“Maybe it’s time to burn our tax returns…” — Jacob Lerner Common Dreams

Why the West is turning on Israel:

As we have argued elsewhere on spiked, Western society today is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its own political, social and economic achievements. Those sentiments are no more progressive when aimed against Israel as a symbol of the West, than when they are directed in an irrational campaign against, say, GM crops or the literature of Dead White Males.

The fact that we feel sympathy and solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians is no reason to endorse many of the reactionary arguments now masquerading as anti-imperialism. Populist anti-Israeli rhetoric is cheap, but it offers no solutions – especially when it ends with a demand for even more Western intervention in the affairs of the Middle East. The long-suffering peoples of the region deserve better than this moralistic posturing. — Mick Hume spiked!

Is Bush the Antichrist?

You see, one of the chief characteristics of the coming antichrist is that he appears “as an angel of light.” Therefore, an obvious reprobate such as Bill Clinton is immediately disqualified. The antichrist, by very definition, is a master deceiver. He must be someone who appears as good and benevolent. The bite is in his tail not in his tongue. In reality, Bush’s angelic persona makes him much more dangerous than bad boy Billy.

Christian Dogs and Politicians:

“In his famous essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” His argument was that democratic politics become corrupt if not impossible when words lose their common meaning and no one knows for sure what is being said. When this happens, political hacks and even tyrants are able to take advantage of a confused electorate and to foist on the people policies that they might not otherwise approve.” The Vocabula Review

“You may not realize it, but you are constantly bombarded by both spoonerisms and malapropisms. You’ll hear or read them in newspapers, magazines, the electronic media — and the local café or street corner. They are the quirks of our language. When you spot them, grin and bear it!” The Vocabula Review

President Bush, April 4: “Enough is enough.”

President Bush, April 6: “Withdraw without delay.”

President Bush, April 8: “I meant what I said.”

‘You have to give President Bush credit. Whereas politicians are known for saying whatever it takes to win over a crowd or sway a voter, Bush’s vernacular is consistently simple, even when he’s on the international stage addressing something as complex and awful as the current Israeli/Palestinian nightmare. That he has nothing of substance to say is beside the point. To his credit, he uses language and tone that most of us can relate to.

Unfortunately, it’s the language and tone people use when talking to their dogs.’ — David Turnley AlterNet

Saudi diplomat’s poem for killers

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain has written a poem praising Palestinian suicide bombers that was published yesterday in a mass market Arabic daily.

The news is likely to strain relations between the oil rich Gulf state and the United States after Ghazi Algosaibi also used the poem to criticise America and said the White House was ‘filled with darkness’.

Algosaibi, a well-known poet and writer, had his latest work published in Arabic on the front page of the London-based al-Hayat newspaper. He has been Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain for more than a decade and was once quoted as saying: ‘Poetry is the soul of the Arabs.’ Guardian UK

Tape of US hijacker aired:

Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera has broadcast a tape that appears to show one of the 11 September hijackers reading his last will and testament. The channel also aired a brief clip of wanted Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, who is shown kneeling beside his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, as al-Zawahri praises the actions of the bombers.

The channel identifies the hijacker as Ahmad al-Haznawi al-Ghamdi, a name which closely resembles that of Ahmed al-Ghamdi, who was on Flight 175 that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Al-Jazeera said the footage – which it says it checked thoroughly before broadcast – showed for the first time that the hijackers knew that they were on a suicide mission. BBC

Home phones get hip, high-tech: the makers of cordless phones are very worried about the consumer trend toward junking your landline in favor of cellular-only. Industry observers say they’ll continue to up the ante in terms of design, technology and features. CNET

Does it work? This compilation

of reviews (from an NBC affiliate in Abilene,

Texas) of those too-good-to-be-true gadgets sold only in late-night TV ads evaluates their amazing! fantastic! performance claims.

Israel’s Security Requires a Sturdy Fence. Ehud Barak, Israel’s 1999-2001 prime minister: “Israel’s strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.” NY Times op-ed

Is it just the mood I’m in, or was there a particular richness in today’s New York Times? Blinking to Times articles kept me busy all morning; sort of like the old days when my family would curl up with the print edition of the Sunday Times most of the morning…

The Cleanup: “There are Israelis who disagree with this rapid-recovery policy, who argue that the lack of memorials to the victims of terrorism, the speed with which the physical scars are plastered over, have the effect of minimizing the horror, of robbing each event of its awful specificity. But the policy is designed to deliver a message to Israelis as well, one both subtle and disturbing. In a land caught in a seemingly ceaseless cycle of revenge and counterrevenge, where the attacks of one side beget an immediate response from the other, the cleanup crews at sites like the Park Hotel send an implicit warning: Don’t mourn too long for this attack; gird yourself for those to come.” NY Times Magazine

Final Chapter: “A year ago, (Carol) Shields was given a rare opportunity. Say you’re a novelist, one of the few who have managed to have it all ways: honored by prize committees, respected by critics, admired by your fiction-writing peers, yet no stranger to the best-seller list. You are given a diagnosis that is the equivalent of a death sentence. The talk is of months, not years. You prepare yourself to say goodbye, and then your doctors decide to try an experimental treatment. Somehow it works, and at least temporarily all bets are off. You have a surge of what feels like pure adrenaline. Incredibly, another novel seems possible. What kind of book do you write?” NY Times

Alternative Medicine Is Finding Its Niche in Nation’s Hospitals. Regardless of your feelings about the validity of the practices, it seems clear that what is driving this phenomenon is market pressure rather than medical efficacy. NY Times

Finding the Stuff of Art in the Gutter:

Walking on the Lower East Side of Manhattan six years ago, Tom Fruin noticed a yellow plastic drug baggie. Curious, he picked it up, thinking that as an artist he could do something with it.

He did. Over the next 18 months, Mr. Fruin, 27, who lives in Brooklyn, collected almost 3,000 drug bags from around the city. They were plastic or glassine, some clear, others solid-colored or patterned, and they ranged from pinkie-nail-size crack bags to credit-card-size marijuana packets. He sewed them together into a quilt that sold for $20,000.

These days, collectors are snapping up Mr. Fruin’s works faster than he can make them. His first solo show, at the Stefan Stux Gallery in Chelsea last year, sold out. Almost all of the 19 quilts in his second solo exhibit, “Cultural Narcotics: The Straight Dope,” were already sold when the show opened at Stux on March 30. The buyers included the actor Willem Dafoe, who paid $30,000 for a piece.

Depicting Nothing but Itself:

‘(Barnett Newman’s) reputation as a major American painter, the textbook view today, didn’t take hold until the 1960’s. Younger artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella and Richard Serra, whose works Newman didn’t even necessarily regard as related to his own, began to describe his art as crucial to them. But even then, showing at the Guggenheim in 1966 his “Stations of the Cross,” a seemingly plain group of 14 raw canvases with a few black lines, Newman was mostly lambasted.’

Hidden Lessons — Walter Kirn: “Do we really want the sort of citizens that high schools with random drug testing will turn out?”

IRS Erroneously Paid Slavery Credits. I love this one. There’s a scam going around telling African American taxpayers that, for a fee, they can get tax credits or refunds as reparations for slavery. Last year more than 77,000 tax returns made a claim for these funds. Here’s the funny part: the IRS actually paid out around $30 million in such claims, even though no such claim is supported in the tax code. “Most of the mistaken payments were for about $43,000, a figure Essence magazine suggested in 1993 as the updated value of 40 acres and a mule, which some freed slaves were given under an order by a Union general during the Civil War. …Starting Monday, the IRS will be begin levying a $500 fine on taxpayers who do not withdraw the claim if they have been caught.” Associated Press …Does this suggest that it’s that easy for anyone to get away with a substantial claim for a nonexistent tax credit?

[My apologies to non-U.S. readers. You may not know that this is Tax Weekend (as I’ve begun to see it referred to), just before the April 15th deadline for Americans to file their income tax return for 2001. Without the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the intricacies of the U.S. tax code, you probably fail to comprehend either how  a farce such as the above could occur or why it would be so amusing. As a matter of fact, I may have only non-U.S. readers this weekend, as the rest of you frantically labor to finish your returns…]

In a Forceful Speech, Gore Criticizes Administration. ‘ORLANDO, Fla., April 13 — Declaring that “here in America, patriotism does not mean keeping quiet,” former Vice President Al Gore re-emerged today at the scene of the 2000 electoral crisis, forcefully — and noisily — taking on President Bush on tax cuts, the environment and other issues.’ Still blowing both ways; he couldn’t have sounded more like the gracefully defeated candidate rallying behind the president in his post-Sept 11 comments; now he reinvents himself once again when the occasion suits him.

Israel’s Security Requires a Sturdy Fence. Ehud Barak, Israel’s 1999-2001 prime minister: “Israel’s strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.” NY Times op-ed

Dutch doctor identifies a post-orgasmic syndrome “A Dutch doctor said Friday he is studying a rare new syndrome among middle-aged men who complain of flu-like symptoms for up to a week after having an orgasm. Marcel Waldinger, head of the department of psychiatry and neurosexology at Leyenburg Hospital in The Hague, said he planned to publish a report on “post-orgasmic illness syndrome” in the U.S. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy this month.” CNN

Sins of Petition: “how the Left got tricked into opposing cloned embryo research”. — Chris Mooney The American Prospect

Therapeutic cloning should not be banned: “We the undersigned recognize that the cloning of cells offers scientists the chance to advance medical research and perhaps one day treat devastating illnesses such as juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s by replacing lost or debilitated cells.

Congress should not outlaw this research despite recent pressure from various political factions. Nor should Congress impose a moratorium on this research, which would have the effect of halting the advances that are currently being made…” Sign the petition online if you agree. The Franklin Society

On Death’s Trail, a Detective Larger Than Life: “Once someone has seen Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand, 47, the country’s most famous pathologist, on television or on the cover of one of her best-selling books, it is impossible to forget her. She may be the strangest looking woman in Thailand. Outlandish outfits. Platform shoes. Hair that seems to say, “Surprise!” in orange, rust, scarlet, mauve, chestnut. And, most unnerving, an absolutely straight face… Almost single-handedly she has expanded the nearly nonexistent field of forensic pathology, has belatedly introduced DNA testing to Thailand and has brought some order to the procedures of her calling, detective work on the dead.” NY Times [thanks, Abby]

Review of professor of geohazards (sic) Bill McGuire’s A Guide to the End of the World, “hysterical account of our planet’s future…” New Scientist

Florida Marine Research Institute update on the ‘blackwater event’ offshore in southwestern Florida (turns out it is a nontoxic algae bloom).

Hubble Astronomer Creates Spectacular Galaxy Collision Visualization for the National Air and Space Museum. Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

Lara Croft Auction: “The original Lara Croft outfit will be auctioned for charity on eBay.co.uk.

Bidding will commence at 12:00 Noon (GMT) on the 26th of April 2002 and last for 10 days.” Proceeds benefit UNICEF.

Easy theft: radioactive bomb parts Christian Science Monitor

Hawaii’s Wake:

‘A warm “counter current” rushes toward Hawaii all the way from Asia — one result of the island’s surprisingly-long wake. The current traces a watery highway that likely helped ancient mariners settle the islands of the Pacific, including Hawaii itself.’ NASA

Bush “deepening U.S. ties with countries that commit human-rights abuses”. Maryland sunspot.net op-ed [via Red Rock Eaters]

“Bush arming troops to protect Occidental Petroleum in Colombia.” MSNBC/Newsweek [via Red Rock Eaters]

Update on Astrobiology: “Just three weeks before E.T. flew back into movie theaters to celebrate his 20th anniversary, a group of interdisciplinary scientists, science fiction authors, teachers, and others interested in the real quest for extraterrestrial life assembled in the Silicon Valley for the 19th annual CONTACT conference.” The Scientist [requires free registration]

Sorting the chimps from the men:

“A team of molecular biologists have taken a step towards defining what makes us human. It is not so much our differing gene sequences that distinguish us from our primate cousins, but how active those genes are, the team has discovered.

Chimp and human genomes vary by only 1.3 per cent and only a tiny fraction of this actually affects genes. The new research shows how variation in the amount of product of a gene may be as significant to our recent evolution as structural changes.

The greatest changes in gene expression have been in the brain, say the researchers, perhaps explaining why human mental capabilities have evolved so rapidly.” New Scientist

“The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work.” The Atlantic

Drug firms hype disease as sales ploy, industry chief claims: ‘A senior pharmaceutical company executive says estimates of the prevalence of diseases are often exaggerated.

Using the example of his company’s promotion of “social phobia,” Fred Nadjarian, managing director of Roche in Australia, said: “The marketing people always beat [hype] these things up. It’s just natural enthusiasm.”

The candid comments come as the pharmaceutical industry intensifies its push to loosen European regulations on direct-to-consumer promotions involving both “disease awareness campaigns” and straight advertisements for drugs.’ British Medical Journal US drug marketing is far ahead of European wit respect to this inflationary trend, which is not surprising given that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing is way ahead here.

Mozilla poised for revival: “Mozilla is an unlikely candidate for a comeback, given that it is barely sliding out of the box.

But a comeback is exactly what the open-source project hopes to pull off in the next few weeks, when the Netscape Communications-backed effort releases the first official version of its Web browser. After four years in development, the pending event has renewed excitement in a project that once was hailed as a possible Microsoft killer–only to tumble into obscurity after lengthy delays.” CNET

When Dad Marches to a Terrifying Drummer: “Frailty, which opens today in the New York metropolitan region, is the directorial debut of Bill Paxton, who stars as Dad. It is a meditation on faith of several different kinds. Religious faith and a belief in the miraculous is one. Faith in oneself and one’s convictions is another. But by far the most important and troubling faith the movie explores is the instinctive faith children place in their parents.

Mr. Paxton’s Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in The Shining. But at moments, he is also one of the most caring and solicitous. Intensely devoted to his sons, he is a proud and protective father so long as they follow his agenda.” NY Times

The Hole in the Reactor: Incredible revelations from the former director of the Union of Concerned Scientists about how the Atomic Energy Commission did business in the face of known doubts about reactor safety:

It’s appropriate now, I think, several years after his death, to identify the Deep Throat who helped acquaint Henry Kendall and me with the problems in American nuclear power plants. In 1974, at the Cosmos Club in Washington, Kendall and I were handed a briefcase full of papers by John F. O’Leary, the director of licensing of the A.E.C. He believed in nuclear energy, he said, but only if it were done right. And it wouldn’t be unless more details of the problems got out and better regulation was demanded. We studied the papers and distributed them to journalists. Major reports ran in the national press. Maintenance, quality control, equipment testing and inspection — these had been described as bywords of nuclear safety. But most nuclear plants, according to the commission’s own internal audits, were failing badly on all counts.

When we asked O’Leary how he could possibly sign off on more and more plant licenses, he offered his personal rationale: Things would leak before they broke. There would be some warning, and the surrounding area could be evacuated in time.

The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P.

‘As a statement of principle set forth by an American chief executive, the now defunct Bush Doctrine may have had a shelf life even shorter than Kenny Boy’s Enron code of ethics. As a statement of presidential intent, it may land in the history books alongside such magisterial moments as Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 pledge not to send American boys to Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s 1968 promise to “bring us together.”

(…) But even as he fudges his good/evil categorizations when it comes to Mr. Arafat and other players he suddenly may need in the Middle East, it’s not clear that Mr. Bush knows that he can no longer look at the world as if it were Major League Baseball, with every team clearly delineated in its particular division. “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance,” he told a British interviewer a week after the Passover massacre in Netanya. “My job is to tell people what I think. . . . I think moral clarity is important.”

Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to realize that nuances are what his own administration is belatedly trying to master — and must — if Colin Powell is going to hasten a cease-fire in the Middle East. Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to know that since the routing of the Taliban his moral clarity has atrophied into simplistic, often hypocritical sloganeering. He has let his infatuation with his own rectitude metastasize into hubris. ‘ NY Times

Similar opinions from the blessed Molly Ivins: The moral simplifier: “Bush is ill-suited for a peacekeeping role in the Middle East.” workingforchange [thanks, Adam]

Renegade View on Child Sex Causes a Storm: “When the University of Minnesota Press agreed more than a year ago to publish a book called Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, it was clear that it would be controversial.” Written as an attack on the abstinence-only school of sex education, it has been roundly criticized as an apologia for pedophilia, which it does not in fact endorse. But, arriving in the midst of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, it has prompted attacks on its publisher which has responded by agreeing to an unprecedented review of the way it selects books for publication. Civil libertarians are alarmed at the implications for publishing. NY Times

An editorial from The New Republic: Fog of War:

“The occasion for the American flailing is Israel’s antiterrorist operation in the West Bank, which the United States cannot but support in principle but is failing to support in practice. What Israel calls Operation Defensive Shield is in no significant way different from what the United States called Operation Enduring Freedom, except that it is even more urgent, since the killers in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa and Netanya and Afula come from next door. But suddenly the United States is treating Israel’s campaign of self-defense as just a huge strategic headache. In the weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the joke made the rounds that Ariel Sharon had called George W. Bush to counsel restraint, but the joke is no longer funny.”

Compare and contrast: Word Play: all wars against terrorism are not the same by Peter Beinert, editor of The New Republic:

“Does Israel have the same right to defend itself against suicide bombers in Tel Aviv as the United States has to defend itself against suicide hijackers in New York? Is an attack on the Indian parliament as evil as an attack on Congress? Absolutely. But the question isn’t moral; it’s strategic. And strategically, Israel’s and India’s wars against terrorism differ radically from America’s because Israel and India aren’t merely fighting a terrorist network; they’re fighting a people. And a people can be militarily occupied, but they can’t be militarily crushed. The moral right to respond to terror with single-minded, overwhelming force doesn’t make such a response successful. And in the end, if a government’s response to terror doesn’t stop future terror, the moral clarity it provides is cold comfort indeed.”

The Man Who Isn’t There: review of Laurent Cantet’s film L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out), “very loosely based on the notorious real-life escapades of one Jean-Claude Romand, who spent 18 years pretending to work for the World Health Organization in Geneva, and then, when discovered, murdered his family.” I wrote about this chilling case when Emmanuel Carrère’s book about Romand, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, came out several years ago.

“Observations of two stars, one unusually small and the other unusually cold, have led astronomers to think they are seeing evidence of a new form of matter and a new kind of star, one possibly made of elementary particles known as quarks and denser than any cosmic object other than a black hole.” NY Times

War Crimes Tribunal Becomes Reality, Without U.S. Role:

“More than half a century after it was proposed in the ruins of World War II, the world’s first permanent court for the prosecution of war criminals and dictators became a reality today as the United States stood on the sidelines in strong opposition.

The treaty that established the court, which is expected to take shape in The Hague over the next year, went into effect after the 60th nation had ratified it. The court closes a gap in international law as the first permanent tribunal dedicated to trying individuals, not nations or armies, responsible for the most horrific crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity.

Until now, just ad hoc courts like the Nuremberg trials after World War II and the Balkans tribunal that is now sitting in judgment on Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, have done that work.” NY Times

Malcolm Gladwell: The curious irrationality of airport security: “What all this demonstrates is the folly of a system focused primarily on the detection of weapons. The hardest task facing any would-be terrorist is not getting his weapon on the plane. That’s just a game of hide-and-seek, and the seeker’s odds in that situation are never particularly good. The real problem for the terrorist is getting himself onto the plane. People about to commit violent acts make mistakes. They get nervous. They have to construct elaborate cover stories for themselves and fall back on training that may have been conducted months or even years before in a country far away.” Slate

The Swastika and the Crescent: “In the wake of Sept. 11, new light is thrown on the international ties increasingly linking Muslim and neo-Nazi extremists.” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report [thanks, Alwin]

High-Tech Futures: “how ‘hard sf’ keeps the science in science fiction.” — Charles Sheffield, physicist and sf writer. Washington Post

Your analyst, my matchmaker: I can only echo what Spike said in sending me a pointer to this item. Holy moly! Eligible New Yorkers currently in therapy can hire psychoanalysts as matchmakers, at $2,000 a whack. Your therapist — in all true, gruesome candor — reveals your personality styles, neuroses, defenses and styles of self-deception to other participating therapists, they find a suitable match on that basis, and you discuss how the arranged relationship is going in your therapy. The self-serving rationale of Frederick Levenson, the analyst organizing this service is that only people who are in therapy are self-observant, and smart, enough to be good romantic prospects, and that only having your therapist present your attributes avoids the dishonest self-promotion people do when dating under their own steam.

My reactions, as a psychiatrist? It’s a no-brainer; this is reprehensible, both in terms of its grandiose claim to omniscience, its exploitative opportunism, and the damage it does to patient autonomy and growth. I think there are grounds to report these people to their profession’s board of ethics, in fact! I’m not alone in these misgivings, of course; the article does a good job of collecting critical quotes. Put succinctly by therapist Jane Greer — organizing your patient’s life for them “is contrary to the notion of therapy, which is teaching patients how to take care of themselves.” Not explored in the article, but worth asking, is how to think about the patients who resort to this service — helpless victims at the mercy of their transference to their analysts or pitifully collusive in their own failure to grow up?

This dating service phenomenon does not stand in isolation, but should probably be seen as part of the more general societal trend away from genuine autonomy as a value. For example, consider the increasingly popular new ‘helping profession’ called life coaching whose practitioners explicitly frame their role as not refraining from telling their clients what to do. It’s not therapy, but… Dr. Levenson, making more of a mockery of his psychoanalytic credentials then he did by authoring the ludicrously titled but similarly exploitative-sounding self-help book, The Anti-Cancer Marriage: Living Longer Through Loving, would be well advised to hang out a ‘life coaching’ shingle instead, but then he couldn’t charge his outrageous Manhattan analytic fees to mess with his clients’ minds, could he? The New York Observer

Here’s a Google search for Levenson. Don’t get me started on how irresponsible it is considered in the medical field to blame cancer patients for their malignancies by unproven innuendoes that their unresolved emotional issues (what? which they can only deal with by paying those Manhattan analytic fees to Levenson and his ilk?) cause or enhance their tumor growth. But, then, he’s not a member of the medical profession after all, he’s a Ph.D. psychologist. (Recall my diatribe several weeks ago when psychologists received prescribing privileges in New Mexico?) It’s a different discussion altogether, but traditional psychoanalytic training institutes, elitist though it may be considered to be, restricted their membership to medical doctors, i.e. psychiatrists. In response, we’ve seen in the last decade the traditional psychoanalytic establishment pit against the explosive growth of alternative psychoanalytic institutes with fewer restrictions on admission criteria, such as the one with which Levenson is associated. Controversy over such populism has torn the field of psychoanalysis asunder, as documented in Janet Malcolm’s eloquent coverage of the discipline in the New Yorker a decade or so ago, for example. Would it strike you that analysts like Levenson are an argument for a return to far more stringent gatekeeping standards on the profession?

Nigeria E-Mail Suckers Exist: “The Nigerian letter fraud, which asks you for access to your bank

account, has been around for two decades and is now proliferating on

the Internet. And last year, some people actually lost big bucks.” Wired

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks: Steve Silberman writes a beautiful, detailed portrait of erudite neurologist Oliver Sacks on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Uncle Tungsten. The picture of a complex, quirky, intense, cherubic polymath that emerges makes me even more envious than I would have been already that Sacks allowed someone to ‘hang out’ with and write about him for essentially the first time.

Silberman zeroes in on Sacks’ impact in “rescuing the clinical anecdote from the margins of medical practice” and taking our ministrations to our patients beyond mere diagnosis (which Sacks and I agree should be more like the starting point — rather than the ending point it so often is in modern medical practice — in appreciating the person, and their dignified struggle, behind the affliction). In relating Sacks’ interest in descriptive narrative to his lifelong literary aspirations (according to Silberman, one of the things that drew Sacks to the Bay Area in the early ’60’s was the presence of English poet Thom Gunn), I wondered whether Silberman had discreetly refrained from speculating on the extent to which Sacks’ direction had been influenced by something abit more personal. Silberman has previously written about Asperger’s Syndrome for Wired; Sacks of course wrote a memorable and loving depiction of Temple Grandin, a woman with Asperger’s, in the title chapter of his An Anthropologist on Mars; this conjunction may account for Silberman’s acute but nonjudgmental sensitivity to Sacks’ own interpersonal quirkiness. Although I doubt that Sacks himself has Asperger’s and in any case one cannot presume to diagnose sight unseen, it may be that his preoccupation with case history functions as a way to attempt to connect to mysteries of human interaction and meaning that elude him from a position on the sidelines.

Silberman alludes to what appears to be a central mystery in Sacks’ life — his transformation from passionate student of the natural sciences to medical humanist. Is Sacks simply unrevealing — he’s stated he doesn’t plan a memoir similar to Uncle Tungsten of the ‘next phase’ — or himself uninsightful about this? Silberman finds that Sacks is only now turning his case study method to his own mind, although an early Sacks work Silberman doesn’t mention, A Leg to Stand On, explores the internal experience of a neurological calamity that befell Sacks himself in exactly the ways he does for others in Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Anthropologist…. The accident and Sacks’ way of processing it may have been formative as well.

Readers of FmH would expect that I would find this article fascinating. Except for the ‘geek-syndrome’ sideline, and some brief allusions to Sacks’ take on mind-as-computer metaphor, it is not clear to me how appealing this would be to typical Wired readers, however. It seems much more like a New Yorker piece; perhaps we’ll be seeing Silberman’s articulate prose there… Related: Here is Oliver Sacks’ own website.

$1 million for science to discover God’s plan — “Can science divine the hand of God in the universe?

Investment tycoon Sir John Templeton wants to know, and he’s paying a total of $1 million to 15 scientists to look for a purpose in the cosmos.

The scientists, many with international reputations, have spent their careers studying the Big Bang, the origin of stars and galaxies, the fundamental physical constants, and the origin of life.

But the money gives the opportunity to focus on the question that intrigues Templeton, as it has philosophers and astronomers for centuries: Is the universe the product of design or accident?” Philadelphia Inquirer

St. John’s wort ineffective for depression: “The largest clinical trial performed to date on the popular herbal supplement St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) has found it to be no more effective than placebo for the treatment of a moderately severe form of major depression, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center. Major depression, also called major depressive disorder, is one of the most common forms of depression.” EurekAlert!

Recreating the Big Bang: “Physicists are hoping that the experiments will give an insight into the elusive Higgs boson, the particle that is thought to give everything mass.” BBC

A tour through the wreckage of the former Soviet Union:

“Ten years after the collapse of communism, the only functioning former Soviet republic is Estonia. A wry and learned tour through the wreckage of what used to be the Soviet Union.” The New Republic

R.U. Sirius wonders: “On 10/11, I posted an article called Ignore the War: A Personal Declaration of Deep Neutrality on Disinfo.com. Most of it was written before the current US bombing raids on Afghanistan. Part of it was written just after it started.

People ask me if I’m still neutral. I might have done better to call it a personal declaration of uncertainty. I could have avoided those nasty emails accusing me of being Swiss. But yes, I am still in a state of uncertainty. In fact, when I wrote the piece, I felt nearly apologetic for not being able to choose whether to be a dove or a hawk. But after awhile, I realized it’s the people who are so fuckin’ sure they know what’s going on and what to do about who are straight up nuts!” The Thresher

Serbia’s anxious mobsters seek out shrinks: “Tony Soprano is not a Serb but he would be at home with in the waiting rooms of Belgrade’s growing army of therapists and psychoanalysts.

There are the depressed and psychologically scarred for whom years of war in the Balkans have proved too much. But Belgrade’s hitmen and mobsters, a legacy of the era of Serbia’s organised crime, are also trying to escape their demons in the psychiatrist’s chair – just like Tony in The Sopranos.Independent UK

Fatal Delusions: “Israel’s own security interests dictate that it should bring its people home to a defensible perimeter (something close to the 1967 borders, but padded here and there for security reasons). Likewise, it’s in the Palestinians’ interest to pipe down about the right of return, for such claims only prevent them from getting a homeland of their own.” — Nicholas Kristof NY Times op-ed

Bush and Sharon Have Similar Views but Distinct Agendas: News analysis in The New York Times

from Serge Schmemann. Bush’s audacity in demanding Israeli withdrawal, his contemptible school-marm tone, and the ludicrousness of banking his personal prestige — of which, as a diplomat, he has none — on it, probably did lead to Sharon’s token withdrawal from two towns in the occupied territory, but only with his impassioned insistence that the Israeli incursions are necessary for Israel’s survival.

…(T)o most experts, this was a tactical dance of two hardheaded men aware of their mutual dependence and not the striving of two close friends to patch up their differences….

Most Israelis view the bonds that developed between Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon since Sept. 11 as being based on mutual interest rather than friendship, although the two men have known each other for a long time. As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush visited Israel, and Mr. Sharon took him on a tour of the West Bank to bolster his arguments about Israel’s vulnerability.

Both leaders came to office less than two months apart, Mr. Bush in late January 2001 and Mr. Sharon in early March of that year, both intent on reversing the policies of their predecessors in the Middle East.

Mr. Bush believed that Mr. Clinton had created a mess in the Middle East by investing too much of his prestige and time, and so became determined to stay clear of the region. Mr. Sharon viewed the whole Oslo process, in which Washington was a central player, as a mistake, and he came to office on a pledge to crush the Palestinian uprising and to punish Mr. Arafat.

When Mr. Sharon and President Bush intersected, it was not always cordial. At a joint news conference in Washington last June, the two men openly disagreed in their description of the situation in the Middle East. After Sept. 11, when Mr. Sharon felt that the United States was cozying up to the Arabs to garner support against Al Qaeda, the prime minister famously used a word associated with the prelude to World War II, saying, “Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense.”

The Hindustan Times reports on Sharon’s determination to create permanent security buffers in the West Bank and the Palestinian perception that this effectively means the end of Palestinian self-rule and the death knell to the peace process. Israeli military commanders wanted eight more weeks to smoke out Palestinian terrorists, and tension has developed between them and the Sharon government for acceding at all to Bush’s demand for a pullout.

Reuters notes that Powell’s shuttle diplomacy got off to a ‘frosty start’ as King Mohammed of Morocco kept him waiting for two hours before receiving him, then asked him acerbically why he had not started his trip in Jerusalem instead. Exactly my question. The article observes that, despite the public rhetoric to the contrary, this step might be interpreted as a US green light to Sharon to continue the West Bank operation until Powell gets around to meeting with the Israelis later this week. It should also be seen as showing our true, craven, priorities. Powell gets sent out whenever the illusory War-on-Terrorism® alliance needs shoring up. This little Israeli-Palestinian brouhaha may just interfere annoyingly with US plans to orchestrate a move on Iraq.

Related: Phil Agre points to this interesting (if at times a little incoherent, probably because we’re reading the English instead of the Farsi…) Islamic perspective in The Iranian on the relationship between suicide bombing, martyrdom and jihad.

A Sophisticated Strain of Anthrax: “Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a “weaponized” form of the bacterium more sophisticated than any previously known.” MSNBC

New York Times dominates Pulitzers: “In a year when terrorism dominated the news as no subject since Vietnam, The New York Times captured a record seven Pulitzer Prizes and The Wall Street Journal won one for publishing a comprehensive edition even as the World Trade Center collapsed a block away.” Globe and Mail

Let’s Roll!

In recent months anyone who surfs the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer’s teary face on every outlet worth mentioning. …

…All right, one might say, but what exactly is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That’s entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly private dimension to real grief, a point at which one’s own words and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a bad thing; it’s a measure of respect, for oneself and for what is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all must bear on our own eventually. The media’s incessant flogging of Beamer’s story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt — a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras. AlterNet

IPod: Music to Hackers’ Ears

“Apple’s iPod is the hottest digital music player on the market. And

thanks to a small army of hackers, it’s being transformed into a

general-purpose device that makes the Palm seem quaint.” Wired

Brace for pop-up downloads: ‘Web surfers who thought online advertisements were becoming increasingly obtrusive may be dismayed by a new tactic: pop-up downloads.

In recent weeks, some software makers have enlisted Web site operators to entice their visitors to download software rather than simply to view some advertising. For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: “Do you accept this download?” If the consumer clicks “Yes,” an application is automatically installed.’ CNET

“Companies are allowed to market computer ID chips which

can be embedded under a person’s skin in the US, after the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the technology its qualified approval.

The FDA said yesterday it would not block use of such devices as long as they contain no medical data – paving the way for the sale of devices such as the VeriChip, from Applied Digital Solutions.

VeriChip, an implantable, radio frequency identification biochip slightly larger than the size of a grain of rice, can be scanned (using equipment expected to cost between $1,000 and $3,000) to give a unique ID number. Its use is touted for security and emergency, as well as for medical applications. In South America, the chip has been bundled with a GPS-unit and sold to potential kidnap victims, Wired reports.

ADS intends to sell the chip for about $200, with an annual service charge of $40 for maintaining a user database.” The Register

Review: Complications: An Uncompromising Look at Medical Fallibility: ‘By his own admission, Gawande purported to tell us unambiguously what is right with medicine and what is wrong with it. This he has done admirably well. At a time when a hospital advertises with the phrase ”where miracles happen”; when physicians claim, without blushing, to perform ”cardiac resuscitation,” letting people believe that they bring back Lazarus every day, candor like Gawande’s deserves unreserved praise.’ NY Times

Cloned-Fetus Rumor Stirs Talk: “Scientists, ethicists and politicians around the world became caught up in a flurry of electronic chatter yesterday triggered by an unconfirmed report that an Italian fertility doctor had helped a woman become pregnant with the world’s first human clone.” Washington Post And: Cloning pregnancy claim prompts outrage: ‘A woman taking part in a controversial human cloning programme is eight

weeks pregnant, claims Severino Antinori, one of the two controversial

fertility specialists leading the effort. “One woman among thousands of infertile couples in the programme is eight

weeks pregnant,” Antinori is reported as saying at a meeting in the United

Arab Emirates. If true, this would represent the first human cloning

pregnancy.’ New Scientist

The Band Is Gone, the Waltz Plays On

Whatever its flaws, “The Last Waltz” returns at a moment in which it can be received far more generously than it was in the mid-70’s. However self-serving “The Last Waltz” might have seemed back then, no one familiar with the meretricious spectacle that the music industry has become in the last two decades can seriously criticize the film and album for glitziness. And at a time when audiences both young and old are discovering music with a connection to something more meaningful than a record company’s bottom line, as shown in the success of the soundtrack album “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” the artists in “The Last Waltz” represent a rare integrity. NY Times

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Moral Duty, National Interest

President Bush’s statement on the crisis on Thursday took an important step toward shedding the administration’s ambiguous and, of late, somewhat incoherent posture. But it falters on three points.

First, by noting that an imminent agreement on a cease-fire was aborted by the bombing of March 27, Mr. Bush risks making the peace process again a hostage to any future terrorist act. Israel would be justified in retaliating against further Palestinian acts of terrorism, but reprisals should be aimed at actual perpetrators and not at destroying the Palestinian political structure. Second, Mr. Bush’s highly personal condemnation of Yasir Arafat implies that the Palestinians should select their leader in keeping with American or even Israeli preferences. Third, the president’s statement should have made clear that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s mission to the Middle East is not to restart a process that focuses more on procedure than on substance. Secretary Powell should seek an Arab statement that categorically condemns suicide bombing even if it reserves the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation and the settlements. Mr. Arafat could then issue such a statement without seeming to be bowing to American and Israeli dictates. NY Times op-ed

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Moral Duty, National Interest

President Bush’s statement on the crisis on Thursday took an important step toward shedding the administration’s ambiguous and, of late, somewhat incoherent posture. But it falters on three points.

First, by noting that an imminent agreement on a cease-fire was aborted by the bombing of March 27, Mr. Bush risks making the peace process again a hostage to any future terrorist act. Israel would be justified in retaliating against further Palestinian acts of terrorism, but reprisals should be aimed at actual perpetrators and not at destroying the Palestinian political structure. Second, Mr. Bush’s highly personal condemnation of Yasir Arafat implies that the Palestinians should select their leader in keeping with American or even Israeli preferences. Third, the president’s statement should have made clear that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s mission to the Middle East is not to restart a process that focuses more on procedure than on substance. Secretary Powell should seek an Arab statement that categorically condemns suicide bombing even if it reserves the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation and the settlements. Mr. Arafat could then issue such a statement without seeming to be bowing to American and Israeli dictates. NY Times op-ed

Boy Becomes Ill After Airport Security Check — he was forced to drink stream water from a one-gallon bottle he had in his backpack, because of new airline flight security regulations requiring passengers to take a drink of any beverage they are carrying as they board. He was taking the Rocky Mountain stream water back to Pennsylvania for a biology project. The Denver Channel

Bombers Gloating in Gaza as They See Goal Within Reach: “Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah, the organization headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, despite years of bitter and sometimes violent feuding.” NY Times

“Laughter No Longer the Best Medicine: Bumped From The Top Spot By Red-Hot Antidepressants.” Andy Borowitz

Church Out of Time: “Deep in Mexico’s rebel heartland stands a centuries-old Catholic church that has heard no mass for 30 years.” Fortean Times Interesting to me because thirty years ago, as a college undergraduate, I lived in this remote Highland Maya village conducting ethnographic research on aspects of the grafting of Catholic iconography on pre-Columbian indigenous shamanic ritual practice, as described here. The author of this article has got some of the details wrong, but not many. Of course, San Cristobal has since become both a hip ecotravel stop and a nidus of rebellion against Mexican oppression of indigenous populations, neither of would be true until long after I lived there.

Mother of all pickpockets: “…a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother with arthritis pleaded guilty to running an elaborate pickpocketing ring targeting elderly shoppers in Florida and Georgia.” ABC News

Chocolate linked to nightmares BBC

Talking Plants: “Plants have more than thorns and thistles to protect themselves—they can cry for help.” Discover

Where are the Mahirs of yesteryear?: ‘Last week, in what was surely the strangest obituary for the Web yet, the New York Times published a feature complaining that the Web is now officially washed up because it no longer provides a sufficiently diverting stream of trivial amusements.

“What attracted many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s,” read the lead article in the Times‘ Circuits section, “were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions” — bagatelles like the Cambridge Coffee Cam, the Fish Tank Cam, the Jennicam, the Telegarden or the ill-fated Web soap opera “The Spot.” (The latter, hardly a “private obsession,” was a thoroughly commercial undertaking from day one, but never mind.)’ I agree with this response from Salon‘s managing editor Scott Rosenberg, essentially that there’s still plenty of frivolity on the Web. Rosenberg turns to the Daypop top links list to show that what’s hot at the moment is still pretty zany. For example, right now he cites a list of Google misspellings of “Britney’ and the “weirdest computer you’ve ever seen” link. But I wonder if the purveyors of triviality may be starting to feel a little disenfranchised. An immature medium will tolerate any content as early adopters explore and play with the potentials of the medium. That’s part of what geek culture was about. But as the novelty of the Web has worn off and the mom-‘n’-pop Web-using public has become familiar with its sensibility as a medium, the urgency is to satisfy a desire for content. Ummm, how else to explain the ascendency of shopping and porn sites (as well as the increasing articulateness of the weblog culture)? Although: “A survey of internet browsing habits has seen people’s interest in online sex fall as business, travel and job searches supplant the search for smut.” silicon.com

A Master Terrorist Is Nabbed: “It is hard to overstate the significance of the capture late last week in central Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda terrorist trainer and operative. His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off. It also shows that Pakistan, whose security forces, with help from the F.B.I. and C.I.A., landed Mr. Zubaydah, can be counted on more than some expected.” NY Times editorial

Rethinking Reagan: Was He a Man of Ideas After All?

Mr. Heclo argued that Mr. Reagan “is among that handful of American politicians, and an even smaller group of presidents, who have conducted their careers primarily as a struggle about ideas.” Contrast that to what Mr. Patterson called the view of “virtually all students of Reagan’s ideas,” that the 40th president offered no more than “the well-traveled baggage of anti-statist, anti-Communist conservatism.”

I watched, with similar revulsion, as Nixon underwent a similar reappraisal in some quarters. Thinking about it, it isn’t really so surprising. Given enough time, it is virtually certain that some opinion contrary to the prevailing consensus will emerge from the woodwork; sooner or later someone slips the reins of inhibition against saying something sufficiently provocative and foolish. Reappraisal doesn’t inherently lend credence, despite the veneer of sober academic analysis and the imprimatur of the ‘judgment of history’. Decontextualization by distance in time may make understanding less, not more, accurate. Sometimes all that reappraisal represents is which ideological spin is in the ascendency at the time.

Going Post-al? “Before their reporters lose it, the paper needs to get a blog.” Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanityfame writes in The American Prospect about the Washington Post mini-flap.

Coin-operated CD duplicating vending machines, on the model of photocopiers, are starting to appear, at least in Australia, according to this news clipping. Like photocopiers, too, the burden of not violating copyright law is on the user; the machines are fitted with software to defeat the copy-protection schemes found on some CDs. [via boing boing]

Happy second blogday to Booknotes, Craig. You’re indispensible…

Robert Fisk: A Speech Laced With Obsessions and Little Else:

‘Ariel Sharon could not have done better. The heaping of blame upon an occupied people, the obsessive use of the word terror – by my rough count there were 50 references in just 10 minutes – and the brief, frightened remarks about “occupation” and (one mention only) to Jewish settlements and the need for Israeli “compassion” at the end were proof enough that President Bush had totally failed to understand the tragedy he is supposedly trying to solve.’ Common Dreams

American Samizdat pointed me to this essay, What the American Flag Stands For, by Charlotte Aldebron, a 12 year-old Maine student:

The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.

School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.

Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag’s real meaning remains.

“The Kansas legislature passed a bill Wednesday for the creation of “Choose Life” license plates. Proceeds from the sale of these specialized tags would go toward a fund of the anti-choice group Kansans for Life, and would be distributed among 60 crisis pregnancy centers throughout the state.” If you have problems with this state intrusion into a woman’s right to choose, the link will take you to a site where you can register your objection. [via Bitter Shack]

I’m glad to find that this article by Dr Jerome Groopman, which I read in the hardcopy of the latest New Yorker, is online for me to blink to. A Knife in the Back should be read by anyone with chronic back pain before they make a decision about whether to have surgery. This is a blunt and disturbing exploration of the ways in which the comfort of the familiar, the power of paradigms to withstand accumulating counter-evidence, market forces and just plain greed and ignorance conspire to maintain a steady stream of referrals for procedures that are not likely to be of help and can easily make things worse. Except that he is a sufferer from chronic back pain himself, Dr Groopman appears to have no vested interests in writing this beyond alerting the public to a widespread travesty of medical practice.

“The real pro-Israel forces are those willing to push Israel to change its policies.” Violence and Excuses in the Mideast:

Bush and the Saudis would like to set up negotiations, restoring the image of calm while the United States pursues its Iraq adventure, meanwhile allowing Bush to weigh in on the side of peace and rational discourse. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will appear to be making a major concession to his Labor party allies by sitting in negotiations. Meanwhile, he will block any concessions that weaken Israel’s hold over a substantial part of the West Bank. And Bush can then have his war.

Israel has become increasingly polarized, between a large group (now close to 46 percent) who favor ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (the polite word being used is transfer) and a growing minority (now close to 25 percent) who sympathize with the Israeli Defense Force Reservists refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. The peace forces have been betrayed by a Labor Party that remains part of Sharon’s government, so Israelis who seek to restore the moral coherence and spiritual health of the Jewish people are increasingly turning to civil disobedience and direct action.

Many Americans have been intimidated into silence by the forces of Jewish-establishment political correctness. They fear they will be labeled either anti-Semitic Christians or self-hating Jews should they say aloud what they feel privately: that Israel is behaving immorally and at times even savagely.

From interesting writing partners — Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and Harvard professor of African American Studies, Cornel West. AlterNet

William Saletan, in Slate, explores Tenet to Mitchell to Chance:

Unofficially, Mitchell and Tenet, like Zinni, Oslo, and Madrid, are buzzwords designed to create an impression of progress where none exists.

The theory put forward by Powell, President Bush, the U.N. Security Council, and other peace process exponents is that Zinni will lead to Tenet, which will lead to Mitchell, which will lead to Oslo, which will lead to peace. But the history of the invention of these steps suggests the opposite. Mitchell was created because Oslo failed. Tenet was created because Mitchell failed. Zinni was created because Tenet failed. The peace process is growing ever more complicated not because each stage leads to the next but because it doesn’t.

But back up a minute. Gary Kamiya in Salon derides the Bush foreign policy catastrophe as a whole:

The Bush administration’s foreign policy is in shambles. Each passing day in the Middle East brings new horrors, new bloodshed, new hatred. And it isn’t just the Middle East: The bankruptcy of the Republican administration’s approach, not just to the most explosive and strategically crucial region in the world, but to foreign policy in general, has become impossible to ignore. In a little over a year in office, Bush has allowed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis to explode from a small brush fire to a raging conflagration; squandered the global goodwill toward the United States after Sept. 11; set back the cause of moderates in Iran with a comic-book invocation of “evil”; endangered key allies in South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; failed to pursue vital peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan; clumsily pushed the Arab world into greater solidarity with Saddam Hussein; put forward a potentially dangerous new first-use nuclear doctrine; and filled our European allies with contempt and rage at our heavy-handed unilateralism. The Bush administration is rapidly staking a claim as one of the most incompetent foreign policy presidencies in the post-World War II era.

As FmH readers know, I’m the first to deride Bush administration ideology, policy, ethics, etc. After all, what can you expect when the President’s main foreign policy analyst has a supertanker named after her by one of her transnational paramours? But, while I agree that the administration’s track record, when you assemble it all together as in the paragraph above, classes it as an incontrovertible flop, I’m not sure I would blame Bush for the Middle East conflagration. The assumption that failure at peacemaking equals responsibility for bloodshed is not a natural one except in a certain narrow subset of the public which accepts a notion of noblesse oblige re: policing foreign conflicts (even though my sentiments lean toward a US obligation, as the sole superpower, to expend its resources around the world in humanitarian crises…). The judgment of history, also, will probably be that there has been a longer-term failure of the US commitment to Middle East peace, at least partially inherited from previous administrations.

No problem with agencies sharing data: “GAO says privacy experts OK with collecting Social Security numbers.” WorldNetDaily

Mobile phones that can lip-read?: “Shouting down your mobile phone may become a thing of the past, thanks to the latest gadget being developed by a Japanese company.

NTT DoCoMo Inc, a subsidiary of NTT Communications Corp, is working on the world’s first lip-reading telephone that could relieve the annoyance of loud mobile phone conversations…” japantoday

Andromeda/Comet conjunction: “Northern sky watchers are in for a treat just after sunset on April 4th. As the sky fades to black, Comet Ikeya-Zhang and the great Andromeda Galaxy will meet about 10 degrees above the western horizon. Less than half a degree (the width of one full Moon) will separate the pair. Dark skies and an unobstructed view of the horizon are essential for observers who wish to watch the encounter. The comet and the galaxy will be only dimly visible to the unaided eye, so binoculars are recommended.” spaceweather.com

CLEVELAND, Tenn. — Bradley County, one of several Tennessee counties to vote recently to post the Ten Commandments, has been <a href=”http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/02/03/15440830.shtml?Element_ID=15440830

“>asked to extend its endorsement of religious documents in public places to include the Five Pillars of Islam.

Adventures of the Passive-Aggressor

NEWTON, MA—According to sullen teenager Steve Geremek, the 23rd century, a time previously restricted to the fantastical imaginings of science-fiction writers and futurists, “sucks.” [courtesy of, and verbatim from, David]

Can Asians think? ‘If the title of Kishore Mahbubani’s collection of essays seems provocative, a quick look through the book will convince you that the author takes the question Can Asians think? very seriously. In his introduction, Mahbubani, the Singaporean ambassador to the United Nations, writes, “Can Asians think? Judging from the record of Asian societies over the past few centuries, the answer should be no — or, at best, not very well.”  ‘ Salon

Rude Americans Seen Proliferating Yahoo! News

Few Risks Seen to the Children of 1st Cousins: “Contrary to widely held beliefs and longstanding taboos in America, first cousins can have children together without a great risk of birth defects or genetic disease, scientists are reporting today. They say there is no biological reason to discourage cousins from marrying.” NY Times

I heard this feature on a Bush administration proposal for universal health insurance for household pets on Monday’s (hint) All Things Considered and, sputtering and fuming, actually believed it! I tried to figure out why the Administration would be invested in this; would it ingratiate them further to the Right-to-Lifers, for example?? Only the soundbite of angry protest from a representative of an organization called “People Are People Too” nearly, but not quite made me suspicious. This NPR feature, on the other hand, was not an April Fools hoax, believe it or not — a group of activists is trying to get the Pope to declare that sea turtle flesh is meat to prevent large numbers of the creatures from being killed for Lenten food. Neither was this LA Times lament, that it appears to be okay to blow your nose without a tissue these days, in jest. On the other hand, I followed a link to this Times of India April 1 news item reporting that bin Laden had been arrested the night before at the New Delhi rail station, and did recognize it as a joke, especially when the article said that ObL had booked his railway passage under the name of George W. Bush. Clever of me. The Museum of Hoaxes site has a gallery of memorable April Fool’s hoaxes and a link for you to subscribe to a free Museum of Hoaxes newsletter. And finally, this Adequacy for Grownups site opines that it is an irresponsible and unseemly betrayal of the public trust in the media (such as it is…) for journalists to perpetrate April Fool’s hoaxes. However, I can’t figure out if that was an April 1 jest or in earnest… [most of these links courtesy of Spike]

In a review of The Panic Room, the new thriller starring Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker, I was amused that New York Times critic A.O. Scott sees fit to caution us that it “has many scenes of graphic violence, some of it directed at the walls and windows of a beautiful old house.”

Addiction to Addition: Bush’s campaign themes included his disdain for public opinion polls and Clinton’s “govern-by-numbers” approach. Nevertheless, members of Bush’s administration — especially Karl Rove — turn out to be avid consumers of polling data. One critic describes them, in contrast to Clinton’s use of polling “to craft popular policies”, as “using polling to spin unpopular ones”. Perhaps more concerning, “…at least the Clintonites were upfront about their addiction to addition. The Bush method is all denial and secrecy, just like its energy plan. The president’s pollsters, Jan van Lohuizen and Fred Steeper, are kept in a secure location — the very distant background.” Maureen Dowd’s commentary concludes, “Aides to Mr. Bush have spent the seven months since the terrorist attacks telling us about his ‘resolute’ grit as a leader. Now we must wonder, every time they reiterate that the president is ‘focused,’ whether the word was focus-grouped.” NY Times

Bioterror Agents Join List of `Emerging’ Ills: The New York Times covers an Atlanta conference on emerging infectious disease sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. In addition to anthrax and other potential biological warfare agents, (“We learned we were not adequately prepared”) the conference paid attention to West Nile Fever (“It will continue to spread and will be a major public health problem in the next decade”), the “roaring” dengue fever epidemic in Latin America, and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections such as fluoroquinolone-resistant pneumococcus, resistant gonorrheal infections, and MRSA (multiply-resistant Staph. aureus). An underlying theme is the ill-prepared nature of our public health infrastructure.