“Security firm Symantec withheld information about at least one big cyberthreat for hours after spotting it, possibly harming millions of Internet users.

Symantec claims to have identified the Slammer worm that ravaged the Internet during the last weekend of January hours before anyone else did. Symantec then shared the information only with select customers, leaving the rest of the global community to get slapped around by Slammer.

In a Feb. 12 press release about its DeepSight Threat Management System, Symantec boasts that the company “discovered the Slammer worm hours before it began rapidly propagating.” Wired News [via Walker]

President George W. Bush’s national security team is assembling final plans for administering and democratizing Iraq after the expected ouster of Saddam Hussein, including a heavy American military presence in the country, military trials of the most senior Iraqi leaders and quick takeover of the nation’s oil fields to pay for reconstruction.

(…) While many elements remain highly classified and some are still being debated, as Bush’s team attempts to allay concerns that the United States seeks to be a colonial power in Iraq, the broad outlines show the complexity of the months ahead and some of the difficulties that would follow even a swift and successful attack.

.

Among the main features are the following… [more] International Herald Tribune

Notably absent from the planning are any representatives of the Iraqi people themselves. It is likely that the post-Saddam Iraqi people, not to mention the rest of the Arab world, will begin to see the U.S. as conquerors rather than liberators. Evidence is that the appropriation of the oilfields to “protect” them will end up a permanent boon to U.S. petrochemical industry cronies of the dysadministration more than anyone else, of course.

“We’ve established a clear link…”:

US court orders treatment to ensure killer is sane enough to be executed:

“A US court of appeal has ruled that a death row prisoner be forcibly treated for psychosis which would make him sane enough to be executed.

A series of court rulings has presented convicted murderer Charles Singleton, his lawyers and prison doctors with an agonising choice.

Should he take the medication voluntarily and be condemned to death or refuse them and be condemned to a life of psychosis? Under the US constitution it is illegal to execute an insane person.

In an extraordinary and sharply divided judgment, the court of appeals in St. Louis has ruled that Singleton should be forced to take medication which will make him fit for execution.

(…) Singleton, who stabbed a shopworker to death in 1979, believes his prison cell is possessed by demons, that a prison doctor implanted a device in his ear and that he is both God and the supreme court.” Guardian UK

‘Barbarity’ is right; this is truly a monstrous travesty of a decision. This Kafkaesque ruling insists that the court did not have to consider the entirety of consequences of forcing the patient to be medicated and that, on balance, the medications would benefit him; that “eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the medication”. (In actuality, one of the hallmarks of competent decision-making is a grasp of the many layers of the context in which a decision is being made, so that the potential consequences can be weighed in their entirety. You will find this principle in any of the textbooks about competency assesment.) In most states, one can only be forced to take antipsychotic medication against one’s will if incompetent to make the decision for oneself, whereas Singleton’s reasoning seems to indicate to me the essence of competent dcision-making!

Furthermore, the standard a court is supposed to use if they take over discretion from an incompetent person is that of so-called “substituted judgment” — substitute decision makers are charged to base decisions not on what they want for the individual but their best surmise of what the person themselves would choose were they competent to make their decision. By this standard, it would appear to be an open-and-shut case that the substituted judgment would be to refuse medications. In my opinion as a psychiatrist, any physician acting in good conscience ought to refuse to cooperate with this ruling. In a just world no one would treat Singleton’s psychosis under these circumstances. Unfortunately, we do not appear to live in that world any more than the one in which no physician would be the agent of the state in administering lethal injections to the condemned. Let us hope Singleton pursues this to the Supreme Court, not that one can expect much from the current Court…

For those of you who might be around New York on President’s Day:

FmH’s template was temporarily messed up again and many of you found the content hopelessly jumbled. Thanks to all who wrote to alert me. As is sometimes the case, Blogger didn’t let me save any of my template edits so I couldn’t correct it all day. Finally fixed now; please let me know if you are seeing any further formatting problems. If so, please tell me your browser and OS. Also, can someone who reads FmH in an RSS feed tell me if that is working for you, please; if not, what XML reader do you use under what OS?

Mozilla 1.3 beta is out.

NATO divided: “Washington’s effort to build a coalition for war against Iraq hit more resistance Tuesday from NATO and beyond, with allies balking and China adding its voice to calls for bolstered U.N. arms inspections.

The division in the alliance – triggered by France, Germany and Belgium blocking U.S. plans to defend Turkey against a possible new Gulf war – was one of NATO’s worst crises in its 53-year history, even though the 15 other alliance members support the United States.” Nando Times More and more likely the U.S. is going to go rogue, with some toadie states trailing along, and defy the opinion of the world community imminently for the greater glory of Dubya.

“An unemployed actor posted himself to the Tate Britain gallery in a wooden box.

Dan Shelton, 23, … said that the idea to post himself came from the technique used by inventors, who sealed their plans in a postmarked envelope to prove when they came up with their concept. He had turned himself into living art to explore the way that artists are seen as objects, he added.” Times of London

“The good vs. evil plot lines of the best-selling books are imbued with Christian morals, the Rev. Don Peter Fleetwood told a Vatican news conference Monday.” Yahoo! News

Death dance for the indie? “Gone are the days of Jim Jarmusch, when the term ‘independent film’ really meant something. Now it’s a label waiting for a vision.” LA Times

” Arty snobs or creative visionaries? Monied idlers or radical Bohemians? As The Hours approaches, (a) fight over the legacy of the Woolf Pack…” Idependent UK

Trading spaces: There’s a quiet curatorial revolution going on at the Museum of Fine Arts in my city of Boston:

Rogers’ rallying cry was “One Museum,” where curators would work together to display artworks in different media and incorporate work from other cultures and historical periods that served as influences. Paintings, sculpture and decorative arts would be displayed together so that objects could “speak” to each other.

Now Rogers’ revolution is starting to evolve in the galleries.

With the groundbreaking for the new East Wing expected in about a year, curators have been quietly reconfiguring spaces that house the permanent collection to experiment with these ideas. Boston Herald

What History Can Teach the Architects at Ground Zero: ‘ “The very notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms: if it is a monument, it cannot be modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument.” The death of the monument has been proclaimed many times…’ [more] The New Republic

“…(S)cholars increasingly dispute the idea that mass production threatens the existence of particular cultural identities, either abroad or at home. After all, regional cuisines are displaying an unexpected vitality in this age of chain restaurants and global brand-names. Why? Many people, it seems, are content to preserve their local cultures through food that is as processed and mass-produced as a Happy Meal.” Boston Globe

“Your quote from ‘Song of Myself’ yesterday reminded me of one of my

favorite older web pages – the favorite poems project… (A) Massachusetts construction worker talks about the poem and recites

portions – including the portion you quoted – in his video. It’s really

a wonderful piece. The guy is great and clearly loves the poem. He

recites it while leaning against his backhoe. A little gem, I’ve always

thought.” [thanks]

I’m Nobody! Who are you? 
Are you ‘Nobody’ Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise, you know!

How dreary to be Somebody!
How public like a Frog
To tell one’s name the livelong June
To an admiring Bog!

— Emily Dickinson
(dedicated to George and Laura Bush as one in a continuing series
honoring ‘banned’ poets of Feb. 12th)

from Epitaph On A Tyrant – W.H. Auden:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

(thanks Adam; would George and Laura have liked Auden?)

“Is the Bush budget all about slashing Social Security and Medicare? Yes, says Kent Conrad and ‘it is nuts, stone-cold nuts’.” MSNBC [thanks to Adam]

A reader asked that I:

get down to it bobbers

And this I did not do.

Another requested:

the body of an american

But Dos Passos or MacGowan, I knew not which, and so I merely sat and mulled my whiskey straight.

And another would very much like please some:

tahitian vanilla…..

But who placed this order I do not know, although I suspect Clarence King.

Yet another informs me:

I spoke to a member of the loyal Naderite opposition in Boulder, and she told me after Allard’s win she’s focusing on her wedding plans, which involve avoiding all traditions of the “wedding-industrial complex.”

And I could have suggested she register at Cut Loose and yet the draw came tardily upon my hand.

Josh Lukin testifies:

I thought of your entry on memorable and moving last lines the other day as I read “The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories” by Etgar Keret, who Justine Larbalestier thinks is the Kelly Link of Tel Aviv: “I tried to imagine my mother’s uterus in the middle of a green, dew-covered field, floating in an ocean full of dolphins and tuna.” “Or else, if the broad in the square wouldn’t have had a boyfrined in the army and she’d given Tiran her phone number and we’d called Rabin Shalom, then he would have been run over anyway, but at least nobody would have got clobbered.” A whole book chock full of heartbreaking final lines.

Still, several days hence I have not read Etgar Keret’s prose collection nor even his comic book.

And when a final reader tells me of one who

was trying to remember the name of wealthbondage.com, and came up with “The Cruising Politician.”

I can only wonder at the undeserved bounty of my days and on my head.

“Astronomers have identified the best candidate yet for our galaxy’s next supernova explosion, according to a new report. Findings published in the February 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal suggest that Rho Cassiopeiae, located 10,000 light-years away from earth, is most likely to run out of fuel and meet a violent fate in the near future.” Scientific American

“More universal than television, livelier than billboards — London marketing whiz kids have hit upon a new advertising medium: the human forehead.

In a national British campaign to be rolled out in coming weeks, marketing agency Cunning Stunts said on Friday it was about to start renting advertising space on the foreheads of university students.” Reuters

The Beard Liberation Front was reacting to a Bristol University study claiming that men who do not shave regularly have a 70% increase in chances of having a stroke. Ananova

From Song of Myself — Walt Whitman

LII

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

(for George and Laura Bush as one in a continuing series honoring ‘banned’ poets of Feb. 12th)

Hosted at the Pomona University’s Dept. of Psychology. Interesting articles in the current incarnation of the web page include:

• Why is consciousness lost in generalized seizures?
  
• Changing or escaping the self: How do we react when seeing ourselves from the outside?
  
• Atoms of thought – The microstate hypothesis of conscious states
  
• Are we ever unconscious? Do we dream at all stages of sleep?
  
• Freely available book in neuropsychology
  

Speaking of the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness (a loose association to the item above), here’s Ellen Goodman’s Boston Globe op-ed piece on the Michael Dini case. Am I the last one to hear about this Texas Tech biology professor — as an aside, apparently a devout Catholic — who is being sued and apparently made a cause celebre by the Ashcroft Justice Dept. for religious discrimination by someone he wouldn’t recommend for medical school admission because the student would not ‘ ”truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question: ”How do you think the human species originated?” ‘ ? Goodman, characterizing this as “the sort of frivolous lawsuit you thought conservatives opposed, but never mind”, notes that

“conservative lawyers are now agile and nervy enough to hijack liberal arguments for their own causes. Kelly Shackleford, the chief counsel, actually compared Dini’s attitude toward a creationist with that of a racist. What if Dini refused to write letters of recommendation to African-Americans? Shackleford asked. ”I can’t imagine the university would say, well, that’s a personal decision of one of our professors and we’re not going to interfere. Discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion is prohibited.”

Needless – or maybe not needless – to say, Dini’s refusal to recommend a creationist for a graduate degree in medicine or science is not like refusing to recommend an African-American. It’s like refusing to recognize someone who doesn’t believe in gravity for a PhD program in physics. But creationists who believe that the origin of species is an open-and-shut book – and the book is the Bible – now accuse evolutionists of being narrow-minded.”

Of course it is specious to make this an issue of intellectual freedom, as Dini’s detractors do. As Goodman concludes with acumen, this is symptomatic of the creationists’ and the dysadministration’s disingenuousness or cognitive difficulty in distniguishing belief from fact:

“If he is convicted of ‘discriminating’ against religion, surely every student can demand that a professor equate beliefs and facts. Next stop, astrology for astronomers? Feng Shui for physicists? Anyone want a recommendation? How about a lawyer instead?”

But there’s even more at stake. Writing references — of which I do alot — trades in the reputation and integrity of the reference-writer. It is a privilege, not a right, to get a good reference. If you don’t know me well enough to know what kind of reference you’re going to get from me, you probably shouldn’t ask me for a reference, because I don’t know you well enough to write a credible one. And, certainly, if you know you disagree with me on a criterion I have for judging your qualifications, I’m the last one you should go to for a recommendation unless you’re deliberately trying to compromise me because of our disagreement. We don’t yet live in a country where there is some ideological means test to qualify for a faculty position.

Clay Shirky:

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

“Men who outwardly express anger at least some of the time may be doing their health a favor: A new study suggests that occasional anger expression is associated with decreased risk of stroke and coronary heart disease.

Men with moderate levels of anger expression had nearly half the risk of nonfatal heart attacks and a significant reduction in the risk of stroke compared to men with low levels of anger expression. In the case of stroke, the researchers found that the risk decreased in proportion to increasing levels of anger expression.” ScienceDaily Good thing there’s so much to be angry about. Thank you George, for one…

Minims (as contrasted with maxims). Giornale Nuovo

This tribute site by Jim Sharpe’s daughter Jennifer Sharpe (of sharpeworld fame) is getting blinked alot. I wasn’t familiar with this hilarious and irreverent duo who, according to the site, “roved the streets of San Francisco in the sixties looking to ‘terrorize’ people in the interest of humor. Their surreal encounters were captured on tape then broadcast on their nightly radio show, ‘On the Loose’ .”

On San Francisco’s Market Street last week, two somber-faced public-opinion ‘pollsters’ approached a young man, thrust a microphone in his face, and after a few minutes of earnest conversation asked: ‘Would you be interested in helping future generations to fly?’ When the young man said ‘yes,’ the pollsters asked: ‘Well, then, would you let us graft a pair of chicken wings on your forehead?’

BTW, as Jennifer suggests at her site:

embarrassed to be an american right now?

call the white house and tell them:

comment line: 202-456-1111

fax line: 202-456-2461

An interview with the author at 80:

Q: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we�ve lost reason to hope?

Vonnegut: I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d�etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka �Christians,� and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or �PPs.�

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete�s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! In These Times

Different Man, Different Moment: ‘ Pundits and officials in Washington have dubbed Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempt to make a case for war against Iraq in the United Nations Security Council an “Adlai Stevenson moment.”

I couldn’t disagree more. My father was Adlai Stevenson, who in 1962, as President Kennedy’s representative to the United Nations, presented the Security Council with incontrovertible proof that the Soviet Union, a nuclear superpower, was installing missiles in Cuba and threatening to upset the world’s “balance of terror.”

That “moment” had an obvious purpose: containing the Soviet Union and maintaining peace. It worked, and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight. This moment has a different purpose: war.’ NY Times op-ed

“What would you do if you got a note from God? Would you sell it on Ebay? Would you call the cops?” Killing the Buddha

You and your constant demands:

“Harpies torture suicides in Hell. How is it you torture me on Earth? What wrong have I committed that you hover here – beside me, over me, behind me – gnawing at my ears? ” —Dennis Mahoney, The Morning News

Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left: “All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.

But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation’s singular ability to soothe.” — Dan Goleman, NY Times Another in the series of remarkable findings emerging from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. [I happened to have been Dan Goleman’s research assistant on the study he writes about above, BTW. -FmH]

‘Germany and France are working on a new initiative to try to avert war in Iraq, a German government spokesman said on Saturday, with a magazine saying they aim to present the plan to the United Nations Security Council.

“I can confirm that there are joint considerations on finding a peaceful alternative to a military solution to the Iraq conflict,” the government spokesman told Reuters.

He declined to provide details.’ ABC.net.au

Spaced Out
Another maudlin, media-crazed moment. But hold the scorn. ” ‘The Columbia is Lost’ story involved large themes, important policies and billions of dollars mixed in with drama, tragedy and heroism too. If not this, then what kind of story should the media go overboard about?” — columnist Jonah Goldberg in WSJ opinionjournal.

“If you want a preview of what might occur if the United States were to invade Iraq, Elaine Fantham suggests looking at what happened in 53 B.C. when the Romans marched into the territory that is now Iraq. Ms. Fantham, 69, is National Public Radio’s mischievous, fruity-voiced classics commentator on ‘Weekend Edition,’ and her specialty is drawing parallels between the ancient world and us.” NY Times

The mysterious white clumps have been reported in over a hundred units of blood so far, most but not all in transfusion bags from a particular manufacturer. One desperately ill patient has died while receiving a transfusion of the adulterated blood (although officials hasten to say the patient was so ill that the association of the death with the transfusion may have been only coincidental) and there have been six other adverse reactions. NY Times Filters remove the clumps during transfusions, but what is causing them?

“Reality takes a new bite at Atlanta area recording studio, The Guest House Live. TGHL, the first on-line recording studio and jam space, is in the midst of recording the first album ever to be completely seen and heard on-line. Anyone can watch and listen to Sonic Whisper, a new pop/rock band, honing their first album just as it happens.” biz ink

Nuke Plants Aging Disgracefully: “Cracks, corrosion and other signs of age at U.S. nuclear power plants have been the root of a growing list of near-miss accidents that experts and environmental activists fear could lead to true disaster.” Wired News

Composer, 85, Dies, eulogized by John Rockwell in the New York Times: “Lou Harrison, a distinguished composer in all genres of classical music, founder of the American gamelan movement and a leading exemplar of the marriage of Asian and Western music, died on Sunday evening at a Denny’s restaurant in Lafayette, Ind. He was 85 and lived in Aptos, Calif.”