, its multiplicity and diversity, which we all praise and promote, will finally be left in very few, and quite uniform, hands. One more of the many paradoxes with which we will have to live in the coming century. eurozine

Errant Stem Cells May Account For Symptoms Of Schizophrenia: “Neural stem cells are a ready supply of new parts for the constant wiring and rewiring of the brain’s circuitry as this complex organ responds to environmental stimuli so that we can learn new skills, interpret new data and rethink old ideas. But if those cells can’t migrate to the right place and morph into the right kinds of neural links, our cognitive and psychological functions fail.” ScienceDaily

“Scientists have created a new kind of matter: It comes in waves and bridges the gap between the everyday world of humans and the micro-domain of quantum physics… Bose-Einstein condensates (“BECs” for short) aren’t like the solids, liquids and gases that we learned about in school. They are not vaporous, not hard, not fluid. Indeed, there are no ordinary words to describe them because they come from another world — the world of quantum mechanics.” Science@NASA

Bug sets windows shaking: a British-designed gadget the size of a computer mouse turns any smooth hard surface into a loudspeaker. It’ll plug into a personal audio device with a regular phone plug. They’re working on a bluetooth interface for cell phones. You can use two in your car to turn the car windows into speakers, if you’re not considerate enough to care about sharing your music with everyone you’re passing by. You can even attach it to the back of your skull. BBC

EU says terror war must respect human rights:

“The European Union has told the United Nations’ top human rights body the battle against terrorism must respect the rule of law.

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique has told the UN Human Rights Commission that countries cannot allow terrorism the victory of abandoning principles.

Mr Pique also said the EU would make it a top priority this year to push for the elimination of the death penalty worldwide.

“Ananova

Mickey Kaus: Campaign-finance reform could turn him into a kingmaker. Slate

Sign the petition: “We, the undersigned, in the interest of international harmony and seeking an end to all violence in this world, do hereby call on the president of the United States, George W. Bush, to find a fully consenting adult intern to service his sexual needs…” [via boing boing]

A helicopter attack on a car-sized wasp’s nest 65 feet above the ground in the New Zealand countryside has probably failed to destroy the nest. Ananova [via boing boing]

Targeted Serendipity: a Fast Company feature — among many these days — about the weblogging phenomenon and the weblogging community, but this one prominently features weblogger Rebecca Blood and her forthcoming book, The Weblog Handbook.

“Automatic Text Summarization is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an interdisciplinary area utilising research in Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics, and Cognitive Science. Automatic Text Summarization, attempts to produce computer systems that summarise textual documents. This website contains a number of resourses primarily aimed at those who are new to text summarization. Hopefully, the material in this website will give the reader an understanding of the problem behind text summarization, a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art systems in both academic and industrial circles, as well as a list of published papers to read, most of which can be found in this website.”

U.S. Intelligence and the Cult of the Confidence Man: “The Confidence Man has long huckstered for U.S. intelligence agencies. Keep that in mind in today’s debates about government intelligence, writes Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh.” Chronicle of Higher Education

In a Skinhead’s Tale, a Picture of Both Hate and Love

On the subway, a muscular young man with a shaved head steps on the toes of a college student wearing a yarmulke and glasses. Outside, the skinhead grabs his book, knocks him down and beats him. The scene has the eerie familiarity of a nightmare, but for one jarring detail. “Get up, yeshiva bucher,” the attacker yells at his fallen prey. How many skinheads know enough Yiddish to employ the favored locution for a shy, unworldly boy?

The scene is from The Believer, a film, based on a true story, about an Orthodox youth who becomes a neo-Nazi leader. “When people would ask me, ‘What’s your film about’?” Henry Bean, the 56-year-old writer and director of “The Believer,” said recently over a bagel (naturally) in a New York coffee shop, “I’d say, `It’s about a Jewish neo-Nazi. But it’s not your typical Jewish neo-Nazi movie’.”

NY Times

Meaning?

“It’s not just about some guy eaten up with self-loathing and wanting to kill people,” he explained. “The film is also my love poem to my religion.”

Paul Krugman: Bad Medicine: “Think of it as the collision between an irresistible force (the growing cost of health care) and an immovable object (the determination of America’s conservative movement to downsize government). For the moment the Bush administration and its allies still won’t admit that there is any conflict between their promises to retirees and their small-government ideology. But we’re already past the stage where this conflict can be hidden with fudged numbers. The effort to live within unrealistically low targets for Medicare expenses has already translated into unrealistically low payments to health-care providers. And it gets worse from here.” NY Times

In Search of the World\’s Best Mobile Phone

U.S. official: Missile test ‘still not realistic’

A successful U.S. missile defense system test completed this week did not realistically duplicate conditions of an actual attack, a top U.S. defense official said Saturday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on CNN’s “Novak, Hunt & Shields” that decoys used to try confusing the “kill vehicle” were not “as good a decoy [as] we expect to face later.” CNN

Three posts courtesy of David:

• World Press Photo of the Year 2001
  

• The Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade vs. the Taliban
  

• The Company Therapist: this /. paean by Jon Katz describes a site whose premise is that you are reading the case files of a fictional therapist whose patients are employees of a fictional San Francisco tech company.
  

  …(A) company called Pipsqueak Productions devised this hyperfictional environment as the perfect vehicle for collaborative fictional storytelling in cyberspace. Very original move. A therapist’s office is a font of narrative, a great device for collecting different stories, honing different voices, full of interesting characters with evolving problems and case histories, able to draw on telephone calls and office transcripts, a place to discuss theories of treatment. Balis’s world — the pressured, constantly changing world of hi-tech – emerges vividly. Updated daily, The Company Therapist provides nearly two years of well-organized, easily accessible stories, doctor’s notes and other materials. Since it’s written by its collective audience rather than a single author or the site’s creators, the range of tales and voices is fascinating.

  Every contributor retains a recognizable style, yet is still able to move the collective narrative forward. In fact, many stories are moving forward at once, relating both to “work” and the personal lives of the patients, each told in an idiosyncratic voice and representing the challenges of a different life, yet collectively, painting a vivid portrait of a culture. This site is unique on the Web, both for its originality and quality of design, strong testimony to the notion online, technology and art are fusing to create things that are as new as they are exciting.
  

  The Company Therapist site is here; this might be a place I would explore if I had the time, but a totally irresponsible first impression after a cursory scan is that I might be annoyed at its focus on the stereotypical aspects of being a therapist…

Review of Warrior Poitics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos By Robert D. Kaplan:

‘In late January, the diligent Internet surfer might have come across a chilling exchange of letters between Robert Wright and Robert D. Kaplan, the latter a respected foreign correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly; an author who has written a number of books based on his travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and North America; and war guru of the moment. Kaplan’s books blend history, current affairs, and forecasts of future world trends.

The first two letters reveal that Kaplan favors some form of “benevolent global hegemony” exercised by the United States. He instructs Wright that “nation-building requires the implicit assumption that we will only have one or two nations at a time to rebuild.” This sentence reflects what Kaplan believes to be humility and realism.

(…)

Conclusion:

Kaplan’s book seems to be, at bottom, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound. The Pagan Ethos aims to provide a kind of pseudo-intellectual and historical cover for the governing class of the United States to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants, all the while claiming the moral high ground and demonizing any opposition. Likewise, U.S. allies have a free reign to overthrow democracy, violently suppress independence movements, sell narcotics, and engage in torture, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing, while designated “enemies” of the United States can be bombed and invaded for doing the same things, or even for simply being accused of doing them.’

I had similar concerns about Kaplan’s dangerous conceit when I heard him interviewed on NPR last month. More about Ludwig von Mises and his Institute, which is located in Auburn, Alabama, and which describes itself as “defend(ing) the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive”, appears here. While I’m by no means aligned with absolutist free-market, private-property, non-interventionist less-government-at-any-cost principles, politics makes strange bedfellows…

Thatcher: Britain must start to quit EU: ‘The time has come for Britain to start pulling out of the European Union, according to Baroness Thatcher. She damns the EU as “fundamentally unreformable”.

The former Prime Minister says in her new book, serialised in The Times, that most of the problems the world has faced, including Nazism and Marxism, have come from mainland Europe. Enoch Powell had been right when he gave warning in the 1970s that entry to the Common Market involved an unacceptable loss of sovereignty.’ The Times of London

“Francis Boyle is a lawyer of the quality of Thomas More or Gandhi… the most competent and impassioned advocate of international law in the U.S.”

The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence by Francis A. Boyle, rofessor of law at the University of Illinois:

‘The Clinton Administration’s Presidential Decision Directive 60 asserted a U.S. right to target non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons in 1997. But PDD60, as well as nuclear deterrence as a whole — both the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons — is illegal under the international law of warfare.

In fact, Francis A. Boyle argues in The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, the Bush administration’s toying with the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, its intent to proceed with National Missile Defense, to renew nuclear testing and develop “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons will have disastrous impact on existing international efforts to rein in the global nuclear arms race through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Already, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has fallen before its scythe.

This book provides a succinct and detailed guide to understanding the arms race from Hiroshima/ Nagasaki through the SALT I, SALT II, ABM and START efforts at arms control, to Star Wars/National Missile Defense, U.S. unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty, and events in Afghanistan and beyond.’

Bill Designed to Force Draft Registration:

‘California’s draft-age men, among the nation’s worst at registering with the Selective Service, could be denied driver’s licenses for failing to sign up under a bill moving through the Senate.

Despite objections that it would quash dissent to the draft and might be used to “flush out” illegal immigrants, the bill passed the Senate Governmental Organization Committee on Tuesday.’ LA Times

The bill is opposed by immigrant advocacy groups and pacifist organizations such as the Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mennonites whose members’ faiths may compel noncomplicity with the selective service system. More generally insidious, however, is the the bill in effect automatically registers draft-age men when they are issued their first driver’s license or state ID by forwarding their names to a federal databank, in essence implementing the cradle-to-grave totalitarian identity control which opponents of a national ID card system decry. 15 other states, it should be noted, sanction nonregistrants with similar consequences, but it does not appear they take this extra step of automatically forwarding driver’s license information to Washington.

An injustice in any tongue: Funding runs out next month on the Massachusetts account that pays for 90% of the interpreters in the courts of the state. Trials involving non-English-speaking parties will simply be put off, according to judicial planners. Nobody seems to care very much; providing interpreters is usually seen as a perk for perps. But in reality it speaks to the very core of our system of rights. This Superior Court judge, a friend of mine, is considering refusing to hear any cases because of the blatant inequality of allowing the English-speaking but not those who speak foreign tongues their day in court. Government is abdicating its responsibility to ensure equal protection under the law, in his powerful argument. Boston Globe

Gray Whales Rebound for West Coast Ritual: “After several trying years for the migratory gray whales, when hundreds of calves and their parents washed up dead along the shore — baffling scientists and dismaying a public that gives them nicknames and tracks their movements — the beginnings of a recovery are meandering up from Mexico, leaving behind a local tourist economy that just hates to see them go.” NY Times

Jennifer Szalai‘s thoughtful essay, whether you agree with it or not, reflects on issues of renewed relevance as we grapple with fundamentalism — among the terrorists and in the dysadministration in Washington. ‘Evil’ is back, and Americans seem to be leading the charge. From Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to Dubya’s ‘axis of evil,’ is the problem the disingenuous misuse of the word, with its hypocrisy and namecalling, or having recourse to the concept of evil at all? After a century that has seen some of the worst atrocities in human history, suggesting almost no bounds to the human capacity to inflict harm on others of his own race (yes, it’s usually males…), do we have to grapple seriously with a notion of the diabolical, free of detachment or irony? Is it unfair that moral absolutism has been usurped by the pitiful and embarrassing Right, from McCarthy through Falwell and Buchanan, to Reagan and the Bushes and Shrubs? Does a notion of evil preclude understanding the perpetrators of heinous acts?

Try to understand we should. But suppose, for a moment, we were to come to a point where we amassed all of these “root causes” and then arranged them into a narrative resembling a “logic” behind 11 September; what kind of story would satisfy our craving for “cause and effect”? What kind of structural factors could completely account for the magnitude of the intended carnage? We can try to say that 3,000 office workers were incinerated “because” of American hegemony in the Middle East or Israeli barbarism in Palestine; we can try to say that 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “because” of the legacy of Belgian imperialism; we can try to say that six million Jews were murdered “because” of the Treaty of Versailles, or “because” Hitler was an illegitimate child. All of these factors surely helped to create grievances, and these grievances surely helped to create the events that followed. After a certain point, however, they ceased to contribute anything, as what was to follow exceeded any sense of necessity that characterises the causal relationships we desperately seek.

This dark space – this gap between what would conceivably constitute a necessary response and what could only be considered a horrifying excess – deserves a name. New Statesman

Conference announcement: “Rational Animals?” (Oxford, UK, October 3-4, 2002) — “Are any non-human animals rational? Do they act for reasons? Do they employ reasoning or are there simpler explanations for their behaviour? The focus of this two-day meeting will be on the character and limits of rationality in animals, in particular, apes, cetaceans, and birds. Speakers will include leading scientists from around the world researching cognitive abilities in animals and philosophers interested in the issues raised by their work.”

“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.”

Older Men Make Better Lovers, Psychologist Says and: Middle-Aged Sex and Sympathy Ring Busted

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:

• what Beck and Moby are listening to these days (Update: the .pdf of what’s on Beck’s iPod is a popular download, according to blogdex)
  

• what it’s like to be in a Guns’n’Roses tribute band
  

• where music will be coming from, according to Kevin Kelly
  

• how Sue Mingus got swept up in the fury that was Charles
  

• whether we should begin making opera relevant again by basing it on lurid talk shows
  

• how (even now) to become an indie-rock success
  

• who some of the ‘downtown girls’ (shouldn’t that be ‘grrrls’?) who help make “Lower Manhattan the center of female music-making” are
  

• how to make a killer (literally) folk song

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!)”

Heaven and Hello:

‘ “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

Nash Denies Film Is Whitewash

Dr. John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning mathematician whose life is portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film A Beautiful Mind, denies being anti–Semitic. His wife denies he’s homosexual. And a son denies he’s a bad father.

Critics of the box-office hit, based on a biography of the same name, have accused the filmmakers of whitewashing Nash’s life and leaving out depictions of that dark side of him.

But in an interview with correspondent Mike Wallace of the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia, his wife, Alicia, and son Johnny deny these allegations, which have made this Academy Award contender controversial in recent weeks.

This is the first time Nash has spoken out since the movie was released. CBS News

Michael Walzer: Can there be a decent left?

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left=s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened. Dissent

“People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.” Rejection can dramatically reduce a person’s IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.

“It’s been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive,” says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. “But we’ve found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive.” New Scientist

American Psychiatric Association Statement on the Insanity Defense and Mental Illness, by Richard K. Harding, M.D.,

President, American Psychiatric Association:

The American Psychiatric Association hopes that the Yates case will lead to

broad public discussion of how our society and its legal system deals with

defendants who are severely mentally ill.  Historically, the insanity defense

was used to excuse from moral culpability, mentally ill  people who were so

deranged that they could not tell right from wrong and could not control their

actions.  However, reviews of insanity cases show that the more heinous the act,

the less likely that an insanity plea will succeed, despite the disabling

presence of severe mental illness.



Also, the standards for handling mentally ill defendants vary across

jurisdictions.  A mentally ill person tried for a capital offense in one state

may be found "not guilty (meaning not responsible) by reason of insanity," while

another person with similar severity of mental illness tried in another state

may be convicted.  Some jurisdictions use the designation "guilty but mentally

ill."



Advances in neuroscience have dramatically increased our understanding of how

brain function is altered by mental illness, and how psychotic illness can

distort reality in very subtle ways, to the degree that black becomes white.

Research also has led to development of more effective treatments.

Unfortunately, public understanding has not kept pace with these advances.



A failure to appreciate the impact of mental illness on thought and behavior

often lies behind decisions to convict and punish persons with mental disorders.



The victims of mental illness are sick--just as sick as if they had cancer or

chronic heart failure--and as human beings, deserve humane and effective

treatment for their illness.  Prisons are overloaded with mentally ill

prisoners, most of whom do not receive adequate treatment.



Defendants whose crimes derive from their mental illness should be sent to a

hospital and treated--not cast into a prison, much less onto death row.





The American Psychiatric Association is a national medical specialty society

whose more than 36,000 physician members specialize in the diagnosis, treatment

and prevention of mental illnesses including substance use disorders.

“The U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office is investigating claims that a scientific cover-up may have been perpetrated at the very heart of the missile defense program.

The program’s two prime contractors, the American aerospace firms TRW and Boeing, have been accused of manipulating data to hide the stark fact that their system cannot tell the difference between warheads and the decoys that accompany them. The controversy dates from the first flight test in 1997, which the Pentagon said was a complete success. Although an interceptor missile was launched in that trial, it made no attempt to hit the dummy warhead. Rather, the mission was a fly-by designed to test the computer algorithm that recognizes the target and the sensors on board the intercepting missile.” Tompaine.com

I’m waiting with bated breath for tonight’s sixth test of NMD over Kwajalein Atoll, which is supposed to demonstrate that the interceptor missile can tell the difference between the target warhead and several decoys. My prediction: the Pentagon will announce another total success. We may or may not be told that the interceptor had been programmed with the vector of the warhead it was supposed to destroy…

Portrait of the director of mental health at the Mazar-i-Sharif General Hospital in Afghanistan, who says that beneath their turbans, thier Islamic rigor and their armed bluster, the Taliban were a significantly depressed group of men. Dr Nader Alemi is one of the few mental health professionals in Afghanistan, facing staggering psychiatric treatment needs. LA Times

An Israeli researcher reports that drivers who listen to fast music in their cars may have more than twice as many accidents as those listening to slower tracks. New Scientist

Camera fished from pond now takes surrealistic photos, a sampling of which accompanies the article… Lawrence Journal-World [via Spike]

Interview with Toby Lester: ‘One of the debates that continually roils the field of New Religious Movements scholarship is whether a distinction can really be made between cults and new religions—after all, many of today’s established religious movements began on the fringes of society. Does this mean that the Hare Krishnas or the Wiccans could be the next big religion? It’s unlikely, but stranger things have happened. One thing is clear, though—a hundred years from now, our religious landscape will look radically different than it does now. “What new religious movements will come to light in the twenty-first century?” ‘ The Atlantic

Paul Krugman:

‘The real reason conservatives want to drill in ANWR is the same reason they want to keep snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone: sheer symbolism. Forcing rangers to wear respirators won’t make much difference to snowmobile sales — but it makes the tree-huggers furious, and that’s what’s appealing about it. The same is true about Arctic drilling; as one very moderate environmentalist told me, the reason the Bush administration pursues high-profile anti-environmental policies is not that they please special interests but that they are “red meat for the right.” (The real special-interest payoffs come via less showy policies, like the way the administration is undermining enforcement of the Clean Air Act.)… Oil companies are not behind the push for drilling there — indeed, they are notably unexcited by the prospect. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest why: Arctic oil is so expensive to get at that it’s barely worth extracting at current market prices. For energy companies it’s the rest of the Bush energy plan, which would give them about $35 billion in tax breaks and subsidies, that really matters.’ NY Times

For Bush, secrecy is a matter of loyalty: “Administration’s tight control over flow of information draws charges of ‘arrogance of power’ in Washington.” As Phil Agre, who pointed me to this blink, put it, “the United States is drifting into monarchy (not just secrecy but a general imperiousness and a broad pattern of nepotism).” USAToday

William Bennett announces “Americans for Victory Over Terrorism” (AVOT), a new project to support America’s war on terrorism. Bennet’s insidious message, in part, says

The threats we face today are both external and internal: external in that there are groups and states that want to attack the United States; internal in that there are those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of ‘blame America first.’ Both threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice. “The threats we face today are both external and internal: external in that there are groups and states that want to attack the United States; internal in that there are those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of ‘blame America first.’ Both threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice.

i.e. “anyone who doesn’t support us is pro-terrorism.” So, in response, would people care to join me in membership in AVOAVOT?

Study Finds Sexism Rampant In Nature: “According to a University of California–San Diego study released Monday, sexism is rampant throughout the natural world, particularly among the highest classes of vertebrates…”Females living in the wild routinely fall victim to everything from stereotyping to exclusion from pack activities to sexual harassment.”

Nowhere is the natural world’s gender inequity more transparent… than in the unfair burden females assume for the rearing of offspring.” The Onion

Can Lyme Disease Cause Psychiatric Disorders?

Lyme disease is no small health threat to persons living in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and northern California. True, the first signs of its onslaught are usually no more than flulike symptoms. But it is also capable, over the long haul, of inflicting a variety of other physiological insults—say, muscle pain, arthritis, heart inflammation, severe headache, stiff neck, or facial paralysis.

Now a new study adds one more malady to that list: psychiatric illness.

The study was conducted by Tomá Hájek, M.D., a psychiatry resident at the Prague Psychiatric Center in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues. It is reported in the February American Journal of Psychiatry.

There were several reasons that Lyme disease piqued the interest of Hájek and his colleagues. For one, Lyme disease is the most frequently recognized anthropod-borne infection of the central nervous system in Europe, as well as in the United States. Second, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease—Borrelia burgdorferi—belongs to the same family as does the bacterium that causes neurosyphilis. Around 1900 neurosyphilis accounted for some 10 percent to 15 percent of psychiatric hospital admissions, but because of penicillin treatment, it is now an uncommon disorder. And third, anecdotal reports have suggested that Lyme disease can lead to psychiatric consequences—say, mood changes or depression. Psychiatric News

I’ve written before about what has essentially been an Inquisition directed against those who claimed there is an insidious chronic outcome of some Lyme Disease infections, with prominent neuropsychiatric consequences — both the patients seeking recognition of and treatment for these effects and the medical personnel who sought to treat them. But there are both compelling theoretical and clinical lines of evidence, for those not wearing blinders, suggesting the need for this paradigm shift.

Saudi police ‘stopped’ fire rescue: “Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful ‘mutaween’ police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.” BBC

Witness to a World Of Defiant Enemies: Interview with a 22-year-old Afghan describing the Taliban cave complex near Shahikot in which he says he was a captive during last week’s battle. “(The man’s) credibility was difficult to judge with certainty; his very name could have been an alias. But three hours of detailed questioning left little doubt that he had spent time in the caves with the anti-American forces during the battle of Shahikot, whether he was taken there willingly or not.” Among other details, he describes how the Afghan and foreign fighters freely “slip into nearby villages despite a security belt established by U.S. and allied Afghan forces.” Washington Post

Domestic Disturbance: the growing labor movement among New York’s nannies and housekeepers. Village Voice

US sends suspects to face torture: “The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources. Prisoners moved to such countries as Egypt and Jordan can be subjected to torture and threats to their families to extract information sought by the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks.” Guardian UK

Remains of 11 Firefighters Are Found at Trade Center NY Times

National Review

editor suggests nuking Mecca The American Prospect

Improving the Way Humans Walk NY Times

Andy Borowitz: Gore loses bid to run ‘shadow government’:

Just days after it was revealed that there is a “shadow government” in place underground somewhere outside of Washington, D.C., former Vice-President Al Gore was trounced in his bid to become President of it.

Subterranean voters gave the former vice-president a scant 38% of the vote, with 59% going to Buford T. Bush, an amateur motocross competitor and a distant cousin of President George W. Bush. JWR

Mugabe’s villainy and Africa’s cynical complicity: ‘(Opposition candidate) Mr Tsvangirai, and the men and women who have conquered their fear in his support, deserve the unstinting support of all African leaders with any claim to democratic legitimacy. They are not getting that support. The Organisation of African Unity, true to its reputation as a despots’ club, has pronounced the poll to be “transparent, credible, free and fair”. Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi has congratulated his “dear brother” on the “confidence and high esteem the people of Zimbabwe hold in you”. Tanzania’s President delights in his “richly deserved” triumph. The observers sent by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, ferociously mocked at home for their complacency, term the outcome “legitimate”, though they could not quite bring out the words “free and fair”.’ The Times of London

America is becoming its own worst enemy,” says Anatole Kaletsky in The Times of London.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the consensus in Britain and most of Europe could be described as morally sympathetic but pragmatically hostile…

Today, the reaction to Vice-President Cheney’s anti-Iraq mission is the mirror image of last year’s view about Afghanistan. The world is emotionally hostile to President Bush’s belligerent and overweening rhetoric. Even Washington’s best friends abroad resent American arrogance and are forced to acknowledge publicly, as Jack Straw did last month, that Mr Bush’s “axis of evil” campaign is motivated as much by domestic political calculations as by legitimate security concerns. Yet despite the emotional hostility and the public expressions of distaste, politicians all over the world are quietly offering Mr Bush practical reassurance…

Unfortunately for America and the world, the tacit support for US policy on Iraq today may prove every bit as misguided as were the anxieties about Afghanistan last year.

Exploding star may have sparked Earth disaster: “Piecing together clues from astronomy, paleontology and geology, scientists have proposed that an ancient supernova may have damaged the protective ozone layer around the Earth and wreaked havoc on terrestrial life.

The researchers theorize that a group of young stars prone to short, cataclysmic lives passed relatively near our solar system several million years ago.” CNN

Shamanism and the Ancient Mind : A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology by James L. Pearson:

“Pearson brings a cogent, well-argued case for the understanding of much prehistoric art as shamanistic practice. Using the theoretical premises of cognitive archaeology and a careful examination of rock art worldwide, Pearson is able to dismiss other theories of why ancient peoples produced art-totemism, art-for-art’s sake, structuralism, hunting magic. Then examining both ethnographic and neuropsychological evidence, he makes a strong case for the use of shamanistic ritual and hallucinogenic substances as the genesis of much prehistoric art. Bolst ered with examples from contemporary cultures and archaeological sites around the world, Pearson’s thesis should be of interest not only to archaeologists, but art historians, psychologists, cultural anthropologist, and the general public.” amazon.com

Did Humans and Neandertals Battle for Control of the Middle East? National Geographic [Some wag might ask whether they still are… –FmH]

Peering Through the Gates of Time

It’s all come down to this.

In one corner is Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, 90, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton and the University of Texas, armed with a battery of hearing aids, fistfuls of colored chalk, unfailing courtesy, a poet’s flair for metaphor, an indomitable sense of duty and the company of a ghost army of great thinkers.

In the other is a “great smoky dragon,” which is how Dr. Wheeler refers sometimes to one of the supreme mysteries of nature. That is the ability, according to the quantum mechanic laws that govern subatomic affairs, of a particle like an electron to exist in a murky state of possibility — to be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all — until clicked into substantiality by a laboratory detector or an eyeball.

Dr. Wheeler suspects that this quantum uncertainty, as it is more commonly known, is the key to understanding why anything exists at all, how something, the universe with its laws, can come from nothing. Or as he likes to put it in the phrase that he has adopted as his mantra: “How come the quantum? How come existence?”

Standing by the window in his third-floor office in Princeton’s Jadwin Hall recently, Dr. Wheeler pointed out at the budding trees and the green domes of the astronomy building in the distance. “We’re all hypnotized into thinking there’s something out there,” he said. NY Times

“Dear FBI, be sure to read my entire web sites to make sure I’m not a terrorist,” says Mark Perkel on his site www.overthrowthegovernment.org, which he describes as attention-getting rather than frankly revolutionary. “Can I actually overthrow the government?

No I can’t, for one simple reason. The government has already been overthrown. George W. Bush and his right wing Republican Bible thumping jesus freak cronies have already overthrown the government.” A message to Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list today says that Perkel was arrested returning to the US from a trip to Australia this morning and is being held without bail; the LA Sheriff’s Dept booking record is here. “Perkel is also the owner of the web-site behind BartCop.com, a daily political humour site which is sometimes

critical of the current federal administration. Updates of Perkel’s

situation will probably be posted first at , or

(on online chat forum) if the

police pull the plug on Perkel’s server,” says the poster to McCullagh’s list. It is not clear to what extent Perkel’s arrest relates to the political views he espouses, or teases us with.

Is Dan Hartung’s Lake Effect gone? http://www.lakefx.nu/ doesn’t seem to work any longer. Dan, has your site moved? folded? Anyone?

Is Al-Amin Conviction a Requiem for the ’60s? AlterNet

I’m hoping people (especially with dialup connections) are noticing a dramatic improvement in the speed at which this page loads. David Gagne did me the tremendous favor of rewriting the template for FmH using CSS- instead of table-based positioning, something that the slow-loading page has been crying out to me about for a long time. I learned to format text with styles a few months ago, and also eliminated some of the deeply-nested tables in my dinosaur layout, but CSS-based layout has not been something I’ve had the time to take on.

David did try to sneak some extra color into the design but, as you can see, I’ve resisted [grin] and restored the familiar grey and white… Seriously, though, I’m deeply indebted to his skill and generosity (which is hardly obscured by his claim that his motives are selfish, given his slow dial-up connection…) and proud the page gets to wear the CSS and HTML validation medals (although, David warns, even though the template may be standards-compliant, some of my posts may not be…). Tweaking the last problem out of the new setup (the sidebar loads beneath the content rather than alongside) now but impatient, a boy with his new toy, to use the new template and post this public thank-you to David right away this evening. He’s been a longtime reader of FmH (I recall him as an early supporter of the ‘blink’ nomenclature) and I’m a sometime reader of his blog, a pleasing combination of beautiful design and tasty content; I’ll frequent it more often from here on out. Consider checking it out…

Long cautionary tale about the perils of mixing Verizon DSL and WinXP (with a happy ending, sort of) The Register

Slaughter in the Name of God: Salman Rushdie contemplates the Hindu-Muslim violence rending the Indian subcontinent: “India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.” Washington Post

Why We Need ‘Nightline’ Washington Post [via Spike]

Review of A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon: ‘…The authors, in their discussion of the limbic system, the center of the emotions, and the unconscious mind make clear that they are not referring to the Freudian unconscious, that maladaptive “cauldron” of aggressive and sexual impulses. Nor do they give credence to the Freudian theory of personality development, psychopathology or psychotherapy. Instead they are speaking of the highly adaptive and prosocial cognitive unconscious, including both the cortex and limbic system, both of which are interacting in therapy and all other intense human relationships, and most centrally in mothers and children.’ Human Nature Review

“Memories are made of this…” “Elegant research released today from Nobelist Eric Kandel’s laboratory reveals that the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), long implicated in memory consolidation, primes brain cells to retain long-term memories. Regulated expression of CREB, during or shortly before a memory task, might allow single-trial learning, and eventually lead to development of memory-enhancing drugs, Kandel says.” BioMedNet [requires free registration]

America’s shady ally against terror: ‘Uzbekistan is drifting toward an anti-American stance, if one understands “American” as implying democracy, human rights and the struggle against state-sponsored terror.’ NY Times

“There is a deep degree of uncertainty. It has to do, in part, with a sense that safety was taken for granted and then ripped away with a suddenness.” Even 6 Months Later, ‘Get Over It’ Just Isn’t an Option. “Mental health professionals across the country say the psychological fallout from Sept. 11 — affecting people with chronic psychiatric and addiction problems and people who had never experienced anything like the wrenching angst they are battling now — is strikingly pervasive

… Many therapists, psychiatrists and drug and alcohol counselors say that they are seeing more serious problems now — and more evidence of a widespread anxiety — than they did in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, attributing it to a delayed reaction after the shock of the attacks wore off. In most cases, these mental health professionals are treating patients who did not lose a relative or close friend, participate in the rescue effort or directly witness the attack but were nevertheless deeply affected.” NY Times

Privacy Watch: Guess who’s tracking you by cell phone?

“The nation’s cell phone service providers will soon know exactly where every one of their customers is, at all times, and privacy rights groups are asking what they plan to do with the information.

All U.S. carriers are under Federal Communications Commission orders to make it possible for police to locate cell phones calling 911, something police can’t do now. Carriers plan to use the same systems to sell services like helping stranded motorists even if they don’t know their location, or finding the closest restaurant.

Because people with cell phone generally always carry their phone with them, the FCC regulations give the thriving market for personal information something its never had a chance to get: the exact locations at all times of more than 140 million people.” ZDNet

In response to my thoughts about inline images and leeching bandwidth, Kareem writes to disagree with my impression that musical sampling is considered fair use. “Musical sampling is not generally not

protected under fair use according to the courts if it

is taken for commericial use. Or at least since 1991

anyway:

http://www.alankorn.com/articles/sampling.html.” And several people wrote to support the idea that no one should have to pay for the bandwidth viewers of other sites eat up when those sites link to their images. I agree with one thing, on reflection; it is impossible to draw a line based on the number of hits. After the first hit, one is on a slippery slope.

Nuclear Arms for Deterrence or Fighting? Responding to the furor over the leaked nuclear posture review, Pentagon spokespeople have begun, quite confusedly, to suggest that their talk of first use of tactical nuclear weapons against subnuclear “situations” is deterrence talk, obscuring the fundamental line they’ve crossed to the acceptability of certain uses of these weapons. At the same time, they maintain the importance of not ruling out any options for targets “able to withstand nonnuclear attack.” This New York Times news analysis points out another administration attempt to obfuscate by positing a distinction between a “policy review” and an “operational plan.” I’ve heard and read credulous journalists considering the implications of the Pentagon analysis take this bait already. But, as the essay points out, “The Pentagon review, however, clearly points to important changes by touting the need for new variable- yield or reduced-yield nuclear weapons, and improved targeting systems so they could be rapidly used in war.” An added, worrisome point is that this change in American posture sends a message to third world countries that there can be acceptable defense policy reasons to develop and consider using nuclear weapons; in so doing, it undermines nonproliferation.

Andy Borowitz: Condit blows job interview with Blockbuster video; declares most questions ‘off limits.’ JWR

Criminal lineups use drivers’ photos. “Ever been in a criminal lineup?

Maybe you haven’t, but the picture on your driver’s license might have, and could be in the future.

Legislation to restrict law enforcement’s use of face-recognition technology shed new light Tuesday on the practice, which surprised many people.

Law enforcement routinely scans the state’s driver’s license photographs to find look-alikes for criminal photo lineups.” Denver Post

Slyck is a compendium of news from the P2P filesharing universe… [via Red Rock Eaters]

Family resemblance may be in eyes of beholder: “Perceptions that a child resembles a parent may be based on an assumption the two are genetically related rather than a strong similarity in features, Italian researchers report.” Reuters Health In my family we have known this ever since we adopted our daughter four years ago…

I’m apparently a “net snowboarder”, a “minuteman of the digital revolution”. MIT Tech Review

The secret contingency plan for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven nations — Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya — in some battlefield situations is the most alarming and enraging evidence of the Dr. Strangelove mentality loose in the Bush dysadministration.

The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. It says the weapons could be used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or “in the event of surprising military developments.” LA Times

Even more than the national missile defense plan against which I’ve been railing since Bush forces took the White House, this indicates that there are no longer any inhibitions against first use of nuclear weapons and ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — crossing the line from maintaining a nuclear arsenal only as a deterrent, paradoxically for the sole purpose of assuring it would never be used, to actually considering the use of nuclear weapons acceptable in some, any, circumstances. What is important is that the American people understand the significance of this fundamental shift and make an informed decision about whether they want to continue to be governed by a cabal of nuclear blackmailers. Organized ways of disseminating the outrage and alarm of people who share my concern are desperately necessary. I have wondered if the weblogging community could be an instrumental part of such a hue and cry.

A March 2002 Wired article last month (which won’t be available online until March 12th) had both comforted and worried me on the nuclear warfighting score already. The article began by noting that the technical knowledge about designing, building and maintaining working nuclear weapons was disappearing as a generation of weapons scientists and engineers retired. Much of their knowledge has never been written down but only passed by word of mouth; and no actual weapons tests (only computer simulations) have been run since the Nuclear Test Ban treaty. But, sadly, a new set of training programs at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Dugway to preserve and expand on the knowledge is graduating its first class, mentored by some of the earlier generation before they depart. These Young Republican physicists seem to have a particular interest in designing — and finding a way to test again — usable tactical and low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons. In tandem with this is an attempt to build a computerized database linking all the scattered secrets relating to nuclear weapons development. Now of course I don’t advocate anything illegal here, but it would seem to me that it would be difficult to blame some macho hacker who thought that disrupting this database would be a particularly difficult and righteous challenge…

Getting serious online: A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that, ” As Americans gain experience, they use the web more at work, write emails with more significant content, perform more online transactions, and pursue more serious activities.”

Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.

In my common book, I include without attribution the sort-of-bumper-sticker-and-teeshirt-aphorism “Dance like no one’s watching, and love like it’s never gonna hurt.” A friend of mine checking out my site noticed, and wrote to tell me it’s from a 1988 lyric from singer-songwriter Guy Clark. Since my reaction was that Clark had probably grabbed it from somewhere else, I embarked on a Google search to see if I could get a bead on its provenance . I haven’t pursued it too far, though; it turns out that there are about 558,000 indexed hits on the phrase “Dance like no one’s watching…” in Google! What is perhaps most amazing is that most of them seem to be to found embedded in this saccharin meditation which is posted over and over again, unattributed (warning: often accompanied by a Windham-Hill-like soundtrack). And they say the real danger is that the Internet is degenerating into a commercial vehicle! [thanks, Rich]

Diary of a hospital application reader: “Medical students endure four years of intense schooling, during which the limitless mysteries of the human body appear as either A, B, C or D. After years of measuring one’s progress with multiple choice exams, how is a person to approach the alien task of self-expression?” Salon