“The historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser weighs in on George W. Bush—his management style, his mean streak, his religiosity, and his recovery from alcoholism.”

In the Name of God: ‘Bush’s rhetoric suggests that he feels God has chosen him to lead the U.S. against “Evil.” Is that why Bush is dragging us into an unprovoked war?’ By Jack Beatty (with whom I have a major axe to grind — as mock-erudite resident pundit on that evening NPR talk show On Point at least, he always seems like he’s just crammed for an exam when he comments on the issue of the day.)

Counterpoint: It’s Not Easy Being Mean: “Mark Bowden talks about the strange life of Saddam Hussein and why his downfall is inevitable.” All from: The Atlantic

Martin Walker wonders, “How does America’s global power compare with that of the great empires of the past?” Wilson Quarterly

What we don’t know about the toxic chemicals in our bodies: Scientists call the accumulation of chemical contaminants (such as PCBs, mercury, and pesticides) within a person’s body the “body burden.” Body burden is just a number, a concentration in parts per billion or micrograms per liter. But the term calls forth an image too, of a body bent over and struggling beneath a heavy load. When scientists start taking about body burden, I think about real bodies — my own and my children’s. Grist

Baghdad, Iraq – January 16th, 2003 Logos Journal

Reflections on Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis – “The writer and the pet owner share a similar neurotic desire to be loved, and it is the pets’ very powerlessness which paradoxically empowers it. Give me your undifferentiated affection. You can trust me, I would only do what’s best for you. Writers want their readers to be obedient, attentive and loyal. They want to see the slobber dripping off the end of a droopy pink tongue.” Between the Lines

An Anecdotal Approach: Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine American readers responding to the opening sentences of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in quite the same ways as they had previously. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). Suddenly these famous words are thrust into new contexts, and yet, I would like to argue that the idea of “comparison” still pervades our ways of understanding. Who can forget the horrifying doubling and déjà vu of the images of the second airplane crashing into the second tower? That scene of doubled impact and destruction at once creates the desire for and, with its sense of radical singularity, denies bases of comparison… Postmodern Culture

I love my fellow creature. Jesus,

how I love him: endways, sideways,

frontways and all the other ways–but

he doesn’t exist! Neither does she. I

do, in a bastardly sort of way.

To whom then am I addressed? To

the imagination. [. . .]

If I could say what is in my mind in

Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so.

But I cannot. I speak for the integrity

of the soul and the greatness of life’s

inanity; the formality of its boredom;

the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill!

kill! let there be fresh meat. . . .

The imagination, intoxicated by

prohibitions, rises to drunken heights

to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it

kill. The imagination is supreme.

“William Carlos Williams might have been surprised to find Context reprinting sections of his 1923 prose-poem and poem collage, “Spring and All.” Then again, writing for all of us truly common readers, the pure products of public and state schools as has never before been true in Western history, perhaps he would have simply nodded. And smiled.” — Linda Wagner-Martin, Context

“The bestselling American writer Donna Tartt scooped her first British book prize last night after winning the £5,000 WH Smith literary award. With only her second novel, The Little Friend, she beat plays by the long-established Tom Stoppard and short stories by fellow American Sam Shepard in a contest open to drama as well as fiction…. The new novel beat Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy, Shepard’s Great Dream of Heaven, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher, and Iain Pears’ Dream of Scipio.” Guardian/UK

Patriot, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

God help Iraq, the world, our American souls. The antiwar movement faces the beginning, not the end, of domestic outrage and resistance to this abhorrent obscenity. Peace activists persevere as war begins:

• Protests sweep across the world and the United States;
• top
  
  10 ways to protest the war;
  
• “there is a roar of protest around the world that is rising in
  
  volume even now.” AlterNet
  
• 
  “Hours before the bombing began, the founder of Voices in the Wilderness
  
  wrote from Baghdad of the soul-sickness that plagues those forced to fight
  
  wars dreamt up in antiseptic think tanks“. — Kathy Kelly, Alternet.
  

• Peaceful Regime Change in 2004: “Instead of feeling comforted by America’s military posturing, many of us
  
  feel neither safe nor free. It’s time to retake, and remake, American
  
  democracy. — Farai Chideya, AlterNet.
  

• “Though most blacks are against the war, for a variety of reasons you won’t
  
  see many of them taking to the streets in protest.” — Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet.
  

• 
  “Today I Weep For My Country”, says Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) . From the Senate floor Wednesday, he asks, “Why can this
  
  President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will
  
  to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?”.

• Although there have been rumors that the Pope has thrown his support behind the US effort (probably spawned by US disinfo sources), I find more credible the reports that he has been making impassioned pleas that the US and its ‘coalition of those who can’t afford to say no’ cease and desist. “The pope lost his temper with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi in recent discussions at the Vatican on a possible war in Iraq, a newspaper reported. ‘John Paul II used words and gestures bordering on a diplomatic incident,’ in his audience with Blair on Feb. 22, the daily said.” ArabNews.

• Casualties of War — First Truth, Then Conscience: “In the domestic media siege being maintained by top-notch spinners and
  
  shrewd political advisers at the White House, conscience is in the cross
  
  hairs.” — Norman Solomon, AlterNet.
  

• Why We Are Taking to the Streets: “A moral and pragmatic explanation for the mass civil disobedience now
  
  taking place in cities across the country.” — Father Louis Vitale and Sister Bernie Galvin, Direct Action to Stop the War
  

• 
  Face the Nation and Dick Cheney: “US anti-war demonstrators are invisible to the U.S. government.” — Ronda Hauben, Telepolis

Searchers seeking debris from the space shuttle Columbia have found a data recorder that captures information from dozens of sensor locations, a spokeswoman for the investigators said this evening, raising hope that investigators will soon have a new trove of data to aid their work.

The recorder was found near Hemphill, Tex., intact and dry, although it may have suffered some heat damage… NY Times

Will ignoring race impede progress in medicine, or is it a scientifically specious notion?“A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.

Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term “race.” But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.

Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was “biologically meaningless,” Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.

Race corresponded broadly to continental ancestry and hence to the branches on the human family tree described by geneticists, he said.” NY Times