“Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

The scientists, specialists in bio-warfare and chemical weapons, say the Pentagon, with the help of the British military, is also working on “non-lethal” weapons similar to the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end last week’s siege in Moscow.” Guardian UK

Now that, I trust, you’ve safely survived Hallowe’en ‘tricks’ (and safely survived Hallowe’en ‘treats’ as well?), it is time to content with — no, not Election Day (for you U.S. readers) — November 4th, Mischief Night, as remembered in this BBC piece about autumn festivals in one of those hallowed places of the world, West Yorkshire. [via plep] Shall we observe it as another annual outbreak of holy foolery along with April 1st?

John Carroll: Lies, Damned Lies and Ongoing Dread

IT’S A COMIC opera, in some ways. We are planning to invade Iraq because it might have nukes one day, and North Korea jumps up and down and says, “We have nukes right now, yes oh yes,” and the United States says, “Well, no more oil for you guys. Where were we?”

Australia experiences something that had almost the psychological force that Sept. 11 had for us, the bombing of a nightclub in Kuta Beach (the Fort Lauderdale of Australia, although technically in another nation), and we say, “Terribly sorry, old things, but how about that Saddam fellow?”

Chechen terrorists hold Russians hostage in a Moscow theater, and administration wonks stay up all night trying to figure out a way to blame it on Iraq.

It’s like, hello, the war is over here. Worldwide Islamic fundamentalist uprising. Saddam Hussein: not an Islamic fundamentalist. I really think Dick Cheney needs to learn to use Google. Commondreams [via wood s lot]

Also:

Robert Jensen: Bush’s Leaps of Illogic Don’t Answer People’s Questions About War:

Bush’s argument reduces to this: No one can prove that Saddam Hussein is not planning to attack us. And if he had a nuclear weapon, no one can prove he wouldn’t use it. And if he used it, it is possible he could destroy us. So, to stop this unknown, unproven, unquantifiable, logic-defying “threat gathering against us,” we must go to war or risk seeing a mushroom cloud rise over the United States. CounterPunch

Carol Wolman MD: Diagnosing Dubya:

Many people, inside and especially outside this country, believe that the American president is nuts, and is taking the world on a suicidal path. As a board-certified psychiatrist, I feel it’s my duty to share my understanding of his psychopathology. He’s a complicated man, under tremendous pressure from both his family/junta, and from the world at large. So the following is offered with humility and questioning, in the form of a differential diagnosis. CounterPunch

And finally, as Rafe Colburn describes:

Slate has an article on Donald Rumsfeld’s private team of intelligence analysts who are trying to come up with evidence that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are somehow linked, mainly because the CIA and DIA have not found evidence of such a connection. It’s obvious that producing a clear link between Saddam and Osama would provide the easiest justification for war that there is, so Rumsfeld and his cronies won’t be satisfied until such a connection is produced. The article takes a historical perspective and shows how Cold War hawks basically took the same approach — twisting the available evidence to produce bogus reports about Soviet capabilities in order to argue against arms control. Ironically, several of the Cold War players who distorted the facts about the Soviets are now on the job making a case for war in Iraq based on fiction. rc3

As Media Whores Online put it, ” An inconsolable Trent Lott shares a somber

moment of grief with President Clinton at

Tuesday’s memorial service for Senator

Paul Wellstone.” [I was only being partially tongue-in-cheek the other day in speculating that the Rabid Right were secretly rejoicing over his death… — FmH]

Peter Straub guest-edits the new issue of literary magazine Conjunctions, full of what he dubs ‘post-genre cult writers’.

The result, New Wave Fabulists ($15), will be published next week. It is a collection of stories and essays by 18 writers who began their careers in a genre but, as Straub says, “drifted away, created their own voices and are completely uncompartmentizable.”

Straub warns readers of Conjunctions, which published writers such as Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace early in their careers, that “should you have a reflexive disdain for anything connected to genre fiction, as you may well may,” this issue “is going to represent, at least initially, something of an unwelcome aberration in the history of an otherwise honorable literary journal.” But he hopes they’ll discover something new. USA Today

Authors collected in the volume include Neil Gaiman, from whose website I learned about it. Good news for fans of Coraline— he divulges that his story, ‘ “October in the Chair”, … was a sort of a test run for some of the themes in The Graveyard Book, the next childrens’ novel.’

There’s more about New Wave Fabulists on the Conjunctions website, including some of the Gahan Wilson artwork.

From Conjunctions:36, Spring 2001, Dark Laughter (“featuring a portfolio of fiction that explores gothic comedy”):

“Promise you’ll use a condom,” my mother whispered in the darkness of her Toyota Camry, the lines of her face lit by the glow of the speed gauge and my boyfriend’s parents’ security lights.

“Ma, we don’t do that stuff,” I whined. She pressed a foil packet into my palm and a sheet of disgust flashed through my midsection.

“Don’t die wondering,” she whispered darkly, driving off, a stripe of red taillights across the back of her beige car.

Which was the same thing Forrest Watson told Jono Shoemaker, trying to convince him to huff Pine-Sol off the dashboard of his car. Jono was still high when he was run over in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven by an unidentified driver in a red Camaro.

Reflecting on the magnitude of last weekend’s outcry, most of the commentators in the mainstream media, including NPR, wonder why “these are nothing like the scale of Vietnam-era protests,” to paraphrase an observation I’ve heard time and again. Uhhh, could it be because in this case people are trying to stop a war before it starts and any Americans start coming home in body bags? Besides, the tacit assumption about the size of the protest movement may not be true. As ‘Tom Tomorrow ‘ notes , “…the prowar types would love to play this down, I’m sure, but this is huge. It took years for the Vietnam era protests to reach this level.” This Modern World

Review of Catherine Crier’s The Case Against Lawyers: Down With Bureaucracy!:

“It was a few years ago, sitting in a barber’s chair, that I came face to face with the niggling over-regulation of American life. When it came time to trim my neck hairs with a straight razor, my barber used his fingers to smear a cold, anemic, trickly, machine-made substance on my skin. What, I asked him, happened to shaving brushes and hot, thick lather? New health-code regulations, he replied. Using a brush and shaving soap in a nice porcelain mug had been decreed illegal.

Catherine Crier in The Case Against Lawyers doesn’t cite that example as she makes her main point: that we the people have ceded power to a corps of lawyers and bureaucrats who are not only smothering us in silly regulations, but are also seizing huge profits for themselves, corrupting the political system and generally undermining freedom and the sense of responsibility. But Ms. Crier, the television newscaster who is currently host of “Catherine Crier Live” on Court TV, doesn’t lack for illustrations. Her book is a kind of lament from within the commonsensical heart of the American spirit.” NY Times

…Say Spirit Plumber: “It was a dark and stormy night — well, it was drizzly anyway — and for the Atlantic Paranormal Society, things were taking a sudden dark turn. The group had come to this harbor town near Boston at the request of a young couple named Jeff and Bekka Caruso, who reported strange goings-on in their small, waterfront house. There had been barking noises, the couple said, and a dresser had inexplicably emptied its contents on Ms. Caruso.” NY Times

U.S. military building database of terror suspects’ fingerprints, faces, voices:

“The United States is compiling digital dossiers of the irises, fingerprints, faces and voices of terrorism suspects and using the information to track their movements and screen foreigners trying to enter the country.

Since January, military and intelligence operatives have collected the identifying data on prisoners in Afghanistan (news – web sites) and at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are also plans to extend the collection process to Iraq in the event of a U.S. invasion.

With this project, the U.S. government has taken biometrics — the measuring of human features — well beyond its most common use to date: verifying people’s identities before giving them access to computers or secure areas.” Yahoo! News